Reduce your self-focus and increase your outward focus

An important strategy for dealing with speech anxiety is what we call focus shifting. It involves shifting focus from the anxiety-driven desire to monitor what’s going on in the body and how we think others are seeing us, to what is actually going on around us. By practising shifting focus, we can achieve a better balance between focusing inwards and outwards. 

Examples of things you can focus on when trying to increase your focus outwards before a presentation are: 

• If you’re not the first one presenting, you can listen attentively and take notes while someone else is giving a presentation, that is, fully focus on what you hear and try to summarise it in writing.
•  The room you are in - what does it look like, what colours can you see? What furniture and equipment is there?
• The audience - what hair colours do you see, what are they wearing? Scan the room and describe what you see quietly to yourself.
• Different sounds that you can hear - try to pick out a few different sounds, and then focus on them one at a time for 10-15 seconds per sound. Examples: voices, ventilation, scraping noise from chairs.

Examples of things you can focus on during a presentation are: 

• The task you are facing - what do you want to communicate? Can you allow yourself to take a few short pauses to think about how you want to express yourself? 
• The audience - can you look up and look a couple of them in the eyes for a second? If that feels too difficult, maybe you can look between two people or a little bit above them? 

After a presentation, negative thoughts about how badly it went may appear and lead to the situation being dwelled on. Examples of what you can focus on after a presentation:

Shift focus from the subjective experience, for example “how hard/embarrassing/bad/useless it was”, to a more objective description of what actually happened during the presentation and to the awareness of what is happening right now at this moment, for example “I felt very nervous and had a lot of negative thoughts during the presentation. Now I’m worried and thinking about what I think the audience was thinking about me.” 

Do you recognise yourself as having an excessive self-focus when speaking in front of others? Think about what will help you direct your attention outwards, to what is happening around you in the moment. What can you try next time you say something in front of a group?