But I get nervous

For the past couple weeks I’ve been mentioning that one of the best ways to raise your ROI on conference attendance is to get on a panel.

You know what, by far, is the most common pushback I get on that?

“But I get nervous.”

I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’re never going to get over it.

I’ve been a presentation trainer for 15 years, and I still get nervous before every speech. My podcast co-host, Alper, has been doing a webinar for the Turkish job site kariyer.net every month for 4 years, for hundreds of people each time, and you know what? He still gets nervous.

Getting nervous when a whole bunch of people are looking at us is just what we do. After all, humans are social animals, and social animals get nervous and go to the worst of mental places when people stare at them. There’s no way around it.

If there’s no way around it, what can you do? Learn how to do it anyway. That’s the whole point of the work we’ll do together.

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