You are minutes away from giving a public speech.
You feel your chest tighten, your breathing is becoming shallow and you are beginning to perspire.
These normal reactions hold true whether your speech is for your high school class or in front of any number of people.
To remain relaxed in this situation can be learned and mastered to your benefit.
To be relaxed in giving a public speech is truly not that difficult.
Actually there is absolutely nothing to fear nor be afraid of.
The first thing that you need to do before you give your speech is to write the speech.
This enables you to use words and phrases that you are comfortable with.
If you rely on someone else to write your speech then you will be using the words that they normally use.
This does nothing to help relax you.
Also before you begin your speech make sure to take a couple of deep breathes with a second or two between each.
These deep breaths will slow your heart, lower your blood pressure, and enable your brain to function as it normally does.
After you have your speech written then it is important to learn the speech.
To accomplish this you will need to practice the speech repeatedly.
The ideal object here is if you practice the speech enough you will actually begin to commit most of it to memory.
Knowing your speech this well is a major step to being relaxed.
If you know your speech and have practiced it enough to be within the allotted time given then you can move on to coming up with the tools to help you give the speech.
Some public speakers like to use a one page outline.
Here you can include the first and last lines of each paragraph and by using one page there is nothing to turn to.
If the thought of only having an outline bothers you then you can begin to write note cards.
Using note cards can help but you need to be aware of the possible problems that note cards bring along.
Even if you know your speech backwards and forwards, having the majority of it on note cards while comforting can be a problem.
Most of those who are not used to standing up and delivering a speech will have the tendency to use their note cards to read from.
If you allow yourself to do this you are no longer giving a speech but you are reading a report.
This is no fun for you and your audience will quickly become bored.
One area of public speaking that is certainly a set up for becoming unrelaxed is making a mistake.
Most public speakers when doing this begin to stumble over their words and actually lose place in their speech.
This should never happen to you.
The reason I can say that is this, you did the research, you wrote you speech, you have learned exactly what it is you wish to say, your audience has no idea as to if you made a mistake or not.
So if you leave something out, gotten a few sentences out of order, whatever the mistake is you are the only one who knows so relax and continue on with your speech.
Public speaking can be nerve wracking no matter how many times you have done this act.