Public Speaking... A Nightmare!

I visited Washington DC couple of weeks back and I was thrilled to see Abraham Lincoln’s memorial wherein his grand structure was sitting royally inside the white grand building. Lincoln was the only US President I had heard of and read about before Clinton’s scandalous performance and Bush’s massacre made US presidents famous to politically ignorant people like me.

I have always dreamt of making a speech like Lincoln made when the American Civil War was yet to end. Something like the Gettysburg Speech made on one of the most famous battlefield of the conflict. A great speech. A speech that knocks the socks of the audience. The ladies gently wipe their eyes with lace handkerchiefs, men watch with their eyes wide open, and children maintain a unique silence. The audience look at each other with raised eyebrows. Clapping begins. Loud uproar. I will stand their proudly with my head held high, and make those small gestures of acknowledgement. Everyone will wonder, wow, was that a speech or was that a speech. The big day comes up. I get up to speak. Forget notes and cue cards. I'll deliver it extempore, like a real MBA professional, like one of those video clips of excellent presentations I have seen in marketing classes. I clear my throat; tap the mike to see if it's working. I open my mouth. And I forget EVERYTHING!! Public speaking is not a dream…it’s a nightmare. My nightmare.

Ever since I have started working, and even while I am doing my MBA, I’ll often come across situations when I have to talk in public. My managers would ask me to lead the team briefing meetings where I have no idea about the project, explain issues in the client forums when I have totally forgotten the issue I had raised, every now and then, my professors would ask me my views on the case being discussed, right at the time when I am in my wonderland, looks like they have some secret antennae connection. And each time I get into a blue funk. After reading my blog, my friends say that if you can put your thoughts down so well, then you should also be able to deliver a flamboyant speech in public. But that’s not true. At least, not in my case.

The fact that I bored you so much so far is ‘coz I wanted to tell you about the best analogy I read in my life for Public Speaking. Public speaking is not an art, nor a science…and neither accountancy or management degree. It's a question of mind over hundreds of eyes shooting (read: staring) at you. Public Speaking is like peeing in public. The harder you try, the more Mission Impossible the job becomes. It's a matter of doing what comes naturally. The more self-conscious you are about it, the more you try to force yourself, the more you literally dry up. It is actually overcoming a biological block.

The above analogy is not just for the rhetoric purposes. There is a strong reasoning behind it. The fault lies in the open-plan design of men's public loos. The women's counterparts have enclosed cubicles, behind which the occupants may get themselves at ease in an unobserved privacy (unless of course an enterprising eavesdropper has installed a spycam). Men's public loos — at least those sections meant for what is known in the common parlance as No. 1, as distinct from No. 2 — are literally that: Public. (Now don’t ask me to correlate these numbers with the activities that takes place inside the door which reads as “Men”…as I am not sure of the jargon consistencies between India and Australia/US!!) Now, this is fine when the facility in question is not crowded. To reiterate the consistency of my article, speaking among limited number of people is not public speaking. But when it is crowded, and there is a long, impatient queue waiting behind you, fiddling, jiggling, jingling keys and coins in its pockets, urging you telepathically if not vocally to hurry up and get it done (What's the matter, you got a prostate problem? Just taken it out for an airing, or what?), and you realise to your growing panic that let alone hurry up and finish, you can't even hurry up and start. Your system seizes up totally.

Public speaking, for me, is EXACTLY like this….