Next week you have to speak to a hall of three hundred people.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- How often you have rehearsed it out loud.The one dial demonstrably known to work, and the one pressed least. Preparation is not exciting and it is the whole difference.
- Whether you prepare for what goes wrong instead of avoiding the thought.The failing technology, the awkward question, the lost thread. Thinking each through once is yours and takes the fright out of them.
- Whether you speak about what you actually think.Anyone saying something he believes has less to memorise and sounds better. That is a choice made while writing, days before the stage.
Not yours
- That you get nervous thinking about it.The body is preparing for something that matters. That is the first movement and it belongs there; speakers who feel nothing are rarely good.
- Whether the hall approves.Three hundred judgments formed from their day, their mood and what they already knew. You can influence them and not determine them, and that difference is the whole teaching.
- Whether somebody says something unpleasant afterwards.There is always one person in the hall who wanted it otherwise. That comes with three hundred people and says nothing about the evening.
The reasoning. Fear of performing aims almost entirely at the hall, and the hall sits on the left. Everything that genuinely shapes the evening sits on the right and happens in the week before: rehearsing aloud, thinking the disasters through once, and saying something you believe. Do those three and you are still nervous and have nothing left to add.
- Do not be unhappy before your time.Seneca
Nearby situations
More on this topic: Fear and the future