Member-only story
How I Overcame My Fear of Public Speaking
And how you can do it too, if you set your mind to it.
Picture this: you are attending a workshop. You are sitting in a room with twenty people, most of which you haven’t met before. The facilitator opens by saying,
“Before we get started, let’s go around the table and have everyone introduce themselves.”
After gazing around the room, in a way that reminds you of the Eye of Sauron, he casually stops at you. The physical reaction is immediate. Your heart starts pumping faster, and you feel how your face turns red. For what feels like an eternity, you sit there, paralyzed.
Until he smiles and says, “I can go first.”
Enter Glossophobia — Fear of Public Speaking
That used to be me. Everything from short introductions to speaking in front of a small group of people made my legs shake and hands tremble. Speaking in front of an audience was almost unthinkable. I was one of those who claim that they would rather take a bullet to the head than to do public speaking, and I meant it.
Luckily enough, I didn’t have to do a lot of that as a young software engineer. While I managed to do what was required of me in terms of holding training sessions and the odd presentation, I always loathed it.
Instead of dealing with my social anxiety, I justified my reluctance to address it by telling myself that my core skills were designing and coding — not to be an overconfident, loud-mouthed sales guy.
At the same time, I knew that this inability to express myself posed a severe career impediment.
It’s hard to pitch your ideas and create buy-in with peers and stakeholders without the ability to command a room.
Let alone to be perceived as a thought-leader and an authority.
I was utterly convinced that qualities like the ability to persuade and speak in public were traits one was born with. Either you had them, or you didn’t.
I was wrong. Both are skills that can be learned.
