Horrible Nervous Tick on the Telephone - Any Advice?

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Here's a question for you guys:

I have always hated talking on the phone, really and truly loathed it.
My job duties have changed recently at work and I have to make more telephone calls. I am not comfortable with this and I find that I have this horrible nervous tick that comes out when I am on the phone.

I think in my urgency to be rid of the caller, I talk extremely quickly and my thoughts come out in a garbled mess (stuttering and a lot of "like", "um", "er", etc.) and my thoughts are really disorganized. I have tried calming down and trying to talk slower but I still feel uncomfortable and it feels like my baser instincts take over when I am in a less-than-comfortable situation.

My boss told me that I have to sound more professional. I struggle with this. Half the time, they don't adequately prepare me for the telephone calls and try and give me information as I am talking to the client. I can't try and listen to the client and listen to my co-workers telling me what to do at the same time. I wish they would just eliminate me and talk to them directly as it seems counter-productive to involve me.

I have tried to plan what I'm going to say but I always end up tripping over words and sounding like a complete dolt. I am very articulate most of the time, but I have always struggled with this and now it's effecting my work.

Any advice would be helpful. Thanks!

are you allowed to use a script for your phone interactions?

if your calls are outgoing (meaning: you do the active calling), i think a script is a good option, perhaps even get a clock or stopwatch, and note some timebrackets on the script, something like "dont start block two sooner then 20 seconds after starting block 1", regardless of how long block one took you to say.

also, it might be a good idea to practice these talks with friends.

if you are on an incoming line, being called, these scripts wont work, but then you can get away with waiting a bit, as if you had to look up something, and, also, practice these calls as well.