Why You Go Blank When You Stand Up to Speak and How to Change It

You can be brilliant at your job, sharp in meetings, the person everyone turns to and then someone says "can you just say a few words?" and your stomach drops through the floor. That's the fear of public speaking, and it has nothing to do with how good you are. In this episode of Moving Minds Forward, Gary Johannes explains what's really happening when you stand up to speak: why your brain treats a friendly room as a life-or-death emergency, why your mind goes blank at exactly the wrong moment, and why avoiding it only makes the fear stronger. Then, what actually helps — including one simple shift you can use the next time your heart starts racing. Around half of us fear public speaking. One in seven call it overwhelming. Almost half say it's held their career back. If that's you, you're not a bad speaker. You're running ancient software in front of a modern audience and that's a pattern, not a fact. Patterns can change. In this episode: 00:00 Intro 01:20 Why capable people go to pieces 02:40 What glossophobia actually is 03:45 How common it really is 04:40 What's happening in your brain 07:00 Where the fear comes from 08:20 What keeps it going: avoidance and safety behaviours 10:40 What actually helps: the solution-focused approach 11:40 Mental rehearsal and how hypnotherapy helps 12:50 The three pillars 14:15 One thing to try today: relabelling the fear Gary Johannes is a solution-focused hypnotherapist, founder of Inspired to Change and a senior lecturer at CPHT. He left school at 14, spent 30 years in sales and hospitality, retrained in his late 40s and completed an MSc in Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health at King's College London at 60. Moving Minds Forward: one condition per episode. What's going on? What's keeping it going? And what actually helps? If the fear of public speaking is holding you back, Inspired to Change has solution-focused hypnotherapists across the UK, in person and online. Book a free initial consultation: https://www.inspiredtochange.biz Subscribe for a new episode every week. #PublicSpeaking #Glossophobia #FearOfPublicSpeaking #Hypnotherapy #MentalHealth #Anxiety #SolutionFocusedHypnotherapy #MovingMindsForward