Stage fright. Help your students overcome anxiety

Many people, whether they are aware of it or not, have something called stage fright anxiety. This is nervousness before or during performing in front of an audience, and, like any other anxiety, it is draining and destructing. Perhaps, some of your students suffer from it.

Even though, in this case, we are only talking about offline classes, sometimes people feel reticent to express their emotions even during an online class. If they know how to deal with it, they might get motivated to speak English in public, help a tourist in the city, talk to some foreigners they meet in real life or on the Internet. It will definitely help them during their exams, and, who knows, maybe one day they will become a TED speaker or give lectures in English.

Let’s take a look at some tips on how to overcome the fear of performing in public according to Don Greene, a well-known sports psychologist, and his book Fight Your Fear and Win.

— Pick one clear intention. Find out what’s your goal – what you want to achieve with your performance. The most important about your intention is to keep it comforting and use positive language. For example, say to yourself “Stay confident” instead of “Don’t screw it up”.

— Pick your focus of attention. It means picking a far-off insignificant point at the back of the room or auditorium. This point will serve you later as a resort of your nervous energy. If you don’t know the room you’ll be performing in, or if it is an online classroom (our case), use some item as your focal point, for instance, a pen and throw your negative energy onto it. You can later put it on the table in front of you.

— Breathe in the right way. Close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Push out your belly with each breath. This helps to concentrate on now and not let your thoughts wander.

— Relax your body muscles. Start at your head or your toes and slowly relax your muscles each at a time. Each part of your body gets an inhale. Relax your feet. Exhale. Go on until all of your muscles are relaxed.

— Find your centre. Think about the spot about 5 cm below your navel and 5 cm below the surface of your belly. Dr Green says we can focus on this spot to calm our mind.

— Choose a reminder for yourself. In the first step, we talked about the goal you want to achieve. Here we talk about how you want to achieve it, what mental or physical reminder do you want for yourself as you process and go through your performance? For example, if you are reading a poem, it could be “feel free to express your emotions”.

— Mental redirection. The focus of attention we pick in step 3 is the actual physical place you can redirect your energy to. As you are about to get nervous, mentally sling this destructive energy into that focus  point. It will certainly relieve you.

You can walk your students through all of these steps, you’ll probably learn some new words and just help them to fight their stage fright anxiety.

Knowing a thing or two about breathing techniques will help your students immensely. The most well-known and effective one is 7-8-4 breathing technique. It is simple as that: breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds and then exhale for 8 seconds. You can repeat these simple actions up to four times. It might take some time to master the technique, even though it looks pretty straightforward, but doing it right will calm your nerves and relax you better than any other exercises. One more benefit of this technique is that it’s not time-consuming and can help in unexpected stressful situations.

Remember to focus on your breath rather than emotions and anxious thoughts.  Try to say two words as you inhale and two words as you exhale. These can be any words, for example, “calmness”, “relaxation”, “harmony” or something unrelated: “chair”, “pillow”, “sun”. You can also try choosing the words you like the sound of or those that remind you of something pleasant. Or they might be the words you will need for your English exam.

To be relaxed before performing on stage, your students need to feel self-confident. And how can you help them with it?

— Let your students know they are not alone. Many of the celebrities also suffer from this unpleasant anxiety. Just realizing that they are not alone in this struggle, that someone they look up to understands them perfectly will raise their self-confidence. More than that, they can get a few helpful tips from their role models

— They should know their audience. If they want to succeed in their speech, they should be good at catching the spectators’ attention. To do that, they need to know what the audience is interested in. In other words, be ready to put themselves in the viewer’s place. Tell them to try to find answers to the following questions:

1. What are the hobbies and interests of the audience?
2. What are their goals in life?
3. What are they afraid of?
4. What are the problems they are facing?

— Make an impressive outline. Grab people’s attention just by starting your speech with something interesting and entertaining. Some of the options are:

1. Ask a question or a chain of questions. Again, target the audience. Pay attention to their interests or troubles (see the previous point). Asking questions in English requires knowing grammar. Prompt a few possible questions with your students in advance, it’ll be useful to review question structure at the same time.
   
2. Tell a story from personal experience. A discovery you’ve made, an insight you’ve got, a bit of valuable advice you’ve received from someone. What was the path you went through looking for answers? We all have these stories, and they will definitely harp on the same strings. Have your students share their stories with you (if that’s an individual lesson) or with the class? Provide them with some corrections (self-correction, delayed correction). Ask other students to give their feedback, suggest them to discuss the stories together.
   
3. Use statistics. They can make your speech more informative but make sure the data you share is scientifically proved and, last but not least, not boring. Remember your speech should be both informative and entertaining.  Searching for information on the Internet is easy and fun, but if the searching is done in English, this is more beneficial. Discuss some thought-provoking subjects for speeches and let the learners dig in, let them seek out for statistics, scientific research etc.

The best way to prepare your students to a public speech is to rehearse giving speeches.

Read it out: Error Correction in Speaking Activities

Ideas for speeches:

1. My hobbies vs popular hobbies of the 21st century
2. Why summer holidays are really important?
3. Can everyone be happy?
4. Is doing nothing a good use of time?
5. Do we need libraries in the 21st century?
6. Distance learning: drawbacks and benefits
7. The impact of tourism on our planet
8. Say “yes” to conscious consumption
9. Are adults always right?
10. Silence doesn’t mean “yes”

Tip: Hold a brainstorming session where teenagers would come up with ideas for their speeches. Believe me, you’ll be surprised by how many striking suggestions they have to offer.

Post-performing stage. Public speaking is a stressful activity. Hopefully, all the tips we looked at will assist your students in overcoming this stress. Yet, there’s one more lifehack you can share with them. As they are done with their speech, they deserve some reward. Encourage them to get an ice-cream, go out for movies, watch their favourite TV-series, play video games. Shortly, recommend them to do something delightful and satisfying, so they can associate public speaking with something pleasant and not scary.

During the quarantine, we tend to learn a lot of new things and develop new skills, but one most essential skill is to try to stay positive and calm. Furthermore, it can help your students in the future. If you can think of more ways to fight a fear of public speaking, please leave a comment.