How to Overcome Fear of Public Speaking as a Manager

Every time someone asks me how their managers can get over the fear of public speaking, I can hear what they're really hoping for. A technique that makes the fear go away, so the manager can walk up to the front of the room feeling calm.

I don't have that technique. And I don't think you need it.

My book opens with a sentence I still stand behind: the most confident person you know is secretly terrified. They've spent years making sure nobody notices. And we believe them, because we're busy doing the exact same thing.

So let me tell you what I've seen actually work, for me and for the people I teach.

Stage fright is a given, not the problem

Here's something I say in my courses that surprises people. For almost everyone, fear of an audience isn't a problem. It's a given.

Put nearly anyone in front of a room that feels threatening enough, or big enough, or new enough, and at some point some level of fear will show up. More or less. It doesn't matter.

So I don't spend four lessons on it. We treat it as if it isn't there, and we start practicing from day one. You'll see that the more people practice, the more the fear just fades. Once in a long while there's someone who starts to talk and suddenly sweats, freezes, can't move. That person I send to a therapist I know for a session or two. Everyone else? We move forward.

You've probably heard the claim that standing in front of an audience scares people more than death. Whether or not that's precise, it tells you how normal this is.

And the people who look fearless aren't the exception. In my experience, the person who can't stop talking and the person who can't open their mouth are usually driven by the same insecurity. Same engine, different exhaust. When a manager looks at a colleague who seems born for the stage and thinks "I'll never be like that," they're comparing their inside to someone else's outside.

Why your own idea is scarier than a report

There's a pattern I see all the time with people who present well and still dread certain meetings.

Fear of failing gets stronger the more personal a task feels, and the more it matters to you. Reading out someone else's numbers is easy. Standing up for your own proposal, in front of people whose opinion you care about, is something else.

I learned this on myself. For years I taught NLP, a method someone else created. When a student pushed back hard on something, I could smile and say "if you don't agree, go talk to Bandler." Of course I explained how I saw it. But the fact that I could, in theory, pass the weight to the guy who invented it made the whole thing less personal. I moved much faster.

Then I wanted to write my own book. I wanted it for years, and I struggled with it for years. In that time I had written complete textbooks for my NLP courses. They didn't count in my head, because they were someone else's method. The book was mine.

So if one of your experienced managers suddenly freezes before a big presentation, don't let them tell themselves "it can't be fear, I've done this a hundred times." It can absolutely be fear. The stakes changed, not their skill.

Confidence shows up after you act

Most people think they need confidence first, and then they'll present. It works the other way.

The strongest boost to confidence I know comes right after you do something you didn't believe you could do, when you look back and realize you actually did it. That moment does more than any note on the mirror or any meditation. And presenting in front of a group is only the first layer of what opens up after that.

I built this on purpose in my own life. I was someone who avoided family photos. I ended up filming hundreds of hours of training videos. I was the one who liked to stay behind the scenes. I pushed myself to the front of every stage I could find. There came a point where, twice a month, I was running workshops bigger than my own wedding.

None of that started with feeling ready.

I give the same advice to people I coach. One person was just starting out as a speaker and wasn't even sure yet how to define her topic. I told her to contact six, eight, ten small community groups that are always looking for speakers. Not everyone will say yes. Book two or three talks in the next month or two. The money doesn't matter at that stage. What matters is that she starts doing it and sees how people respond. If one talk isn't what she wanted, the next one will be a little different. A lot of people discover who they are as speakers by talking, not by thinking about talking.

There's also a reason this works that goes deeper than practice. Much of our insecurity comes from comparing ourselves to others and feeling we're not good enough. When I'm fully focused on serving something bigger than me, my own importance shrinks, and suddenly I can do things my confidence would never allow. For a manager, that "something bigger" can be as simple as the message the team needs to hear.

Treat it as if it isn't there, and raise a flag

When I open a new program, I ask who's afraid of exposure. Of failing. Of running a webinar nobody shows up to. Pretty much every hand goes up.

Then I tell them: from now on, I'm going to treat you as if you don't have it. As capable. We're going to move at the pace of people who aren't stopped by fear.

But we all know it does show up sometimes. So I give them one responsibility. When it gets in the way, when you notice you keep putting something off, raise a flag. Tell us, before you start eating yourself alive in your own head.

That's a useful model for any manager's development. Expect people to act, and make it normal to say "I'm stuck, and I think it's fear."

And when someone does stumble, how you frame the feedback matters. In one of my programs, a woman presented to her group on a subject she cares about deeply. You could feel it. She spoke from the heart and knew her material. But things happened around her during the presentation, she let them throw her, and she didn't finish. I told her the area to work on was keeping her own emotional stability. That it wasn't criticism, just what happened. And that the next time she stood in front of everyone, it would already be much easier.

When the thing you feared actually happens

Sometimes the nightmare comes true. Mine did.

Early in my speaking career, around my thirtieth or fortieth talk, I ran my first workshop on relationships. About half an hour in, a participant stood up and explained why everything I'd said was wrong and useless in real life. I tried to talk it through, and the participant shouted at me. And I did the worst thing a speaker can do there. I argued back.

It dragged on. It drained me and everyone else in the room. I went home seriously thinking about quitting. I had other work that paid better. "If nobody appreciates this anyway, why am I doing it?"

Looking back, that was my wounded ego talking. I worked on what that moment had touched in me. I analyzed the workshop, talked to colleagues, and found tools for handling that kind of moment. Then I called all thirty-eight people who were there, apologized, refunded them and invited them back for free.

About eight years later, someone stood up angry in a seminar I was running. It was resolved in under seven minutes, and the recording is now used in our facilitator certification course as an example of how to handle extreme situations.

That's the part people miss. The worst moment is what taught me how to handle the next one. One of my tools for getting up fast is turning a fall into a story. The moment it's a story, I'm already standing outside it, looking at it with some perspective. Successful people fall like everyone else. They just get up faster.

Where a storytelling workshop fits

If you're planning training for managers who dread presenting, I wouldn't book a session on beating fear. I'd give them something to put their attention on instead of themselves: the message.

My Authentic Storytelling workshop is designed exactly for that. Managers practice choosing the moment for a story, choosing the story, and telling a short one with a single sharp point that moves people to do something. We also work on getting people curious enough to listen, checking that the main point really got through, and staying steady when someone pushes back. Which, as you just read, I had to learn the hard way.

The fear will probably still be there when they stand up. It just won't be running the room.