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When I got home from work the other day, my four year-old daughter, Madison, came running up to me. She was very excited and proudly exclaimed, “I did the monkey bars, I did the monkey bars!”
After a proud fatherly cuddle, I asked her if she was scared when she did it because the monkey bars are so high off the ground.
She thought for a moment and responded, “No, I just looked up, not down.”
What a wonderfully profound statement from a four year-old.
When confronted with a challenge, instead of focusing on what could possibly go wrong, she focused on what she needed to do to achieve her goal.
In many surveys, it turns out that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying.
According to Jerry Seinfeld, this means that at a funeral, we would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy!
Thankfully, there are ways to overcome your fear of public speaking.
As someone who is regularly speaking to audiences of hundreds of people, I still get nervous. So I use three statements that I say to myself to help me to perform at my best.
Very few people will admit it, but we secretly love the fears that hold us back.
We’ve lived with them for so long that they’ve become a part of the family. We are so accustomed to them that we can’t imagine living without them.
We’re afraid of failure, of embarrassing ourselves, of standing out in the crowd, of change and of a range of other things that we’ve rationalised that we can do without.
It holds us back from doing a lot of meaningful things…
and we like it like that because we feel safe.
It’s time to make a change.