TRANSFORM Nerves into Your GREATEST Speaking ALLY

What if your nerves about public speaking could be your greatest strength? In this episode, I share my journey from social anxiety to becoming a confident podcast host. Discover how launching my podcast helped me turn fear into passion, improve active listening, and connect deeply with my audience. I also reveal how guesting on other shows sharpened my storytelling and communication skills, boosting my confidence in unexpected ways. Tune in to learn how embracing your nerves can enhance your message and build a lasting legacy through the power of public speaking. 
 
KEY HIGHLIGHTS  
[00:00] Nerves as a strength 
[01:50] Starting your podcast 
[08:00] Recording yourself 
[09:57] Focusing on the audience 
 
NOTABLE QUOTES 
"You should always be nervous when you're speaking in front of people because that means you care." – Philip 
"As a [podcast] host, get to learn how to ask better questions, how to listen in to that person that's speaking and dive in deeper to the topics that they're talking about." – Philip 
"That's a great place to start at first—talk about anything, talk about everything."– Philip 
"When I focus on helping somebody else versus helping myself, I tend to be more courageous, I tend to be more willing to stick it through and find a solution." – Philip 
"Start to focus on the things of the future that you want to leave for people." – Philip 
 
RESOURCES 
Philip 
Digital Course: https://www.speakingsessions.com/digital-course 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamphilipsessions/?hl=en 
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@philipsessions 
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-sessions-b2986563/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therealphilipsessions

Chapters

• 0:00 Nerves as a strength
• 1:50 Starting your podcast
• 8:00 Recording yourself
• 9:57 Focusing on the audience

Transcript

Philip Sessions: 0:01

Today I wanted to share with you how I conquered my fear of public speaking, in hopes that it will help you be able to conquer your fear of public speaking as well. And as I go through this, I'll explain once I got on the other end how this actually helped me. I just happened to honestly stumble upon conquering my fear of public speaking. Part of it was a drive to want to get out of that. So hopefully you're at that point where you're wanting to get out of that, or maybe you've already started a little bit, but you're just looking for how can you actually fully overcome that fear of public speaking? And before I get into this as well, I want to let you know that you're always going to be nervous or you should always be nervous when you're speaking in front of people, because that means you care. Those nerves are not going to be nearly the same as when you had that fear of speaking, because now you're comfortable and confident in yourself and what you're going to share and you don't necessarily have that fear of speaking anymore. But the thing is that you are just concerned that your message is not going to come across properly, and that's a good thing, because that means you actually care about the message you're sharing and the people that you're sharing it with. So nerves are always going to be there, unless if you get arrogant and decide that you're the best thing since sliced bread, that you are a gift to the audience rather than they're a gift to you, that you are able to pour into them. But when you're just focused on yourself, or I'm focused on myself, that's when that arrogance comes in, and then you tend to lose that fear or that nervousness, rather, of public speaking. So don't be arrogant and realize that the nervousness is going to be there.

Philip Sessions: 1:50

So how in the world did I overcome public speaking and how can you overcome your fear of public speaking? Well, what I did first and foremost was started a podcast. Now, I would actually flip the order of this in the future, but I started with a podcast. Actually, I decided that I want to do that. That was kind of the cool thing at the time. This was maybe 2015, 2016, somewhere in there, where this idea of starting a podcast was becoming a bigger thing. People were doing it, and nowadays it seems like even more people are doing it. Podcasts are becoming more and more popular. So definitely something to look into. But there's one step that's a little bit easier than that and we'll get into that in the next one. But I started with a podcast. And why is this helpful? Why is this something that I still recommend to do to get better at public speaking? Well, there's two parts to that and one. It took me a while actually to figure out that that was actually going to be beneficial for me in my speaking career, until actually I was talking with somebody and they started talking about that and I realized you know what that makes a lot of sense. I'm going to start doing that.

Philip Sessions: 2:59

But the first thing, which most podcasts are, are guest-based podcasts. So they'll have themselves the host as well as a guest come on and they'll speak on different topics or a specific topic. You can kind of choose how you want to do that. I'm not going to tell you one format's better than another, but the reason why this is beneficial for you as a speaker is that you get to learn how to have conversations with people. So you, as a host, get to learn how to ask better questions, how to listen in to that person that's speaking and dive in deeper to the topics that they're talking about, rather than having 20 questions that are canned, and okay question one, they answer, okay question two, and then they answer it. That gets to be really boring and you don't get the depth of an answer unless if you have a very articulate guest that can really dive in and give you details and stories and all of this stuff to really answer that question. Otherwise, you, as the host, you need to learn how to actively listen in on what they're saying and then ask a deeper question and, knowing who your audience is, so, as you're trying to extrapolate this information from them, you want to know what is it that your audience wants to learn?

Philip Sessions: 4:14

So, say, my audience is a bunch of parents and I have somebody on that's been a parent there. Maybe they have kids that are over 20 now, so out of the house, but they're going to talk about rearing children through those teenage years and what was that like? And as they start talking now I can keep in my mind okay, I've got parents right now, so let me ask more questions digging deeper. How did you manage your time Would probably be a great question. How did you go about disciplining your children? Another great question, because this is things that parents would want to learn. But if I try to talk to single people on the podcast and I've got somebody that happens to be a parent on the podcast, well, I might bring up parenting a little bit, but then we're going to talk about something different maybe before they got married, maybe before they had kids and talk through that. But I know who my audience is and what message is I want to share with them.

Philip Sessions: 5:09

And so you, as a host, you can learn a lot by being able to ask questions and listen attentively and actively. But on the flip side, you going on people's podcasts this is another important thing going on people's podcasts and being interviewed, you need to learn how to answer questions. You start to hear and see what people are asking that you may have not thought was actually important but actually turns out, hey, this is what people want to know, because it's an outside perspective. But it allows you to learn how to answer a question but then elaborate on the answer with stories, with analogies, examples, experiences. There's all sorts of ways that you can not only just answer the question by saying, yeah, here's how you get over the fear of public speaking, but you could talk about a story of how you got over that fear, like I'm doing right now. I'm going into some details about things that you can do, but you can do that going on somebody else's podcast.

Philip Sessions: 6:03

But the thing that changed for me, that really helped me with my speaking abilities again, this was later down the road the other things I started doing before even this point, but I want to bring it in because it's a part of podcast is doing solo episodes. And why solo episodes? Well, now, like you're listening right now, I can talk about a specific topic how did I conquer my fear of public speaking and then I can give you a couple of points with that and I can share stories and analogies of my experience to help you understand and learn and be able to take action to conquer your fear of public speaking. So, when you have a podcast, you're going to have it on with a particular audience, most likely a particular message, or maybe you just have a message that's on your heart. You want to share, want to share, and now you're learning how to articulate your thoughts that are in your mind and be able to deliver them to your audience. Even if they're not actually in person in front of you and you're not on a stage or anything, you're still learning how to articulate those thoughts and here's what you'll find when you first get started.

Philip Sessions: 7:09

Five minutes would probably be a long solo episode for you, probably. Oh my gosh, I talk so long and you're like, oh, it was only five minutes, that's it. Oh man, okay, I need to figure out how to talk more. But over time you're going to learn how to elaborate more. You're going to learn how to tell better stories. You're going to learn how to explain things in multiple ways, not just say, hey, start a podcast, get over your fear of public speaking. You're going to give more examples rather than just telling the facts and the data. Me being an engineer, that was a tough thing for me to overcome, and there I go with a little analogy there for you. It was tough for me because of me being an engineer, but doing those solo episodes will help you conquer that fear, and that's part of what helped me conquer that fear and helped me learn how to elongate and be able to elaborate on topics that I speak on.

Philip Sessions: 8:00

The second thing and this is what I would say to start first on, it's probably the easiest way is getting this cool device called your phone out and getting on that and starting to do video content, but not only recording it but actually posting it online. And so I just started posting. I didn't think about it Record. If I messed up I might just rerecord, but then I would just upload it and that'd be it, and I just talked about anything and everything. And that's a great place to start at first. Talk about anything, talk about everything. Just start speaking, because as you build up that muscle speaking muscle it's going to get easier, it's going to get more comfortable.

Philip Sessions: 8:40

But you just have to start recording and then you can start to refine your message. You can start to refine what it is that you're going to speak about. What are you going to share a message on? What do you want to be known for from there? But first it's just all about actually hitting record. Is you have to get those reps in? So that's why it's really number one but this was kind of number two for me of how I conquered my fear.

Philip Sessions: 9:04

But I always suggest to my clients and people that aren't even clients like you listening right now that you should just start with video content, start to those videos. But once you get comfortable with that, you start to refine your message. Then go back and watch those videos. Just hear it, watch it without audio, watch it with audio and video and look at yourself and see one thing that you can improve, just one thing. Don't try and improve everything at once and improve one thing and fix that and then improve the next thing, and you'll start to see hey, I say I'm in awe a lot. Or you're seeing my hand going right now and in my mind I'm like, okay, I need to do this a little bit less, but I'm still kind of doing it. But you can do that and figure out okay, I move my hand a lot, or I move one hand or both hands and I need to start fixing that. So what can I do to fix that? And subconsciously, you'll start to fix that. And so that would be the second thing. The third thing then would be stop focusing on me, stop focusing on you and start focusing on your audience, the message that you're trying to share.

Philip Sessions: 10:08

So this kind of goes in parallel with the video videos about actually getting a message clear and what you want to talk about. But it goes the next step, because if you really want to be a professional speaker, if you want to be somebody that people look to and want to learn from. They need to know that you're not just there for you. I've been there plenty of times where I get the DMs or I hear speakers on stage and I'm like, okay, when are they gonna drop their sales pitch? When are they gonna drop that? They want me to buy something from them. You just feel that energy, and it's the same thing when it comes to public speaking, when it comes to video content. You can just tell when somebody is solely focused on themselves and they're solely focused on their bank account. So transition yourself from focusing on me to focusing on the audience, because through that you'll be able to start to generate more interest, more curiosity, and you'll get more comfortable as well, because now you're going to be thinking about the audience and you're going to start sharing things that are valuable for them. And it'll help you get more comfortable, because now you're focused on helping somebody else.

Philip Sessions: 11:20

I don't know how many times in my life, and I'm a person that's really kind of a people pleaser, so maybe for me it's a little bit more emphasized in my life. But when I focus on helping somebody else versus helping myself, I tend to be more courageous, I tend to be more willing to stick it through and find a solution or help somebody out in general, versus if it's just for me, if it's just going to help me, if it's just going to benefit me, if I start hitting some resistance or I don't really feel like doing it, then I may not do it, but when I am doing it for somebody else, I'm willing to do that and so for me. Ultimately, what got me to conquer that fear of public speaking and get out of my own head and start focus on me was I started focusing on my future children. I started thinking about a legacy for myself. What is it that I wanted to leave?

Philip Sessions: 12:09

And one of those things was actually, at the time, future children. Now I've got two beautiful girls, but I want it to have videos that they could go back and look on and say, oh look, there's dad, and maybe they'll watch them. Maybe they won't, maybe we'll have a different format for videos and they won't be able to watch them, much like we had cassettes and CDs and now MP3s and all this stuff. So it's a lot more difficult Vinyl records before that for us to be able to listen to these older technologies. But still, I wanted to have a way that my children would be able to go back and hear my message, and some of the things that I share on are hardships that I'm going through at the time, and I want them to be able to see that. I want others to be able to see it as well.

Philip Sessions: 12:53

But for me, it really started with trying to build a legacy for those future children, so they could see dad, just in case if I died or something happened. But they could go back. And then, of course, there was a little bit there for me too, if I wanted to go back and see oh man, I remember what I was struggling with speaking. I remember when I was struggling in business. I can go back and see that. I can see me talking about that, and so, for you, that's what you could do as well. But start to focus on that legacy. Start to focus on the things of the future that you want to leave for people.

Philip Sessions: 13:26

So the three ways that I got over the fear of public speaking were one, just starting a podcast, being a guest on podcast, having guests come on my podcast as well as doing solo episodes. Two was doing video content, just putting it out there, refining that message and finally reviewing it and critiquing myself and fixing that. And then number three was actually getting rid of myself, getting out of my own way and focusing on me and starting to focus on my legacy, focusing on my future children, focusing on other people helping them out. And those three things helped me conquer my fear of public speaking, and if you have any questions on how to conquer your fear of public speaking, maybe these were helpful for you. Please share this show, because without you, we can't get this message out and we can't help more people be able to overcome their fear of public speaking and become the speakers that they're meant to be.