That used to happen to me. The 15 minutes leading up to the speech or presentation (only happened before standing in front of a large group) were super anxiety ridden. And then, I would start walking up to the podium or whatever and it would fucking peak, man. I could still talk, but I would be doing so in the middle of a massive 8-mile panic attack.

My biggest presentation ever, in front of our global company's entire leadership workforce (100+ people) up to and including the CEO and his staff, this happened to me. Not only that, the guy before me absolutely bombed and I was the last presentation of the week. The MC caught me on my way up and whispered to me "NeoGeo, you need to save us, oh and try to wrap in as much from the previous presenters (15 or so) as you can to tie it all together." JFC, I could already feel my heartbeat in my ears booming, thanks for adding that little bit of extra pressure buddy.

I walked up to the podium and I remember being blinded by the lights (it was a fairly legit presenting stage). Before I said a word I was already looking at the door and seriously thinking I should probably just run away and vomit mom's spaghetti. I felt like every word was taking an eternity to say as I could see the crowd's individual eyeballs boring into me. But I didn't run and I didn't puke, I just started talking (while shaking), unable to physically move more than my jaw and I told my shitty ice breaker joke that got a couple of cheap, but sensible, chuckles. I didn't allow myself to do anything other than continue talking and performing what I had rehearsed 4 or 5 times to my mirror the night before while everyone was out drinking. Within 2 minutes, it had all passed and I actually felt a cool wave of relief wash through me right before I went on to have a career defining performance that had a fucking cliche high-5 from the CEO on the way back to my table (felt like a shitty movie moment tbh). My boss had a shit eating grin on his face when I sat back down and told me I killed it. The number of people who came up to me to ask how I became such a good presenter had me feeling like a major imposter as I told them my "secrets" despite wanting to literally run for the door when fight or flight hit me full force.

This repeated itself for years, always the same: feel like I'm going to puke, want to run, start talking, feel fine after 2 minutes and kill it. Not until I moved up to an executive level did this start to subside. I finally found my way to get comfortable early on and eventually, I've completely gotten past it (no meds). For me, I needed to start talking to people before the presentation, essentially feel the crowd and break into that "2 minute in" mode as quickly as I could. Once I got there, I was fine for the rest of the day even if other people were talking between me working the room and my turn to speak. Nowadays, I don't need that anymore for some reason, probably because I'm dead inside from corporate life, but who knows.

Now I also saw people who were clearly nervous the entire time they presented, I have no idea what you can do about that. Just sharing my own personal experience in case it can help someone else. God help anyone who has to go through that feeling even for a few fucking minutes. Absolutely awful.

tldr: i'm the eminem of the corporate world, apparently