Hi this is Peter Murphy here from howtotalkwithconfidence.com today I am going to talk about conversation courage or in other words, how to eliminate conversation fear and how to get the courage that you want so that you can express yourself more freely and have more fun when you are talking to people.
To begin with, I want to talk about the recipe for conversation fear. That is the way we look at things that makes the fear more of a problem and I am going to talk about so that you can identify. If you are already doing, that and then afterwards we look at a more positive way of approaching it.
The first element that creates conversation fear is demanding perfection. If you are demanding perfection of every conversation and every interaction you have, you will make yourself very tense and you will make it much more difficult to speak freely. Secondly, if you have an attitude that mistakes are not allowed, you are boxing yourself into a corner. You are going to limit your creativity and you are going to make any spontaneity in any effort to be original and expressive virtually impossible. Finally, if you make unfair comparisons between yourself and other people, again you are going to set yourself up for failure so these three attitudes are actually quite negative and they do not help you when it comes to moving ahead and improving your communication skills.
Now let us take a look at the basics of conversation courage. The first one is to have a daily relaxation habit. For a lot of people, myself included, we like to start a day with let us say 15 or 20 minutes of meditation. For someone else it might be yoga, for someone else it might me listening to relaxing music or taking some exercise. Whatever it is, I strongly encourage you, first thing in the morning to have a ritual. Again let us say for 15 or 20 minutes, something that you can do that centers you that allow you to relax and focus for the day ahead. Second key element is to work in your capability, what am I talking about? I am talking about your actual capability to hold a good conversation, now if you go to my blog, you will find a lot of tips for starting conversations, keeping them going, conversation topics and so on. That is what I am talking about, I am talking about the nitty gritty of holding a conversation. That is a capability, if you have lots of courage and lots of confidence but you do not have the capability, you will find you will come on stuck. Finally, you do need confidence, you do need to have that feeling of I can do it when you are talking to people, so these are three fundamental elements of conversation courage so what can we do specifically then to have more courage and to kill the conversation fear. Well you are going to need a pen and paper.
The first thing to do is to identify this specific fears that block when you are talking to people. Just write them down, get that piece of paper out and just start writing down one line at a time all the things that bother you, the little things that get in the way that make you fearful. We need to identify the fear first of all before we can examine it and break it down. What we do then is we question and destroy what logic each of the fears that we have on the list. Let us say I have a fear that I am going to look silly and I write that down, so I write down look silly and then I have another fear saying the wrong thing and I write that down on the next line. I am afraid I am going to say the wrong thing then what we do is we question the fear so I might say okay, I am afraid of looking silly. How do I question that? I would say is that likely to happen? What if I look silly? Let us say I look silly, is that the end of the world, and then I start to look at rationally with logic to see is it really that important?
And by doing so all of the smaller fears on that list of yours, you will realize they are really not that big of deal. Maybe 90% of them does not matter that much and already you will feel that you are not as bothered as you taught you were. The next point then is to improve your level of capability. Like I mentioned a moment ago, put more time into looking at the fundamentals of conversation, you can improve your body language. You can improve your knowledge of things to talk about so that you have a wider range of conversation topics, you can improve starting, keeping it going and ending the conversation and yes, I have mentioned ending the conversation. A lot of us get stuck because we do not know what to do when it gets to the end and that could bring about some fears as well. I am going to get stuck, what am I going to do so improving capability gives you more confidence and literally greater ability so that you can stay in charge and direct the conversation. Finally, to kill conversation fear, you need to stretch your comfort zones but only by a degree, only by small steps. Let us say at a party for example, you would normally talk to let us say two strangers. The next time you go to a party, you might talk to two more so aim to talk to four people. Do not go to a party and decide okay, I am going to talk to everyone of the 200 people in the room. That is too much of a stretch so to kill the fear, you want to gradually stretch your comfort zone so that you gradually become more comfortable and you gradually have more courage and confidence.
So how can we develop conversation courage? Well one great way is to go to new locations. Go to places that you do not normally go to in a typical week. You might go to a new café, let us say you need to go to a supermarket, you might go to a different one. What this does is it gets you used to dealing with new situations and talking to new people. You will find yourself in a situation where there is a new in front of you. That is practice, you get to meet someone new and you get to try out your new skills. In a key point here let us say you hesitate, let us say you think oh no, I am not sure what to do. Do not regard that as failure, treat it as a signal that is a signal to stretch to get slightly better and to go just a little bit beyond your previous limits.
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