Why does your brain make public speaking hard?

We can be very tough on ourselves

The human brain wasn’t designed in the 21st century. It wasn’t designed. It evolved. And that has profound implications for public speaking anxiety and how we are with ourselves.
Our ancestors had to prioritise threat to survive. Our flight and fight part of our brain is 400 million years old at least. The freeze part of our brain is 500 million years old. Our brain evolved to solve the pressing problems of the times such as famine, large animals with big teeth, scary noises outside the cave etc. Our ancestors were warriors AND worriers in order to keep themselves alive.
In the stone age we had to prioritise threat so much that we remember negative things in .6 of a second and positive things takes TEN times longer at six seconds. If you time six seconds, it’s actually quite a long time.You really have to dwell in the positive to remember it.

For me, the connection between our stone age mind and public speaking is really very clear. Working with over 8000 people over 25 years, I've seen that our brain is really good at massively overthinking, great at catastrophising and fantastic at giving ourselves a hard time. 

Most of us are doing this, we think “it’s just me that does it”. Often in workshops people might say “I’m an over-thinker”. Oh no! Lots of us are over-thinking. One of the gifts of doing the same work for so long, I get to see the patterns of human behaviour and what our brain gives us. It’s really not just you

For instance, take the inner voice, or the critical voice…

If you spoke to your friends, like you speak to yourself, would you have any friends? Probably not…

So why are we so tough on ourselves?  Why do so many people have that critical voice.
That inner voice has to have some evolutionary purpose. It’s there to keep you small and safe in a group by not being noticed or keeping small. So that inner voice is a stone age voice trying to help you but in a very sharp way.
It’s trying to keep you safe by keeping you small. That’s really important to get that. It’s a stone age software giving you messages to keep you down. The impostor syndrome (If they really knew me they wouldn’t have given me this job) is shared by 70% of the population. But I know that calling it the impostor syndrome is just a light way of saying “I’m not ______ enough” . I’m not “good”, “tall”, “handsome”, “intelligent”, “thin enough”

You have a very normal brain if your inner voice gives you a hard time and says you are not enough. You are not broken. There is nothing wrong with you. But it’s not very helpful a lot of the time.

The human brain is wonky AND it's doing the job it evolved to do. We are left with an evolutionary legacy. It's not our fault we have our brain but its our problem to sort out. We need to learn how to manage ourselves differently if we want to live a full life.
Exploring letting thoughts go and stepping back from what our brain gives us can be a liberation. I teach this on my courses but also you can read “The Confidence Gap” by Russ Harris which is a great introduction to the skills you need to work with a wonky brain