How a poorly researched blog post can hold back your career

On March 8, 2017 at SketchBubble Ashish Arora blogged about How Fear of Public Speaking Can Hold Back Your Career. His seven reasonable tips were to:

Be Gentle with Yourself

Be Yourself

Don’t Focus on Being Perfect

Inspire

Prepare

Retrain Your Self-Sabotaging Mind

Get the Audience Involved

But he opened his post with this credibility destroying nonsense:

"If you suffer from a fear of public speaking, you are definitely not alone. In fact, fear of public speaking often lands in the top five of the biggest fears that humans have. In some surveys, it even lands in the number one slot, with death coming in at a close second!"

When you click on his link to the Washington Post article about the first Chapman Survey on American Fears, you will find no mention of death. If you dig further and look at the Chapman press release, you’ll find that they only listed public speaking in the top five, not first.

Where did the claim that public speaking is number one with death a close second really come from? It’s a nonsensical Fear/Phobia Statistics web page, which I blogged about in a post on December 7, 2014 titled Statistic Brain is just a statistical medicine show.

The image was adapted from a tuberculosis test poster at the Library of Congress.