Public Speaking Anxiety: Why Speaking Up in Leadership Meetings Feels So Scary | Keeping Calm When Presenting

What if the biggest barrier holding women leaders back from speaking up with confidence isn't a lack of ability at all? Public speaking anxiety begins with the negative thoughts running through your own mind, and that story can quietly undermime your leadership visibility, executive presence and opportunities for promotion.

Rather than trying to eliminate nerves, this conversation offers a different perspective. You'll discover why your inner dialogue has such a powerful impact on public speaking, how fear of judgement fuels public speaking anxiety, and why changing your thinking can transform the way you show up. This builds on the ideas shared in Episode 6, Women Leaders: Is it Really Imposter Syndrome? | Transforming Self Doubt to Self Worth, where self-belief becomes the foundation for confident leadership.

You'll also take away four practical strategies to help women leaders feel calmer before presenting: focus on your audience before your slides, practise out loud until your message feels natural, replace imagined criticism with positive audience engagement, and use simple body language techniques to settle your nervous system. Whether you're speaking up in meetings, pitching ideas or presenting to senior stakeholders, these tools help your message land with greater clarity and confidence.

Leadership visibility isn't about being the loudest person in the room. It's about trusting that your voice matters. When women leaders stop letting fear dictate their decisions, they create more opportunities to influence, inspire and lead with authenticity.

If speaking up feels harder than it should, or you're stepping into a leadership role where your voice suddenly matters more than ever, I'd love to have a conversation with you. 

You can book a free Exploration Conversation through the link in the show notes and together we'll find your bearings before your next important conversation.

https://www.boldmovescoach.co.uk/connect 

Women leaders deserve to be heard.

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Leadership Communication in Action is a podcast for women who are capable, thoughtful, and quietly questioning how they’re showing up at work and in life.

I’m Liz Boswell. I work with professional women who don’t need more advice, but do need space to think clearly, especially when the pressure is on.

Each episode is a calm, mentoring-style conversation grounded in real client moments. We look at the stories people carry, the behaviours those stories create, and the small, practical shifts that change how things land day to day.

You’ll hear honest reflections, psychologically precise questions, and simple actions you can try immediately, without overhauling your life or becoming someone else.

If you’re stepping into more responsibility, more visibility, or simply feeling the weight of decisions that matter, this podcast is here to help you slow things down, think more clearly, and move forward in a way that feels grounded and real.

A quiet companion for people who want to make better moves, not louder ones.

Transcript

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When you wake up at 3:00 AM worrying about that presentation you've got to deliver tomorrow, it's very rarely because you're worrying about the presentation slides that you prepared and wanting to make sure they look good enough. No, it's more likely to be the conversation you're having in your head. What if I mess it up? What if I forget the words that I'm supposed to be saying? What if everybody realizes I'm not as good as I think I am? Over the last 17 years, I've worked with hundreds of women, helping them to overcome their fear of public speaking, and something's become really clear to me. Very few people are frightened of PowerPoint. What they're frightened of is something completely different. It's judgment. And so today I want to share with you a different way of thinking about those nerves and public speaking anxiety that you have because the goal is not to become fearless. It's to feel enough like yourself that your message can be heard Hi, and welcome back to Leadership Communication in Action. I'm your host, Liz Boswell, and I'm so pleased that you came back, and it's really great to have you here for this conversation today, we're talking about public speaking anxiety. Did you know that the fear of public speaking is often classed as the number one fear that most people have? So if you've ever worried about a presentation, if you've ever avoided one or given back word on a presentation, then you're not on your own. But one of the things I wanna talk to you about today is looking at this in a completely different way because when it comes to public speaking anxiety, most people think that it's their nerves that are the problem, and they're worried that people will see their nerves. But when people come to me as a coach because they're terrified of presenting, and I talk to them about my own experience of overcoming the fear of public speaking- what I talk to them about is it's rarely about the presentation and the structure. What we really wanna talk about is the conversation in our head, our inner voice, because for me and for most of the women that I've worked with as well, that's usually where the anxiety starts. It's that voice in our head that's telling us we're gonna mess up, and if we believe that's what everyone else is thinking, and we believe that the audience are just sat there waiting for us to fail, then what happens is our body responds to that fear as well. We clam up, our palms become sweaty, our throat starts to close, and we start to have them palpitations. Everything changes, and it's those symptoms that we get, those physical symptoms, they come from the brain sending us those thoughts. And the reason for that is it comes back to the age-old fight or flight response that we have. It's the brain's way of keeping us safe and sending those signals to the body. So the brain's trying to keep us safe. It's trying to tell us, "This is not a good situation to be in. It's not good to be standing here in front of lots of people looking at you." Because let's face it, it's not something we do every day, is it? So this is the reason why it feels uncomfortable for you. It's the reason why you have anxiety, and it's the reason why most people avoid public speaking as well. And what happens is they don't push through that fear. They don't push through that anxiety to get more practice at it to become more comfortable. That's essentially what I help my clients to do, is to work through that fear so that they can become more of themselves when they're speaking Let's talk about why this matters for you then. Why should you want to listen to what I'm talking about today, and why is it important for you as a woman in leadership? the fact is that the higher we get in the leadership position, and the more responsibility we take on, public speaking's much more than just presentations. It's much more than creating a PowerPoint maybe you'll have to speak at board meetings. You'll probably have to get involved in pitching ideas and sharing your strategy. as we step into leading a team or being a head of department, each year, maybe each, even each six months, you're gonna be asked what is your business plan going forward? What's your plan for achieving your next quarter's objectives or your next year's objectives? And we have to present those back, don't we? So it's so important because your voice becomes part of how you lead. It becomes part of who you are as a leader in your organization. Most people talk about visibility for leaders, and it's much more about visibility. It's much more about what people see when you are speaking to them and how you come across. And if fear stops people hearing your thoughts and your ideas, then you know what? Your organization are missing out as well. Other people in your business are missing out, and even more than that, it could be people in your industry are missing out because you're probably knocking back opportunities to go and speak at conferences, industry events, and that's slowing down your progress of getting promoted as a woman in business as well. One of the biggest shifts that I see in coaching women leaders is them realizing that it's not confidence that they need to be able to speak up. It's more about belief in themselves and trusting that what they have to say is of value and will be listened to. And when we get more confident and get more capable as a speaker, then we start to believe ourselves that our voice matters, and when we believe it, you better believe that other people believe it as well. So I really want to talk to you about this today and help you to see that this is possible for you as well, and I know that because I've worked with lots of different women in helping them to overcome this fear and helping them to go from being terrified of speaking to speaking at conferences. One of my clients came to me because she was struggling with imposter syndrome, and if you want to know my thoughts on that, go back and listen to the previous, episode. And so imposter syndrome was stopping her from going out there and speaking about her business, and she'd actually just written a book as well, and speaking was gonna help her to promote that book. But in her head, no one was interested. That voice in her head was telling her, "No, if you get out there and talk about it, people will think you're showing off. People will think you're big-headed." So she was holding herself back from doing that. So through the coaching that we did together, we focused primarily on her thinking before we focused at all... Before we did anything about her nerves or her speaking, it was all about how she thought in her head what the audience were thinking. And you know what? Now she's speaking at international conferences, she's been asked to go back and speak again, and this is a big part of her business development for her. So it really has made a difference. So as I say, I believe the same is true for you as well. You can make this change, and I'm gonna share with you just four principles today of- that made the biggest difference for me in overcoming my fear of public speaking, and how I help other people do this as well. So let's get into it then. Here's the first one. Start with the audience, not your slides. So before you even open PowerPoint, I want you to sit down and think about your audience. And honestly, this is the biggest mistake that most people make when it comes to public speaking. They start thinking about, what do I want to talk about, and they put everything in there. For example, imagine if I was giving a talk about public speaking, I could take the last 17 years of experience and put it all into a presentation. But the problem with that is it would completely overwhelm my audience, and also I might be telling them things they already know or don't want to know. So instead, what we do is we sit down and think about our audience that we're gonna be speaking to. If we're gonna be speaking to other women in business, what do they want to know? When these people get up and walk away from this presentation today, what do I want people to be thinking about on the drive home? And honestly, when you start thinking about that when you're preparing a presentation, it will change things completely, because you no longer got that voice in your head saying, "No one cares." Because you're thinking, "Well, they do care, because I know that I've created this for them." So we're creating a conversation with our audience instead of delivering information. That's the first shift The second one, and the one that probably made the biggest difference for me, was practicing out loud. And again, not enough people do this. They prepare the PowerPoint slides, make it all look pretty, but they never actually practice it. So I still do this now. Before a big presentation, I put it on my, cards and I practice out loud in front of a mirror. I talk it through, and it's not because I don't know my stuff. What it is I want to feel so natural that when I get out there and deliver the talk, I want it to feel like me. I want to feel as though I'm relaxed because I know exactly what I'm gonna talk about. And it's for this reason, by the way, as well, that I don't write everything down, and that's another top tip for you. Don't write down everything that you're going to say. Just write a few bullets and then you can practice out loud. And the second thing is as well with that, you're not worrying about forgetting what you're gonna say because you've not written everything down. You've just written a few notes. So then you can speak around that. You can be really natural, relaxed, and no one knows what you're gonna say anyway, do they? So they won't know if you miss something. Doesn't matter. So the best way that I've found is walking around the kitchen with a cup of tea, and it's just a really natural way of talking through my presentation beforehand Number three is change the thoughts in your head by changing the picture. So what I mean by this is picture the people that are coming to listen to you, and instead of looking at those people out there in the audience and thinking, "They're all judging me," I want you to imagine that they're all sat there writing down lots of notes, looking at their friends and nodding, looking back at you and smiling because they're so engaged in what, it is you have to say. The power of positive thoughts, honestly, it will make a massive difference to you if you can picture them sitting there, and smiling and engaged and, really wanting to know what you've got to say. Because when they leave with a different perspective because of something that you've told them, then that will make such a difference to them and such a difference to you as well. And that's why you're there. That's why you're doing this. So imagine that is what will happen, and you're telling your brain then when you stand up there and s- and speak in front of those people, your brain is prepared for it 'cause you've already told it, "This is the picture we're going to get." So it's feeling safe, it's feeling secure, and you will be more relaxed because of that The fourth point that I want to share with you as well is about posture, and this is about creating stability for yourself as well when you start speaking. This helps with anxiety because, as I said before as well, the body is linked to the mind. So if we can help the body to feel stable and secure, the mind feels stable and secure as well, and that will help you to relax. It helps your vocal cords to relax. It helps your anxiety to decrease, and you'll just feel so much more in control. So how we do this is with what we call the parking position, and you can read about this in all the books about public speaking and body language. There's one that I ref- reference as well called You Are The Message by Roger Ailes, A-I-L-E-S, and that book talks about the parking position. How we do it is to stand with your feet hip distance apart, flat to the floor, and arms by your side, and that's like the car in neutral. before you even put it into gear to move forward, we've got a neutral position, and this is the same when we are speaking on a stage or presenting at the front of a room. If you can start with a neutral position, it helps your body to relax before you get started, and that helps you to... your mind to relax as well. You can aid this as well by taking a slow breath, looking around the room, eye contact with people, and it's just all about creating that safe space for yourself before you get started Just one bonus tip for you then. I wanna leave you with a coaching question, and just to ask you if you're thinking about a presentation that you've got coming up Think about the story that you've told yourself in your head previously when you've been doing presentations or speaking at meetings, and think about the story that you could tell yourself this time. Think about creating that story, and if you've got a story from previously where you've said, "No one's interested. I always mess it up. I speak too quickly. I rush through it. I put far too much information in," then think about rewriting that story for the future. Over the years, I've found that self-doubt loves missing information, so if we can create a story in our own heads, then that will just fill in that gap and tell it s- tell ourself before we've even got there to do this presentation or talk, it's gonna go well. It, it's gonna be a real success. And honestly, positive thinking, it's so powerful. Just to recap then on what I've talked to you about today. So what exactly is anxiety? It's coming from the thoughts in our head before we even get the nerves. So you change your thoughts, you change your feelings. Why is it important for you? Because you're gonna have lots of opportunities to speak, and whether it's a board meeting, a management meeting, your next presentation at the annual conference, these opportunities are gonna come up, and they really help you to get yourself more visible and look for those opportunities for promotion when you take on these speaking engagements. Those four tips then just very briefly. Remember, first of all, think about your audience first, not your slides. Number two, practice out loud. Number three, remember to change the picture in your head and imagine people smiling, not judging. And number four, create the parking position to keep yourself stable. So that's everything from me for today. If speaking up feels harder than it should, or you're stepping into a leadership role where your voice suddenly matters more than ever, then I would love to have a conversation with you. You can book a free exploration conversation through the link in the show notes, and together we'll find your bearings before your next important conversation. And if you found today's episode useful, please share it with a friend, and don't forget to follow Leadership Communication in a- in Action. Leave a review, and I really am looking forward to seeing you in the next episode Bye for now