At a recent seminar my daughter Katy and I were conducting in Kansas City, I asked the audience how many people had a high level of anxiety when it came to giving a presentation. More than half of the people in the room held up their hand.

If you had a seat in that audience, would you have held up your hand?

Here’s the bad news: research suggests that giving a presentation probably makes you extremely uncomfortable and highly anxious.

Here’s the good news: It does the same thing to everyone else.

Here’s the best news: That makes giving presentations the easiest place to find a competitive advantage in your career.

Let me explain.

Over the years of giving seminars, doing one-on-one coaching and attending thousands of presentations I developed an acute awareness of how many people don’t like standing in front of the room talking to an audience. I knew it was a large number, a large percentage, but after digging into the latest research, the numbers are staggering.

And that’s why it’s such a huge competitive advantage if you can develop your presentation skills—because the competition will never catch up with you. They’re too afraid to even try.

The Research:

The age of the hybrid workforce has dramatically increased the number of presentations in the workplace. A survey done by dectopus.com discovered that more than 50-percent of professionals create or give presentations at least once a week, with at least 10-percent of professionals giving presentations every day!

Research published by Forbes revealed that 70% of the people who present regularly believe that presentations are critical to their work success. So even at an intuitive level we know this is important. But that importance can’t get most people past their discomfort. More than half of all professionals struggle with presentation design and, according to SupportiveCareABA, more than 75% of the workforce has a fear of public speaking.

If three out of four people are afraid of doing something, that means you’re really only competing with 25% of the field.

Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that? Oh, right, the whole fear and anxiety thing.

Most people tell me they would feel better about giving presentations if only they had more confidence. Here’s the secret: Confidence isn’t the starting point. Courage is a starting point.

You have to have courage to go where you don’t feel comfortable. The more often you do that, the more confident you become.

What Your Audience Really Wants

The latest surveys reveal the top four things audiences want now from a presentation:

· Clarity

· Brevity

· Visuals

· Engagement

The Importance of Engagement:

In his book, Brain Rules, John Medina discovered that with shrinking attention spans, in longer presentations, if you don’t recapture your audience’s attention frequently, every 10-minutes at the most, you lose the audience for the rest of the presentation. Engaging presentations are presentations that remain engaging, start to finish.

Translation: If you waste the first part of your presentation just trying to get comfortable and hoping the audience likes you, by the time you settle in you will have already lost the audience.

The Five Steps:

Here’s a simple strategy to put both the anxiety and the research on your side.

1. Identify that most people feel high anxiety around giving presentations.

2. Think courage, not confidence. You don’t need confidence. That comes later. You need courage to get up there and start leaving the competition behind.

3. Start small with shorter presentations—10 minutes or less.

4. Learn how to hook the audience’s attention early and often.

5. Rinse and repeat.

The more you follow those five simple steps, the more your presentation skill and confidence will. Remember, you don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great.

Seventy-five percent of the people who do what you do for a living will never get up in front of the room because they will let the fear keep them in their seat.

You don’t need complicated Presentation strategies to start gaining a competitive advantage. You just need to get going.

This is your opportunity to leave the competition behind.

It doesn’t take long to get good. It takes courage to start.

Here’s a photo of a group of volunteers (okay, so maybe I volunteered them, but it got them to the front of the room) at the seminar we conducted for Mechanical Contractors Association of America in Kansas City.

All the people you see, identified as high-anxiety presenters. But look how comfortable they appear now. It didn’t take long to get them to a high comfort, growing confidence place.

Your competitive advantage is waiting for you, but you won’t find it in the chair where you are sitting. You’ll find it in the front of the room where most of your competition is too afraid to venture.

Go put yourself out there. Great things await.