Friday, January 24, 2020

A humorous reminder that you don’t have to be the world expert on a topic in order to speak







































On January 24, 2020 there was a Savage Chickens cartoon titled Expert, which is shown above. Doug Savage noted that a speaker only needs to be more of an expert than everybody else in the room.

You still have to do your homework. You can’t get away with quoting information from somewhere on the web without going back to its source. I just ran across a blog post from January 10, 2020 by Andrew Stapleton titled Fear of public speaking facts. It has a section titled Fear of public speaking facts from around the web. The second reference (an article at Magnetic Speaking) says public speaking fear has 10% impairment on wages and a 15% impairment on promotion to management. The third reference (a blog post at ethos3)  mentions those same percentages, and it actually got them from the second reference. Another blog post on January 16, 2020 from Cynthia Kay titled Do You Have Glossophobia [Public Speaking Fear] also referred to that Magnetic Speaking article.







































But, as shown above, if you follow links back four more levels to the original source, then you will find it instead says that generalized social anxiety disorder is associated with 10% lower wages when looking at direct effects and 19% lower wages when looking at total effects. It also says generalized social anxiety disorder is associated with a 14% lower probability of being in a managerial, technical, or professional occupation. If you search the text of the original source, you will not even find either the word public or the word speaking. Back on December 15, 2016 I blogged about the Magnetic Speaking article in a post titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking.

UPDATE February 25, 2020


An article at the KSL web site on February 25, 2020 by the Salt Lake Chamber also referenced that 2005 PowerPoint presentation, and incorrectly claimed the 2001 report (really an article) said fear of public speaking had a 10% impact on ability to earn.  


 

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