Marie

Do you feel like speaking in public in English is a mountain that’s impossible to climb?

Your colleagues are much better than you? You feel like an idiot when you need to present in English?

These self-doubts probably stop you from being as visible as you deserve to be.

The majority of the clients I coach in public speaking in English tell me that their level of English stops them from performing to their full potential.

Yet in reality, they usually have a good enough level to express themselves with conviction. It’s just that their mental blocks make them feel less good than they actually are.

 

So, this is what I tell them:

The next time you’re feeling worried or even ashamed of your level of English, tell yourself it’s simply a tool of communication. Just like a new software tool, it takes time to learn how to master it. But the more you practice, the better you become. Speaking in public is exactly the same. You need to learn the techniques, put them into practice and use them over and over again until you feel comfortable.

 

If you continue to see English public speaking as an impossible obstacle, you’ll put too much pressure on yourself. This’ll stop you from performing to your full capacity. You’ll even speak less well and make more mistakes than you usually would.

 

Whereas telling yourself English is simply a tool of communication takes the spotlight off the language itself. Speaking English doesn’t define who you are or the value you have. It’s a means to exchange and share ideas.

 

Then you can focus more on other public speaking techniques to be really impactful during your speech.

 

If you’d like to learn other really useful public speaking techniques, you can watch my previous videos.

Also, please feel free to reach out to learn more about my specific coaching approach, helping you to feel confident and comfortable each time you need to communicate with impact.

Do you start to panic when you get up to speak in public? Do you feel judged by all those eyes staring at you? Do you wish you could be anywhere else except on that stage?

I used to feel like that too. I hated speaking in public. When I worked as an English teacher in business schools I would dread my first class. I’d actually feel my legs trembling as I stood there in front of a group of demanding students!

Here’s a tip that has really helped me to feel more comfortable:

Lock, Talk and Pause

This means creating positive eye contact with your audience by looking at them directly.

Most people think they’re looking at their audience but actually they’re looking all around, spraying them with their vision. Or they’re looking upwards for divine inspiration, or downwards reading their notes!

Not only does this create a disconnect with your audience but it also makes you imagine dozens or even hundreds of hostile eyes, just waiting for you to slip up and make a fool of yourself.

Whereas, in reality, your audience wants you to do well.

Here’s how the Lock, Talk, Pause method works:

• Lock eyes with one member of the audience, anywhere in the room
• Talk directly to that person for a few seconds
• Pause and then move on to another person, not too close but not too far away from the previous person

The advantage of this technique is that your audience feels involved in what you’re saying & you’re actually talking to 1 person at a time, rather than to a big mass of people.

Clients who I coached years ago in public speaking in English, still remember this technique and they tell me it has really helped them too.

Try it out during your next presentation and feel free to pass on this video to anyone else who needs to feel confident about speaking in public.

And please let me know how you get on.

“I feel illegitimate when I speak in public.” “I feel like an impostor.” “I’m afraid people will find me boring.”

“It’s even worse when I present in a foreign language, I start to blush, tremble, sweat, forget what I’m saying….”

 

These are the words of the clients I coach in public speaking in English to overcome their blockages. Clients who contact me because they need to gain self-belief in their ability to be credible public speakers.

To stop this feeling of being illegitimate, here’s a simple, yet effective, tip:

Think about “WIIFM?” (“What’s In It For Me?”)

 

This is what you’re subconsciously thinking while you listen to me. What benefits am I getting out of Marie’s speech?

And this is what your audience is thinking while they listen to you presenting.

 

If you don’t think about your audience’s needs, you’ll create a disconnect. You’ll question what you’re doing there in front of this group of people.

And this will make you feel uncomfortable and stop you performing to your full potential.

 

To avoid this happening, here’s what to do:

When you’re preparing your content, ask yourself: “What is my special knowledge, expertise, experience that will be of benefit to my audience? So that they leave my presentation feeling like they’ve really learned something useful?”

Make your presentation about them, not about you. You’ll feel proud of sharing instructive and useful information. Legitimate in your role as an expert in your field.

 

And as we saw in my previous video, “Stop The Fear Syndrome”, telling yourself positive thoughts will put you in the right frame of mind for successful public speaking.

 

So always remember: “WIIFM?”- “What’s In It For Me?”

 

 

How do you feel when speaking in front of an audience?

Would you like to have more confidence and impact in your Public Speaking?

Please do get in touch for a free 20-minute phone appointment to discuss your needs. I’ll describe in more detail my specific coaching approach.

Let’s work together to release your inner voice!

When you talk about speaking in public in English, do you say you’re afraid or stressed?

The words you use when you talk to yourself are important for your success.

Let me share something I tell my clients so they become confident and impactful public speakers.

If you talk about being afraid of speaking in public, that’s what your brain will retain. And if you’re afraid of speaking in public, then the “fight or flight” response will be triggered, causing you to either want to run away from your audience or see them as the enemy. As a result, you’ll start to tremble, forget your words, sweat, blush etc.

In fact, there’s a simple solution.

Avoid saying to yourself “I’m feeling afraid of next week’s presentation”.

Instead, say “I’m a bit stressed about this presentation”.

Why is this choice of words so important?

Fear stops you from performing to your full potential because it makes you imagine unreal risks.

Positive stress, on the other hand, raises your cortisol level. It means that you’ll work hard preparing your presentation, rehearsing lots beforehand, and on the big day your adrenaline will give you the energy you need to give the best of yourself.

If you listen to great leaders talking, you’ll notice they don’t talk about being afraid of something but they might talk about feeling a bit stressed. This is because they know that fear will stop them from being successful.

As I said, your brain only retains what you tell it to remember. Therefore, it’s important to only tell yourself something that will have a positive outcome for your presentation.

So, the next time you find yourself saying you’re afraid of speaking in public, stop yourself, rephrase it and simply say: “I’m just in stress-mode right now”.

Tell me, did you ever realize the words you tell yourself matter so much when you’re preparing your speeches in English?

 

Would you like to have more confidence and impact in your Public Speaking?

Please do get in touch for a free 20-minute phone appointment to discuss your needs. I’ll describe in more detail my specific coaching approach.

Let’s work together to release your inner voice!

How are you coping with the uncertainty and turmoil many of us are facing today? Are you feeling drained by the worries of what’s going to happen? Are you struggling to cope with the new ways of working remotely?

Or maybe you’re using this time usefully to take a step back from old patterns that weren’t good for you and you’re reflecting on what you really want in the future?

My work as an executive coach and hypnotherapist is centered around helping my clients to gain self-confidence and self-belief. Today, in these times of turmoil and uncertainty, it seems even more important for me to be helping people to have confidence in their ability to overcome the obstacles they’re facing and to rebound from this situation with hope for a positive future. Which is why I’m delighted to be sharing with you, in this blog article, my personal thoughts and tips on how you can turn this period of uncertainty into an advantage.

I also want to put forward my conviction that the unknown (or we could call it uncertainty) is not our enemy. Instead, I firmly believe that the unknown offers us the possibility for hope & positive change.

How does uncertainty manifest itself?

Deepak Chopra wisely tells us:

All great changes are preceded by chaos.

We’re certainly living through chaotic times at the moment, so you may well ask how can we bring about great changes? Before answering this question further on, let’s firstly take a look at how uncertainty manifests itself in our minds and what we can do to stop negative thoughts.

If someone had told you on 1^st January that in a few months’ time you would be quarantined in your home for 2 months, unable to have contact with family and friends and forced to work from home, how would you have reacted? Personally, I probably would have panicked and thought I’d have to stock up on tons of toilet paper to keep me going! Yet, we, like a large part of the world, have experienced lockdown and we’ve all survived it. And personally, I didn’t stock up on toilet paper either! In fact, I’ve used this time positively to think about what I really want to do in life, and from what I can see, many other people have done the same.

So, we can say that it’s when we imagine the terrible things that might happen to us in the future that we feel fear and anxiety. These things we imagine might stop us from sleeping at night, or they might cause panic attacks, negative stress and consistent worrying. They stop us from focusing properly and getting things done effectively. We imagine all the terrible things that can happen and they become amplified in our mind. That’s what then causes us to suffer. Yet, these things haven’t actually happened so they’re not real.

By allowing our imagination to tell us terrible things are going to happen to us, we feel afraid, anxious and panic-stricken. However, they’re only imaginary events that might happen, but then again they might not. At this present moment we don’t know what will happen. So, we could say that it’s not actually uncertainty that we fear. It’s the certainty of what our imagination tells us is going to happen that we fear, e.g. I’ll get sick, I’ll lose my job, the economy will explode.

Let’s take an example: when we listen to the news, we hear talk of a major worldwide recession. This might make us worry about redundancy, losing customers or maybe not having a role to play in our company anymore. It can make us fear for our jobs and livelihood. Yet, those terrible events haven’t happened, they’re only what our imagination is telling us might happen. What’s important to remember is that all that’s real is what’s happening in this present moment. The past is just our memory of events, which is why 2 people who lived the same event will often tell a different story of what happened. The future hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not real either. All that is real is the present moment.

What, then, can you do to stop this negative thinking? I’d advise you to not try to fight against it by telling yourself off for having negative thoughts for example. You’ll only reinforce the negativity and make it worse. Instead, you should pay attention to the moments of thinking “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen.” What thoughts are making you feel like that? What are you “certain” about that’s making you feel pain or fear right now? What story have you created in your mind? It’s important to then go on to recognise the futility and distractive nature of the thinking and go on to tell yourself these are not real events.

Exercise

Here’s a short exercise to illustrate how to do this:

1. Take a minute to list all the negative events that your imagination is telling you might happen in the future.
2. Now, take a moment to tell yourself that these aren’t real events because they haven’t happened, they’re only imaginary.

 The purpose of this exercise is to reprogramme your brain to focus on the reality of what’s happening now. Your brain will retain what you tell it. By telling it terrible things will happen, you’ll start to panic and feel anxiety. On the other hand, by telling it these events are only imaginary, your brain will remember these aren’t actually real events and it will focus more on the present moment.

When have you used your resilience in the past?

I love this quote by William Shakespeare because it reinforces how we have the ability to take control of our own destiny:

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.

In order to believe in ourselves, it’s so important to connect to our inner resources, so let’s now consider when you’ve used your own resilience in the past.

Firstly, what is resilience?

It’s the strength that allows us to rebound after a failure, which makes us believe in ourselves in spite of hardships and which gives us the courage to keep going in spite of all the difficulties we’re encountering.

As we saw in the previous topic, we worry about events that might happen but they’re not real because they haven’t actually happened. What’s really important to remember is that if bad things actually do happen to us, we will be able to draw on our inner resilience to make it through the difficult period. That’s why sometimes we look back on a difficult situation we lived through and wonder how we actually got through it and maybe even came out the better for it. It’s our resilience that helps us to persevere in the face of adversity.

I’d like to share with you a personal experience of when I connected to my inner resilience.

My personal example

When I hit 40, I had a mid-life crisis and my world was basically turned upside down. I got divorced, I had a clash with my business partner and I moved house – 3 of the main causes of stress and anxiety, by the way! These events led to me living a life of total uncertainty, both professionally and personally, not having any idea of how I’d be able to cope and provide a comfortable home for my 2 teenage children. I was also worried about what, I realise today, to be minor details like how to fill in my tax form, as I’d never even done that before!

Yet, in the long term those events led to me gaining my freedom to do things differently. I’d become bored with working as an English trainer and I discovered a new vocation in coaching. I also set up my own business, which I’d never have believed I could have done before. Today, I can truly say I love my work, it’s a real vocation, and I love my life. And I also discovered that filling in my tax form was one of the easiest things I had to do!

In these times of uncertainty, it’s important to reassure ourselves that if any of the bad things we’re imagining do actually happen, we’ll have the inner resources to deal with them at that time. So, following my own advice, I asked myself what helped me to get through that challenging period of uncertainty and to come out of it for the better? I came up with this list:

• Support of my family and friends
• Yoga
• Spirituality
• Meditation
• Being coached
• And last, but certainly not least, trust in my inner voice (my intuition) that was telling me that “better days would return” (to quote the Queen!)

Exercise

You can do this exercise to reflect on your own experiences with uncertainty and how you used your resilience to pull through:

1. Think about one particular time in the past when you experienced uncertainty, professionally or personally. It was a time when you had no control over the situation, but it all worked out in the end.
2. List everything that helped you to pull through that difficult period. (e.g. support of family and friends, a coach/psychotherapist, doing sport, yoga, meditation, religious belief, spirituality, leisure activities etc.)
3. Now, go back to your previous list of current negative imaginings and ask yourself how the resources you just noted can help you to cope if ever those events do become real.

 The purpose of this exercise is to show you that you have more inner resources than you imagine and that your past experiences have helped you to build up the resilience that you can use in the future if you need to.

 

What are you able to control today?

I find this quote by Marcus Aurelius particularly inspiring:

Give me patience, to reconcile with what I am not able to change.

Give me strength to change what I can.

And give me wisdom to distinguish one from another.

 I believe that now more than ever, we need to learn how to accept a situation that we don’t have any control over and to draw on our inner strength to bring about the transformations that will be positive for us.

With this in mind, let’s consider the question: what are you able to control today?

There are so many things at the moment that are out of our control, which makes us uncomfortable because it’s human nature to want to have everything under control.

Yet, we can ask ourselves, is control not actually an illusion? We thought we were controlling our lives by having the power to buy nice things, travel, go out to nice restaurants, etc. etc. But today, with lockdown or other restrictions on our freedom, we have little or no control of what’s going to happen next. Which just goes to show how fragile our control over events actually is.

This lack of control, of things not going as we want them to, can create unhappiness and frustration. As I just said, it’s human nature to want to experience the security of being in our comfort zone. However, staying in our comfort zone doesn’t allow us to grow and discover the hidden resources that can bring about positive transformations in our life.

Usually, we’re able to go to the office and interact with colleagues. We can also go out and socialize, go to restaurants with family and friends, go to the cinema, theatre, etc. But these can be distractions from the outside world that are stopping us from connecting to our inner selves. Being stuck at home, we’re faced with ourselves, maybe feeling powerless and imprisoned. But we also have more time to think about what we really want from life and to do some introspection. Which leads us to consider this question:

Does true power and freedom not lie within ourselves?

We may not be able to change the events that are happening to us today, but we can change how we respond to them. That’s the control that we do have. By taking this time to focus on what’s really important for us, we can find ways of being more creative and productive in the future.

People who make it through difficult times have more resilience because they’ve learned that there’s no point in trying to force their lives into turning out a certain way. They accept what is and work with it, rather than against it. They don’t need to have a guarantee to succeed, they’re prepared to take the risk of jumping into the unknown. They know that it might be scary to jump into the unknown, but it’s also opening up the possibility for new and more wonderful things to happen. A period of uncertainty like we’re living through at the moment can be the opportunity for us to connect to our creativity. This can lead to us finding new ways of living that are in greater harmony to our true self.

Concrete example from my practice of transition coaching

I’ll share with you the example of one of my clients – let’s call him John – who I coached after he was made redundant. John had been working for the same company for 22 years when it merged with another firm, leading to job cuts. When he started the coaching sessions, he was anxious about finding a new job as he was in his early 50s and everyone kept telling him that in France employers won’t hire anyone over the age of 50. During the coaching, we worked on his passions and he told me how he was a real foodie and he’d always dreamed of setting up his own restaurant. Financially, it would be tight, but he had received a redundancy package and his wife was more than happy to go back to work full time to help to make ends meet. So, he set up his restaurant, which became a great success. Of course, today, he’s in a challenging period again with the repercussions of lockdown but he’s now looking into possibilities of offering catering services.

In John’s example, his redundancy actually led to him being freed from previous constraints that had limited his personal fulfillment. Having his world turned upside down meant he was more open to new doors opening up and it led to making his dream become reality. Also, because he has already lived through a difficult period, he knows today that he has the resilience to make it through this one too.

Exercise

I’d like to invite you to now take the time to think about everything that you have the power to control today. And list everything, professional and personal.

(Some ideas: take the time to do an online training course on a subject that’s always interested you, do some online sport sessions to get fit, learn to cook, play games with your children, meditate each morning, or simply daydream about something you’d love to do in the future. Or maybe you’ll take the decision to be coached to have support in reinventing yourself.)

The purpose of this exercise is to help you to strengthen your resilience and to better connect to your inner resources. There are a lot of things that are out of your control today but there are also lots of things you can control. If you go looking for them, you can also find possibilities for you to open up new doors and bring about positive transformations in your life.

Strengthening our resilience through the expression of gratitude

Eckhart Tolle, offering us hope, says:

If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear.

If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness,

alertness and creativity.

 As we’ve already seen, the refusal to accept the uncertainty of our situation leads to us feeling fear and anxiety. Yet, as Eckhart Tolle says, by accepting it we become more alive and creative. We’ve also seen how important it is to connect to our inner resilience in order to better accept the uncertainty of our current situation and to keep hope in the future. We’re going to now look at how we can strengthen our resilience through the expression of gratitude.

Our resilience is strengthened when we express gratitude for what we already have. It means recognising that our life may not be as we’d like it to be, but it could be worse. It means appreciating the good things that we do have.

Concrete example from my practice of coaching for self-confidence

I’d like to share with you the example of another client I coached – let’s call her Alice – to help her to pull through a period when she was being psychologically harassed at work. She was close to having a burn out, not sleeping at night and living under permanent stress. This caused her to be swept up in the vicious cycle of seeing everything negatively.

One of the tools I used with Alice was to build up her resilience to the situation through the expression of gratitude. I invited her to list every morning and every evening 5 things she felt gratitude for. Sometimes, it was big things like feeling gratitude for her supportive husband, sometimes it was the joy of watching her children playing and laughing in the garden, or simply listening to the birds singing. When we feel gratitude for what we have, we can more easily brush aside our worries and fears. We connect to the present moment, where we can experience serenity.

The coaching process helped Alice to regain her self-confidence by seeing life more positively, breaking the vicious cycle of negativity. Her expression of gratitude for the good things she had in her life helped her to build up her resilience. She found the strength to leave the company where she was being ill-treated and she had enough self-confidence to find a new and better job.

During our sessions, I suggested to Alice that she pay attention to any negative thoughts she had, recognize the futility of them and then come back into the present moment. To do this, I taught her some self-hypnosis and positive visualisation exercises that helped her to relax and let go of the pressure.

I’m now going to share with you a simple positive visualisation exercise that I use in my sessions. It’ll help you to focus on connecting to gratitude. You can do this exercise by yourself at any moment when you feel anxious or stressed.

Exercise

Sit comfortably and close your eyes. Or leave them open if you prefer, focusing on one spot.

Place your hands on your thighs, palms placed upwards. Observe your breathing, without judgement, and very gradually let it slow down.

Now, scan each part of your body to let it relax, from your feet to your legs, to your stomach, to your chest, shoulders, arms hand. Then relax the back of your neck, your throat and each part of your face, up to your head.

Now, bring your attention to your hands – you might feel them tingling, which means the energy is circulating. If you don’t feel anything, that’s ok too. Slowly, let your hands join together and feel the energy circulating in both hands.

Then bring your hands to your heart and place them there, one on top of the other. Feel your breathing calm and regular. Feel the energy of love circulating around your heart. Now, in your mind, list 3 things you feel grateful to have in your life today. They’re the first three things that come into your mind. You can visualise these three things, maybe they’re an image, words, music or anything else.

When you’re ready, gently bring your hands back onto your thighs and place them palms downwards.

Then, when you’re ready, open your eyes and bring your attention back to the present moment.

My personal message to you

To conclude, I’ve talked about the negative effects of not being in our comfort zone. I’ve also given examples to show you how to strengthen your resilience in order to transform these times of uncertainty into an advantage.

I’d like to now end with my own message to you:

Embrace uncertainty. Be curious about what’s coming next. A new chapter in your life is being written.

And never forget this: as human beings, we have an incredible and powerful capacity to reinvent ourselves.

 

 

This blog post is also available as a spoken version on YouTube and on Anchor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bUom_oGg6E&feature=youtu.be

https://anchor.fm/marie-stephenson/episodes/Turning-Uncertainty-into-an-Advantage—Stephenson-Coaching-edo82s/a-a24mak8

 

 

 

 

Do you ever feel fake, like a fraud, when you speak in public or in meetings? Like you’re pretending to have expertise that you don’t really have? And that your audience and colleagues are going to see right through you for the impostor you really are?

If this sounds like you, then welcome to the impostor syndrome club! This phenomenon manifests itself through the feeling of fooling everyone into believing you’re more intelligent and capable than you actually are. It would seem that it affects more women than men, which is why so much literature on the subject is directed at the female population*. However, men can suffer from it too.

The term “impostor syndrome” was first introduced in 1978 by Drs Clance and Imes (2 American psychologists) in an article in which they defined it as “an individual experience of self-perceived intellectual fraud.” They explain that people suffering from this syndrome put their success down to luck, to working particularly hard or to a mistake having been made, not thanks to their intelligence or talents. They don’t feel an internal sense of success. For example, university graduates suffering from the impostor syndrome would state that their high examination scores are due to luck, to misgrading, or to the faulty judgment of professors. Accomplished professionals feel over evaluated by colleagues and bosses.

Famous people also suffer from the impostor syndrome

If it can reassure you in any way, this syndrome affects many intelligent and successful people. There are even surprising examples of famous people who have owned up to feeling like a fraud. Meryl Streep has admitted: “You think, ‘Why would anyone want to see me again in a movie? And I don’t know how to act anyway, so why am I doing this ?’” Ironically, Academy Award winner Jodie Foster, for her part, confessed: “I thought everybody would find out, and they’d take the Oscar back. They’d come to my house, knocking on the door, ‘Excuse me, we meant to give that to someone else. That was going to Meryl Streep.’” Tom Hanks also admitted: “No matter what we’ve done, there comes a point where you think, ‘How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?'”

 

The impostor syndrome isn’t just limited to university graduates or famous actors and actresses. Who would believe that such a successful business woman as Sheryl Sandberg would suffer from it? Yet in her book, Lean In, she wrote : “Every time I took a test, I was sure that it had gone badly. And every time I didn’t embarrass myself – or even excelled – I believed that I had fooled everyone yet again. One day soon, the jig would be up.” In an interview about her book, she shared: “There are still days when I wake up feeling like a fraud, not sure I should be where I am.”

The real problem with the impostor syndrome is that it can stop you from feeling proud of your achievements. It leaves you with the fear that you’re going to be found out for the fake you really are. It can also stop you from fully achieving your potential or taking risks. You feel like you’re less capable than you actually are, so you may not reach out to take the opportunities of success that are within your grasp.

How can coaching help in this case?

Let’s take an example I often encounter during my public speaking coaching. My client, a CFO, needs to give a presentation in front of the shareholders of her company. However, my client (let’s call her Francesca) has an inner fear that she’s only in her position because she has fooled her bosses into believing she has more expertise than she actually has. She’s terrified that everyone will realize during her presentation that she’s less competent than they thought and that she’s actually been a fraud all this time. During our coaching sessions I work with Francesca on building up her inner self-confidence so that she truly feels she’s in her rightful place. The coaching helps her to accept it’s ok to not know everything about everything. She also integrates that’s it’s ok to not be perfect all the time (perfectionism is often a consequence of the impostor syndrome). Letting go of the pressure she was putting on herself helps Francesca to feel more comfortable about getting up to speak in public. It means she can then successfully integrate the other public speaking tools I share with her, such as displaying confident body language. The guiding principle of our sessions is to help Francesca to believe in her true capacities so that she can then give the best of herself. She can then truly release her inner voice.

5 practical tips to beat this syndrome

I’m very happy to now be sharing with you 5 of the tips that are highly effective in my coaching sessions. They help my clients to gain self-confidence and self-belief, to overcome their feeling of being an impostor, not only during their public speaking, but also in other areas of their professional and private lives.

1. Fake it until you become it

Even if you feel like a fraud, you still need to force yourself to get up and give presentations or to speak up in meetings. The more you get into the habit of doing an action that makes you uncomfortable at first, the more it’ll become second nature to you. Eventually, you won’t think about it anymore and you’ll have actually become that confident person you were pretending to be.

2. Talk to friends and trustworthy colleagues about how you’re feeling

Part of the problem with the impostor syndrome is people think they’re the only ones feeling that way. I suggest you talk about it with friends and colleagues you feel comfortable with. You’ll no doubt be surprised to discover that seemingly confident people also feel that way. You’ll realize that you’re not the only accomplished person who has impostor feelings.

3. Send positive messages to your brain

The brain retains what we tell it. If you tell yourself things like: “I’m so stupid, why did I do that?”, your brain will register that thought and will believe it. Would you tell your child or nephew or niece that they’re stupid for making a mistake? Hopefully not! So be careful to talk to yourself positively too. For example, after giving a presentation, stop yourself from going through the list of what you did wrong and instead remind yourself of what you did well. This advice will help you to feel more comfortable the next time you get up to speak.

4. Accept that you don’t know everything

People suffering from the impostor syndrome have the feeling that they don’t have enough knowledge. By accepting that you don’t have to be an expert in all fields, you’ll be able to confidently talk about the knowledge you do have. There is no end to knowledge and there will always be someone who knows more than you in certain fields. Competence means respecting your limitations and, if necessary, delegating to someone who has the skills you lack.

5. Remind yourself of your achievements

Each morning, write a list of 3 things you want to achieve that day and then in the evening, tick everything you’ve done successfully. They can be professional and/or personal achievements. It’s essential that you recognise and remember everything you do well. Even small successes give a sense of satisfaction and help to build up inner self-confidence, provided you acknowledge their existence!

Which of the above tips do you feel will be the most beneficial for you? Which will help stop the impostor syndrome from having negative consequences on your professional and private life? Do you have other tips that have helped you to accept that you’re in your rightful place?

 

I’ll be delighted to discuss this subject further with you. I’ll also be delighted to share my coaching skills with you so that you can learn how to thrive professionally and personally in spite of the impostor syndrome.

Please do get in touch for a free 20-minute phone appointment to discuss your needs. I’ll describe in more detail my specific coaching approach. Let’s work together to release your inner voice!

 

* I recommend this excellent book on the Impostor Syndrome is: The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women (Why capable people suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and how to thrive in spite of it) by Valerie Young, Ed.D

Nowadays, we often hear the word “assertiveness” being used. In fact, it’s become quite a buzzword in personal development. But do you know how you can use it for better communication?

From my experience, I’ve noticed that people often mix up assertiveness and aggressiveness. Yet, they’re certainly not the same. Communicating assertively means you get your message across with self-assurance and confidence while also respecting the person you’re talking to. Communicating aggressively means that you force your opinion on others and you have no respect for their thoughts or needs.

According to the situation (professional, personal) and the person you find yourself with, you may find that you react more or less assertively. For example, a person can be assertive in their professional life but very passive at home with their partner, or vice versa.

So, let’s take a closer look at what assertive behaviour consists in by comparing it to its opposites, i.e. passiveness and aggressiveness.

 

Passive v aggressive behaviour

 

Passiveness means going along with the beliefs and desires of others, without expressing your own rights and feelings. Passive people don’t respect their own personal boundaries and they let themselves be walked over, even manipulated, by aggressive people. They have little self-worth.

Often people adopt passive behaviour because it’s important for them to be liked. They end up doing things they don’t really want to do in order to please others. For example, a passive employee may find him/herself staying late each evening at work to please his/her boss, so as to be considered as conscientious and hard-working.

Let’s now take a look at the opposite extreme: aggressive behaviour. Aggressiveness means putting your opinion and needs first, without taking into consideration the other person. Aggressive people don’t respect the personal boundaries of others and they manipulate them into going along with what they want and need. For example, an aggressive manager may unfairly criticise his/her team members, saying they’re lazy because they don’t stay late in the evening and they take too long for lunch.

An assertive manager, on the other hand, will respect his/her team member’s personal boundaries, while inspiring them to do their best work and achieve positive results.

 

The characteristics of assertive people

 

Assertive people know their rights and have good self-esteem. They feel free to express their feelings, thoughts and needs, not letting themselves be walked over. They’re good communicators because they are willing to compromise when it’s appropriate to do so, while ensuring their own opinion and needs are respected.

Assertive people are true to themselves and are appreciated for their true value.

 

The key points for assertive communication

 

Following this formula will help you to communicate more effectively, by showing respect for both your own and the other person’s beliefs and opinions:

 

1. Express your needs
2. Show that you understand the position of the other person
3. Say why you need what you’re asking for
4. Explain what the positive outcome will be for both parties.

 

Let me now give you an example of how I help my clients to be more assertive by using this formula:

 

Alice needs to collaborate closely with Bernard on a new product launch. However, Bernard is used to working alone and taking all the credit for himself. As a result, he doesn’t keep Alice updated on the progress of the project and she’s unable to advance productively on her side.

If Alice adopted passive behaviour, she might let Bernard get away with it and potentially allow herself to be blamed for the failure of the launch. If she behaved aggressively, she might get angry with him, telling him he’s selfish and unprofessional. She might even create a scandal, refusing to continue working with him.

Alice could also talk directly to her boss to sort out the problem. However, before doing so, I’d advise her to explain her position assertively with Bernard by approaching the subject in this way:

 

• Bernard, I really need us to collaborate closely on this product launch. At the moment, I’m finding it hard to advance on my side because you don’t keep me updated on your progress.
• I understand that such close collaboration is new for you. Maybe you’re not used to having to check in with me regularly on the progress you’re making. I know you’ve always worked alone in the past.
• However, for me to work efficiently on this product launch and make it a success, I need to have all the updated elements at my disposal. I can only offer coherent solutions if I know what work you’re doing with your team.
• You’ve got great expertise in your domain and I’m an expert in my field, which is why we’ve been asked to work together. By uniting our skills, I’m sure we can come up with a cutting-edge product launch that will be talked about all over the market. I’d really like us to make this launch be a success together.

 

Learn how to become more assertive

 

An assertive approach isn’t a guarantee that you’ll persuade the other person to come round to your way of thinking. After all, they have the right to their opinion too! However, it brings personal satisfaction to know that you’ve allowed yourself to express your needs and beliefs, respecting both your own boundaries and those of others.

 

Would you like to discover how assertiveness can be beneficial to you in your professional and/or personal life? Please do get in touch. We’ll discuss a coaching programme totally adapted to your specific needs.

Do you sometimes fear that your colleagues, managers or clients are judging you when you express your opinion or when you speak in public?

If you do, join the club that most people belong to!

We live in a competitive society where judgment is ubiquitous. Children are graded at school for their work, encouraged to be good at sports and to be top of the class. As adults, employees receive performance reviews that affect the salary and promotion they receive. Entrepreneurs need to constantly prove that their services or products are better than their competitors.

So, it’s hardly surprising that so many of us feel like we’re being judged. Negative judgment has pervaded our lives since an early age and it continues to do so today.

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Which response to the fear of public speaking do you choose: fight or flight?

 

Have you ever had to give an important presentation in front of colleagues or clients and you felt like you desperately wanted to run off the stage and escape?

I have! In fact, I almost always used to feel like that when I had to speak in public. I used to suffer from stage fright and I would find myself trembling and sweating. What saved me was the fact that I could cover it up so no one actually noticed. But I still had a very unpleasant feeling of it being “me against them”, as if the audience were my enemy and I had to fight against them.

So, you may well be asking how I became a public speaking coach myself?! Well, I learned some really useful techniques to help me to manage my stress so as to feel more confident and comfortable in front of my audience. I also researched the reasons for people feeling such fear of public speaking and realised that it’s actually a totally natural phenomenon called the “fight or flight” response.

 

What is the “Fight or Flight” Response?

 

It’s a survival mechanism which enables us to react quickly when our life is in danger. The hormonal changes and physiological responses that occur in the body help us to run away to safety as quickly as possible or have the strength to fight against the threat.

Our automatic nervous system has two components:

1. The sympathetic nervous system, which triggers the fight or flight response and fills the body with a burst of energy,
2. The parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes the “rest and digest” response, calming down the body once the danger has passed.

 

Firstly, the sympathetic nervous system activates the fight or flight response. It reacts to unexpected changes in our environment, especially threats. The body speeds up and becomes more tense and alert to maximise our chances of survival in a dangerous situation. Adrenaline and noradrenaline hormones are released into the bloodstream so that we can deal with the threat successfully. This leads to the following physical reactions:

 

• Our heart rate, blood pressure and breathing speed up,
• Our muscles become tense,
• Fat and sugar are released to provide energy to the muscles. This can also cause trembling,
• Digestion and urine production are put standby as they’re not needed in this situation,
• Sweating occurs. This keeps the body cool and makes us harder to grab if we’re attacked,
• Our pupils dilate so that more light can enter and we can see the threat more clearly,
• Salivation shuts down, making our mouth feel dry,
• Blood vessels open wide, flooding the skin with blood. This causes our face to redden.

 

So, we can see that those unpleasant reactions that many of us experience when we have to speak in public (blushing, dry mouth, sweating, trembling, accelerated heart beat…) are actually just our body’s way of preparing us to successfully deal with the threat we’re facing.

 

Secondly, the parasympathetic nervous system restores the body to a sense of calm once the danger has passed. Whereas the sympathetic system reacts immediately, the parasympathetic system takes a while to return our body to a normal state and the stress hormones tend to linger in the blood stream. This is why it can take a few hours to get the body recovered from the exertion. You may well continue to feel stressed and even exhausted during this time.

I’ve created a Public Speaking coaching offer to help you gain confidence and impact.

 

5 coaching tips to avoid experiencing those unpleasant physical reactions

 

It’s important to send positive messages to our brain to let it know that our audience isn’t actually a threat. This is done by establishing good rapport with the people listening to us. Over the years I’ve learned techniques on how to do this and I coach my clients to do the same. Here are some of the tips that help my clients to communicate confidently and comfortably in English:

 

1. Establish positive eye contact with your audience, addressing individuals rather than the whole group. This allows you speak to one person at a time rather than to a big mass of people, which can be very intimidating. I suggest using the Lock, Talk and Pause method:

http://stephensoncoaching.com/lock-talk-pause/

 

2. Use a lot of pausing during your presentation so as to leave yourself time to breathe and avoid your body panicking. Read more about this technique here:

http://stephensoncoaching.com/the-power-of-pausing/

 

3. Adopt positive body language to let your audience see that you’re confident and to also send the signal to your own brain that you’re feeling comfortable. See Amy Cuddy’s great talk entitled “Your body language may shape who you are”:

https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are

 

4. Ensure that you prepare and rehearse your speech well in advance. If you get up on stage not feeling prepared enough there’s a strong risk of panicking. You’ll then send the wrong signals to your brain, telling it that you’re in danger and your body needs to prepare for the worst.

 

5. Use hypnosis and relaxation techniques to reprogramme your brain. You’ll no longer see your audience as a threat. Quite the opposite, you’ll know how to captivate your audience with flowing and impactful talk. You can access my free relaxation recordings here:

http://stephensoncoaching.com/public-speaking-tips-and-relaxation-session-gift/

 

If you suffer from the ‘fight or flight” response, causing you to experience stage fright and maybe even stopping you from giving oral presentations, please do get in touch.

I’ll be delighted to put my coach’s toolkit at your disposal, using hypnosis and other tools. You’ll learn how to win over your fear and enhance your professional image during all your public speaking.

 

“I’m ashamed of speaking in front of an audience in English. In my company, the level of professional English is good and I don’t feel I measure up. As a company director I have to give oral presentations in English but I feel like my colleagues and bosses are judging me. I’m sure they think I’m incompetent. This situation stresses me too much.”

When Marc contacted me to improve his oral communication in English, his feeling of shame was a real cause of suffering. It meant he wasn’t giving the best of himself and he lacked credibility and professional effectiveness in front of his team and managers.

Being ashamed of speaking in public in English is much more common than we’d imagine. So, what’s the cause?

Basically, when Marc says he feels ashamed it’s because 3 of his fundamental needs aren’t being met: acceptance, belonging and dignity.

He feels that his “poor” level stops him from belonging to the group of good public speakers in English, he thinks he won’t be accepted by them and as a result he loses his dignity.

Since our childhood, we’ve been taught to behave well so as to be accepted and loved by our family. As teenagers, we adopt certain behaviours in order to fit into a group. Typically, as young adults, we dress and act in certain ways in order to have a group of friends, find a job and even to fall in love with our future partner.

So, for Marc, as a company director, he believes that to be legitimate in his position, he has to master spoken English just as well as, if not better than, his colleagues.

The origin of this shame

 Working as an executive coach in France, I meet many people who feel ashamed of their level of English and who suffer from stage fright in front of an audience. The French school system, in my opinion, achieves excellent results, but it also tends to be very demanding and even judgmental. Many of my clients have bad memories of learning English at school. Sometimes they or their classmates were mocked for making grammatical mistakes or having a bad accent. Often, they were told by their teachers that they weren’t any good at foreign languages. Or their parents and teachers advised them to take German as a 1^st language so as to get into the better pathways, and so English became less important.

Our brain stores these unpleasant memories of learning English and reminds us of them when we find ourselves speaking in front of a group of people who we feel are judging us.

Coaching as a solution

Well, you’re probably wondering how public speaking coaching helped Marc to overcome his shame of speaking English? During the sessions, we worked, especially, on strengthening his confidence in his level of oral expression and improving his stress management. He learned how to:

• Accept that his level wasn’t perfect and allow himself to make mistakes. The only way to progress and become a good communicator is by speaking as much as possible, even if that means making grammatical mistakes and having a typically French accent (which, by the way, is very charming in English!).
• Be less judgmental of himself. In reality, he was far harsher on himself than his colleagues were. When he asked for feedback on his English level from trusted colleagues, he realized that it was far better than he imagined. His level was already good enough to give presentations with assertiveness.
• Understand the importance of his expertise and take pleasure in sharing it with his audience. He did this by learning how to connect to his audience. He used to avoid looking at them directly because he was afraid of seeing their disapproval. This caused him to feel even more stressed. By establishing positive eye contact, he gained credibility and as a result he felt more confident when speaking in public in English.

In reality, Marc’s level of English wasn’t the problem. It was the voices in his own head that were telling him that it was bad. His fear of not belonging and not being accepted was the real cause of his stress.

The feeling of dignity restored

By the end of the coaching sessions, Marc was able to appreciate his true value and his feeling of dignity was restored. Today, he has a good command of oral communication in English. He even takes pleasure in sharing his expertise, in English, with his international colleagues.

Public speaking doesn’t come naturally to many people. But the good news is that it can be learned and mastered through coaching and training for effective oral communication in English.

If you too feel ashamed of your level and it’s stopping you from giving the best of yourself, please get in touch. We’ll discuss strategies to help you to gain self-confidence and be more comfortable during your oral presentations. You’ll, too, become a confident and impactful public speaker.