Ask HN: How to overcome stage fear / social anxiety

This attitude sorted my entire life, and it keeps solving more and more problems.

I am so glad that I adopted this mindset very early in life (late teens).

Thank you :-)

> because it’s never so simple

I thought I made it abundantly clear that the reality of the situation overwhelms me and oversimplification is the only way that I could make work.

The solution for me was to visit a therapist. It took 1.5 years of a therapy (and another 6 months of waiting for a seat) but this is the best investement I have ever made.

For me the issues seemed to originate in the childhood, certain events impacting my thoughts like the feeling of being judged, being inferior to others etc. The therapy is not easy - you need to trust your therapist, open up and be honest with him but it can certainly help.

There is no replacement for practice… make a slide deck or script and practice it repeatedly, to the point you barely need notes. This will take 10-40 hours for a 30 minute presentation. (Spaced across multiple weeks - you will increase the chances you bomb your talk if you attempt on short notice)

Then practice it in front of someone, and edit the copy until someone who is not an expert in your domain doesn’t want to ask clarifying questions.

Then practice another 10-40 hours until you’re as comfortable as you were prior to trying it out on a test audience.

You might spend 20-40 hours practicing per 30 min of speaking initially, but eventually you’ll get to a point where that ramp up period will get much shorter.

The above, paired with some improv classes and purposefully letting yourself bomb a few open mics will get you to a point where not only will you advance your career, you’ll be so persuasive you may not care if you have one due to all the side quests you go on with the enraptured folks who come to you after your lectures :-)

Long story short, I read somewhere (usual "I didn't verify this at all" caveat applies) they did some brain scans on him to see if they could figure out anything about stuttering, and as it turns out, when he speaks now, he uses the part of his brain that relates to singing, rather than talking. He didn't fix the problem, in other words, he just sang his way around it, and once you keep that in mind, listening to him speak has a feel to it.

I had crippling social anxiety when younger, I would feel absolute terror going into a party for instance. But I also play in bands, and not once have I ever experienced stagefright in 30ish years of live performance. But if I do a good show and an attractive person approaches me afterwards, I'm just as awkward and useless as ever at closing the deal. In fact, I only feel comfortable hanging out at a bar if I'm playing there - if I'm working, in other words.

Basically, a room full of your peers is not the same as an audience, so don't bother contrasting the two situations; I can tell you with great confidence that they are two different things, even when they are comprised of exactly the same group of people. So whatever you do, don't be confused about why you do well in one and not so much in the other. This is how the anxiety brain works.

The usual suggestion from professionals these days seems to be Cognitive Behavioral Therapy after just about any diagnosis, but it doesn't sound like you've sought a diagnosis for your social anxiety yet. Worth pursuing - there are also pills that can help without the debilitating effects of alcohol or other things people use to get over that hump.