How to Cope With Presentation Anxiety — from chronicle.com by James M. Lang
Here’s how a professor and experienced public speaker has learned to deal with the academic version of stage fright.
Excerpts:
Build a pause into the initial minutes of a presentation, so that you can stop and catch your breath. I don’t mean the kind of brief pause you might make between two sentences. I mean a substantive pause in which you are able to stop speaking — for at least 30 seconds — because you have given your audience something to view, think about, or discuss.
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The remedy: Don’t envision yourself speaking for 45 minutes. Instead, soothe your brain and nervous system by persuading them that you only have to get through the next five minutes.
Your audience wants to learn from you. But real learning requires active thought from the learner. So use those early moments of your talk to start them thinking and take some of the pressure off you.