Stage Fright

“Whenever I have to make a presentation or speak in public I get so panicky that I even draw a blank as I start to plan it” Sound familiar? You’re in good company.

Did you know that the number one fear of the American public — researched annually for the last 40 years — has been and still is any form of public speaking!It comes up as number one year after year. Amazing.

Actually amazing to me because, since I was a small child, I was always glad to appear in public. To say my piece, play my tune, dance my dance, make my speech — all of it was not only easy and natural for me but also fun! So I have tremendous empathy for folks who find appearing in public to be terrifying and in my adult professional work I’ve not only continued to reach out, connect with and perform for the public but also to teach other people “how-to” — whether in the courtroom, the boardroom or the media.

In an effort to understand why this fear is so rampant and widespread and to help solve it, I’ve studied all aspects of this panic to find out what creates it. And you know what? I’ve found the key ingredients! Understanding and demystifying them can help launch you on the path to erasing them.

So let me share what I learned about how to help folks get over that panic, that stage fright and be able to stand up in public and give that smashing presentation, explain your ideas, and present yourself as you really are, to your best advantage.

Stage fright is really based on a myth. Here it is: somewhere in the world there’s a way to deliver your speech with a perfect 10. You become obsessed with measuring yourself against that perfect “10,” thinking how far below that you’ll fall. This gives birth to an enormous case of “What if I fumble and lose my words?” ” I hate how I look,” “What will my boss (colleagues, clients) think of this — good? Smart? Well-conceived?” You can also add “My mother (father, teacher) always said I mumbled” and “I never liked making a show of myself” and there you’ve got it — Stage Fright!

See — the energy and the focus is all about ME ME ME the speaker, not YOU YOU YOU the people being spoken to. Obsessing on you and your performance — what kind of grade you’ll get, how far off the markyou’ll be. But that’s not what presentations are about! They’re about giving your message to an audience! About explaining, persuading, supporting what information you want to get across to them. About how to make your audience listen. About helping them get your ideas and understand your points, not at all about you and how you’re doing.

So let’s go to the source of this problem. How come so many people get stuck in this trap? Where does it come from?

Well, there are three basic well-springs in our backgrounds:

Childhood – How you communicate starts out embedded in your childhood. You watch others around you in the family and unconsciously try to copy them. But your folks and teachers, in an effort to make you better at it, often criticize how you’re doing it so you start out thinking “there’s a better way and I haven’t done it.” Next comes…

Adolescence – the real killer to self-confidence. Here we introduce the full-length mirror and all the “unacceptable” messages it gives us about our potential for success against our peers. And does the media ever have a field day with telling you how far short you’re falling from the ideal! All this does such a job on how you feel about displaying yourself in public for everyone’s perusal and grading!

Adult Experience – Here’s where your professional and work experience begin to single out what’s admirable and what’s not, what works, who stands out and gets ahead and why. And you start comparing yourself — unrealistically — since you really have no idea how you come across to others. You can only use your own internal insecurities to grade yourself. And you also add some assumptions about how self-confident and competent others appear (though they may not feel that way at all, either!). This dramatically helps you slide up and down, mostly down, on that grade scale. And of course it continues your focus inward, onto you and how you’re doing, and away from outward — towards finding out whatothers care about and how to best tell them your ideas and help them understand you better.

Funny thing is, this insight, this change of focus can get truly get you over stage fright because you’ll get so busy concentrating on capturing your audience, on making them get your message and thinking about the best ways to do that that you stop obsessing about yourself and what kind of grade you’re going to get.

See — the true secret to being a great communicator is understand your audience. Know that people are motivated by self-interest and the key to reaching, persuading, capturing others is to reach out to their self-interest before you get yours met.

So all the self-focus that is the essence of stage fright dooms you to failing in this key pursuit. That’s one of the major reasons to work on this — beyond the sheer business of getting comfortable so your best natural self can come through.

Bottom line: Your sense of self is so often fashioned by illusions — by comparisons and wrong assumptions. And by what other people — and the media — have told you is good and admirable. You gotta drop all that and start focusing first on the job at hand when you present. Use your good head, your past experience and the knowledge you’ve gathered to attack your presentation from the audience’s point of view, not your own. What do they need from you? What have you to offer them? What do they already know and what do you need to fill in? What worries them? What’s tough in today’s world? Grab them with relevance and with energy, with the sense that they’ll miss something they can use if they don’t listen and stay tuned. And then think about what new interesting ways can you make your message clear. Attention getting. Compelling.

And y’know what? Out the window goes the panic while you stay tight on grabbing and keeping them. Making them know that they need to hear you!

In another blog I’m going to give you some great tips on what makes people listen today and some great techniques for being a charismatic presenter. But for now I hope you’ve gotten some insights into the heart of the matter and that they’ll help you start enjoying the sharing of your ideas and feelings with others.

The Travyon Martin Case and the Media

Let me begin by telling you that I’m a long-time jury consultant who’s studied and interviewed juries, worked on many cases and written three books about what makes jurors listen and how they decide. Because of this, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years as a commentator on the media discussing famous cases (including the whole O.J. Simpson case live on daily TV) and analyzing how jurors would see the developments in the case, what the issues are for lay people in these cases, what they believe and understand and so on.

So I’ve been watching the Trayvon Martin case and how it has advanced with a practiced eye. And although I’m pleased to see that it has now finally moved into the courts and the judicial system, where it belongs, I shake my head about how it got it there and what’s happening to the original intentions of how American law is supposed to be practiced.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “to be tried by a jury of their peers,” yes? When our system of laws was formed, “a jury of their peers” was indeed possible and made lots of sense. It meant that not only would most people in any town know the accused and his family but that the jurors thus chosen (though I must decry the fact that it was then only men who were asked to serve… ) all lived in the same environment, understood the efforts of life in that place and shared a number of the common burdens as well as benefits they lived with. They were part of one community and would therefore understand the problems people faced as well as share conclusions about what was a mutually beneficial way to live together and what was out of bounds. And they did utilize the laws of the land as they were created and given.

Well, we have surely grown from those days. Juries today don’t often reflect or share the lives of those accused and may have come to vastly different conclusions about how life should be lived in their community. But I’ll tell you something that is very encouraging. Jurors generally take their work very seriously and really do want to do a good job. And, by and large, the jury system of 12 lay people listening, discussing and deciding is still the best way to bring justice to the analysis and conclusion of any case compared with the other narrow possibilities — a single judge or a panel of three judges or a military tribunal deciding on civilian cases. It’s what has worked for us Americans since we began and speaks of the same intrinsic faith in us as human beings that democracy and voting itself represents.

So what’s happened to that old idealistic system as our country has morphed into a 24-hour news-hungry electronic loudspeaker-with-pictures that rushes to bring us every detail of any event in our daily lives as soon as it happens?

Trial law insists that only the facts and evidence presented in court, during the trial, as sworn testimony heard equally by the jury and all concerned and allowed by the judge according to the rules can be used to analyze and decide on a fair and just verdict. And how is this jury chosen? What is the big goal? To find people who are questioned by the lawyers and/or the judge to be sure they do not have prior knowledge of or prejudice about the case so they can hear what will be said and shown with an open mind… That they haven’t already made up their minds until they hear the evidence.

And what have we got now in the Trayvon Martin case? What hope of finding an open-minded jury of his peers to judge the defendant as we have absorbed the media frenzy for over a month?

We must look at the two sides of this effort — the powerful role the media played to spread the news and get a defendant to even stand trial. But at the same time what evidence was being discovered and described and shown in infinite detail by this same media process? To everyone in this country and beyond? And now that we’re here, what effect has all this information — untested, unexamined from both sides as prescribed by law — had on our hopes of proceeding with a fair trial as prescribed by law? So along with our instant access to everything media wants to send us, I’m ruminating about what basic principles and carefully nurtured systems of our democracy are maybe falling by the wayside?

Humanizing the Ad Business

“Mad Men” fever has taken the country by storm, depicting the changing moods and unwritten rules of America in the 1960s and how the ad business worked then. It’s made me re-focus on what approaches that all-powerful business used to make us spend and buy in the old days. Which is why I’m especially interested in a new trend in the ad business today.

Have you noticed that something’s happening to the way products- and companies- are now being marketed? Have you noticed what’s happened to GE ads? They’re not showing their superior products any more. They’re zooming in on various workers on the job in their jet engine who are telling you how they feel about building these things?

“From the time I was a kid I was fascinated by planes and how they can get off the ground” or “People see engines as just a lot of metal. These are made by hand, piece by piece” or “I’d give anything to see one of these babies fire up and take off”.

Cut to an airfield. A lineup of jet engine workers standing on the tarmac. Here comes the plane, zooming past them -up up and away…

“Wow!”, “Did you see that?”, “Ooh” followed by grins, high fives, hugs and an overall team sense of pride. Of ownership. Of “we made those.” Identifying the grandeur of the machine by focusing on the people who made it. They’re showing the people who make turbines (cut to a train zooming at you and the workers cheering) or compressors (“you wouldn’t have cold beer without us!”).

There’s another very touching one – all about GE’s cancer-connected X-ray and radiation machines. Again–it shows the people who make the machines talking about how they work on something life-saving. One says “I’d love to meet someone who’s been helped by these” Next shot–a group of cancer survivors walking into a GE building and meeting the workers. Hugs, deep looks at each other, close-ups of survivors saying how lucky they are. Very moving, very touching, very human and personal. What a new sales angle!

Remember how products used to be sold? It was always about the product or machine itself. The “It” factor. How strong, reliable, fast, unique, avant-garde it was. How slick or economically solid it was, how it was the most advanced in the field, how its new twists and turns make it the best, the most. “Don’t get left behind. Run- do not walk. Get one NOW. “

But suddenly there’s a complete about-face. A new face–not It but Who. Selling a product or a company by concentrating on the people who make their stuff. To identify the prestige and personal connection of a company by focusing on the basic component of any business – the people who make it happen.

Interesting. How come? Why did GE come up with this idea? What is it telling us? We all know that marketing- the life blood of any business- always looks for what can reach the public best. What new wrinkle, what new gimmick, what new approach can grab the public and persuade. And if GE has decided that it helps to make their company more appealing, more attractive to the marketplace- and the general public by identifying its products with folks, not its brilliant mechanical advances — what an interesting implication. Does it suggest that GE may be looking at its workers and respecting them and their needs differently? That they recognize that it’s good business to acknowledge them as the heart of the business?

Hmmm. In the midst of our age of supertechnological advances, someone is remembering that it’s people who actually make the stuff…

You Really Can’t Go Home Again

I made a speech in Boston yesterday and am in a state of shock. You see, I lived in the Boston area most of my grown up life. I hosted my own TV talk show there, was cultural reporter on the news, lectured at the Museum of Fine Arts, taught at Harvard graduate schools, bore and raised my three sons there, ate and laughed and played there — I really knew and connected with every part of that city.

But yesterday, driving in from the airport I thought “Wait a Minute! Where am I? What are those skyscrapers? What new highway am I on? What’s happened to my town!”

So I’ve been nursing my wounds — my sense of loss, of estrangement from what was basically “my home town” for so long. How could they do this to my distinctive wonderful city with its visible blend of the old and the new world? Those historic twisted streets of downtown laid out on old Indian trails, those still-standing brick symbols of our heritage, reminders of how our forefathers lived and hoped. All of these affected this New York city girl so deeply when I first moved there. I was in love with joining that legendary America I read about but could never really feel a part of as an apartment-dwelling, hard-driving New York City kid. See, I never fit my childhood books’ descriptions of a front door/ back door/attic/cellar/dog named Spot kind of life. That was really America, I thought, not where I was.

But moving to the Boston area meant I finally joined. Here was Beacon Hill, the old and new State House. Faneuil Hall with its speeches still echoing. Paul Revere’s church tower, the Tea Party harbor, Old Ironsides, Bunker Hill — I was finally a true citizen! How I loved driving into town, seeing the Custom House Tower, remembering that, historically, it was once the tallest building in the city. Every corner was so familiar to me.

But then the “building and improving” started. Sure we need to live in our time and what it can do — but that original Boston/history flavor was still so prevalent when I left that it still sang out–”here’s where it started. Here’s where our great human experiment took form.”

When I moved back to New York, my original home, those images stood fast in my mind. I was still connected to that savory taste of America and the roots I found there.

So what was it really that turned me on so- that made me feel such a part of, so connected to this place?

Symbols. Familiar icons. I guess we get all tied up emotionally in what we see in our daily lives, what we can rely on to be there – recognizable, comforting landmarks that stay stable and dependable and mark the visual corners of our lives. That will always show us the way home.

And what made me react so violently to the new Boston?

When I returned I expected all the old bells to chime for me — ah, there’s where we used to… here’s where that… how I loved the old… But wait a minute!!! What happened?

Overtaken. Boston got overtaken, dominated by what we can do now. See how high, how glistening, how round and square and miraculous we can make these gorgeous new towers? See how we can build new streets, highways, tunnels, create sweeping new landscapes? Everything I saw sang hymns of praise to our technical prowess and how Boston’s face now speaks predominantly of the future.

No, they haven’t torn down the major historic remnants. They’ve just overshadowed them, overwhelmed them — and made them seem little and irrelevant. Little hidden treasures you discover tucked away in the cracks between the new stately, dominant behemoths.

And why did I resent the changes so?

Well, first because it requires me to make adjustments. I had to let go of old familiar memories. To engage in thinking about “where is this? Where do I turn? Is this Stuart Street? Nah, can’t be”.

Then there is the sense of loss. Memories are so connected to places. Going to Theatre Row required eating at the Athens Olympia restaurant every time we went because it was the only real restaurant around there. Seeing the new Stuart/ Tremont Street neighborhood, all glitzy and grown up, meant letting go of pictures of my life — the stuff we all carry around in our memory bank. And in the process, taking a hard look at the march of time — the inexorable movement of life that keeps pushing you on to make room for others. Others coming along who will need to discover their neighborhoods, relate to their city, their version of home. And to create their memory banks.

The new icons and landmarks of Boston today will also change for them someday. And they’ll also feel that disarranged sense of loss as they look at what were their familiar icons and say “Hey! What’s going on? Where are my old buildings and hangouts!?

Lesson learned.

You can’t ever really go home again. No part of the world will stand still and wait for you while you move on in your life. Wait to reassure you about how it was. To help you feel safe and connected to stable earmarks. To let you know that your life was indelible and cast in solid matter.

Nothing told me more starkly about the journey. And what gets erased as you pass by.

What Penn State Tells Us About Us

What’s the main takeaway from the Penn State child abuse horror? For me it’s all about taking a hard look at our accepted priorities — at what’s at the top of our societal list in terms of what matters, what needs to be preserved, what we’re proud of and care about. And how come we’ve ended up with this list.

Maybe it’s time to take that hard look at what slot the powerful domain of football holds, what it really stands for and what’s gotten pushed much further down.

That inviolate Sat/Sun magnet that overrides all other activities and media programming touches one of our most basic instincts. It’s really all about a field of battle and which side we’re on, playing into one of our most ancient, genetic instincts: to go forth on a field of battle with our cave (team) mates to best our enemies and protect ourselves, to fight for our territory, to survive and win. What else could stir more group passion? “De-fense, de-fense” — listen to the power, the unison of the onlookers. We’re all driven by that old need for a group win (be safe and strong), not a group loss (danger, weakness). We get deeply involved in the vicarious fight for territory — that old warring spirit, the good guys vs. the bad guys, the conquest, the defeat.

Tapping into such atavistic needs and feelings, the football practitioners — teams, coaches, colleges, media, money-makers — have an easy time gathering the force to carve out a high place on our list of passions and priorities — and create an unbelievably lucrative kingdom.

But we’re born with a whole bunch of instincts, all left over from the early days when we, as a species, were just trying to get a toehold on the earth and figure out what we needed to do to survive. The two overriding forces were:

• not getting killed (battling for safety) and
• procreating the species (protecting the offspring).

Well, that battle for territorial safety has surely changed and football merely re-enacts that ancient drama. But protecting our children? That’s real — as strong and firm an instinct as it ever was.

The passion for protecting the offspring is rule one throughout the animal kingdom — not just lioness and cubs but us, too. And since our offspring take much longer to develop and leave the nest, our instinct should be greater and last much longer.

How did football grow to such a station in our lives that Penn State’s officials and practitioners would go against such basic human nature just to protect the franchise?

To save the reputation and grooved machinery of the their football kingdom, we see grown men who train and develop, actually mold young athletes, whose powerful involvement in their lives also teaches them morals, values, standards and ways of playing life’s games. We see these men find no deeper calling than just saving the status quo — and the power and money it represents.

What was that assistant coach thinking when he came in and saw a grown man (allegedly) assaulting and sexually violating a child? What did he feel? Wasn’t he horrified? Didn’t he identify with the victim, not the perp? Wasn’t his first instinct to run forward and stop it? Isn’t that genetic? But the perp was a Penn State football coach! What would it do to the kingdom if he confronted and fought him, let alone tell on him? What overrode that first human instinct and made him leave and just call Daddy?

“Fight a coach? I could lose my job! I’d threaten JoePa’s football kingdom, ruin my future — and Penn State’s golden franchise!”

Result? Execs, coaches, those who could have put a stop to it laid low. Did the minimum. Passed it on sotto voce to the next in line, whispering in corners, no action taken. And let Sandusky continue his destruction of young boys’ lives. No sense of responsibility to anything above the good of that franchise. No higher priority.

And when the media finally moved in, (telling us about Syracuse and The Citadel, too) we got our noses rubbed in what has been raised to such a high position on our priority list. Not only that the law wasn’t followed but that a deep human instinct didn’t register with any of those people to want to prevent Sandusky from hurting any more children.

 So — let’s take another look at our priority list — and at where kids fit on it. What other kids’ needs are we missing besides safety and protection from fiendish adults? What priorities are we giving to education? To their health? To helping them grow into useful adults who will direct the future of our society? What other roles do adults need to play in their lives?

And maybe we’ll even start thinking — “Football? Great. But it’s still only a game.”

Put Down That Smartphone and Look at Me!

Hearing the inventory of Steve Jobs’ ground-breaking innovations, it made me think of what effect his genius has had on how we now relate to each other. What have we gained?

We can now make magic — we can bolt right over those old time/space barriers that made connecting with each other take time and physical effort. Now we can communicate with each other instantly, effortlessly — no seeing/hearing/touching/talking necessary. Our words fly through space and land just where we want them to with just the tap of a finger. And while we’re with one person we can even answer another’s demands and reach them too — putting the live, visible person we’re with on hold.

But what have we lost?

Communication science tells us that first impressions — the input that helps us learn and discern as we judge people — are made up of 55 percent experiencing your body language, 38 percent your tone of voice and that only 7 percent is your words. Seven percent of total information about anyone is what cell phones give us as we contact each other! Even less since we use acronyms — not even whole words.

So what is our new magic making us miss ?

Each other. The delight and surprise, the troubling demands, the enigmatic and fulfilling contacts we used to make with each other. The challenge of learning how to scratch the surface we all present. To recognize the human traits we all share. To experience each other, to see and learn how others are handling life and its issues — by looking and listening to them.

From the beginning, we used to invest ourselves personally in communicating. From painting pictures in caves to drums and smoke signals to developing language so we could get more specific to creating rites and rituals, plays, dances, songs — we were driven emotionally to reach out and affect each other, to share how we felt. To confirm and find solace in the commonality of our human condition.

It worked for centuries. As we moved on, we still treasured what had been said and done before because we continually recognized that the outreach of all the arts kept answering our questions, giving us other approaches to what we all still continued to live through and care about. And we kept seeking out the personal relating and responding, savoring the talking, the sharing — the contact. In every society, at any time in history, there were always family get-togethers, community celebrations, participation in events and intimacies with fellow humans. We saw and felt each other, reassured by the recognition that we’re not alone. That we do share the space and the life we all live.

Until now.

Yes — we still gather in groups. We still have family get-togethers. We still meet and eat with friends and colleagues. But the drive for contact? Eye contact? Verbal contact? Vocal contact? Reaching out to make personal, human contact? That’s fading. We’re now satisfied to share through little hand-held mechanical devices and solo finger exercises. Human contact is becoming theoretical. If the little device shows letters on a screen that means we’ve made today’s kind of contact. And it’s enough. Much easier and faster than talking. Safer too, since we can reconsider, edit and rewrite before reaching out. But what’s getting short-circuited in the creation of this unquestionably genius device? The looking, seeing, smiling, frowning, raising a voice, laughing a laugh — all those native people-gifts that we used to use for pleasure. And to instinctively judge, react to, understand and feel the human contacts we made.

Young people’s acronym-filled messages are now simply asking, “Are you still there?” waiting for the screen to say “Contact — I’m here.” We all use the new technology to fulfill more than just work tasks. The screen also answers “Who knows me?” “Do I matter” “Am I a player in the big game?” But the basic substance of life and how we live it is still human — not mechanical — and these extraordinary inventions are also starting to dry up our original communicative talents that always made reaching out to each other — though a little more time consuming — such full, rich, meaningful experiences.

So — what have we gained? Speed and ease and freedom in completing the circuits; in making technology do our bidding, short-cutting all the tiresome, time-consuming ways we used to use to accomplish our tasks. That’s good.

But what are we losing?

Those native human gifts we all own. Finding the individuality, the one-of-a-kindness that we can only discover by looking and listening, by interacting and processing live, at once, while we’re in real, personal contact with each other.

So — what am I asking for? Especially from the younger ones among us who grew up addicted to those devices. Put down those cell phones and go for being present. When you’re together with others, park the phone. Look. Listen. Perceive. Tune in. Treasure and use those inherent human instincts we used to be so good at when we needed to sense friend or foe, danger or joy, surprise or discovery. Notice. Touch. Breathe in. Feel what happens between people. Find out what we share before we lose those skills altogether. Discover what else you can learn about yourself and living – -not just the fact that we can now also make contact by tapping away.

Funny thing about us in Emergencies

If you read or listen to the news on a fairly regular basis you may have come to the conclusion that we’ve become a group of angry, divisive, name-calling sects, busily elbowing each other out of line, judging each other’s moral and mental capacities and losing that old, dependable sense of connection that used to mean being an American. Yes, we were always different from each other but we were always still related, allied, unified as Americans. Remember?

Then along comes Irene. And those hard, thorny, judgmental shells get peeled back to reveal— we’re all still connected. Connected by that most durable, eternal thread— our shared humanity. Everywhere we saw just folks rushing to rescue total strangers. Putting their own lives in jeopardy simply because they could feel the link. Their empathy and concern born out of the simple, innate human emotions we’re all born with. And suddenly we got to view that old American arm-in-armness that has been so sorely missing these last couple of years.

Of course folks like Rep. Eric Cantor couldn’t lose the opportunity to exhort us that FEMA – busy saving lives and property but spending money to do it —has to be considered one those evil government- spending programs that must be cut back in order to save money. Rather than asking the super-rich to kick in more revenue to solve our growing insolvency, certain politicians still see the human services our government provides as unnecessary, indulgent and only adding to the weakness of our economy rather than being the basic fabric of our society, grounded in our country’s founding principles.

So—does it have to take hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and blackouts for us to rise to showing the best in us? And what will it take to move the hearts of those members of Congress who worship the almighty dollar and the bottom line more than our universally basic human needs. Needs we all share, we who are lucky enough to be part of this country whose foundations were built on answering those human needs— freedom of speech and of worship ,from want and from fear.