“Everyone hates public speaking… I’m happy to miss this one out!”

“It’s nerves. Everyone gets them, right? I’m happy for someone else to do the presentation”

You tell yourself this as your heart pounds, your mouth goes dry, and your hands start to shake. You’ve prepared thoroughly, you know your material, but your body seems determined to betray you. The physical symptoms seem impossible to hide with the trembling voice, the flushed face, the churning stomach, the sweating palms that leave marks on your notes and then there is the brain fog!

As a Primary Teacher and senior Leader, I delivered countless presentations, assemblies, and staff meetings. I understand that there is always a flutter of nerves before speaking but I’ve also seen how debilitating it can become. That moment when “a bit of nerves” crosses into something that makes you avoid opportunities, turn down promotions or feel physically ill before every presentation, meeting or event.

What is going on?

Performance anxiety happens when your primitive brain misreads the situation. You’re about to present to colleagues or speak at a meeting but your brain interprets this as a threat instead of what it is, a challenge. It’s trying to protect you by triggering your fight, flight or fright response, the same response our ancestors needed when facing a wild animal.

The problem is that the increased heart rate, sweating, churning stomach and adrenaline were useful when running from predators, but they’re not exactly helpful when you’re trying to deliver a confident presentation in your own office. Your rational brain knows you’re perfectly safe, but your primitive brain has already flooded your system with adrenaline and is preparing to fight that wild animal!

What makes it worse is that worrying about the physical symptoms creates more symptoms. You start thinking, “What if people notice my hands shaking? What if my voice wobbles?” This worry fills your stress bucket even more and your brain increases the threat response. Before you know it, you’re more focused on managing your anxiety than on the content of what you’re saying.

What can we do about it?

Solution Focused Hypnotherapy helps you understand why your brain is creating this response and, more importantly, how to retrain it to channel those nerves into what I like to call challenge stress. This is when you feel completely in the zone, showing everyone exactly what you are capable of. Once you recognise that your primitive brain is trying to protect you from a danger that doesn’t exist, you can start to change the pattern.

The sessions teach you techniques to keep your stress bucket under control so you’re not starting from a place of high anxiety. You can learn to interrupt those unhelpful thought patterns before they spiral and replace them with inspirational and encouraging thoughts.

Instead of your brain shouting “DANGER!” when you step up to speak, it learns that this is a safe situation where you can perform well. Clients often tell me they’re amazed at how calm they feel in situations that used to terrify them. The physical symptoms that seemed impossible to control gradually seem to fade away.

Is it the right time to change?

Performance anxiety can cost you opportunities such as the promotion you didn’t apply for, the presentation you avoided, the ideas you never shared because speaking up felt too overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Are you nodding to yourself right now? Is it the right time for you now?

Do you want to speak with confidence instead of counting down the seconds until you can sit down

Do you want to share your ideas and skills with the confidence they deserve?

If any of these feel true for you, that’s your answer.