Facing the audience Michał Moroz

There’s an image in front of me. An image of Ancient Rome. That’s where great orators such as Julius Caesar, Cato or Cicero defended their views in the Roman Senate, persuading others to their argument. But none of them died of old age in their own bed. With that image in my mind I imagine the worst conceivable consequences of public speaking. Death, mutilation, exile. I’d never wish that to anybody.

But if no one is going to start a fist fight with me because of what I’ve said, then there’s nothing to worry, isn’t it? So why… there lingers this strange fear of public speaking?

Michał Moroz and the participants of the Toastmasters International – Speakers of Łódź meeting, 28th July 2020. Translations available in: Polish.

Much can be said on the topic of public speaking. It’s an act connected with a certain fear. It’s very useful to ask oneself a question: what are the causes of this fear? It’s not so trivial to find a useful answer to this question. Can you even verbalise, what causes the biggest fear related to public speaking in you?

If you are able to give a clear, concise answer on that matter, you have most likely been pondering on this dilemma for some time now. And it’s such an important subject to familiarize oneself with this fear. I, too, am very curious as to the nature of the fear of public speaking. That’s why on the 28th July 2020, with that dilemma in mind, I conducted a Toastmasters meeting in the Speakers of Łódź club. The attendees have diverse experiences with regard to public speaking and I was positive I would gain a new insight out of that.

But in order to reach these insights, we need to go through a few facets of our dilemma. The first of them was naming the factors that contribute to our fear of public speaking. That was the question I asked our participants, and noted down all the answers.

Stress (that feeds back itself)
The act of very being on the stage
Audience that seems indifferent to us
A suspicion of judgement
Perfectionism, or an idea that mistakes are wrongdoings and will not be tolerated
A feeling that every our move will be watched
A suspicion that we won’t be correctly understood

What’s more, some factors contribute more to one’s stress than others. For one person perfectionism can be the decisive factor, for another, not being able to satisfy every person listening to them. That’s why I’m going to follow this with our first hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: Every person has their own unique mixture of factors that contribute to their fear of public speaking. These factors can activate stress responses in varying degrees.

Fortunately, there is a finite amount of factors contributing to the fear of public speaking, and the list above is a good starter to explore them.

I warmly encourage you to discover what blend is your mixture.

The observations described above can seem unrelated at a first glance. But there’s a feature that binds them together. All of these factors wouldn’t be true if there would be no observer with an ability to judge our behaviour negatively. And that’s precisely where we should focus our efforts next. Let’s delve into the relation between the speaker and the audience. If we look at it with our fear of public speaking in mind, a somber realisation comes in:

“We are certain that if we do anything wrong, we are going to be exiled from the group”.

There’s also a deeper, positive intention behind this sentence. That intention ensured our evolutionary survival. In the past, being exiled from the tribe often resulted in death. That’s why we have a strong mechanism that protects us from going up against the group to which we belong.

“We want to conform to the social norms of the groups we belong to in order to secure our survival.”

Why this positive intention triggers a fear in us? The essence of it lies with the definition of the “wrongdoing”. A “wrongdoing” is an act that could potentially result in people talking between themselves that we’re not trustworthy. And because the “audience” has “infinitely many eyes”, it’s going to treat us in a depersonalized, cruel fashion, whereas we are in the increased state of alertness, because we’re aware that our every move is being watched.

Hypothesis 2: In certain contexts we believe that people listening to us are a single, all-seeing entity that we call the “audience”. This entity has power to exile us at any time. Our fear protects us from such a scenario.

That leads us to a very interesting video interview, where Jordan Peterson, a known Canadian clinical psychologist and author of a book 12 Rules for life describes his own point of view on public speaking.

I recommend pausing for a while and watching the video. The key arguments are laid below. The main faults of thinking about public speaking are:

It’s not “a talk” (a product)
You are not “delivering it” (it’s not a matter of repeating the same thing again and again from memory without much attention)
People are not the “audience”

A three solutions are proposed instead.

Public speaking, persuasive or informative is a theatre. A theatre not only of voice and gestures, but also a theatre of ideas.
During public speaking, engage with the ideas actively and with their consequences, allowing new insights to surface out in front of you and your viewers.
You talk and listen to individuals in your audience. At a time, a person nods in agreement. Another time, a different person can look confused.

In the Toastmasters world, these statements can be pretty controversial, because contest speeches winning the world championships are repeated even a few hundred times. But controversy is good. What would a world where everybody agrees be good for?

This video was a foundation for the 20-minute discussion that was placed instead of a Table Topics Session. During this discussion we were trying to answer the following question: Being a speaker on a stage, what do you think about people that are in front of you?

The following ideas were noted:

I want for them to get something out of my speech
I want to motivate people in my audience
I want to make a connection with people (e.g. my topic)
I want to reveal a different way of looking at a known topic for the people
I want to share my story/experience
I want to share my knowledge and get remembered
The audience as a group seems scary
But every person in the audience can get distracted as well (e.g. with a mobile). They aren’t ideal as well
I can gain confidence with public speaking experience
Good preparation helps with stress
I can prepare arguments for different groups of people (e.g. supporters, neutrals, opposers / people aware and not aware of the topic)
People can teach me, how to adapt to different environments
People can teach, what emotions I feel under different circumstances and how to control them
I can observe reactions of individuals in my audience to understand what works

What is beautiful is how closely are these answers related to the theme of “connecting with humans”. At the same time, do you see how big the discrepancy is between what we think about individuals in the “audience” and this constructed entity of “audience”?

Hypothesis 3: When we speak publicly, we yearn for connection with people. Each person in the audience also shares this desire to connect with us. However, we don’t make our connection with the construct of the “audience”, but with individuals in the audience.

It’s time to wrap up this argument. We have three hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Every person has their own unique mixture of factors that contribute to their fear of public speaking. These factors can activate stress responses in varying degrees.

These are the working hypotheses that are not proven by any real research. All I did was to propose a mechanism that explains what could be a possible cause for the fear of public speaking and gives some hypotheses to test them out in the field. The proposed mechanism can be valid, imprecise or plainly wrong.

That’s why I invite you to test them out. Think about these hypotheses and try to integrate them into your own understanding of your public speaking and your own awareness of fear of public speaking. And then, test them out in real life. If these hypotheses help you become a better public speaker (or don’t help at all), feel free to write to me. I’m really curious if this proposed mechanism is valuable to anybody besides myself.