Tell A Personal Story To Cure Public Speaking Paralysis

Public speaking can be terrifying for some people but it’s something that business owners often have to do in order to raise their company’s profile. Even speaking at an intimate networking event can be daunting. One start-up founder recommends having a back-up personal story that you can rely on when you freeze up from stage fright.

Adrià Hernández is the founder of start-up Physem. He has struggled through the world of public speaking since joining the start-up community and shared some tips about how to present better on Hackernoon. One of the public speaking lessons he learned from experience was to always have a back-up personal story to tell in the event that you get stage paralysis.

Even if you’ve done the prep work and have some speaking experience under your belt, you can still suffer stage paralysis, and that’s exactly what happened to Hernández at a presentation he gave at a start-up event:

“It was by far the worst start ever for all the presentations I have done, even though I already had some previous experience. I was completely paralysed on the stage, with a blank mind, and near a panic attack from the embarrassment of the moment.
 
I took a deep breath, and I told myself that surrender wasn’t an option.
 
Then I started automatically telling my entrepreneur story, just like I lived it. Once I was calmed after talking for a minute or two, I started feeling powerful and comfortable again, with my confidence growing every second of the presentation.”

Always have a familiar and personal story about your business that you can fall back on when you find yourself having a panic attack or if your mind goes blank at during a professional presentation, he said.

[Via Hackernoon]


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