Public speaking

Phobia is defined as an irrational fear. Public speaking is the phobia suffered by majority of people in the world. Talking is something we all enjoy doing. Look at the people who gossip, how animated and involved they become. When we gossip, we get fully involved in the content, mind and emotions become one and we forget time.

Both the forms of speaking – gossiping and public speaking – are more or less same. There is an important content, flow of language and engaging the listener by captivating his or her attention. And there is only one minor difference and that is the number of people listening. In gossiping, the number is few and in public speaking it is many.

Then why are we afraid of one and attracted to the other? The primary function of our brain is to protect us and make sure that we survive well and produce children for the next generation. And our brain for most part got hard wired when we were living in the forest which was extremely hostile. Human being is a pack animal that we lived in group and went for hunting in a group and cultivated land in a group. So for an individual, his status in the group is utmost important. If he is ridiculed or laughed at, then his position in the group will be very lower and in that precarious situation he will neither get served best food available and he will be neglected by the women of the group. One needs to be in a higher status to attract opposite gender. If dogs are supposed to give a public speech, they also will go through the tension we go through because they are pack animal. But in case cats have to give public speech, they will be cool and chilled out since they live alone and not a pack animal so they give a damn what fellow cats think about him or her.

Since the mind is hard-wired to take care of our survival, it sees the public speaking may harm our status in the group. So it creates a picture of catastrophe when we need to speak in public. It projects that the situation is life and death. In the present world, even though, we know that we will not be thrown out of the society for messing up our speech, and also we know that most are sleeping or day dreaming when we speak, yet the primitive brain start controlling our behavior and we become anxious and depressed.

If you suffer from the phobia called public speaking, you are perfectly normal. It means that you do give lots of weight to other people’s opinion about you. There are few techniques in overcoming this phobia, but my question is why do you want to overcome? It is always good to have few phobias.