The Emotional Stages Every Speaker Goes Through (And Why You’re Not Alone)
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
If you’ve ever said yes to a speaking opportunity and then, a few days later, found yourself staring at a blank screen as if it were staring back, accusing you of being an imposter, you’re in good company. Not because you’re failing, but because public speaking is not merely a skill to execute. It’s an emotional journey every speaker moves through.
The emotional stages every speaker goes through don't disappear with experience. In fact, one of the most reassuring patterns I’ve seen after coaching thousands of speakers is that the emotional stages tend to remain remarkably consistent. The faces and contexts change, but the internal weather is often the same. The goal, then, isn’t to avoid these feelings or to treat them as proof you shouldn’t be on a stage. The goal is to recognize them, understand what they’re doing, and keep building anyway. And after you read this, I hope you’ll do so with patience and a little more self-trust than you had at the beginning.
Because you really can do this.
Stage 1: Excitement — the “Yes” that feels like possibility
The journey often begins with genuine energy. You accept an invitation, your talk is approved, or you finally commit to sharing what you’ve been carrying around in your head for months. In this stage, the future feels bright and uncomplicated. Ideas come easily. You imagine the impact, the clarity, the moment when the audience leans in and you feel the room shift.
Excitement is a gift. It’s also temporary. Not because anything has gone wrong, but because the moment you move from imagination to construction, the work becomes real. Planning replaces daydreaming. And that’s when most speakers enter the next stage.
Stage 2: Overwhelm — when reality arrives with a clipboard
Sooner or later, you sit down to begin, and what looked simple from a distance suddenly looks … enormous. Your mind, trying to protect you, starts asking questions that feel urgent and relentless: Is my idea good enough? How do I organize this? What if I forget what I planned to say? What if they can tell I’m nervous? What if I’m not interesting?
Overwhelm is common because speaking forces choice. You can’t include everything you know. You have to decide what matters most. You have to select, sequence, cut, and commit. And decision-making, especially when the stakes feel personal, is always emotional.
It’s a little like opening an IKEA box and realizing the “simple” project contains 187 pieces and a 90 step process where the instructions are written in a tone of a skeptical sibling taunting you to just do it. You were excited about what it would become. Now you’re holding a plank, wondering if you’ve ever truly understood anything in your life.
In this stage, the most important thing to remember is that overwhelm is not a sign you should stop. It’s a sign you’ve reached the part of the process where the talk begins to take shape one step at a time. Coincidentally, that’s the only way any meaningful talk has ever been built.
Stage 3: Frustration — the wrestling match with your own ideas
Once you begin outlining or drafting, you may notice that effort doesn’t immediately produce coherence. The talk feels too long, then too thin. The transitions are clunky. The examples don’t sit where you want them. You read what you wrote and think, This isn’t it, without being able to explain why.
This is the stage where it can feel like you are in a wrestling match with your manuscript, and you realize that your manuscript has been working out. Frustration has a peculiar way of making you tired and impatient at the same time. It also carries a temptation that nearly every speaker feels: the urge to fix discomfort by adding more. More stories, more points, more slides, more information, more proof that you’re an expert who really does belong on that stage.
But more is rarely the solution. Frustration usually isn’t a sign you need volume. It’s a sign you need clarity.
This is where it helps to release the fantasy of a “perfect” talk. Even the best speakers revise, rearrange, and trim. What you’re reaching for is not perfection. It’s meaning. Not the most content, but the right content. Not the fullest draft, but the clearest one.
Stage 4: Clarity — when the talk begins to click into place
If you stay with the process, something begins to settle. The noise quiets. You stop trying to say everything and start choosing what matters. This is often the moment when speakers discover a crucial truth: your talk doesn’t need to be comprehensive, it needs to be coherent and significant.
Clarity feels less like a dramatic breakthrough and more like gradual alignment. You refine the throughline. You begin to sense which ideas belong and which ones are merely interesting. You can feel the talk tightening, not because it’s shrinking, but because it’s becoming more itself.
I often compare this stage to decluttering a closet. At first, everything is everywhere. It looks worse before it looks better. But as you remove what no longer fits, what doesn’t belong, what distracts from the center, you begin to see the shape of something clean and intentional.
Clarity brings relief, and with relief comes the early arrival of confidence.
Stage 5: Confidence — earned, not manufactured
Confidence is often misunderstood as something you either have or don’t, kinda like a personality trait. In speaking, confidence is more accurately the byproduct of work. It’s what shows up when you’ve made enough decisions, practiced enough times, and shaped your message enough that you can finally trust it.
This doesn’t mean you stop feeling nervous. It means the nerves no longer get to define the moment. You can feel the energy in your body and still know where you’re going. You can step onto the stage with an internal sense of: I’ve built something valuable, and I can carry it.
It’s much like learning to ride a bike. At first, it’s unstable, and you can’t imagine ever doing it smoothly. Then one day, something changes. Not because you became a different person, but because repetition taught your body what to do.
Speaking works the same way. Preparation creates stability. Stability creates freedom. And freedom allows you to sound like yourself.
The point of all of this
Even at the end of the journey, anxiety may still follow you. If you’ve ever wondered why you agreed to speak in the first place, you’re not alone. The presence of fear is not the absence of readiness. Often, it is simply the evidence that you care about doing this well.
The deeper point is this: the emotions are not a detour from the process. They are part of the process. And once you understand that, you stop interpreting them as warning signs and start treating them as landmarks.
Wherever you are right now, whether you are full of excitement, buried in overwhelm, exhausted by frustration, inching toward clarity, or beginning to feel confident … you are not behind. You are not uniquely struggling. You are not failing some invisible test that “natural speakers” pass without effort.
You are in the speaking journey, which means you are doing it the way it actually gets done: imperfectly, humanly, and one intentional choice at a time.
And yes, despite what your inner critic keeps yelling from the sideline, you really can do this.
