Member-only story
How to Make Your Fear of Public Speaking Work for You
Our thoughts are unruly children, aren’t they? They go where they want, show up when they want, and distract us as much as they please. Hence, in Western philosophical tradition, we think of them on the whole as something we can’t control. More than that, we think of them as natural phenomena that are vaguely improper to try to control.
We tend to identify ourselves with our feelings, so that controlling or eliminating them seems like a strange, perhaps Machiavellian, thing to do.
Nonetheless, here in the West, when a nervous thought shows up just before a speech, we are willing to put in a good deal of effort to attempt to get rid of this unruly, distracting thing that gets in the way of making speaking fun. Moreover, speech coaches like me spend a lot of time coaching people on how to eliminate those pesky terrors.
It’s a curious contradiction and what’s even more interesting, both ends of the contradiction are wrong.
We are not our feelings, first of all, so it should be OK to learn to control them. And second, rather than eliminating the feeling of fear, a better approach is to redefine it so that all that energy can be used to help you deliver a better speech.
The good news is that neuroscience is coming to the rescue, gradually providing us with…
