Professional speaking coach and yoga teacher Margie Newman guides you through breath, movement, and meditation techniques to improve your onstage presence, face your fears, and deliver your best. Includes strategies to deal with "in the moment" nerves as you take stage as well as ways to become a more calm and confident speaker over time.
Yoga for Public Speaking (Y4PS) addresses onstage presence through a new lens, based on an ancient tradition. Using yoga-inspired techniques to rewire your nervous system, you can improve your public speaking presence, build confidence, and manage the most common public speaking challenges, including performance anxiety.
Connect with whatâs happening in your mind, body, and spirit, and learn simple yogic strategies â breath, meditation, and movement â to self-regulate your nervous system and regain control. While these practices are grounded in ancient traditions, they are backed up by modern neuroscience and presented in a practical, easy-to-implement set of skills and techniques.
Professional speaking coach and yoga teacher Margie Newman guides you through breath, movement, and meditation techniques to improve your onstage presence, face your fears, and deliver your best. Includes strategies to deal with "in the moment" nerves as you take stage as well as ways to become a more calm and confident speaker over time.
Yoga for Public Speaking (Y4PS) addresses onstage presence through a new lens, based on an ancient tradition. Using yoga-inspired techniques to rewire your nervous system, you can improve your public speaking presence, build confidence, and manage the most common public speaking challenges, including performance anxiety.
Connect with whatâs happening in your mind, body, and spirit, and learn simple yogic strategies â breath, meditation, and movement â to self-regulate your nervous system and regain control. While these practices are grounded in ancient traditions, they are backed up by modern neuroscience and presented in a practical, easy-to-implement set of skills and techniques.
âYoga ceases the fluctuations of the mind.â
-The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Welcome to Yoga for Public Speaking (Y4PS)!
Congratulations on taking this important step toward improving your onstage presence. You are about to discover ideas and practices that can help you manage fear and anxiety; become a calmer, stronger, and more confident presenter; and make speaking a more pleasant, even enjoyable experience.
Spoiler alert: these practices can also change your life.
What is Y4PS?
Yoga for Public Speaking will introduce you to breath, movement, and mindfulness techniques anchored in ancient yogic teachings. As opposed to a general yoga practice youâd find in a gym or yoga studio, the set of practices youâll learn in Y4PS have been chosen to address the specific needs of public speakers: building confidence, finding calm, and reducing fear. These practices can help you get out of your head, and into your body, so you can bring your whole self to the stage and fully embody your message.
Why should we look to yoga for this purpose?
Itâs not unusual to hear committed yoga practitioners say that yoga and meditation âchanged my life.â
A huge benefit of a yoga and meditation practice is that it has the potential to shift things at a fundamental level â in a sense, to alter your base âoperating systemâ and rewire your nervous system in substantial ways.
Through yoga and meditation, you can change the way your nervous system experiences and handles some of the most vexing challenges related to public speaking, such as how to deal with presentation-related fear and anxiety; how to handle feelings of âexcess energyâ before you take the stage and on stage; and how to direct that excess energy to enhance your delivery, rather than hamper your performance.
As you make these shifts to enhance your presence as a speaker, you may find yoga and meditation changing your life in other ways as well. You might find yourself more prepared to handle difficult conversations of any sort, personal or professional; more steady and ready as you enter high-stakes meetings or job interviews; and less likely to ruminate about conversations youâve had in the past or worry or be hypervigilant about what may happen in the future.
States vs Traits
The ancient yogis were in effect the original bio-hackers, experimenting with breath, movement, and meditation practices to alter not only their in-the-moment âstates,â but also the âtraitsâ that define who we are and how we show up to lifeâs challenges over the long term.
While ancient yogis developed these ideas and practices over thousands of years, modern neuroscience has validated many benefits of breathwork and meditation, showing that we actually do have the ability to change not only our behavior and mood, but also our neural pathways, in positive ways.
These yogis discovered what we today call neuroplasticity: the ability to change the brainâs neural networks, which can have profound effects on our lives. We can become more aware of our own thought processes, less reactive, more resilient, and less beholden â physically, mentally, and emotionally â to every worry and fear.
Letâs Talk About Fear of Public Speaking
If youâve ever felt anxious or fearful about public speaking, the first and most important thing to know is that you are not alone. Nothing is wrong with you, and you have no reason to feel ashamed. In fact, most speakers â even veterans of large events â experience some anxiety.
Public speaking can be incredibly rewarding. Itâs a way to share our ideas, to teach others what we know, and to advance in our lives and careers as we connect with other people. At some point, itâs possible youâll be asked to share what you know with a group, and that group size is likely to grow larger as you advance in your career.
But speaking in front of an audience can also be very intimidating. In fact, itâs one of the things people fear most, showing up in public polls right up there with death and snakes. An estimated 75% of people have experienced fear of public speaking.
In my work as a public speaking coach and creative director for large events, I help to prepare executives who are presenting to hundreds or even thousands of people in the room, and often many thousands more watching online; so a bit of fear and anxiety is part of the deal.
Speakers donât always want to say they are nervous, even when itâs obvious they are. The speakers I work with fall into several categories:
Speakers who are nervous in advance and say so (we can work with this!)
Speakers who are obviously anxious, but who say theyâre fine (harder to address, but we can get there)
Speakers who arenât overtly nervous until about hour before they take the stage; but then excess energy starts to build â or outright symptoms of anxiety blind-side them (we can plan for this and have strategies both to prevent it and to address symptoms that sneak in anyway)
And finally, those rare speakers who donât seem nervous at all, who we might even call ânaturalsâ (even in this category, an excellent and at-ease speaker will often acknowledge that they sometimes feel so nervous that they suspect people can tell; usually we canât, a testament to their âpoker faceâ skills)
Performance anxiety, nerves, butterflies â whatever you want to call it â itâs a near-universal problem that speakers at all levels experience, and sometimes are ashamed to acknowledge. One speaker told me that she was afraid to admit that she was nervous because saying so would reveal her to be the impostor she alone knew herself to be. (Thatâs a lot to carry around and a good illustration of how heavy self-doubt and fear can become!)
Even experienced speakers and those whoâve had professional coaching often carry this shame and fear with them. Most speaker coaching addresses important issues like how to open your presentation with personal stories, how to use your hands, and a myriad of other helpful advice. But these things are mostly happening on the surface and donât address the deeper issue of whatâs going on in our nervous systems to hijack our minds and bodies as we take stage â or what to do about it, so we can be calm and confident and just be ourselves.
Y4PS offers a new approach and seeks to fill this gap for nervous speakers. Through yoga, we will connect with whatâs happening in our minds, bodies, and spirits, and use yogic strategies â breath, movement, and meditation â to self-regulate our nervous systems and regain control.
Y4PS is for you if:
You are an experienced speaker, but youâd like to be more comfortable and authentic onstage
You are a newer speaker and feel uncertain and a little anxious about taking stage or presenting in small groups
You have never practiced yoga before, but youâre open to learning about breath, movement, and mindfulness practices that can help your onstage presence
You already have a strong yoga practice and want to apply the ideas of yoga to public speaking
You are a curious individual who just wants to know how the heck yoga can help public speakers!
So is Y4PS a workout?
In a word: No. Letâs get this one out of the way right now: while Y4PS does include some simple movement practices, it is not a workout.
In the West, we often think of yoga as a physical workout done at a gym or yoga studio by fit, bendy people. But this view of yoga arose only in the last 50 years or so.
In its ancient roots going back over two thousand years in India, yoga was a much more holistic set of practices. âAsana,â or yoga poses, are just one of the eight limbs of yoga:
Yamas (abstinence)
Niyamas (observances)
Asana (postures)
Pranayama (breathwork)
Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses)
Dharana (concentration)
Dhyana (meditation)
Samadhi (absorption)
For our purposes in Y4PS, weâll be focusing on asana (postures), pranayama (breathwork), and dhyana (meditation/mindfulness practices). I do encourage you to learn more about the other limbs of yoga as you build a comprehensive practice.
Because yoga is so much more than poses, it offers us more comprehensive benefits than physical exercise alone can. And the biggest benefit of all, for our purposes, involves the mind-body connection.
The Sanskrit word âyogaâ means âunionâ or âto yokeâ â offering us the ability to connect our breath, attention, movement, and ultimately to connect with and even shift our nervous systems, quite intentionally, so that we can move about the world in more calm and conscious ways.
Over two thousand years ago, yoga was described in one of its most foundational texts, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, as a way to âcease the fluctuations of the mind.â For anyone who has ridden the wave of public speaking anxiety, this potential holds huge promise â much more than any mere workout can.
Y4PS is based upon the more holistic aspects of yoga â breathing exercises, meditation/mindfulness techniques, and some brief, gentle movement practices. You do not need to be flexible, fit, or a prior yoga practitioner to practice Yoga for Public Speaking.
Also know that the physical practices are adjustable and adaptable to your needs. As I say at the beginning of every yoga class I teach: Everything is adjustable, and everything is optional. You can and should opt out of anything that doesnât feel right for your body or mind. You can even do many of these practices seated, including some that you can do discreetly while you are sitting in the front row of an event, while you are waiting to be introduced.
So what does all of this mind/body/spirit stuff have to do with public speaking?
Itâs natural to think of public speaking as a cerebral pursuit, or to focus on the content of a presentation or even just the visuals as you prepare. And of course it is important to have a well-prepared message.
But public speaking is so much more than that. When we step out in front of an audience, we arenât just presenting our story; we are putting our whole selves out there, including our nervous systems.
Standing in front of an audience of any size can make us feel quite vulnerable and it can challenge the body, the mind, and the spirit in new ways. No one wants to feel nauseated or shaky or even terrified when they take the stage, or to have their mouth go dry or their knees shake. But without a plan for managing the nervous system, fear can make an unscheduled and unwelcome appearance, and itâs absolutely key to have strategies in place to deal with those symptoms.
Y4PS helps us arm ourselves against unchecked fear and be ready for these challenges on a truly embodied, whole-person level.
A Missing Link
In 25+ years of helping speakers deliver their messages to large audiences, I came to understand that what was missing from traditional speaker coaching is this view of the whole person â body, mind, and spirit. Speakers might have great slides and carefully developed talking points, but they are often missing a way to deal with the often-unspoken fears, anxieties, and insecurities that they bring to the stage with them.
Traditional speaker coaching focuses on important things like refining the story thatâs being told; choosing clean and simple visuals that support the message; having a plan for how to open, close, and transition between topics; using vocal pacing, pauses, and voice modulation; how to move about the stage (what we call âblockingâ); body language; for virtual events, how to connect with a remote audience; and much more.
All of these are important. And having a clear plan and preparation process for these elements can help build confidence, too. So to be clear, Y4PS doesnât replace strong preparation and a well-honed message.
But the final missing piece for most speakers is the deeper stuff: how to deal with mental and physical symptoms of fear and anxiety, such as mouth dryness, heart rate increases, or shallow respiration; how to handle feelings of inadequacy, aka âimpostor syndromeâ; how to ride waves of unexpected and unwelcome fears and sensations that can arise; and most of all, how to protect yourself in advance from these and find a place of calm at the center of the storm.
This deeper stuff can sneak up on and overwhelm speakers, whether they feel well prepared or not. No matter how strong your message is, how powerful your visuals, how many drafts of your script, you also need a plan for how to manage your nervous system.
Hereâs the good news: Yoga can help. It can help a whole lot.
Can I use these tools right away?
Yes. In this book, we address this âwhole personâ approach in two ways: techniques that can help in the short term, right before and as you take the stage; and also over the long term, with practices that can slowly but surely change the way you show up and react to these challenges.
My Journey to Yoga â and Y4PS
Yoga first came into my life as a way to counterbalance a very high-intensity job.
For over 25 years, Iâve enjoyed a career as a large-event creative director and public speaking coach. Itâs a privilege to help individual speakers and entire organizations put their messages on stage, and Iâve been lucky to travel around the world to some of the biggest events imaginable, with tens of thousands of attendees.
Itâs fascinating to see it all come together and to be part of creating these monumental events. I take great pleasure in helping speakers climb the mountain of preparation and rehearsal and in seeing them succeed on stage.
During the actual live event, Iâm often at the back of a huge room filled with people who are watching âmyâ speakers take the stage. If you see me back there, Iâm like a proud parent at a recital, smiling and sending all the good and calm vibes to the stage as each speaker brings their message to life after weeks or even months of preparation.
Itâs also incredibly intense. Event âpre-productionâ â the period of weeks and months with the event date looming on the horizon â is a high-pressure, high-exposure process for my clients. The live event itself will be seen and assessed by hundreds or thousands of people. And even during the preparation process, speakers are being viewed by peers and bosses as they pitch their story plans and rehearse their delivery.
Iâm honored to help speakers prepare to present to audiences with thousands in the room â and tens of thousands more watching on live video streams.
Itâs intense for the speakers and for everyone involved in the event, from the meeting planners to the production crew to the executives whose careers are riding on the flawless execution and success of every element.
If all of this sounds like a high-wire act, it is. We have a saying in the production world: âThe parachute only has to open once, but it had better open.â
My peers in the event production business bring a set of skills that are equal to this high-pressure environment. We all know how to exude calm under intense pressure. We have incredibly good poker faces.
We know that even when the clock is ticking down to the start of a big meeting, if something goes awry (and it will, occasionally, despite all the measures we take to prevent it), we canât show fear or spread panic. Fear and panic are not only dangerous; they are contagious â and people who spread these unhelpful vibes are not welcome nor are they invited to work on the next event.
We must appear serene and under control, even when a voice in our headsets is telling us that a presenter suddenly canât be found (just before they are to be announced to the stage), or that an important piece of equipment has just failed and we donât currently have a sound signal, or â well, you can imagine the million things that can go wrong, but which simply canât.
Many of us in the production business are âtype Aâ personalities who have learned to thrive in intense environments. In fact, itâs common to learn that fellow production folks cut their professional teeth in the restaurant industry. Waiting tables in college, I learned to ride waves of adrenaline during the Friday night rush â to trust my instincts and to never let them see me sweat. Many of my peers have similar backstories; most of us learned early on how to handle work situations loaded with intensity, fueled by adrenaline and the knowledge that failure is not an option.
But the benefits of an adrenaline rush, as with any drug, are dose-dependent. And too much, over too much time, will burn you out and stress your system. Even those of us who thrive on pressure, as resilient as we may seem, have our limits.
We all need to find antidotes to these rushes of adrenaline. Back in the college days of waiting tables, that may have meant drinking with fellow restaurant âsoldiersâ into the wee hours after an intense night. I donât have to tell you that as an adult and a professional speaking coach, thatâs not a sustainable path â especially if you need to be back in rehearsals at 6 am!
Yoga came into the picture for me about 20 years ago as a workout and as a release valve for the high-pressure settings I was constantly immersed in. Iâd work on an event from Sunday to Thursday, fly home Friday, and take a yoga class on Saturday to finally exhale and offload the stress of the week.
This intensity/release, on/off cycle worked well for me for a while, as I continued to see yoga as a workout and as an âoffâ switch after each event.
But then, over a few years, my Saturday antidote started to seep into my work week. I began to bring a yoga mat in my suitcase so I could do some stretching in my hotel room. Stretching led to an improvised meditation practice with breathing, sitting, and reflecting 10 or 15 minutes first thing in the morning.
I surprised myself because I had always assumed that meditation was for a different kind of person â not me, whose vibe could be described as âcaffeine driven.â
I remember thinking, Am I really meditating? Huh, I guess I am!
Making time for yoga and meditation while I was traveling was a big shift for me, but it felt so good, I kept at it.
And over time, without trying, the way I showed up in intense situations began to change. A little bit at a time, things were shifting. Instead of wearing a well-practiced poker face to hide my low-level panic, I actually felt a bit more serene, more thoughtful in my reactions, more at peace with trusting other people to solve problems rather than thinking I had to help put out every small fire. I found myself more able to keep focus on the big things and less likely to be distracted by the small ones.
All of this made my own experience infinitely more pleasant. I was not only able to be more effective, I was suffering less. Being less fearful and less hypervigilant made my own experience better.
As I began to use some of the breathing techniques Iâd learned with the speakers I coached, I saw them suffering less, too.
While it didnât happen all at once, there were points along the way when I had a-ha moments that something big had changed deep in my operating system. People I worked with noticed, too.
I remember when one client, a young woman who was newer to the crazy world of big-event planning and production, invited me to lunch and asked for a bit of mentoring. She wondered how I did it â how did I show up in the middle of such intense situations in such a bubble of calm?
I thanked her for noticing and told her that it was on purpose; that it was an acquired set of skills; and that yoga and meditation had helped tremendously. I also shared that part of my motivation was that, for the sake of our speakers, we all need to âprotect the vibeâ so they can stay calm and confident.
Finally, I told her that for now, she could fake a poker face, but over time, she could choose to cultivate skills to help her become authentically more calm and serene.
As these changes took hold in my own operating system, it was nice to have people Iâd worked with for years noticing the ânew me.â But I wanted to know more. I became super curious about just exactly what had happened to change the way I was showing up in intense work situations and in my life in general.
I knew yoga and meditation had helped, but I wanted to know why. Had my brain changed in some way? Was my nervous system reacting differently in chaotic situations? How did I become less hypervigilant (and if Iâm honest, maybe a little more pleasant to work with) because of this change?
Why and how did this happen? And most of all â how could I get more of this good stuff? And how might I then share it with others?
That curiosity would eventually lead me to study the fascinating neuroscience of yoga and meditation; to become a yoga and meditation teacher (not in my original career plans!); and to write this book and develop a companion course to help nervous speakers (aka most speakers).
Itâs my great pleasure and privilege to share what Iâve learned in the hope that it will help you to build your own toolkit of breath, movement, and meditation practices â and to find your calm and confidence as a fearless public speaker.
CHAPTER 1: THE TAKEAWAYS
Breath, movement, and meditation/mindfulness practices based in ancient yoga traditions have the potential to help us self-regulate our nervous systems and, over time, change how we respond to stress in significant ways.
Practicing these techniques, public speakers can build resilience and a toolkit of practical skills to help manage fear and anxiety, find calm amidst chaos, and bring a more confident and authentic âyouâ to the stage.
Y4PS will guide you through a strategically selected set of techniques, step by step, to build your own practice and become a calmer and more confident speaker.
In todays post-Covid society, it might seem as though public speaking is actually on a down-turn - but you'd be surprised. If anything, it's possibly becoming more common, although maybe in different guises. I, for one, have found myself using Zoom a lot more than I would have ever thought - for anything from meetings with perspective clients as well as get togethers with friends. At some point in the not too far distant future, I have a presentation to give over the platform, and needless to say, I'm a little nervous. Which is why this particular book caught my eye.
So, Yoga for Public Speaking: An Embodied Approach to Mastering Your Onstage Presence. At not one point was I expecting the author to expect me to break out into the Tree or Warrior Pose mid-speech, but I was expecting much more of a guided breathing program. In Chapter four, you're informed that you'll learn
five pranayama practices that will help you self-regulate your nervous system In effect, you will change your breath in order to change your mind.
Unfortunately, however, there were no practices - which left me somewhat disappointed. Although in Chapter six, there are several meditation practices that the author describes in detail for you. I tried each of them, and found them to be easy to follow and relaxing. Although the Mantra Meditation did feel a little strange at first - I could understand the benefit of speaking out-loud to get one used to public speaking. I found the Visualisation Meditation technique the easiest; you imagine your excess energy as a ball of light, which you move down your body with each breath, until it's at a place where it can leave. I practise a similar technique when I struggle getting to sleep - imagining myself descending further down a ladder with each breath - the lower I go, the closer to sleep I am.
In all, although there are some issues with this small book (such as errors on the pages, no breathing or movement descriptions in Chapters four and five), this book can help someone who may be almost crippled with nerves before speaking at a public event. It offers mindful techniques, and even some more practical approaches before you even begin to write the speech.
S. A
Edited to add:
After the author read this review, they sent me an updated copy of the book which included the missing practices from the copy I received through Reedsy. Having seen that copy and attempted the practices, it worked well for me. An extra star has been added due to that as it was simply an error in the Digital edition.
S. A