The Secrets of Speech Anxiety: Why You Feel It and How You Can Fight It
The uncertainty of your voice. The sweat coating your palms. The jerky, unnatural gesticulation of your arms. Perhaps the worst—the audience’s eyes: a bunch of searing spotlights burning into you. Every intrusive thought makes your tongue feel heavier in your mouth, your stuttering brain leaving you with nothing to say besides a long “um…” to fill the silence.
Speaking, however much anxiety it may cause is inescapable. Francesca Rico, 18, a freshman film student at Emerson College, describes public speaking as anxiety-inducing. “I don’t like public speaking,” she says, describing her tendency to shake during class presentations. “It stems from both feeling unsure and not liking to have a ton of attention on myself,” Rico says about her speech anxiety. On the face of it, the likelihood of embarrassing yourself increases tenfold when a room’s eyes are on us. “I do want to get better, just because I know it’s something that I have to do,” says Rico. “If I want to pitch an idea for a film, I know that I have to be confident.”
Upon entering college, students are faced with challenges to develop their ability to communicate. Often having to take required public speaking classes, they learn how to express opinions, analyses, and ideas. These skills must be developed in preparation for the job force, but even after years of education, many students still feel unsure of their ability to express themselves vocally.
Conquering speech anxiety may seem impossible, but by considering speech in itself—rather than our anxiety towards it—as conquerable, then the process can become less Michael Myers scary.
Public Speaking: The Horror Film
Public speaking, whether it be a speech, interview, or group meeting, creates a terrifying environment where the socially anxious feel acutely out of place and unable to protect themselves. It can seem like the entire room, yourself included, is waiting for you to mess up. But even though this feeling may be isolating, its origins are rooted in human nature.
Emily Malkin, a freshman theater student at Emerson College, has an extensive repertoire of standing in front of an audience. However, she describes giving speeches and presentations in class as more stressful. “There’s more pressure,” she says.
During speeches, there’s also the addition of impressing your audience. Malkin describes theater as living in another world, but giving speeches means having to exist in the “real world” consisting of real people’s thoughts. “So many theater majors hate presentations,” she says, “it’s because we have to be ourselves!”
“If you distill it all down to a very simple level, we can either feel safe or unsafe,” says Amanda Hennessey, speech coach and author of Your Guide to Public Speaking. “Public speaking feels unsafe.” Laying yourself out before an audience requires vulnerability. On one hand, as a speaker, you want to connect with the people before you, but on the other, you want to shield yourself from their scrutiny. Finding a safe space proves to be impossible, and speakers find themselves fighting their anxiety while simultaneously trying to share ideas.
Speaking Wounds and Proverbial Band-Aids
“People are not taught this skill,” Hennessey says. “People have this idea of ‘if this goes okay, then I’m okay,’ rather than, ‘I’m okay, now let me share my message.’” Even experts will forget important information when giving presentations because their stress causes them to lose their train of thought.
“Wounds,” Hennessey says, can affect a person’s entire outlook on sharing their ideas. Previous bad experiences—a bad speech, an off-pitch choir performance, a snicker from a peer during a presentation—offset our mindset and leave holes in our confidence. From then onwards we become overly conscious of the way we blush or fidget.
Nammi Velicheti, a 2022 national DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) winner and current college freshman is no stranger to giving passionate presentations, but even she has had trouble with finding her voice. “When you’re an insecure kid, you’ll say something and it’ll seem looked down upon. Those moments are very traumatizing,” she says.
These ‘traumas’ are more debilitating than what meets the eye. Seemingly inconsequential experiences create a marker of anxiety, resulting in that immediate panic at having to speak, whether it’s planned or unprompted.
Since nerves often cannot be completely eliminated, Hennessey recommends that speakers accept, rather than fight them. The physical reaction of our spiraling minds is what most impairs our ability to give a message. The stutters, the averted eyes, the stiff posture: all of these reactions are a result of a deeper inner battle. “We can choose to not go down that route; we can decide ‘it’s okay if I’m nervous,” says Hennessey. She continues, “Accept yourself so that the experience doesn’t become about others accepting you.”
Within her first semester, Malkan had earned a role in a student production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Her talent as well as her confidence, however, did not come seamlessly. “Bad performances have helped,” she says about building confidence. “Once you have a bad performance, you realize it’s not so scary if you mess up.”
“Um”: Translated
What makes speakers feel most critical of their words is the unintended “um” and “uh” that will appear at some point of uncertainty during a presentation. Filler words and stutters are a type of language disfluency that congests speech in moments of anxiety. In his book Um: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Bumbles Michael Erard describes these disfluencies as an ”interruption” of speech, a moment where a person’s mind and mouth cannot find camaraderie.
Shane Martin, a communications professor at various institutions in the Boston area, has become proficient in his ability to control his speech, being able to ‘turn off’ the use of vocal fillers completely. Martin’s ability to free his speech of filler words comes from a two-step process of recognizing and pausing.
“Take a paper, and every time you use a vocal filler, mark a notch on the page,” Martin says, “the next step is to use pauses instead.”
Though we may want to fill silences out of a desire to make the speaking experience less awkward, overusing “um” causes disengagement with our audience. “When we’re bridging our thoughts from what we're saying to our next thought, using a vocal filler doesn’t allow the audience to take in that moment of silence,” explains Martin. That silence after finishing a thought is a cue for the audience that a transition in the speech is occurring, without it, sentences become jumbled rather than fluid.
“Think of vocal fillers as profanity,” Martin suggests, “in speech communication class, if you’re using vocal fillers, you’re using profanity.” In the same way parents teach their children not to swear, Professor Martin tries to retrain his students to not say “um.”
While filler words are not the only part of speech anxiety, finding ways to minimize them can improve a person’s ability to feel in control of their message.
The Greatest Speaking Tool: Passion
When Nammi Velicheti won her national DECA title, she was also surprised to have gained recognition with a performance award. “Winning the competition was one of the happiest moments of my life,” she says.
Her presentation focused on a local business’ handmade clothing. “Clothes are universal,” she says. Connecting with an audience proves to be much easier when a speaker is passionate and trying to relate that passion to others.
At the beginning of her presentation, Velicheti chose to tell a story from her youth, and though she called it “dumb” and “embarrassing,” she noticed that when she told her story to her peers, they laughed. Later, when she told the judges as a preface to her presentation, they laughed too. The connection formed through that laughter, she affirms, was the key to her success. Once she knew she had established a relationship with the judges, all of her anxieties about her last-minute preparations disappeared.
“Once, I had to work with this chef who had to look directly into a camera,” says Amanda Hennessey. Her client, a chef going on network television, was panicked at the idea of coming up with what to say during her segment since writing down and memorizing a script doesn’t create the authentic air that the show required. “I wanted her first sentence to feel like her,” Hennessey says. After some deliberation, they came up with the very simple and real exclamation of “I hate doing dishes!” With that, she’s on the same page as her viewers.
“If students are focusing on a topic they don’t like, thinking about how much they don’t like it can be harmful to their ability to give that speech,” says Martin. Emotions toward the actual words and ideas being shared during a presentation can make or break your experience sharing them with others.
“Marie Kondo your mindset,” says Hennessey. “Sit with your thoughts, see how your body reacts; if it sparks joy, keep them, if they make you feel unworthy, let go.”