What are you unwilling to face, a large audience, your colleagues, or yourself?  Cowardice defines the edges of your life. This place beyond your comfort level, out of reach of your positive imagination and just beyond your current skills, is where you find this shirking, shaking self.  Confronting your cowardice requires becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, commanding your imagination, and committing to refining yourself.

“Don’t wish it was easier; wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems; wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenges; wish for more wisdom.”
– Jim Rohn

It seems you are always getting ready.  Kindergarten readies you for 1st grade, middle school prepares you for high school and then high school gets you ready for college.  After all that, were you really ready for your first job?    The point of education is to learn how to learn.  Unless you are a teenager, you know you don’t know everything, and you know how irritating ignorance is.  Dealing with the uncomfortable until you become comfortable is the key.  Your challenge as a speaker is realizing what feels most comfortable to you (like folding your arms across your chest) often communicates discomfort to the audience (Hmm, why does he look defensive).  Cowards shrink from life because they are never ready to be uncomfortable, valuing personal comfort over personal growth.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.”
– Shakespeare

Your imagination is a devious master or a faithful servant.  Let your imagination run wild and it will often seize upon the specter of death, creating an endless array of possible demises.  The cascading fears which can overwhelm an aspiring speaker come from these mischievous imaginings.   Put your mind to work focusing on positive outcomes.  Ask it for the finest phrases, visions of perfect visuals and courageous concepts and it will deliver.  Why?  Because, it is subservient to your will.  One day your life will end and in that moment, and only in that moment, you are done. Cowards create an imaginative list of a thousand fates to fear before even standing before an audience. As a valiant speaker you accommodate the inevitable by commanding your imagination to produce positive presentations.

So, you are good at something and, perhaps, you are proud enough to say you are better than most. Wherever you find your smug self assurance, untested, you are in the clutches of cowardice.  Being better than someone else is a crude way to measure yourself.   Refined measurement comes from comparing who you are with who you can become.  Cowards don’t refine their skills because what they have done is all they can become.  You feel great when you win over an audience; however, winning over the audience is the result, not the point, of your presentation.  It is scary to think that a jet spends most of the time off course, and only arrives at its destination due to constant course corrections.    The pilot is constantly checking and calibrating and so should you.  By reviewing recordings, reading evaluations and honest introspection after each presentation, you steady the quivering cowardice which is content to believe you did your best. Find your best self by refining how you present yourself.

When you cover your face in cowardice, you blind your best self.  When you face the facts that discomfort comes before living comfortably, that your will commands your imagination and that the only competition is in being superior to your previous self, you encourage your finest self.