Fear of Public Speaking – View from a Professional Public Speaking Coach
Apr 17th, 2008 by Pete Miller
I believe that a blog should be controversial and of course always interesting and I think that you will find my take as a professional public speaking coach on the fear of public speaking fulfils both criteria.
I have noticed through the Google alerts that I receive that the topic of the fear of public speaking is featured in about 90% of the posts on public speaking. Obviously this is on the minds of people.
What I find strange is that as a professional public speaking coach, and I have been doing this for almost 15 years, that it is very rare that I came up against this fear of public speaking. I can think of one case in my 15 years as a coach. Her fear of public speaking was definitely caused by an incident where a teacher at school had told her to sit down and shut up, and she took it on board. She had risen very high in her career because she’s very good at what she does. Due to this she kept getting asked to speak at functions. And she did a couple, and she felt terrible, and she said, “Pete, you have to help me,”. I just dug a little bit deeper and found out within a couple of minutes what it was and we wrote that teacher a letter. A metaphorical letter if you like, we didn’t actually write it and post it, but I said, “What would you say to this teacher if you could see her now.” She said, “This, this and this,” and it was all gone. So this issue about fear of public speaking, if it is an issue, it’s a very insignificant issue. It’s very small. And anybody who knows anything about public speaking will realize that it should be not be made into a bigger issue than it is.
I dispute that this fear of public speaking exists as I think that as a professional public speaking coach I should come across this a lot more often if it was a major issue.
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