Can hypnotherapy cure a lifetime phobia of public speaking? Journalist Annabelle Spranklen finds out…
Until a few months ago, if there was one thing that frightened me more than my childhood fear of male hairdressers (one took it upon himself to chop off my bottom-length hair without warning) it was standing up and talking in front of a room full of people. In a weird way, I’m not a massively shy person and as I’ve got older and faced all manners of situations as a journalist – from interviewing A-List celebrities in grand hotel suites to walking into dinners and work events without knowing another soul – I’ve become far more confident. However, I’ve never quite got over my fear of public speaking – and have spent the best part of my 15 year career doing everything I possibly could to ensure I never had to do it.
For the small number of times I haven’t been able to slink my way out of a presentation, I’ve spent days and sleepless nights fretting about it. You know – that gut-wrenching feeling in the pit of my stomach making me feel nauseous at the very thought of opening my mouth, my eyes darting across the room to a sea of judgemental faces concentrating on my every word. Voice shaking, hands wobbling, I’d barely be about to get out my first sentence without feeling like I had a frog preparing to leap out of my throat at any moment.
Interestingly, a fear of public speaking, or to use its medical term, Glossophobia, is one of the most common fears in the UK – a recent YouGov poll found that it was the third most common phobia for Brits, ahead of snakes, going to the dentist and needles. 23% of us reportedly suffer from it, affecting 57% of women compared to 39% of men. Many of my friends have agreed they too don’t like public speaking, but they’ve overcome it just by practice.
The current health headlines are not helping.
The thing is, I didn’t have time for practice. After having my son and coming back from maternity leave to a wave of new clients and consultancy projects, alongside invitations requesting me to host panel discussions and to speak about my work, I realised not only was my phobia becoming seriously career-limiting, I was also fed up of feeling intensely worried about it. I needed to confront it at last.
It was a colleague that suggested I look into hypnotherapy instead. I’ll be honest, up until this point I’d never had any kind of therapy – images of The Jungle Book snake and his psychedelic colour-changing eyes came to mind – and I never thought it could be a viable treatment option that would help me overcome my long-standing fear head-on.
Through some research I came across Christopher Paul Jones, a Harley Street hypnotherapist who has had lots of success helping people with all kinds of phobias – especially public speaking, something he’d previously suffered from himself. His work regularly sees results in as quickly as one or two sessions – which, unsurprisingly, hugely appealed to me. Could he really relieve my fear in a matter of hours? I was about to put it to the test.
Of course, there was no witchcraft woo-woo involved, nor was I put into a trance-like state either. Instead, Chris used a combination of widely-established practices, namely Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and clinical Hypnotherapy to engage my brain’s thought processes, helping me create new, healthy patterns of thinking that stopped the feelings of fear from taking hold.
I had two sessions, both lasting around 90 minutes, which started with us sitting in his Harley Street clinic chatting about where my public speaking phobia may have began. The process of mental training that followed was strangely calming. I felt the most serene I had in some time, like I had suddenly lost this baggage of anxiety that had been strapped to my body for years.
The techniques are designed to not only help us talk about our fears, but also identify the root cause – that catalyst moment that triggered the phobia – and change old beliefs. More often than not, the trigger is an incident or experience that you hadn’t even associated with the ‘fear’ - for me, it was a moment during my first ever primary school assembly when I was four, something hadn’t given any thought to for years. Other experiences related to my phobia came to mind too, moments when I had found myself needing to stand in front of a room full of colleagues to speak, the times when I can only remember stumbling on my words as adrenaline took over, breathless and embarrassed – a memory well and truly cemented into my psyche.
I’m visualising these very scenes in my session, but instead I imagine myself floating above the events and fast-forwarding to the feelings of accomplishment that follow after my talks have ended. I see the good feedback, the beaming audience, the sense of feeling proud, realising now that they weren’t moments to be afraid of. I laugh as Chris tells me to pretend to talk in a Mickey Mouse voice, which tackled that lumpy feeling in my throat. Gently, my patterns of thinking begin to scramble. Chris also helped me to develop a new technique to help in situations when I am feeling nervous, by associating an action with a positive memory. We conditioned the action of clutching my fists to bring two highly emotional, happy moments to life in my head – which Chris tells me is stronger than the fear. The brain can’t process both, he says, so the strongest always wins.
I’ll admit, while I felt gloriously calm in his office, there was a part of me that wondered if my newfound techniques would actually take effect when I needed them to. But lo and behold, just a few weeks later I was asked to present a talk to a room full of graduates. I already felt an instant shift in anxiety when the email came through – dread had somehow turned into excitement. I slept well the night before and felt more in control than I had ever previously experienced. As I walked up to the stand, there was still a few nerves, but I used the techniques Chris gave me to full effect. I discreetly clenched my fists, looked straight ahead, my eyes focused on one point to help me focus my breathing. And then… I spoke well. I didn’t stumble on those first few lines and actually enjoyed myself. I’ve since learnt to focus on the positives anytime I do public speaking – the adrenaline rush of doing a good job and how great it felt to be in the spotlight. Standing up in front of a friendly audience and talking about something I know about? I can hardly remember why it seemed so scary.
For anyone struggling with a phobia or form of anxiety, I’d wholeheartedly recommend trying hypnotherapy. It could change your life for the better – it certainly has for me.
Here, Chris shares his 7 steps on how to overcome your fear of public speaking...
Step 1: Recognise what you're really afraid of
Begin by identifying the specific aspects of public speaking that trigger your fear. Instead of wondering why you are fearful, ask yourself more insightful questions like, "What about speaking in public scares me?" or "When do I feel this fear most acutely?" Explore your beliefs about speaking in front of others and how they contribute to your fear.
Step 2: Relax the conscious mind
Prepare your mind to be calm and present. One method is through what's called ‘open awareness’, which broadens your perceptual field and relaxes the mind – which also helps you see your entire audience while staying relaxed. Stand upright with feet shoulder-width apart and smile. Extend your arms forward, touching your index fingers, and focus on a spot above eye level. Slowly move your fingers apart while maintaining your gaze on that spot, stretching your arms to the sides. As you hold this pose, use your peripheral vision to remain aware of your surroundings. Finally, let your arms drop and take deep breaths, maintaining your broadened awareness.
Step 3: Consider what ‘reward’ your fear achieves
All emotions meet a need at the subconscious level, however illogical they might seem; typically, this is related to safety or readiness. Consider what you might lose if your fear were to disappear and what you might have to face that you don’t want to. Perhaps your fear protects you from feeling embarrassed, or stepping out of your comfort zone.
Step 4: Deconstruct your fear ‘recipe’
We don't catch emotions; we create them. In order to maintain your fear of public speaking (your fear recipe), you're engaging in specific actions with your thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, and breathing. One method to change this recipe is by altering the images you visualise when thinking of public speaking. Try changing colourful images to black and white, or freezing moving ones. Minimise the image, make it tiny, and imagine disposing of it far away. Make it humorous by imagining the scenario as if it were a comedy. Notice how it changes your emotions.
Step 5: Release the past
Ask yourself what is your earliest memory of feeling this way. There are various methods to change the memory at its root. One method is known as tapping:
Begin by tapping the side of your hand, then move to other key points such as under the eyes, on the collarbone, and under the arm. As you tap each point, speak out your fears and notice any emotional shifts. Continue until the fear's impact notably lessens. You can learn more about tapping here.
Step 6: Recondition your emotions
Replace negative emotional responses with positive ones through anchoring – i.e. recall a moment of peace, laughter, or connection. Fully immerse yourself in this memory, noticing every detail.
At the peak of this positive feeling, squeeze your fist. Release as the emotion fades.
Continue doing this for as many positive emotions as you can think of, squeezing your fist at the peak of the feeling and letting go as the feeling fades.
Now, think of speaking and squeeze your fist. The right positive emotion should reduce or remove the negative feeling about speaking.
Step 7: Realise a powerful future
Visualise a successful outcome rather than focusing on a negative future of speaking. Instead of being nervous at the start of a speech, imagine the applause at the end of your speech and how good you’ll feel. Focus on your audience, not yourself; think about what you can offer in your talk rather than how you'll be perceived. By focusing on a positive future and starting with the end in mind, you're likely to feel better.
For more information visit christopherpauljones.com
