So, what causes speech apprehension? Well the answer is a lot of stuff. But we can broadly classify the causes into what we think's going on internally and externally. So, internally, what we think we're feeling, and externally, what we think about the audience and the setting. In this video we'll examine both. So let's start with the internal causes. To begin with, when giving a speech, we're pretty bad at accurately interpreting stuff. So we misinterpret our physical states all the time. We misinterpreted or we misremember what actually happened. And it makes sense, our mind's racing in the moment. Accurately detecting our physiological state is tough. And we call this ability, interoceptive sensitivity. And in fact, in one study some psycho-physiologist tracked individuals' interoceptive sensitivity while they were speaking. And speakers who are good at accurately detecting what their bodies were doing, well, they reported lower apprehension when delivering a speech. So it was in the moment those folks were just better at processing their bodies own signals. So they could say like, my heart rate is up, but my heart's not beating out of control or, my palms are a little sweaty, but I'm not sweating buckets. They were just more accurate in their interpretation. And we're really bad, all of us are really bad at accurately guessing what the audience saw. So people routinely rate themselves as worse than their audiences do. So as speakers, we assume that audiences can see how we feel, even when that behavior's not showing. We call this the illusion of transparency. And as it turns out, audiences just don't notice as much as you think they do. They just, [LAUGH] they just don't care as much about you as you think they should. The dark, unfeeling universe cares nothing for your insignificance. That might fill you with existential dread, but maybe it can help you out a little bit with your speech apprehension. But you want to understand what to remember, because remembering yourself as having done poorly can have lots of negative effects. A study in the Australian Journal of Psychology showed that if you beat yourself up after a speech, or what they call self disparagement, you're probably contributing to your own trait-based speech apprehension. So not only are you wrong, probably, about how you did in the speech, but thinking of it negatively will strengthen your own fear of public speaking. So stop it, knock it off, don't do that. So those are some of the internal causes. Let's talk a little bit about the external causes. And the fact is we know that certain situational factors can make your apprehension worse. And these include things like novelty, so how much experience do you have with this particular type of speech? Formality, is the speech pretty formal? Status, are you presenting to someone with more power or expertise than you, like say your boss or somebody? Degree of evaluation, are you getting a grade or a performance review? And there are lots more, the similarity between you and the audience, and so forth. But these factors characterize situations in which the perceived stakes are high and your perceived flexibility is low. Let me give you an extended example of this. So for a number of years I was in charge of reading student names at graduation. And this was for the communication major. We're a very large major. We got about 1000 undergraduates, and I hated reading the names. Now don't get me wrong, I love speaking. I'm happy to do it in front of very, very, very large audiences. It's fine, but reading names made me pretty nervous, why? Well, it was pretty novel. I don't routinely stand in front of people and read unfamiliar names for hours on end. It was formal. I was there in my full academic regalia and that's pretty formal, I'm draped in a velvet medieval costume, okay? That's not my normal kicking around town attire, that's pretty formal. Evaluation? You bet man. Okay, this is actually what I was the most worried about. I didn't want to say someone's name wrong. Families had flown in from the other side of the world to see their child walk across a stage, and I'm going to be the guy who [LAUGH] screws up their name? Man, that's what I really dreaded. So, the first time I did this, it was fine. It was okay. As it was, the biggest challenge wasn't the student's names, it was actually the students themselves. So, what was supposed to happen is students were supposed to on a card write their name, and then right underneath that write out their name phonetically. So that way the idea is, they'd hand me the card, I could look at their name, and if I needed to I could crib of that phonetic spelling. But it turns out that that phonetic spelling, that was the problem. People are really bad at spelling their own names out phonetically. And so what would happen is students would walk up and they'd silently hand me their card, never say their name. They'd hand me their card and I'd read it. And I'd struggle to figure out what it meant. And so I would rely on the phonetic spelling, and I would award degrees to someone like Brianne Smith, or as his friends know him, Brian Smith. Thanks Bry Guy, that was a big help. Their phonetic spelling took me totally in the wrong direction. Now this didn't happen too many times, but it happened way more than I wanted it to. So, at the end of that I went back and I evaluated. So the next year, I started to chip away a little bit at those external factors. So it was already less novel than it had been, because I'd done it the year before. I still wore my robes, but I changed my speech to make it less formal. I tried to play more to my strengths. And I felt a lot more comfortable not trying to be the most serious person in the room. And as it turned out people liked that talk better anyway. But then there was the big thing, the card situation. I had to figure out a fix to that. So what I decided to do was, I would stand at the podium and students come up. And instead of just waiting until they were there and taking their card, I'd step away from the podium, grab their card and say their name to them. And if I was wrong, they could say it correctly back to me. So that way, I could just turn to the microphone and say what I knew was the correct pronunciation of the name. And it worked! I was way less nervous and I didn't mess up any names. And so I would say that is a good tactic that I found there. But as we turn to treatments for speech apprehension, many of them are kind of like that, identifying specific problem areas and coming up with specific remedies. It's not going to be one trick that works every single time. [MUSIC]
