Moneynomist “Seize the Advantage” Series of Workshops: Establishing the Speaker Persona

The following article is expanded from points based on my slide notes for my 40-minute workshop, “Establishing the Speaker Persona”, conducted as part of club speechcraft programmes.  This is part of the wider Moneynomist “Seize the Advantage” programme, along with Eric Tan Shi Wei, Gerald Yong Kim Heong, Margrette Lo Foong Quan, Oh Cheng Kok, and Zhuo Shu Zhen.  The Moneynomist team is from AIA Toastmasters Club, and are all past presidents. 

How we define things sets the parameters of our understanding.  Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali at-Tusi (r.a.), the Persian philosopher and theologian once said that before we speak of a cup, it is important to know what a cup is.  Even when we speak to people who use the same language that we do, there is still that chance of misunderstanding.  We come into any conversation with the baggage of our experiences, and we view things through the prism of our level of understanding, shaped by history, by education, by our role in the relationship. 

In this case, public speaking is not merely talking to a crowd, but addressing them on a specific topic or subject matter, putting forward a cogent, coherent argument, for or against, a contention.  We will not be covering the elements of an effective speech here.  We will address, only, the fear of speaking in public, and how we address that psychological barrier. 

The fear of public speaking is so common that it has a name: glossophobia.  Glossophobia, otherwise known as speech anxiety, is derived from the Greek, “glossa” (γλῶσσα), meaning “tongue”, and “phobos” (φόβος), meaning “fear” or even “dread”.  Some people have this specific phobia, while others may also have broader social phobia or social anxiety disorder.  It is important for us to name our fears, define them, and then break them down, so that we can conquer them.  Otherwise, we are dealing with nameless terrors.  It is like watching any monster movie.  Once the monster is revealed, it is defined, and is, somehow, less terrifying. 

It is estimated that at least 75% of the average sample of people have this fear.  That is more than people with arachnophobia, fear of spiders; thanatophobia, the fear of death; and acrophobia, fear of heights.  If you are afraid of public speaking, you are not alone.  People around you have that fear, and it means you have a natural support network. 

We now consider the elements of glossophobia: the physiology, the psychology, the environment, and finally the lack of skills and experience.  We break it down, and address these elements individually. 

Fear has an effect on our body, and how it reacts.  This is part of the fight or flight stimulus we all have.  In times past, when our ancestors were afraid, the nervous system shut down the higher cognitive functions, and boosted our immune system.  When we could not think, there was no need to consider the consequences of certain acts, such as charging into a wall of spears, or facing a sabre-toothed cat on a hunt.  Our sense of pain was dampened, our vision narrowed its field to focus on the immediate threat, and our breathing hyperventilated to bring more oxygen to the lungs. 

At a genetic level, it has been hypothesised that fears are inherited.  This is the field of epigenetics.  Dr. Brian Dias of Emory University conducted an experiment with mice using the aroma of acetophenone, a chemical whose sweet smell reminds people of almonds.  He repeatedly let them sniff the chemical, then gave them mild electric shocks, until the mice learned that the smell was a sign that something bad was about to happen.  A generation later, the offspring of that first group of mice also reacted in fear at the smell of acetophenone, even though they had never experienced an electric shock themselves.  And their own offspring, now two generations removed from the shock experiment, also inherited a fear of the distinctive smell. 

We could hypothesis, for example, that if your ancestor had a near drowning experience, you could have aquaphobia.  If someone in your lineage was bitten by a snake, and there was extreme trauma, you may have irrational ophidiophobia even if you have never actually seen a live snake.  In that same vein, some of us have had ancestors who lived through some violent, traumatic periods of history.  This would make explain the increased sense of social anxiety in the current generation.  You have the enhanced instinct to fight or take flight, but social conditions are not conducive to that, so it builds up in you. 

In this age, unless you about to enter a physical confrontation, whether a fight or a game, this is not helpful.  We need to reset that physiology.  Paradoxically, or perhaps not, for some people, it helps to exercise regularly.  You need to get it out of that system.  A sedentary lifestyle makes sedentary activities more challenging.  Exercise is really good for you. 

There are, among us, those who generally experience higher anxiety across different situations, and this is exacerbated when it comes to public speaking as well.  For others, the anxiety is limited to public speaking only, but the physiological signs of fear because they anticipate, they prepare, and they perform in public are similar.  And then there are people who have anxiety sensitivity, the fear of fear.  For them, in addition to worrying about public speaking, they worry about their anxiety of public speaking.  We need to cut that cycle out. 

In addition to exercise, for many speakers, even experienced ones, it helps to get into a mental zone.  They meditate, they practice breathing techniques, they have a routine to prepare the mind for a cerebral challenge, rather than a physical one.  This means learning to control our breathing, lowering our heart rate, and reducing tension in our muscles.  We are going out there to move the audience, not beat them up, and run away. 

The first thing to do, is breathe deeply.  Whenever you feel that rising tide of panic, stop, breathe deeply a few times, exhale slowly.  This resets the brain, and allows your cognitive functions to flow.  You can now think.  If you are on stage, resist the urge to pace; you want to lower your heart rate, not raise it.  Carry yourself straight, and do not slump.  Do not look at the ground or away; it tells the voices in your head that there is something to fear, and the cycle of fear repeats.  If looking in people’s eyes is difficult, then look at the point on their forehead just above the eyes. 

For newer speakers, or speakers who are addressing a large audience in an unfamiliar environment for the first time, it is good practice to come early, familiar yourself with the stage, the floor, but most of all, the people.  Make friends in the audience.  When you speak, look for these friendly faces.  Failing this, plant friends in the audience.  And if you want people to support you, support them. 

The next point to address is the psychology of public speaking, people’s beliefs.  Too often, people overestimate the stakes involved when communicating their ideas, their thoughts, and their positions to others.  Unless you are delivering a policy speech with global stakes, or advocating at the murder trial of your father, nothing much is going to happen.  In most cases, there are no real stakes, unless you say something very offensive or very stupid, and that is, in itself, an achievement. 

Some psychological theories distinguish between performance orientation and communication orientation.  Performance orientation is to view public speaking as something that requires special skills, and you imagine the role of the audience is to judge how good you are.  In contrast, communication orientation is to think that the primary focus is on the expressing your ideas, the art of rhetoric.  The objective of communication focus is to communicate with the audience in the manner you would speak at any social function.  In the former, you are focus on the imaginary judgement, whereas in the latter, you understand that this is about telling your side of the story, and you focus on it. 

This is easily addressed when we recognise that we do this all the time, when we banter with our friends; when we joke with our colleagues; when we passionately explain why we support our favourite sports team, and why the referee is an idiot.  Every moment of airtime is, in fact, a form of public speaking.  We are merely expanding the audience when we go on that stage, real or metaphorical. 

The root of this is your lack of confidence, your own negative view of your ability, your hero’s journey, your sense of self.  There are people out there who will diminish us, dismiss us, disenfranchise us; we do not need to do that for them.  One of the things you do is learn to be more assertive.  We begin by fooling ourselves into it, until it begins a reality.  I want you to practice looking into the mirror.  Note the way you stand, the way you move, the way you sit.  Cultivate the habit of keeping your back straight.  Cultivate the habit of looking straight, and looking into people’s eyes. 

The third way is called cognitive reframing.  We do this by having a conversation with ourselves, and be aware of the voices within.  Find a quiet place, before you have to speak, and look inside.  Your thoughts will be floating around.  Some of them, or for many of you, most of them, would be negative – you are not good enough, you are boring, you are nothing.  Silence these voices.  Focus on the ideas you have, your hopes, your dreams, the affirmation of your abilities and achievements.  If you feel you do not have enough, build a world in your head where you do.  This is your hero’s journey, and you are going to save the day.  People do not spend enough time building themselves up. 

In essence, you are teaching yourself to recognise public speaking as a non-threatening event that you can learn to handle and excel in, you are telling yourself that your thoughts have value, you are believing in yourself before others. 

Thirdly, we must recognise that some people are anxious because of the environment, the social circumstances.  This is related to the previous point about worth.  In essence, you are convinced that you are not good enough to be there.  This must be disabused immediately. 

The first hurdle is the lack of experience.  Lack of experience should be views as potential, not a hindrance.  People are uncertain of themselves because they lack experience, imagining that experience itself would fix that anxiety.  It will not, if the underlying contentions have not been addressed.  That will be replaced with the weight of undue expectations. 

People tend to be anxious because they fear judgement.  Again, this requires a mindset change.  We must learn to take the good, and leave the bad.  Not every opinion matters, not every person is an authority.  Rather, we should welcome this as an opportunity to be better, to be affirmed. 

People tend to be anxious when they perceive a status difference.  This is particularly so in hierarchical settings, such as in the military, and in companies.  Firstly, we must recognise that people want to be aggrandised, elevated, recognised.  We acknowledge the status, and then we focus on the message.  As long as we are focusing on the message and the subject matter, we are not thinking about the difference in status. 

People are anxious when they have to share new ideas, especially when it is theirs, and they feel their credibility is tied to it.  There is no shame in having ideas.  There is only shame in having no ideas and not trying.  This is addressed by preparation and homework.  When we are prepared, we are less anxious.  When we are well prepared, we tend to be quietly confident.  This, we have power over. 

People are anxious when they have to present to an unfamiliar audience, or an unusually large one.  Again, we apply what we have mentioned above, from preparing the ground, to preparing ourselves.  The audience may change, but people are essentially the same, and eminently quantifiable and predictable. 

A different cognitive approach here would be engaging in a paradigm shift, from being evaluated to being a person of value, and a source of learning and knowledge.  Before others recognise our value, we need to recognise ours first so that it will show.  This paradigm shift relieves you of the pressure of how you will come across, and focuses you on how to best get your message across. 

The last real factor that contributes to our fear of public speaking is our competency, and how authoritative we come across on the subject matter, our credibility.  Regardless of how good we may consider ourselves as public speakers, we must focus on our skills, our delivery, our knowledge, our ability to connect. 

There are two sets of skills here.  The first, and that involves personal study, is mastery of the subject matter.  For new speakers, the easiest subject matter is themselves.  We are the authorities of ourselves, our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our triumphs, our hurts, our pains, our loves, our hates.  No one walks in our shoes.  No one can gainsay us.  No one is a better authority of us.  Speaking of ourselves gives us confidence. 

The second set of skills is the art of rhetoric, and that is my personal passion.  This is the judicious deployment of rhetorical devices to bring the audience to your side, and move them.  In other workshops, I have covered those in great detail, so I will not go into them at some depth here.  Real language is the art of using words and sounds as a bridge, otherwise, we are not communicating, merely making noise.  This skill can only be mastered through practice, apprenticeship, and then more practice. 

A public speaking appearance is the culmination of the process of putting forward our ideas, our positions, to seek understanding and support.  It is an opportunity to not just be heard, but understood.  It is a validation of who we are, and it is a life skill for all of us.  In time, with practice, it becomes normal. 

Coming back to glossophobia, fear is not necessarily bad.  Debilitating fear is unhelpful.  Fear itself is a great driver.  It is about using that fear.  Whether you work on your physiological and psychological responses to fear, your view of yourself as a speaker, or your intent of public speaking, the more experience you get, the more confidence you will acquire, the more self-belief you will gain.  It is imperative, then, for us all to find and create opportunities to speak, this airtime.  And in all that, to have no fear of failure.  Failure is an opportunity to be better. 

The most effective solution to overcoming this fear is the Toastmasters programme.  Toastmasters is an environment where we can fail, and fail spectacularly, so that we can learn to be better in the real world, which is less forgiving.  In Toastmasters, we generally speak for around five to seven minutes.  This is because that is the average attention span of people.  We have formal evaluations of speeches for around three minutes, because that is the average tolerance for criticism.  We have table topics to practice speaking in impromptu situations.  Most importantly however, is finding the correct mentor or mentors, and imbibing the skills of rhetoric. 

This programme is about tackling glossophobia in a structured, a systematic, a methodical manner, to remove the mystery of speaking in public, to eviscerate the fear of failure, and to elevate ourselves.  It is about building us to who we are. 

Finally, we must address something a bit more advanced than what is normally addressed in Toastmasters.  That is the concept of persona.  When we go on that stage, as an accomplished speaker, or in our journey to becoming one, we wear a mask, just as we wear masks all the time.  In this case, it is the speaker persona. 

The speaker persona is to channel the thoughts, feelings, ideas of the audience, and to move them to the position we want to, brining them on a narrative journey, and making them feel that they are walking in our shoes, feeling what we feel, thinking what we think, and believing, all that time, that this is also their journey.  When we can do this, we have achieved a moment of immortality, because we have made the audience aware that they are part of something greater than themselves.  That is the culmination of public speaking. 

In summary, this fear of public speaking is measureable, definable, understandable.  Once we have removed the mystery of it, we have gone some way towards addressing that fear.  From there, we can work on building that persona to communicate effectively, and speak with authority.  Like anything, it is a skill.  Unlike most skills, this is the basis of who we are as a species.