Take a peek inside:

Week 1

Introduction & Overview

This session will leave you with a solid roadmap of where we are going and what’s in store. This is a mandatory session as we will be reviewing the ‘house rules’ for group work and how to get the most out of the next 10 weeks.

Week 2

Getting to Know your Fear

As psychologists we often say ‘to name it is to tame it’ to help us make sense of our fears. In this group session, our main objective is to understand the source and triggers of our public speaking fears, both on a micro and macro level.

Week 3

Building your Speaking Hierarchy

Getting exposure to the speaking situations we are avoiding is a huge part of changing our relationship to the fear. In this session we identify public speaking situations you will get practice with during our 10 weeks (and beyond!)

Week 4

Learn to Ride the Wave

Always rated as a top-favourite session, we talk about what it means to ride the wave and review a framework to help you let the fear flow through you (via “the T-Swift exercise”). Hint: when we stop responding to the fear, our bodies will adjust and the adrenaline will start to wane.

Week 5

Tolerating Unpleasant Feelings

It might surprise you to know that we are sometimes more afraid of the unpleasant feelings post speaking more than speaking itself. In this group, we talk about learning to work through unpleasant feelings related to speaking like disappointment, embarrassment and shame.

Week 6

Connect with Your Body & Breath

It all comes down to our breath. In this group we talk about some practical tips to connect with your breath and body to feel yourself and speak with greater ease. “Speaking is a whole-body experience” and therefore we even incorporate methods to help you relax your body prior to speaking.

Week 7

Combat Negative Self-Talk

We are our own worst critics and this only serves to reinforce our fears. In today’s session we are going to tackle the negative self-talk and learn why changing our mindset is critical to changing our relationship with public-speaking

Week 8

Focusing Less on You

Learn the difference between adopting an observer vs. field perspective while speaking and why this is the key to being present with your audience. We also explore how we can transform performance anxiety into performance energy.

Week 9

Visualization and Mental Imagery

We think in terms of images when it comes to fear. In this group, we work on developing new images of ourselves feeling successful through understanding how we want to feel (and how we want our audience to feel, too!)

Week 10

Bringing it All Together

Our time together comes to an end this week! Let’s learn from one another about our key takeaways and set some goals to get in the spotlight! Our group members share their final capstone projects and talk about their growth while participating in the group.