Free guide from Jennifer Channer, TEDx speaker
How to Speak When You're Fucking Terrified
I threw myself on the floor at my TEDx audition. A year later, I stood on the red dot. This is everything I did in between.
They said no.
Picture this. My TEDx audition. They liked what I had to say โ they really did.
Then I tried to read my script. I was so nervous I threw myself on the floor.
They told me I couldn't speak that year. But they said they'd coach me to speak the next.
So I turned up. To everything they'd let me come to. Every session. Every rehearsal. Every room where I could practise being terrified in front of people.
And eventually, they let me speak. I stood on the red dot.
Here's the strange part. I speak in public all the time.
I hold women's circles. I direct shoots. I stand in rooms full of women and talk about being seen. Speaking isn't new to me.
But Public Speaking โ the capital-letters, script-in-hand, red-dot kind โ had a grip on me I couldn't talk my way out of.
I didn't need to stop being scared. I needed to make the situation familiar enough that fear stopped making the decision.
This guide is every single thing that helped me loosen that grip. Not a clinical method. Just what genuinely worked โ including the bits I could have quietly left out.
Inside the guide
- Rehearse the ending before it happens. Visualise walking off the stage, not just onto it.
- Decide what failure actually means. The one reframe that changed the assignment.
- Find where you already know how to do this. Why it might just be a bigger version of a room you already hold.
- Make your words playable. The strange trick that got the talk out of my ears and into my mouth.
- Learn the journey, not a wall of words. Beats, pictures and cue cards as safety rails.
- Make presence the job. Not perfection. Talk to her. Then him. Then her.
- Full disclosure. The one thing I wasn't going to quietly leave out.
Plus a five-minute check to run through before you speak.
You don't have to stop being scared.
You just have to stop letting fear make the decision.
Free. Instant access. An 11-page workbook with space to write as you go.