The Art of Public Speaking
Turning Fear of Failure
into Satisfaction of Success
" The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops... until you stand up to speak in public." - George Jessel
Public Speaking, where your greatest fear can determine either failure or success. According to most studies on the subject, public speaking is the #1 fear of most adults living in the United States. The fear of death is 4th on the list. Which means at a funeral, most people would rather be in the box than delivering the eulogy. For the curious, the 2nd and 3rd highest fears are spiders and snakes.
John Kennedy said, “Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.” I can certainly understand that statement given the questionable nature and the lack of credibility of most politicians. In politics, the secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made!
For the rest of us, public speaking feels more like public freaking. When we’re asked to make a presentation at school or work or some other public forum, our knees shake, our hands shake, our voice shakes, our cheeks twitch our mouth gets dry, we forget what we planned to say. When we’re finished we sit down and wonder what just happened.
Sound familiar?
The fear we feel when we get up to speak comes from a deep-seated desire to do well and look good. No one wants to feel inadequate. We want to leave our audience with the impression we’re not only proficient, but powerful. We worry if we screw up or look nervous our audience will judge us harshly; that they’ll think less of us and see that we really aren’t the expert they imagine us to be.
Most everyone struggles to some degree with fear and worry related to speaking in public. This blog intends to separate the truth from lies about the art of speaking and to provide you with an excellent avenue to practice and improve your skills. But my goal is not to eliminate your fears all together. You should always have some amount of fear, but I’ll talk about the value of that later.
In public speaking your initial goals should be:
Feeling comfortable standing and introducing yourself to a group.
Feeling confident in sharing a bit about yourself; your likes, hobbies, work or thoughts on a given topic or idea.
From there, your goals should grow to include:
Radiating confidence, poise and success while speaking
Minimizing nervousness
Strengthening effective verbal and non-verbal delivery skills
Maximizing your potential
In my next installment, we’ll begin to unfold these ideas for greater clarity.
