Attention is a funny thing, isn’t it? You can be bathed in it by friends, in a safe environment, and it feels lovely. Or you can walk out on stage and feel overwhelmed, threatened and out of control. The gear change between ease and shaky loss of control is often beneath our conscious awareness, but it doesn’t have to be that way. And when you know how to find ease in front of an audience, you suddenly have time to think.

You have space. You can respond to the audience as your calm- centred, best self, rather than the shaky, anxious version of you who may have shown up in the past.

Language often has clues – and answers – if you dig. The word ‘attention’ comes from the Latin words ad (towards) and tendere (to stretch). It literally means to stretch towards. That’s precisely it, isn’t it? All of those audience eyes on stalks, stretching towards you. And there’s another relevant word for us that comes from tendere. It’s ‘tension’. There is always a hold, a tension in feeling a roomful of people looking at you. You can not help but be held by their gaze.

The secret superpower of effective speakers is that while they know that tension is implicit in attention, they have learned to welcome it as a warm, comfortable, supportive hug, rather than seeing it as a death grip, a stranglehold of stares that they have to defend them selves against. You might have experienced this death grip when speaking in the spotlight – suddenly being pinned down by the focus of a roomful of people – it’s not much fun. Your body reacts as if in the grip of an attacker. You tense, your breath rises and you speak faster. Your voice is flat and defensive. As a result, your audience tenses and seems less engaged. This makes it worse.

The death grip can create a vicious circle that convinces you that you are a bad speaker. It makes you find reasons not to speak. It stops you practising. It can keep you awake the night before, worrying about the visibility, the judgement, the fear. This fear shows up in those loud, ‘confident’ speakers too. You know the ones, lots of volume, lots of energy and lots of tension. If you look and listen closely, you can sense the fear: the hard, staccato edge to their voice, the overdone, effortful ‘confidence’, the eyes staring just that bit too much. If I see myself in that zone on video, I learn from it. It tells me that I didn’t get properly centred before I started to speak. Your audience can always tell when you’re in that zone, because they literally feel the stress and effort. But you can always avoid that grip of attention when you understand a little about your nervous system.

What people don’t grasp when they are panicking is that being in the spotlight can actually feel good. Rather than tensing and bracing when it happens, you can open out, give it a metaphorical hug and welcome it as a feeling of power. This allows you to step up and speak up, to turn fear into energy, grace and even excitement. Once you master being calm in the spotlight, you will have a wonderful, invisible superpower that will make others say what a natural speaker you are. When you find your calm, the discomfort of the rush, the overwhelming intensity will be replaced by a feeling of space, grace and safety, even in front of the biggest audiences. So rather than being a runaway train, you will be calm and conversational, as if you are chatting to old friends.

I want you to find a confidence within you that you can come back to every time you speak, no matter what is happening around you. If you’d like to make the feeling of being under attack in the spotlight a thing of the past, then what you need to under stand is what happens to your nervous system in the spotlight, and particularly what effect your devices have on you.

Our current relationship with our devices is a dark and twisty tale of chronic stress, the autonomic nervous system, and compromised breathing. But it could be so much better . . . We need to awaken to the physiology of technology and cultivate a new set of skills related to posture and breathing.

Linda Stone, writer, speaker and consultant

Something to ponder over the weekend? I wrote about the impact our phones are having on our speaking here.