Fear and Loathing of Public Speaking

No one likes to be pulled from a warm bed and thrust into a cold shower.  And many people I’ve met feel the same about being plucked from the blanket of everyday life to stand alone on a stage with a thousand pairs of eyes on them.   And so, when they find themselves on stage, they naturally seek refuge.

They seek refuge in two ways.  They disappear emotionally by making themselves small, or they try to dominate by increasing their size.

Disappearing emotionally is a remarkable human art.  Some of us have had an “out-of-body” experience when presenting, which is similar to the experience of passing out when in great pain: It’s a way of avoiding a difficult reality.

When I was very young, I caught a baby rabbit in my bare hands because when he saw me coming, he froze and played dead.  I walked right up to him, picked him up and took him home to show my mother.  I was very proud of myself.

Some of us become adept at disappearing emotionally as children, either because we observe that others are not emotionally present,  or we are taught that we should keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves.  As adults, we might therefore use words, gestures, and a tone of voice that basically say, “I wish I weren’t here.”

We make ourselves absent or small by using words such as, “I guess,” “I think,” “Sort of,” “like, you know,” “kind of,” and many other common expressions that communicate uncertainty.

We absent ourselves by avoiding eye contact, slouching, hiding our hands, stepping back, and shifting our weight back and forth, as though we felt safer as a moving target.

And finally, we communicate absence or smallness by speaking too quietly, speaking too quickly, or using a rising intonation at the ends of our sentences, as though we were asking a question or seeking approval for our thoughts.

How do we make ourselves appear to be bigger than we actually are?

We use words that make us sound important, such as, “We anticipate experiencing considerable weather,” when we actually mean, “The plane ride will be bumpy.”

We might say, “We need to precipitate brand loyalty before the advent of competitive intrusion,” when we really mean, “Let’s get ‘em hooked on our stuff before the other guys come out with theirs.”

In other words, we try to sound like an institution instead of a person.

We make ourselves bigger with our bodies too.  We wear suits with padded shoulders.  We wear shoes with high heels.  We expand our gestures to occupy more space, like peacocks spreading their tails to frighten other males away.  And we practice a look of stern intention, focusing our eyes on one person at a time, as if to say, “I am a force to be reckoned with.  I will brook no dissent.”

Finally, we make ourselves bigger with our voices, by projecting more forcefully, be elongating vowels, by actually speaking in a sing-song cadence that echoes from the early 19th century but still lives in some of our political candidates.

We make ourselves smaller and bigger because we are scared.  We are scared because we are afraid of the audience.  We are afraid of the audience because we don’t know them, or we know them too well, or we simply have no experience speaking to groups.

We make ourselves small in the hope that we will not be noticed.  We make ourselves bigger hoping that the audience will not notice that we are small.  We change into something we’re not because we are afraid that, as we are, we are not all that impressive.

It’s a cop-out to be smaller than you are.  It’s a put-on to be bigger than you are.  The sweet spot is to trust that you’re big enough.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 1:45 pmand is filed under Assertiveness, Body Language, Delivery, Elements of presentation style, Expressiveness, Glossophobia, Language, Performance Psychology, Public Speaking Anxiety, Speaker's Anxiety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.