How I Tricked My Body Into Being Okay With Public Speaking

This story is part of How to Get Better at Public Speaking, the Forge guide to talking in front of a crowd.

I like to tell people that I got my first job at the age of 30. The truth is a little more complicated. I spent most of my twenties as a full-time freelance journalist and eventually became the boss of a couple of online magazines at the same time, managing teams of contractors mostly from a home office in my pajamas.

When I found myself a potential escape hatch (that is, one single job that would pay me enough to live on), I leapt at it. Little did I consider that, there, I’d have to participate in meetings. Real meetings. In rooms, with other people, and the added bonus of even more people piped in by video from a conference room across the country.

For a person unaccustomed to presenting with authority in a professional setting, the expectation to do so on a weekly basis in front of the person signing my paychecks was a real-time, waking nightmare. My awkwardness at talking to a roomful of colleagues became a constant preoccupation. I lost sleep. I clenched my jaw with such routine force that I broke a tooth into the shape of Mississippi.

I’d uprooted my entire life for a job I wasn’t sure I was qualified to have. So I did the only thing I knew I could: I quit everything and joined a subsistence agricultural commune in Tahiti.

Just kidding. I got a therapist.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, is a mode of skill-based psychotherapy designed to help people regulate their moods and communicate effectively with others — basically, to make it easier to both listen and be heard. It was designed by the psychologist Marsha Linehan to treat severely emotionally distressed and suicidal patients, but I knew enough about DBT to suspect that its methods could also help me with my problems at work.

My DBT therapist was a cherubic, tattoo-covered New York City native who’d gone to high school with Nicki Minaj and taught me the difference between Bronx and Brooklyn accents (Brooklynites talk through their noses while the Bronx accent is “more mouth-produced,” she said). She also taught me two suites of DBT skills I found almost instantly useful, one to help with what Linehan calls “distress tolerance” and the other for “interpersonal effectiveness.”

Linehan is fond of grouping related sets of skills with extreme acronyms, which I’m constantly struggling to keep straight. But each of these sets contains explicit, set modifications to behavior and bodily state — strategies that can not only trick your brain into feeling better, but alter the way you come across to others around you.

For distress tolerance, there’s “TIPP:” Temperature, Intense exercise, Paced breathing, Paired muscle relaxation. When we’re stressed out or panicked, our bodies have a tendency to overheat; when we regulate our body temperature by taking a cold shower or even splashing some cold water on our faces, we cool down emotionally, too. Intense exercise both physically exhausts us and jacks up our endorphins, which makes it much more difficult to remain high-strung in the moment. Steady breathing reduces the body’s fight-or-flight response. And focusing on tightening and releasing a group of muscles, like the muscles in your face, in five-second intervals can make you feel more relaxed than before you tensed up in the first place.

Then there’s DEAR MAN, a useful mechanism for defusing potential conflict but also for getting what you want out of an interpersonal exchange:

Describe the situation, and stick to the facts

Express how you feel about the situation

Assert yourself by asking, clearly, for what you want

Reinforce the person’s change of behavior by telling them, in advance, how it would make the situation better for everyone

(stay) Mindful and focused on your position

Appear confident by maintaining eye contact and a steady voice

Negotiate the terms of your agreement, and be willing to give a little in order to get in return

Drawing from those two sets of tools, I cobbled together a preemptive salve for pre-presentation jitters. And, for me, it really worked.

About 10 minutes before a meeting, I’d splash my face with cold water and take a series of long, slow breaths. I aimed to make my exhalations twice as long as my inhales, which I’d learned to do in yoga. I’d go over my agenda items and make sure I went into the meeting with a clear sense of what I wanted to communicate, even if I only needed to make a couple of distinct points. Then, when presenting, I’d sit tall with my legs apart (a bit of discreet, under-the-table manspreading) and my hands on my hips in a kind of “power pose” — one of a series of postures that were then touted as physiological hacks for boosting confidence. The science of power posing has since been thoroughly contested, but, if nothing else, it gave me something to do with my hands.

Eventually, I no longer needed to do any of these things before addressing a group of colleagues. Over the years, I became a more relaxed presenter, and more conversationally like myself. I stopped needing to run through the pre-meeting rigamarole because I felt confident in my ability to convey what I meant in the moment — and I had the goods to back myself up. For the time being, my Tahitian commune can wait.