Fear of presenting comes from a good intention

The intention is responsibility to do things well. In performing arts the fear of presenting is called stage fright. It’s the same thing. The intention is responsibility to do things well. When an artist is to perform in front of people who came to his performance for money or for free, the artist feels responsibility to give the audience a good experience. When a professional in the corporate world presents facts at a meeting, he feels responsibility to deliver the facts well so that his listeners understand correctly and act in a desired direction.

Doing things well is another intention of the fear of presenting. Every decent adult wants to do things well and right. The highest grade of doing things well is perfectionism. Most decent adults want others to see them in the best light. We want to show that we know, that we’re competent. We want to be credible and taken seriously. But the flip side of wanting to be perfect is that when we’re not perfect, we can block ourselves. One wrong word can totally derail us in stress. Sounds familiar? Perhaps…

Other factors that play a role in the fear of presenting

Some people are born performers. They thrive on being the centre of attention. Others are the opposite – they hate being the centre of attention. Hence if a person who hates being the centre of attention is to present at a meeting, of course s/he will feel stressed by the sheer fact that s/he suddenly must be the centre of attention! Just the words “introduce yourselves” at the beginning of meetings can trigger hellish stress, because they directly invite one to be the centre of attention. And one will be, because all eyes will be on him/her and all ears will wait to hear the introduction.

The second factor is how prepared one feels. A performing artist can prepare for a performance for years and feel supremely prepared until the moment when he is to go on the stage. Yet at the moment of having to go on the stage when he feels stage fright he never feels 100% prepared. It’s the nature of the beast, it’s a natural manifestation of the responsibility to give a good performance. How prepared one feels is therefore impossible to influence, manipulate, correct, suppress, or eliminate.

The only remedy is to prepare to really 100%. After all, preparation is a true mark of a professional, and the more prepared one is, the better he will handle mistakes, surprises, and blocks in stress. So always prepare as well as you possibly can. If you’re a student, this advice will stand you in good stead for exams! Students are always immensely afraid of exams because they don’t study enough to feel prepared!

The third factor is adrenaline. Many people report that they get hot in the body when they have to present at meetings. This is simply the result of an adrenaline rush. Public speaking raises adrenaline big time. So getting hot is a natural reaction. And a necessary one, because when we get hot, we start sweating. Sweat is a cooling mechanism which balances the adrenaline rush.

The fourth factor of the fear of presenting is the surprise element. What if someone drops something and the drop makes such a loud bang that we get completely distracted and won’t know where we stopped in stress? Or what if someone interrupts us and the interruption derails us? Alternatively what if someone asks a question to which we won’t know the answer even when we feel prepared?  There’re unforeseeable elements in every situation. And surprises are hard to handle because we cannot prepare for them. So here comes improvisation versus interpretation.

Interpretation is following exact text, choreography, wording, notation, agenda. We interpret what someone composed. Improvisation is making things up from our expertise and experience. Interpretation is usually memorised. We have to memorise a text, wording, agenda, dance, piece of music. If the memory fails, we will be lost… until we find ourselves and pick it up somewhere. In contrast, when we improvise, we don’t feel the stress of what might happen if the memory fails… We don’t have to be afraid of how we’ll handle the situation. We make things up from expertise and experience. And while making things up we sometimes even get brilliant insights! So we always have something to keep us grounded in knowing. And the intuition to guide us!

So how to handle the fear of presenting?

1. If you often present at meetings, accept that you will be the centre of attention for the time when you present. It is a fact which you can’t avoid, so accept it instead of fighting it. Fighting or wanting to avoid it won’t avoid it and will only stress you out. Even if you don’t like being the centre of attention, experiment with imagining that you’re an actor, and present as if you were the actor. This plus knowing that you will go back to your normal self after the meeting will definitely help.
2. Expect a certain degree of stage fright. It’s that natural reminder of responsibility to deliver the best you can. Instead of fighting it embrace it as a gift and treat it as an advisor. It’s a natural phenomenon, it will always be with you to a degree. You’ll never completely get rid of it, so what’s the point in fighting it? Now you know that it’s there for good reasons.
3. Always prepare as well as you possibly can. Even if you may not feel like preparing, don’t cut corners, because it is the law of life that cut corners will come to haunt you. You won’t know how to react to a question out of the blue etc. if you don’t prepare well.
4. Be as good at your profession as you possibly can. Not cutting corners of preparing will get you there by a great deal! And always aspire to being the best, because the best have the most experience. The most experience predisposes one to the highest expertise. And the highest expertise is the best cure against surprises. When we’re not experienced and expert enough, things easily surprise us. Conversely few things will surprise a seasoned expert. Plus when you’re experienced experts, people will take you seriously. Isn’t that what every professional wants?
5. Expect the adrenaline rush and take it as such. Just think of the bodily heat as the result of an adrenaline rush, not the result of stress. And thank god for the heat, because you can now also think of the resulting sweat as a cooling mechanism with which the body balances the heat of the adrenaline rush!
6. Concentrate on putting the main point across even if the words aren’t perfect. People want to hear the main points. They don’t care about how good your wording is. This applies especially if you must present in a foreign language which you don’t know perfectly. People don’t care about the fact that you don’t know the exact word. Find other simpler words to describe the exact word or phrase which you know that exists in the foreign language, but you don’t know.  People want to hear the point of the content.

…and the best for last…

7. bear in mind that others won’t see what you feel. They’ll see you from outside and mainly concentrate on the content of what you say. There will be people who will see that you are nervous. So what? They’ll probably see that you’re nervous because they feel exactly what they see you feeling when they present! And that’s also exactly why they’ll empathise, not criticise. The rest will not even notice your nerves. They’ll take your presenting on the face value and concentrate on the content of what you say.

8. Be human! If you get stuck, say that you’re nervous or forgot what you wanted to say or forgot the word… Or turn the fact that you’re stuck into humour. Say something funny or pull a face that will make people laugh. Who says that the corporate world has to be stiff and cold? Even corporate professionals are human beings who like to laugh. And I guarantee you that if you make them laugh, you’ll make them quickly forget about your nerves. And they’ll very likely remember how you made them laugh at the meeting!

If you feel that despite me having presented the advice in this article to perfection you’d like some NLP coaching on the fear of presenting, I’m here for you.

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Get out of autopilot – get into the zone

He who wants to get into the zone at will must start practising not living on autopilot. The more he practises on any activity, the faster he will learn to be present in the moment, which is the door to getting into the zone. Getting into the zone is a state in which one is totally and effortlessly immersed in an activity. One feels that the activity flows naturally as if it were his second skin or nature. He enjoys it, he feels it in every bone, it goes through him, it surrounds him. It’s concentration and meditation in one. It’s an amazing state. And that’s why so many people want to achieve it. But how?

The first NLP technique that will help to get into the zone

…is knowing the submodalities of being in the zone. What does being in the zone look, sound, feel, smell, taste like? What do you see, hear, feel, smell, taste when you are in the zone? How bright are the pictures that you see? How far are they? And how loud are the sounds? Where do they come from? Is what you feel warm, cold, heavy, light… etc.? Where do you feel it? Does it move? When you know these submodalities, you know the state of being in the zone = you cannot confuse it with another state. You know that that’s it.

The second NLP technique for how to get into the zone

…is setting an anchor. Anchors are all around us. The traffic lights are an anchor for us to stop when they’re red and go when they’re green. A song can be an anchor that transports us to a particular moment… So can be a perfume – you know which person wore or wears it immediately as you smell it. Or someone’s voice can be an anchor which will immediately make you happy or angry. And of course, feelings can be anchors too. That familiar feeling… Or have you ever tasted something which you couldn’t tell what was, but which immediately reminded you of a certain place or person that used to serve that taste? So anchors can be visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory.

As long as the anchor which you set for getting into the zone is unique so that you can easily remember it, repeatable so that you can repeat it at will, appropriate so that you can fire it anywhere, intense enough to evoke the intensity of the state which it is to bring on, and pure so that it can evoke the state in the pure form of which you want to be, the anchor can be whatever picture, sound, feeling, smell, or taste works for you. Practise firing the anchor and getting into the state in which you want to be by firing the anchor.

The third NLP technique that helps to get into the zone

…is practising staying in the zone for longer and longer. Stretching the time when you are in the zone. If you read the article about NLP for breaking vicious circles, you’ll see commonalities with the principle of training yourself to stay in the zone longer and longer. The beginnings are usually shaky, but the more you practise, the more solid things will become. Because you know what it’s like to be in the zone and because you have a reliable anchor which will bring you into the zone, you’ll know when you have been in the zone for the first few seconds at the beginning. When you can be in the zone for seconds, you can be in the zone for a minute. And when you can do a minute, you can certainly do another minute. And so it goes until you find being in the zone for a long time. It’s all a matter of practice.

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If the public doesn’t know what life coaching is, of course it is difficult to sell!

The superficial usage and the confusion surrounding the term life coaching is still disturbing even in this day when coaching has been on the increase for decades. I explained the differences between coaching, teaching, counselling, consulting, training and guiding, teaching, mentoring, sponsoring, and awakening. Whenever I hear someone say that their friend is a life coach, I ask to learn more. And then I’ll hear that the “life coach” did some course and has been counseling for just over a year…. And even worse is when people ask me what I do, I say that I coach people, and they ask ‘so you’re a shrink?’. No!  The horrible word shrink is a slang for psychiatrist! The difference is that a life coach helps mentally healthy people refine what they do while a psychiatrist cures mentally ill people.

And even if the public knew what coaching was, coaching would still be difficult to sell because…

There’re life coaches and there’re life coaches. The challenge of a person looking for a life coach is to distinguish which is which. As if the confusion around what life coaching is wasn’t enough, I hear from every direction that “my friend is a life coach” or somebody’s somebody is a life coach.. And the internet is full of people who sell themselves as life coaches… It seems as if the sack with life coaches has ripped and they’ve all fallen out. Many folks even sell life coaching, counselling, consulting, and therapy interchangeably!  So how is a person looking for a life coach to distinguish who is a life coach? And who is credible? What will sell you life coaching?

Unfortunately life coaching is being practised today by many who have not studied it, do not have credentials, and sell traditional counselling,  consulting, training, and pop psychology advice as coaching. And people who think that they practise life coaching are very often caught in the same epistemological trap of thinking as are the clients to whom they sell themselves. Learning still does not respond to the demands of our times and what and how we learn is part of the problem, not a solution.

Many people in the western culture believe that more information will bring them wisdom. When we confuse having information with knowing, we leave out the emotional, intuitive, and aesthetic dimensions of knowing and the intimate and spiritual aspects of our connection with the world. Our current learning practices pursue more information. Most people need to change them to include what there is between the lines to illuminate the path to wisdom and effective living. Knowing is far more encompassing than having information. Knowing requires far more awareness and attention to where and when we do what, how, why, with whom than does having information.

The intangible is harder to sell than the tangible

When someone sells cars, we know what cars are. They’re tangible – we can imagine and touch them. And we know exactly what we’ll get if we buy them. When someone sells accounting, we know what accounting is. It’s intangible – we cannot touch it, but we know what we’ll get. When I sell life coaching, it’s intangible. We can’t touch it and don’t know what we’ll get, because every person who has life coaching will get different things. So how does one sell life coaching to someone who has never had it? The first question people will usually ask will be what guarantees I can give that coaching will work for them. I wrote about that subject in this article. Judge for yourself.

The second question often is whether people hire life coaches when their lives are falling apart. Sometimes yes. And sometimes no. If a person let his life fall apart, he has left it too late.  He should have acted sooner. No, life doesn’t have to fall apart for someone to hire a life coach. A person can hire a life coach for one context of life. I coach on health, relationships, work, money, and success. If someone hires a life coach for, say, a problem in his relationship, his life isn’t necessarily falling apart. His problem is in one context of life. Of course, the problem will surely impact his health, work, money, and success. But it’s not the same as life falling apart.

Money money money…

The third question will often be whether the sometimes high fees are worth taking the risk for when we don’t know what outcome we’ll get from life coaching. We all have things to pay for.  Hence this is understandably an important question for people in all societies around the world. And I addressed this subject too.

And finally…

Regardless of whether coaching is tangible or intangible and whether we know what we’ll get out of coaching or not, one thing is absolutely certain. Every person who has life coaching will get immensely deep value from it.  Value is also intangible, yet we rarely think of it like that when we buy real estate, jewelry, and other valuables. In these cases we somehow see value in the amounts we pay for those things.  And we somehow even imagine the value of those things in the long term… But this perception of value still doesn’t make value tangible! Yet when I sell coaching, most people immediately scrutinisse the value for the money they are to pay for coaching.  Isn’t it fascinating how human nature can work? Why not look at the long-term value of coaching the same way?

The value of life coaching is that it shifts people from problems to resources or from problem states to what they want.  Of course, the person getting coaching has to do the work, but the more he puts in, the more he’ll get out.  If a person’s relationship is falling apart, coaching surely will bring value to the person’s life. And the value will ripple from his relationship to his health, work, money, and success. Everything is connected.

But the highest value of coaching by a professional coach, not by a friend, family, member, etc., lies in the fact that a coach will give you the objective view of your problem, while you, family members, friends, etc. have the subjective view. So if these words inspired you or finally sold you life coaching, let’s talk.

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A famous coach won’t give as good value

The reason is that, as in any field, people work hard up to the point when they become famous. When they’re famous,  they just ride on the big names for the rest of their careers. They work, but often to lower quality, because they trade on the fact that their names will sell even lower quality. People do it, companies do it. This happens in retail and everywhere we look. Sole traders who don’t have the name and smaller companies usually give a customer far better value because they know well that they compete with the big names. A famous coach will certainly give you the name, but not necessarily the quality for the big money s/he will charge.  An unknown coach will give you superior quality for far less. So which one’s a better deal?

Not every unknown coach will of course give superior quality. But when you find one carefully, you’ll get superior quality. Many coaches have become famous because of rich friends who helped them market themselves. Not because of the quality of their work or intelligence. There are superintelligent coaches who don’t have the rich friends to market them to fame. Bear this in mind.

Depth and personalization

An unknown life coach will usually also be far more thorough than a famous coach. Being thorough is important in coaching, because coaching is best when it’s deep, hence thorough. A famous coach won’t have time to pay you as much attention, because s/he will highly likely be a slave to a hectic schedule. The personal factor of a big name coach’s approach to you will also be lesser because a coach with a big name won’t have time to truly connect with you. The more famous the coach, the more s/he will likely work with groups rather than individuals. And this fact will also influence his/her depersonalized approach over time. In contrast, hire a coach who has no name and you’ll benefit from a much more thorough and personal approach to you as a coaching client.

Would you like to test this principle? Let’s have a conversation.

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There are two timelines. One goes through you from front to back like this.

The other one goes immediately in front of you from left to right like this. 

The first timeline is in time. The second one is through time. 

Which one do you use?

It’s useful to know, because your timeline tells you how you perceive time. If you’re mostly in time, you are mostly in the now, in the present moment. When you’re in the present moment, you are little or not aware of what was yesterday and what will be sometimes even an hour later. A person in time tends to be immersed in the now. Since he isn’t aware much of what’s around him [yesterday or an hour later is part of what’s around], he tends to be stuck in the moment and may therefore have difficulties with planning, be late a lot, double or even triple book meetings, etc. 

If a person is through time a lot, he will likely have the opposite problem. He may be an excellent planner because his timeline goes slightly in front of him and he has an excellent view of what happened yesterday, even years ago, and where he’s going, i.e. what will happen an hour later, or even what he wants to happen 5 years later. He may be very aware of time and have life planned out. But he may have a problem enjoying even beautiful moments, because his timeline goes slightly in front of him outside his body, not directly through him. 

This is directly connected to limiting beliefs.

A person who is mostly in time will probably be stuck in looking at things from his viewpoint and not be aware of how what he believes at this moment is connected with what he believed yesterday or even years ago, and how what he believes at the moment will influence his life tomorrow and years later. 

A person who is mostly through time will have the opposite problem: he may be too influenced by too many beliefs or perspectives at once, and may find it difficult to form a belief or even recognize what he believes. This is as limiting as is the limiting belief of the person who is mostly in time. 

2 things you can do today:

1. Identify which timeline you mostly use
2. Imagine that you’re in a helicopter. Fly above you standing/sitting/lying on the ground and look at the you on the ground from the helicopter. See yourself on the ground with your timeline going through or in front of you. Now see the dark spots on your timeline. Shine a flashlight or zoom in on each dark spot and see what it contains. The dark spots are your limiting beliefs. How do they connect? How do the ones in your present moment connect to the ones in your past? And if you keep limiting yourself to believing them, how will they affect your future? How many more dark spots will they make on the timeline in future? 

If you see dark spots (=limiting beliefs) on your timeline in future, again shine a flashlight or zoom in on them and find out what they contain. Remember that since future hasn’t happened yet, the fact that you already see them is a form of limiting belief which you are forming now. You can experiment with this. As you see what the limiting beliefs from the future are, you can connect them with all the ones earlier on the timeline. What are the connections among them all?

Artists can use NLP timelines for limiting beliefs

Many artists take their lives exactly because they come across a limiting belief which often connects to or influences time. Using this NLP strategy will be wonderful for them, because it will give them a wider perspective on life.

Found this fascinating? Or perhaps scary, but still fascinating? Would you like to know more about NLP, timelines, and limiting beliefs? Let’s talk. 

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Arts & recreational activities with ungrounding effects on people with learning difficulties:

design

drawing

modeling

photography

viewing paintings, pictures, photographs

the musical genres: dance, disco, trance, hip hop, rap, RnB

some compositions of classical music from the 20th century

extreme / adventurous sports

dance

acrobatics

acting

Arts & recreational activities with grounding effects on people with learning difficulties:

painting

sculpture

knitting, embroidery, sewing

playing a musical instrument

singing

musical genres: classical, country, house

epochs of classical music: baroque and classicism

martial arts

Reiki

Tai Chi

Yoga

The good thing is that if you are often ungrounded and want to practice grounding until it becomes part of your bloodstream, you can pick an artistic activity with a grounding effect.  Regularly engaging in it will kill two birds with one stone – you’ll enjoy the artistic activity and certainly become far more grounded over time.

And finally…

Here’s more on grounding and learning difficulties. Every person with and without learning difficulties can highly benefit from grounding. Artists can use grounding to tame stage fright before and while performing. I was a classical pianist before I became an NLP coach. If I had known about grounding then, I’d have far more fun on stage!

Here’s how you can get grounded and also grounding exercises not only for people with learning difficulties. People who practice dance, sports, yoga, martial arts etc. will find them more familiar, hence easier to learn. Of course, I’m always here to help you.

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