Developing Confidence: Your

Speech Class

Nervousness Is Normal
Dealing with Nervousness
Dealing with Nervousness
Nervous is a natural thing that everyone felt
when they appear in public for the first time. But
we must not let the sense of nervousness makes
us so pessimistic. But we must not let the sense
of nervousness makes us so pessimistic. We can
change the sense of nervousness into something
positive. Here are 6 ways to transform your
nervousness into something positive.
1. Acquire Speaking Experience
For more students, the biggest part of stage fright is fear of the
unknown. The more you learn about public speaking and the more
speeches you give, the less threatening speechmaking will become.
Your speech class will provide knowledge and experience to help
you speak with confidence. The road to confidence will sometimes
be bumpy. Learning to give a speech is not much different from
learning other skill, it proceeds by trial and error. The purpose of your
speech class is to shorten the process and to minimize the errors.
Your teacher recognizes that you are a novice and is trained to give
the kind of guidance you need to get started. In your fellow students
you have a highly sympathetic audience who will provide valuable
feedback to help you improve your speaking skills.
 2. Prepare
Before appearing in public, surely you must prepare
your speeches. You have to train you to be successful
speeches when appearing in public. That's very
helpful. How much time should you devote to
preparing your speeches? A standard rule of thumb is
that each minute of speaking time requires one to two
hours of preparation time or perhaps more, depending
on the amount of research needed for the speech.
You have researched the speech throughly and
practiced it several times until it feels absolutely
comfortable.
 3. Think Positively
Positive thinking is also a way to handle the
nervousness. You must be optimistic. If you think you
can, you certainly can. Be confident in the ability of
each of you. Don’t ever think you can not. Negative
thinking will only make us more nervous and easily
give up. Everyone’s nervous, if they can handle it, I can
too.
 4. Use the Power of Visualization
Visualization is closely related to psitive thinking. It is
a technique used by many people to enchance their
performance in stressful situations. The key to
visualization is creating a vivid mental blueprint in
which you see yourself succeeding in your speech.
5. Know That Most Nervousness Is Not Visible
Your nervous system may be giving you a thousand
shocks, but the viewer can see only a few of them.
Even though your palms are sweating and your heart
is pounding, your listeners probably won’t realize
how tense you are, especially if you do your best to
act cool and confident on the outside.
 6. Don’t Expect
Perfection
It may also help you to know that there is no such thing as a
perfect speech. At some point in every presentation, every
speakers says or does something that doesn’t come across
exactly as he or she had planned. Fortunately, as with one’s
nerves, such moments are usually not evident to the
audience. Why? Because the audience doesn’t know what
the speakers plans to say. It hears only what the speakers
does say. If you momentarily lose your place, reverse the
order of a couple statements, or forget to pause at a certain
spot, no one need be the wiser. When such moments occur,
don’t worry about them. Just proceed as if nothing happened.