Strategies for managing speech anxiety

Goals and valued direction

You can start working on your speech anxiety by formulating one or more goals that you want to achieve. Think about why these goals are important to you. By thinking through what is important to you in your life, what you care about and what you want to spend time and energy on, it can be easier to decide what steps you need to take and what will guide you in difficult situations.

Valued direction

A valued direction is the direction you want to move towards. It helps you remember why you want to act in a certain way. Unlike a goal, it’s not something that you can achieve and check off, but something that you can always continue to strive for through the concrete actions you take in everyday life. To identify your valued direction, you can think about how you want to act in difficult situations, how you want to tackle your insecurity, and what will govern your life – your values or the anxiety that tells you not to do certain things. 

There is no right or wrong value as long as it is anchored in yourself and what you want to stand for, and as long as it’s not confused with achievement. An example of a value can be “I want to be able to express my opinion in front of others even though it’s difficult” or “I want to dare to challenge myself when it feels important even though I know that I will have an anxiety reaction”.

Goals

Goals are concrete and tell you what to do to move toward your valued direction, such as “Raise your hand and say something at a seminar” or “Present my part of a group work”. They can be part of a larger goal. like “I want to graduate in order to be able to work with what I want”.  

It’s important to formulate your goals as things you want to be able to do, rather than how you want to feel when you do them. The goal of “I want to stop having anxiety when speaking in front of others” is tricky because anxiety is an automatic reaction that you don’t control, even though anxiety can both diminish and feel easier to handle with practice in doing difficult things.  

When setting goals, you need to distinguish between behavioural goals and performance goals. A behavioural goal can be: “I want to say something at the next seminar even though it’s scary and I’d like to avoid it, and it doesn’t matter how well or badly I express myself”. A performance goal can be: “I want to make a really good presentation”. It’s good to start with behavioural goals, that is, with a focus on doing things, and to move to possible performance goals only at a later stage.

Before you move on, think for a moment and answer the questions below. Formulate at least one value and one goal. 

• What value(s) will guide you during your work to manage your speech anxiety? 
• What is/are your goal(s) when it comes to speaking in front of others? 
• Why is it important to you? 

Example: