Overcome the Fear of Public Speaking with EFT.

Facing the audience

Surveys often find that the fear of public speaking is both our most common and most intense fear. This fear can be so intense that people rate it higher than the fear of death, although I expect that this is because most of us expect to carry on living for the foreseeable future! Almost everyone who has this fear will have already experienced it in their past at least once, and they know how bad it feels. "Fearing the fear", that is the fear of having to go through this pain again, is usually a large part of the problem.

I know exactly how it feels because this is one of my own fears and I am in the process of overcoming it myself. At the next opportunity that I get to test myself I hope to have made a huge improvement: so I'll report back on how that goes!

Can you remember standing in front of an audience some time ago, perhaps when you were at school, or some social function and feeling this fear? If so what effect did it have on you? Commonly our heart rate goes up, we loose the power the think and remember what we have to say, have difficulty even getting the words out of our mouths and feel strong and unpleasant physical symptoms in our bodies.

All of these symptoms are a result of us going into what is known as a "fight or flight" response. The mind/body interprets this high level of fear just as it would have done in primitive times when we were under real physical threat from wild animals and other people. The blood is directed from the brain and internal organs of the body towards the muscles, whilst adrenaline is quickly secreted to boost our physical performance. Now are prepared for a short burst of intense physical activity, ready to do whatever it takes to overcome this perceived threat to our existence.

Unfortunately this is exactly what we don't need! We loose the power to concentrate and recall from memory because the higher functions of the brain have been sacrificed for physical gain. Our stomach and other parts of the body feel strange since they too are being deliberately neglected in order to increase our physical strength.

Logically we know that there is no real threat to our survival. We are certainly not about to be attacked by a wild animal, what is the worst that can happen? Some form of embarrassment? Hardly life threatening. However, the knowledge that the fear is really unjustified very rarely takes away the fear. This is true of all phobias, so what can we do?

What we can do is identify the belief(s) that we have which are driving the intense emotions that cause the unwanted fear-induced behaviour. A belief is "an idea that you accept as being true". It is nothing more than that. Most of our key beliefs about the world, our own model of the world in fact, are formed before the age of six. It would be surprising if we always got it right, but once we create a belief we rarely question it even as adults! However, our early beliefs are so deeply ingrained that we have difficulty recognizing them for what they are.

EFT is a great tool to gently uncover these beliefs and inspect them once more. In the light of our adult awareness, such beliefs are seen as absurd. Once that point has been reached, the incorrect belief no longer has any power over us.



To find out how EFT could help you: