Fear

In just over a week, I’ll be standing on a stage in front of lots of people, talking to them about Evernote. I’m afraid.

I’m not afraid that I don’t know the material because I’m no slouch when it comes to Evernote. Nor am I afraid that the audience will be looking for me to fail.

Since most of the people reading this (I assume) have never heard my voice, I’ll explain why, exactly, I’m afraid.

When I talk, I tend to mumble and speak too quickly and trip over my words. Put another way, my brain moves faster than my lips and I very often turn into a yammering idiot when I get halfway through saying something before realizing that it’s either unclear or inaccurate and I start quickly qualifying or rewording what I haven’t even finished saying yet and it turns into a big ball of suck.

During the handful of times when I’ve spoken publicly in the past, it only takes one of little episode like the one described above to throw me completely off balance; what little confidence I had when I stood up has completely evaporated and I spend the rest of my presentation with my brain split evenly across two tasks: feebly formulating coherent things to say and trying desperately to ignore the inflammatory little jerkoff in my head that won’t stop telling me that I royally suck at this and that I should just apologize for wasting everybody’s time, walk off-stage and feel really, really bad about it for a good long time.

Like my buddy Jason told me, I have the distinct advantage of having a pretty rock-solid understanding of the material I’ll be presenting, but as I sit here drafting out what I want to say, I’m a huge ball of nerves who is already imagining walking up to the podium and spectacularly blowing the whole thing. It’s not my confidence in understanding the material that’s got me wavering, but my utter lack of confidence in my ability to convey what I know in a non-stupid fashion.

Thing is, I knew *all* of this going in. When my coworkers asked me if I wanted to give a presentation at the Evernote Trunk Conference, here’s what happened, simultaneously:

• Brain: “Hah, are you serious? I’d rather chew on a lightbulb. Thanks, but no thanks.”
• Mouth: “Yep, count me in.”

I’ve been around this world long enough to know that the way you get good at things is by doing them. Given my short and shameful list of prior speaking engagements, I also know that I’ve got a hell of a long way to go if I’m ever going to even be a passable public speaker (something I’d like, frankly). I’m scared shitless, but I know that this is the only way to stop sucking at talking to groups of people.

So, here I sit. If I were preparing the same material for a blog post or some other written project, I’d be fine like cherry wine because I know I don’t suck too badly at writing. But when the whole thing is peppered with the idea that I’m going to have to stand up in front of what will seem like an arena full of people and that my fly might be open and I’ll probably stutter a good bit is making my current task orders of magnitude more difficult.

Anyway, this has been today’s episode of “Brett’s White Guy Pity Party”. Thanks for indulging me.

Photo by Simon Scott