Fear of public speaking doesn’t happen to everybody - or all the time

On September 16, 2019 Douglas Kruger posted a 4-1/2 minute YouTube video titled From amateur to expert - my number one tip for conquering fear. I watched it after he posted about it at the LinkedIn groups Public Speaking and Public Speaking Network. His tip about reframing fear is sensible, but his introduction to it is not. He begins:

“Despite how confident they may look, nobody you have ever met in your lifetime is exempt from fear. Fear is one of the most basic human emotions and it seems to underpin everything. If you are really paying attention to it we seem to stew in fear as a species. So when was the last time you felt terribly nervous before a big presentation, before a big meeting, before an important date?  

It happens to everyone, and it happens all the time. We simply don’t have access to other people’s internal emotional states. And that’s why we tend to perceive the people around us as more confident, and we perceive ourselves as more fearful.  

It’s a fallacy. It’s a fallacy that is easy to understand when you realize that you only have access to your own internal state. What you have access to in terms of other people is their external state. You’re seeing the body language. You’re seeing the act. You’re seeing the persona. The fear is always there.

I’ve been a professional speaker for some fifteen years now, and people ask whether or not I become nervous, and I get a little afraid before I get up on the stage. And the answer is yes, it never goes away. It gets better. It gets easier, and you learn to control it. But I think there is something of a perverse comfort in the idea that it doesn’t ever go away, and so if you’re feeling the fear you’re human, you are mortal , you are normal.”    

Mr. Kruger commits another fallacy of assuming that everyone else thinks the same way he does. He does not provide any proof for his claim that fear happens to everyone, and it happens all the time.  

While we cannot directly access the internal state of other people, we certainly can ask them about how they feel – specifically how much they fear things like public speaking. On December 20, 2016 I blogged about Bursting the overblown claim that 95% of Americans fear public speaking at some level. In that post I discussed percentages from both three annual Chapman Surveys of American Fears and YouGov surveys in the U.S. and Britain. (Since then there have been two more Chapman surveys). Percentages from them all for Not Afraid are as follows:

Chapman 2014 – 34.1%

Chapman 2015 – 36.7%

Chapman 2016 – 38.3%

Chapman 2017 – 41.9%

Chapman 2018 – 41.4%

YouGov U.S. 2014 – 23%

YouGov Britain 2014 – 19%

Averaging the five Chapman surveys, 38.5% or almost 2 out of 5 Americans were NOT afraid of public speaking. The YouGov surveys found more like 1 out of 5. If people were as self-aware as a pro like Mr. Kruger, then you might expect them to all be afraid. But they aren’t.

Do people fear speaking all the time, or just in some situations? Back on November 2, 2008 I blogged about how Public speaking is still the #1 specific social fear according to the latest results from the NCS-R survey. In that post I mentioned two interesting results from the earlier National Comorbidity Survey – that while 30.2% feared public speaking only 15.2% feared talking in front of a small group.