Matt Abrahams: recommendation

Transcript context

…Well, let's actually talk about this one while we're on it because I think this is a really powerful technique. An idea just to kind of summarize, you picture ahead of time, what it's going to look like and feel like. You talking, looking at the audience. You talk about that and just how to go about using that technique. Yeah, absolutely. And this is some of the oldest research on public speaking anxiety. It was research done in the '80s from the University of Oregon. So visualization, what it does is it allows you to see the event in a way that you have much more control over it so you can think about it. So a good visualization involves some deep breathing to calm yourself. Either you close your eyes or you just look at a picture. Maybe you can get a picture of the environment you're speaking in. I often recommend speakers see the room even if they're not physically present, but get a picture online or some way envision yourself in the room, envision yourself in the room with the people you'll be speaking to. Often we know the individuals or some of them. We can also go online and figure out who they are. So visualization is a really useful technique and you see yourself not just in the moment of speaking but getting up to the stage, delivering the presentation, seeing it being well received, thinking about how you step off the stage. And by taking yourself through that you in essence are a dress rehearsal even though you're not physically in the room. And there's good research to say that this desensitizes people. We see athletes do this kind of thing all the time where they'll do visualization to help them and it really does work. And like I said, there are virtual tools now that can help you do this where you can actually program it to have a certain size audience. You can even program some of these to have a responsive audience or a distracted audience. All of this in service of just preparing you for what you're really going to see. And the bottom line is this, what you're doing for yourself is making sure it's not new and novel. It's something been there, done that, even though if it was virtual or visualized in your mind, to help you feel better about the circumstance. It gives you a sense of agency. I've done this myself actually. I gave a TEDx talk once and it was probably the scariest talk I've ever given and I spent a lot of time doing this and it doesn't actually have to take that much time. It could be like a five-minute thing where you sit down, calm yourself, and then just picture the stuff. And ideally you do it a couple times, I imagine. That's right. Good for you. And congratulations on giving a TEDx talk. That is a high-stakes talk. Thank you. That was before TEDx became super uncool. It was still pretty early. It's out there in the internet in case people want to find it. Don't say they're uncool. I'm doing one in two weeks.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.