Introduction

Every organisation needs its people to share information and insights with each other freely and happily, and that means people delivering presentations — regularly. Preferably while relaxed, open and engaged. (These states of mind improve communication outcomes.) Eliminating stage-fright matters — at both the personal and organisational levels.

Stage fright is a very visceral fear. It’s a fear of communicating with others, which is a terrible thing. It can undermine performance. But it’s also a very natural fear, and it can be helpful to understand its underlying mechanics and causes — in order to overcome it.

How stage-fright manifests

We all know what stage-fright is, because we’ve all experienced it. Right now, you’re probably recalling that horrid feeling of an overload of adrenaline and cortisol (the two big stress hormones) for minutes or hours before a major presentation. That’s stage fright. But there’s a worse manifestation of stage-fright, often overlooked, that you’ll probably also recognise: Those nights of broken, fitful sleep. Tossing and turning and waking blurry-eyed from an interrupted sleep perhaps the night before the presentation, or in some cases, days or weeks out. Existential angst in overdrive. This is clearly not a healthy situation to be in. What causes it?

What it is: cortisol

The short answer is: fear, and the physiological “cause” of the feelings of distress is, specifically, cortisol — the big stress hormone. Cortisol can be very good for us in small doses, because when threatened, it is released into the bloodstream where it has three very helpful outcomes:

First, it shuts down our ability to think about other things. We can’t afford to have a mind wandering to our favourite foods if there is a hungry hyena thinking about us right now in the same way. Cortisol tells us: Hyena, NOW!, and nothing else! Second, cortisol sharpens our ability to deal with the threat by prioritising everything to do with eliminating that threat. Focus, focus, focus: deal with it, deal with it, deal with it. Third, heightened emotional reactions (e.g. lots of cortisol) help us to remember the events around them for future reference: it can be pretty handy to be able to remember last time we were in trouble, and what we did about it. Cortisol is part of some complex but terrifically useful hormonal responses. Some of the time. It has a down side.

Too much cortisol can be a bad thing — both mentally and physically. And, frankly, an upcoming presentation (even to an audience of a thousand that includes your CEO) is simply not as threatening as a pack of hyenas. Well, hopefully not. To manage stage fright effectively, it helps to understand what triggers the cortisol.

Why it happens: an evolutionary tale

We don’t need to fear hyenas any more, but from an evolutionary perspective, our CEO can be just as threatening. Why? For millions of years, we evolved in the wild, in tribes. And if we offended our tribe or its leader to the point of a complete falling-out, our ejection from the tribe would mean probable death (a likely outcome for anyone alone in the wild, but that’s not generally where we go if we’re ejected from a modern corporation). We’ve evolved to be extremely socially sensitive, especially when we are looking at a sea of skeptical or negative expressions. We feel that threat of social isolation.

Now, because we’ve all experienced delivering a dud presentation at one time or another in the past, and we felt our hopes of social success dashed at that time (setting off cortisol while we were on stage), we remember it, we fear a repeat, and our brain somewhat unhelpfully perceives upcoming presentations as threats… and the stage fright begins, sometimes weeks ahead of our stage appearance. Is this kind of worry helpful?

Its impact: disengagement

The impacts of bad stage fright are an urge for disengagement and, in bad cases, poor health and performance outcomes for the sufferer. Any urge to disengage is not a good thing for either our careers or our organisations. We all know people who avoid presenting, and we have all witnessed presentations in which a message was lost to its audience due to a terrified messenger. 

So, we know what it is, we know how it works, and we want to get rid of it. What can we do?

What to do at the individual level:

At the individual level, there are some immediate things we can do to alleviate the symptoms, and also some mindset changes that many people find useful. (Myself included; I’m writing from perspectives of both research and experience.)

Breathe; Sarnoff Squeeze

First, the physiological “fixes”. Number one: BREATHE… Deep, slow breathing — preferably with eyes closed — calms the soul, the mind and ultimately the body. It takes some practice to get it right, but for most people who practise it, it works. Number two: The Sarnoff Squeeze. It’s a simple idea with a nice little story behind it. Dorothy Sarnoff observed the famous actor, Yul Brynner, doing strange stuff backstage, and he admitted that he was terrified of audiences, and could only control his stage fright by tensing every muscle, nerve and bone in his body. This became the Sarnoff Squeeze, as Dorothy taught it to every actor she came into contact with for the rest of her career. Try it. It burrnnns cortisol and adrenaline, on the spot. But we don’t need to stop at physiological interventions.

Mindset: From “me” to “them” — learn to be a conduit

In my opinion, and in my experience, addressing your own mindset in relation to your “performance” is a more powerful, longer-term fix (though I still breathe and squeeze when I need to). Your task is to get your own mind off your fear about the way your audience will be judging you, and onto something else. We can really only focus on one thing effectively at a time, so this is about keeping on refocusing, on the material you are presenting, instead of allowing your mind to drift to what might possibly go wrong.

Focus on the information you can share

Be very clear — in your preparation, and then in your mind — about why the information you are sharing with your audience will be useful to them. Once you’ve identified what you can share that will be truly useful to your audience, you now simply treat yourself as a conduit for it. “Your presentation” is no longer about you, and it’s certainly not about any personal consequences for you. It’s about you serving your material and your audience by making sure the audience “gets” what you’re giving them. It’s actually perfectly OK for your presentation not to be a world beater, if the information lands. Isn’t it? Ideas like that help most people to overcome stage fright to some degree. Which sets up a virtuous cycle, because elimination of stage fright generally leads to better presentations that allow better communication of information.

Try keeping that in mind from now on: No presentation is ever about you, and it really doesn’t matter whether you’re great or terrible. What matters is that you do your best to share some useful information with your audience, to their benefit. Whenever you find yourself worrying about yourself… discipline yourself to return to what it is that you want to share.

Care about them

A variation on the “information for the audience” approach is the “care for them” or “love them” approach. Again, the benefit of this approach is that it takes your focus off you, and puts it somewhere else. When we are truly caring for others, we are not worrying about ourselves. (Our attention is really quite severely limited!) Furthermore, when we are genuinely absorbed in caring for others, we are often at our best. So, as you wait beside the stage, or prepare weeks earlier, or step on stage in front of your audience, or feel a need to rejig part of your presentation on the fly, just remind yourself: It’s not about me; it’s for them and I don’t care what they think about me; I’m going to care about them while I’m up here.

These simple refocusing techniques can have powerful influence over your own psyche. I highly recommend giving them a try.

So that’s it. You can go now… I’ve given you all I’m going to give you to address your own stage fright. But, if you are currently in any kind of leadership role, or want to be in future, I’ll encourage you to keep reading, and to think about the team and organisational ramifications of stage fright.

Organisational level

For anyone in any kind of leadership role, your management of your team members’ stage fright — and its impact on the quality of their communication — can be a valuable contributor to a positive and productive organisational culture.

Consider “alpha” types vs humble types

One of the best pieces of empirical research into teams (I’ve linked to it at the end of this post) showed that (i) equality of contributions to ongoing conversations and, (ii) diversity, contributed to better measurable outcomes in team performance. There’s plenty of other evidence that extroverted, alpha-personality types can dominate group (tribe?) communications, sometimes with negative outcomes.

Often, it’s the introverted and perhaps more humble types (no less intelligent or productive) who bypass big meetings, because they don’t feel comfortable in “public” roles — even when invited to present. Regardless of “type”, when we are negatively stressed, we all tend to be less open, less engaged, less creative and even less intelligent. Put all of this evidence together, and it’s quickly apparent that we need to set up our team interactions so that everyone can get equally involved, in a relaxed manner. Stage fright really can be an enemy of high performance culture.

As a leader, there are various ways you can address stage fright on behalf of others in your organisation. I’ll give you some quick tips to hopefully get you started.

Within your own team

Start small, at team meetings: Ensure that you ask everyone for regular contributions to your meetings (everyone!), and encourage all team members to accept gradually increasing responsibility for talking or preparing information for the team. This helps everyone to practise. Be supportive of their efforts; offer plenty of positive feedback, and some tough constructive criticism too. Let everyone build their confidence in “going public” gradually. Also, strongly encourage a casual — as opposed to a formal — tone at any presentation session. The less formal the tone, the easier for everyone — including the presenter — to relax. And when we are relaxed, we engage better with others. It’s a huge win for communication, and a win-win for everyone at any communication session: Remember: “As informal as appropriately possible” is a great way to set up small meetings.

Create informal communication rituals so everyone can relax

Next, take the same informal tone for presentations through to every platform in your organisation: every high-stakes meeting and presentation. Create conversations instead of presentations. Include everyone. Never sit people formally for presentations — including those delivered by the CEO — if you can avoid it. “As informal as appropriately possible” is a great way to set up big meetings. Every meeting. It helps everyone to relax, and communication (and creativity, and retention, and engagement) will all be improved. And is there anyone in any leadership position who doesn’t want to maximise creativity, information retention and engagement?

Keep reviewing your approaches

As with any social “science”, we are always subject to “multiple causality”. In short, this means that nothing works for all of the people all of the time. Although: we do also know that some things work for most of the people most of the time. So the things that work more often for others are the things we should try first… to see if they work for us, and for our teams. Keep what works, and anything that doesn’t — ditch, and try something else instead.

Presentations, clearly, can be a very constructive and efficient means of communication. So stage fright is an enemy. It’s important that we set up our meetings so that nobody is scared of the stage. Which means we all need to be scared of stage fright — we need to recognise it as a threat, focus on it, and eliminate it if we can.

My Top Implementation Tips:

• Develop a personal routine to deal with immediate stage fright (breathe; squeeze; mindset? — Whatever works for you: practise, practise, practise…)
• Support people around you whenever they have a presentation to deliver: help them to prepare, and help them to facilitate an informal presentation context
• Design your meetings to minimise the “presenter on the spot” crisis moments — for everyone
• Drive an organisational culture of relaxed, open, inclusive communication

Suggestions for a little bit of extra reading, if you want to explore further:

An easy-to-read Psychology Today piece on cortisol and stress: Cortisol: Why the “Stress Hormone” Is Public Enemy No. 1

And my favourite piece of science about teams: Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups