Docteur Dino's method

Fear of public speaking has a cause, and it can be found.

The tight throat, the hands that no longer know what to do, the shortening breath. What you call stage fright is not a character flaw. It is a badly tuned alertness, and it can be tuned.

What most methods work on: the effect

Breathe, stand up straight, fix a point at the back of the room: you are often taught to mask what your body expresses. It helps, but it treats the effect. Stage fright returns at the next deadline, because what triggers it has not changed.

“We're not going to look at how the illness shows itself in your body, that's the effect. What we want to find is the cause of this stage fright.”Docteur Dino

Why the audience seems hostile

In front of a room, the mind looks for danger first. It is an ancient reflex: human beings pay far more attention to what threatens them than to what nourishes them. In front of an audience, this reflex produces two mechanisms found in almost everyone who is afraid of speaking.

• We attribute to the audience a judgement it does not hold. Someone self-conscious about their nose sees, in a smile from the audience, a mockery that is not there. The audience thought nothing: they read their own fear on the faces.
• We end up causing what we dreaded. Convinced we will be badly received, we close up, speed up, avoid eye contact, and the audience really does switch off. The fear came true because it steered the speech.

Finding your cause, not a general one

General explanations for the fear of speaking exist: upbringing, culture, instinct. They are reassuring, but they do not tell you why you, personally, lose your footing in one situation and not in another.

In Docteur Dino's training, the first lesson, “Stop being afraid to speak”, helps you understand how stage fright works. It is followed by a questionnaire, “Who am I?”, which combines several personality questionnaires, including the Big Five, to work with you to find the cause of your own stage fright. Work on delivery, voice, posture and speech structure only comes afterwards.

What stage fright becomes when you stop fighting it

The goal is not to make stage fright disappear. Speaking with no tension at all is often speaking with no energy. The goal is to tune it: to go from a fear that paralyses to an alertness that makes you present, attentive to the room and precise in your words.

And because this cannot be proven on paper, the programme ends on a real stage, in front of a real audience.