Here’s a stat that reframes the “just get more confident” advice a lot of women in business get: according to the National Institute of Mental Health, women experience specific phobia — the diagnostic category that includes glossophobia, or fear of public speaking — at more than double the rate of men. Past-year prevalence sits at 12.2% for women versus 5.8% for men. And separately, Chapman University’s 2025 Survey of American Fears, an annual academic study of a nationally representative sample, found that roughly a third of Americans (33.7%) fear public speaking specifically.
If the invitation to speak on a panel, pitch a room, or guest on a podcast makes your stomach drop before your brain has even processed the opportunity, you’re not uniquely bad at this. You’re dealing with something that’s both common and, per the data, unevenly distributed by gender — which makes it worth solving with something more specific than “just relax.”
Why this fear costs more than it looks like
Public speaking isn’t a side skill for a business owner — it’s frequently the visibility mechanism itself. The podcast guest slot, the conference panel, the client pitch, the investor meeting, the video that actually gets watched: most of them run through some version of speaking in front of people, live or recorded. Avoiding the format doesn’t just mean skipping a few uncomfortable minutes. It means opting out of a channel that builds the personal brand other people use to decide who they refer, hire, fund, or feature.
That’s the actual cost of letting the fear make the decision by default: not the discomfort in the moment, but the compounding effect of consistently being the person in the room who doesn’t raise a hand.
Stop trying to calm down — try getting excited instead
The instinct almost everyone has before a nerve-wracking talk is to try to relax: deep breaths, a mental “you’ve got this,” an attempt to talk the nervous system down. Harvard Business School researcher Alison Wood Brooks tested that instinct directly, and the result is one of the more useful findings in this space. In a 2014 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Brooks found that people who reframed their pre-performance anxiety as excitement — literally saying “I am excited” instead of attempting to calm down — performed better on public speaking, singing, and math tasks, and were rated by observers as more persuasive and effective.
The mechanism is simpler than it sounds: anxiety and excitement produce nearly identical physical sensations — racing heart, heightened alertness, a jolt of adrenaline. The nervous system doesn’t hand you a pre-labeled emotion; your brain assigns the label. “I’m anxious” tells your brain to treat the moment as a threat. “I’m excited” tells it the exact same physical state is an opportunity. Same body, different story, measurably different outcome.
Next time the nerves show up before a talk, try saying it out loud, even quietly to yourself: “I am excited.” It costs nothing to test and the research says it beats the version where you try to will the feeling away.
Prepare the way that actually reduces anxiety
Most fear around public speaking isn’t really about the audience — it’s about not trusting yourself to handle whatever happens once you’re up there. That’s a preparation problem, not a personality problem, and it responds to structure.
Skip memorizing a script word for word; a single dropped line can derail someone who’s relying on exact recall, and it reads as stiff even when it goes right. Instead, know your talk in three layers: the one sentence you’d say if you had ten seconds, the three points you’d hit with two minutes, and the full version with the stories and examples that make it land. Rehearse out loud, not just in your head — silently reviewing a talk and actually saying the words out loud use different parts of your brain, and only one of them tells you where you’ll actually stumble. And walk in with an opening line you don’t have to think of on the spot; the first ten seconds are the hardest ones to improvise and the easiest ones to prepare.
This is the same logic behind building an evidence file for imposter syndrome: replace an in-the-moment performance you’re not sure you can pull off with something you already built in advance, so you’re not gambling on quick thinking under pressure.
Build the skill in reps too small to be scary
Confidence on stage isn’t a trait some people are born with — it’s built the same way any other skill is, through repetition small enough to survive a bad attempt. Waiting to feel ready before taking the big keynote or the investor pitch usually means waiting indefinitely, because that confidence tends to arrive after the reps, not before them.
Start with the lowest-stakes version available: a two-minute update in a small internal meeting, a question asked out loud instead of typed in the chat, a guest slot on a friend’s podcast, a five-minute talk at a small local meetup. None of those need to go perfectly. Their entire job is to lower the stakes of the next one, the same way one real conversation lowers the stakes of the next one in a networking room. By the time the bigger stage shows up, it’s not your first time managing the feeling — it’s your twentieth.
The fear doesn’t have to disappear to stop running the show
It’s worth saying plainly: the goal isn’t to reach a state where public speaking no longer produces any nerves. Even experienced, frequent speakers report pre-talk anxiety — the difference isn’t the absence of the feeling, it’s what they’ve learned to do with it. Reappraise the sensation, prepare in layers instead of by rote, and take the small rep instead of waiting for the big one to feel safe. None of that requires the fear to go away first. It just stops the fear from being the one making the decision about whether you show up.
Frequently asked questions
Are women actually more afraid of public speaking than men?
The clearest data point comes from the National Institute of Mental Health, which tracks specific phobia — the diagnostic category that includes glossophobia, fear of public speaking. Past-year prevalence is 12.2% for women versus 5.8% for men, more than double. That’s a broader category than public speaking alone, but it’s the most rigorous gender breakdown available, and it lines up with what most women in business report anecdotally: the fear is real, common, and not evenly distributed.
Does trying to calm down before speaking actually work?
Not as well as the alternative, according to Harvard Business School researcher Alison Wood Brooks. Her 2014 study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, found that people who reframed pre-performance anxiety as excitement — saying “I am excited” rather than trying to calm down — performed better and were rated as more persuasive and effective speakers than people who tried to relax. Anxious energy and excited energy are physiologically almost identical; the difference is which label your brain attaches to it.
How common is the fear of public speaking, really?
Chapman University’s Survey of American Fears — an annual, nationally representative academic survey — found in its 2025 wave that 33.7% of Americans reported fearing public speaking. That’s roughly one in three people, which also means most rooms are full of people managing the same thing you are, whether or not it shows.
What’s the single most effective way to get better at it?
Low-stakes repetition. Confidence in public speaking is built the same way any skill is: through reps that are small enough to survive a bad one. A five-minute update in a small meeting, a guest slot on a podcast, a two-minute intro at a local event — each one lowers the stakes of the next, which is a more reliable path than waiting to feel ready for the big stage first.