Four Keys to Navigating Presentation Nerves
- Stephanie Edward
- Mar 26
- 11 min read
Something that comes up a lot in discussion with my Clarity Session clients and even among participants after my keynote presentations is how to manage public speaking anxiety. People frequently comment on how calm I appear to be on stage and are always surprised to learn that presentation jitters are very much something I contend with every single time I get on stage, too.
However, I will also admit that my experience with presentation anxiety has morphed over time. The nerves don’t “get to me” as much as they used to.
So, in this article, I’m sharing four of the top things I have learned to do to minimize the impact of public speaking nerves on me and my presentation.
These are the four Rs of navigating presentation nerves, whether you are delivering a presentation to a handful of people or speaking to hundreds from a stage.
1. RECOGNIZE: Recognize that presentation nerves are part of the experience.
I named this article Navigating Presentation Nerves.
I did not name it Overcoming Presentation Nerves.
Or Getting Rid of Presentation Nerves.
Or Avoiding Presentation Nerves.
I intentionally named it Navigating Presentation Nerves because I’ve come to accept that public speaking jitters are a reality for most of us. Yes, the degree to which they are present may vary from one person to the next but most of us contend with some form of stress or nervousness before presentations.
We can’t really control when stress and nerves come up. They are a physiological reaction.
So, the first step in navigating presentation nerves is to accept that they are merely part of the whole presentation experience.
This is important because if you continually think, “What is wrong with me? Why can’t I get rid of this nervousness? Why am I nervous in the first place? This is so stupid.”, you’ll be wasting your energy on judging yourself or worrying about the situation rather than putting that energy to good use in trying to interact with your public speaking anxiety in helpful ways.
2. RETHINK: Rethink presentation nerves.
Let’s say two people have to deliver separate talks to a group of a hundred people. They are both very nervous and, for the purposes of this example, let’s imagine that we know they have exactly the same level of anxiety over delivering their presentations.
However, person A is thinking things along the lines of, “I’m so nervous. What if I mess up? I have to get a grip. What if this stress makes me forget everything I want to say? What if this anxiety makes me stumble over my words? What if I totally goof up and humiliate myself in front of all these people?”
Person B, by contrast, thinks things like, “Wow. I’m really nervous. I must care a lot about this presentation. The stress I’m feeling right now is my body preparing me to do an amazing job. I’m anxious but I’m so ready. These jitters don’t mean I’m going to mess up. These jitters mean I care and am going to kick ass.”
Does this sound cheesy to you? I get it, if it does but challenge yourself to undo that perspective because of these two facts:
What person B just said is true. Stress (or nerves or anxiety or whatever you want to call it) is in fact present as a result of your body preparing you to step up to the challenge. In this case, the challenge is delivering a presentation.
Studies have shown that people who think like person B will almost always do better on whatever it is they have do (in this case, a presentation), than person A.
In other words, the way we think about presentation nerves pretty much becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In fact, how we think about presentation jitters is more important than the jitters themselves.
Hard to believe, right? But our mindset is incredibly powerful. Countless studies have demonstrated the power of our mindset in all kinds of areas of our lives. The way we think about presentation nerves is a magnificent example.
If you view stress as something that has come to trip you up and make you look like a fool during your presentation, then that’s far more likely to be the case.
If you view stress as a sign that you care and as evidence that your body is preparing to deliver a stellar presentation, then that’s also far more likely to be the case.
As I wrote earlier, you can’t control when stress and nerves come up but you can control how you think about them… and luckily that’s much more important!
3. REGULATE: Regulate your nervous system.
Notwithstanding that you can choose the more helpful perspective of seeing presentation nerves as something that can help you, I do understand how uncomfortable it can feel when we’re terribly nervous for a presentation.
We each have an optimal amount of stress.
When we have less than that, we have a hard time getting out of bed but when we have more than that optimal amount, we feel uncomfortable or awful. You might use terms like “stressed out” or “overwhelmed”.
Sometimes, before presentations or high stakes events, our stress levels tip a little too far past what is optimal and it doesn’t feel great.
What’s critical to understand here is that you are not a helpless victim of stress or presentation jitters.
There are simple things you can do to regulate your nervous system and get your stress levels back to a more optimal level that doesn’t feel as icky and distracting.
I am going to share a few of those with you now but first I want to clarify something.
It is okay if your stress levels are high for short periods of time. Stress is a problem when we experience sustained periods of very high stress. So, if you are super nervous for your presentation and you try some of these techniques and do not feel that they are working, don’t sweat it… because the amount of time you spend super stressed over a presentation is generally not very much!
What matters more is that you view presentation nerves in the right light. (If you don’t know what I mean, go back to point 2: RETHINK!)
When it comes to regulating the nervous system, this is something that has to happen at the level of the body. You can’t “think” yourself out of jitters and anxiety. You need to get into your body.
Here are some simple ways to do that:
a. Breathe.
While it can always be helpful to slow down your breathing, trying to do merely that, when you’re really amped up with nerves before a presentation, might not be all that helpful to you.
Instead, I recommend adding a little more structure to your breathing. Here are some suggestions.
Box breathing:
Breathe in for a count of 4.
Hold the breath in for a count of 4.
Breathe out for a count of 4.
Hold the breath out for a count of 4.
Repeat however many times you’d like.
Important note: If you are really anxious, a count of 4 might be too much. No big deal, if that’s the case. Just adjust to what works for you: a count of 3, maybe even a count of 2.
Why this works: It keeps your mind busy with counting and focusing on the various “parts” of your breathing, while also ensuring you continue to breathe, which calms down your nervous system.
Alternate nostril breathing:
If you are somewhere private, give this a try.
With the pinky of your right hand, close your right nostril and breathe in through your left nostril.
Hold the breath for a second.
Then close the left nostril and breathe out through the right.
Pause for a second.
Then breathe in through the right nostril.
Pause.
Then close the right nostril again and breathe out through the left.
Then continue in that way.
Breathe in again through the left.
Pause.
Close the left nostril and breathe out through the right.
Pause.
Breathe in through the right.
Pause.
Close the right nostril.
Breathe in through the left.
And so on.
Why this works: Again, you’re keeping your mind busy with some light effort. It requires a bit of focus to coordinate closing the nostrils and alternating which nostril you breathe through. This gets you out of your thoughts and into your body and the breathing starts to calm your nervous system down.
b. Connect with your senses.
If focusing on your breathing doesn’t appeal to you, you may prefer to focus on your senses instead.
The idea here is that you take a moment to really think about what you are detecting with all or some of your five senses: what you can touch, see, hear, taste, or smell.
Here are some techniques:
5-4-3-2-1:
Identify:
5 things you can feel (shoes on your feet, air on your skin, etc.)
4 things you can see (paint colours, light, objects)
3 things you can hear (voices, music, mechanical sounds)
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste.
Why this works: This also gets you out of your head. Connecting with our senses can be very grounding and soothing for the nervous system.
Focus on one sense:
Perhaps you are walking to your presentation.
You might choose to focus on all the things you can hear: your feet hitting the ground, the sounds of traffic, the sounds of your clothing rustling as you move.
Or perhaps you would rather pay attention to all the things you can see: colours and shadows, shapes and objects, etc.
Why this works: This works for the same reasons mentioned above: It gets you out of your thoughts and into your body.
c. Soothe with movement.
Our brain and body love simple patterns. When we are very nervous, it can be helpful to create simple rhythmic movements with our bodies.
Here are some examples:
Hand pressure
If you are seated, you can place your right hand, palm down, on your right thigh and your left hand, palm down, on your left thigh.
Then, gently press your right hand into your right thigh and release.
Then press your left hand into your left thigh and release.
Continue applying gentle pressure onto each thigh, alternating between right and left.
Hand pressure with breathwork
You can do the above on its own or, if you want to build on this, you can introduce a bit of breathwork to this.
As you press your right hand into your right thigh, breathe in.
hen as you breathe out release the downward pressure from the right hand.
Then as you breathe in again, press the left hand into the left thigh.
As you breathe out, release the left hand.
This is a wonderfully soothing technique for the nervous system.
Gentle rocking
Depending on where you are, you can try rocking very gently side to side or moving your torso front, side, back, side, front, in very tiny circles.
This also calms the nervous system.
There are almost countless ways of regulating the nervous system.
If you are interested in learning more, be sure to sign up for my newsletter because, in the next few weeks, I will be launching my channel on Insight Timer, which will contain many guided practices like those above.
4. REDUCE: Reduce extra stressors.
If you want to navigate presentation nerves successfully, you need to get rid of whatever additional stressors you can proactively. Note here that I’m not saying you should get rid of stress. As I talked about earlier, that isn’t the goal here. However, if getting up to speak in front of a group of people already makes you nervous, then why not do yourself a favour and eliminate additional stress where you can.
Here’s an example from my life:
I get a lot of anxiety around travel and transportation.
When I am going anywhere, especially when I am going somewhere to deliver a talk or training session, I can worry a lot about transit, parking, travel time, etc. So, I’ve learned that it helps me to do things like scope out the parking situation in advance, allow extra time for travel, buy tickets for trains in advance, etc.
My additional stressors are likely different from yours. Perhaps you worry about what you will wear during the presentation. If that’s you, be sure to plan your outfit in advance and try it on and make sure it’s ironed and ready to go on presentation day.
Perhaps not knowing anything about the space where you will be presenting makes you extra nervous. This is something that can add to my presentation nerves, too. Sometimes it’s possible to ask others about the set-up of the room, where people will be seated, etc. Maybe one of your colleagues has been to this space before or there is an organizer for the event that you can reach out to.
I think sometimes we realize that certain things like these add to our presentation nerves but we don’t do anything about them for a couple of reasons:
We might consider the things causing us presentation nerves to be silly. For instance, I used to berate myself for getting so nervous about parking. However, as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, that kind of approach isn’t helpful. If anything, it only adds to our stress because now we are not only worried about delivering a presentation and where we’re going to park when we arrive but we’re also stressed about how mean we’re being to ourselves about being stressed about the parking.
We sometimes are already so stressed about an upcoming presentation that we fear that looking at all the ancillary items that might add to our stress might just put us over the edge. So we pretend they don’t exist until the last moment, when we can’t ignore them anymore and then our nerves skyrocket.
Sticking our heads in the sand is rarely a very effective tactic.
I recommend making yourself a quick honest list of all the things that are making or might make you nervous for your presentation. The purpose of doing this is to allow you to address the items that you can deal with early and therefore prevent those same items from unnecessarily adding to your presentation-day sources of nerves.
So, those are the four Rs of navigating presentation nerves:
1. RECOGNIZE: Recognize that presentation nerves are part of the experience.
2. RETHINK: Rethink presentation nerves.
3. REGULATE: Regulate your nervous system.
4. REDUCE: Reduce the extra stressors
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