If youre like me you've likely had an experience of getting the jitters at the thought of standing in front of an audience to do a presentation. The experience of those jitters is often the same i.e. nervousness, anxiety, tension, sweating, feeling faint, tightness in your abdominal region, feeling confused, going blank, tripping over your words, speaking too softly, fear of making eye contact and so on. Surprisingly however the actual cause of those jitters is not always the same from one individual to another. So what are the underlying causes of one's public speaking fears or performance anxiety? Well some of them are as follows: 1. The fear of making a mistake. 2. The fear of going blank. 3. The fear of rejection. 4. The fear that you will look foolish or stupid. 5. The fear that others will find your talk boring and a waste of their time. 6. The fear that others will find your talk offensive in some way. 7. The fear of having a panic attack or having a breakdown right in front of the audience. 8. The perception of the audience as hostile and unforgiving. And so on. At a deeper level where do these fears originate from? Well they are related to early traumatic life experiences that are stored deep in one's unconscious mind and body and which happen to be re-triggered by the speaking situation. It's as if, while in the speaking situation, the speaker is taken back to earlier negative experiences and starts to relive these experiences right in front of the audience. Of course it goes without saying that not only is this inappropriate it also makes the individual quite dysfunctional. The worst part of all of this is that each time an individual faces an audience and thus re-triggers the old emotional trauma they essentially become re-traumatized by it. In other words their fear of speaking in crowds becomes more deeply ingrained. It is for this reason that I do not employ nor advocate approaches to overcoming one's fears that do not help the individual first release the hidden traumatic material. I too suffered from a public speaking phobia and severely debilitating shyness for most of my early life. Like most people I tried many methods to help myself: meditation, hypnosis, psychotherapy, EMDR, imagery exercises, behavior modification etc. My experience with many of these was that they were only temporarily helpful, required ongoing effort on my part, and/or were re-traumatizing to me. In the latter years as a psychiatrist I yearned for and discovered another way which I later called the Mind Resonance Process(TM) (MRP). MRP is a powerful tool that helps release emotionally based trauma and the negative beliefs, emotions, behaviors, perceptions, and reactions associated with them once and for all from the mind and body. It's very much like doing what I call an "emotional detoxification". The results are permanent and leave the individual with a renewed sense of confidence that requires no added effort to sustain. If you suffer from a speaking phobia, shyness, performance anxiety, or some other phobia you may be interested in my ongoing Public Speaking Teleclass or in an Introductory Consultation. If so kindly visit the web link below. |
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