At Forbes on September 7, 2022 there is an article by Jennifer Stephens Acree titled Back to Basics: 5 tips to nail any speaking opportunity. Her five tips are:
Prepare and practice
Visualize your surroundings
Channel your mentor
Tailor your speech to fit your audience
Don’t expect perfection
But she opens by claiming that:
“To the vast majority of people, public speaking is terrifying.”
Is there survey data which addresses that claim? Yes, there is for Americans, but it contradicts what she says.
Chapman University did seven annual surveys on American Fears (2014 to 2020/21), which asked about four different levels of fear: Very Afraid, Afraid, Slightly Afraid, and Not Afraid. Very Afraid is an approximation for Terrified. Their blog posts report the sum for the top two levels, Very Afraid and Afraid (average 26.9%). But you can look up the detailed results for all levels. It also is of interest to look at the other sum for the two lowest levels, Not Afraid and Slightly Afraid. As is shown above in a table, just 8.8 to 12.8% (average 10.6%) were Very Afraid, but the vast majority, 68.8% to 76.5% (average 71.8%) were just Slightly Afraid or Not Afraid.
Where did public speaking rank at the Very Afraid fear level? On September 27, 2021 I blogged about how In the 2020/2021 Chapman Survey of American Fears, public speaking was only ranked #67 (11.5%) out of 95 fears at the Very Afraid level. And on September 29, 2021 I blogged about how Based on the Grand Sum, the fear of public speaking was only ranked #45 (61.7%) out of 95 fears in the 2020/2021 Chapman Survey of American Fears. In the latter post I also calculated Fear Scores, and reported public speaking at 2.023 where Very Afraid = 4.0, Afraid = 3.0, Slightly Afraid = 2.0, and Not Afraid = 1.0.
Jennifer’s business is in Santa Monica, which is less than a fifty-mile drive from Orange (where Chapman University is located).
The cartoon of a woman speaker was modified from an image at Wikimedia Commons.
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