What are you doing in those last few moments before you begin a speech?  Most people are just getting nervous.  Or more nervous.  They’re thinking about all the things that can go wrong, and all the ways in which they might screw up.  They’re worrying about being judged by the audience — and found lacking.  In other words, they’re sabatoging themselves. 

Is there a better way to spend those last few moments?  There is.  There are a couple of things you should be doing rather than picturing disaster. 

First, you should be taking a couple of big ‘belly breaths’.  Deep breathing (as opposed to hyperventilating) will calm and ground you, and over a period of time, with practice, will become a physical act you do that will tell you ‘this is going to be a success’. 

How do you breathe in this way?  Imagine your body is an eye dropper, with the bulb as your stomach.  Inflate your stomach (expand it) as you breathe IN.  Then, tense your diaphragmatic muscles (the ones over your stomach and under your rib cage — the ones you’d tense if someone punched you in the stomach) and hold the air in for a few seconds.  Longer if you can.  Then, slowly let the air out, pushing your (tensed) stomach in as you do. 

Don’t move your shoulders during this procedure; the shoulders should not be involved.  When you’re full of adrenaline, and panicky, you’ll tend to breathe from your upper chest, taking in shallow breaths, using your shoulders.  The result is to increase your feelings of panic.  You must breathe DEEP breaths, from the BELLY.

By the way.  Those Taoist sages who live to be 100?  They take 100 deep, belly breaths per day, religiously.   

I’ll talk about the other thing you should be doing in tomorrow’s blog.