Who has a fear of speaking in certain situations?

[charlieHungerford]

How big a problem is this with SA sufferers? If you suffer from this fear do you think if you overcame this problem that SA could be overcome? I personally feel that this is the only problem I have with SA - the fear of speaking when anxious makes me avoid anxious situations.

Would anyone be interested in dedicating a post to overcoming this fear whereby those who are interested discuss and chat about this and help work out how we can do it. I am going to tackle this myself but I would love to work with people who are also motivated to overcome this - 2 heads are better than 1.

I have lots of ideas but I never really get any replies to my messages, so I want to find people who are interested, I can chat forever about this - whether its on here, messenger, private messages - but I really want to find people who want to work on this.

What do you think?

 

[maggie]

hey Charlie..i have a fear of speaking in almost every situation involving speaking to someone i'm not familiar with..speeches and presentations in school were more like torture than anything :!: and it's much worse if i have to actually initiate the conversation..not so bad if i'm answering someone else's questions or whatever...my voice is pretty quiet, so i usually have to repeat myself..which really sucks..if i'm really stressed, my words can come out a little mixed up..and..i'm guessing...makes me sound much less intelligent than i really am :evil:

 

[charlieHungerford]

Maggie do you fear speaking around friends and family?

 

[garnet]

Hi charlieHungerford!

I would love to hear any of your ideas to overcome fear of speaking . I'm quite fortunate in that I have slowly but surely managed to become more comfortable chatting when there are quite a few people around, in informal situations. However my real stumbling block is when I have to do presentations or perform activites in front of others.

How are you affected with your fear?

 

[charlieHungerford]

Hi Garnet,

I really don't know at this moment how to overcome this fear. I worked out a plan this week in order to overcome SA and I realised that one big factor was that I had to change my beliefs about speaking.

What I do believe is that I don't have a fear of speaking and neither do you almost certainly. But we do have a fear of speaking WHEN anxious. i.e. when we are calm and comfortable speaking is not a problem right? Which was why I asked maggie if she was comfortable speaking around friends and family.

There are two things that I am thinking about here. 1 is that we are anxious for other reasons which make us anxious in the situations we are anxious in - and it is that anxiety that makes us fear speaking, because we know when we are anxious we struggle to speak. I don't know if you can relate to that? And 2 - In order to overcome SA we need to change our mindset about speaking - right now we have hugely negative beliefs about speaking, we don't believe we can do it when anxious, we believe that speaking will show we are lacking in confidence and are nervous/anxious, we probably all believe that if people see us struggling with speaking that people will think we are strange and weird. This must change - we need to believe we can do speaking, we need to believe we will not be judged negatively and that infact speaking is a chance for us to show how good a person we are. Because if we continue to feel negative about speaking we will have no belief in ourselves to succeed in speaking situations.

What do you think of any of that? Agree or disagree? I would love to hear what you think because I have a lot to learn.

There is a long long way to go before I feel I am close to overcoming this fear, but if we work on it and understand it properly I am sure it can be overcome.

 

[Emma]

I have a fear of speaking around everyone, even family members (except my Mum, Dad and Sister)...who would have thought my own Uncles would scare me