Would you label yourself a nervous public speaker?
May 14, 2026A Marketing VP I work with came to me this week wanting help with her public speaking.
The previous week, she had presented to a room of 150 people. In her own words, she described the experience as feeling like she was "naked".
She was looking for a tool—a quick fix—to manage the nervousness.
I didn't give her one.
I didn't give her a tool because the very word she was using was the problem. "Nervous" was a label hiding two completely different internal experiences, and as the saying goes: you cannot work on what you cannot see clearly.
The Label vs The Reality
Most of what we categorise as "nerves," "a lack of confidence," or "feeling exposed" functions as a blanket term. While the label feels accurate in the heat of the moment, it almost never is.
In this leader's case:
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One part of her "nervousness" turned out not to be a problem at all.
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The other part had absolutely nothing to do with the act of speaking.
This is exactly why preparing more rarely fixes the issue. If you are preparing for "nerves" but the root cause is something else entirely, you are solving the wrong equation.
The Truth Underneath
Most of us have walked out of a high-stakes room and told ourselves we were "just nervous". It is a convenient story, but it is rarely a factual one.
I have deep-dived into what was actually sitting underneath that VP's experience, including the one specific sentence she could have said in the first ten seconds of her talk that would have changed the entire dynamic.
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