Confessions of a Public Speaker (2 page)

My brain snapped into gear and I looked out into the crowd to get my
bearings. My eyes, on their way back to the center of the room, stopped at
the countdown timer. There I found a surprise. Instead of the 10 minutes I
expected—the 10 minutes I’d planned, prepared, and practiced for—I had
only 9 minutes and 34 seconds. Twenty-six of my precious seconds were
gone.

I confess here in the comforts of this book, with no audience and no
pressure, 26 seconds doesn’t seem worth complaining about. It’s barely
enough time to tie your shoelaces. But there in the moment, raring to go,
I was caught off guard. I couldn’t imagine how I wasted 26 seconds without
starting. (I’d learn later that Brady’s introduction and my walk across
the big stage explained the lapse.) And as I tried to make sense of this
surprising number, more time went by. My brain—
not as smart as it thinks it is—insisted on playing
detective right there, live on stage, consuming even more precious time. I
don’t know why my brain did this, but my brain does many curious things I
have to figure out later.

Meanwhile, I’m rambling. Blah blah innovation blah creativity blah.
I’m not a blabbermouth in real life, but for 15 seconds I can ramble on
about a subject I know well enough to seem like I’m
not
rambling. Doing this bought me just enough time
for my brain to give
up its pointless investigation of what happened. Finally
focused, I had to waste even more time managing the surgery-like segue
between my rambles and the first point of my prepared material.
Confidently back on track, despite being a full minute behind, I hit the
remote to advance the slide. But when I did, I held it too long and two
slides flew by.

We all have reserve tanks of strength that help us cope when things
go wrong, but here mine hit empty. I didn’t have the courage to stop my
talk, ask the tech folks over the microphone—as if speaking to the gods
above—to go back, while just standing there on stage, waiting helplessly
as the clock ate even more of my precious seconds. So, I pressed on, did
my best, and fled the stage after my 10 minutes ended.

It was a disaster to me. I never found my rhythm and couldn’t
remember much of what I’d said. But as I talked with people I knew in the
audience, I discovered something much more interesting. Not
only did no one care, no one noticed. The drama was mostly in my own mind.
As Dale Carnegie wrote in
Public Speaking for Success
:
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You can watch the 10-minute video of the talk and see for
yourself.
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It’s not an amazing presentation, but it’s not a bad one
either. Whatever mistakes and imperfections exist, they’re larger in my
head than in yours. My struggles on stage that night taught me a lesson:
never plan to use the full time given. Had I planned to go 9 minutes
instead of 10, I wouldn’t have cared what the clock said, how weird the
remote was, or how long it took me to cross the stage.

And it’s often the case that the things speakers obsess about are
the opposite of what the audience cares about. They want to be
entertained. They want to learn. And most of all, they want you to do
well. Many mistakes you can make while performing do not prevent those
things from happening. It’s the mistakes you make before you even say a
word that matter more. These include the mistakes of not having an
interesting opinion, of not thinking clearly about your points, and of not
planning ways to make those points relevant to your audience. Those are
the ones that make the difference. If you can figure out how to get those
right, not much else will matter.

While there are good reasons why people fear public speaking, until
I see someone flee from the lectern mid-presentation, running for his life
through the fire exit on stage left, we can’t say public speaking is
scarier
than
death. This oddly popular factoid, commonly stated as, “Did
you know people would rather die than speak in public?”, is a classic case
of why you should ask people how they know what they think they know. This
“fact” implies that people will, if given the chance, choose to jump off
buildings or swallow cyanide capsules rather than give a short
presentation to their coworkers. Since this doesn’t happen in the real
world—no suicide note has ever mentioned an upcoming presentation as the
reason for leaving this world—it’s worth asking: where does this factoid
come from?

The source is
The Book of Lists
by David
Wallechinksy et al. (William Morrow), a trivia book first
published in 1977. It included a list of things people are afraid of, and
public speaking came in at number one. Here’s the list, titled “The Worst
Human Fears”:

People who mention this factoid haven’t seen the list because if
they had, they’d know it’s too silly and strange to be taken seriously.
The Book of Lists
says a team of market researchers
asked 3,000 Americans the simple question, “What are you most afraid of?”,
but they allowed them to write down as many answers as they wanted. Since
there was no list to pick from, the survey data is far from scientific.
Worse, no information is provided about who these people were.
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We have no way of knowing whether these people were
representative of the rest of us. I know I avoid most surveys I’m asked to
fill out, as do many of you, which begs the question why we place so much
faith in survey-based research.

When you do look at the list, it’s easy to see that people fear
heights (#2), deep water (#5), sickness (#6), and flying (#8) because of
the likelihood of dying from those things. Add them up, and
death easily comes in first place, restoring the Grim
Reaper’s fearsome reputation.
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Facts about public speaking are often misleading since they
frequently come from people selling services, such as books, that benefit
from making public speaking seem as scary as possible. Even if the
research were done properly, people tend to list fears of minor things
they encounter in everyday life more often
than more fearsome but abstract experiences like
dying.

When thinking about fun things like death, bad surveys, and public
speaking, the best place to start is with the realization that no has died
from giving a bad presentation. Well, at least one person did, President
William Henry Harrison, but he developed pneumonia after giving the
longest inaugural address in U.S. history. The easy lesson from his story:
keep it short, or you might die. This exception aside, by the time you’re
important enough—like Gandhi or Lincoln—for someone to want to kill you,
it’s not the public speaking that’s going to do you in. Malcolm X was shot
at the beginning of a speech in 1965, but he was a fantastic speaker (if
anything, he was killed because he spoke too well). Lincoln was
assassinated
watching
other people on stage. He was
shot from behind his seat, which points out one major advantage of giving
a lecture: it’s unlikely someone will sneak up from behind you to do you
in without the audience noticing. Being on stage behind a lectern gave
safety to President George W. Bush in his last public appearance in Iraq
when, in disgust, an Iraqi reporter threw one, then a second, shoe at him.
Watching the onslaught from the stage, Bush had the advantage and nimbly
dodged them both.

The real danger is always in the crowds. Fans of rock bands like The
Who, Pearl Jam, and the Rolling Stones have been killed in the stands. And
although the drummer
for Spinal Tap did mysteriously explode while performing,
very few real on-stage deaths have ever been reported in the history of
the world. The danger of crowds is why some people prefer the aisle
seats—they can quickly escape, whether they’re fleeing from fire or
boredom. If you’re on stage, not only do you have better access to the
fire exits, but should you faint, fall down, or suffer a heart attack,
everyone in attendance will know immediately and call an ambulance for
you. The next time you’re at the front of the room to give a presentation,
you should know that, by all logic, you are the safest person there. The
problem is that our brains are wired to believe the opposite; see
Figure 2-1
.

Figure 2-1. When you see the left, your brain sees the right.

Our brains, for all their wonders, identify the following four
things as being very bad for survival:

In the long history of all living things, any situation where all
the above were true was very bad
for you. It meant the odds were high that you would soon be
attacked and eaten alive. Many predators hunt in packs, and their easiest
prey are those who stand alone, without a weapon, on a flat area of land
where there is little cover (e.g., a stage). Our ancestors, the ones who
survived, developed a fear response to these situations. So, despite my 15
years of teaching classes, running workshops, and giving lectures, no
matter how comfortable I appear to the audience when at the front of the
room, it’s a scientific fact that my brain and body will experience some
kind of fear before and often while I’m speaking.

The design of the brain’s wiring—given its long operational history,
which is hundreds of thousands of years older than the history of public
speaking, or speaking at all, for that matter—makes it impossible to stop
fearing what it knows is the worst tactical situation for a person to be
in. There is no way to turn it off, at least not completely. This wiring
is so primal that it lives in the oldest part of our brains where, like
many of the brain’s other important functions, we have almost no
control.

Take, for example, the simple act of breathing. Right now, try to
hold your breath. The average person can go for a minute or so, but as the
pain intensifies—pain generated by your nervous system to stop you from
doing stupid things like killing yourself—your body will eventually force
you to give in. Your brain desperately wants you to live and will do many
things without asking permission to help you survive. Even if you’re
particularly stubborn and you make yourself pass out from lack of oxygen,
guess what happens? You live anyway. Your ever-faithful amygdala, one of
the oldest parts of your brain, takes over, continuing to regulate your
breathing, heart rate, and a thousand other things you never think about
until you come to your senses (literally and figuratively).

For years, I was in denial about my public speaking fears. After
seeing me speak, when people asked whether I get nervous, I always did the
stupid machismo thing. I’d smirk, as if to say, “Who me? Only mere mortals
get nervous.” At some level, I’d always known my answer was bullshit, but
I didn’t know the science, nor had I studied what others had to say. It
turns out there are consistent reports from
famous public figures confirming that, despite their talents
and success, their brains have the same wiring as ours:

Even if you could completely shut off these fear-response systems,
which is the first thing people with fears of public speaking want to do,
it would be a bad idea for two
reasons. First, having the old parts of our brains in
control of our fear responses is a good thing. If a legion of escaped
half-lion, half-ninja warriors were to fall through the ceiling and
surround you—with the sole mission of converting your fine flesh into thin
sandwich-ready slices—do you want the burden of consciously deciding how
fast to increase your heart rate, or which muscles to fire first to get
your legs moving so you can run away? Your conscious mind cannot work fast
enough to do these things in the small amount of time you’d have to
survive. It’s good that fear responses are controlled
by the subconscious parts
of our minds, since those are the only parts with fast
enough wires to do anything useful when real danger happens.

The downside is that this fear-response wiring causes problems
because our lives today are very safe. Few of us are regularly chased by
lions or wrestle alligators on our way to work, making our fear-response
programming out of sync with much of modern life. As a result, the same
stress responses we used
for survival for millions of years get applied to
nonsurvival situations by our eager brains. We develop ulcers, high blood
pressure, headaches, and other physical problems in part because our
stress systems aren’t designed to handle the “dangers” of our brave new
world: computer crashes, micromanaging bosses, 12-way conference calls,
and long commutes in rush-hour traffic. If we were chased by tigers on the
way to give a presentation, we’d likely find the presentation not nearly
as scary—our perspective on what things are worth fearing would have been
freshly calibrated.

Second, fear focuses attention. All the fun, interesting things in
life come with fears. Want to ask that cute girl out on a date? Thinking
of applying for that cool job? Want to write a novel? Start a company? All
good things come with the possibility of failure, whether it’s rejection,
disappointment, or embarrassment, and fear of those failures is what
motivates many people to do the work necessary to be successful. That fear
gives us the energy to proactively prevent failures from happening. Many
psychological causes of fear in work situations—being laughed at by
coworkers or looking stupid in front of the boss—can also be seen as
opportunities to impress or prove your value. Curiously enough, there may
be little difference biologically between fear of failure and anticipation
of success. In his excellent book
Brain Rules
(Pear Press), Dr. John
Medina points out that it is very difficult for the body to
distinguish between states of arousal and states of anxiety: