Fear of Speaking Extreme
Friday, April 3rd, 2009Whoa! Now this is stage fright.
What happens here is a fear feedback loop. Basically, this is a fear of failure. The thought of looking foolish starts the cycle. Your mind, on automatic, looks back into your past and starts drenching up times in your life where you looked foolish. You remember being laughed at for saying the wrong thing. You remember feeling ashamed and embarrassed. The problem is that you never released these feeling from the past, so they are still with you.
The cycle continues when the energy from your past memories is used to analyze your actions in the present. This makes the present situation seem more important and larger than life. Your current fears are then added on to the fears of the past.
Your mind on automatic, tried to recover ever more memories to help you in this fight or flight situation, but only finds more examples of how your have failed in similar circumstances. The new fear is added to the first loop. The cycle continues until your mind is processing so many thoughts at once that it can no longer handle the input load. Your mind starts to draw energy from the rest of your body. Your breathing slows, which creates less oxygen to the brain, which in turn makes things worse. Finally your brain start to shut down from the strain and lack of oxygen and you pass out.
This is a very extreme case of speaking fear, but a similar fear loop can make you shake or feel ill. There are some simple steps to ease the situation. Here are some suggestions:
1) BREATH!!! Your brain needs the oxygen, especially now. Focus on your breathing not on what you are going to say. This is what they do in yoga or meditation.
2) Blank your mind out. Think of nothing. Don’t focus on the speech. If you have prepared, it will come back to you easily went your mind is clear.
3) Ignore messages from your subconscious that have anything to do with past speeches. This speech has nothing to do with those. It’s a new day, and new time, and a new speech.