Hypnotherapy and NLP are the best combination to make you a confident public speaker
Some say that the fear of public speaking is the most common phobia in the western world. Whether this is true or not, it is certainly the most common phobia we get to help people with. We have worked with many organisations, such as the Department of Trade and Industry, and with many individuals ranging from students to CEO's of major international companies to alleviate their fear of public speaking.
Be a better public speaker in any context
People's own definitions of 'public speaking' vary widely. Some just want help to feel more confident giving a short talk to two or three people, some want help to feel capable of public speaking, without fear, on a grander scale, including business presentations to clients or a best man's speech through to being interviewed on national television.
For whatever reason you want help to be rid of your public speaking phobia, hypnotherapy and NLP offer a powerful combination of techniques to both help you to reprogram your mind, and also to give you tools to control and guide your own thinking patterns in advance.
How can you help me with my fear of Public Speaking?
The good news is that this fear of public speaking can be 'unlearned', often quite rapidly, sometimes in a matter of minutes. There are a whole range of techniques from the fields of hypnosis and NLP that can be employed to help you to 'unlearn' the fear of public speaking, and people generally find the sessions both absorbing and interesting.
This fear of public speaking manifests itself in many situations, and for people from all walks of life. It ranges from nervousness when talking to more than a couple of people in at work, to full blown panic at the mere thought of speaking in any public situation. Whether you are the person who dreads the moment in a meeting when someone turns to you and says 'what do you think', worry and worry that soon it will be your turn to introduce yourself, or virtually pass out at the thought of any public speaking, you CAN be helped.
All those with Fear or Phobia of Public Speaking have the following thing in common...
They experience anxiety, to a greater or lesser extent, prior to the event.
The difference between someone with a phobia or fear of public speaking and someone who feels calm and capable when speaking is that the former frets about it in advance and the latter doesn't.
Rationally, worrying sort of makes sense. After all, if you were nervous on similar occasions before, perhaps on several occasions, then it's 'logical' to expect to be scared again.
The fear of the fear IS the problem
Unfortunately it is this 'fear of the fear' that is mainly responsible for you unwittingly continuing to create the problem.
One of the approaches is use, based on the principles of NLP, is to give you conscious tools that allow YOU to reprogram yourself and we work with you to enable you to learn to use and integrate these tools efficiently and effectively. Sometimes this is all it takes.
However, we also use a range of hypnotherapeutic techniques to help you to re-pattern your thought processes, and I find that a combination of approaches works best.
How long will it take to cure my public speaking phobia?
Typically, we see people between 2 - 4 times, an hour at a time for this, though on many occasions one session suffices.
Read specific comments regarding how to stop Stage Fright
Fear of Public Speaking - Phobia of Public Speaking - Examples
Here are a couple of summarised 'case histories' of Steve Tromans' that illustrate the range of these fears.
John was chairman and chief executive a major international IT company. He had started the company four years earlier with just three employees, now he had hundreds of people working for him, and he had opened offices in many countries. Despite being a focused, 'driven' and resourceful person he had a fear of public speaking that bordered on terror. He had avoided speaking in public by getting one of his employees to speak on his behalf. Two weeks earlier, however, he had opened his Paris office but the person who was due to make the speech couldn't make it at the last minute and there was no way of avoiding the issue. He made a complete mess of it, mumbled, forgot what to say and felt awful. However, this was so 'out of character' with how people perceived him that everyone thought he was joking and the event was a great success.
The week I saw him, however, he was due to make an important speech he had somehow lumbered himself with, in front of six hundred people in the City, including Bill Clinton. I only had one hour to work with him.
Techniques that simply work
I used basic, simple, powerful NLP techniques to empower him to get out of the 'fear of the fear'. He was a controlling sort of man, and as he began to realise that he had just discovered a new thing to control (his thinking), his eyes lit up. His speech turned out to be a great success.
Sally was a mature student and a trainee teacher. She was, by all accounts, excellent with children and loved teaching but lived in fear of 'performing' in front of a classroom invigilator. In these circumstances she under performed to the extent that she thought she might fail to get her teaching qualification.
I asked her what she was doing in your head that filled her with so much fear. After she said 'This is going to sound really silly' - a lot of people say that - she told me the following. She said that every time she thought of the invigilator in the room, she imagined being in front of the class and all the children staring at her with grey blank faces and unblinking eyes. Then she would feel chest tighten and became aware of her heart beating quickly. 'And all I can hear', she said', is the scratching of the invigilator's pencil from the darkness beyond...'
Two sessions of NLP and hypnotherapy combined and she was completely comfortable in these situations.
Not everyone is quite as vivid as that, most don't run complex scenarios, they just think of speaking in a public situation and immediately feel fear.
But it doesn't have to be this way, there is an alternative...
