Hypnosis Guide

At work last month, I attended a Toast Master meeting, in which a few select individuals deliver a speech in front of an assembled audience. As is always the case, some speakers were very good, some were average, and some were trembling like a leaf in front of the audience. For a person who suffers from low confidence during public speaking, the general advice is that if they want to improve public speaking skills they should practice repeatedly in front of a mirror in order to feel confident. This advice however would be incomplete if the person is not told ‘How’ to feel confident, and ‘What’ needs to be done in order to feel confident.

A simple technique of Neuro Linguistic Programming can help.

If one person can be a spontaneous powerful speaker, so can others. Speaking powerfully is a threefold process: Using one’s body to get into a confident state, stopping anxiety build up, and running the movie in your mind that You.Are.Confident.

Use of Body: Our Body and mind work together. In short, the human body is the hardware and the brain is the software. For a person to feel confident and become a powerful speaker, the first aspect to master is the ‘Conscious use of body’. The body needs to send positive signals to the brain in terms of its well being- A strong stance: head straight, erect shoulders, equal weight on both feet; slow and deep breathing (also known as ‘Abdominal Breathing’) gives a strong signal to the mind about the comfort level. It sets up the brain for confident thinking mode, as the body has provided its go-ahead. When was the last time you saw a person with droopy shoulders, head down, and shallow breathing delivering a powerful speech?

Removing anxiety associated with public speaking: The fear associated with public speaking is generally because of Anxiety. To understand how a person creates anxiety is very important. Each individual is different, and will have a different experience while experiencing anxiety. For example: A person might imagine having butterflies in his/her stomach, probably an image of him/her with people laughing in that scene, which he/her can even hear. To remove anxiety, try analyzing the sub-modalities (in short attributes) of the root cause: Direction of spin of butterflies in the stomach, quality of the image (mostly negative in this case – dark, without borders etc). A simple solution like reversing the direction of butterflies, and making the dark image with people laughing a colored one with borders, and distorting the sound of people laughing into a duck quacking can change the mind pattern and help removing the anxiety.

Confident belief: To generate confidence, all that is required is to close your eyes and go back in your past and get associated with the memory when you were super confident in a given situation. Notice the sub-modalities of the senses (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory): You may be able to see colored bright images, hear loud noise of people clapping, feel warmth in your body, etc. Be aware of these sub-modalities and increase the intensity of these attributes in your mind in order to increase your confidence generating attributes. Take the sub-modalities of confidence of that particular situation and apply it to public speaking to see a remarkable difference.