According to a survey, people fear "public speaking" more than death. And the no.1 fear in the world is public speaking. The term best used to describe it is known as “Glossophobia.”
Can you imagine that people fear public speaking more than height or insects? That’s crazy. I mean just stand in front of bunch of people and open your mouth. That’s it. What’s there to fear? If you are thinking like that, then you are probably wrong. People hate speaking in front of people and they can make any excuses in order to prevent that. Trust me because I have done that too. And after successfully overcoming this stupid fear and speaking confidently, I identified few reasons why we fear public speaking so much.
We are humans and humans are social animals. We love showing our good things to others, sharing our progress to others and we even love sharing weaknesses of others but, we hate sharing our weaknesses and failures with others. We want others to love us. We want others to only see good things about us. And when that doesn’t happen, we are sad, angry. So we try to avoid those circumstances and public speaking is one such activity where we have to speak in front of group of people and we are constantly worrying about what others will think about us if we made a mistake, if we made a fool out of ourselves.
We need validation from people but this same validation is stopping us from becoming a great speaker. When we allow others to judge us or make their opinion about us more than our will to speak what we want, we give away our powers to them. And that my friend, is the biggest reason why we fear public speaking.
So what’s the best way to overcome Glossophobia? I’ll be sharing many tips in upcoming lessons. So stay tuned.