Fear of Public Speaking

crutches that you have in your way of communicating. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, I'm I'm like like like like like like. There are three examples right there. And if you have an interview coming up and you want to make sure that you put your best foot forward, this is the man who can help you. So Dennis, Dennis Becker, welcome Tonight's.

Improvement Company is the place you want to be. We are located in Boston, and we're actually the oldest speech coaching company in the United States. We started this industry. It's sixty years ago. Now we can imagine that more than it's been sixty years since this company has been started. Now, we we're in Boston. We did some local things. Now we've got coaches and offices around the world and we're doing very well. And thank you for inviting me to be on the show to say some of that.

and out for clients to come to our office. And yes, we had a company a building that we bought that used to belong to a company that sold and made furniture and they would advertise their product in this huge window was about an eight and a half by eleven and a half foot all glass window, and so they would advertise their furniture in the window because they had stuff to sell and it would help people could see the stuff. Well, when we were at the building, I

thought to myself, how do you sell this stuff? We don't have stuff like that. So we decided, well, let's keep the building up anyway, we find something creative. What we started to do, which we started to make life size characters, mannequin kind of things and put them in

the window as sort of a joke. Well, over the years it not only caught on and people were looking forward to what's the new window this Segi Poova Company's going to put up, but we began to win some awards, and we always used a little bit of humor but had some speech message in the humor with it. So after thirty one years, what happened technology change, population change, and most of all, it became easier to deal with people not having to go into town or them to

come out a long game. Technology and then nowadays, of course everything is done by zoom and whatever. So we decided a few years ago, we decided to move the company out of what became a very high lench district. Although we owned the building, taxes were incredible in Brookline, so we moved it out to where most of our team moved, which was the west of the city. So now the office is located the home office is located in framing them.

We had them sh hripped two day with each one was about two hundred pounds. We had them shipped to the office and Bookline put them in the window, and then we had to think of things that were cute and speechy like to put around them. Well, they became so popular of people walking by that we had to keep them in, keep them in there for a lot of things that had Halloween Blues Brothers, things, Christmas Blues Brothers. But I'll tell you one funny quick thing about it.

When we first put them in, When we first put them in the window, we were in a part of Bookline that had a very heavy Jewish population and many of them were Hasidic and they would come to go to temple. They would pass our office in our window and they just look in the window all the time.

When we put these Blues Brothers in the window. For those of you who are listening who can remember what the Blues Brothers looked like, they were in black suits, white shirts, black tie, black shoes and socks, wore a hat. They had that look and some glass Ye all I time was absolutely so little kids would come by and look in the window on their noses and fingerprints would be on the window about four feet from the ground, and they were asking their daddy's in the bummies, know

why are the rabbis in the window. They had to explain to the kids that these were not rabbis, right, And it became they had a couple of folks stopped in the office and said, could you preach and put something in their window to explain to I said, well, we don't really want to do that, but I'm appreciating that you're explaining it to your kids. And it became popular for all kinds of reasons.

an ability to communicate. Help that person look within themselves and tell them what they should say in front of mister big boss. And the phone number here is six one, seven, two, five, four, ten thirty eight eight, eight, nine, two, nine ten thirty. Be our demo, Be the person that doctor Becker is going to help instill confidence in you. And let me

take our break and come back and get started. Six one, seven, two, five, four, ten, thirty eight, eight, eight, nine, two, nine ten thirty here on night side Time and temperature eleven sixteen coincidentally sixteen degrees.

into that a little bit. I mean, people are speaking to each other all the time. But where happens. Why is it that when you have to talk to in front of a committee meeting or a town meeting or heaven STAVEETCHI if you have to give a speech on the stage or something like that, people all of a sudden freeze up. They get frightened. What's all? I don't like public speaking? Public speaking makes it? Okay, stop right there, let's begin with this. There's no such thing as public speaking. Now,

let me explain what I mean. I mean that every time you talk, it's public that you're taking your thoughts out and expressing them, giving them to somebody else. It's always public. Now, I know what you mean when you say public robin the stage and you have some slides and you get a clicker and you got people staring at you and all that stuff. Yeah, I get it. I know what people mean when they say that. But the truth is a lot of that fear comes from

the fear of self humiliation, public humiliation. And if you can think about the speaking that you do to your family, to your friends in the areas and times of comfort, and you know they're not fear of public speaking, it doesn't bother you. You just mean who you are. Okay. That's the way you have to approach this thing called the fear of public speaking. There isn't even a thing. I hate to even give it an identity. You've got to remember that you speak all the time and it's

always public when you talk. So that's one of the first things that we would have to deal with. Where does that come from? Now? How do we find that out? We use a technique called the ABC technique. A. You have to identify what activates your fear. Could be being on a stage, standing up in front of a group, if I have lights on me, if I have to have a microphone. It depends on who's in the room. Oh,

she's here, right, go book. There's a lot of things that they're going to be people's A. What activates you A fear? That's the first thing you have to do is find out that. Then let's skip the B for a moment and go right to the C, because the C is the consequence of the A. Once people experience one of those a's so and so in the room or whatever it is, the consequence happens. What's that We

all know what that is? A hand shall my voice, breathing gets difficult, rash breaks out, all kinds of things. That's the consequence of the AN. So you say, oh, I know, so if I fix the A, the C goes away. No, wait a minute, let's go back to the B for just a second, because how does that How does that A get to you like that? It's because of the B in the middle. A for activator, C for consequence, But the B stand for what is your belief about that A. Don't jump ahead of me.

I'm not going to go down the path of power of positive thinking. And if I believe it won't happen. No, no, that doesn't work. I mean, it's okay, do it. I mean, positive thinking is not a bad thing, but it's not going to work. It works for a little one and it comes back, it comes back. So what we do, Morgan, that's different, I think from almost everybody that does this sort of work, is we use what's called a skills approach.

Now there's such things as cognitive restructuring and immersive and sometimes when people think drugs you know, but no, none of that. We work on a skills basis. Everything that you fear, which is one of your a's, we know how to fix, We know how to take care of it. We give you techniques to give you exercises to control, but we may not be able to make them go away, but we're going to help you control them so that they don't bother you when you're in those speaking situations.

So that's one of the things that we would have to approach with folks, because almost everybody is bothered by an organs. Maybe not you, my friend, but most people.

But I never had any problems doing that, And when I began in radio, it was no challenge at least as far as those fears rearing their ugly head. Yeah, so.

let's step a little bit into the causes of the fear. Now, what I told you before about shaking and breathing and ration, those are the symptoms that we are all familiar with. They're not the causes. So let me talk a little bit deeper about that for just a moment, about the causes. It starts with your mother, and I say that because it started in the womb. There is truth to the belief, not the belief. There is truth to the fact that the condition of the mother during pregnancy has an impact

on the condition of the child inside. This is why, to be dramatically tragic about it, This is why some women who are addicted to drugs or alcohol or whatever substance like that while pregnant, the child often is born with that drug addiction. The same thing is true about the other aspects of childhood. You if your mother is calm and relaxed, or she's nervous enough set all the time, that's going to be part of the DNA that's going

to come over to you. All right. So now you get a little bit older, and what are you getting to you about three years old or four years old? Oh morgant, Oh look at you so cue, Look how he walks off bargain. Come here you go, kid, give

you a hunt. All you get for about three years of your life, that's all you get is it's nice and yet damn when you get to me about four years old, you go visit your aunt Dars and uncle John, and you walk over their coffee table and you can knock over some statue and it breaks on the floor.

Oh my goodness, Momy comes over Dad. That gives you a little no. You should see that that very no. That's the first time that a child begins to fear and hear the word no. Up until that is all beautiful and all of a sudden you get no. All right, let's move ahead a little best pastor here you get into school. Dare you ever talk out of turn? Mister White Morgan come over here, you get publicly humilified, humiliated,

maybe get put in the closset. Who knows. School teachers have a huge impact on those young kids about their fear of speaking, speaking out a turn again, public humiliation, watch out.

your legs. If it was a young girl who committed the faux pas and everybody feared the rat hand, and you got it once. You did everything you could to stay the straight and narrow. I got it once, and I be sure I never got it again.

I just wrote a book about manipulation, and manipulators constantly use public humiliation, sarcasm, all kinds of things to make you feel bad about your speaking, the way you communicate with others. Hen stop you.

in and stand out. Stand out and fit in, so that means they learned to talk, and they imitate all their friends and whatever the trend is, they want to do it. You get to be teenager and in this high school and so forth. If you go off to cool college, then your peers begin to have a stronger effect begins that you feel lonely if you're not in certain kind of a group and whatnot. So the speech part of being in a relationship is a very important part of how you grew into it as an adult.

So we look at it at all ages and from all different perspectives, and there's always a way. I have never found a person in the sixty years, we've never found anyone that we could not help with this. We know it's absolutely fixable. So don't let it fear you, folks.

and maybe it's a movie star or an athlete. You imitate other people maybe once or twice or three times. The next thing you know, you're doing it all the time. It becomes a habit. I can't tell you how many times we're coaching people and we correct them on one of those three things and they say, I did no, No, I didn't say that. You don't even know it. After a while, it becomes so common as a part of the way that you speak that you don't even notice this.

So what do you do to fix it? The first thing you have to do is draw people's awareness to it. My son used to say right right all the time, so I had to fix it. He was like, I just junior high school, I suppose. And he said, well, then to track me right, and I said, him next to Joey right, and Joey get the head starts to right. He said, well, you say right. He didn't know. He said it, okay. So next time he came home he said, so I went to the game right, and all the

other guys are going right. And so so every time he said right, I said wrong the same thing else I said wrong. So we're going to the game right, and I said wrong. Yeah, we got in the car right now, I wrong? He said, what what do you mean? What? What what do you say? Wrong? What you said right? I said wrong, I didn't say. I had to get his attention to it. Once you get that, that almost breaks what does break the habit. But then to make it stick, you have to keep that up, folks. So

that's the best way to break it. Otherwise it becomes part of the culture, it becomes part of the maturity process. But it doesn't have to be there. You can help correct it.

thing that's new about it is technology. Now that has changed a lot of things because you no longer have to even talk to somebody, and if you talk with them, it's almost an abbreviation. We see it all the time. And of course with writing lol, WTF, all of that, all of those things are abbreviation. So now when people talk to each other they actually say those kind of things, they are actually talking about lol, they'll say it. So technology and the brevity of technology has put that on.

And then there's a new appreciation allowance, if you will, for what used to be considered in vulgarity, but not any longer. People have stopped correcting their kids. Maybe they've begun using it in their own language in conversation, and the F word has become very popular, almost non correctible. Some parents don't want to take it on. Well everybody did you pretty approval, but you'll be nasty. So language has got to be corrected at home. Schools have almost

lost control of it. I think the parents have got to take control of the twenty twenties and the acronyms and so forth that we hear nowadays. To me, they're unacceptable, but you've got to correct it at home.

I stopped the god, I said, Louie, tell me you fail. Yeah. When I say give you to, don't say right. I think I said, Kersey, correct this kid, I said, he's never going.

challenging things is to make people aware I didn't say that. Yeah, I've recorded, play a fact, why they don't even they can't even remember that they said those things. So they're the most difficult to correc but they are.

she sat down. She said, So he came over to the table, and like I walked, I looked at him, and like he looked at me, and so I like said, well, what do you want? And so he looks over at the table and he said like what she said it like five times in like ten second. My wife looked at me. My wife looked at me and she said, Dennis, we're not working now. She knew, oh, oh awful, that's the toughest one.

That's the name of our company, speech improvement dot com. And if you type type that in somewhere, you'll see all kinds of things on our website. Everything's for free. We have videos and blogs, and we do a podcast every week and it's just all kinds of things that you'll find there, and it's all for free Speech Improvement

dot Com. If you want to call easy enough from whoever you are, we're in Boston that area code six one seven six one seven seven three nine thirty three thirty six one seven seven three nine three three three zero and they can put you wherever you go there you will find me. And if you want to write to me directly, it's just Dennis at Speech Improvement dot Com. Very easy be happy to help you with anything.

the government of Ua email less. Why do you go there? Why do you have those guys think boys, well two or three bad guys from there about them? Yeah, but you shouldn't go there and help them. You shouldn't be that. Why are you doing that? At a simple answer then, and I had the same and more clients in UAE

and other countries. Now my answer is still the same as it was then, and the answer is I go there because at this moment, the tone between our two countries is that the picture is not on television picture a fist. That's what exists in terms of communication there. Now, Why am I going Because I want to change that to this and I put it to a handshake. I want to change that fist to a handshake, and you can do it through communication. Now that was years ago.

I'm still there anyway. I'm very proud of the relationships that we have with other folks because we believe that communication is essential to everybody getting along with everybody else, whether it's in your country or between countries. So we're very, very proud of the coverage we have with this company.

did great together. And about a year and a half after into the relationship, I get a phone call from his lawyer and he says, I want to talk to you on behalf of the Shaikhah. Thought, oh, what happened, and he said, no, no, no, He said, the shaikha really loves the work that she's doing. He would like to have her come to Kazakhstan and do the coaching. I said, well, I'll have to ask her, because she's

got family. I don't know she can travel that far, and he said, well, it only be to Kazakhstand and we'll take care of everything that costs the blah blahah. And as the conversation went along, he thought it was money right was objecting, So he said, well, let's make it one hundred thousand dollars. I said, oh no, no, it' stop that. He thought. I immediately thought I was objecting. Okay,

well two hundred thousand. He cut up to three hundred thousand, and I said, wait a minute, why are you so eager? He said, well, sure, of course, will belong to the shape and she will live here, her children will come. And I said, what she wanted to buy her? That was the cultural nom he wanted to buy her. And so we deal occasionally. And that was a little bit severe, but we have dealt with things from that all along

the line. So you meet it and you just understand the culture and turned the fist into a handshake and everything works out.

in that way is where we are. We have already conquered virtual reality, and we use that for different kinds of things. Virtual reality. We're teaching people how to use the phone, their own phones, which is not going to go away, how to use the phone to help them improve their speech. We have an app that we use. So there's all kinds of things that are changing in society, but people don't change the necessity for being able to

communicate with one another. It's a spouse or a child, or a neighbor or a business, another countryman, another country that remains the same. Human beings are going to be the same, and so we'll be here to treat them for the next sixty years.

two words I really hate to say. It means the end. By Boston