How Speech Anxiety Turns You Into Someone Else

How Speech Anxiety Turns You Into Someone Else

We all have a colleague who is normally comfortable, confident, and relaxed when speaking 1-on-1, but suddenly turns flat, monotone, and boring when they speak in public. What’s that all about? Why does public speaking suck our personality from our body like a Dementor from Harry Potter? It is because speech anxiety creates what I call a “public speaking avatar”.

All of us have, or impersonate, a this public speaking avatar when giving a speech. The public speaking avatar is…

…the departure from your natural style of communicating…

…in order to display a style you think others want to see…

…while you speak in public.

We worry people don’t want to see who and what we actually are, so we pretend to be something else. This is akin to putting on a different outfit to resemble someone we wish we were.

Two Types of Public Speaking Avatar

There are two different kinds of public speaking avatars, and each type is motivated by an underlying assumption about the self :

  • Armor Avatar- it is reductive, removing color and character like a filter to hide parts of ourselves we don’t want seen. Example 1, 2, 3
    • Assumption- I am “too much”.
  • Clown-suit Avatar- it is additive, pushing and forced to enhance what we think is boring inside us. It becomes a dance we do to keep people entertained. Example 1, 2, 3
    • Assumption- I am not interesting enough.

No matter which avatar you lean toward, the bedrock beneath both assumptions is “People don’t want to see me present myself the way I am”. So, we create something else to offer the crowd in order to protect ourselves from the vulnerability of showing up as we are. When you use your avatar, however, it has the opposite effect than you hope for; the audience feels bored and disconnected from you. Public speaking avatars are awkward to watch and terrifying to embody.

How to Spot A Public Speaking Avatar

Before eliminating a public speaking avatar, we first have to know what it looks like. The Armor Avatar makes a person less expressive. It makes the speaker become oddly devoid of vocal inflection, make awkward gestures, and lack the energy and zest that they normally exhibit. The Clown-Suit Avatar is the opposite. It makes the speaker more energetic and dynamic than they usually are. The facial expressions become intense, jokes are forced, vocal inflection is exaggerated, and gestures are usually grandiose. This was the avatar that emerged early in my coaching career. When I taught, I pushed my energy. More enthusiasm came out of me than was natural. It was forced and it drained me.

Who Has One?

Almost everyone. Think of how many people have speech anxiety. Then, think of every college presentation ever, most presentations at work, even many TED talkers use it (see examples of Armor Avatar above). Who can blame them; it’s almost universal and we use it without knowing it.

How to Eliminate the Avatar

After a few months of “wearing” my own avatar, I had a radical thought: “What if I was just unabashedly myself today? All the dorky humor, all the overly-animated gestures will be good enough.” So I dropped the avatar. Lo and behold, no one booed me out of the room. In fact, everyone had more fun than usual…because I had more fun. When we own the parts of us that we want to hide, suddenly, we become a real, relate-able human being. EVERYONE is hiding parts of themselves they don’t want seen! When you show yours, they relax and worry less about hiding themselves.

Two ways to eliminate your public speaking avatar is:

  1. By allowing you to just be you, for better or for worse.
  2. By being conversational with the audience. Public speaking should ALWAYS be a conversation. Stop being so measured. Measured is boring. Speak as you would speak to a friend or family member, someone you are comfortable around. Speak with them, not at them, even though they probably won’t be speaking back.

When you do these things, you’ll become the colorful, interesting human everyone knows and WANTS you to be, instead of who your speech anxiety forces you to be. Here are some examples of speakers  who have thrown out their public speaking avatar in favor of their raw selves.

One last side note: the video examples of public speaking avatar I linked are not bad speakers, and I am not commenting on how good their speeches were overall. After all, most of them are speaking at some of the highest levels. It is the AVATAR I want to point at, to show the effect it has on the viewer.

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