After a number of requests, here’s the follow-up to my recent post about lowering your heart rate before giving a talk.

In that piece, I said there were two main types of anxiety or excitement when giving a talk.

I mentioned in the first piece that I haven’t had the Major kind for like 15 years, and many asked how I solved it. So that’s what you’re reading now.

Framing

As with many things in life, the key to being more comfortable in front of audiences is all about framing.

Framing is how you look at a situation. Two people could be looking at the identical thing, and if one has a positive frame, or a useful frame, and the other one has a negative one, that distinction is everything.

It’s the difference between excitement and anxiety, stress and arousal, and looking forward to something versus dreading it.

For public speaking, I use a framework that I got—strangely enough—from a book called, The Dichotomy of Leadership, by Jocko Willink. That book is about leadership, but what it had in it was a series of variable sliders that represented a spectrum of ways to think or act in various situations.

These are some of them that I extracted in my review of the book.

Basically, the entire book was about the fact that different situations—with different people—require the leader to respond differently. Sometimes a subordinate needs to be empowered. Sometimes they need prescriptive guidance. Sometimes it’s time to mentor. Other times it’s time to fire. Etc.

My public speaking sliders

I imagine a similar set of sliders when thinking about public speaking.

The right side of this scale is what people normally think about when they think of public speaking. They include self-talk like:

Well no shit you’re scared. This is a recipe for freaking out. It’s the wrong framing.

The positive frame

The right frame is to move those sliders to the other side.

We are all taught to fear public speaking growing up. We’re all taught the old mindset. Abandon it. It’s old, 1950’s, IBM thinking.

Think of it this way. The moment you are thinking about so-called “public speaking”, you’ve lost the plot. Once you do that, you’re not thinking about what you’re talking about. You’re now focused 100% on the audience, your slides, and how to make sounds with your mouth.

This is confusing funny things with laughter. Body movements with dancing. Vibrating stuff vs playing music.

If you want to make someone laugh, you can’t think about laughter! You have to focus on what’s funny. If you want to dance you have to think of the music, not how to move your foot and elbow. Same in the bedroom. That’s what the framework above does—it brings your focus back to what’s important.

Mindset components

And don’t think of things as a big moment. A talk is not a big moment.

The idea is the big moment. The idea in the talk is the thing that’s on stage, and the star of the show. You’re just broadcasting your fascination with it!

It’s not a matter of “will this talk be perfect?”, because you’re going to talk about this topic another 20 times or 50 times or 100 times in the future. And every time you learn something new, you’ll tweak the talk and deliver it slightly differently. This fluid nature of the talk should remind you of how unimportant “perfect” is.

Next, you are not “doing public speaking”, which is utterly meaningless.

You’re sharing your enthusiasm for an idea or set of ideas. Or something surprising you learned. Something you find super interesting that you can’t wait to share.

When you approach talks this way, it won’t matter if you make a couple of mistakes. Nobody will care or remember because they’ll be too busy absorbing the idea itself.

When you get into this frame while you’re up there, you are not on the stage, and the audience isn’t even really there. And whether it’s two people who you’ve known since high school or 40,000 people in a giant stadium, it doesn’t matter.

The reason it doesn’t matter is because the audience is not the point. And you aren’t the point either. It’s the content. It’s the idea. It’s the thing that you are here to talk about. That is all that matters.

You will know that you have reached this frame when what matters to you after the talk is not whether or not someone says,

That just means you didn’t piss yourself, didn’t sweat too much, didn’t fall off the stage, and didn’t fall over dead. That’s what most people are looking for when they get off stage because they were so scared to get up there. And maybe someone took a note or something.

But as you switch your frame, you’re looking for something completely different. You’re instead looking for someone to come up and say,

That’s the standard. And if you focus on the idea and your enthusiasm, you can still nail that while making lots of mistakes during delivery.

Summary

And here’s my promise: Once you start seeing public speaking in this frame, you will—like I did—start massively looking forward to presenting.

Now, get out there and practice sharing what excites you.