How can I overcome fear of talking to a group?

I am assuming that having had the good idea you have researched it well and put a together a proposal that is succinct and to the point for your presentation. I am also assuming that you have spent time practising so that if you lost all of your notes and the technology didn’t work you could do verbatim from memory.

Can you identify why you freeze up? As Melanie has pointed out practise on your own until you can do it without notes.  Then present it several times to someone you trust before doing it to the group.

Read the CMI leaflet on giving effective presentations, practise speaking at an even pace and changing the intonation in your voice.  Most importantly practise breathing and pacing.  Unfortunately there’s no quick and easy fix for this and if it’s any consultation after thirty years of speaking to audiences large and small I still feel nervous before I actually start speaking.  Good luck.

If you are completely new at presenting, then start doing it "for fun" at home on your favourite subject/hobby, be that kids, sport, gardening or whatever. It's not as silly as it sounds, as having that passion in a subject will make your presenting easy, and give you belief and/or areas for improvement to take to "work" subjects. Get a recording device and record yourself going through your presentation. The choice of device doesn't matter (mobile phone, web cam, dictaphone etc) but you'll be amazed what you can pick up with self-criticism when you play it back to yourself - often more than friends or family will notice or share.

Take any lessons learned into preparing for the "real thing". Know what it is that you are presenting about. Confidence comes from being able to talk with authority on your subject, so make sure you have all aspects researched and prepared before you start. Think about what questions your audience might ask and make sure you know the answers. Keep using your recording device while you practice.

Finally, when it comes to the actual presentation, try to approach it as if you are going to speak on that favourite subject/hobby. Try to kid yourself that you are presenting on your kids/sport/garden/whatever, and then your nerves should be tempered considerably.

I am a trainer (presentation skills is one of our most popular courses) but I am also a trained secondary school teacher and have encountered this issue often.  At the risk of putting myself out of business I will let you in on a trick that I picked up early in my career.

I found that some students can create great written materials and really exciting and dynamic PowerPoint presentations but their delivery is dry or nervous.  The key is simply to focus on what you are good at.  You can overprepare and make yourself more nervous but you can not spend too much time making sure your handouts and your presentation speak for themselves. (Some of the best presenters take up to an hour per minute of presentation). Make handouts informative, thorough but concise.  Make slides look good, transition smoothly and use animations if you feel they would add something. 

Even with all my years of experience, teaching and training to all levels and even though I am happy to front a rock band on a regular basis, I could never present a joke to a room full of people.  It is not merely that I am outside my comfort zone - I simply am not funny in person - but I can, and do, present them on slides and people really do laugh!

The previous posters are correct when they say practice improves confidence, that is why experienced personnel are paid more, but using a few good quality visual aids never harmed a person's performance.

Good luck, and if you need a quick pep-talk, (or if you would like me to sell you some formal training - has to be worth a shot), give me a call on 07517 201202.

Some thoughts on this from our LinkedIn group:

Vince Pizzoni
You have had lots of good input already but here is mine:
1. Everyone gets nervous to a greater or lesser extent so you are not alone.
2. Practise does make perfect and know your subject well. If you do this you will know more than anyone else in there.
3. Try running the presentation past peers and your manager and request critical feedback.
4. Engage your audience, and focus on eye contact, body language and voice tone. Surveys show these make up 93 percent of what people remember.
5. I am not sure of how you plan to do this but I often have a PP with bullet points and and no cards but you might prefer something different that makes you more comfortable.
6. Tell them what you are going to say, tell them and then tell them what you said.
Good luck, Vince

Matt Baker

If you are completely new at presenting, then start doing it "for fun" at home on your favourite subject/hobby, be that kids, sport, gardening or whatever. It's not as silly as it sounds, as having that passion in a subject will make your presenting easy, and give you belief and/or areas for improvement to take to "work" subjects. Get a recording device and record yourself going through your presentation. The choice of device doesn't matter (mobile phone, web cam, dictaphone etc) but you'll be amazed what you can pick up with self-criticism when you play it back to yourself - often more than friends or family will notice or share.

Take any lessons learned into preparing for the "real thing". Know what it is that you are presenting about. Confidence comes from being able to talk with authority on your subject, so make sure you have all aspects researched and prepared before you start. Think about what questions your audience might ask and make sure you know the answers. Keep using your recording device while you practice.

Finally, when it comes to the actual presentation, try to approach it as if you are going to speak on that favourite subject/hobby. Try to kid yourself that you are presenting on your kids/sport/garden/whatever, and then your nerves should be tempered considerably.

Simon Roberts:
Practice, practice, practice! The points above are all good, you could also practice in front of the mirror then you can pick up on your own facial expressions and mannerisms, try not to use a lecturn as people who are nervous tend to hide behind and hold on for dear life. But most importantly......practice some more! Time your presentation too as you will be surprised at how much you speed up when talking, so take deep breaths and use pauses well. Good luck I'm sure you will be fine.

Melanie Alder:

Not an expert myself, but some tips that have helped me:

Practice, keeping content as relevant and concise as possible (pretending I am trying to explain my subject to a bored teenager helps with this!) & making sure the tone of my presentation suits the audience, familiarising myself with the room layout / IT equipment before the event, smiling for a couple of minutes (in private!) just before presenting - can't help but relax a little doing this, keeping a card with only high level bullet points as a prompt just in case, and reminding myself that it's OK not to be word perfect or not to have all the answers where the presentation is followed by Q&A.
Unless you are doing stand-up I think your audience will be kind to you : ) Would like to know how it goes - good luck!

Andy Hatton:

I'm surprised no one has dredged up the old "picture the audience naked" yet.. so I will ;) ... working on the theory that a room full of naked people isn't threatening (not so sure about that myself) or as an old army instructor once said to me, "picture them on the toilet suffering constipation. You can't be afraid of anyone in that predicament".

Light hearted comments but with a serious reasoning and logic behind them. Most people struggle with presentations because of an irrational fear that they'll get it wrong and "what will everyone think" syndrome, otherwise known as "stage-fright". What you need to do is remove that irrational fear and any "tool" that helps you remove the fear is a huge step in being able to deliver presentations to groups of any size.

Importantly remember it is your presentation. You are in control. The audience are there to listen to you. To learn from you. You are doing them a favor. You are in judgement of them, not the other way around.

I often say to people who are nervous about doing presentations that the question to ask themselves is "what are the consequences if I get it wrong?"... and the answer when they've really thought about it is in fact that there aren't any really.

The greatest way to overcome embarrassment is to learn to laugh at yourself. If you can laugh at yourself then no one can laugh at you.. only with you. Secondly understand that if you make a gaff, get the wrong slide, jumble your words, it really doesn't matter. No one is bothered.. honestly. Relax, be yourself, it doesn't matter if it all goes Pete Tong. The sun will still come up tomorrow morning and by then today will be yesterday and people will already have moved on.

If nerves do kick in, stop, take a deep breath, a long pause, gather yourself, (refresh the image of everyone naked or constipated if it helps) and pick up where you left off.

Of course a lot depends on the format of your presentation. For me jokes are a personal thing and unless you're a natural joke teller I'd avoid them. It's too easy to become focused on "is it funny" and then if doesn't get a laugh and bombs it just leads to getting all flustered and worried that everything else you say is going to bomb.

Stories on the other hand, short anecdotes to highlight points, if told in a lighthearted way are a different matter and can be used to generate feedback or warm up a cold audience by telling them something they can relate to.

Again, depending on the type and style of presentation, another technique is to turn it back on the audience. This can work well if you have someone who is being disruptive, single them out and throw a question to them. It takes the heat off you and can give you valuable time to rally the troops.

If you really don't want to be interrupted state at the very beginning you will take questions at the end, if someone blurts out a question, don't try and answer, just politely remind then that you're taking questions at the end. Questions during a presentation can make it a lot more informal and relax the atmosphere but there is a danger that your presentation can then start to drag out. Remember it is YOUR presentation. You are in control

Biggest thing though... KNOW YOUR SUBJECT! It's far easier to talk about something you know well. If you go off-piste it's much easier to get back on and pick up wandering threads. Don't ever try and talk about something you know nothing about especially to a room full of people who do know something about it.

There is a gazillion books on how to give good presentations written by a host of self proclaimed gurus and most of them aren't worth the paper they're written on. If you think about it, some of the best "presenters" oddly enough are stand up comedians. If you really must get a book try something like the Step by Step to Stand Up Comedy by Greg Dean before you blow $150 on "How to Give the Worlds Greatest Powerpoint Presentations"

Jamie Uff:
Ask somebody to video you giving a live presentation. It sounds scary now...but, when you watch it back you'll realise that "how you feel" and "how you come across" are two very different things.

Is it fear of talking to a group or fear of the group talking to you?

I can't really add much to what has already been said, however, presentations almost always have an interactive element, even if it is only questions and clarifications.
It can be very intimidating to present your thoughts and ideas on a subject to your peers - many of whom will (hopefully) be engaged and pick up on topics and ideas you may not have researched or be aware of.
I have found that it is often not the presentation but the leadership of the questions / debate that follows that is the more tricky. Learning some phrases or ways to keep the discussion tight and focused enabled me to be less apprehensive of presenting.
In some ways it is rather freeing to be able to say "I don't know, what do yo think?"

I also think that if you have time to take a quick look at how you prefer to operate - do you thrive on the motivation provided by others or do you prefer to prepare by yourself? This can guide you in further research as I find that (in very general terms) often the more introverted people are drawn to more practical examples and more extroverted people the more emotional based material.
It can be easy to put yourself off by going for the wrong type of material.

[also posted on the LinkedIn group discussion - thought they were linked...]

Once you have your conficence as rob robson said earlier get it on camera you will then see your manarism and how nervous you are.  One tip is to take your time and pause do not set the presentation (if by powerpoint) to change slides every few seconds do it on a click of the mouse or space bar.  once tip also is if you want to emphasize on a certain slide press the B button which will black out the slide and the group will consentrate on what you are saying then again press the B button to show what you mean on the designated slide.  Make sure you have printouts of the presentation slides as worst case senario the it goes down just prior to your presentation you can give handouts and still be able to present your ideas.  This also shows forward thinking and planning to your superiors.  If the IT doesnt go down then at the end you can give the handouts to the group as food for thought and say that "any further thoughts and feedback would be greatly appreciated."

Hope things go really well for you.

Choose a comedian or two who you like (probably not Frankie Boyle) watch and emulate their style and timing. I attended a talk on the dangers of dealing with an accident involving nuclear materials presented in the style of Eddie Izzard (sans make up) entertaining informative and memorable. good luck

As someone who had a speech impedement as a child (I simply didn't speak until I went to speech therapy) any kind of presentation even at school was always a nightmare for me.  Even though after having gone to speech therapy I spoke perfectly normally, I just dreaded the thought of speaking to a group of people.

My confidence in giving presentations to people grew during my university days.  I always made sure that I researched the subject thoroughly and had peripheral knowledge about the subject for those awkward questions.  A tip I found useful for presenting is not to read from a script and not to put down every word you say on your power point slides.  You will lose people's interest if they know that everything you are about to say is going to be given to them in a document - and as soon as you notce they have lost interest in listening, you will become uncomfortable.  Instead make a list of bullet points for yourself and a few memory prompts associated with it so you know what you wanted to mention.  I'll try reconstruct an example from a literature presentation:

Ottilie - young. niece. Eduard. Boat. coffin.

This prompted me to remember that when I was talking about the character Ottilie in the book  I wanted to mention that she was the youngest in the household when she joined and so felt uncomfortbale in the new surroundings of her aunt's home. While there she developed a platonic but romantic relationship with her aunt's husband Eduard.  The tension climaxes while they are taking a boat ride on an artificial lake at the castle.  Despite all that happens Ottilie is still viewed as a beautiful innocent and is laid to rest in a glass coffin, which becomes a pilgrimage destination for the surrounding villagers.

You see, it can be an efficient way of remembering a script without writing every word down.

Something else I found useful was amateur dramatics.  After a friend had said that he could see me on the stage I decided to give it a try and much to my surprise I actually enjoyed it.  One of the great things about amateur dramatics is the audience is not that huge and the lighting normally done so that you can hear them but not see them (just their outlines).  I only did one show with the drama society but it certainly helped.

I later went on to teach English to business clients of a language school in Germany for a year.  Although I was fine when sitting at a table with the students, I always felt uncomfortable when I first got up to speak at a podium.  I just had to remember "You're the expert, they are here to listen to you, take all the time you need".

Nowadays I am still a little nervous about giving presentations but remind myself each time that I have been up on stage and given talks in very difficult situations.

When preparing to give a presentation remind yourself of past performances where things have gone excellently and draw on the confidence from this.  Don't focus on the audience, look through them by focusing on a window or painting the other side of the room and only engage eye contact with an audience member occasionally.  Politicians are great at looking at everyone but noone while delivering a speech - not a bad tactic.

Join Toastmasters and practice, practice, practice. A great course you can attend is Joanna Martins PPI and another great one is Christopher Howards Platform Skills Intensive - after that you'll be able to front a rock band if you so desire.

Might give Toastmasters a go myself.  Did they teach you all you know Jacqui?

Shall have to look for my local chapter and pop along, try it out.

Charlie, you've had some very good advice.

My one tip:

Always remember you know (or should know) your subject better than anyone else. Nothing should frighten you.