Lose Your Ego to Gain an Audience and Make Winning Speeches

Park Your Ego When Speaking

Posted by Eamonn O'Brien - April 13, 2012

Any chance you suffer from nerves when called upon to speak?

How about fretting about all the stuff that could go wrong or errors you could make?

If you said yes, you’re not alone.

3 of 4 adults admit to suffering from speech anxiety or ‘glossophobia’ according to a recent study by the National Institute of Mental Health.

In a similar study we completed 18 months ago, just 1 in 5 Irish adults claimed to have any confidence when speaking in public.

Any yet, most of us feel entirely comfortable about having conversations with our friends, families or peers. Indeed, we Irish are famous for our ‘gift of the gab’.

So, why do the rules seem to change once we have to be upstanding in front of others?

The most common fears people have of speaking include:

I’ll forget what I want to say
I’ll stumble over words
I’ll go blank
I’ll look foolish

Have you noticed something all of these things have in common?

It’s the ‘I’ bit. In other words, a focus on self or ego

Lose your ego and gain an audience

Here’s the thing, while there may be an ‘i’ in speaking, it’s so not about you.

Shocking as it may seem, your audience is almost never as focused or bothered about you (the speaker) as they are about themselves.

Most audience members are much more interested in the old marketing mantra of WIIFM – what’s in it for me.

So spend less time worrying about how you look or sound, check your ego (if you have one) somewhere before you speak and concentrate all of your energies on the only thing that counts – what your audience gets out of the experience.

What do you think?

Does parking your ego seem like a hard thing to do?

What makes your nerves jangle before you speak and what tactics do you use to calm these?

http://write-on-track.com/ Lorna

Apparently some people would prefer death to speaking in public! Agree though, if a speaker admits they are nervous, the audience then look for signs of nervousness etc – much better to focus on the audience.
- Eamonn O’Brien
  
  Thanks Lorna, you’re absolutely right.
  
  And it’s certainly true that a huge proportion of people suffer from speech anxiety (75% in the US and 80% in Ireland).
  
  Funnily enough,the preferring death over speaking has always been a bit of an OTT use of stats…dating back to the books of lists in the 70s – people never actually said that! But, so many people would love to overcome this fear – engendering greater confidence in work & social situations.
http://www.cendrinemarrouat.com Cendrine Marrouat

Hello Eamonn,

Excellent article and so true on many levels.

English is not my mother tongue, so when I started facilitating social media workshops in that language, I was really nervous — and only spent 2 hours the night before the first class. I was worried people would focus on my accent, my grammatical errors, and what not.

Then, as the class started, I remembered that my training was in teaching (I used to teach French to adults) and that the only thing that was preventing me from being the best I can be was my ego.

At the end of the workshop, which lasted three hours, half the class came to chat with me and told me how impressed they had been with the entire class. They said that they hadn’t even paid attention to my accent and loved how passionate and entertaining I was.

Sorry for the rambling.

Thank you for taking the time to write this article!
- Epobrien
  
  Thanks so much for your comments Cendrine – I couldn’t have put it better myself.
  - http://www.cendrinemarrouat.com Cendrine Marrouat
    
    Well, your article triggered the comment, so I guess great minds think alike.
Anonymous

I’m to the point now where I’m comfortable speaking in front of groups, except when my talk is being recorded to, say, be placed on a website. Then, I am less comfortable, less relaxed, and am probably not as interesting. It’s like, yes, that offhand comment may be humorous to family or friends (to use your example), but do I want it memorialized on the internet?