The study that everybody cites but nobody reads.

There is a statistic that speaker coaches seem to love.

Public speaking is scarier than death.

If you go back to 1973, there was a study by RH Bruskin Associates, which took 2,543 participants and gave them the opportunity to select fears from a list of 14 fears.

The one which was picked the most was public speaking.

Death came in at seventh.

From that point onwards everyone who talks about public speaking shouts about the fact that public speaking is scarier than death.

Well it’s bollocks.

On a number of accounts really.

Firstly the original paper wasn’t peer-reviewed research. It was done for promotion.

Having studied both podiatry and nursing, which involves a lot of reviewing of research, you understand the importance of the hierarchy of research and what to believe from the findings.

Secondly they looked at preference. They didn’t look at ranking fears against each other.

They didn’t ask which of these fears is scariest.

Jump forward to 2012 and Dwyer and Davidson went and redid the research, what they found was really interesting.
 
 While speaking was still the most selected and death was third, when people were asked to rank their single top fear, death came in first.
 
 So what does this mean?

Well for me, it means a number of things.

It means that people will often dick around with the data to make it serve their purpose.
 
 It means that people will often look at the surface level of things and not challenge stuff further.

It means that because death is scarier, if you want to develop your public speaking skills, you can.
 
 Mate, I’m not saying that speaking in public isn’t scary because it is.

I still get nervous every time I speak but I understand the context of it now and I appreciate the importance of taking those nerves with me.
 
 But there are things that you can do to develop your speaking skills.
 
 A lot of the work I do now begins with carefully exposing people to things that might scare them when it comes to speaking in public.

Exercises that are useful and are designed to build up a bank of evidence that everything is going to be okay.

To change people’s relationship with fear of failure and imperfection.

Because when we have enough evidence of safety, things become easier.
 
I wonder if that’s what we think about when it comes to the fear of public speaking. It’s not the public speaking itself, it’s what not doing a great job at it would represent.

Standing up in front of a room full of people and sharing something which you believe is important, and also doing a good job, can be quite hard.

It tugs on all of the evolutionary fears that we have about being cast out from a tribe and not being liked.

But if we think about how we develop those skills in a way where you’re supported and you can gather the evidence that everything is going to be okay…

…well that seems to me like a good way to go.

I don’t really have a hard sell to close this but what I will say is I am running a workshop at the end of the week in Bromsgrove and there’s still a couple of places left. If you want to join me on that one, drop me a DM or contact me.