Very self conscious when using the phone?

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I always try to avoid using the phone because I get very self conscious using it, even if there is no one in ear shot and I constantly think I must sound unconfident or stupid to someone on the other line. Even saying hello just makes me cringe. I always try to email even if its quite a urgent issue, because I feel much better to gather all my thoughts and put it in one mail and structure it. I find phone conversations very unnatural because I get this strange feeling that the words I'm saying, I'm not actually saying them maybe because I am too anxious.
Unexpected calls and calls to banks are the worst because they say all these terms and words I don't understand and I don't like the uncertainty of conversations on the phone and the fast paced nature of it. I have to prepare myself for quite a while before I make a call and if one out of the blue comes I panic and can't gather my thoughts and stumble my words.

Another thing is I am even more self concious when someone is in earshot of my conversation. Anxiety kicks in of what the person on the other line thinks of me, and also what the other person listening thinks of me. This is why I can never answer calls in public or on transport, unlike others. My anxiety about self consciousness is so strong it stops me making important calls, the worst thing is I feel like I would act like this in a emergency.
I have to have a 30min call with someone on Skype a few days (5 mins was anxiety provoking enough) and my roommate will likely be home and it will be quite personal. I just always think the other person is analysing the information that is being said and judging me.

Is there any way I can lessen my anxiety about using the phone for all the reasons above? Particularly about what others think of me if their in earshot.

Thanks!

Recognise this, I never enjoy having to pick uop the phone at work to raise a query with a vendor/manufacturer etc, so pleased with myself yesterday when a fault needed me to arrange an exchange for a power supply module and I succeded in making that call, confirming the e-mail details so that I could then raise things officially on company e-mail with all the relevant serial numbers etc.

I also find it gets hard if i have to call a private customer if there has been some delays in getting a date fixed for the next stages of work which has to be done in stages. I do like e-mail and text messaging at these times oftroubled mind so I do.

I've slowly become more comfortable about making and taking calls as I've grown older, but it was a huge problem for me when I was a child/young teen, teenager and adult. I still only feel okay about an incoming call if I'm expecting it, if it's from a friend or other pleasant entity rather than from a stranger or company, and I hate making a call to a stranger.

I feel less freaked out than I did when younger, but I don't like it still; I just learned to handle it slightly better as the years went on. Forcing yourself and rehearsing things helps.

I also hate phone calls but I don't have any thoughts about how others think of me. It's stressing situation for another reason: I have to focus a lot to be able to hear and understand what the other person says. Any background sound can distract me and if I don't intentionally force myself to listen I might forget anybody is talking to me. And I can't rely on body language to let them know I am listening so they won't know if I am listening or got distracted. If I let myself calm down I might threat the voice as a background sound and not reply. And I often catch myself nodding when talking through phone because I learned top nod when anybody is talking to me to let them know I listen. Which makes me think "Stupid, they don't see you so why are you nodding? You should rather make some sounds". Then I try to make sounds like "oh" or "aha" but it sounds forced and I am interrupting the voice so after trying it I shut up and just listen, wanting to nod/make presence but knowing it's pointless.

For me phone calls are not as scary as just tiring. They take way too much mental resources.

More than the talk itself I am scared a background sound is going to distract me or someone in reality calls me and I will have to explain I am on a phone while being on the phone. Especially my dad tends to ask "What?... Whaat?... WHAAAT?" from downstairs when I talk with someone through phone because he thinks I am talking to him. It's so distracting!

I definitely prefer e-mails or even face to face meetings where at least my nodding works(well, it doesn't always work - sometimes I nod and realize I didn't actually listen at all... ... really... human voice is something that doesn't hold my attention at all).
In e-mail I can reread anything and during face to face meeting I can ask people to show, draw or write something down. In a phone call I have to rely on my hearing - which is my weakest sense. Or you can call it the strongest sense - I can hear everything(clock ticking, cars, computer hum, TV downstairs, kids outside, the wind, electric sound in speakers...) so it's hard for me to focus on speech. I find my sight way more reliable - because you only see what you are looking at. Well, this and your imagination/thoughts but because I think in images it's easy for me to understand what I see because it gets directly translated into thoughts. With sounds it has to be translated to images first before getting to memory.