Giving Speeches and Other Frightening Experiences 

I’ve read that, next to dying, most people fear public speaking more than anything else.

I get that. I know what it is like to stand in front of an audience of several hundred people who are waiting to see if you are about to tell them something that is worth an hour or two of their time.

Having given dozens of speeches in my career, I can attest to the growing anxiety one feels as the day of performance draws near. It’s similar to how I feel before a Jiu Jitsu competition, where I face glory or embarrassment in front of onlookers who, I’ve convinced myself, are there not to see any of the other dozens of competitors, but just little old me.

My Jiu Jitsu friends that have competed hundreds of times over many years tell me that the anxiety lessens over time. And I am happy to report that my anxiety about public speaking has likewise diminished over the last 40 years.

In about a week, in Tokyo, I’ll be speaking to the largest group I’ve ever faced: 2,000 Japanese people that have paid money to hear me speak about business, entrepreneurship, and wealth building.

As my confidence in speaking grew over the years and my anxiety ebbed, I adopted the practice of doing very little preparation – just spending an hour or two thinking about what I was going to say, putting down a few notes on an index card, and ad-libbing the actual speech.

But this time I will be in front of 2,000 people and I’ll be speaking for three hours and – to make matters worse – I was asked to prepare written notes on my presentation to help the simultaneous translators do their jobs well. And so I spent many hours and wrote thousands of words and even prepared 56 slides to illustrate the points I intended to make – something I’d never done before.

Yes, I am feeling anxious right now, and I’m sure that anxiety will build in the next five or six days. But I’m sure it won’t get as bad as the anxiety I was feeling leading up to the presentation I made earlier today (I’m writing this on Saturday evening) at the Cornell Art Museum right here in Delray Beach. The subject: Central American Modernism, the book that Suzanne Snider, my partner, and I spent eight years researching and writing.

When I started writing books, I developed a fear about public speaking that I had not confronted before – the fear that I would appear at some random bookstore to talk about one of my books and find myself in a room of 50 or 60 chairs on which sat only five or six people.

That fear was so great that in my contract with John Wiley, which published many of my bestselling books, I had myself exempted from the obligation to face that sort of humiliation.

But there I was this morning, heading from my car to the museum, heart pounding, prepared to be mortified. And sure enough, when I climbed to the museum’s second floor and peeked into the room where Suzanne and I were going to speak, there were about 50 neatly arranged little white chairs on which about a half-dozen people were sitting.

I almost turned around and walked away. But I stayed. And minute by minute, people began strolling in and taking seats. By speaking time, to my utter delight, it was standing room only. And afterwards, for a good half-hour, Suzanne and I were both surrounded by people who wanted to chat about what we had said. And the comments were kind.

That put me in a good and confident mood for the rest of the afternoon. But it’s 8:15 in the evening now, and K and I are waking at 5:30 tomorrow morning to catch our planes to Japan. And already I’m feeling that slowly percolating dread that I thought I had completely subdued many years ago.

Wish me luck.