Public Speaking, A New Strategy
The fear of public speaking is widespread. It is regularly reported that true sufferers of the affliction would rather die – cease to exist, croak, bite the dust, expire – than to have to go to the front of a room and give a speech.
This is pretty good bang for the buck fear-wise.
The event, everyone would agree, including the fearful speaker, will never result in an outright fatality; otherwise every speaking engagement would have police standing by with that orange tape they put everywhere, at least in the crime shows on television, a coroner on call, and one of those fellows with chalk who outline exactly where the speaker’s body fell.
The police would collect as evidence the PowerPoint presentation still on the screen – New Expense Account Reporting System Rolls Out…Hang On To Your Hats! – and one detective would hand the presentation to another as evidence.
“Poor bastard, this is what did him in. He looked like he was going to pull through till be got to part where he intended to get the crowd going with a joke.” He shakes his head.
“What was the joke?” asks the second detective, a grizzled veteran only a few months away from his retirement.
“Let’s see, looks like he sets it up on one slide by asking which state is known for being the wife of a hippie, then waited for a moment to keep them in suspense.”
“And?” says the second guy.
“You sure you want to hear? It’s pretty grim.”
“I’ve seen a lot. I’m just a few months from retirement. I can take it.”
The next slide says ‘Mississippi.’” He pauses to collect himself, shaken. “I might have died too if I had known that was coming up.” He looks further at the speaker’s notes. “Oh, my God, if this wasn’t sad before…”
“What?”
“He’s got a note to himself, ‘wait for laughter to die down.’”
The second cop, muses on the mystery and the sorrow of human nature. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Well, I think that was always the problem.”
But the point is that such scenes never happen.
No one literally dies from fright in front of the room so why is it that so many react as if they are about to?
A simple analysis of how the power is apportioned throughout the room is enough to give us the answer.
The speaker may consciously feel only ordinary jangled nerves suitable to the occasion as he makes his way to the podium, but his unconscious autonomous nervous system, all unbeknownst to him, has scanned the crowd and come to the conclusion that all the danger in the room is concentrated solely upon him.
No one else cares a fig for the situation he is in.
As a matter of fact, they don’t want to be here at all. Given the choice they would be about their busy day, or at least at the cocktail bar in the hotel lobby.
Instead they have been dragged or otherwise coerced into this hot room for who knows what length of time to listen to who knows what kind of folderol, in this case, the roll-out of this new damnable expense accounting system.
Of course they hate the speaker!
You know how the human mind is under these circumstances. It looks for a scapegoat, someone that the crowd can fix its ire upon. Someone who can plausibly be said to be blameworthy in this whole fiasco of a ruined day.
The thought leaps from mind to mind without a word like torches being lit by a baying crowd of angry peasants, and within seconds the crowd is in danger of turning into a mob, hungry for vengeance.
In taking this all in, this unconscious autonomous nervous system that I speak of, sends a five alarm clanging alert to the fellow’s conscious self: run!
The scenario, as you see, is wildly one-sided, with all the fear of the situation landing in a heap upon the poor bastard at the front of the room. It is no skin off the teeth of the audience if the speaker falls flat on his face, a fact that only accelerates and increases the subject’s original fear until he is a bundle of nerves with quivering voice, shaky hands, and knocking knees.
Is there no solution?
Of course there is.
A child could rearrange this scenario to make it a fairer one.
If the speaker cannot be made less fearful then the only solution is to make the audience more fearful. This more evenly distributes the dread in the room.
The fellow who has arranged beforehand to have the doors of the conference room locked from the outside, and has also arranged for a massive pendulum, its blade sharpened to a knife’s edge, to slowly – but inexorably! – descend from the ceiling upon the audience, swinging back and forth in monstrous sweeping surges, will find them much readier to hear out the man at the front of the room.
Audience members will quickly take their seats and briskly take in the contents of the presentation, declaring it overall fascinating. Fascinating!
The richness of the content is rivaled only by the good humor that leavens it: the wife of a hippie? Why, Mississippi, of course! They roar…but quickly.
Just a few minutes before the audience members were content that the speaker be the only one suffering from presentation anxiety, but now somehow, as the monstrous pendulum swoops lower and lower, cutting through the air, they now feel a oneness with him and wish him well. ‘Really, aren’t we all in this together?’ is the new attitude in the room.
For his part, the speaker, while still suffering from the nervousness he is so familiar with, can at least say to himself, ‘well, at least a giant sharpened pendulum isn’t descending upon me.’
This has a calming effect, relaxing the vocal chords and stiffening the knees, giving him the confidence to plow forward through all 442 of his slides.
A simple brainstorming session can come up with many such solutions.
There are still numerous indigenous tribes in the world who, bless ‘em, retain the old tradition of shooting poison darts at unsuspecting trespassers. For the right price they can be brought over for the sake of the presentation.
Emerging from the back of the room just as the crowd is getting restless and the speaker is reaching new heights of nerves, they let fly with the deadly darts. They quiver noisily in the mahogany woodwork upon impact, and the speaker says, “oh, howdy, boys, didn’t see you there; how was the flight?”
Oh, they’re not really poisonous darts!
But no on in the audience knows that!
And for that reason they listen with a strange new respect.
Sometimes a simple prop can ease the mind of the nervous speakers.
Taking, for instance, a shrunken head with you on the way to podium and arranging it nicely so it can be viewed by all, and referring to it from time to time as “Henderson from Accounting who kept fiddling with his phone at the last quarterly meeting,” puts a new spirit in the air and gives the speaker an air of command.
Your more forward-looking hotels and civic centers are now incorporating trap doors into their conference rooms and ballrooms situated directly under the audience section, and for an additional fee may be willing to arrange upward facing pointed bamboo spears at the bottom.
In these and other circumstances people listen politely, though fearfully, putting the wind in the sails of the public speaker. They like him! As it turns out, they really like him!
Sensing their support he now has a spring in his step; his speaking points unroll like clockwork as he rattles them off; he pauses for breath at the recommended points in the presentation; he introduces color and humor into his otherwise dry recitation of facts just as he had dreamed of as he practiced.
With these and other select methods the nervous speaker has finally found the path to a successful speaking strategy.
