Presentation Tips

Glossophobia- a Sticking Point for Presenters, Who Are You?

(by E.J. Huh, a Professional Presentation Specialist at Good Pello & Senior Consultant at Kairos Partners)

Not long ago, I happened to come across an interesting article in a newspaper. It was an article about a survey conducted by Chapman University in U.S. towards Americans in year 2015; the main purpose of the survey was finding out the objects that Americans fear the most. Total 1541 people living in the entire U.S. have participated in the survey and the participants was asked to mark the level of fear towards the 88 elements given in the list of fears covering total 10 domains. (refer to Table 1)

<Table 1>

Ref.) Chapman University Survey on American Fears 2015 (https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2015/10/13/americas-top-fears-2015/)

As a person who has been giving lectures on Presentations for years, I became very curious about the ranking these people living in the modern society of year 2015 have placed for ‘public speaking’. Cutting to the result first, 28.4% of the participants have marked ‘very afraid’ or ‘afraid’ on ‘public speaking’ resulting it to rank the 26th out of total 88 fears. For your reference, Government’s corruption ranked the top having 58% of participants answering ‘very afraid’ or ‘afraid’, the ‘cyber terrorism’ ranked 2nd with 44.8%, ‘corporate tracking of personal information’ ranked the 3rd with 44.6% and ‘terrorist attacks’ ranked the 4th with 44.4%. If we take a closer look into the rankings, it turns out that people feel more fear on ‘public speaking’ than earthquake, flood, gun control, unemployment and etc. Considering the fact that ‘public speech’ ranked the 26th, which falls under high rank, out of all these fearsome and frightful fear elements, I believe the American’s fear toward public speaking is bigger than I thought. Limiting the fear domain to personal anxieties brings more interesting results; public speaking ranked the 2nd out of elements that are horrid and frightening just by looking at it, such as reptiles, insects, needles and etc. (refer to table 2).

<Table 2>

Ref.) Chapman University Survey on American Fears 2015 (https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2015/10/13/americas-top-fears-2015/)

Glossophobia is a cruel and bitter obstacle that drag down our hopes and desires to give a great presentation or speech.
 
Then, why aren’t we free from glossophobia?
 
You have probably experienced your body shaking, getting stiff and your voice quivering slightly many times when you are standing in front of people. The phenomenon like this is very natural body reactions. In general when people are placed in a dangerous volatile situation, the sympathetic nerves of our body rapidly rush adrenalin, and as a result heart, starts to bounce, breathe gets faster and body gets stiff. When we are in a situation like public speaking, where many people are only focuses on me, our body starts to rush adrenalin and embarrassing body reactions like mentioned above start to appear as if we are in a dangerous situation. In another words, these reactions occur not because I am not as good as other people and lack in skills, but rather it can happen to anyone – anyone can experience these kind of anxiousness and fear in front of a large group of people. For those who blame oneself and experience frustration watching oneself getting nervous everything being in front of people, wouldn’t knowing this be a way to overcome the fear at last by looking at oneself with a more tranquil heart? A famous novelist ‘Mark Twain’ said, “There are two types of speech-makers; one who gets nervous and one who tells a like that s/he doesn’t get nervous.” His saying gives a considerable comfort to ordinary people like us.

Besides these natural body reactions, we can find the reasons for fearing public speaking from our mental attitudes. I meet various types of speakers(presenters) when I am out for lectures in companies and organizations. Among them, those who appeal relatively more fears towards public speaking are usually people with perfectionism. Perfectionists find peace of mind if things go as they’d planned and designed, but get easily very nervous if they make even a little mistake. These type of speakers end up making more mistakes brooding on what has happened, if they make small mistakes like stuttering or saying wrong words and etc. In addition, a sense of inferiority- believing oneself as one who is bad at public speaking, can cause s/he to continuously feel fear on public speaking. These type of people self-judge themselves that their physical appearance, voice, knowledge level and etc. are not as good as others and fear the public speaking itself. We all need to remember that perfectionism and sense of inferiority can all become a factor that makes you to avoid and fear public speaking even more.

For those who are stuck with Glossophobia and don’t know how to cut it loose, I will talk about how to get over glossophobia in my next column.

-To Be Continued…