48. Speaking Up Without Freaking Out: How to Tackle Communication Anxiety
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According to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, people fear public speaking more than death. So at a funeral, most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. This joke is funny because it rings true for many of us. Hello, I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

For today's episode, we return to one of our podcast's key goals, helping people feel more comfortable and confident in their communication. With this in mind, we've pulled together insights from three episodes to help us better understand our nervousness and provide us with specific tools to manage it. To get started, we need to understand where our communication apprehension comes from. Then we can explore how our mindset and framing of this stress can be hacked to help us.

Finally, we'll look at specific techniques we can use to manage our anxiety. The fear of speaking in high-stakes situations is very common. 85% of people report being nervous about speaking in public. And I quite frankly believe the other 15% are lying. So why is this? What is it about speaking in front of others that makes most of us nervous? Those of us who study this ubiquitous fear believe it is part of our human condition.

Evolution has wired us to pay very close attention to our relative status to others. Now, when I'm talking about status, I'm not talking about who drives the fanciest car or who got the most likes on a social media post.

What I'm referring to is back in our evolutionary past, when we were hanging around in groups of about 150 people, your status in comparison or relative to others meant your survival. The lower status you had, the less opportunity you had to get shelter, to get food, for reproduction. Your life was literally on the line. When we speak in front of others, we risk that status. People are judging and assessing us.

This is ingrained in who we are. Now, just because this is part of the human condition does not mean we can't manage our nerves. There will always be a situation that can make us nervous, but we can learn to manage our anxiety so it doesn't manage us. Not only will this help us feel less nervous and more confident, but it helps our audience too. Let me explain. We have all watched a nervous speaker. Most of us feel bad for them.

Some of us begin to experience what I call secondhand anxiety. We get nervous because the presenter is nervous. We're distracted and can't focus on the speaker's message. So as a speaker, reducing anxiety also helps our audience by allowing them to focus on us and our message and not our anxiety and their reaction to it. One way to address our speaking anxiety is to explore our mindset and framing.

Here is a helpful exchange I had with Stanford psychology professor Aaliyah Crum on this topic. You know, when it comes to communication, stress and anxiety loom really large, be it delivering a presentation, giving constructive feedback, or answering questions. What insight does your work on stress provide to those of us suffering from communication anxiety and stress around speaking?

People have been studying stress and anxiety for over a century now from an academic standpoint. Of course, we've always experienced stress and anxiety to some degree. And by and large, what they focused on is, you know, when it comes to the psychology of stress is what's

what people call appraisal. So how do you appraise or think about the stressor and your ability to handle it? So do you view a conflict or a challenging situation or an important presentation or an important meeting as a threat, something that you don't have the resources to overcome or a challenge, something that's difficult but you do have the resources to overcome?

Those sort of appraisals have shown to be really important in shaping how we show up and how we perform in stressful situations. Our work on mindset goes a little bit deeper into the mind, into understanding not just sort of how we appraise a particular situation, but what are our core assumptions about the nature of stress itself?

the nature of a challenging situation or a demand in our life. That's what we've been focused on. And what we've found is that if you kind of go back into those core assumptions, what you realize is that

Most people have the mindset that stressful situations are inherently debilitating. They're going to ultimately make us sick, make us struggle, make us crumble under pressure.

And when you look at the truth about stress, which is like most things very complicated, you realize that that is a simplified assumption. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's only one way of viewing stress. And you start to realize that the true nature of stress is more complex. And in fact, there's a whole other side of stress.

that reveals to us that the body's stress response, the mind's stress response, was not designed to be debilitating, but instead designed to help us elevate our performance and behavior to meet the demands we're facing. There's a whole side of stress that shows that it can have enhancing qualities on our cognitive functioning, our physical health, and on how we behave and interact with others.

And so our work is not necessarily to find out the truth of stress, what is or what isn't, but to look at how our mindsets, the core assumptions we make about it, shape how we respond in stressful situations.

And what we've shown is that if we can get people to open their minds to this notion that stress can be enhancing, that stress can help you rise to a newer level of understanding, can deepen your connection with others, can make us even physiologically grow tougher and stronger. Having that focus shifts our attention and behaviors in ways that make that mindset more true.

To reiterate what Aliyah said, reappraising our communication stress and changing our mindset toward it helps us put our anxiety into perspective and actually harnesses the benefits of it. Next up is advice we heard from Stanford School of Medicine professor Andrew Huberman. Andrew shares the purpose of reframing while helping us understand the biology behind our anxiety. When we are in a state of alertness, whether because of excitement or fear, the anxiety

sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, let's just call it the alertness system, deploys a hormone from our adrenal glands, adrenaline, and it deploys the equivalent chemical in the brain where it's called epinephrine. It's actually the same chemically identical structure but called two different things because neuroscientists and physiologists like to make things complicated. Not simple. But the role of adrenaline slash epinephrine is

is to create agitation in the body and to create focus in the mind. And this is an important concept because

That agitation makes it harder to be still, which is sort of a duh, right? That's the definition of agitation. But it was designed to move us, to physically move us so that we would be biased toward ambulation or biased toward shifting from one position to a new one.

And so one of the toughest things for many people is to tolerate that level of adrenaline or alertness when they have to be still. The simplest example I can give of this that I think most people will be familiar with is if in the days where we congregated in person, there's this traditional practice of going around the room and introducing yourself and saying something about what you do. And most...

Most people actually find that to be very stressful, especially if they get toward the end of the line. Now, why would that be? Most people know their name and can say their name. Most people know what they do and can say that. It's anything but a high-stress circumstance. Occasionally, there's some social pressure where if someone's very funny before us or they say something in a particularly nice way, then we feel like some additional pressure to do that as well. But it really has more to do with the fact that when we're in a room listening to somebody, we can—

we're comfortable with the fact that we're not going to speak or walk or do much and we could just sit there and write or listen or text or whatever it is we have to do. As we are called on to say something, the reason it's easier to do early in the line is because

We are holding on to a reverberatory circuit. There are circuits in our brain that anticipate action and prepare us for action. And the longer we keep that in check, the more challenging it becomes. When we are trying to withhold action, but we're preparing for action, there's a lot of reverberatory activity in our nervous system, and it feels like

stress. Getting ready to go up to the podium is tough. When we get up to the podium, many people, including myself, find that if we rock back and forth a little bit or we can engage some movement in our body, suddenly we start to relax. And that's because adrenaline slash epinephrine was designed to move us. And it wasn't designed to move us in response to

incoming large predators it was, but that's not its primary function. Its primary function was to move us from whatever position we're into a new position, sometimes towards things, sometimes away from things, depending on whether or not we want the experience or we want to avoid the experience. But the actual inner experience, what we call interoception, our perception of our internal landscape is identical for something that we want to approach versus we want to move away from.

Absolutely identical below that from the neck down, that is really interesting. So so if you can reframe the physiological response, you can see it very differently. And I find fascinating that that when we see somebody who is nervous.

moving one way versus the other way as an audience member, we have very different perceptions. So if somebody steps up on a stage and then takes a step back as they're starting to speak, it looks like they're retreating and therefore maybe nervous or shy. But if somebody actually steps forward, we have a perception that they're confident and stepping into the challenging situation. So it's not only what we perceive, it's how the audience perceives it as well.

So once again, we learned that reframing how we see speaking anxiety can really change how we feel and act. Additionally, forward movement, like stepping toward our audience when we start an in-person presentation, or leaning in slightly when in a virtual meeting, can help us feel better and appear more confident. Reframing is one key element to managing our anxiety about speaking. Let's explore other ways.

We will again hear from Professor Alia Crum, followed by Stanford GSB Professor Baba Shiv. So let me put you on the spot. Let's say I am somebody who has a big upcoming presentation or a meeting contribution and I'm getting nervous. What could I do in terms of my mindset to help me feel a little less nervous and perhaps even more excited about the opportunity?

The first is to acknowledge that you're stressed, right? So you have an upcoming meeting or a presentation that you're given.

It's important. Just acknowledge that you're stressed. I'm stressed about this. Right. And also become a... Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, and it's normal to be stressed about it. Most people would be. Exactly. Notice that it's normal. So acknowledging means, yeah, acknowledging without judgment. Right. Knowing, just noticing. Right.

what you're feeling, right? How do you respond to stress? Is it, you know, hype getting, you know, hyperactive and, you know, sweaty palms or is it, you know, for me, sometimes it's like I have a big presentation or talk and I just get all of a sudden I'm exhausted. I perspire and blush. That's my big thing. I start dripping with sweat.

Yeah, so noticing the physiological reactions, noticing your emotional reactions, noticing your behavioral responses without judgment. That's the first step. The second step is to welcome your stress. So why the heck would we welcome our stress? Well, it goes back to what I just talked about. We only stress about things that we care about.

And so inherently underneath the stress is a true value, a true care, a true purpose. And we wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for something that mattered. Or we wouldn't be stressed about it if it wasn't for something that mattered. So that step involves basically just asking yourself or completing the sentence, right? I'm stressed about X, this upcoming presentation, because I care about Y. And what is the Y?

Right. So it's the goal that you're trying to achieve or the change you're trying to affect. That's the why. Exactly. I care about it because I, you know, really feel like I have something important to say that could improve the lives of the people I'm communicating to or could change the way we're doing things at this company or could, you know, alter fundamentally things.

you know, the relationship that I have with this loved one, right? These, these are the why's right. And, you know, you got to go deeper in asking the why we call it sort of the downward arrows of wise. You know, sometimes people are like, well, I'm stressed about this presentation because like, I don't want to screw it up. Right. Well, well, why don't you want to screw it up? Well, I don't want to screw it up because I,

I don't want to get fired. It's like, well, why don't you want to get fired? You know, right. I don't get fired because I feel like I have a contribution to make here because I you know, there's something in here that I feel that I really have to offer. You go until it becomes a it resonates at that positive level for you.

That's the second step. So first, acknowledge your stress. Second, welcome your stress as being linked with something you care about. Reconnect with what you care about. And the third is to use or utilize your stress in ways that help address the purpose, address that why, rather than spending all your time, money, effort, energy trying to avoid or get rid of the stress. Right.

So you start to realize, oh, you could go back to those behavioral or emotional responses you identified in step one. Like, you know, you get flushed or you start getting jittery. You know, I start kind of getting tired. It's like, OK, well, sometimes physiological responses you can't change, but oftentimes the behavioral responses you can. Right. So maybe, you know,

start, you know, snapping at your spouse or your kids or something. Or you start, you know, getting anxious and talking really fast and you realize, okay, well, that's not serving my purpose of the underlying value, which is to really communicate this important thing that I have to share. So the third step is really utilizing your stress to address the core value or, you know, purpose underlying that stress.

So those are three steps that we share with people to help them to get into this mindset that stress can be enhancing, that the experience of stress can help us rise to a higher level of communication and performance and existence. That is really powerful and very specific. And thank you. And it avoids the checking out and the freaking out and allows you to harness the stress to support the goal that you're trying to achieve. I think that's fantastic.

First and foremost, in my opinion, the tactic is go for any practice that will kind of de-stress you, right? Anything, and this can range from, in some case, just taking some deep breaths. It could be visualizing the audience and visualizing the other person being very receptive. It could be laughter. It need not be real laughter. Even fake laughter will kind of de-stress you.

The reason that is important is because if we don't do that, if you're not in the right state, and what I mean by right state, if you're stressed, then your brain tends to adopt frames that are much more risk averse. And it doesn't allow you to experiment.

because you're coming out of fear. So the main tactic I'll say is just feel comfortable in your own skin. Are you comfortable out there or are you still stressed? Now, sometimes you don't know that. So that's why practices like meditation is so very crucial, not just for health reasons,

But also for communication reason, to be a good communicator, your brain needs to be a lot more resilient to stress. Right. I mean, Matt, you have done this talking to an audience. And what will happen is that when you want to crack a joke and this has been part of what you're what you plan to do and you get into the stressful situation, the joke will fall flat. Oh, yeah.

Right? Right. Some of the things that I'll do is I'll do the following. Oh, I got to tell you a joke. I laugh myself before I tell the joke. And then people will start giggling. Right. Because that's a natural human tendency, right? If someone else, if someone is laughing, you tend to laugh yourself. Right. And it's

infectious and then I'll crack the joke so there are these kind of techniques but the most important thing I believe is that of course you need to know your audience that is the first thing you've got to know and you probably have been mentioning this time and time again we have I'm a big believer that the most critical factor here is you are in a state of comfort right

And we've talked about this. Interestingly, we've had a couple guests, Christian being one of them who you teach with and Dan Klein, who I know, you know, when it comes to to this improvisational mindset. And really, the logic is the same. We get in our own way through our anxiety and the pressure we put on ourselves. And if we can actually learn to relax.

that allows us to achieve our goal much more readily and be much more present oriented too. Right, and you've got to understand that the way the brain is working is all these instinctual brain systems are shaping it. If you're stressed...

Then what happens is that it will completely shape the frame that you're adopting about the audience, about your content, etc. And your body language is also going to tell a lot of our ability to persuade, as we all know, that's not just depend upon what we are saying, but how we are saying it. Right. And so if you're not in that state, I mean, it is an issue.

Right. The tells that we reveal for sure. I've enjoyed so much getting some of your tips. I'm wondering, do you have any other tips that we haven't discussed that you think might help us be more effective communicators?

Absolutely. So if it is going to be a very important piece of thing, you're giving a talk to an audience, a large audience out there, I would just say go to bed early as you often do. Get a good night's rest. Don't sacrifice on sleep. I know people doing this that they will keep on practicing the talk and go through the night and they get about three hours of sleep before they deliver the talk.

If you're not had a good night's rest, guess what? Your brain chemicals are going to be such that you are going to be risk averse. You'll then adopt a frame of mind where your brain is already thinking about failure.

And that's the wrong state to be in. If you didn't get good night's rest, it could happen, right? And then you're traveling like, Matt, you do this and I have done this. You travel across time zones and get in the jet lag and stuff like that. So one of the things I very quickly do, I'll order food that is comfort food.

For me. Okay. Right? So for me, it is growing up in India and you talk to most Indians, it is yogurt rice. So I will just go order some plain rice, get some yogurt, plain yogurt, mix it up and have it. Because you need to have that comfort. And food brings a lot of comfort.

And then if I'm not able to sleep that night, I will go for a run in the morning because running also within about 15 minutes of a run, serotonin levels, some of the chemicals in the brain will actually be, will increase. And then you get into the right kind of a state when you're giving the talk.

Great. I love that. Any excuse to eat my comfort foods, I'll take. So I'm now going to tell everybody Baba told me to. Even if it is unhealthy, a little bit of it. We now have some very specific techniques we can employ to manage our communication apprehension. We can change how we view our anxiety through reframing. We can explore the value our communication brings to us and others. We can work to sleep well and eat right.

For more techniques you can use to manage your anxiety, check out stanford.io slash AMP. stanford.io slash AMP. Each of us has the ability to become a more confident, calm communicator. It can take a lot of repetition, reflection, and feedback, but it is possible.

I see it all the time with my students, the people I coach, and I've even seen it in my own communication journey. So regardless of if you're presenting at a wedding or a meeting, protesting or pitching, I hope you confidently share your stories, give your input, and spread your ideas. We all stand to benefit from your speaking up without freaking out. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, The Podcast.

produced by Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. For more information and episodes, visit gsb.stanford.edu or subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, find us on social media at stanford.gsb.

Hi, Matt here. Before we jump in, I wanted to let you know about three unique executive education programs offered to senior-level business leaders by the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Executive Program in Leadership, the Emerging CFO Program, and the Director's Consortium Program are

are all being hosted here on Stanford's beautiful campus in the next few months, crafted with proven strategies for success and filled with diverse leaders from around the globe, taught by many of the guests you've heard on Think Fast, Talk Smart. Apply today at grow.stanford.edu slash upcoming to join us.