Confidence & Performance · Hypnosis session
A Third of the Room Has Felt This. You’re the One Standing Up.
Not the writing, not the slides. The moment the faces turn and your voice arrives thinner than the one you rehearsed. About one adult in three says the same, which is worth knowing before you decide something is wrong with you. Most of what helps here is free.
Public Speaking Confidence
Just under twenty-seven minutes, aimed at the arousal you carry into the room rather than at the words you say in it, and built for repeated use across the weeks before you speak.
US$18.95one-off · no subscription · about A$27
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The publisher reports 8,228 purchases of this title.
Chosen by Ernest McLeodClinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice. About Ernest →
Is this your version of it?
- They go round the table, and three people out you stop hearing anyone
- A hand unsteady enough that the page goes flat on the lectern
- A voice higher and faster than the one you practised in the car
- “I’ll just email it through instead” — said, and meant
- Heat up the neck, and the certainty they can all see it
Three of those and you are on the right page. If it is one dated event doing this rather than audiences in general, presentation anxiety fits better.
One line worth drawing firstPerformance nerves are confined to performing. If the same dread turns up at the checkout, on the phone to a stranger, or at a family lunch, that is social anxiety disorder rather than stage nerves, with its own treatment. The Australian Bureau of Statistics recorded it in 7.3% of people aged 16 to 85 in 2020-22. Start at social anxiety instead.
How many people are frightened of this?
Commoner than a room ever lets on, and the clearest number is thirty years old. Stein, Walker and Forde surveyed 499 adults in Winnipeg for the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1996, asking plainly about speaking to a large audience. About one adult in three reported excessive anxiety doing it.
The half nobody quotes is the rest. Roughly one in ten said it had cost them something: marked interference with education for 4%, work for 2%, social life for 1%, distress for 8%. Most of the third are not being run by it.
And 5% had it on its own, no other social fears at all. Fine at the barbecue, fine on the phone, undone by a lectern.
Do people really fear public speaking more than death?
No, and the claim has a traceable birthday. In April 1973, R. H. Bruskin Associates asked 2,543 American adults to mark, from a list of fourteen situations, the ones that gave them some degree of fear. Speaking before a group came top at 41%, death further down at 19%. The Book of Lists printed it in 1977, a newspaper called it people’s greatest fear, and speakers have repeated that since.
Nobody in that survey was ever asked which fear was greatest. They were handed a list and asked to tick.
Dwyer and Davidson did it properly for Communication Research Reports in 2012, with 815 students. Ticking from a list, public speaking led again at around 62%. Asked to rank their three worst, death came first at 20%, public speaking second at 18.4%.
Which is the more useful result anyway. Not that a talk frightens people more than dying. That it frightens nearly as many, and one of the two is on Tuesday.
Why does being looked at change your voice?
Because a group of faces pointed at you has never been a neutral event. Being judged decides your standing and your work, and the system handling that is the one that handles physical danger. Blood to the big muscles, breathing up, hands tuned for gripping rather than for holding a page still, and useless for the two things you need up there: an unhurried voice and a working memory. The tremor is the right answer to the wrong question.
Then the part that decides whether it ever changes. The fear peaks just before you start and in the first minute of talking, then falls away while you are still standing there — provided you stay in it. Most never find out, because they speed up to get it over with, and speed cuts the exposure to almost nothing.
Public Speaking ConfidenceUS$18.95 · instant download · full refund within 90 days if it isn’t right.
Opens the publisher’s checkout in a new tab. Or keep reading — the free techniques below cost nothing.
What can you practise for nothing?
Four. The first is the treatment with the evidence, the second is where to get it cheaply, the third removes what stops the first working, the fourth corrects an error about what the room sees.
- Build a ladder of real rooms and climb it slowly
Exposure only works graded, repeated and real. Write down eight speaking situations and score each out of a hundred for dread. One question at a meeting you would normally sit through: 25. A two-minute update to your team: 40. A toast at a family lunch: 60. Training a room of strangers: 85.
Start at the 25 and do it three times before moving up. A rung climbed once teaches nothing. Stay in each until the fear starts coming down.
Reeves and colleagues pooled 11 trials and 508 people for Behavior Modification in 2022: live exposure at a standardised 1.41 against control, virtual reality at 1.39. Both large, both measured only at the end of treatment, with no follow-up.
- Visit a Toastmasters club, then join one
This is the part I would push hardest. A Toastmasters meeting is graded exposure with an audience that wants you to do well: prepared talks built over months, and Table Topics, two minutes on a subject you have not seen.
Roughly 600 clubs in Australia, about 10,000 members. Their New South Wales body puts membership at around $15 to $20 a month, with a joining fee near $100 in the first year. Visiting is free.
A year of it is fifty-odd repetitions in front of real people. Nothing sold here competes with that.
- Give up the things you do to survive it
Everyone with this fear has a kit. The script read word for word. The lectern gripped. The laptop stood behind. Lights down. Above all, talking fast. They work, in the sense that you reach the end, and that is the trouble: your body credits the escape to the prop.
So drop one per talk, speed first. Put a full stop where a full stop belongs and let a two-second silence sit. Two seconds is enormous from the inside and invisible from the outside.
- Find out what the room can actually see
You believe your nerves show far more than they do. Savitsky and Gilovich tested that for the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2003: seventy-seven students gave impromptu speeches, and those told beforehand about this error were rated by observers as more composed and as better speakers.
Run it on yourself. Record two minutes on your phone, standing and nervous, then watch it back the next day. The gap between how it felt and how it plays is the exercise. Their sample was undergraduates, so treat it as a correction rather than a treatment.
Where do beta blockers fit?
They exist and performers use them. A beta blocker blunts the physical end — tremor, pounding, unsteady hand — and does little to the frightened thinking or the avoidance, where the problem lives. The musician literature lands in the same place every time: occasional, for a genuine one-off. In Australia they are prescription-only, so it is a conversation with your GP. A once-in-a-career event in three weeks is reasonable to raise; the next twenty years of meetings is not.
Does hypnosis do anything for public speaking anxiety?
Less than the field would like, and the best study anyone can point to is nearly thirty years old.
Schoenberger, Kirsch and colleagues published it in Behavior Therapy in 1997. Sixty-two people with a real speaking fear, 42 finishing, assigned at random to five two-hour sessions of cognitive behavioural treatment, the same treatment relabelled as hypnosis, or a waiting list. Both beat the waiting list, and the hypnotic version came out larger: 1.25 standard deviations against 0.80.
Then the awkward part. The ingredients were identical; what differed was the label. The authors read that as expectancy: calling it hypnosis raised what people expected, and expectation predicted outcome. Both findings cut against the sale: ten hours with a therapist, not a recording through earphones, and some of the effect riding on a word. Not a reason to write hypnosis off. A reason to keep it the size it earned, alongside the ladder rather than instead of it.
A recording, a course, or a coach?
Public speaking is one of the most heavily sold subjects in the personal-development trade. Weekend bootcamps at four figures. Executive presence coaching by the hour. Programmes promising the fear gone by Sunday afternoon.
So here is the proportion. A recording is not a course and it is not a coach. It is a twenty-seven dollar audio file working on your arousal while the real work happens elsewhere.
If you have a keynote in six weeks that genuinely decides something — the funding round, the conference that decides whether you are asked back, the eulogy you cannot get wrong — a coach who will sit in a room, watch you deliver it and tell you the truth is probably the better spend. Several hundred dollars aimed precisely, against nineteen US dollars aimed generally. I would rather you read that here than work it out afterwards.
What is in the Public Speaking Confidence session?
Twenty-six minutes and forty-eight seconds, narrated by Roger Elliott, built for repeated listening across weeks rather than one determined go the night before. Gentle and permissive: no commands, no barked affirmations. It works on the arousal you carry into the room and the automatic picture of yourself going badly. Neither is your material. If the slides are wrong, this will not fix them.
One thing before you spend anything. The publisher offers free previews on some titles and this is not one. Voice is the commonest reason a recording fails for a particular person, and here you cannot test it first. The ninety-day refund stands in for that.
Public Speaking Confidence
US$18.95About A$27 · one-off, no subscription.
- 26 minutes 48 seconds, narrated by Roger Elliott of Uncommon Knowledge, publishing since 1998
- Instant MP3 download plus the publisher’s app — any device, unlimited listens
- No free preview for this title — the ninety-day window covers that
- For someone whose fear is confined to being watched while speaking
Opens the publisher’s secure checkout · no account needed
Figures the publisher reports about itself: trading since 1998, upwards of 24,000 people trained in person, and 8,228 purchases of this title — the highest count of any session on this site.
They also report 97% satisfaction from 9,604 customers surveyed. That describes the people answering the email, not what the audio did for anybody.
Who is this session wrong for?
Anyone whose fear is bigger than the lectern, and anyone with a fixed date and a lot riding on it.
- The same dread turns up in shops, on the phone, or at a lunch where nobody is watching you.
- You have turned down work, promotion or study to avoid speaking.
- You have had a panic attack while speaking, and now avoid the rooms.
- You need a drink before you speak, or several afterwards.
- You have had thoughts of harming yourself, or of not wanting to be here.
- Something high-stakes falls inside a month and you have not said it out loud to anyone.
The first five belong with a GP or a psychologist rather than in a basket, and the first has its own page here. The last is not medical, just the wrong buy: book an hour with somebody who will watch you deliver it. A recording played in the car is not the intervention.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Common questions about the fear of public speaking
How common is the fear of public speaking?
Commoner than almost anything else people fear. In a 1996 survey of 499 adults published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, about one in three reported excessive anxiety speaking to a large audience. Around one in ten said it had markedly interfered with work, education or social life.
Do people really fear public speaking more than death?
No. The claim comes from a 1973 survey of 2,543 American adults, handed a list of fourteen situations and asked to tick the ones they feared at all. Speaking before a group scored 41%, death 19%. Nobody was asked to rank them. When researchers did ask, in 2012, death came first at 20% and public speaking second at 18.4%.
What is the most effective treatment for fear of public speaking?
Graded exposure: speaking repeatedly, in front of real people, starting where you can just about manage and staying in it until the fear falls. A 2022 meta-analysis of 11 trials and 508 people found large effects for live and virtual-reality exposure alike. Toastmasters is the cheapest route to that repetition in Australia.
Do beta blockers help with public speaking nerves?
They reduce the physical side, meaning tremor, racing heart and unsteady hands, and leave the frightened thinking and the avoidance largely untouched. The usual position in the performance literature is occasional use for a one-off, alongside psychological work. In Australia they are prescription-only, so it is a conversation with your GP.
Is fear of public speaking the same as social anxiety?
Not necessarily. In that 1996 survey, 5% of people had a public-speaking fear and no other social fears at all: fine in shops, fine on the phone, undone by an audience. Social anxiety disorder is broader and is a clinical diagnosis, recorded by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 7.3% of adults in 2020-22.
What if the session doesn’t help me?
You email the publisher your order number within 90 days and the full amount comes back, with nothing to justify. One refund per customer. That matters more here than usual, because this title has no free preview, and voice is the commonest reason a recording fails for a particular person.
Other sessions that may fit you better
- Presentation AnxietyIf it is one dated presentation and the waiting is worse than the day
- Stage FrightIf the material is rehearsed and it is walking on that undoes you
- Interview NervesIf it is one room, two people and an outcome you want badly
- What hypnosis has actually been tested onNo trial on the fear itself. Three on what sits right next to it, read straight.
If none is quite it, the confidence and performance guide sorts sessions by situation rather than label. If the fear reaches past the podium, social anxiety is the door.
Whatever you decide about buying, find a Toastmasters club near you and sit in one this month. Visiting costs nothing, nobody makes you speak, and it is the most useful thing here.
Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.
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This is the most over-sold subject in the catalogue, which is why the free half of this page runs longer than the selling half, and the cheapest thing on it is the one I told you to do first. More →
Just under twenty-seven minutes, and ninety days to change your mind
If the ladder is under way and you want something private for the arousal you walk in carrying, this is a small thing to keep on the phone.
US$18.95Instant download · 90-day refund · about A$27 · opens in a new tab
This is a self-help audio session, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. A fear of public speaking is not itself a medical condition, but if the same fear turns up in ordinary social situations, or you avoid work or people because of it, raise it with a GP. Beta blockers are prescription medicines and belong with your doctor. Never listen at the wheel.