How to Overcome Public Speaking Anxiety – By Sam R. Hamburg | Copyright © 2025
Fear of public speaking is one of the most common phobias. Which is not surprising when you consider that you’re up there, everyone is looking at you, and they’re waiting for you to perform. Yikes! So, of course you’re not alone in being very nervous about public speaking.
The good news is that it is easy to overcome public speaking anxiety very quickly, virtually instantly, by using paradoxical intention (PI). PI was developed as a psychological treatment by the Austrian psychologist, Victor Frankl, in the middle of the last century. I have found it useful in a variety of applications, including panic disorder, agoraphobia, and fear of flying. (If you would like to see my soon-to be published article on PI, just write me an email and I will send you an electronic preprint.)
PI works by having the person lean into what their afraid of instead of escaping it or trying to calm themselves down. So if a person is having a panic attack and their heart is racing, and they’re afraid of having a panic attack, what they should do is some jumping jacks. If they are short of breath what they should do is not try to breathe slowly and deeply but rather hold their breath. In a sense you can think of anxiety as a bully.
When you stand up to a bully instead of being intimidated, the bully backs off. PI is how you stand up to the anxiety bully.
If you have a fear of public speaking you are afraid of a sequence of three things happening: 1) You look nervous up there. 2) The audience sees you looking nervous. 3) They think about you in some kind of negative way because they see you looking nervous.
So to use PI to beat your anxiety about public speaking you do this: You make sure you’re holding some papers before you start speaking. Then you shake them on purpose as if you’re trembling. Then you point to your trembling hand and say, “Don’t mind this folks. I’m always a bit shaky at the start of the talk. I’ll settle down soon enough.”
By doing this you have faced down everything you’re afraid of. You’re not afraid of being seen to be nervous because you’ve acted nervous on purpose, and called the audience’s attention to it. And you’re not worried about what they will think about it because you’ve told them what to think about it. By telling them that you don’t think it’s a big deal, you are telling them that they don’t have to think it’s a big deal.
It takes a little moxie to do PI for public speaking anxiety or for any other kind of anxiety. But it’s surefire—it works. And it’s as simple as that.