I’m trying to understand fear of public speaking, because that’s an emotion I appear to lack entirely.
So if you have it—a little or a lot—can you tell me if it is better when your audience is paying full attention, versus when they’re somewhat distracted, looking somewhere else, versus when they’re not listening at all but looking at their cellphones or something?
What does it feel like when someone is silently looking at you with a blank expression, and how does that feeling change depending on whether you’re speaking?
That’s something I’ve never understood about myself: I’m terrified to ask a passerby for the time of day, or ask a prospective love interest out on a date, or even call to order a pizza, but I have absolutely no problem standing in front of a room of strangers and speak for hours and hours. My suspicion is that it’s a power dynamic issue: when I need to ask something of someone, I’m at a disadvantage, but when a group of people have already been convinced to gather in a room with little choice but to listen to me, I don’t need to be afraid.
Another hypo: it is a confidence issue because you know you are an expert of what you speak about and the audience is interested and how good a presenter you does not matter so much. So you are full of confidence. You know you are giving them a good product, you know they want to buy this product, maybe the packaging is not so good but that is okay.
For the other situations, you don’t know the product is good and you don’t know they want to buy.
Mild fear here, I can talk in groups of people just fine, but I get nervous before and during a presentation (something for which I have taken deliberate steps to get better at).
For me at least, the primary thing that helps is being comfortable with the subject matter. If I feel like I know what I’m talking about and I practiced what I am going to say it usually goes fine (it took some effort to get to this level, btw), but if I feel like I have to bluff my way through everything falls apart real fast. The number of people in the audience and how well I know them both have noticeable effect as well, but what the audience is doing has almost no influence at all.
The one exception to this is asking questions, if I have a good answer to a question my mind switches from presentation mode to conversation mode, which I am, for some reason, much more at ease with. (Note: This doesn’t work on everyone, some people instead get way more nervous, so don’t take this as an encouragement to start asking questions when the presenter seems nervous.)
I had a paralyzing fear of public speaking which I have now mostly overcome. However this was almost entirely anticipatory fear that would go away once I actually started to speak, for example I would lose sleep about teaching a small group, excessively rehearse even for small and relatively unimportant public speaking occasions. My worries were mainly related to performance failure, e.g. that I would lose track of my plan, that I would stammer too badly, that I would suffer momentary anomia and be unable to get past it, or that I would freeze in some other way.
Audience engagement: entirely orthogonal to fear of public speaking at least for me. I may be self-critical later on if the audience isn’t engaged, and may try to adapt on the fly if I notice signs of reduced engagement, but for me the fear is gone as soon as I start talking.
I don’t have much fear of public speaking myself, but I’ll guess that the answer to your question about audience attention depends heavily on whether they’re paying / not paying attention (1) from the outset for reasons that have nothing to do with you, (2) from the outset because of your reputation or appearance or something, or (3) as a result of what you’ve said and done so far. I would expect a public appearance to be maximally traumatic when everyone is initially paying rapt attention, but as you proceed they visibly get bored and stop listening.
I don’t think I have a particularly extreme fear of public speaking, but it certainly makes me feel very nervous. People are investing their time and attention into what you have to say and if you disappoint them, you have a whole room full of people that are immediately allied against you in their distaste for what you provided them in return for that attention.
Disappointing a few people in a crowd of many is nothing. Disappointing the crowd is fucking terrifying.
It’s primarily fear of embarrassment taking the form of something very similar to, if not exactly similar to, anxiety.
Anxiety, judging by the couple of times I’ve experienced it, originates from over-and-behind, is tinted reddish-orange and tastes sharp, and feels somewhat like you’ve consumed too much caffeine (these descriptions may or may not make any sense to you, and may not translate correctly even if they did make sense owing to the subjective nature of emotion) - there’s a need to act, to do -something-, which I think is supposed to express as a feeling to get away from the current location, but may get expressed instead as, for example, a need to pace.
Fear of public speaking is similar, with tinges of yellow and sour—embarrassment, I think. There’s a bit of a leftish direction to it? It expresses more as a need to do nothing, to prevent anything from being done wrong. It provokes a curious mixture of a need to run away and a feeling of being pinned in place and being unable to. When you start talking, the need to “run” pushes into your voice, and you talk too quickly, while the need to do nothing may cause you to stand completely still, doing nothing but speaking.
Fear of public speaking seems only weakly influenced by the audience—it’s an internal experience. Everything will get interpreted according to the internal narrative—people looking at their cell phones are rude if you’re feeling okay, and bored with you and your terrible presentation if you’re still feeling anxious.
People studying you with a blank expression will intensify the feeling of being studied for any mistakes, but how you interpret their expression in the first place will, again, be largely determined by the internal narrative.
I’m trying to understand fear of public speaking, because that’s an emotion I appear to lack entirely.
So if you have it—a little or a lot—can you tell me if it is better when your audience is paying full attention, versus when they’re somewhat distracted, looking somewhere else, versus when they’re not listening at all but looking at their cellphones or something?
What does it feel like when someone is silently looking at you with a blank expression, and how does that feeling change depending on whether you’re speaking?
That’s something I’ve never understood about myself: I’m terrified to ask a passerby for the time of day, or ask a prospective love interest out on a date, or even call to order a pizza, but I have absolutely no problem standing in front of a room of strangers and speak for hours and hours. My suspicion is that it’s a power dynamic issue: when I need to ask something of someone, I’m at a disadvantage, but when a group of people have already been convinced to gather in a room with little choice but to listen to me, I don’t need to be afraid.
Another hypo: it is a confidence issue because you know you are an expert of what you speak about and the audience is interested and how good a presenter you does not matter so much. So you are full of confidence. You know you are giving them a good product, you know they want to buy this product, maybe the packaging is not so good but that is okay.
For the other situations, you don’t know the product is good and you don’t know they want to buy.
Mild fear here, I can talk in groups of people just fine, but I get nervous before and during a presentation (something for which I have taken deliberate steps to get better at).
For me at least, the primary thing that helps is being comfortable with the subject matter. If I feel like I know what I’m talking about and I practiced what I am going to say it usually goes fine (it took some effort to get to this level, btw), but if I feel like I have to bluff my way through everything falls apart real fast. The number of people in the audience and how well I know them both have noticeable effect as well, but what the audience is doing has almost no influence at all.
The one exception to this is asking questions, if I have a good answer to a question my mind switches from presentation mode to conversation mode, which I am, for some reason, much more at ease with. (Note: This doesn’t work on everyone, some people instead get way more nervous, so don’t take this as an encouragement to start asking questions when the presenter seems nervous.)
I had a paralyzing fear of public speaking which I have now mostly overcome. However this was almost entirely anticipatory fear that would go away once I actually started to speak, for example I would lose sleep about teaching a small group, excessively rehearse even for small and relatively unimportant public speaking occasions. My worries were mainly related to performance failure, e.g. that I would lose track of my plan, that I would stammer too badly, that I would suffer momentary anomia and be unable to get past it, or that I would freeze in some other way.
Audience engagement: entirely orthogonal to fear of public speaking at least for me. I may be self-critical later on if the audience isn’t engaged, and may try to adapt on the fly if I notice signs of reduced engagement, but for me the fear is gone as soon as I start talking.
I don’t have much fear of public speaking myself, but I’ll guess that the answer to your question about audience attention depends heavily on whether they’re paying / not paying attention (1) from the outset for reasons that have nothing to do with you, (2) from the outset because of your reputation or appearance or something, or (3) as a result of what you’ve said and done so far. I would expect a public appearance to be maximally traumatic when everyone is initially paying rapt attention, but as you proceed they visibly get bored and stop listening.
I don’t think I have a particularly extreme fear of public speaking, but it certainly makes me feel very nervous. People are investing their time and attention into what you have to say and if you disappoint them, you have a whole room full of people that are immediately allied against you in their distaste for what you provided them in return for that attention.
Disappointing a few people in a crowd of many is nothing. Disappointing the crowd is fucking terrifying.
It’s primarily fear of embarrassment taking the form of something very similar to, if not exactly similar to, anxiety.
Anxiety, judging by the couple of times I’ve experienced it, originates from over-and-behind, is tinted reddish-orange and tastes sharp, and feels somewhat like you’ve consumed too much caffeine (these descriptions may or may not make any sense to you, and may not translate correctly even if they did make sense owing to the subjective nature of emotion) - there’s a need to act, to do -something-, which I think is supposed to express as a feeling to get away from the current location, but may get expressed instead as, for example, a need to pace.
Fear of public speaking is similar, with tinges of yellow and sour—embarrassment, I think. There’s a bit of a leftish direction to it? It expresses more as a need to do nothing, to prevent anything from being done wrong. It provokes a curious mixture of a need to run away and a feeling of being pinned in place and being unable to. When you start talking, the need to “run” pushes into your voice, and you talk too quickly, while the need to do nothing may cause you to stand completely still, doing nothing but speaking.
Fear of public speaking seems only weakly influenced by the audience—it’s an internal experience. Everything will get interpreted according to the internal narrative—people looking at their cell phones are rude if you’re feeling okay, and bored with you and your terrible presentation if you’re still feeling anxious.
People studying you with a blank expression will intensify the feeling of being studied for any mistakes, but how you interpret their expression in the first place will, again, be largely determined by the internal narrative.