My Fear of Public Speaking Controlled my Life – Until I Tried Hypnotherapy
Extract taken from the article available here:
I couldn’t do job interviews, Zoom meetings or even share a story with a group of people without a tight throat, compressed chest and fluttery head tension at best. At worst, a pounding heart would drag my mind and body into an uncontrollable panic. In the past year, desperate for relief, I’d sporadically used prescribed beta blockers. On the call, her warm smile and serene voice felt like the opposite of my bubbling nerves and nervous anticipation of the unfamiliar. “Can you think of a recent time – a particularly bad instance – this fear came up for you?” she asked. “What happened?” I felt a plastic cable tie tightening around my neck and got the words out as best as I could. “You can hear it. It’s in your throat, isn’t it?” she immediately asked. Some of my fear came from feeling like a diversity tick box throughout my career, for example, and feeling as if public speaking put me straight into a lion’s den where I needed to prove I was far from a token brown person. This belief was why the stakes felt like they were extremely high each time.
“I feel like my body had betrayed me that first time I had a panic attack in front of a room full of people,” I told her, surprised I’d never made this connection before. She immediately understood, explaining how my mind and body had “fractured from that moment”. I soon learned through her reassuring analysis that it was entirely possible to ‘switch off’ these physical alarm systems: my body had simply established them mistakenly thinking it was protecting me. We could re-teach it through the meditations, she said, with unwavering confidence. I listened to Boston’s voice for a week after that through a tailored mp3 she’d created for me. The impact was immediate. I became curious about how far the meditations could take me. On Thursday, five days after my first hypnosis, I agreed to speak on camera during a work event. I made a spontaneous joke and then another, and he held back laughter in response. “This is so easy,” I thought. I was even enjoying myself. Nearly a week since the course finished, I’m finding myself feeling excited to further investigate my new relationship with public speaking. It feels like ordering a new gadget or toy and testing out its capabilities – equal parts fun and equal parts curiosity to tackle the unknown, which is a truly novel feeling. This in itself is life-changing. I can’t help but think Boston may have changed my life, and I wish I’d tried hypnotherapy sooner.
In my signature one-week programme, AWAKEN YOUR VOICE; we look at absolutely everything in your life contributing to your current lack of confidence in your ability to speak in public and how it might have become a hindrance to the successful life you dream about. We work through all that’s getting in your way, both internally and externally, so that you can finally start living the confident, fun, free and fulfilled life of your dreams. AWAKEN YOUR VOICE is the real deal.
