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Comment by cloudie78 | Hacker News Reader

Hi, former student with social phobia and terrified of public speaking.

Today: adult with no problems doing public speaking in front of hundreds.

What fixed me: more public speaking and not having the option of avoiding the task.

I worked in sales for a few years when I was younger before I started my actual career, I went from an introvert afraid of public speaking to completely comfortable breaking the ice with basically anyone in those years (mostly because I liked having four walls and a roof) and that led to me doing technical training/talks to strangers years later.

I still don't really like it but I also realised that dragons don't appear from portals and eat you immediately if you do it.

My missus is much like I was but she never got through it, she finds it fascinating that I can.

The social model of diability is great in some ways (encouraging activism), but the idea that everything needs to be changed to be "designed for" people with disabilities has its downsides. Not all disabilities can be overcome, but to the extent that some can (at least partly), often IMO it's a good thing to have an expectation that most people can deal with the real world.

I also had a sales job at uni, just selling windows. But it was great for making me much more socially competent. Highly recommend.

Tech sales for me :).

I was good at it because I sold the customer what they needed vs what the company wanted me to sell them, it actually led to the same customers coming back and asking for me by name and I got offered a job by one of them - I do wonder what my life would have been like had I taken it but it also led to my entire career as well, my first consulting gig came off the back of a conversation with a customer about a quote they'd had for some development and with the hubris of youth I said I could do that way cheaper (I could and I did, found out later how much cheaper and kicked myself, also a valuable lesson - You don't get paid for your effort, you get paid to save them money, if you are saving them a lot of money you can charge a lot of money).

Was never going to be my career and didn't pay particularly well so I wasn't too concerned about what management thought long term.

I studied my masters in Denmark 5 years ago, before AI. This was absolutely the case - first oral exams in my batchelors many of my fellow students were incredibly nervous. By the end the exam atmosphere was very chill. I definitely improved with public speaking, and so did the other students - including some who had been almost incapacitatingly anxious (throwing up, requiring a lot of convincing from us to even attend exams) and ended roughly the same as the rest of us

The best class I ever took in any school setting was Public Speaking in my first year, first semester in college just to "get it out of the way."

The teacher started off with "you're all going to look like idiots and embarrass yourselves, and you'll have to get over it. Best you do it here now rather than in front of coworkers in a few years. She gave us skills and techniques that I still rely on today, and most importantly, the opportunity to practice.

I was a introverted going in to college, and that class didn't turn my into an extroverted social butterfly in 4 months. However, I have never been paralyzed with fear when required to talk in front of a crowd, and that has been invaluable in my career.

I had an English teacher in high school where everyone had to alternately do a 5-10 minute talk on a topic of their chosing at the beginning of class. They were rarely much good but it was a good exercise.

Practice helps!

What also helped me is being so knowledgeable about the topic that I didn't need to prepare the presentation much (except for the slides and the general plan). When you know what you have to talk about, it becomes a lot more natural and relaxed for me.

I would be a lot more stressed if I had to learn a presentation by heart and it would probably be a robotic delivery.

So I did quite a few "surprise" presentations, with very light prepared material and a topic I cared about. Got me the practice I needed and I learned not to get "stuck" as if I forgot the next sentence. The presentation always flows!

Now, I have a talk at a major conference, and I'm afraid this won't work there, so I'll prepare my talk better this time, maybe even have speaker notes!

That's part of what fixed it for me. What really fixed it was three things:

1. Actually being very knowledgeable about the subject in question, to the extent that I can offer facts or well-reasoned opinion on the topic on essentially any reasonable question. In other words, not being a junior high school student asked to do a 15 minute speech on a topic drawn from a hat.

2. Not having the idea that the audience expects a correct and immediate answer to every possible question.

3. Not doing every single speech literally in front of 15% of my entire peer group, including all my friends, all the people I admired, and all the people who treated me poorly.

I still hate doing Zoom calls without slides or a screen to share because I can't stand having 20 people staring intently at me. It's just distracting. But otherwise I have no problem at all talking for hours on a topic I know well.

One thing doctor, and to a lesser extent lawyers, have to do is project confidence when they may in fact not have much. A doctor/lawyer regularly has to quickly become an expert on a subject, or seem like one, often overnight but sometimes much faster than that. Briefing something you are still new to, without getting it horribly wrong, is a skill that must be developed.

I run into this in the military too. "The person to do the ethics/roe/safety/drugs/mental health brief just called in sick. Two hundred soldiers will be here at 0800 tomorrow. Read fast."

I would much prefer for a doctor who isn't sure to signal that fact somehow. It was annoying enough for LLMs to confidently lead you down wrong paths most of the time (they've gotten much better by now), we don't need humans doing it too. For lawyers it makes sense, of course.

There's still the option for the doctor to signal that they confidently don't know everything. When I ask my PCP a question outside her knowledge, she quickly and assuredly sends me to a specialist (or asks one and gets back to me, etc.).

I never get the feeling that she is guessing. She is confident in her sphere of knowledge.

Likewise, I thought I was bad at public speaking and avoided it almost entirely until my last couple years of university. By then I found myself surrounded by friendly, curious peers who were happy for me to nerd about whatever it was I became a semi-expert on. That confidence served me well once I needed to lead/train a team at work.

Doing a presentation on Zoom seems kind of pointless as you lose the connection to the audience. I'd rather just assign a pre-record to watch and do a live Q&A later on. More like a Lecture+Tutorial format.

> What fixed me: more public speaking

Yup, that's the cure. Worked for me, too.

As someone with lifelong social anxiety. There is the concept of White Knuckling an event. If the anxiety is so far beyond your capability that start to panic, you only reinforce the fear instead of soothe it.

That’s why exposure therapy with an anxiety ladder is important

Right, that’s the problem: for most people this works, but those it doesn’t work for, it can really fuck up. So what this amounts to in expected utility is you need guardrails before forcing things this way.

Well I think what ultimately helps is having a safe space to practice and learn in.

Fears are further reinforced if, when you trip over your words and get all anxious, your audience laughs at you rather than with you.

That does help of course, but it overlooks the fact that anxiety can be an illogical mental health problem rather than just a logical well-founded concern. By which I mean even if the audience's reactions are completely ideal, it doesn't mean someone with bad anxiety won't spend lots of time in the future thinking of all the ways in which the audience might have been silently judging them etc.

I get this because I do it. I get immense anxiety from what people may be thinking, or what could go wrong in all areas of life.

Speaking to the entire company gets me nervous, but strangely not as much as other things, I think because I have to be delivering a presentation there's less time to spin in a loop worrying.

Agreed

And think of your whole education hinged on a presentation in front teachers and pupils.

Nightmare fuel for many

Yes, yes, yes. Thank you for posting this. It drives me absolutely freaking crazy when people do the "Oh, I'm just not _____," having essentially decided they are not _____, and therefore will never learn or change.

Like every time I hear "Oh I'm just not a math person." It's not that I expect everyone to like math because I do, not at all. But I do expect people to not artificially limit themselves. :/

I'm not a drawing person. I wish I could draw a lot better. I used to try once in a while, and the results were universally bad.

So a few years ago, I took a drawing course, and pushed it as fas as I could. The results were the best I ever did in my life, and not terrible, but still far from good. At this point, I've decided this is as good as things will get, and I should stop spending effort and focus on other things that I am good in.

If I happen to find myself in a situation that requires me to draw, I will make a honest effort. Maybe something will happen that makes me grow. But I have decided that for the forseeable future I am not a drawing person and that's fine.

If kids were more aware how much public speaking is tied into their social and especially romantic life later they’d all be majoring in public speaking :)

If kids were aware of how high they can get in a company with talk vs work, they would think all adults were morons. So your approach has an important double duty.

I think the important part is having a good learning curve. Having to speak in front of 100+ people without any prior experience is terrifying.

However, there are very challenging tasks that can help to build experience in smaller groups. Like talking about a topic you just received a second earlier, without preparation, in a group of 10 where everybody takes turns and knows the experience from both sides.

Thanks for sharing this, a good example that people can grow and adapt. Some need a push and support but it's possible.

As a counterpoint. Simply getting older and more confident fixed it for me. From highschool to university It was terrible for me, it even got worse. A few years later during work it was simply fixed. From my perspective forcing children and young adults to this seems almost immoral.

I second this.

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