Why I don’t like speaking in public
I sometimes get invited to speak in front of an audience; I get invited to do workshops or teaching sessions on photography or software engineering, presentations or lectures on subjects that I’ve researched and often blog about, or interviews on a variety of subjects. But most of the time I decline these invitations, and when I do I feel bad about disappointing people and worry that they might get the wrong idea about why I decline.
For example, when I decline in the case of workshops and teaching sessions, I get worried that people might think that I’m not very willing to share my knowledge with them, when on the contrary, I do love to share knowledge. When I decline in the case of presentations, lectures or interviews, I get worried that people might find me too arrogant, too proud or even that I may not like them for some reason. I always do my best to explain to everyone why I decline, but I still worry that they may not believe me. So in this post I want to explain why I generally decline speaking engagements in order to be open and transparent about it and in order to prevent misunderstandings.
There are very few cases where I’ve done teaching sessions in the past and those were for people I already knew well (friends, colleagues) and even then for small groups (4-10 people). There was one time where I agreed to do a very short presentation on advanced photo retouching during a photography workshop by photographer Raul Neijhorst. But other than that I can’t remember doing any other speaking engagements in the past. In fact I have declined some very nice opportunities. For example, in 2013 I was invited to do a talk for TEDx Paramaribo, which I declined. At the end of 2014 I was invited to teach Software Engineering (C/C++) to students at the Adek University of Suriname during their first two semesters, and I declined and recommended someone else instead. I also declined various opportunities for speaking engagements and interviews that would have given me a good amount of publicity in the past.
So what’s the problem?
The first issue is that I’m a shy person. This might not always be apparent to most people, but trust me, I am. I’m very confident about my knowledge and capabilities so that’s not the problem. It’s just that I get very nervous when I have to speak in front of an audience (even a very small one), with everyone’s attention focused on me. I get clammy hands, my voice starts to tremble and I may even stutter. Obviously this sucks a lot and can have a very negative impact on the message I’m trying to get across.
The second issue is that I’m an introvert (I’m an INTJ), and introverts by nature don’t like to be the center of attention, unless it’s required because of some very important reason. Introverts also don’t like to be in public and/or in crowds. Introverts don’t like to socialize much either. In fact, introverts don’t like to talk very much and love to spend most of their time in their own minds. Most kinds of social interactions use up a tremendous amount of energy from them. Back when I was doing teaching sessions, I can remember feeling completely drained of energy after only 3-4 hours during each session. Afterwards I had to rest for hours back home in order to recharge. It’s the same when I spend time with people, be it acquaintances, friends or family; I can’t do it for very long and very soon I need to be by myself again, no matter how good the company is.
The third issue is my mind. The way my mind works doesn’t make it easy for me to do interviews or any kind of speaking engagements where there’s interactivity and you’re required to give quick answers. This is especially so when it’s about subjects that I don’t talk about to people on a daily basis. The reason for this is that the part of my mind that’s responsible for information processing (pre- and subconscious) works in parallel and very fast, and my conscious mind that’s responsible for serializing the output through my mouth is unable to keep up. Normally when I’m just busy thinking about things by myself this is a huge advantage because I’m able to internally process information and see relations between various pieces of information very fast which allows me to quickly develop valuable insights. When my mind has processed certain information the output is stored internally in a way that’s only understandable to me — a kind of raw data that can quickly be used internally. In order for me to output that information, it has to be structured differently and then translated into words so that I can speak them out or write them down. And that last part of outputting the information is a very slow process compared to how fast my mind can formulate answers internally. This is why I often tell people that talking is so inefficient and primitive and that it’s going to be awesome when we can communicate telepathically and transfer thoughts and ideas to each other at high speed.
The best way I can describe how my mind works is by comparing it to parallel information processing using a number of worker threads that are simultaneously running, each of them processing parts of the information, and all the pieces of outputs being added together at the end. Very often you also don’t get the outputs from the different threads in chronological order, so before adding everything together you have to sort them chronologically too. Software engineers who are reading this will readily understand what I mean.
So what happens in practice is that by the time I’ve spoken the first sentence, my mind has already finished processing a whole paragraph (sometimes several) in various pieces and in random order. Consequently it can often happen that I get stuck in the middle of my speech and have to retrace where I should pick up again. This leads to stuttering and may even lead to coming across as incoherent, which can further give people the impression that I’m not very confident about what I’m saying, or that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and can generally have a very negative impact on the message I’m trying to get across.
All of the above mentioned issues are why I can sympathize with people like Elon Musk and John Carmack (though Carmack has certainly improved). A lot of people are of the opinion that Elon Musk is a terrible public speaker and some even think that he might have some kind of speech impediment (just Google it). If you watch some of his public presentations, you’ll notice that he often stutters and has some difficulty getting his message across. I think it has a lot to do with the issues I mentioned above.
When I mention the above issues to people (mostly the first two) they almost always tell me that public speaking can be learned through practice and that it’s possible to learn to overcome stage fright. Some even offer to help me out with that. And I am aware of all of that and appreciate the offers for help, but the truth is that right now it’s just not a priority for me. There are many other things that I feel are more important and that I should currently spend my time on, one of which is to continue to do my research and to keep documenting what I find especially here on my blog. I will most likely spend time on learning how to become a good public speaker and how to give effective presentations in the future. It will certainly be required if I want to share my knowledge and ideas through other mediums in addition to writing. But in the mean time, I hope that you’ll understand why, at present, I can’t accept any (public) speaking invitations. You’re always free to ask of course, and I can promise you that I will certainly consider it for the future.
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