Confessions of a Public Speaker Read Online Free PDF Page A

many performers. If you watch athletes and musicians, people who perform
     in front of massive crowds nightly, they all have preshowrituals. LeBron James and Mike Bibby, all-star basketball
     players, chew their nails superstitiously before and during games.
     Michael Jordan wore his old University of North Carolina shorts under
     his NBA shorts in every game. Wayne Gretzky tucked his jersey into his
     hockey pants, something he learned to do before games as a kid. Wade
     Boggs ate chicken before every single game. These small acts of control,
     however random or bizarre they seem to us, helped give them the
     confidence needed to face the out-of-control reality of their jobs. And
     their jobs are much harder than what public speakers do. For every point
     Michael Jordan ever scored, there was another well-paid professional
     athlete, or team of athletes, trying very hard to stop him from doing
     so.
    So, unless presentation terrorists steal your microphone
     mid-sentence or put up their own projector and start showing their own
     slide deck—designed specifically to contradict your every point—you’re
     free from the pressures other performers face nightly. Small
     observations like this make it easier to laugh at nerves, even if they
     won’t go away.
    ----
    [ 6 ]
The Book of Lists
doesn’t say, but it’s
     likely that its source was the 1973 report published by the
     Bruskin/Goldkin agency.
    [ 7 ] If you combined this list to create the scariest thing possible,
     it would be to give a presentation in an airplane at 35,000 feet, near
     a spider web, while doing your taxes, sitting in the deep end of a
     pool inside the airplane, feeling ill, with the lights out, next to a
     rabid dog, near an escalator that leads to an elevator.
    [ 8 ] It is debated what the motivations were for Jefferson’s
     small number of speeches. The Jefferson Library takes a decidedly
     generous view: see http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Public_Speaking and Halford Ryan’s
U.S. Presidents As Orators: A
     Bio-Critical Sourcebook
(Greenwood Press).
    [ 9 ] From
Conquer Your Speech Anxiety
,
     Karen Kangas Dwyer (Wadsworth).
    [ 10 ]
The Francis Effect
, M. F. Fensholt
     (Oakmont Press), p. 286.
    [ 11 ] The attack of stomach butterflies is still a mystery. The best
     guess is that it’s a side effect of your stress response, moving
     blood away from your digestive system to more important parts of
     your body for survival. Peeing and related excrementous activity in
     your pants has similar motivations, plus the bonus effect of
     distracting whatever is trying to eat you away from your tasty
     flesh.
    [ 12 ] There is a wide range from 10,000–20,000, depending on the
     individual. (This data comes from Michael Erard’s Um [Anchor].) I wish you could know the number
     for the person sitting next to you on a plane before you start
     talking to him.

Chapter 3. $30,000 an hour

    It’s 7:47 a.m. at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, so early the
    sun is just starting to rise. It’s an ungodly time and place for any
    writer to be outside. Writers aren’t the most well-adjusted people, and
    it’s telling that our preferred means of interaction with civilization is
    throwing paragraph-shaped grenades at people from behind the safety of a
    laptop. I know few writers who love mornings, and the doorman at my
    hotel—who wears a bright blue sailor’s uniform as part of the
    nautical-themed thrill ride that is the Argonaut Hotel—is clearly on my
    side. He waves down a cab for me and gives a half-smile from underneath
    his tired eyes, a smile that says, “Doesn’t it suck to work this early?”
    Anyone who finishes the night shift with a sense of humor is a good man
    indeed. Or perhaps I just look like trash this morning and he finds my
    appearance entertaining. Maybe it’s both.
    People talk about sunrises as if they were magical things. Yet here
    at Fisherman’s Wharf, the morning fog forming a glorious orange