Stepping Back from Speaking

That was exactly me. Fortunately, my PhD advisor noticed the trend and solved it in a severe but functional way. Starting from my second year, I was assigned to teach calculus to first-year computer science undergrads (three groups of about 80 students each). It was absolutely terrifying. At the beginning I vomited, had diarrhea, anxiety, the whole pack. But since the schedule was so intense, somehow my body got used to it. After a couple of months, I had become desensitized to it, and actually started enjoying it.

It may be unusual, but my advisor coached me quite well on how to teach, and that helped me a lot. A couple of days before my first class, he asked me how was it going, and I told him that it was quite bad... then he asked me casually if I had already prepared my first class (of course, I had spent the entire summer preparing for it!), and to remind him what was it about, since it had been a few years since he last taught it. Then I told him the whole contents of the first session in about 20 minutes, even reaching for the blackboard to write a couple of formulas. After that, I said "the way I'm going to explain all that is...", and he cut me: "no! forget about your preparation. The informal explanation you just gave is actually a good first class, just repeat it a bit slowly and call it a day". I knew he was fucking with me just to calm me down, but this actually gave me a confidence boost.

When I had to speak at my first somewhat major conference venue, I had similar concerns, and he told me "remember the first course you taught? do exactly the same thing: explain your stuff to fellow scientists as you would do if you found them by the coffee machine".

> But I feel I'm missing a part of life by it.

Surely not! If you really don't like speaking in public, it's alright. There's plenty of other things that you are not doing, and that are not either "a part of life". Nobody can do everything.

It's important to distinguish the fear you may have of speaking in front of people from the fear you may have of presenting incorrect material. If you're giving an instructional speech about a practice/process that's well known with zero controversy, and which you are very familiar with, do you still have anxiety?

That's a different breed of anxiety than when you are postulating in front of a crowd of peers about fringe techniques that you may harbor doubts about yourself (a new way to do a process, or a change to the accepted standard, or a new interpretation of history, etc).

It's important to distinguish what's causing the anxiety because the fix is different for these two issues. For the latter, it's building confidence in your own preparation and learning. Do you know what you're talking about? Could you put it on paper and publish it and not look like a jackass? If so, carry on.

For the former - like you just get anxiety from talking in front of people even about material that is uncontroversial - the key is kind of a mind trick on yourself. For me, I try to find some aspect of the topic that I really love and enjoy, and am fascinated by. If I can do that, my mind is focused on giving and sharing that fascination, and all anxiety goes away.

That said, I started speaking publicly in high school as part of Academic Decathlon - speech competitions and the like. I remember being anxious about doing that in the same way I would be anxious about a school musical. As a kid, overcoming that and just doing it is the first step to learning how to enjoy it.

I highly recommend that parents expose their kids to this early - school plays, speech competitions - if they have the opportunity to do so. With most skills in life, exposure to it as a kid helps greatly.

As an adult, I look back on those younger days about stressing over a two-minute speech with some amusement. Now I have zero problem talking for 40+ minutes. It's not something I every worked up to like reps of an exercise, it's just the relatively simple trick of falling in love with subject matter and having confidence that you know the material and have seen a thing or two that gives you some authority (road mileage) on the topic. Probably also advantageous as an adult to recognize that EVERYBODY out there in the world is fundamentally a hack in life, just trying to get by day-by-day, the same as you, wanting to understand things and for people to treat them with dignity.

Speaking is serving - think of it that way and (for me at least) anxiety goes away.