How to NOT Get Nervous When Speaking (Uncommon Advice for Speaking Up Without Freaking Out)

How not to get nervous when speaking. Do you ever get nervous whenever you try to speak up or maybe you are nervous every time you get in front of a room or on stage? Do you ever feel nervous even before you get on stage and they're about to announce you or invite you on stage, your palms are sweaty, your pupils are dilated and your heart's beating really fast? Do you ever have that experience? Today in this video I'm going to share with you some very uncommon advice on how to not get nervous anytime you want to get up to speak. This is all about speaking up without freaking out. My name is Dr. Grace Lee and I am here standing out in Coal Harbor in Vancouver. It's a really nice day out. And by the way, if you play a musical instrument, right, I want you to subscribe to this channel. Click the link below, ring that bell as well. Every time I release a new video, you will be notified. Even if you don't play a musical instrument, that's okay. Still subscribe to my channel because I want to hear from you and I release a new video every single week. So if you want to not get nervous in front of an audience, here's my uncommon advice, right? But first of all, before I share it, I want to let you know that I wasn't always confident when I speak. I wasn't always able to have my words flow, to be able to speak in front of anyone, to be able to speak in front of a live audience. It wasn't always like this. What you're seeing right now in my YouTube videos, if you have been watching me for a while, or if you've watched a few of my channels and my videos on speaking and articulation, it wasn't always like this. What you're seeing is the sizzle reel, right? If you knew me 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was so nervous, right? Anytime that I would be speaking in front of one person, even if I just met that person or I've known them for a while, anytime I would speak, my face would turn red, right? I don't wear a lot of makeup. In fact, I'm not used to wearing makeup and my face would turn beet red from forehead all the way to the chin. Even if I wasn't, even if I wasn't speaking, I was about to speak. I knew it was going to be my turn to speak. I knew I was going to get called out. I would already be nervous, right? So that was me. And I remember that when I knew it was going to be my turn, right? Like two turns from now, two people from now, I knew it was going to be my turn to speak. In that waiting, in that anticipation, my heart would already be beating really fast, my palms would already be sweating and I would already have all of these thoughts inside my head, how it's going to fail, how I don't know if I'm going to say it right. I don't know if I'm going to remember what I'm going to say. I don't know if someone's going to ask me a question and I won't know the answer to that question. And it was overwhelming. And one of the biggest struggles that I had in my nervousness was because I was so nervous, I wasn't likely to volunteer to speak, right? I really wasn't going to be the person who would want to do a presentation and I really hesitated to accept those opportunities or to really bring them the attention to me. And it also made it very difficult for me to sell myself or for me to share my ideas or for me to even have clarity of thought to articulate my ideas. And that's where I was coming from, right? And so my nervousness really prevented a lot of opportunities coming to my career path. It wasn't until I implemented this advice that I'm going to share with you right now where things have changed for me. So here's my uncommon advice. Even though I started working in on my speaking, right? I hired a coach and I started to give seminars in front of a live audience and I was really nervous, right? I was the girl who if I was on the side of the stage and the MC was going to introduce me, I wasn't even on stage yet. The spotlights weren't even on me yet and I was already so nervous that my knees would be shaking. I actually felt my knees shake. And then I would get up on stage. I would deliver my content because I had rehearsed it many times and even while I was delivering it, I could feel my voice shaking because I was nervous. And every time I tried to make gestures like this, I could feel the vibrations on my wrist and my fingers because I was so nervous that it was shaking. But here's what happened. Even though I was nervous every single time when I did that presentation, the audience would come up to me to ask questions and they would tell me that they learned a lot. They would tell me that they want to be confident just like me. I remember hearing that comment and I was thinking, confident? I didn't feel confident at all. And the thing is, I didn't feel confident, but yet they perceived me as somebody who was confident. So here's my uncommon advice to you. In order for you to not get nervous, right? To be able to get to the point where like now when I go on a stage in front of a thousand people or even 10,000 people, I'm not nervous at all. I'm actually excited to get on that stage, right? It's come to the point where I don't feel nervous at all. I don't have the voice shaking anymore, the knees shaking or the palms, but I don't get those symptoms anymore. But in order for you to get there, it's not about making the nervousness stop. It is about coming to the first step is about coming to the point where you don't sound nervous, right? And then when you don't sound nervous, what you're going to do is you're going to have people like that come to you and tell you that they really enjoyed your presentation. They really enjoyed your speaking, your speech, and they want to be like you. And the perception they have of you is that you're confident. Even though you don't feel confident, you appear confident. So that's the first step. And the way to do that is to work on your vocal modulations, right? And that's the uncommon advice I have for you is to exercise and really pay attention to your voice, how you exercise your voice. So there's two things about your voice that you want to pay attention to. There's tone and there's intonation. Two things. What's the difference? The first one is tone. Tone is what conveys the emotion in your voice, right? For example, if I say, hello, hello, hello, you notice how those three ways I said just the simple word, hello, conveys a different emotion, right? You can sound angry, you can sound frustrated, you can sound happy depending on the tone of your voice. So tones convey emotion. That's the first thing that you want to pay attention to and to really master the tone and make it match the emotion that you're conveying. If you're telling a story in your communication and your story is sad, you want your tone to reflect that. If you're telling a story and there's an adventurous side of it, you want to have your tone reflect that. So that's the first part is tone. The second part is intonation, right? So intonation is the natural rise and fall of your tone, of your voice when you speak a sentence. If you listen to the last sentence that I spoke, you'll notice that my voice naturally goes up and down, up and down, the rise and fall of my voice, which is natural in any given sentence that I speak. And that's your intonation. Intonation is key because it makes you sound human. That is where you're not sounding monotonous. You don't sound like a robot like this. You actually sound like you sound like a human being because of the intonations, you sound like a human being. And that is where the connection happens. So those are the two things. So then it gets to how do you work on that, right? And the key to being able to control your voice, even when you actually feel nervous, that is the first step towards achieving no more nervousness, right? Before you can get to that point, you have to get to the point where your audience won't perceive you as being nervous. So the way to do that is to practice the musculature in your throat, on your tongue, in your palate, and especially in your mouth here, right? Because intonations, the proper intonations, the proper tones is a vocal control and that's all like voluntary muscle. So here's what I'm going to show you. To practice the musculature in your voice, the first thing that you want to practice and the most important thing you want to practice is something called your embouchure. So what's an embouchure? The embouchure is the positioning of your lips and your tongue and basically your whole mouth and even your pharynx, which is at the back of your throat. And it happens, your embouchure happens, for example, when you're playing a musical instrument, right? So if I were, now this is kind of nerdy, pardon this. I used to play clarinet in high school and this was my clarinet. So it's been more than a couple of decades since I played clarinet regularly and I'm not going to play a tune for you today, but I'm going to show you what embouchure means. If I were to play a clarinet or any musical instrument, a winded musical instrument, what I do is I put it to my mouth and you can see the way that I hold it. The thing about being able to play a sound on the clarinet, if I were to play a sound on the clarinet, I am not supposed to clamp down on it with my teeth, right? So if I clamp down on it with my teeth, it's not going to produce that sound. So the strength comes from your embouchure, which is the muscles here, the muscles here and the muscle on your tongue, right? So you're clamping down at it with the muscles around your lips. Most of the time we don't exercise those muscles and when they're weak, that's when we lose control over them and that's where that shaking of the voice that you hear when you're nervous is the most prominent because we don't have control over the muscle. So if you want to achieve this, what you do is if you don't own a musical instrument, that's okay. Just you can practice with your finger or practice with something, a spoon, a fork, put it here and hold it, right? It looks like this and you're squeezing the muscles here. And so over time when you squeeze it and you're holding this, you're holding that thing in your mouth only with your lips. You're not clamping down with your jaw. You're not using your jaw muscle because your jaw muscle is going to be stronger. So you're not using your jaw muscle. You're only using the embouchure. That's where you practice that vocal control and the tongue as well. So when you have that control, that's when you can truly have the mastery over your intonation, your tone, and that's where the confidence can be portrayed. First you portray the confidence. You exude the confidence by how you sound, by mastering the muscles of your mouth. Your audience will perceive you as having confidence. Your audience will be able to understand what you have to say because they perceive you as someone of authority, someone who has the confidence. And then over time with that feedback, over the truth of what you've experienced, over the truth of what you've done, your confidence is going to build naturally and over time the nervousness will be no more. So this is the first step. So that is my uncommon advice, how not to be nervous. The first step is to exude that confidence. By the way, if you want help to achieve results where you speak with true confidence, where you have clarity in articulating your thoughts, where you are able to do a presentation or to have a conversation with one-on-one or one-to-many and your audience is hanging on your every word. And as a result of what you said, that you are able to persuade them to say yes, to adopt your ideas, to adopt your recommendation. If those are the results that you want to produce so that you can open up opportunities in your professional future, then I invite you to work with me. You want to accelerate your results, then I invite you to take advantage of this opportunity. Just click the link below this video and that is where you can apply to work with me as your coach, as your communications coach, as your speaking mentor. Just click the link below, apply there, and I'll see you on the inside.