How to Overcome Negative Anticipation when Speaking with Online Speech Training

Have you ever had an important speaking opportunity come up and you start to get worried about it? You're anxious about it; you dread it. In fact, you even started thinking about the fact that you probably wouldn't perform well because you hadn't performed well in the past. You might get stuck, lose your train of thought, or speak too fast. Has that ever happened to you?

It has happened to me, and I have made it my mission to correct my speech for the past 12 years. In this series, we're going to be talking about seven of the most common speaking challenges that many people have. First up is negative anticipation.

Negative anticipation is when we assign an outcome to something that hasn't happened yet. When we are anxious about something, we become nervous about something, and we start to worry about something that hasn't happened yet. One of the byproducts of this thinking and feeling is that we're setting ourselves up for failure. That's why we call this negative anticipation.

Let’s define negative anticipation. Anticipation is an interesting word.

It's not a negative word. And often, we use this word in a positive way. But I want us to examine this word a little bit, because I think it can help us understand what happens to us through the power of our mind, our thoughts, our imagination, our visualization, and so forth. Anticipate comes from the noun of action from the past participle stem of anticipare, meaning "take care of ahead of time."

Consider how you might be anticipating something, and especially when you think about negatively anticipating what you're doing in your mind, using your thoughts, using your imagination, you are going forward into the future. And you're grabbing hold of an experience that hasn't happened yet.

When you take something that has not happened yet and bring it into the present for yourself. You're imagining, visualizing, and emotionalizing, something that actually hasn't happened yet. And when you do this with a failure mindset, you're actually putting a negative spin on it. Inadvertently, you're saying that you hope that this negative thing doesn't happen, or that you believe that this negative thing is going to happen? You start to picture it, see it, and experience it emotionally. So you're going ahead into the future, grabbing something that hasn't happened yet and pulling it into yourself.

When you routinely envision something that has not happened yet, you are making a mental imprint. Persistent negative mental imprints are actually preparing you to fail. By visualizing poor performance, you reduce the likelihood of performing well. You're emotionalizing and actually starting to feel the way you would feel if you didn't perform well. You are thinking about it often, talking about what it would be like if you did not perform well. How can we combat this cycle of poor mental imprinting and poor attendance performance?

What can I do about negative anticipation? The obvious thing to do is remove this word, negative anticipation. We want to replace it with something positive. Positively anticipate your performance and your future experiences. How do we create positive anticipation? We create positive mental imprints. We practice daily, looking forward to our speech and interactions.

The Pro90d Ultimate Smooth Speech System provides a daily routine and prescribes the exact things that you need to do to change what you think on a moment-by-moment basis. We give you exactly what you need to do to prepare yourself speech-wise to be able to speak well. Some of these exercises may include models to change your style of speaking, change the way you physically speak, change the way you breathe, and change the way you use your body language to change the way you think about yourself as a speaker and about the speaking situations.

One of the first things that happens to my students and clients is that they start feeling more confident. And guess what happens? They stop negatively anticipating future experiences. And ultimately, we want to get to the place where we don't anticipate at all for the most part, unless it's something that you want to positively prepare for. Being able to say what they want to say and having the confidence to express it in that moment takes practice, and that is where these advanced exercises come into play.