The number one fear is rejection!

Just to expand on Amanda's post, I would say that Public Speaking is a lot like Sales and the number one fear that people have in Sales is the fear of rejection. People say that fear of public speaking is number one, but it’s not really public speaking as much as it is the fear of the criticism they get when they speak publically. And it’s that rejection and not getting approval from the audience.

In what I refer to as “traditional sales”, we are trying to get people to approve of what we are doing. We want people to like us and we want them to agree with what we are doing and we want them to believe in our product, our service, and our benefits and so we go out of our way to get them to approve of it and to approve of us.

What I’ve come to understand is that my audience isn't interested in what I know; they're only interested in their own issues; for example, MONEY - to make more money, to save more money, or to stop throwing money away. So the TRUTH IS that I'm not trying to SELL anybody anything ... my audience is really trying to decide what to BUY – or what to “buy into” when attending a public speaking event. As the speaker, I'm trying to help facilitate that buying process through helping them discover their ISSUES.

My Goal is to get the audience to focus on the ISSUES and to find out if the ISSUES are real for them; and then help them to DISCOVER that there may be a solution (maybe through what we're doing) to help them SOLVE their ISSUES.

This approach takes the pressure off the speaker, and places it where it belongs ... directly on the audience.