There is abundant evidence that the best way to help people overcome their fear of public speaking is to get them doing public speaking. Indeed, the sense of anxiety often declines significantly once you get up there, a phenomenon known as ‘within-session habituation’. In this case, the words ‘just do it, you‘ll be fine’ are actually true!

This does not mean that we should throw students in at the deep end. We don’t want to completely overwhelm them and reinforce their fears. We need to allow the gradient to be shallow or as steep as each student needs it to be in order to push them to the edge of their comfort zone. The journey to success is fast for some students; for others, it can require many steps – modelling, explaining, deconstructing, coaching, mentoring and allowing students to practice in non-threatening ways (e.g. to just two or three people, or just to the teacher, or only saying a few words at first, or using cue cards). The main thing is to continue to gradually increase the difficulty level for each student – speaking to more people, or different groups, for increasing lengths of time, without cue cards and so on – until they can present confidently, from memory, using a range of rhetorical language devices.