Speaking Anxiety
After taking the short quiz "Do you suffer from speech anxiety?", according to Adler, I tend to have significant anxiety about public speaking.
There are two types of anxiety levels: helpful or unhelpful. Helpful speech anxiety is where speakers can think more rapidly and express what they're thinking confidently. The other level is unhelpful- where there is an intense apprehension about speaking before an audience (Adler, 2015).
Well, my anxiety is actually the unhelpful one. There are two main reasons why I could have unhelpful speech anxiety and they are from previous negative experiences and irrational thinking, and I feel like I have both.
Previous negative experience could be from a traumatic failure at an earlier speech during childhood or rude audience members. This actually happened to me when I was in middle school. Everyone in my class were expected to present their speech on this day and of course my PowerPoint was not working and I had to talk in front of the class just like that. Mind you, most kids in middle school read directly from the PowerPoint and called it a day, so it was very hard for me to try to recite all the information i've written down. Ever since then, I just get super nervous presenting in front of an audience.
The other reason for unhelpful anxiety is irrational thinking- where beliefs that have no basis in reality or logic (Adler, 2015). Out of the four fallacies: catastrophic failure, perfection, approval, and overgeneralization, I believe fallacy of catastrophic and overgeneralization applies to my way of thinking. Fallacy of catastrophic is the irrational belief that the worst possible outcome will probably occur (Adler, 2015). I tend to think that the audience members would think my ideas are stupid or how much my speech sucked. Fallacy of overgeneralization is the irrational belief in which conclusions are based on limited evidence or communicators exaggerate their shortcoming (Adler, 2015). This describes my way of thinking by how I always tell myself, "I can't do this, I always mess up my lines, I always forget what to say".
There are four ways to not feel overly anxious in front of a crowd and they are: using nervousness to your advantage, understand the difference between rational and irrational fears, maintain a receiver orientation, and keeping a positive attitude (Adler, 2015). I feel like the most effective way for me to not feel overly anxious in front of a crowd is to keep a positive attitude. I always throw so much pessimistic comments on myself and I feel like if I actually start becoming more confident, it would help me with my speech anxiety.
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