Article Public Speaking Feeling Comfortable With Who You Are

By Laurie Smale

All the public speaking techniques and positive affirmations in the world are not going to make you an interesting speaker if you’re full of self-doubt, question who you really are, and just want to get your talk over and done with as quickly as possible.

Uncertainty in yourself clouds the message you want to get across and just make matters worse!

This insightful article reveals the importance of feeling comfortable with who you really are so people not only respect you, they sit up and listen!

Steve’s Story

This had to work but how could HE do it?

Sometimes the things that are holding us back from speaking comfortably before groups are not the peripheral things we normally tend to focus on, like body language, voice projection etc.

Quite often these stumbling blocks turn out to be something else entirely.

Brings to mind a client in his early 30s I once had to coach, we’ll call him Steve.

Now Steve was desperate for some help in formulating and delivering a Best Man speech at his best mate Sam’s wedding, and in so doing attempt to get rid of a debilitating public speaking fear that had dogged him for years.

All his family, friends, and work mates would be there so this time there was nowhere to hide. This had to work but how could HE do it?

As our coaching session progressed Steve made the casual comment “Friends tell me that I look a bit like Woody from Toy Story” and looked a bit uneasy as he said this.

My focus momentarily brought to what Steve looked like; I could see this uncanny resemblance too and smiled. I learnt that when Steve was a little boy he simply adored Woody’s loveable cowboy character and the friendliness embodied in his song ‘You Got a Friend in Me’.

As he spoke I had the feeling I was onto something significant. I soon discovered a terrible burden that Steve had kept hidden for most of his life. So bizarre was this that if he were to share it with others they simply would not have believed him, so he kept it to himself.

Now if you were to meet him, and this resemblance wasn’t mentioned, you’d see the tall, good-looking and friendly person that he is. Alas, his young friends at school didn’t see it that way.

They picked up on him being Woody’s double and relentlessly poked fun at him. Pretty soon ‘Woody’ had become a real negative in his life because everyone – even grownups – were mentioning the fact and making a big deal about it.

Little Steve now only saw himself as a second-rate ‘Woody’ and began to forget who he really was. He was to live in ‘Woody’s’ shadow for more than 20 years, especially if he had to stand before groups because all they would see would be Woody. If this negative frame-of-mind was not addressed, the success of his Best Man speech was doomed.

In spite of this perception of himself, over time, Steve progressed to being a building manager looking after projects of up to five million dollars; He is now happily married with a young family and his wife sees him for who he is, a proud father and partner, certainly not a second-rate Woody. But Woody’s dark shadow forever loomed over all of this.

Successful Coaching

We can be guided to see things from a different angle: I pointed out to Steve that he was no longer that little boy relentlessly being ragged in the schoolyard for being a Woody look-alike, that decades had passed since then, that he was now a successful grown man with a family and it was time to let Woody go back to his Toy Story world in the movies where he belongs for he has nothing to do with the man Steve is today.

Hey, we all meet other individuals who have an uncanny resemblance to someone else… it happens all the time. Just the other day I was having coffee with a new acquaintance when I said to this guy: “Has anyone ever told you that you look a bit like Peter Sellers?” And he said, “As a matter of fact someone said that to me yesterday”. We had a bit of a laugh at this pleasant observation, teased it out a bit, and then moved on.

What is important here is, the way we were conditioned in our formative years can often stay with us for years and cloud our thinking.

But if we can be guided to view things from a different angle, that which we fear most can be cleared up and seen for what it really is.

And that’s precisely what happened to Steve.

The dark pall of negativity has now gone. He now accepts the way he was born and understands that the sheer coincidence of a group of filmmakers creating a character that looks a bit like him has little to do with who he really is.

He now sees Woody for what his character stands for: a friendly computer-generated cowboy who cares about his friends and nothing more.

Putting his talk together was the easy part: At long last Steve feels truly at home with who he is and where he is going. And with this ‘Woody thing’ all sorted out, putting his talk together was the easy part.

By using a simple framework of ‘How Things Were Then’, ‘How Things Are Now’, and ‘How Things Will Be’, we simply brainstormed a couple of stories on how he’d met Sam, what had happened in the intervening years, and one or two thoughts regarding Sam for the future.

And the magic of it all was when Steve got to the end of his speech where he asked everyone to charge their glasses and drink a toast to the bride and groom, he bent down to a nondescript carton box beside him, pulled out a big cowboy hat and put it on his head. He then looked his friend Sam in the eye and said: “You Got a Friend in Me!”

He told me later the crowd went wild because they were in on the harmless joke of who he looked like and loved the sincerity of his message.

Steve is now okay speaking comfortably before groups as the unique human being he is and actually plays on the fact that he looks a bit like Woody… it’s no longer a big deal.

The point for you in all of this is: Whenever you step forward to speak, whoever or whatever your ‘Woody’ may be, with the wisdom of hindsight, relegate it to its historical pigeon-hole where it belongs and move into the future with a new understanding of yourself. The words of the great thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson sum this up nicely: Make the most of who you are for that is all there is of you

ARTICLE // Feeling Comfortable With Who You Are

By Laurie Smale, Author, Finding me, Finding you 🦋

Have you ever been labelled with ‘you look just like so and so…?’ Did it ever hold you back? What can you do to move past it?

Find out in this article how Steve’s beliefs were changed.

Read all the details at https://lauriesmale.com/blog/article-public-speaking-feeling-comfortable-with-who-you-are

All of my practical coaching wisdom is in my three books available at https://lauriesmale.com/books

#lauriesmale #article #findingmefindingyoubook #feelingcomfortable

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