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| Photo by Tuur Tisseghem from Pexels |
(for
the introduction, see the preceding article on this blog)
Causes
of fear of public speaking
There
are various causes for the fear of public speaking.
·
Someone
has experienced traumatic events during childhood or adolescence. Others made
fun of you while you were speaking, interrupted you frequently or characterized
you as an inept speaker in general.
·
Maybe
you had a role model that was afraid of public speaking himself or herself,
like one of your parents.
·
Your
overall personality makes you avoid larger gatherings of people.
Here
is my personal theory.
Most
of us do most things, including speaking, on autopilot. When we meet with
relatives, friends and colleagues, we do not consciously think about how we are
speaking (and moving, sitting). We just do it more or less automatically. In
public speaking, the situation itself does not allow us to function on
autopilot anymore: because it is not familiar enough, because we become aware
that others have expectations of us.
Now
we need to speak in a conscious manner. We need to assemble each sentence
consciously. The problem is that we feel incompetent in doing that. It is like
if, somewhere in the future, people will have become accustomed to self-driving
cars, and, after years of usage, they are asked to pass a driving test where
they will need to drive the car manually.
From
this follows, that if we want to overcome our fear of public speaking, we need
to regain conscious control over how we produce our sentences.
Many
of us apply the opposite strategy. They memorize their entire speech. Or they
try. Because those who memorize are often those who fail most bitterly. Due to
my theory above, at a certain point, the outside stimulation will be too much,
so that their automatic process of reproducing their memorized speech fails:
they forget special keywords and do not know how to continue at all.
Techniques
and strategies
Before
we move on to more specific techniques, I cannot emphasize enough the
importance of practicing improvised phrase and sentence construction. This will
give you a flexibility in paraphrasing in the moment, when you forget a word,
or when you want to react spontaneously do something in the room. Here are some
examples of what you can do:
1.
Find
accidental words in the dictionary, and improvise 10 sentences that contain the
respective word.
2.
Focus
on one phrase or sentence from a text (anything goes: a book, newspaper
article, publicity, instruction manual, food packaging, etc.) and read it aloud
repeatedly, replacing one word each time.
3.
Take
one sentence and try to transform this sentence into other structures and
grammatical tenses.
Examples
for English:
1.
Fairy
tales. I never enjoyed fairy tales. Children like fairy tales. Politicians tell
us fairy tales. It is often difficult to differentiate fairy tales from
reality. What are the key characteristics of fairy tales? Etc.
2.
Societies
are generally built upon mythologies: Large corporations are generally built
upon mythologies. Families are generally built upon mythologies. Political parties
are generally built upon mythologies. Cohesive teams are generally built upon
mythologies. Etc.
3.
Societies
are generally built upon mythologies. Are societies generally built upon
mythologies? Why are societies generally built upon mythologies? Do you know
whether societies are generally built upon mythologies? Societies will
generally be built upon mythologies. Etc.
Record
yourself with your smartphone will doing this, and listen to your voice.
(to be continued)
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Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg
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