"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 . . . and Beyond
As a child I was inordinately shy. I am sure if you know me, dear reader, as you read this you are falling on the floor laughing. Those who are familiar with my personality would use phrases like “never meets a stranger,” “will talk you to death,” “extroverted beyond belief,” “talks until you feel you are in a hostage situation.”
Those are all true, but I can assure you—nay, I can take a sacred oath—that as a child I was shy. It seemed to be mitigated by each year that passed, but in high school I was very talkative and tried to be funny only around my inner circle of friends. To the “cool” people I would clam up. And when I had to give a book report I would not eat before that class, I would become highly nervous to the point of feeling like passing out, and I would pray for a bolt of lightning to relieve me from my agony.
This is NOT overstatement, it is a pure recording of FACT--I was that nervous. They say fear of death is not the number one fear of the American public, nay, it is public speaking. I am a living example of this. I can only tell you that transforming myself into the extrovert that I am now took backbreaking work and the nerve of a lion tamer. It is harrowing, spine tingling, onerous, exhausting, tedious, scary WORK.
I can also attest unequivocally that I know I am an EXTROVERT. I have clear proof as I have taken the Myers Briggs testing process on three different occasions and have scores that are akin to an alien’s. Our particular work group agreed to take this test and divulge our personal data so as to form a more efficient work team.
I shall never forget the day that we sat at a large table and in round robin fashion reported our particular results of this instrument that measured our personality preferences. It started quite innocently with people giving their 4-letter type and the attendant score for each category-- Introversion or Extroversion, Sensing or Intuition, Thinking or Feeling, Judging or Perceiving.
The first few people gave scores something like 1, 5, 7, and 6, and 3, 7, 5, and 8 and 9, 4, 6 and 10, and so it went until we were halfway through the group revelations. By this time a faint mist of perspiration began to cover my forehead. Surely I was in a time warp or the middle of a bad dream for my scores only showed to me what must be the profile of a mutant—35, 37, 60 and 65. I quickly looked to see how close I was to an exit as a quick escape would save me from being institutionalized or at the very least being laughed at by my coworkers.
The short end of this work story is that my boss was a bona fide instructor in this area and feared that I had not understood the process. In other words I “thought too long about the answer, which should just be a knee jerk, quick response,” and thus had such erroneous high scores. The upshot being that I took the test three times--always revealing roughly the same scores. (By the way, each time the most recently published, different, test booklet was used so as not to skew the results.)
So, it was official. I was a mutant after all and I had done it to myself. How? I had one day decided to abandon the Land of the Fraidy Cats, and become a person who could speak before a crowd. After all, I had seen my father speak before others very successfully and felt that in addition to his honesty and knowledge as a law officer, it did not hurt that he acquitted himself beautifully in the public speaking arena.
What followed was a brutal number of years where I forced myself to take speech or speech and drama courses until it seemed I had gotten up before the entire state of Georgia. I kept this up through high school, college and into my career until I one day found myself in a huge auditorium with two large movie cameras running and beaming my part in a televised program to all our facilities in the agency. For that one I had a slight flutter from one or two left over butterflies, but basically I had beaten my phobia. I felt like Rocky on those steps in Philadelphia as he celebrated victory.
The thing that brought all this to mind was watching Colin Firth portray King George VI to Geoffrey Rush’s Lionel Logue, the real life speech teacher who helped the king with his problem of stuttering. I know that some who watched The King‘s Speech thought that the king’s fear of public speaking was exaggerated. I can assure you that I believe it was most authentic. I could recall such trepidation up from my past very quickly and had only sympathy for the troubled monarch.
If you share my former concern you can also break this chain of fear. All it takes is practice, practice, and more practice until you have slain that particular dragon. You can do it. But be careful not to overdo.
I am told by friends and family that I speak or strike up a conversation with everybody I meet. Alas, it is true. I guess like Dr. Frankenstein when he got crazy in the lab, I have transformed myself into something totally different from what I once was. But it’s all good—I never meet a stranger, I learn many human interest stories as I stand in checkout lines, and I even make a new friend here and there. And I am cured, that is the most important thing—no more a shrinking violet.
There is also an added bonus that my husband pointed out. He felt that he did not have to worry if I found myself in a hostage situation. His theory was that after 45 minutes to an hour, I would be returned unharmed. I would be unloaded so to speak, from whence I was kidnapped because no kidnapper wants to deal with a person who was “vaccinated with a phonograph needle,” as he put it.