February 3, 2016 • 15 mins
One of the top American fears, alongside walking alone at night and personal injury, is public speaking. Find out why it can be so terrifying to step into the spotlight.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From how Stuff Works dot com. This is the stuff
of life. We get out in front of an audience
the first time and see all those people out there
looking at us. You start to think, am I ready?
(00:21):
Can I do this? What was I thinking? Maybe this
was a really, really bad idea. Welcome to the Stuff
of Life. I'm your host, Julie Douglas, and this episode
is a companion to our one on fear. It's about glossophobia,
(00:41):
the fear of public speaking. You know what I'm talking about.
Your name is announced, your legs feel like lead as
you walk to the mic, The words on your power
point presentation suddenly mutate into incomprehensible symbols, and your eyes
(01:03):
widened into questioning orbs. Words Come now, you command your
brain as you stare back up the audience, heart racing.
Lassophobia is no joke. It regularly shows up on the
top ten list of things that scare the pants off
of people. In fact, in the two thousand and fourteen
(01:24):
American Survey of Fears by Chapman University, it broke into
the top five, alongside fears of personal safety. Maybe that's
because at some point in our lives, most of us
submit ourselves to it in one way or another. For
people who scared of public speaking, they'll only have to
say things when it's like a funeral and or have
(01:47):
to be uncomfortable at a wedding, you know, those big
milestones of life. Today, we'll hear from How Stuff Works
staff members about their experiences with public speaking. Do you
guys remember elm frodding the carton and our Daffy Doug
or something, and they would they would walk off the
cliff and they wouldn't fall until they looked down and
(02:10):
realized that they were off right. Yeah, just don't look down.
That's how. And we'll hear clips from professional speech coach
Tim Wilson from his talk Fight the Fear Handling Stage fright.
Pict yourself in front of the audience. You're cons know
you're speaking. You look out of the audience, you see
(02:30):
people are enjoying the speak. They're laughing at your jokes.
Having Let's hear from three people who have dared to
step into the light. I'm Raquel Willis. I'm a digital
publisher here at How Stuff Works. I'm Lauren Vogeldown. Mostly
I write and research for a video and also appear
in some of those videos and you know, whatever else
(02:53):
is necessary on the given day. My name is Ben Bullen,
a former child actor at the Grand Old Opry. Yeah,
I know, true story. Uh do a lot of things,
and one of those things I do is work here
with you amazing folks. Yeah you heard that right. Ben
was a wee child star of the Grand Old Opery.
It's Grand Old Aprey time. Most of my memories, because
(03:19):
it's very, very young, Most of my memories of that
moment relate directly to my parents ruinning dates by showing
them pictures of you know, this baby with a tin
gallon hat. Ben, those girls were not worth your time
if they couldn't appreciate a baby and a ten gallon hat.
I'm here to tell you. Look, hey, I can't put
it all on them. There were a lot of factors involved,
(03:41):
but yeah, public speaking, so well, that's what I think.
It's interesting about this. At a young age, you're voicted
on stage, made to wear a ten gallon hat, and
you re enact this in some ways over and over again.
Freud called this repe teaching compulsion. They need to reenact
(04:02):
something over and over again to gain mastery of it.
Something this group knows a lot about Lauren, Riquel and
I have all done various live venues. I do a
lot of comedy, which well theoretically ideally you do. You
do have seen it comedy. I appreciate your very kind,
(04:24):
very kind person Thank you. Lauren, you have done literary
events around town, and Riquel you've done very speaking events
as well. Right. Yeah. Funny thing is that my public
speaking has really evolved because now I'm really kind of
just talking about real life like ideas and not really performing.
(04:48):
But I do kind of come more from a performing background.
Now I'm just more of an activist and speaking more
on um race and lgbt Q issues and feminism and
all those at things. So it's been really interesting because
just speaking as me is really nerve racking. But before,
(05:09):
when I was a character or I was there was
more of a barrier between me and the audience. Artistically,
it was a little bit easier just to to be
on stage and exist and have that self confidence. I
don't know, I feel like every time I'm on stage,
I'm playing a character. Even if I'm reading a personal
(05:31):
essay or or talking about myself, I feel like I'm
in this stage persona that's not quite me. It's like
related to me, but it's entirely separate, like it's it's
it's the person who's not terrified to be on stage
in that moment because because because I would never be
on stage, but like that, this person doesn't mind, so
(05:52):
she's pretty red. Listen to her for a long Perhaps
the reason public speaking is terrifying is because, if he's
take the long view of history, standing in front of
an audience signaled some kind of transgression. You are paraded
in front of people to answer to something. Maybe you
were making a plea or justifying an action. The audience
(06:14):
might ridicule you or become violent. In any case, historically,
stepping onto a stage wouldn't have been pretty, which is
probably why we have coping techniques. Do you have a
ritual before you had a public speaking engagement? I guess
I would say just affirmations in in front of a mirror.
(06:35):
If I can get in front of a mirror before
I go on stage, that's awesome. Just still away to
the restroom before they get to my part. It It
just helps just look at myself and just remind myself,
like you're here for a reason, you're here for a purpose,
You're going to knock it out of the ballpark. In
my experience, the more that I have obsessively prepared myself,
(06:59):
the it or it goes, because that's sort of my
strategy for trying to put myself out there on display
and say to myself, oh, yeah, like here's this version
of Julie that's going to go up there and do this.
It's not really me, but here you go, hologram and
exhaustively researched and well polished version of ourselves, right, hopefully, right,
(07:23):
hopefully yeah. And I'm not alone in this. Lauren has
her thing too. I go through this like like well,
mental preparation routine, but also physical grooming routine, and it's
you know, you know, the physical grooming part I think
is partially sociologically fair, because like, especially being a woman,
(07:43):
society puts such acute judgment on on how we look
when we're especially if we're putting ourselves in the public eye.
So so there's that factor. But it's also like I
might forget all my lines, I might lose the English
language from my brain. I my sincter could fall out,
but my eyebrows are going to be on point. It's
(08:06):
about installing order into a situation you don't have full
control over. As an example, let's look at a two
thousand and fifteen study by Martin Lange at All in
which sixty two university students were fitted with heart rate
monitor and an accelerometer on each risk to measure risk movements.
Then they were presented with a silver metal sculpture. Half
(08:28):
were told they'd have to give a five minute speech
about the object to an art expert no less, and
would be given only three minutes to prepare. There was
a list of questions they need to address in their speech,
questions like what genre does this sculpture belong to? The
other half were told to just ponder the questions, look
at the object. Then both groups were instructed to polish away. Well.
(08:52):
Guess which group obsessively polished the object. There would be
speech givers, of course, who self reported anxiet the levels
directly related to their elevated heart rates and hand movements.
For them, polishing the sculpture was a self soothing act
of preparation. As part of the ritual of preparation, Professional
(09:13):
speech coach Tim Wilson underscores the need to practice and
practice the right way. He advocates several approaches to your speech,
including reading your text over and no over again, saying
it out loud, and taking time to even video yourself
so you can really see how you present information. You
do look like that, and you do sound like that.
(09:43):
There's another thing you can do to prepare, and it
has everything to do with something called embodied cognition, the
idea that how you interact with the physical world can
affect your internal world. I can tell you a little
bit about a ritual I do, but it's it's sort
of embarrassing. So I try to be the the nicest,
(10:04):
coolest version of me or whatever character I'm playing. I
go super way too far into into characters because if
I if I'm supposed to host as a different character,
play a role, then I won't show up, but that
dude will and he'll hang out and that can be
(10:25):
a little bit weird for cast or other people. But
if it's actually me, if I'm doing something um as
this version of myself, then the person people meet about
two hours or so before the show that that person
is way better than the actual meet, way nicer, way funnier,
(10:46):
and goes out of his way to do something good
for people. Beforehand, just like little things, you know, because
then for some reason, feeling that way puts me in
a really good space, and I feel I feel like
the good guys, confident. Ben's tapping into something that a
(11:08):
two thousand and thirteen study by Jeremy Jamison found about
harnessing anxiety when it comes to performance, essentially making stage
fright your friend. Instead of calming yourself, which is counterintuitive
to the physiological state of your body, you should jump
on that chemical cocktail and marshal the body's resources in
a positive way. Whether it's Raquel telling herself positive things
(11:31):
in a mirror or Ben becoming the ultimate minch. It's
recasting stress as excitement and opportunity. It's that same fear
that's same exciting we can use development builder speaking. That's
(11:52):
not to say that every time you stick your neck
out it's going to be a win. Everyone has at
least one very public moment that they wish went differently.
There was a Dracula play and I really wanted to
be Rinfield. I was like, looking at it, I was like,
it's totally me. I can do this, I can own this,
And drama teacher passed me as Dracula. And I was like,
(12:14):
why I look like a young Orville red and Bocker
in this stupid cape? And then she cast my best
friend Lemuel, who is like six four and on the
football team as van helsing. This is that talking about
a directorial choice, because that that confrontation was it was
hilarious and we were trying to do the accents to
(12:35):
Julie trying to do the accents too. I wouldn't trade
those kind of moments for anything, because it's so it's
so embarrassing, but it's also, I don't know, it's amazing there,
life changing. I mean, they're very formative moments that need
to happen. All of these things that we've all described
that we have gone through. Once you get to the
(12:56):
other side is life changing and something in these ways
that you're not even aware of, because it gives you
the courage to realize that, like Elmer Fudd, if you
don't look down, maybe you'll you know, still survive, You'll
you're still there, you're you know, creating your own reality.
Wonderful callback, Julie, just don't look down, right, not once,
(13:20):
not never, never, But even if you do, I mean,
the point is like, you don't die from this, it's
a metaphorical death. When we see someone allowing themselves to
be vulnerable and putting themselves out there, we root for them.
We see ourselves in that person, that person who has
something to say and is taking a risk to do it.
(13:43):
And there's also another story bubbling underneath the surface. There
something about who that person is and what they can
teach us about what it is to be human. I
promise you that of the time, everybody watching you wants
it to be amazing, and they believe in you. They
are on your side. And the next episode will take
(14:06):
on immortality. But the idea of creating an eternal avatar
of yourself, we're not trying to create like the Clan,
like a very lifelike Clane. We're trying to create something
that offers a very easy interface to access those memories.
I'm glad if it's going to be very clear that
that's not a copy of the person. Thank you to
(14:28):
Tim Wilson for allowing us to use clips from quite
the Fear Handling Stage right. You can find more from
him at Speaking Quick Tips dot blogspot dot com. And
thank you to Lauren Vogelbaum, Ben Bolan and Raquel willis
for bearing your public speaking souls. The Stuff of Life
is written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original
(14:50):
music and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown,
and editorial oversight is provided by Head of production Jerry Rowland.
You can send your thoughts to us at the Stuff
of Life at how stuff works dot com, and you
can visit our Facebook page, The Stuff of Life, where
we'll post some outtakes from our round table speaking of
(15:10):
This is what happened when we put Ben on the
spot and asked him to freestyle. Yeah, I'll free style
if you want, if you give me a word bird?
All right? Uh? I asked for a word and the
word was bird. It's crazy how people confuse gold with turds.
I've got that Mina's touch. I give minus every time
(15:32):
people come to me like what's up? Look? I eat
people on more on the hard
From how Stuff Works dot com. This is the stuff
of life. We get out in front of an audience
the first time and see all those people out there
looking at us. You start to think, am I ready?
(00:21):
Can I do this? What was I thinking? Maybe this
was a really, really bad idea. Welcome to the Stuff
of Life. I'm your host, Julie Douglas, and this episode
is a companion to our one on fear. It's about glossophobia,
(00:41):
the fear of public speaking. You know what I'm talking about.
Your name is announced, your legs feel like lead as
you walk to the mic, The words on your power
point presentation suddenly mutate into incomprehensible symbols, and your eyes
(01:03):
widened into questioning orbs. Words Come now, you command your
brain as you stare back up the audience, heart racing.
Lassophobia is no joke. It regularly shows up on the
top ten list of things that scare the pants off
of people. In fact, in the two thousand and fourteen
(01:24):
American Survey of Fears by Chapman University, it broke into
the top five, alongside fears of personal safety. Maybe that's
because at some point in our lives, most of us
submit ourselves to it in one way or another. For
people who scared of public speaking, they'll only have to
say things when it's like a funeral and or have
(01:47):
to be uncomfortable at a wedding, you know, those big
milestones of life. Today, we'll hear from How Stuff Works
staff members about their experiences with public speaking. Do you
guys remember elm frodding the carton and our Daffy Doug
or something, and they would they would walk off the
cliff and they wouldn't fall until they looked down and
(02:10):
realized that they were off right. Yeah, just don't look down.
That's how. And we'll hear clips from professional speech coach
Tim Wilson from his talk Fight the Fear Handling Stage fright.
Pict yourself in front of the audience. You're cons know
you're speaking. You look out of the audience, you see
(02:30):
people are enjoying the speak. They're laughing at your jokes.
Having Let's hear from three people who have dared to
step into the light. I'm Raquel Willis. I'm a digital
publisher here at How Stuff Works. I'm Lauren Vogeldown. Mostly
I write and research for a video and also appear
in some of those videos and you know, whatever else
(02:53):
is necessary on the given day. My name is Ben Bullen,
a former child actor at the Grand Old Opry. Yeah,
I know, true story. Uh do a lot of things,
and one of those things I do is work here
with you amazing folks. Yeah you heard that right. Ben
was a wee child star of the Grand Old Opery.
It's Grand Old Aprey time. Most of my memories, because
(03:19):
it's very, very young, Most of my memories of that
moment relate directly to my parents ruinning dates by showing
them pictures of you know, this baby with a tin
gallon hat. Ben, those girls were not worth your time
if they couldn't appreciate a baby and a ten gallon hat.
I'm here to tell you. Look, hey, I can't put
it all on them. There were a lot of factors involved,
(03:41):
but yeah, public speaking, so well, that's what I think.
It's interesting about this. At a young age, you're voicted
on stage, made to wear a ten gallon hat, and
you re enact this in some ways over and over again.
Freud called this repe teaching compulsion. They need to reenact
(04:02):
something over and over again to gain mastery of it.
Something this group knows a lot about Lauren, Riquel and
I have all done various live venues. I do a
lot of comedy, which well theoretically ideally you do. You
do have seen it comedy. I appreciate your very kind,
(04:24):
very kind person Thank you. Lauren, you have done literary
events around town, and Riquel you've done very speaking events
as well. Right. Yeah. Funny thing is that my public
speaking has really evolved because now I'm really kind of
just talking about real life like ideas and not really performing.
(04:48):
But I do kind of come more from a performing background.
Now I'm just more of an activist and speaking more
on um race and lgbt Q issues and feminism and
all those at things. So it's been really interesting because
just speaking as me is really nerve racking. But before,
(05:09):
when I was a character or I was there was
more of a barrier between me and the audience. Artistically,
it was a little bit easier just to to be
on stage and exist and have that self confidence. I
don't know, I feel like every time I'm on stage,
I'm playing a character. Even if I'm reading a personal
(05:31):
essay or or talking about myself, I feel like I'm
in this stage persona that's not quite me. It's like
related to me, but it's entirely separate, like it's it's
it's the person who's not terrified to be on stage
in that moment because because because I would never be
on stage, but like that, this person doesn't mind, so
(05:52):
she's pretty red. Listen to her for a long Perhaps
the reason public speaking is terrifying is because, if he's
take the long view of history, standing in front of
an audience signaled some kind of transgression. You are paraded
in front of people to answer to something. Maybe you
were making a plea or justifying an action. The audience
(06:14):
might ridicule you or become violent. In any case, historically,
stepping onto a stage wouldn't have been pretty, which is
probably why we have coping techniques. Do you have a
ritual before you had a public speaking engagement? I guess
I would say just affirmations in in front of a mirror.
(06:35):
If I can get in front of a mirror before
I go on stage, that's awesome. Just still away to
the restroom before they get to my part. It It
just helps just look at myself and just remind myself,
like you're here for a reason, you're here for a purpose,
You're going to knock it out of the ballpark. In
my experience, the more that I have obsessively prepared myself,
(06:59):
the it or it goes, because that's sort of my
strategy for trying to put myself out there on display
and say to myself, oh, yeah, like here's this version
of Julie that's going to go up there and do this.
It's not really me, but here you go, hologram and
exhaustively researched and well polished version of ourselves, right, hopefully, right,
(07:23):
hopefully yeah. And I'm not alone in this. Lauren has
her thing too. I go through this like like well,
mental preparation routine, but also physical grooming routine, and it's
you know, you know, the physical grooming part I think
is partially sociologically fair, because like, especially being a woman,
(07:43):
society puts such acute judgment on on how we look
when we're especially if we're putting ourselves in the public eye.
So so there's that factor. But it's also like I
might forget all my lines, I might lose the English
language from my brain. I my sincter could fall out,
but my eyebrows are going to be on point. It's
(08:06):
about installing order into a situation you don't have full
control over. As an example, let's look at a two
thousand and fifteen study by Martin Lange at All in
which sixty two university students were fitted with heart rate
monitor and an accelerometer on each risk to measure risk movements.
Then they were presented with a silver metal sculpture. Half
(08:28):
were told they'd have to give a five minute speech
about the object to an art expert no less, and
would be given only three minutes to prepare. There was
a list of questions they need to address in their speech,
questions like what genre does this sculpture belong to? The
other half were told to just ponder the questions, look
at the object. Then both groups were instructed to polish away. Well.
(08:52):
Guess which group obsessively polished the object. There would be
speech givers, of course, who self reported anxiet the levels
directly related to their elevated heart rates and hand movements.
For them, polishing the sculpture was a self soothing act
of preparation. As part of the ritual of preparation, Professional
(09:13):
speech coach Tim Wilson underscores the need to practice and
practice the right way. He advocates several approaches to your speech,
including reading your text over and no over again, saying
it out loud, and taking time to even video yourself
so you can really see how you present information. You
do look like that, and you do sound like that.
(09:43):
There's another thing you can do to prepare, and it
has everything to do with something called embodied cognition, the
idea that how you interact with the physical world can
affect your internal world. I can tell you a little
bit about a ritual I do, but it's it's sort
of embarrassing. So I try to be the the nicest,
(10:04):
coolest version of me or whatever character I'm playing. I
go super way too far into into characters because if
I if I'm supposed to host as a different character,
play a role, then I won't show up, but that
dude will and he'll hang out and that can be
(10:25):
a little bit weird for cast or other people. But
if it's actually me, if I'm doing something um as
this version of myself, then the person people meet about
two hours or so before the show that that person
is way better than the actual meet, way nicer, way funnier,
(10:46):
and goes out of his way to do something good
for people. Beforehand, just like little things, you know, because
then for some reason, feeling that way puts me in
a really good space, and I feel I feel like
the good guys, confident. Ben's tapping into something that a
(11:08):
two thousand and thirteen study by Jeremy Jamison found about
harnessing anxiety when it comes to performance, essentially making stage
fright your friend. Instead of calming yourself, which is counterintuitive
to the physiological state of your body, you should jump
on that chemical cocktail and marshal the body's resources in
a positive way. Whether it's Raquel telling herself positive things
(11:31):
in a mirror or Ben becoming the ultimate minch. It's
recasting stress as excitement and opportunity. It's that same fear
that's same exciting we can use development builder speaking. That's
(11:52):
not to say that every time you stick your neck
out it's going to be a win. Everyone has at
least one very public moment that they wish went differently.
There was a Dracula play and I really wanted to
be Rinfield. I was like, looking at it, I was like,
it's totally me. I can do this, I can own this,
And drama teacher passed me as Dracula. And I was like,
(12:14):
why I look like a young Orville red and Bocker
in this stupid cape? And then she cast my best
friend Lemuel, who is like six four and on the
football team as van helsing. This is that talking about
a directorial choice, because that that confrontation was it was
hilarious and we were trying to do the accents to
(12:35):
Julie trying to do the accents too. I wouldn't trade
those kind of moments for anything, because it's so it's
so embarrassing, but it's also, I don't know, it's amazing there,
life changing. I mean, they're very formative moments that need
to happen. All of these things that we've all described
that we have gone through. Once you get to the
(12:56):
other side is life changing and something in these ways
that you're not even aware of, because it gives you
the courage to realize that, like Elmer Fudd, if you
don't look down, maybe you'll you know, still survive, You'll
you're still there, you're you know, creating your own reality.
Wonderful callback, Julie, just don't look down, right, not once,
(13:20):
not never, never, But even if you do, I mean,
the point is like, you don't die from this, it's
a metaphorical death. When we see someone allowing themselves to
be vulnerable and putting themselves out there, we root for them.
We see ourselves in that person, that person who has
something to say and is taking a risk to do it.
(13:43):
And there's also another story bubbling underneath the surface. There
something about who that person is and what they can
teach us about what it is to be human. I
promise you that of the time, everybody watching you wants
it to be amazing, and they believe in you. They
are on your side. And the next episode will take
(14:06):
on immortality. But the idea of creating an eternal avatar
of yourself, we're not trying to create like the Clan,
like a very lifelike Clane. We're trying to create something
that offers a very easy interface to access those memories.
I'm glad if it's going to be very clear that
that's not a copy of the person. Thank you to
(14:28):
Tim Wilson for allowing us to use clips from quite
the Fear Handling Stage right. You can find more from
him at Speaking Quick Tips dot blogspot dot com. And
thank you to Lauren Vogelbaum, Ben Bolan and Raquel willis
for bearing your public speaking souls. The Stuff of Life
is written and co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original
(14:50):
music and sound design is by co producer Noel Brown,
and editorial oversight is provided by Head of production Jerry Rowland.
You can send your thoughts to us at the Stuff
of Life at how stuff works dot com, and you
can visit our Facebook page, The Stuff of Life, where
we'll post some outtakes from our round table speaking of
(15:10):
This is what happened when we put Ben on the
spot and asked him to freestyle. Yeah, I'll free style
if you want, if you give me a word bird?
All right? Uh? I asked for a word and the
word was bird. It's crazy how people confuse gold with turds.
I've got that Mina's touch. I give minus every time
(15:32):
people come to me like what's up? Look? I eat
people on more on the hard
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