How I Overcame Public Speaking Anxiety at My First National Conference
The day my untrapped authority introduced itself
I was in a hotel room in Arizona, crying my makeup off, and my sister wasn’t answering the phone.
That’s where this story starts.
Not on the stage.
Not at the podium.
In a hotel room, alone, across the country from my kids, fighting back tears I didn’t even see coming — because that’s what extreme stress does to me. Always has. My dad used to say, you cry for everything. He wasn’t wrong. I was a highly sensitive kid who felt everything at full volume. I just didn’t have a name for it.
That name, I’d learn years later, was ADHD and with it, something called Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria — which means for me, the fear of being watched, evaluated, or rejected doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It feels like physical pain.
I share that so you’ll understand what it meant for me to be standing in that hotel room.
I Said Yes Before I Could Think
I’d been a Senior Technical Trainer with this company for three years. For the first two, I was exactly where I wanted to be — in the background. Internal trainings.
Smaller settings. Nothing member-facing. I liked it there. It was safe.
Then year three came, and I got tapped on the shoulder to speak at the annual national conference…on an actual stage.
The pleaser in me said yes before I could think.
The rest of me had a complete meltdown.
The Fear Beneath the Fear
Agreeing to speaking at the conference wasn’t just a matter of being on stage. It was everything that went along with it.
I live on the East Coast. The conference was in Arizona. I hadn’t packed a bag and left my kids for a week since they were young. We’d been joined at the hip for years — homeschool, virtual school, me working from home…always together.
I was just as attached to them as they were attached to me.
So on the plane to Phoenix, I was carrying two kinds of fear. The stage fright and the quiet, constant worry of what if something happens at home and I’m not there.
I over-prepared the way I always do when I’m terrified. As if hundreds of slides could drown out an activated nervous system.
They couldn’t.
The Hotel Room Breakdown
By the time I got to Arizona, my session wasn’t until the afternoon of the first day. Which meant I had hours to sit in the general sessions, surrounded by people I didn’t know, reading every face, every expression, every shift in body language. Trying to assess whether I was safe. Whether they’d accept me. Whether I belonged there.
That’s what RSD does. It turns a room full of strangers into a threat assessment.
I was so overstimulated I could feel the tears trying to come. I excused myself and went back to my room.
And then I let them come.
I cried it all out. The fear, the loneliness, the noise, all of it. Then I picked up the phone and called my sister — she’s a mental health professional — because I thought, she can talk me down.
She didn’t answer.
One Question That Calmed My Speaking Fear
In that silence, I asked myself a question I hadn’t thought to ask before.
What do I need right now?
Not “how do I fix this.” Not “how do I push through.” Not “how do I look like I’m okay when I’m not.”
What do I need.
The answer came in pieces.
Breathing first. I did box breathing — four counts in, hold four, out four, hold four — until my eyes dried up and my chest relaxed a little.
Then I asked again. “What do I need?” Go get something familiar came to mind. There was a grocery store a few blocks away. So I walked there in the Arizona heat and got my favorite drinks, some snacks — things I keep at home.
On the way back, the sun hit my skin and I stopped walking for a second.
I am a sun-bug. Always have been. And something about that heat just — soothed me. It was like medicine. So, I stood there and let it do its work.
Then I happen to see a Starbucks across the street.
Listen. My coffee taste has evolved since then. But I have been drinking coffee since I was nine years old. I found Starbucks freshman year of college and never looked back. My drink was the white chocolate mocha. It was ritual. It was comfort. It was mine.
I walked in and the smell of the coffee beans hit me before I even got to the line.
I closed my eyes and thought, "Yes. Whatever is happening right now is working.”
I got my drink. I got a lemon cake. I walked back to the hotel in the sun, warm cup in my hand, and by the time I got on the elevator, the fear was still there — but it no longer had a hold on me the way it did an hour before.
I sat down in the chair in my room. I took a deep breath, then took a sip of my drink.
Then suddenly, phone rang. It was my sister.
She Called After. That’s the Lesson.
Here’s what I need you to catch about that timing.
My sister called after I did the work. I believe that’s how it’s supposed to go. If she had answered when I was mid-meltdown, I would have lacked the ability to describe what was wrong clearly, which would’ve made it difficult for her to support me in a way I need.
You can’t receive help you haven’t prepared yourself to use.
When I told her what I’d done — the breathing, the walk, the sun, the Starbucks — she said: you did everything right.
And then she started naming my receipts.
You were the quiet girl. The introvert. The hermit. You hid under the pews when Daddy called you up to sing. You were the girl who didn’t want to stand in front of anyone because being watched felt like it might break you. And now here you are. Across the country. About to get on a stage. You don’t see how far you’ve come?
My sister is my hype woman in that moment and she sent my confidence through the roof. After I hung up, I rehearsed that presentation like my life depended on it.
The Girl Under the Pew Transformed
I want to go back to that image I mentioned earlier for a second.
My father was a preacher. He used to call me and my sisters up to sing before he preached. Every time, I’d feel it — this wave of something that wasn’t just nerves. It was pain. Physical, real, full-body pain at the thought of people watching me… judging me.
I’d hide under the pew until it was over.
That little girl grew up and stood in front of bank regulators in Arizona.
Not because the fear went away. Because she asked herself what she needed and she did that instead.
The Moment I Walked on Stage
When I finally walked out, my heart was racing.
I started talking.
And then something shifted.
The tension eased. The room blurred. I couldn’t really see anyone anymore — I was just in the content, in the material, in the thing I actually knew how to do. Forty-five minutes passed like a breath.
I felt alive.
Afterward, people came up to me: Is this really your first time? You seemed so polished. Like a pro.
And yes, I had done Toastmasters. I had taken public speaking classes over the years. I had always known I wanted to train, even when I didn’t have the opportunity yet.
I had planted seeds for years that I couldn’t see growing.
That’s the thing about seeds.
They don’t announce themselves.
They’re underground — being cultivated, being nurtured — and then one day, they break through. And you think it happened suddenly. But it didn’t.
The tree was always coming.
This Is What Untrapped Authority Looks Like
It doesn’t show up before the stage.
It doesn’t arrive when you feel ready, calm, or certain. It doesn’t come because you prepared enough, prayed enough, or finally convinced yourself you belonged.
It shows up when you stop asking how do I get through this — and start asking what do I need right now.
That question is not a stalling tactic. It is not avoidance dressed up in self-care language. It is the move.
It’s what gave my authority the window and the opportunity to step forward — so that the trapped archetypes, the pleaser, the anxious one, the girl who hid under the pew — no longer could run the show.
And here’s what I want you to understand about that conference. It wasn’t the first time I had put anything into my speaking. I had done Toastmasters. I had taken classes. I had always known I wanted to be a trainer and speaker, even in the years when no one gave me the opportunity.
I kept building my skills anyway…in the background…quietly... with no stage, applause or proof it was working.
Those type of seeds sown don’t germinate instantly.
They develop underground and over time — on a timeline you don’t control — they break through the ground.
You see the sprouts.
Then you see the tree.
Then you see the fruit.
Me getting on that stage and delivering the way I delivered was a byproduct of seeds sown years and years before Arizona.
I went back to that conference every year for the remaining years I was with that organization. And I kept getting better. I never had that same mopey, woe-is-me, I’m-falling-apart moment again. Not like that first time.
Why, you ask? I believe it’s because once your authority introduces itself — once you feel what you’re actually capable of — you can’t unfeel it, nor can you unsee it. It has to be embodied from that point forward.
The girl who hid under the pew was always a speaker.
She just needed to learn how to ask herself the right question first.
So do you.
You don’t have to feel fearless to walk out there. You don’t have to have it together. You just have to stop negotiating with fear at the finish line — and start asking what you actually need to move.
If you’re in the middle of negotiating with fear at your own finish line — whether it’s a stage, a pitch, or a page — the work we do together inside Untrap Your Expertise™ is built for exactly this.
You can start here.
Before You Go
What do you need right now — not to feel fearless, but to take the next step anyway?