Yesterday’s superficial advice about fear of public speaking

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The July 2021 Toastmaster magazine has an article by Craig Harrison titled Due Your Due Diligence on pages 22 to 25. He says to avoid intellectual complacency and that:

 

“Professional speakers who fact-check know from experience to seek the original source of facts and stats.”

 

There is an excellent example yesterday of how silly you can look by not following Craig’s advice. It is in an article by Jacob Highley at the Inquisitr titled How to Overcome the Fear of Public Speaking. His third paragraph says:

 

“According to studies, the fear of public speaking does more than impact how you interact with the world, your co-workers, or how you view yourself. The data indicates it affects your career too!”

 

But Jacob links to another article by Peter Khoury at Magnetic Speaking on December 13, 2016 titled 7 Unbelievable “Fear of Public Speaking” Statistics. The ‘statistics’ Peter cites really are about social anxiety disorder, which is not the same as fear of public speaking. On December 15, 2016 I blogged about them in a post titled Believable and unbelievable statistics about fears and phobias of public speaking.

 

And later in his article Jacob claims that:

 

“Only 7% of how a presentation is received revolves around the content presented. 55% of effective presentations are composed of non-verbal communication (like body language) and 38% of successful presentations are made up of your tone of voice.”  

 

He doesn’t say where those percentages came from, but they are mythical. I blogged about them way back on July 25, 2009 in a post titled Bullfighting the Mehrabian myth.

 

The image of a man shoveling dirt was adapted from this one at Openclipart.