Like most school children, I performed on stage for school plays and the like but I also had to perform on stage for the elocution lessons my mother used to send me to. All of which, I am sure, set me up for the amount of times I have had to give speeches. Nothing, though, stops the imagined disasters I play in my mind just before giving a speech!
The first time I remember performing on a stage I was younger than 6 years old because I remember where we were living at the time as a family and we moved from there when I was almost 6. I was dressed as a sunflower in a papier mache costume that I loved so much I slept in it and, apparently, wore until it fell apart! I see that behaviour in my son so can quite believe I did the same thing! I have a vague memory of skipping up and down the road wearing it the next day. For the performance, I distinctly remember having to be ‘woken up’ by a fairy or something to the music of ‘Morning Has Broken’. I have absolutely no idea other than that what the play was about or my role within it! The reason I remember it was because the fairy forgot the line I was standing in so we had to wake ourselves up. I know from my mother that I was in other school plays subsequently, but they clearly had no impact on me as I don’t recall them at all. I do, though, remember the performances I had to give as part of my elocution lessons and the exams we had to perform for. For those, we had to recite poems and prose both individually and as a group that we had memorised. I was undoubtedly nervous before each performance and exam, standing as we did on a stage in front of parents and the examiners as well as teachers. I remember there being quite a lot of people. Did it improve my elocution? Probably. I come from East London and South Essex originally and while I can have those accents, for the most part I do not unlike the rest of my family.
What it did give me, however, was the ability to give speeches later on in life. Public speaking does not particularly bother me at all which has definitely been a bonus in my career life. Speaking in front of a lot of people does not turn me into a quivering wreck, though I do play out a catastrophic scene in my mind as I wait to go on stage! So, if I have to step up onto a stage I worry that my skirt will inhibit my ability to step up enough especially as I have not been blessed with the longest legs at all! I have sat in my seat, not listening to the previous speaker because my focus has been on a large cable I will have to navigate to get to the lectern. My mind catastrophised the fact that I was wearing high heels which could easily get caught on the cable…and I could trip over it…sending the projector flying along with the table it was standing on…whilst showing off my underwear to the audience. I literally saw the whole scene happening in my mind’s eye, so when I got up to speak I was excruciatingly careful around said cable. Ridiculously so. But, I didn’t trip over it and my speech went off well…until my mobile began to ring. I mean, seriously, what are the chances of your own phone going off during your speech? In your handbag. Which is not with you. So someone has to go into the void that is your handbag, locate it amongst all the detritus and switch it off. Yeah, I didn’t catastrophise that outcome though suffice to say it was a lesson well learned for future speeches.
I have given many speeches during my career but I had never thought how those speeches made me appear to others. I have a natural confidence when giving speeches thanks to those elocution lesson days, but that doesn’t mean I have a natural confidence the rest of the time. Far from it. Even during the speeches, I am always checking internally that what I am saying is accurate despite the fact I will have checked, double-checked, and triple-checked my facts beforehand. But I do come across, apparently, as fabulously confident. To the point where for some, it is intimidating. This was brought home to me when I started in a new job and one of my team managers came for our first ‘get to know you’ meeting. She came into my office, sat down at the table and promptly burst into tears. To say I was shocked was an understatement. She had, apparently, been working herself up into a real state about the fact that she was petrified about public speaking and was scared to tell me because I was so confident at it that I had intimidated her when she had seen me give speeches. I really had no idea then that I came across that way. It didn’t stop me speaking the way I did publicly because it was something that came naturally to me, but I was always clear with anyone I spoke with after that I was my usual self. That I didn’t try to wear the ‘speech giving me’ mask afterwards as I had used to because of not wanting to be seen as a fraud if I was my usual self.
I do genuinely think that anyone can make speeches with the right training. They don’t have to be confident in their everyday lives, but they can stand in front of people and talk if they are helped into the right mindset about it. I know that sounds glib, but I do know a lot of people who have been terrified of speaking publicly and when asked why, their response is invariably being afraid of making a fool of themself. Which is entirely understandable but the chances are, you won’t. If you know what you’re talking about or if you have the gift of the gab ordinarily, you will not make a fool of yourself. Even if you trip over your words, most people will feel some form of empathy for you rather than ridicule. But when we say that, it is more about how we feel about ourselves and how we then project that onto others. It is about our own judgement of ourselves that we are afraid of. That we will not or can not measure up to our own expectations of ourselves. That we will not be perfect and will be imperfect in front of an audience. That is what inhibits us. And that can be overcome for public speaking, even if we don’t overcome it in our everyday lives.
I am not the person who is on that stage or lectern, speaking. It is an alter ego that I have adopted courtesy of training as a child. That people think I am that person until they get to know me, shows that I am capable of wearing a mask and performing – as we all are.
Louisa Simpson 