Embrace Your Freaking Out

TITLE: Embrace Your Freaking Out CHANNEL: Stanford Graduate School of Business DATE: 2014-02-27 ---TRANSCRIPT--- [Music] this view should absolutely freak you out as much as team one has helped you to breathe and do press UPS looking at this standing in front of the microphone looking at all those people staring back at you should still make you nerves and frankly after 10 weeks of having great coaching who still gets nervous when they have to present now I know team W ask this question so I saw all of you put your hands up so participate well we have good news for you today because the reality is after practicing and practicing and practicing even more you will continue to freak out and the reason that that’s good news is because being nervous has its uses it reminds you that you care it helps you be authentic and at the GSB it’s what we love right and I think comedian Mr Lindy put it best which is if I completely lost my nervousness I would be completely frightened to death so I think there’s a role that nervousness can play when we speak and today we tell we’re here to help you Embrace freaking out now today we have three great guests with us each of them suffer from freaking out in a slightly different way so we have with us miss situational we have with us Mr audience and we have Dr gold now each one of them will go through a little bit about what makes them freak out and then share a little bit about how they embrace it anyway without further Ado I’d like to welcome our first guest Z also known as Miss situation thanks so I used to be very nervous when I’d have to come in front of people and speak but then I figured out why I was nervous and I was able to implement techniques to help me with it so more specifically I I read the book uh by Matt Abrams uh speaking out without freaking out and I discovered that my source of nervousness is called situation-based anxiety what does that mean so that means I’m nervous because of the situation or context I’m in when I’m speaking to people so to give you guys an example to illustrate this let’s say James is outside speaking with a few of his friends about his startup he’s not nervous at all and he knows the topic very well but then if JD was to come and ask him to present in front of aund few hundred people James would be very nervous and that’s what we call situation-based anxiety he’s nervous because of the situation he’s in so as Patricio um talked about earlier in the presentation one of the reasons why you’re nervous is that you see it no longer as a conversation but as a performance and you see it as having one right way of communicating your message so as an actor or performer there’s a right and a wrong way if you hit miss your cues other actors on stage are going to be confused your light and sound people aren’t going to know what’s going on but the good thing about speaking is that there isn’t just one right way of doing it there’s definitely better and worse ways but there isn’t one right way so by reframing the situation into a conversation as opposed to a performance you’re much more likely to remove some of that anxiety so I know it’s a little more difficult than just saying imagine having a conversation with a 200 people in front of you so I’m going to give you guys a few techniques that you can use to do this the first one is to practice conversationally so instead of practicing in front of standing up in front of uh pretending to be in front of people practice uh by like the dinner table or at coffee I actually practiced early on the phone right so practice conversationally Second Use questions so these can be rhetorical questions but by using questions you’re engaging the audience and it becomes a dialogue and a dialogue is a conversation so you can start by using questions finally the third thing I’d like to share with you guys is to speak conversationally a lot of people when they get in front of a group of people to present they feel like they have to use formal language but the reality is when we’re speaking every day we don’t use formal language I’d encourage you guys to use the word you you is a very powerful word and it connects you with your audience and so use it it’s one of a great tool that you guys have so with that I hope that you guys find these techniques useful and try them out if uh what you think you have is situational based anxiety and now James will introduce speaker thank you so much z uh next up we have Chris also known as Mr audience so I may look calm relaxed at ease in front of you right now but it wasn’t always like that in fact there was a time when a situation like this clammy Palms high pitched voice forgetting my lines the whole nine yards but that changed and it wasn’t by accident it was actually kind of like an old joke that many of you may have heard already how do you get to Carnegie Hall practice practice practice and in particular one of the practice techniques I used was visualization and over the course of This research I actually found that there’s over 30 years of academic science backing up the idea that visualization is one of the best ways to deal with anxiety when dealing with an audience so what is visualization anyways a lot of you are probably already familiar with it it’s sort of seeing success happen in your mind it’s when your coach told you that you could make the big shot land the perfect dive or play that piano piece perfectly and visualization translates well into performance into giving talks into presentations so at this point you might be thinking like that’s great but I don’t want to become a peeee football star I’m talking to hundreds maybe thousands of people how can I use visualization to improve uh my performance and before we answer that question I think it’s good to take a step back and think about what’s actually driving the audience anxiety in the first place so if you really consider it for a moment um you realize that what makes you or at least what makes many people uh ill at ease about the audience they’re speaking to is that they don’t know who they is you know your audience might not have the same level of knowledge about the subject matter they might have power over you or you know you might want to Pro preserve or improve your relationship with them and so that’s where visualization comes into play well before you actually give a talk like this what you want to do is come to the venue where you’ll actually be speaking stand in the middle of the floor soak it all in imagine your audience in front of you and then see them in your mind’s eye responding positively to your message so even me right now a couple days ago I was in here kind of looking around soaking it in and now you know the key is that it makes you feel desensitized to the experience so that when you come in front of your audience and it’s that big moment it’s not new to you it’s all hat so I want to finish up now that we’ve talked about sort of how to use visualization we talked about what it is I want to take one quick minute and talk about what it’s not visualization is not rehearsing your speech again and again in your head that can actually be counterproductive because because ironically you’re going to get performance anxiety if you do that your goal with visualization is to get yourself to a good mental Comfort level with the people in venue you’ll be speaking with and that’s how you’ll improve audience anxiety thanks Chris and then last but not least we have James also known as Dr go yes people call me Dr go because because first of all I’m a doctor in engineering second I always set high standards for everything I will do for example when I give presentation to the audience it’s got to be perfect the process the result the uh the message I’m delivering they got to be perfect let me tell you a story when I was working before coming to jsd I used to frequently give presentations to group group of people from different indust uh from different different industry and companies trying to convince them to buy my product from technical Point View so before presentation I used to I used to think this presentation got to be perfect otherwise I may lose my job or then I will lose my apartment oh maybe I will lose my wife my family and then I got I won’t have food to eat I I will starve to death to to that then you can see how this escalate from uh failure of presentation or possible failure of presentation to a death lifethreatening event that’s to say you very care you very care about the result because you doo care about the possible consequence so that’s what I experienced then how did I overcome this I got two techniques to overcome this goal oriented nervousness the first technique is to accept the worst consequence and then do your best to build whatever you can upon it let me give you an example now I’m doing presentation here in the United States at GSB thousands M miles away from my home country China and what what’s going to happen if I SC up then here I’m using James English name not using my real name in China and it’s far away from there no one knows me that much then I just say if I screw up I just say sayala and see you all guys in Japan and yes if you are from Japan use another country yes so when I accept this consequence then I feel more relaxed when I give the presentation the second technique you can use is to try to focus on the present when you are actually before you are actually walking on the stage I was actually doing push-ups when I was there I I only did five I only did five but I think it helped uh it helped you to focus on the present because when when you are doing push-ups actually your brain is is stuck in that moment you cannot thinking of anything else with just counting the push-ups and hope you’ll you’ll finish that very very soon so that’s the second technique you can use try to do something to force yourself focus on the present and I hope these two techniques will help you especially the first one the accept the worst consequence okay thank you Dr gold so there we have it three very different ways that people typically freak out now some of our guests also shared a few methods in which they use to embrace their freaking out but there’s one thing that’s important to knowe and that is they picked ways that worked for them because most commonly when people try and address this issue of freaking out when they speak they try and pick the three or four things that other people suggest that they should do and often that doesn’t quite work and then people freak out even more and no matter how many times you take JD’s class you’re doomed you think you’re doomed to be a bad speaker so actually what we encourage you to do is to use Matt Abrams book inside this book there are 35 proven techniques that you can help embrace your freaking out and we suggest that you understand what drives your anxiety and then pick the techniques that work for you now before we let our guests go I want to make sure that we help you along in your journey towards embracing your freaking out so are there any questions that I can direct to our wonderful guests here today please is it possible to be more than one I try to think through these sometimes and I can’t figure out which one I am so is it possible to be more than one and how do you have you got any tips to find out which one you are see so I’d say I I definitely think it’s like a very personal thing and as James was mentioning you kind of need to find the techniques that work for you and I think it’s the same thing in terms of cause of your anxiety it’s going to be not only based on what when you’re talking in general but also on the situation and context that you’re in right it might sometimes be the goal that’s the most stressful and sometimes it might be just because there’s a thousand people in the room right and so I think you just need to work on whatever techniques help you and just it’s a learning process and know that at all times you’re still going to be nervous and to continue like working on finding new techniques to help you any other questions please for James what do you do in a case where you are in uh China or Japan and um it is actually your home country and it’s important for you how do you then deal with that situation when it is something that’s really high St uh yes that’s a that’s a tough situation uh actually when I was in China I I was doing the presentation I tried to convince me even if I screw up this presentation I’m going to be fine uh the worst case is I I I lose this job and then I will try to find I will try to find another so I just try to convince myself okay this is not that important uh you just do do your best so that’s that’s the technique I I use I just uh maybe I so the example when I was doing presentation here that’s a that’s a that’s a simplified version of the justification final question please is there in the research you did the work you did on this presentation is there anything that has been suggested that you like just are very clear doesn’t work that you could eliminate from our lists of things we would try Chris sure um one that immediately leavs to mind and as I was speaking I skipped over it uh a re recommends sort of like digging in to like find out exactly who your audience will be so like he in particular he said you know get on Facebook Google them you know linked it and I think that’s a little bit of Overkill I think that uh to the extent that you can focus focus on the issues and anxieties driving you rather than trying to sort of get inside the heads of the audience before you start speaking uh that’ll serve you better thank you for all your questions now remember situation audience and goal pick from the menu for what works for you thank you