Public Speaking

I'm wondering how you guys deal with public speaking? I know by definition it's basically an avoidant's nightmare. I know nobody likes doing it, but personally I can't do it anymore. I'm simply incapable of it now. I was never good at it no matter how much I practiced my speeches. I never even fully understood the point of them, most of the time the speeches and presentations I gave were annotated versions of pieces I've written that have had the souls ripped out of them. I've always felt that giving or listening to a speech out of it's original written context simply is the lazy way out and short changes everyone out of the true content that is available in the original piece. When I was younger I could make passable attempts at public speaking, but not anymore. Whenever I get up on stage or at a podium now I start talking and as soon as I make one mistake, I'm done. My brain just completely shuts down and focuses solely on the mistake I made, then the focus turns to the blank stares in the audience. It becomes a vicious cycle and I never can get it back on track. The last two speeches I've given have resulted in losing my place and standing there like a deer in headlights floundering for my words like an idiot. What drives me crazy is that I consider myself to be a fairly good writer, but I can never express those words out loud. The problem is that I know I can't avoid it forever and society will force me to perform again in the future. I'm so self conscious about it now that I know at this point I'm incapable of even giving a passable speech anymore.

What are your thoughts on public speaking? How do you deal with this?

Array wrote:What are your thoughts on public speaking? How do you deal with this?

Well... easy to say for me but... Just pretend they are not there.
At least, try to be less self conscious. Try to act casually and have backup plans in case you stumble on a word (which will unfortunately almost certainly happens at the beginning). Also, I don't know if it helps, but try to think of yourself as the audience and that you are looking at somebody else. What would you think of a person stumbling on a word or being nervous on stage? Personally I wouldn't give a damn about it at all...

OK. I know this probably isn't the best advice but it's what I do. Improvise. That's all. It's what I always do. I simply research everything on the subject, do a sort of sketch of what I want to say and read it and try to memorize the most important parts but when the time comes to go onstage I throw the thing away and improvise everything. I try to think thatI'm not giving a presentation but tha I'm just talking to them about a subject that I know about and they don't, that gives me confidence. I've done this many times in the past and always get complimented on how confident I was and how surprising it is for them to see me like that.

Array wrote:What drives me crazy is that I consider myself to be a fairly good writer, but I can never express those words out loud.

Definitely a maddening thing, I can relate.

For me, public speaking in school wasn't really horrible, I oddly do relatively well on a stage but horrible in real life. I mean, I do get nervous, shaky, and maybe sometimes stumble over my words... but I could always get through it.

I think the main reason speeches weren't too big of a deal for me was because I knew that almost everyone else hated/dreaded them; that meant I was just behaving normally! so right on.

For people that are hypercritical one mistake can be the thing that makes you want to scrap a project or burn your masterpiece, honestly it's not the huge problem that we make it. You're human, so is everyone else; knowing that always helps me.

When I had to do class presentations by myself I would freak out and overcompensate by working way harder at learning my topic than most people did. I always felt like I'd never done enough and dreaded going into class when I had to present. Other people muddled through theirs and got good-natured laughs when they screwed up, but I still felt like I was going to get something completely, embarrassingly wrong. Starting out is the worst, I'd plan out in my head exactly how I want to introduce my topic, and then something completely different would come out and a lot of the time I'd say random words and "um"s and stuttering and silence for what felt like five minutes before I remembered something else to say. But once I got into it, I usually found that I knew a huge amount of information and really understood the topic, because I'd put so much time into making sure I got everything right. After that sometimes I would even have to leave stuff out that I wanted to say because I had so much information and not enough time to speak. I still stutter and make no sense a lot of the time but once I get into a thread of thought I can make it reasonably coherant and full of good information. I guess times like this AvPD can almost come in handy, since my fear of public humiliation and criticism is about the only thing that can outweigh my total laziness when it comes to school work.

In school what I lacked in presentation marks I made up for in written and examination work.
We rarely had to present things in speech and that sort of thing to begin with. When it happened I would always keep my head down at the paper in front of me and even though I didn't read directly from it, I spoke in monotone and dulled even the ones who were intent in listening to the content. Ofcourse I'd always get a "well researched but work on presentation skills, yadda yadda", but I didn't care because I knew that despite being severely challenged in that area at the end of the day it doesn't matter for the career and things I want to do. All these little kind of 'show and tell' were always in scientific topics and subjects, so

Ikari Shinji wrote:Improvise. That's all. It's what I always do. I simply research everything on the subject, do a sort of sketch of what I want to say and read it and try to memorize the most important parts but when the time comes to go onstage I throw the thing away and improvise everything.

Isn't it what you are supposed to always be doing? At least at the school I was going to it's what we had to do. You would get a zero grade if the teacher could sense that you were just reading a text out of your memory. I couldn't do a speech based on memory alone, I have an horrible memory when it comes to know things by heart. I have a strong logic and capacity for understanding things, as long as it doesn't involve using my memory.

In school what I lacked in presentation marks I made up for in written and examination work.
We rarely had to present things in speech and that sort of thing to begin with. When it happened I would always keep my head down at the paper in front of me and even though I didn't read directly from it, I spoke in monotone and dulled even the ones who were intent in listening to the content. Ofcourse I'd always get a "well researched but work on presentation skills, yadda yadda", but I didn't care because I knew that despite being severely challenged in that area, at the end of the day it doesn't matter for the career and things I want to do. All these little kind of 'show and tell' were always in scientific topics and subjects, so I always find that assessment in presentation skills is #######4 in this kind of context.
This isn't an audition, I'm trying to tell you more about the topic not the way it is given to you.
And ofcourse the extrovert idiots who barely read anything about it made up for it by being funny and amusing to the class.
I'm sorry but at then end of the day if your work is crap then you've wasted everyone's time, and if the people who are assessing these things refuse to see that, then it shows how low standards really are.

Can you tell I'm bitter?
I just hated that the popular jocks and bimbos were still able to pass with their abysmal work.

Peptron wrote:

Ikari Shinji wrote:Improvise. That's all. It's what I always do. I simply research everything on the subject, do a sort of sketch of what I want to say and read it and try to memorize the most important parts but when the time comes to go onstage I throw the thing away and improvise everything.

Isn't it what you are supposed to always be doing? At least at the school I was going to it's what we had to do. You would get a zero grade if the teacher could sense that you were just reading a text out of your memory. I couldn't do a speech based on memory alone, I have an horrible memory when it comes to know things by heart. I have a strong logic and capacity for understanding things, as long as it doesn't involve using my memory.

All the schools I've been to actually encouraged memorizing and regurgitating. It's very stupid, I know and it makes them mess up and then it all goes downhill from that point onward. I don't know about other places since the education system in my country is BAD but I mean BAD.

When ever I had to give a speech in highschool or college I wouldn't sleep the night before I would be so damn scared. I would be ######6 trembling by the time I got up in front of the room, my face would turn bright red, I would start sweating profusely, and I would stutter. The knowledge that I was doing this made me even more nervous and made it worse. "Oh crap I'm sweating like crazy"... and that thought would make me sweat even more. It was terrible.

In highschool I had a class that was just an entire semester of giving speeches. And unfortunatly it didn't count for $#%^ because in college I had another class that was an entire semester of giving speeches. My dad once told me in college he would take a couple shots to help relax before he had to give a speech. A couple wouldn't work for me so in highschool I gave almost every speech drunk. Sluring was better than stuttering. In college my avpd was worse and after the first few speeches I just stopped going to that class(among others) and eventually dropped out.