A scene from the TV show Quantico. The real Quantico doesn’t look like this BUT they DO carry around those FAKE red plastic guns in holsters!
My first paying gig for doing a presentation was at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, VA. When FBI special agent, Paula Barrows, offered me the job, I turned it down flatly. I said: I don’t do public speaking. (I’d done a few free programs at that point and realized: Public speaking was NOT for me.) She twisted my arm a bit, offered me $500 and I reluctantly agreed to do it. From that moment until the time I presented the program (three months later) I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I soon realized that this was the worst part for people who have a fear of public speaking: Worrying about it non-stop for months prior to the event.
But the event itself can be even more terrifying. As I was about to walk into the lecture hall at Quantico, Ms. Barrows whispered: “this is probably going to be the most difficult audience you’ll ever have to face. If you can handle these guys, you will be able to handle anybody.” I remember thinking to myself at the time, that’s got to be an exaggeration. It turned out to be absolutely true.
These guys had no qualms about interrupting at any time. Within 5 minutes of starting my presentation one of the trainees basically just shouted out: “You know how we manage our stress? We just kick the sh*t out of somebody.” For a moment I was just dumbfounded. I told the trainee, that he was going to have stay after class for some remedial work. I got a big laugh, and I got the audience back under MY control.
On that day I was teaching the mostly male crowd about cognitive restructuring, or how you can learn to change your thinking during a stressful event. I remember at one point you could hear a pin drop. I recovered nicely from that rough beginning, and now I had everyone in the room right in the palm of my hand. It was immensely satisfying. (It’s moments like this, that make you want to do this terrifying activity, more and more.)
When I teach people about cognitive restructuring I talk about how it helps you handle stress by helping you become aware of your overly negative self-talk and learning to correct it. It’s this overly negative self-talk that fuels the fire of any stressful event. So assuming that a public speaking gig is going to go badly SHOULD fall under the category of what COULD be corrected by cognitive restructuring.
Clearly the whole notion that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of dying clearly proves just how IRRATIONAL the mind can be. But guess what? All my understanding of cognitive restructuring didn’t really help me when it came to getting comfortable with public speaking. I still worried obsessively about embarrassing myself and making mistakes and being viewed as less than perfect. This irrational thinking continued even after I started getting great evaluations from my audiences and the people who hired me. (This positive feedback would more than qualify as all the proof I should need to turn my irrational thinking around but it didn’t.)
I had a lot more to learn to get to the point where I could BEGIN to get comfortable with idea of public speaking and mostly that had to do with mindfulness which I will write about in part 2.