UTTER ANXIETY

We have nothing to fear but public speaking itself.

By Herbert Hadad

My friend Emil came down on a trapeze before a full house. He sang his aria, and the crowd erupted in a happy roar. After the curtain fell, I went back to congratulate Emil, a star tenor with the New York City Opera, in his dressing room. Then I wandered onto the City Center’s stage. A single light bulb dangled overhead.

I stared out at the empty theater and remembered an act I’d seen once on The Ed Sullivan Show. A comic strides to center stage, adjusts his tie, clutches the microphone, and says nothing. After fifteen seconds of silence, the audience begins to chuckle. After thirty, they are laughing harder. As the amusement builds, the comic leans into the microphone and says, “How do you like me so far?” The audience flips out.

Looking out at the 2,700 seats, I thought, If they were filled with people, what in the world would I say? What if I said “How do you like me so far?” and everybody just coughed and waited for me to disappear? Aside from running races on a track or trading punches in a ring, I had never engaged in any public display, certainly never any public utterances. (Well, once I spoke in the ring. I said, “Ouch!”)

I stood stock still, feeling uncomfortable. I knew what was happening. I was experiencing my lifelong dread of public speaking.


When I was a student at Northeastern, the threat of public speaking loomed like a bully stalking the schoolyard. I was an economics major, and though I’ve never earned a nickel with my economics expertise, I enjoyed my studies, partly because mastering the theory was a pleasant challenge, and partly because my professors were skillful teachers and fun to boot.

All this agreeable comfort vanished the day one professor announced his next assignment. We would have a week to study an aspect of economic theory, prepare a lecture on it, and present the lecture to the class. “I really want you to know your subject,” he said. “No notes. A few words on a three-by-five card if you really need it, but that’s all.”

Oh, no. The prospect of speaking in public threw me into a tailspin. I worried about it in bed at night, on the Huntington Avenue trolley, in the school cafeteria. I worried so much, I felt sick. In high school, I’d joined the football team with big scary guys rather than sign up for speech class.

Instead of thinking about how to present my understanding of the Malthusian theory of population control, I thought about how not to. How to avoid what appeared an inevitable showdown with my worst nightmare. Compounding the anxiety was my reluctance to disappoint my professor. He’d been kind enough to invite us scholars to his apartment, and serve us beer and wine, and cheese and crackers, and make us feel like grown-ups. How could I tell him I was refusing to talk before his class?

One night, though, at my job as a part-time Boston Globe copy boy, ripping news stories off the teletypes and rushing them to the editors’ desks, watching the rolls of paper skip through the keyboards and fall to the floor, I had an inspiration. The morning of the lecture, I was ready.

The professor called my name. I walked to the podium, looked at the class, and said, “Ah, I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a few notes.” Then I unfurled the teletype paper, with my entire lecture typed on it. It rolled down the lectern, across the front of the room, and down the aisle. My classmates howled. “Sit down, Mr. Hadad,” the professor said.

I’d done it! I’d avoided speaking in public. It was a trial I would not risk again for decades.


Even today, when I sat down to write about public speaking—just write about it—a terrible thing happened. I froze. I couldn’t think of how to start. I couldn’t decide what readers might find interesting, what would make them remember their own experiences, laugh, shudder, maybe even get a little teary. I eyed the deadline marked on my calendar. I fretted over letting others—and myself—down.

Where does that fear begin? How does it become so deeply ingrained? With a weary parent telling a baby to hush up and go to sleep? An elder sibling stealing the dinner-table spotlight, reducing the younger ones to silence? Does it happen outside the house, when neighborhood kids laugh at the way another kid looks, or talks, or dresses?

I can’t trace any clues, except for one obscure detail. I am a middle child; my son Charles Aram is a middle child. At a summer camp show long ago, his group marched out to sing a medley before an audience of adoring parents. The moment the conductor raised his arm, Charles did a crisp about-face. He sang the entire concert facing the brick schoolhouse wall. And his dad understood deeply, beyond words.

My children were so aware of my fear of public speaking that for one birthday they had an aphorism I like engraved on a wooden plaque: “A writer is a shy actor.” They also, indirectly, prompted my first speaking engagement. Since I was known in the community as a contributing reporter for the New York Times, our PTA president thought I’d make a good moderator for an upcoming Candidates’ Night, where six school-board hopefuls would talk about why they should fill one of three open seats.

As the evening neared, I tried to convince myself this wasn’t even a speech. All I had to do was say good evening, introduce the speakers, tell them when their time was up, and point to people in the audience who wanted to say something.

My self-deception didn’t work. In fact, I found myself dwelling on a favorite movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, which follows three World War II servicemen who return to their Midwestern town and try to pick up their old lives. In the scene my mind kept replaying, banker and army sergeant Al Stephenson, played by Fredric March, tells his wife how he will prepare for a speech before the town’s leaders. “I plan to meet that situation,” the war hero explains, “by getting well plastered.”
I wasn’t proud of myself, but by the time my wife, Evelyn, drove me to the school cafeteria on the appointed night through the early-autumn cold, I was Sgt. Stephenson. After two cocktails, I wavered between suave self-confidence and desperately not giving a damn.

The greetings and introductions went smoothly enough, but when it was time for rebuttals, I forgot one of the candidates. People in the audience jumped up and said, “What about Mrs. Gottlieb? You forgot Mrs. Gottlieb.”

“My apologies, Mrs. Gottlieb,” I said, as she glared at me. “Please proceed.” As it happened, I’d never cared for the pompous Mrs. Gottlieb, a detail the gin had just revealed.

Then, during audience participation time, a teacher known for his position on the importance of high salaries rose to deliver his usual discourse. “You’ll get your raise, Mr. Langdon,” I said. “Now, sit down.”
I was not invited back.


Years later, Northeastern would test me a second time. My wife and I were asked to dine at the stately University Club on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue with members of a new graduating class who, it was hoped, would become active alumni. When we arrived at six o’clock on an ideal summer’s evening, we noticed no bar had been set up. “Some of the students are not of legal drinking age,” our host explained, “and we’re taking them to a play afterwards, so we decided to skip the liquor.” Then he delivered the bombshell. “By the way, we’re going to call upon you to speak to the students about why Northeastern’s a great school.”

I whispered to Evelyn, and we dashed out the door and down East 54th to a place I knew, Ciao Europa. I ordered a very dry cocktail and consumed it rapidly. We returned to the club. My name was called. I rose to speak. I could feel the heat coming out of every pore.

“You’ve chosen well,” I told the students. “In the years to come, time and again, you will realize the wisdom of your decision to attend Northeastern.” As I spoke, I hammered the side of my fist into my open palm for emphasis, marveling at my own lyricism. “And Northeastern will not disappoint you. It has already given you a great education. It will continue to give you support, friendship, and guidance.”

When I sat down to applause and slaps on the back, I knew what I’d said had been spontaneous and true. I also knew I’d been lucky not to fall flat on my face. I would never want to write a story under the influence. I had to learn to stand and speak on my own as well.

By now, I had been a newspaper reporter, a public relations executive, a freelance writer. I was a husband and a father. But I was not a syllable closer to dealing with the terror of public speaking. Aware of the vast if untidy body of information on the Internet, I decided to look for answers there.

The first website I found offered the services of a hypnotherapist, who proposed helping clients get in touch with their inner critic by verbalizing what might lie just beneath consciousness: “Why don’t you shut up? You’ll never amount to anything. Don’t embarrass me again. Quit daydreaming. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say.” There was more, about inadequate parents, punitive teachers, unworthiness, loneliness. I fled to another site.

An illustration on the Toastmasters International home page featured a confident-looking man in a double-breasted suit speaking beside a chart on an easel to an attentive young woman. The site offered ten straightforward tips for successful public speaking: Know the room. Know the audience. Know the material. Relax. Visualize yourself giving your speech. Realize that people want you to succeed. Don’t apologize. Concentrate on the message, not the medium. Turn nervousness into positive energy. Gain experience.

Though the advice seemed eminently more sensible than that of the hypnotist, the overall approach seemed too chummy. I learned that Toastmasters met morning, noon, and night in some seventy countries, that I’d be able to find a group nearby. With what I considered my highly personal and secret problem, clubby was not the way to go.


As it turned out, the key to unraveling the mystery of my fear wasn’t found in cyberspace, but in my own backyard. And it came not from a teacher, but a student. Jude Westerfield had been a member of my long-running personal-essay class (note that even there, I didn’t lecture—I handed out guidelines, had the students read their own efforts, and offered brief comments). Jude had written a book called I Have to Give a Presentation, Now What?

How could you not be drawn to a book that tells you you have a lot in common with Cicero, Murrow, and Seinfeld? “I turn pale at the outset of a speech,” said the Roman orator, “and quake in every limb and in all my soul.” According to broadcast news pioneer Edward R. Murrow, “Stage fright is the sweat of perfection.” Philosopher-comedian Jerry Seinfeld neatly summed up the irony of having public speaking as your biggest fear: “That means if you’re at a funeral, you’d rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.”

But the book explained something even more elemental. The act of public speaking taps into the body’s primitive “fight or flight” reaction. “It’s hard to imagine that all the dreaded physical effects of fear—sweaty palms, racing heart, shallow breathing—were originally designed to empower us against lunging tigers and bears,” Jude writes. “But that’s how the ‘fight or flight’ response works. At the first sign of a threat, your brain triggers the release of cortisol and adrenaline. . . . But what happens if the threat is not an attacking bear but just a little daydream you are having of speaking before an audience? Believe it or not, the adrenaline will pump just as hard, regardless of whether the threat is imagined or real.”

Later Jude told me more. “Getting pumped with adrenaline is of course good, but if you don’t actually go out and slay a lion—or deliver a speech—exactly when you’re pumped, the adrenaline gets absorbed into your system in a way that makes you lightheaded, tired, and disconnected. So a lot of fearful speakers panic when they know they have to address an audience, and, unless they speak right away, the constant surge of adrenaline eventually floods the system and dissipates, leaving the speaker exhausted and faint at the podium.”

She was describing a manner of delivery we’ve all seen, if not experienced ourselves. To counter it, the book urges, speakers should try not to fear the fear, but use it. “Put your nervous energy into your talk. Make it relevant to your listeners and fun. If you connect with your topic, you and your topic will connect with the audience.”

Jude’s book persuaded me I could overcome my shyness and fright—or at least mask them—and go out there and win. I just needed to outflank the bully inside me.


For the first time, I campaigned to speak in public. I’d written some essays and short stories, many unpublished, that I loved. I called them “my little children.” I convinced a local literary group to let me read several at their next library event. Evelyn helped me prepare by listening to my delivery and suggesting improvements, as well as recommending introductory remarks for each piece.

The day came. When it was my turn, I went to the podium, gulped, thanked the audience for coming and the group for the opportunity, briefly described my opening story, and read “The Tailor’s Two Sons.” It’s an essay about an immigrant tailor I knew who had lost the son he adored and, after his own death, is succeeded at the shop by the older son he had ignored. In the story, I recognize it’s my moral obligation not to let the surviving son know he was the scorned and unloved one. I read the last line: “Never. That is my secret. I will stare him in the eye and tell him nothing.”

I looked up. The hall began to fill with applause, the long-awaited endorsement I’d craved. I was on a roll. I read and spoke for over an hour. The next reader, a novelist, stood and said, “I don’t expect to be as exciting as our first author.” It was one of the greatest afternoons of my life. At the reception afterward, though, as I thanked people for their compliments, I could feel myself reverting to shyness.

After witnessing September 11’s New York attacks, I wrote a New York Times op-ed in which I said that Arabs and Muslims around the world should not be blamed for the acts of a handful of irrational killers. A few days later, the Reverend F. Paul DeHoff, of the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York, where my wife worships, called to say he’d seen the essay; would I address his congregation?

Though the nerves returned, the next Sunday I delivered a call I ardently believed in—for faith in America, for an ecumenical embrace of our Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters. When I’d finished, the solemn silence disconcerted me, and I returned to the pew rattled. In front of me sat ninety-two-year-old Laurance S. Rockefeller, patriarch of the famous family, famous avoider of public appearances. Rockefeller stood, turned, and saved me. “You were splendid,” he said. “We should have clapped.” He knew exactly what to say. He is shy himself.


Since then, I’ve been coaxed to go on cable TV and give talks at colleges, and I’m learning more about controlling and masking those old feelings of nervousness and dread. If you’re sitting in the audience, I appear to be a confident man who has something to say that you want to hear.

But in the still of the night in my bedroom, on the empty amphitheater stage, behind the lectern, there is still truth to face. The truth is, you never entirely lose the fear and the jitters. Instead, you prepare for the task and, for good measure, you make a pact. You promise to be more attentive to your children, or sweeter to your wife, or kinder to the cats. If only you’re allowed to complete the next appearance without a nosedive.

And if there are times you find public speaking exhilarating—akin to the first time you rode a two-wheeler, or tasted pepperoni pizza, or skimmed effortlessly over fresh powdery trails, or finally asked her out and she said yes—you are to enjoy them but not forget the following:

You fell off that blue bike and stayed overnight for observation at Boston City Hospital. You devoured copious slices and suffered almost terminal indigestion. You collapsed in a laughable tangle of skis and snow. And, sweet as she was, she ultimately broke your heart.

That’s how it is with public speaking. You try to forget the anxiety, but you probably never will. So you just go on.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and award-winning writer, is available for speaking engagements in person or on videotape. Neither comes with any guarantees.