Overcoming your fear of presenting – The ACT Model

A common anxiety we encounter in business coaching is the fear of giving presentations.   While strategising and planning your way through a difficult situation will help, your thoughts are very powerful and may not simply go away because of this.

Psychotherapy has a powerful tool called ACTAcceptance and Commitment Therapy, that uses acceptance and mindfulnesss strategies to help people cope with changes in circumstances and think about problems and tasks in a novel, creative way.

One of the key elements of the ACT model is the principle of Acceptance of difficult thoughts and strategies to use to diffuse these negative thoughts so you can cope with them.

Acceptance involves allowing the difficult thoughts without trying to avoid them or fight them.

Defusion techniques then try to change the way you interact with those thoughts and so alleviate some of the negative results.

Acceptance

For example, you have some anxiety about an upcoming presentation. Acceptance is accepting that the anxiety will always be there and going to courses, writing a script won’t remove those anxious thoughts. They will happen. There is even a positive aspect as the anxiety ensure you are in a heightened state that could make your presentation more engaging.

However, if the anxiety takes over this can be destructive. To manage the negative thoughts you can use a number of Defusion techniques that help you reframe the thought and your perspective of it. There is no substitute to actually trying these – on reading they may sound simplistic and bizarre!

Defusion Techniques

These and many other useful techniques are covered in Donald Robertson’s book Building your Resilience (available in the Sun and Moon Store).

  1. Name the thought specifically eg “I am having the thought that I might fail in my presentation”. Say this out loud and even thank your mind for bringing this up as if your mind is a separate person. “Thank you mind for highlighting this!”
  2. Use the words of the thought eg “anxious”, “fear” to symbolise the thought and repeat the words unusually quickly many times for about 30 seconds.
  3. Sing the words of the thought to a tune eg Happy Birthday.
  4. Say the words in another voice – a comic character or just a silly voice.

These techniques, used widely and successfully in psychotherapy, weaken the power of negative thoughts by loosening their connection with real events.

The thoughts will still happen – you may still get anxious – however your anxiety will remain a thought disassociated with reality and potentially free you to act positively.

Obviously, there is a lot more to the subject, perhaps this will whet your appetite to work with Sun and Moon!

David Solomon

Managing Director, Sun and Moon Training

@SunMoonDavid

Photo copyright: PressMaster / 123RF Stock Photo

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