Why is Public Speaking so Scary?

According to an American study 75% of people fear public speaking more than they fear death?! Whilst this data point may not be entirely conclusive, it’s well recognised that public speaking – whether it’s standing up in front of hundreds of people at a conference, speaking at your department meeting of 50, or sharing a presentation with your boss – fills most people with horror and is something many people actively avoid doing.

But why is this? Why do we find it so scary? What is it that leads us to think we would rather die than open our mouths and speak in front of an audience?

For many of us, it’s a fear of pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone, and the feelings that accompany that fear. We know that we are going to feel nervous, anxious – even scared – and this is an uncomfortable feeling that we don’t enjoy or want to invite in.
This fear – and associated nerves – is often rooted in the fact that we can have little confidence in ourselves as a public speaker. We tell ourselves that we don’t know the topic, that we can’t keep the audience engaged, and that we are not very entertaining. More often than not, this isn’t true, but in our moments of panic, our mind is very happy to believe it.

The flip side of this is a fear of the audience – the perception that they are a pack of wolves out to get us and trip us up. Despite weeks of preparation and practice, we can still go into a presentation worrying that the audience is trying to catch us out – that they want to expose a lack of in-depth knowledge about the presentation topic, that they want to bombard us with difficult and challenging questions, that they are out to prove a point and prove us wrong. This can be particularly draining when we are new in our role or presenting to a group of people who we imagine to be significantly more senior or knowledgeable than us.