On Public Speaking and Healing
After I wrote about my traumatic relationship with public speaking — fails leading to shame, shame leading to worse fails— a friend of mine asked me a question:
When was the exact moment I started feeling shame?
As a little kid, I don’t actually recall having any concrete notions of shame, and that’s how I could fall off the stage and get up right away to finish the speech. I didn’t know better.
But when DID shame get control over me?
After some searching, I managed to trace it back to one specific moment: an improv performance workshop in junior high, when I was still a nervous newcomer to the school.
I was assigned to perform with all the cool kids. Ours was an international school, so this was the United Nations of cool kids — beautiful and popular people from all over.
And when my turn came, I froze. In the worst way possible.
I just stood there, all blank, for several minutes. My improv partner, this blonde, popular American boy, looked at me with a mix of panic and disdain — I can still recall nearly every twitch of his facial muscle, every curl in his dirty-blonde hair, as he yelled at me to say something.
The others didn’t openly mock me, but they had a look of amusement that was even worse.
And I felt so, so ashamed.
I knew I had effed up every chance there was to make friends with the cool kids, and I stuck myself with the “loser” label faster than any of them could.
From that day forward, any time I had to do anything in public — be it a speech or musical performance — my body would be paralyzed with pain, especially in bowel and brain.
I didn’t have a way to rationalize it — citing some biological or psychological principles. I just knew how I felt: terrified. I wanted to run away, but that simply doubled the shame, because now I was a coward too.
And yet I still ran away. Repeatedly.
Once, I even hid in a bathroom for an hour just to escape a presentation. I ran in there, turned off all the lights, and wondered wtf was wrong with me.
I never told my family this, but at one point I thought about ending my own life, because if I wasn’t able to function normally in life and work, then what’s the point of going on?
Before this post takes too dark a turn, let’s fast forward to today.
Today, I speak for a living. I’ve worked with presidents, mayors, and CEOs on how to communicate. And I regularly run workshops w/ roomfuls of executives, holding the room in full control.
What the hell happened?
Well, healing happened.
Healing
Only in retrospect do I see that all the pain public humiliation caused me, all the trauma… they got healed.
How? It didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t a specific instance. It took years.
And two things in particular made it happen:
- I started working for a professor — Professor YT Lee, the first Taiwanese to win the Nobel Prize (for chemistry), but more importantly, a leader of infinite kindness who gave me nothing but encouragement. When I screwed up, all he ever said was: “You did good, keep going.”
- I joined Toastmasters — an odd community of people who met every week or two to practice public speaking, but more importantly, gave each other nothing but kindness and encouragement. When you freeze on stage or lose your wits, all people ever say is: “Don’t worry about it, happens to the best of us! Keep going.”
See the common thread?
My early trauma with public performance didn’t come from me freezing on stage or effing up. It came from people’s reaction to it. It was the disdain I saw on their face that shamed me. The fact that it came from the “cool kids” hurt all the more.
When I got out of school and started working, it kept happening. When I messed up at events, my superiors would look at me with disdain and literally say: “Wtf is wrong with you? I’m not sure I want to work with you anymore.”
And you know what? I agreed with them. They’re smart people, right? If they said that to me, it must mean I’m not capable, I’m not worthy, and people really don’t want to work with me.
I felt like dirt. Worthless.
Then, by pure chance, I went into a different world, a new environment. In this new world, when I messed up, people smiled at me with kindness and said: “Nah it’s all good, we know you’re capable, keep trying.”
And that was all.
Just simple, human kindness, repeated over years. That’s what healed me — a years-long flywheel of human kindness.
You know the saying that “compounding” is the 8th wonder of the world? Well, it’s not just interest rates that compound on itself, shame and low self-confidence too.
Thankfully, so does kindness.
The kindness that people showed me compounded on itself. It gave me the space to believe just a little bit more in myself every day.
That I could speak to people… could do it well… could do it well on a big stage… could help other people do it… could help other people do it so well, they achieved what they couldn’t before…
Today, whenever I’m coaching startups or corporate executives, I insist on kindness, and I never judge.
And the reason couldn’t be simpler.
Kindness is what healed me. Kindness is the reason I’m alive.
