When It Comes To Speaking In Front Of Seniors, I Often Fumble And Stammer Even When I Am Not Nervous. Why Is This So And How Can I Stop This?

This happens because of the fear, the fear that: You are NOT comfortable in language (Most of the time, English); They will laugh at you; You don't want to disturb someone; You are introvert; You think someone will talk behind if you talk with them; You don't have correct topics to talk; You are not confident about yourself. And thus, try and follow these points:- Build confidence, usually confidence is a derivative of your knowledge and your soft skills. Build a strong domain knowledge, this gives you an ability of making great conversations with colleagues as well your manager etc. - Having a strong domain knowledge also results into clarity of thoughts which is direct ingredient to the recipe of building confidence. - Always try to chalk down your points. Helps you remember things better. - Always try to be objective driven while framing the question, that would help you also do a background check and get the desired answer.

From the surface it seems like you are suffering from anxiety when dealing with superiors. You may want to analyse if this anxiety is pervasive or that you only experience it when you are out of your depths. Anxiety is a reaction to a perceived threat- real or imagined. FEAR is also known as a false evaluation of actual reality. Faced with an intimidating situation you are probably assessing the risk as much higher than both the internal and external resources that you have. You will be surprised if you put pen to paper and evaluate your resources, your superiors won’t seem so intimidating. If your resources are less, then look at strategies to strengthen your knowledge base and work on your confidence. Get out of your comfort zone. That will be the biggest gift you can give yourself. The best way to deal with this is to instill a practice of meditation to first put your mind to rest even when there is no threat. When you operate from a place of perpetual calm then external stimuli will not rattle you as much and fumbling will be a think of the past.

In most of the cases it could be your unwarranted and irrational fear related to hierarchy. It stems from a mindset that a certain position or a certain level is “superior” to me in all aspects. When you approach someone with this mindset then you would feel a lot of pressure and fumble. One of the best ways to overcome this is to start valuing your work more and see how it links to bigger organizational goals. Infact, get more pride in your contributions and develop a mindset that everyone has a role to play in organizational success irrespective of levels and my role is no less significant than my seniors.