Posts Tagged ‘Humiliation’

Public Speaking is the number one fear of our society – but why is that? After all, if we are objective we have to admit that it is not the worst thing that might happen.

Jerry Seinfeld observed that an internet search would reveal that public speaking is the number one fear of our society while death only makes it to number six. It stands to reason then that if you have to go to a funeral it is better to be in the coffin then delivering the eulogy.

Something is out of place here. Should we really be more afraid of speaking than of death – and if I am correct that we have a mis-perception and how did we get this way?

My own situation involves some childhood experiences at public school. When I was about nine my teacher gave my class an assignment. She told us to write a report/project on an animal of our choice.

That was it – write a report on an animal of our choice. No further instruction.

I had never written a report before – actually I could hardly write at all. How was I supposed to write a report if I didn’t know what one was?

I procrastinated and put it off until the day before it was due. I managed to scribble down some unintelligible sentences along with a picture that if you looked at it at just the right angle might have been interpreted as a dog.

I handed it in and hoped that it would be acceptable. Boy, I was glad that was over - what could possibly be worse than a research project? Well I found out soon enough – a research presentation. Yes, not only did I have the stress of having to read and write about a subject with next to no instruction but now I also got to stand up in front of my classmates and tell them what I knew (or didn’t know) about the subject. There was a recipe for humiliation.

Add together the stress of being responsible for the outcome of the presentation without knowing what would make it successful and the potential for humiliation and I got a lot of psychological pain. Now our subconscious learns from nothing better then pain – and it doesn’t matter whether it’s physical or psychological, our subconscious does not like it.
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We often talk about the fear of public speaking but do we stop to think about what we are really afraid of? I would suggest that for most people it is not the act of speaking that is the problem – after all, most of us don’t have a problem speaking. Whether it is talking with one other person or in a group of friends, being afraid is not a common problem – in fact most of us need to stop speaking and listen more..

So if we are not afraid of speaking, then there must be some other component that makes us afraid of “public speaking” – could it be the “public”?

Of course it is – and that confirms that were not really afraid of the speaking component – we’re really afraid of the audience.

But why?

Does the audience have some sort of power or authority over us? Can they make are lives miserable if we fail even in the most minute way? In some cases the answer is a very real “yes” – however those cases are very rare and when they do exist the individuals can usually make our lives miserable whether we fail or not.

In most cases however, it’s something else.

Most of us are afraid of being humiliated?

Humiliated if we are boring, humiliated if we stutter, humiliated if we forget our material for even a second or even humiliated because we can’t figure out what to do with our hands.

But what are the chances of this really happening? We don’t want to answer these questions because we don’t want to face the very real fear – yet it is the unknown that makes it that much more terrifying?
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