It's tough to deal with the nervous feeling of adrenaline right before you speak to an audience, client, or on a call. The adrenaline spike is real, it's biological, and it's completely normal — even for people who speak professionally for a living. The question isn't how to eliminate it, because you can't. The question is what you do with it. Adrenaline before a performance event is the body mobilizing resources. Increased heart rate, heightened focus, elevated energy — these are not malfunction signals. They're preparation signals. The problem occurs when speakers interpret that physical state as evidence that something is wrong. That interpretation creates a second layer of anxiety on top of the first, and that's when it spirals. The reframe that changes everything is this: anxiety and excitement are physiologically identical states. Same heart rate, same cortisol, same physical sensation. The only difference is the story you tell yourself about what it means. Research in performance psychology consistently shows that telling yourself 'I'm excited' before a high-stakes moment — rather than trying to calm down — produces better outcomes than suppression attempts. Weird, I know. The goal isn't to walk in flat and relaxed. It's to walk in activated and directed. Your nervous system is giving you energy. Learn to aim it. Don't run from it. This is one of the first things I address with clients — recalibrating the relationship with pre-performance physiology. Once that shifts, everything downstream gets easier.

This is one of the most disorienting experiences a speaker can have — your mind feels calm, but your body is doing something completely different. You're not imagining it, and it's not a character flaw. What's happening is a mismatch between conscious and physiological state. Your nervous system has registered the speaking situation as a performance event — high-stakes, evaluative, visible — and it's responded with adrenaline before your conscious mind even had a vote. The voice shake comes from that adrenaline tightening the muscles around your vocal cords. It has nothing to do with how prepared you are. The shift that actually works here is moving your attention outward. Most people try to suppress the shaking by focusing harder on controlling it — which is internal focus, and it amplifies the problem. When you redirect attention to the person listening, the idea you're communicating, the outcome for the room, the nervous system begins to settle. Not because you forced it to, but because you gave it a different signal. The voice shake is a physiological response to perceived threat. Change the perceived threat, and the response changes. It's trainable — not through willpower, but through deliberate performance conditioning. Breaking the physiological loop and rebuilding the delivery from the ground up is what's necessary to advance. The voice is fixable. It just requires the right kind of practice. This is not medical advice.

Losing your train of thought happens easily and often. You're mid-sentence, the thought is right there — and then it's gone. This happens to sharp, prepared people all the time, and the reason is almost never about intelligence or preparation. When we speak in high-stakes situations, the brain is running two processes simultaneously: generating the content of what you're saying, and monitoring how it's landing. That monitoring process — watching faces, reading energy, evaluating your own performance in real time — consumes a significant amount of working memory. When the monitoring load gets too heavy, the content thread drops. The structural fix is to stop trying to remember what you were going to say, and instead ask: what is the point I'm making right now? There's a difference between remembering a prepared line and knowing the idea underneath it. Speakers who hold structure lightly — who understand the shape of their message rather than its exact words — can lose a sentence and still navigate forward, because they know where they're going. Think of it this way: a GPS doesn't panic when you miss a turn. It recalculates. If you build your thinking around clear points rather than memorized scripts, you gain the same kind of resilience. In my work with coaches and founders, this is one of the most common problems — and one of the most reliably solvable. Structure is the foundation of fluency. You got this!

Come and Practice delivering your message so your clients and audience actually buy into what you’re saying. Align your focus with the things you can control like…: - Prep - Practice - Delivery - Cadence It takes time and practice. I’m looking to hold a free practice zone for all those looking to hone their craft! Saturday mid mornings over zoom! Comment below if you’d be interested in a free, judgement free practice zone!

Remember WHY you’re doing this and WHO you’re serving! It’s not about you, how you feel things should go, how you think it should be, and not even what you feel is best for your clients and audience. It’s about what THEY want, feel, and think! You will increase revenue by doubling the number of clients you serve by remembering it’s NOT about you. Remove how you feel about yourself and think solely on what your clients and audience has communicated. Then engineer a solution and communicate that to them. It’s time for your to become the authority.