How can you train your mind to overcome all of the negative fear and anxiety which is often associated with public speaking, and instead boost positive and confident thought, thereby paving the way to delivering your speech calmly, powerfully and successfully?

Great public speaking is all about confidence; the confidence to stand up in a room full of people who you don't know, and deliver a speech with eloquence and gusto. It's not easy - without effective mental rehearsal you may become short of breath, experience butterflies in your stomach, forget what you were going to talk about or even freeze completely. Some unfortunate people have even been known to faint.

Some people are naturally accomplished orators, who not only speak with passion and wit, but thoroughly enjoy being in the limelight. They have the ability to make every single person in the audience feel that they are communicating almost solely with you, and compel your full attention. Others prefer to stand back, to mingle amongst the crowd and shy away from the spot light. How can humans be so very different, from one individual to the next? We all have the same individual components after all. We are all born with the capacity to learn, develop and achieve almost unlimited things.

At birth, the human brain is not fully formed. A template is there which adapts to the environment and culture to which we are born. We learn through experience, be it our native tongue or a familiarity with standing up in front of our peers and taking centre stage. We learn whether something feels good to us or not depending upon each individual experience. Before the age of 10 we usually have a reasonably well developed sense of who we are and what we are comfortable with or not.

From there on in, we tend to live our lives within the limitations of these core beliefs and expectations. If we have had bad experiences or no experience of "performing" in front of a crowd, the tendency for most is to shy away from such circumstances. On the other hand, those who have had good experiences have the budding confidence to stand up there again and again, building greater degrees of confidence along the way. Good experiences, repeated time and again lead to comfort and confidence.

But if you haven't had such good and powerful experiences, you don't have to stay the same way. You can learn to overcome your shyness, fear or trepidation and think differently and feel differently. You have the capacity to feel just as confident and comfortable as the best orators in the world. The key is in knowing how to mentally rehearse your speech again and again so that you effectively "trick" your inner mind into believing that you have been in this situation many times before and so you feel the comfort of this experience and the confidence which accompanies it.

Your mind does not know the difference between something which is real and something which is vividly imagined. This is fact. Thus by vividly imagining yourself making a great speech and receiving positive feedback from the crowd you in effect train your brain to feel comfortable and happy about such events. I do not just mean thinking about your speech and imagining it to be word perfect, I mean that you should really see yourself there, to step right into a movie in your minds' eye, to hear your own voice, loud and clear, to feel the confidence in your stance, to feel the warm response of the audience.

A thought without an emotion will have no effect. Your effective mental rehearsal will involve all of your senses; you will be powerfully aware and fully absorbed in the sights, sounds and feelings associated with your imagery. It is this vivid detail and emotion which embeds the "experience" within your psyche. It is this detailed emotional input which makes it "true". And as you visualize your speech again and again and again, it is as if you have already "been there and done that" all of those many times..and so public speaking truly feels like second nature to you.

There is another way in which you can enhance the effect of such visualization. You can use hypnosis to relax and access your subconscious mind and then run through your visualizations in this state of relaxed focus. In this way your visualizations will take on more color and texture, more vividness and reality, as your creative mind is unleashed. Hypnotic suggestions can also be made to further increase confidence and empower you to an ever more compelling performance.

What are you waiting for? You can start visualizing right now and you will find you get better and better at it, and you can get hypnosis downloads to make your visualizations more powerfully compelling and therefore effective.

Roseanna Leaton, specialist in hypnosis downloads for hypnosis confidence