CHAPTER 2
BUILDING SPEAKER CONFIDENCE
Chapter Objective: This chapter offers specific ways speakers can reduce the level of anxiety
(stage fright) they experience when they prepare for and deliver presentations. Although every
instructor of public speaking wants to reduce the anxiety that students experience, no student
situational anxiety and lead students through tips to try the next time they feel anxiety. Define
the term positive imagery (visualization) and explain why and how it helps manage trait
anxiety. List and describe several other methods of managing anxiety that public speakers find
helpful.
Chapter Outline
I. Speaker anxiety is called many things: stage fright, communicator apprehension,
speaker reticence, or public speaking anxiety.
A. Not all cultures have the same levels of anxiety; the Chinese and Taiwanese are
more anxious than Americans while Puerto Ricans are much less anxious.
B. People who are confident speakers are perceived as more competent and fare
better in professional environments than anxious people.
C. Confidence helps harmonize vocal, visual, and verbal messages to increase
believability.
D. Situational anxiety (state anxiety) is caused by factors in a specific situation
(being graded, being interviewed for a job, speaking to a large group of
strangers).
E. Trait anxiety refers to internal anxieties an individual brings to the speaking
situation.
II. Situational anxiety.
A. Feeling nervous in a new communication situation is normal
1. Any time you become anxious, afraid, or excited, your body gets ready
for action by giving you a short o adrenaline.
2. Our bodies are preparing to deal with the extra demand of the new
situation.
3. Neither age nor experience seems to alleviate speaker anxiety.
B. Well-known speakers experienced situational anxiety but still achieved
speaking success.
1. They learned to view the symptoms of situational anxiety as normal
excitement necessary for dynamic communication.
a. Anxiety not only becomes manageable, but usually disappears as the
speech progresses.
2. Poor communicators allow symptoms of situational anxiety to increase
their fear.
a. They view the symptoms as further indication they are poor speakers.
b. As a result, their anxiety gets worse,
3. Good communicators use a variety of techniques.
III. Trait anxiety
A. Fewer people experience trait anxiety (communication anxiety, apprehension).
1. It is a more personal, internal feeling about communication.
B. The current view is that it is both inborn and learned.
1. Some researchers refer to genetically-caused anxiety as
communibiology.
C. Although biology may play a role in anxiety, it is likely not the only factor.
1. Biopsychologists view behavior as interaction of:
a. Genetic makeup
b. Experience
c. How we see our current situation
D. For many, anxiety is a learned behavior.
1. If your anxiety about speaking is learned, you will likely experience two
or more of these characteristics:
a. Feel you are different from other speakers
b. Have a history of negative speaking experiences
c. Consider yourself inferior
E. Most nervousness is internal and only minimally obvious to an audience.
1. The best way to prove this to yourself is to videotape yourself giving a
speech.
IV. Managing situational anxiety.
A. The following suggestions will help you control your butterflies.
1. Prepare and practice.
2. Warm up first.
3. Use deep breathing.
4. Plan an introduction to relax yourself and your listeners.
5. Concentrate on meaning.
6. Use visual aids.
7. Use positive imagery.
A. Positive imagery requires the use of your imagination and is a successful
technique you can do on your own.
1. Researchers have found positive imagery to be easy to use and have a
long-term effect.
2. Positive imagery is creating a positive, vivid, and detailed mental image
of yourself giving a successful and confident speech.
3. Once you see yourself as a good speaker, you will find that it is easier to
be a good speaker.
B. Positive imagery works
1. This mental energy has many of the same effects as physical activity.
2. We act as the person we “see” ourselves to be.
C. Mastering positive imagery
1. This method is used in athletic programs, business seminars, and
coaching sessions.
a. Develop the habit of self-talk.
b. Refocus negative mental pictures into positive ones.
c. Don’t compare yourself to others.
2. In addition to visualizing your positive statements, tape yourself reading
the positive-imagery exercises from your textbook.
VI. Other methods for managing anxiety
A. Relaxation with deep breathing involves learning to relax using deep muscle
relaxation and breathing and visualizing yourself giving a
successful presentation while remaining relaxed.
B. We can change our irrational beliefs and replace them with rational statements
using cognitive restructuring.
C. Skills training involves identifying reasonable speaking goals, determining
behavior or skills needed to achieve each goal, and developing
procedures for judging the success of each goal.
D. Presentation aids can decrease your anxiety by assisting your memory and
freeing you from the podium.
Classroom Exercises
Online Activity
This is an excellent time to begin online group activities, which the students enjoy and which
will also begin to develop a sense of community with your online students. Divide the class into
groups and ask them to develop a brief list of Hopes and Fears—five things they Hope will
happen during their first presentation and five things they Fear or worry will happen in their first
presentation. Have one group member post the group’s list on the discussion board and ask other
classmates to comment on what has been posted. The instructor should periodically address the
things the students are concerned about and give suggestions to overcome these Fears. This
activity helps students see that they are not the only ones that have a particular fear or worry.
Speech Builder Express Activity
Have the students log onto Speech Builder Express (SBE) and complete Step I (goal/purpose),
Step II (thesis statement), and Step III (organization) for their first major presentation.
Depending on when their first presentation will take place, you may want them to complete
fewer or more steps in the speech building process.
Active Critical Thinking Activity
To think further about communicator anxiety, ask students to complete the following:
1. Which types of anxiety do you have – situational, trait, or both? Give a personal
example of each type of anxiety you have experienced.
2. How serious would you say your anxiety is on a scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high)?
Does your assessment of your anxiety match the results of the PRCA-24? Why or
why not?
To think further about situational anxiety, ask students to complete the following:
1. Make a list of several situations that make you nervous (e.g., speaking before
large audiences or with family members present or at a job interview).
2. Which of the suggested methods for managing situational anxiety do you think
will work the best for you and why? Give an example to illustrate your answer.
3. Suggest an additional method for managing situational anxiety that you or
someone you know have used in the past.
To think further about trait anxiety, ask students to complete the following:
1. Write out five to ten positive statements that represent the speaking characteristics
you wish to develop or polish. Make sure that each statement is written as if it
were true right now even though you know it isn’t yet. Avoid using want, will, or
hope in your statements.
2. To see a change in confidence, visualize yourself confidently doing each of your
positive statements twice a day for four weeks. Read each statement, see yourself
doing each statement, and work to feel confident doing each statement. For
example, (correct) “my voice is strong, steady, and enthusiastic when I speak”;
(incorrect) “I hope my voice is strong” or “My voice does not shake when I
speak.”
To think further about managing anxiety, ask students to complete the following:
1. Brainstorm 10 reasons why you experience anxiety or communication
apprehension when speaking in public. Next, rank these reasons from most
serious to least serious.
2. Take the top 3-5 reasons and list any negative or irrational statements you say to
yourself. Write out a positive statement for each irrational belief.
3. Finally, taking the top 3-5 reasons, picture or visualize how you would change as
a public speaker if this “reason” were no longer part of you. Continue moving up
your list, visualizing how you would act and feel as a public speaker if each
reason no longer existed.
4. When finished, write a reaction paper listing the original anxiety reasons,
irrational beliefs, and rewritten positive statements and your success in visualizing
change.
2.1 Biography Mini-Speech
You and your students are probably familiar with the Biography series on A&E. Here’s the
classroom version. Ask each student to bring to class a magazine photo of a famous person.
Students then exchange the photos and take them home. During the next class period, each
2.2 Artifact Speech
You can design an artifact speech and ask each student to bring a single artifact to class. That
2.3 Hat Speech
Bring in a box of hats (scour second-hand stores, garage sales, your closets, or borrow from the
2.4 Name That Celebrity
Here is a way to channel the introductory speeches away from personal comments the students
might make about themselves or each other. Ask students to write the name of their favorite
2.5 Contributions to Confidence
Many students suffering from a high level of communication apprehension may have
programmed themselves with negative thoughts for so long that they can’t even visualize a
positive quality. Here’s a way to build productive images for visualization. By this time, each
2.6 Living an Excellent Speech
If some of your students have a history of bad experiences with public speeches, try this
exercise. Ask them to identify a speech or speaker they consider excellent. Once that speaker is
identified, use her or him as a model for the student. Find the text of a speech given by that
2.7 The Sports Connection
You probably noticed the abundance of references to athletes in this chapter. Positive imagery
2.8 Reducing Situational Anxiety
Objective: Although it receives less attention, situational anxiety can be just as debilitating as
trait anxiety. This exercise allows students to identify causes of situational anxiety and devise
ways to prevent or minimize those contributing factors.
When the groups have produced a list, ask a representative from each group to read the items
identified by the group’s members. You should hear factors such as:
After listing the items on the chalkboard, point out that many of the situational factors were
repeated as trouble spots by several groups. For the most frequently pinpointed factors,
2.9 If They Can Get Away with It . . .
Spend a week watching either one major network evening news program or a variety of the
major network broadcasts. Log the number of times the anchor makes a mispronunciation or
misreads the teleprompter for each program. You will be surprised at the number of minor flubs
you witness. How does the anchor handle it? Chances are they simply correct themselves and
move on. What is the lesson here? (Nobody can be a perfectly fluid speaker consistently. Making
a few minor mistakes is fine; we are only human. The trick is to correct oneself swiftly and move
on with purpose). How can you adapt this tactic into your performance style?
2.10 Grouping Common Fears*
This activity helps students understand that they are not the only one to fear public speaking and
that their peer share similar concerns about the speaking process. During the class session before
the discussion about public speaking apprehension, ask students to think about their first speech
and what they were (or what will be) feeling emotionally or physically on that day. Ask them to
they will worry about looking foolish. Typical social concerns include worrying that the
audience will laugh at them, that the audience will judge them, and that the audience will be
hostile towards them.
For the discussion on speaking apprehension that day, reveal the themes that emerged through
everyone’s concerns, reminding everyone that all students turned in fears and concerns and that
2.11 Think, Pair, Share: Hopes and Fears
This activity was outlined above as an online activity, but also works well for the “in person”
classroom as well. Ask your students to take just a few minutes and develop a list of two to
three things they fear or worry will happen in their first presentation, as well as five things they