Transforming Stage Fright into Confidence: A Personal Journey

 For many, the idea of talking in public is about as close an approximation to hell on Earth as you’re ever likely to get. People find that their voice quivers, their mind goes blank, and it takes everything they have to desperately get from “Good morning” to “Thank you.”

For me, speaking in public started at age ten when I found myself standing on a milk crate behind a pulpit, reading from the Bible to a crowded church. It was big thick Bible written in old English with words this cowboy from Colorado had never seen (Want to know how I pronounced “gentiles”? Well, it had more to do with the medical pronunciation of reproductive organs). To be sure, it was a totally unnerving, lackluster performance. I crawled out from behind the pulpit, my face red with embarrassment, and totally relieved the ordeal was over.

“Not to worry,” Fr. Verde said after services. “You’ll do better next week.”

Excuse me? Next week! There was more of this ahead? I thought about it all, and thought, like hell I’m going through this again. But I had too much respect for the man to say otherwise. Dad was, of course, was his compassionate self when I expressed my fears to him. “What happens when you get tossed from a horse?” Well, every cowboy worth his salt knows that answer. You get up, grab your hat, dust off your pants, pull the cactus thorns from your butt, and you climb back on.

So, I cowboyed up and began studying public speaking. To be sure, there wasn’t much to be found at the grade school level and so I began talking to my teachers on the subject and many were willing to help.

One of the first things I was asked was why I had a problem?

Well, I was a last-minute replacement (the lector came down with the flu and his backup wasn’t in church) and on top of everything else, every one of my teachers knew I was a stutterer. So, I got three pieces of advice that proved invaluable.

1. Know your material. I already had the material prepared for me, but just reading it wasn’t enough. I had to read it beforehand and practice it a bit. For the next week, one of my teachers would hand me something and ask me to read it out loud to myself. I did this several times and then they’d toss me in front of the class to read it out loud. What I discovered was that just having been through the material several times and reading it out loud before going out there, helped dramatically. And if there was a word I didn’t know or understand, I learned to ask.
2. Take your time and pause occasionally. The idea was not to take the text as one long race, but a number of smaller walks. This has the effect of taking a massive task and breaking it into smaller easy to handle chunks. I also learned that during these pauses, you glance up and make eye contact with your audience, and if you’re familiar enough with your material that you can do so during reading, even better. Years later I had this idea reinforced when I began smoking a pipe. In order to say something while smoking, you had to take the pipe out of your mouth and by that time you had your thoughts together and could come out with something that made sense and was coherent. (I think that’s why pipe smokers are always portrayed as wise). Someone who did something similar was Neil Armstrong. You’d ask him something and about the time you thought he hadn’t heard you, he’d open his mouth and out would come this perfectly constructed statement or formula. So taking your time is vitally important.
3. Ask for feedback. How did I do? Where could I improve? My teachers and priest were more than willing to provide it, and I’d take their ideas and build them in. I also acquired a small cassette recorder, which I used to record myself and play it back. I knew I’d be my own worst critic, but wanted to hear how I sounded. I learned to project emotion, and I also learned to drop my voice a bit. It gave my voice more authority and also made it clearer and easier to listen to.

With these three weapons at my disposal, one of the biggest items I experienced, good old fashioned fear, began to go away. Surprisingly, even my stuttering subsided. It still surfaces now and again, especially when I’m teaching. I tend to get very passionate, and the brain gets ahead of the mouth. I’ve a sign hanging over my desk that always admonishes me to slow down. If I don’t pay it any mind, my wife will be happy to remind me. I found I actually began to enjoy public speaking and, after several months,  you’d never have known that the kid standing behind the pulpit had been ready to pass out from fear a few months before.

The next phase in this had to wait till college. I began doing several things, all related to speaking.

One, I began producing planetarium shows. These were mine, from start to finish, and it taught me to have passion in what you talk about and how to use humor. It also taught me how to tell a story, to take complex ideas (like the formation of stars and such) and make them easy to understand. Albert Einstein wrote that “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it yourself.” I took the advice to heart and learned to take an idea fraught with mathematical ideas and turn it into a story anyone could follow. It also taught me to use graphics and illustrations and to incorporate them into a means that would educate and entertain at the same time. This was all way back in the pre-PowerPoint days. I learned that the graphics shouldn’t tell the story. That’s the function of the person doing the talking, and you had to weave it all together to draw the audience into worlds they’d never seen before.

I took speech courses and learned not only the use of words and the voice, but props as well. Our prof assigned us topics to research. I drew “Violence as part of the Human Race.” I borrowed two skulls from the Anthropology Department, the owners of which had both died violent deaths ages ago. Using them I illustrated that violence was nothing new. An interesting aside was that during my talk, and while handling the skulls, some dried mud fell out of one them. A young lady sitting in the front row threw up. She thought it was dried brains.

I thought it was a very effective presentation!

And that of course led to acting and to the Toastmasters club.

Acting is a really good medium to get over stage fright and it’s all about the role. When you’re acting, for at least a little while, you become someone else. It’s probably the only occupation, with the possible exception of being a spy, where you can do that and not be locked up as a lunatic. You learn about motion, expression, and most of all, focus. I couldn’t have cared less about the audience at that point. I wanted the person I was playing to be real. In order to do that, I had to tune the audience out completely. I didn’t care about the laughs or the cough, or someone murmuring something. Every ounce of my being had to go into the part.

I had some real fun with acting. We did Once in a Lifetime and me and another actor found ourselves on stage, live, having to improv because the girl who was supposed to come out into the scene didn’t for at least two minutes.

Another play we did was The Ruling Class. I wasn’t one of the actors. I was running lights for this one. In the opening of the play, we have an English earl who get’s his jollies by hanging himself. The actor in question would also play the earl’s heir. In the opening, the earl misses his ladder and hangs himself. The actor was suspended by a harness and a wire to keep that from actually happening.

Closing night. The actor is going through his thing and suddenly the scene changed from what had happened before. He wasn’t going back to the ladder like he should have and his flailing about was a little too real. That’s when I saw the wire wasn’t tight. It had broken and he’d actually hung himself.

I quickly got someone’s attention, killed the lights, and they went out and got him down. It was ten minutes before the actor could talk again.

Several friends were with Toastmasters and while not exactly a member, I did attend a meeting or ten. That short amount of exposure improved me even more as a speaker. I was good when I started attending, I was better when I left. Some of the folks who were members were my professors from college. Others were community members like ministers, teachers, politicians, lawyers and just plain community folk. Most were more than happy to offer critique or praise, and what I began to learn from them was to take an idea and get people to see it your way or in a new light. But something else was happening here, something was being cultivated that I didn’t fully appreciate until years later. I was building relationships that would pay benefits years later. These were people who I would encounter in my careers as a Police Officer, Sheriff, and an Emergency Manager. The fact these people knew me, and to some degree had a hand in making who and what I’d become, made them easier to deal with as equals. The big thing I learned from Toastmasters was to use your voice as a leader, to convey dreams, ideas and needs, and most importantly, to build relationships with people.

Most recently, I gave a talk to the fifth-grade class at Westridge Academy her in Greeley, Colorado. The talk was part of their Veterans Day celebration, and I was urging students to preserve their family history. I took an old helmet salvaged from a chicken coop. If I’ve read everything off it correctly and my research was correct, then this helmet MIGHT have been at the Battle of the Bulge.

I recorded the talk and to be honest, it’s not the best recording. But it did inspire children to start getting those stories and writing them down.

Here’s the story of that talk and here’s the video.