| It's normal to have anxiety about public speaking. It's also within reach of most to overcome it. I think taking meds for it is not a good practice at all. It's important to distinguish the fear you may have of speaking in front of people from the fear you may have of presenting incorrect material. If you're giving an instructional speech about a practice/process that's well known with zero controversy, and which you are very familiar with, do you still have anxiety? That's a different breed of anxiety than when you are postulating in front of a crowd of peers about fringe techniques that you may harbor doubts about yourself (a new way to do a process, or a change to the accepted standard, or a new interpretation of history, etc). It's important to distinguish what's causing the anxiety because the fix is different for these two issues. For the latter, it's building confidence in your own preparation and learning. Do you know what you're talking about? Could you put it on paper and publish it and not look like a jackass? If so, carry on. For the former - like you just get anxiety from talking in front of people even about material that is uncontroversial - the key is kind of a mind trick on yourself. For me, I try to find some aspect of the topic that I really love and enjoy, and am fascinated by. If I can do that, my mind is focused on giving and sharing that fascination, and all anxiety goes away. That said, I started speaking publicly in high school as part of Academic Decathlon - speech competitions and the like. I remember being anxious about doing that in the same way I would be anxious about a school musical. As a kid, overcoming that and just doing it is the first step to learning how to enjoy it. I highly recommend that parents expose their kids to this early - school plays, speech competitions - if they have the opportunity to do so. With most skills in life, exposure to it as a kid helps greatly. As an adult, I look back on those younger days about stressing over a two-minute speech with some amusement. Now I have zero problem talking for 40+ minutes. It's not something I every worked up to like reps of an exercise, it's just the relatively simple trick of falling in love with subject matter and having confidence that you know the material and have seen a thing or two that gives you some authority (road mileage) on the topic. Probably also advantageous as an adult to recognize that EVERYBODY out there in the world is fundamentally a hack in life, just trying to get by day-by-day, the same as you, wanting to understand things and for people to treat them with dignity. Speaking is serving - think of it that way and (for me at least) anxiety goes away. |
Public speaking was always difficult for me. For me the anxiety never truly goes away. That is why I really likes Martin’s post.