How to Conquer an Introvert’s Fear and Loathing of Public Speaking
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the stage
Many of us dislike public speaking. But an outright fear of it isn’t as common as you might think, despite the popularity of throwing around an estimate that 75 percent of us suffer from speech anxiety. Approximately 7 percent of the global population deals with some sort of anxiety disorder (although this varies wildly by country), and speech anxiety is a subset of that.
But it is true that public speaking is by far the most common fear for people who actually have social phobia (91 to 97 percent fear it). That means in the United States alone, approximately 20 million people are struggling with this fear of public speaking! Believe it or not, that includes people like Warren Buffet and others you’d have a hard time imagining being nervous on stage. They experience nausea, panic attacks, and sleepless nights before events.
If you’re one of these people (like I was), for most of your life you try to escape any situation that requires speaking in front of a group. With a few rare exceptions, I avoided public speaking until I was almost 40 years old. When forced to present to an audience, I felt those familiar butterflies in the stomach, my chest would tighten, my breathing became shallow, my…
