Is fear of public speaking the greatest fear in the entire galaxy?

Who knows? Right now on this planet we don’t have access to statistics like that. (That’s the kind of information we’d expect to read in the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). We don’t even have any real surveys for this whole world. But that hasn’t stopped people from making inflated claims, like that:

“Fear of public speaking has become the number one global fear...”

Those inflated claims often are connected with sales of books, courses, or coaching. First the problem is exaggerated, and then a quick fix solution is offered. It’s the same ridiculous process that is shown above in a century old cartoon about selling patent medicine.  

What about just the United States? On July 27th Tim Ellmore blogged that:

“You probably know that in frequent surveys taken among Americans, people continue to confirm that public speaking is their number one fear.”

On May 24th Sonya Hamlin claimed:

“... Did you know that the number one fear of the American public -- researched annually for the last 40 years -- has been and still is any form of public speaking! It comes up as number one year after year. Amazing.”

On February 4, 2011 Fred E. Miller claimed:

“Survey after survey consistently lists the ‘Fear of Public Speaking’ as the number one fear most people have.”

Those three claims all are nonsense. How do I know that? On this blog I have previously discussed fifteen surveys of adults in the U.S. There were only five where public speaking was the number one fear. Here are the rankings, and titles (with links) to those posts. The notation N/M means that the fear of speaking was ranked Nth out of M fears.

4/4: Getting a root canal done is scarier than public speaking or a job interview.

9/14: Lists where the fear of public speaking isn’t anywhere near the top - The Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study.

3/4: Poll by Reader’s Digest Canada found fear of public speaking wasn’t ranked first in 15 of 16 countries surveyed.

3/5: More American men feared poor sexual performance than public speaking.

6/10: U. S. residents are slightly more afraid of public speaking than of hell or fire.

3/6: Giving presentations isn’t the top fear of employees in the United States.

5/20: 20 fears for a new millennium - replacing the 1977 Book of Lists.

2/13 (twice) Fear of public speaking versus fear of snakes (Gallup Polls 2001 and 1998).

2/10: Ten high anxiety social situations.

1/14: Putting the fears puzzle pieces together: social and specific fears from the National Comorbidity Survey.

1/12: More Americans fear public speaking than getting fat, and death tied for third.

1/14: America’s Number One Fear: Public Speaking - that 1993 Bruskin-Goldring Survey.

1/4: According to LG, people fear public speaking even more than cleaning, dentists, or doing taxes.

1/14: The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from?

Fear of public speaking was ranked number one only a third of the time, not all the time.

Back on June 4th I’d blogged about Sonya Hamlin’s claim being bogus. Since then I also posted on the Public Speaking Network group at LinkedIn asking if anyone knew of something to back up her claim. The only slightly positive reply was one that cited another phobia list that I’ve also blogged about - as being bogus.

Why is your conference audience frowning? Perhaps they just lost at travel roulette

Suppose that you were going to speak at the evening opening session of a conference. You planned ahead, got there the day before, and rehearsed your speech repeatedly. But, when you went to give it you noticed a whole bunch of frowning faces in the audience. Were they upset because your content and delivery were terrible? Perhaps not.

Back in 1975 I attended an international technical conference that was held at a lovely resort location - Jackson Lake Lodge, in Grand Teton National Park. To get there you probably had to fly to Jackson, Wyoming via Frontier Airlines, whose nearest hub airports were in Denver and Salt Lake City. Back then they flew Convair 580 turboprop airliners that only held fifty people.

The conference had been organized by a pair of university professors. They’d warned Frontier not to overbook flights to Jackson by their usual percentages on the day and evening when the conference opened. Of course Frontier ignored them, and everybody with reservations showed up at the counters in their two hubs. Some people had to take later flights. Others missed the opening session.

At the conference one disgruntled traveler told me he’d had to take a later flight. John worked in market development for a huge international metals company. The person behind the counter also told him that his baggage might not fly with him, and might not even arrive until the next morning. When he asked if the airline could be more specific, the counter person just snidely replied:

“That’s what we call Frontier roulette!”

John spent most of his work week traveling around the U.S. visiting customers. I wonder how many business travelers he told that customer disservice punch line, and how many million dollars of lost business it eventually cost Frontier, who went bankrupt in 1986.  
    
The roulette cartoon came from an old Puck magazine. This post was inspired by Lisa Braithwaite’s Speak Schmeak blog post yesterday on why I’m my own worst audience member.

Off-topic spam blog comments - the hCG Diet Scam

When you give a speech you may be asked irrelevant questions by hecklers who have their own agendas. On a blog the equivalent is spam comments. This blog is hosted using Google Blogger, which includes a feature for detecting and diverting spam comments to a junk folder - once you tell it you want to moderate comments rather than publish every one.  

The last time I checked my junk folder I was surprised to find over two dozen comments made just on July 20th. They all contained links to Canadian web sites peddling diet supplement products for the Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) diet.

The day before they started spamming me I had read a long and somewhat technical post on the Science-Based Medicine blog by Scott Gavura titled The HCG Diet: Yet another ineffective quick fix diet plan and supplement. In that post he discussed how the diet had long been shown to be ineffective (and potentially dangerous), but had been popularized again in 2007 by the notorious telemarketer Kevin Trudeau in a worthless book. It also mentioned that last December the U.S. FDA had taken action to pull unapproved HCG products off the market. So, the dirty business has moved across the border to Canada.

There is an excellent, more readable two-page discussion of the diet in Myth vs. Fact - The Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hCG) Diet, a downloadable fact sheet from The Hormone Foundation. I found it via some quick research on Google that led me to a blog post by a dietician.

Getting that pile of spam reminded me of a line from The Mary Ellen Carter, a song by the Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers bemoaning:

“....smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go.”

The vintage SPAM can is from Wikimedia Commons.

Adding a safety net for speech evaluations in Toastmasters meetings

Every Toastmasters manual in the Communication series contains a set of projects. The first page for each project has a list of Objectives. For each project the last page has a one-page Evaluation Guide. The guide has a list with about a half-dozen written questions to guide the speech evaluator. Before the meeting begins, the speaker hands the manual to his evaluator. After the speeches, the evaluator gives a two to three minute verbal evaluation. Later he also provides a more detailed written evaluation by answering all the questions in the manual. For more details, see the Effective Evaluations publication.

That’s how it should work - assuming the speaker doesn’t forget to bring the manual to the meeting. But, what happens if he forgets? Then the evaluator might get lucky and find a spare manual in the club’s files. What if he isn’t lucky though? You have a situation like a fire minus the safety net shown above.

It would be very useful to have a generic rubric as a safety net for that occasion. The August 2009 Toastmaster magazine contains an article by Carol Dean Schreiner on pages 16 to 19 titled The GOOD the BAD and the UGLY: How speech evaluations can help - or hurt. On page 19 there is exactly such a rubric - a Handy Evaluation Checklist. It has a dozen specific points, plus the following four general ones:

Suggestions..........

The part I could really appreciate was..........

The best suggestion I can offer is ..........

The best thing about this speech, overall, was ..........

That article was published when I was Vice President - Education for Capitol Club. So, I formatted a version of her Handy Evaluation Checklist to fit on a single page, indicated the source at the bottom, saved it in Microsoft Word, and put twenty copies in a folder for emergency use at our meetings. I emailed Carol to suggest that she put a printable version of it on her web site. She didn’t. Unfortunately the html version of her article on the Toastmasters web site also doesn’t contain that checklist. You can find it in the pdf file for that entire issue of Toastmaster magazine though.

However, you can find an uncredited printable version to download at a web page about evaluation tools on the web site for Calgary Toastmasters. Why isn’t it on the main Toastmasters web site? Was it just Not Invented Here?

The image of a life net was adapted from a Puck magazine centerfold published in 1911.

A narrated hike through the forest along Morris Creek

A month ago, on June 23rd, I went for an afternoon hike in the Scotchman Peaks roadless area northeast of Lake Pend Oreille. That’s way up in northern Idaho, not far south of the border with Canada and west of the Montana state line. About a dozen people followed a trail uphill along dry creek bed parallel to Morris Creek. The return was downhill along the same route.

It was part of the annual meeting for the Idaho Native Plant Society (INPS). The hike was led by  Derek Antonelli, who is president of the Calypso Chapter of INPS in Coeur d’ Alene. He works for the state Fish and Game department, and has edited materials for the Idaho Master Naturalist Program. Derek’s description for our route said that the vegetation would be a good representation of the native plants found in the moist Western Hemlock / Western Red Cedar forests of northern Idaho. When he’d hiked this trail last September, he’d counted over 100 different species of plants.

For me it was an eye opening presentation. He was surrounded by visual aids, presenting a topic he was passionate about as an extended conversation. In response to questions from the group Derek identified and discussed everything from little pipecleaner moss and oak fern to other large trees like Douglas Fir and Grand Fir. Depending on the amount of water, there’s a sequence of which trees predominate in western forests. I quickly lost track of the number of wildflowers, ferns, and mosses but came away with a sense of wonder. 

Isn’t it time to bury this joke?

Two decades ago in a comedy routine Jerry Seinfeld joked that:

“According to most studies, people’s number-one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. ‘Death’ is number two! Now, this means to the average person, if you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

After watching prolonged coverage of the massacre at a theater in Aurora, Colorado on Friday (and the anniversary of an even worse massacre in Norway) I’ve concluded that it’s time for speaking coaches and teachers to quit referring to this joke. What do you think?

How to lose your credibility - a tinhorn at the Buck-A-Roo Breakfast

Early yesterday morning I was listening to a remote radio broadcast by KIDO in Nampa from the Buck-A-Roo Breakfast, which is part of a venerable rodeo - the 97th Snake River Stampede. One of their guests was Wayne Hoffman, who is executive director of the Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF). He was there to promote an IFF celebration and banquet on Thursday in Boise.

Wayne said something which made my jaw drop in astonishment. It was that Obamacare is unconstitutional, and I don’t care what John Roberts says. Huh?

John Roberts is the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. What he said in writing is an Opinion, and it really is the last word on that topic. What Wayne says just is an opinion with a very small letter o. He is not an expert on the law, and was just shooting off his mouth.

Given the venue, two uncomplimentary cowboy-related words came to mind to describe Wayne: tinhorn and drugstore cowboy. Wayne won’t be on a list of the ten worst moments in public speaking but he now has no credibility with me. 

The image of movie cowboy Tom Mix came from the Library of Congress.