Fear of Public Speaking | My journey from anxiety to loving the spotlight

So the idea of public speaking gives you so much anxiety that you'd rather do pretty much anything else ever? That used to be me, too. In this video I'll tell you about my journey from literal panic attacks to now, and give you some tips to get you started overcoming your own fear of public speaking.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

If you struggle with chronic illness, trauma, or depression, and want to go from stuck to unstoppable, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified when I post a new video every Tuesday. This topic is something a viewer requested a while back, and I'm so excited to finally get a chance to talk about it.

First, allow me to tell you the Odyssey that is my personal journey with public speaking. So my fear of public speaking, no, my fear of doing so much as raising my hand in class to answer a question, goes as far back as I can remember. I was terrified. I was terrified of how my teacher would see me. I was terrified what my fellow students would think of me. I got bullied a lot. And when it came time in fourth grade to do my first like presentation in front of the class? Like I, I have such a clear memory of it. I was terrified. I was quiet. Putting sentences together was incredibly difficult, and I was just horrified. This continued all the way through college.

As I look back on that experience, I now understand it wasn't me simply being shy. I had a long ongoing history of trauma and abuse, and that deeply affected how I was able to show up in the world amongst my friends, amongst my peers, amongst my teachers who I loved, or the teachers who scared the living daylights out of me and basically triggered me over and over again. It wasn't as simple as being shy. I was often triggered and going into emotional flashbacks and also panic attacks when I had to even consider the idea of speaking in front of a group of people, particularly my peers in school. It was awful.

And also looking back, I now understand I had Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), which tends to present as the physical panic attack symptoms simply from standing up. I had this perfect storm of my body hating going from sitting to standing, and what's worse standing and not going anywhere. So my muscles weren't helping to recirculate my blood. So I would lose my breath. My heart would be racing. And on top of that, I would be deathly afraid of the situation I was in. And for those of you who are familiar with Complex PTSD, personally I have a freeze/fawn type. So when I go into sympathetic nervous system arousal, it's either freeze (which is basically the human equivalent of playing dead) or fawn (which is people pleasing). Because I did not have the skills to be a good public speaker, people pleasing wasn't an option 'cause I didn't know how in those circumstances. So I would tend to just freeze. I believe I dissociated a lot, but more often than not, I would be actively in flashback and terrified because my body had time traveled back to a time when I had been traumatized. If you haven't seen my video on emotional flashbacks, I'll link it here so you can go watch that next. Over time, I think what happened is I would be less actively in flashback when going to speak in front of my classes, and instead be more disassociated from the situation. I would be running on autopilot as it were, and not a hundred percent present in my body or the moment.

One of the solutions that I found that helped me (especially once I got into high school), in doing presentations in front of my classmates became more common, was I would always volunteer to go first. I would rather experience that exquisite terror for five minutes and get it over with than experience the 45 minutes to an hour of waiting 'cause I'm too anxious to go next. That torture I could not tolerate. That would make everything so much worse. I tended to go first, get it over with, and then I could spend the rest of the class, not necessarily paying attention to my peers' presentations, but just emotionally recovering from what I just went through.

This is something I experienced all the way through college. And I remember one particular presentation I gave in old English literature, which was basically Catholic church drama from medieval England. (These plays are bonkers, highly recommend if you're bored.) But I had to do a presentation on the script for the story of the burning bush and Moses traveling to Egypt. First of all, tangent! The stage direction to create the burning bush in this particular play, was the use of fireworks. So It was not a burning bush, it was an exploding bush. Which, you know, much more exciting. Gets your attention. As I was giving this presentation on the story, and it came to the point in the story for Moses to actually travel to Egypt, I said (amidst my body-shaking panic), "Moses MOSEYED on down to Egypt." And I am still humiliated. Although present day me, as you may or may not have noticed, would be so proud of that in the moment. I make bad jokes like that all the time on purpose 'cause I enjoy it now. But the memory of that still has the panic and anxiety attached, so even though it's the most glorious pun I've probably ever made in my entire life, I can't appreciate it because giving that presentation was awful. So that was my origin story.

You may be wondering, well, "How did you end up here on YouTube Cassie?" So I thought I was going to have to live out the rest of my days being that terrified of being in front of people. But no, that, that wasn't in the cards for me. It was not a fast process. So what happened is I started partner dancing in college. Over time, I was able to gently push outside my comfort zone socially. I had some friends who I had made in the dance classes I was taking, and one of them after a few months invited me to actually go social dancing. Which, whoa, that was a lot for me. But I went, and that's the beginning of the end for me. I am still a dancer, and I also teach dance and I perform and I choreograph and it's wonderful.

But getting to where I am now? It's a long journey. So it started with being comfortable just like being social in a non-structured environment. School? Fairly structured. College? Fairly structured. Social dancing? While structured to the extent that there are people either dancing or not dancing, and there are songs with beginnings and ends, the rest of it's kind of up to you. You get to ask people to dance. People ask you to dance. You can say yes or no. You dance. You sit down. You chat with people. There's a lot socially going on in a social dance. It was a lot for me for the longest time. It can still be incredibly overstimulating for me and I need to recover from it, but I have gotten to the point where people don't realize I'm an introvert and I tend towards social anxiety. Instead, people tend to think I'm incredibly extroverted and intimidating. Apparently I scare people. I have to keep reminding myself that has nothing I think to do with me, and everything to do with them, 'cause I'm harmless. I guarantee you I'm more afraid of you then you are of me. So if you ever see me in public, you get up the guts to say hi, if I twitch, it's not because of you. It's because I'm scared. I digress...

The thing that really pushed me to start being comfortable talking in front of people was that I was assisting a local dance instructor. All of the students tended to prefer how I explained things. And for years, while I assisted this teacher, people kept asking me, "When are you going to teach your own classes, Cassie? When?" And I'm like, "When hell freezes over! Are you kidding me?" 'Cause I was still terrified. I'm like, "No!" And looking back, I really did start teaching because of that peer pressure, and not because I was necessarily qualified enough to teach at that point in time. I was just really good at explaining the more beginner/intermediate things that I had mastered. I am significantly more qualified to teach now, but I was peer pressured into teaching pretty early. And I actually taught my first class on my own the day I graduated from college in 2008. Big graduation ceremony, celebratory meal, and then hop over to the dance studio because the teacher that I'd been assisting ages couldn't teach that day. So I was the substitute. Oh, it was horrifying. But that was the beginning.

And it took about a decade of that to get to my next step where I was brave enough to start trying Facebook lives to get this business off the ground. At that time, I was focusing heavily on helping writers in particular because I am also a writer. As you can tell that has changed drastically, but if you go back in my YouTube history, you can see the recordings of my original Facebook lives. I'm not going to go look, but if you want to have fun. I appreciated doing Facebook lives because it's a medium where people don't necessarily expect you to be perfect. It can be rough around the edges, and it was a nice, gentle way for me to push outside my comfort zone into speaking in front of other people on purpose. Because while I had gotten to the point where I felt really confident in my dance teaching, that's a very specific instance of being in front of a group of people who paid you money for you to talk at them for an hour and they automatically respect you. Whereas when you're trying to build some sort of social media presence to build a business, that's different. More often than not the person you're talking in front of does not like, know, or trust you yet. And that? Terrifying. But that was easier for me to do on Facebook lives.

Fast forward a year or so when I found a really great course to learn basically how to do the SEO portion of YouTube (so the algorithm likes me). I started last September and I've been doing a YouTube video almost every week. I've taken very few breaks. It's simply the repetition. Doing it over and over and over again, and acclimating myself to this feeling that is really bizarre as a human being: of sitting in your chair, staring at a camera lens, and talking to it as if it's another human being (which it's not).

The other thing that has really helped me be able to speak in front of others, and to be comfortable with that, and to no longer be triggered when it happens (to be in emotional flashback or in a panic attack), is that I got trauma therapy. Counseling doesn't cut it. I had almost a decade of counseling and it did nothing. But I found a trauma trained therapist who was able to help me genuinely process a lot of my childhood trauma, and that has helped so much with my social anxiety. Am I cured? No. I am just in a better place to manage everything that goes into public speaking for me. The skill of writing a script for YouTube or preparing a dance class. The skill of being present with my students or present with my clients so that I can help them in the moment. The skill of being eloquent with my language when I'm not speaking from a script like right now. (I'm talking off of a bullet point and I've been talking off of the same bullet point for like five minutes at this point.) But the skill of being able to communicate, be eloquent, to tell a story, to give information in a way that is easy to understand and is helpful. Those are all skills that I have slowly been building, building, building. But then there's the emotional intelligence of being able to care for myself in these situations, being able to reparent myself when I'm anxious, being able to set boundaries and stop or step back when I need to, being able to coach myself through any form of imposter syndrome that I may be experiencing, the ability to take care of myself and prioritize myself and distance myself from other people's opinions, being really clear about whose opinions I actually value and respect.

I think one of the things that can make fear of public speaking so much worse is you value everyone's opinions at the same high level, which is above your own opinion of yourself. You want to exceed everyone else's expectations, make everybody else happy. You yourself be damned. And I have flipped that. I am now much more invested in being in integrity with myself doing the work that makes me feel like, yeah, that was a good video. Yeah, that was a good class. I am proud of that work. It's just really important to me that I be me, and show up as myself, because I'm the person that helps my clients. I'm the person that helps my dance students. They want me to be me when I show up. And getting to the point where I could see and understand that has been a long and hard road, but it has been so worth it.

So if you're on the other side of this lens and whatever screen you're looking at, and you feel like I used to (when I would be triggered in a panic attack, and my voice would waver, and I'd be out of breath, and my heart was racing, and I would say unintentionally dumb puns like, "Moses moseyed"), if you are in that place right now, I want you to start considering toying with the idea that your authentic self is the only thing you need to show up with in order to have massive value. Pandering to other people, trying to please them? If the only reason you are doing that is to try to ensure your safety, that's coming from a traumatized place, because you have already experienced trauma from a similar circumstance, and you're just trying to do everything in your power to prevent it from happening again. And that's okay. The first step is to see that, and maybe start considering: This upcoming presentation I have to give? This video that I want to film? Is that circumstance actually a risk for my safety? Because if it's not, you can show up as your authentic self and it's so worth it. Before I go on to give you some actual tips and tricks for public speaking, comment below and tell me at what point on your public speaking journey you're at right now.

All right, some public speaking tips. First and foremost? Therapy! If you have any form of social anxiety, especially if it's incredibly severe, find yourself a therapist and especially one who is trauma informed or even better yet trauma trained (which means they're actually trained in modalities to treat trauma). Ever since I have learned about PTSD and C-PTSD, I see how prevalent trauma is in our society. And if you think you are someone who has not experienced trauma, if you consider yourself a hundred percent mentally healthy, fine, you might not have trauma. But if you have any semblance of mental health issues, it's worth looking into to see if you have a history of trauma. No matter how small you may think it is, it could still have a huge impact on your life and your behavior. Okay, so that was step one, get therapy or coaching. And just as a reminder, I'm a productivity coach. Like I'm a great interim coach if you already have a therapist, but I cannot replace a therapist. So just remember that.

Public speaking tip number two: practice. Unfortunately, besides therapy and coaching, this is the main way to overcome a fear of public speaking. The more you do it, the more confidence you'll gain and the less anxiety you'll experience. Will you be able to eliminate anxiety altogether? No. I still have lots of anxiety. But will it eventually become manageable? Yes.

Now let's touch on some tips for the actual speaking itself, once you've actually found yourself speaking in front of a group of people or into a camera.

One: the more passionate and skilled you are at a topic, the easier it will be to speak on it. Ranting is great for example! And if you struggle with imposter syndrome, you can check out this video where one of my mindset habits that I talk about is all about imposter syndrome.

Public speaking tip number two: the format of how you speak. So I love this formula. Goodness, I must have been in second or third grade when I learned this, but it goes like this: 1) Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em; 2) Tell 'em; 3) Tell 'em what you told 'em. It's really simple. You just want to get started by giving an overview of everything that you're going to be talking about, so that way the viewer has an idea of what they're getting into and they can bail if they so choose. Two: actually tell them all the things. And then three: wrap up what you've talked about, summarize what you said, and leave them with one main takeaway that you are sure you don't want them to forget. Bonus! This is also a great format for writing papers.

Public speaking tip number three: keep it simple. The best speakers are those who can make their subject matter simple and easy to understand. Don't try to be fancy. Don't try to sound smart. It may seem counterproductive, but the most intelligent people are those who can explain complex topics with simple and clear language.

Public speaking tip number four: humor. My personal brand of humor is a symptom of my extensive trauma. Not only does it help me laugh at life, but it helps me people please. Yay. I don't know how to teach you how to be funny. It like genuinely comes from my fawn response that has been ingrained into me throughout my life because of the extensive trauma I've experienced. Being able to lighten the mood, calm someone down, or make someone who was about to smash a plate suddenly laugh? Very valuable skill. So I'm not quite sure how to teach it. It is on the bucket list though, to study it more in depth so I can be more aware of my humor and why it's funny. When I make people laugh I'm often confused. Like logically I get it. Yeah, that was funny. But WHY was it funny? Who knows? But a few things you can do is be unexpected. Use word play. Do my favorite: it's funny 'cause it's true. And using really unexpected metaphors and similes. Those are always really fun.

There you have it. My journey with public speaking anxiety and some tips to help you overcome your own fear. And like I mentioned earlier, I'm not a public speaking coach, but I am a productivity coach. If you want to learn more about that, I highly recommend checking out my free Masterclass, where I teach you three mindset shifts and one simple three-step system to help you get procrastination to the curb. All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.

Check out this video next on the eight mindset habits that changed my life, and remember, one of them is my take on imposter syndrome.

If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe, and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back next week with another video. See you then. Bye.