subject: HOW TO GAIN SELF-CONFIDENCE [print this page] HOW TO GAIN SELF-CONFIDENCE HOW TO GAIN SELF-CONFIDENCE
The gaining of self-confidence and courage, and the ability to think calmly and clearly while talking to a group is not one-tenth as difficult as most people imagine. It is not a gift bestowed by providence on only a few rarely endowed individuals. It is like the ability to play golf. Anyone can develop his own latent capacity if he has sufficient desire to do so.
Is there any reason why you should not be able to think as well as in a perpendicular position before an audience as you can when sitting down? Surely you know there is not. In fact, you ought to think better when facing a group. There presence ought to stir you and lift you. A great many speakers will tell you that the presence of an audience is a stimulus an inspiration, that drives their brains to function more clearly, more keenly. At such times, thoughts, fact, ideas that they did not know they possessed come drifting in.
That ought to be your experience. It probably will be if you practice and persevere. Of this much, however, you may be absolutely sure; training and practice will wear away your audience fright and give you self-confidence and abiding courage.
Do not imagine that your case is unusually difficult. Even those who afterward became the most eloquent representative of their generation were, at the onset of their career afflicted by this blinding fear and self-consciousness.
There is a certain responsibility in making a talk, even if it is to only a dozen people a certain strain, a certain shock, a certain excitement. The immortal Cicero said "Every public speaking of real merit was characterized by nervousness".
Speakers often experience this same feeling even when they are talking over the radio. "Microphone fright"; it is called. Some people no matter how often they speak, always experience this self-consciousness just before they commence, but in a few seconds after they have got to their feet, it disappears.
At first you might be awkward and seems a real labour to adjust yourself. You might struggle for a time under a feeling of apparent diffidence and sensitiveness and these may add to your awkwardness, but this will be only for a short time.
In a few moments you will regain your composure and warmth and earnestness and your real speech will begin. All it takes is practice.
Think of the benefits it will bring you. Therefore arouse your enthusiasms for this self-study. Enumerate its benefits. Think of what additional self-confidence and ability to speak more convincingly in public will mean to you. Think of what it may mean and what it ought to mean in dollars and cents.
Think of what it may mean to you socially; of friends it will bring; of leadership it will give you, of the increase of your personal influence.
And it will give your leadership more rapidly than almost any other activity you can think of or imagine.
"There is no other accomplishment" which any man can have that will so quickly make for him a career and secure recognition as the ability to speak acceptability. It is an attainment that almost every person of education longs for.
In every effort some men grow faint-hearted and fall by the way side; so you should keep thinking of what this skill will mean to you until your desire is white hot.
In order to get the most out of your efforts to become a good speaker in public and to get it with rapidity and dispatch, four things are essential.
First: Start with a strong and persistence desire. This is of far more importance than you probably realize.
Second: Know thoroughly what you are going to talk about. Unless a person has thought out and planned his talk and knows what he is going to say, he cannot feel very comfortable when he face his auditors.
Third: Act Confident: All famous psychologist agree that action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling which is not. So to feel brave, act as we were brave, use all of your will to that end, and a courage will very likely replace the fit of fear.
Fourth: Practice! Practice! Practice
If you forget everything you have read so far, do remember this; the first way, the last way, the never failing way to develop self-confidence in speaking is to speak.
