Читать книгу Powerful Presentations - Jacques Waisvisz - Страница 8

“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself.”

Galileo

“No way, you won’t get me up in front of a group of people! I would not dare! I am too self-conscious! I don’t want to make a fool of myself! Why in earth should I want to make a speech?” Add to those remarks all the other excuses you have personally used and you will know why a study conducted by Reader’s Digest and Yale University has, for twelve years in a row, concluded that the number one fear amongst 75 per cent of North Americans is the fear of speaking in front of a group of people. Why do we have this fear of speaking in public? Why would most people rather die than make a speech?

Somehow we have developed a negative attitude about getting up and speaking in front of a group of people. When someone just mentions the words “making a speech” our subconscious immediately starts to regurgitate negative information to our conscious mind. Far too many of us tend to look at the “speech” as a problem rather than an opportunity for growth. And no wonder. Ever since our days at kindergarten and the “show and tell” sessions, we have had little opportunity to build on a positive base of public speaking experience. What little we may have had has often been a mind-numbing experience.

But let us take a few moments to examine how our minds function and how we can take control of our thoughts to overcome those negative attitudes towards public speaking and, for that matter, all other self-defeating behaviour patterns. Once we have prepared ourselves mentally to speak in front of a group, the negative emotions suffered years ago will soon disappear. The physical part of presentations will become manageable ... simply a set of skills that we can learn and use for our benefit and for the benefit of others.

Computers were built to emulate a model of the human mind. We have, on the one hand, the subconscious mind or the hard disk; and on the other hand, we have the operating system or the conscious mind. The conscious mind is constantly feeding information to the subconscious mind which stores all our experiences from the day we were born, into a file manager system. The sum of our thoughts, up to the present moment, is our belief system.

The belief system comprises all of the knowledge, the education and the experience we have acquired from our birth to the present moment. This includes information received from our parents, peers, teachers, religious, organizations and the media. This information could be good, bad or benign. The file manager does not care, it just stores that information. However, the belief system or the sum total of what is in each person’s file, is what most of us believe about ourselves to be the truth - or close to it.

The information we receive in our conscious mind, as feed back from our subconscious mind, becomes either a negative or positive attitude towards each activity in our life. The conscious mind constantly checks with our subconscious mind on how a certain activity we are doing was performed previously. If the sum of that particular file is negative, our belief system feeds negative instructions back to our conscious mind which reinforces the present negative belief in ourselves ... to do otherwise would be inconsistent with our belief system. But if the sum of the file is positive, we reinforce our present positive belief and we do well in that activity.

This proven negative attitude about public speaking goes back, in many cases, to our schooldays when we were called in front of the class and were humiliated because we did not know the answers or were speechless through sheer terror.

Even the student whom we secretly admired, snickered at our ineptness (or so we thought), as we fumbled in front of our peers. Many teachers, unwittingly, have helped to program and even reinforce the negative feelings in our minds about speaking in front of a group. The philosophy of teaching has changed somewhat over the past ten years, but I believe that many of us can still relate to these examples. And so these negative feelings and attitudes have stayed with us in our minds.

As a result, today, whenever we are offered the chance to get up and say something in front of a group, we try to get out of it at all cost. We don’t want to be ridiculed again! We simply avoid the pain.

If we actually do pick up the courage to stand up and speak, we panic, our hands start to sweat, our stomachs become upset, our knees buckle and our voice seems to belong to someone else or not exist at all! The words, if they come out, have no resemblance to the thoughts we wanted to get across to the audience. What are we doing?

We are reinforcing our negative belief in our ability to stand up and speak in front of a group. “I am no good at public speaking!” Once again we succeed in reinforcing the negative self-image we have on the file in our belief system. We complete the circle of our own self-fulfilling prophecy.

A negative self-image about public speaking might be an indication of a host of other negative attitudes and self-images filed in your belief system. If your negative attitudes and negative images overpower your positive attitudes and positive images (your true self), you likely will have a low self-esteem.

The measure or degree to which you like yourself is your self-esteem. A low self-esteem may prevent you from reaching the level of success you desire, because success is not consistent with your belief system.

Charles Simmons once said: “Our attitudes control our lives; attitudes are a secret power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force.”

So you might well ask, if we have programmed our belief system ever since we were born, can we reprogram it so that our belief system provides positive feedback to our conscious mind instead of negative feedback? Can we reprogram positive attitude changes towards any activity or behaviour we would like to learn and thus change our self-esteem from negative to positive, thereby creating more success in our daily life?” The answer is yes!

Even though we have created a negative balance in our belief system about one or more of our talents, abilities or behaviours, we should realize that many of these negative thoughts are not based on truth. This negative balance is based on negative impressions we have received over the years from comments by other people and by “self-talk”. We have created a ‘false self’.

An interesting series of studies were conducted by Yale University to examine the types of messages being sent out to adolescents by the average North American family. In a large sample testing, over a seven-day period, the messages were 32 positive, and over 431 negative. So much for the comments you receive from other people. Are you going to build the rest of your life on those negative comments? I hope not.

And what of “self-talk”? We talk to ourselves all the time. Very often it goes something like this: “I am so stupid! How could I do something so silly! I am so disorganized!” and on and on it goes. If I were to talk to my friends the way some people talk to themselves, I would not have any friends left! Are you going to build the rest of your life on those negative comments? I hope not.

The subconscious mind can be influenced, not by willpower as some people maintain, but by supplanting, replacing and simply overriding the false impressions in our belief system with positive beliefs about ourselves. This will allow our ‘true self’ to surface.

Before we discuss the ways we can change our belief system, we must understand and remember that our subconscious mind constantly records, files and feeds back information. Remember it is the hard disk, not the operating system. It does not judge or make decisions. It also does not understand the difference between real and imagined and it memorizes best when processing emotionally-charged information, repeatedly, over an extended period of time.