More Faces, More Fear: The Strange Math of Public Speaking

Stage fright doesn’t stay the same size. It grows with the room. One person watching you? Manageable. A small team meeting? Still tense, but survivable. Put hundreds of eyes on you, though, and suddenly your nervous system behaves as if you’re standing in front of a firing squad. Fear doesn’t just add up - it multiplies.

Some call it glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, though there’s nothing glossy about it. The name sounds like it should belong to a beauty trend, but what it really describes is the opposite of glamour: the sweat, the shakes, the blank mind.

Why it happens

• Ancient wiring
  For most of human history, survival meant staying safely inside the tribe. To be singled out - standing apart, with every eye on you - was a threat. If the group turned against you, exile meant death. Neuroscience shows this primal logic is still driving us: the amygdala, our brain’s alarm system, lights up under scrutiny just as it would facing physical danger (Tillfors et al., 2001, Psychological Medicine).

• Fear of judgment
  Psychologist Nickolas Cottrell’s evaluation apprehension model shows anxiety skyrockets when we believe others are evaluating us. One or two faces can be shrugged off. Hundreds of unreadable expressions? Your brain translates that into existential threat ([Cottrell, 1972, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology]).

• Body in revolt
  When the alarm sounds, adrenaline surges: your heart pounds, your palms sweat, your breath shortens. The prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain that retrieves memory and logic - temporarily shuts down. That’s why intelligent leaders blank mid-sentence. Not because they don’t know their stuff, but because biology has prioritised “run from tiger” over “quote the Q4 numbers” (American Psychological Association, 2013).

• The spotlight effect
  Research shows we consistently overestimate how much others notice our slip-ups. A stumble at the microphone feels catastrophic inside; most of the audience barely registers it ([Gilovich, Medvec & Savitsky, 2000, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology]).

What it feels like

Executives describe it the same way:

• Tunnel vision, as if the room shrinks and the lights get hotter.

• Words slipping away like soap in the shower.

• Silent faces turning into a wall of critics.

Actually, most audiences are neutral, even supportive. But your nervous system doesn’t wait for data - it fills the silence with disaster.

The way through (without gimmicks)

You don’t solve stage fright by forcing yourself to “be confident” or by memorising your script until you sound like a robot. 

This is the work I see leaders grow through:

• Somatic anchoring
  Learning how to stand, breathe, and ground so the body stops broadcasting panic.

• Reframing adrenaline
  Harvard research shows reframing anxiety as excitement improves performance. Anxiety and excitement share the same physiology; it’s the meaning you attach that shifts the outcome ([Brooks, 2014, Journal of Experimental Psychology]).

• Competence as confidence
  Not clinging to perfect wording, but embodying the message. When leaders connect deeply to what they know and why it matters, audiences feel it. Authenticity outlives flawless delivery every time.

One COO I worked with used to dread her company all-hands. She’d shake so visibly that she wanted to disappear. After learning to anchor and redirect her energy, she delivered with such calm authority that colleagues later said: “That was the best talk of the event. You were so confident” Her notes hadn’t changed. Her presence had.

Bottom line

Stage fright is scalable. The more faces you add, the louder your nervous system screams. But the way through isn’t to kill the fear - it’s to carry it differently.

If you’ve ever stood there, heart racing, mind blank, that isn’t failure. It’s biology doing its outdated job. And I’ve seen leaders take that same flood of adrenaline and turn it into the moment they looked taller, stronger, more themselves than ever before.

Adele, Shania Twain, Andrea Bocelli, even Stephen Fry have all admitted to stage fright. These are not amateurs but world-class performers, seasoned in their craft. Their nerves don’t mean they don’t belong on stage -they show that stage fright is part of the deal. The same mechanism shows up for leaders. In the boardroom it might be a quick spike of nerves before a presentation. On the big stage it can feel like a tidal wave. The scale changes, but the principle is the same: your system is charged, and that surge of energy can be turned into presence and power.

That’s the shift: not escaping fear, but standing inside it - human, whole, and powerful - in front of the tribe.