I’ve spent the last several months crafting a PowerPoint for a presentation I was asked to give at a social work conference in July in Chicago. The coordinator of the conference had read a post I wrote on suicide almost 15 years ago and asked me if I could adapt it to a 90-minute presentation. I was flattered and excited and said yes without thinking the whole thing through.
It wasn’t so much the research, the outlining and finally, developing the 135 slides, although that took what seemed countless hours. What’s getting to me is the thought of the public speaking. I’ve given readings of my own published writing before, but this is different. The forum is a professional conference, and the audience will be other clinicians: social workers and psychologists, maybe nurses and/or nurse practitioners, perhaps even a stray psychiatrist or two.
A 2024 study identifies one of my biggest fears—that I will look out at the audience mid-presentation and interpret the expressions on their faces as disengagement or negativity. I imagine my anxiety skyrocketing as I perceive the audience’s reaction as my failure, and the anxiety making it difficult to continue.
It is in a way comforting to know that, according to another study, more than three out of four people fear public speaking. It is not comforting to know that, per the same study, “fear of public speaking is usually diagnosed as social anxiety disorder (SAD), nongeneralized type.” As far as I know, I’ve never even come close to having social anxiety disorder. Drop me in a room full of people I don’t know, and I may not be the most comfortable, but I can hold my own. I’m an introvert more at home in small groups, but if I need to make small talk with people who are strangers to me, I can. But when I picture myself standing in front of a room full of professional colleagues whom I imagine to be scrutinizing every word I say, I fear my anxiety going out of control. As the National Social Anxiety Center reports, “The underlying fear is judgment or negative evaluation by others.”
I viewed a couple of TED Talks on public speaking, and the consensus was that the best way to hold an audience’s attention was to juxtapose personal experience with research/facts. The title for my presentation is “Considering Suicide: No Way to Understand Unless You’ve Been There—Critical Insights & Clinical Guidance for Clinicians.” So that is how I structured my presentation.
In a Psychology Today post, Suzanne Degges-White, Ph.D., writes, “If you’re feeling a lot of anxiety about speaking to a group–and your biggest fear is being rejected or discounted, your fear-related behaviors will increase the likelihood that these things will actually occur.” That’s not what I particularly wanted to hear. But Degges-White suggests a solution: “The trick is to “inoculate” yourself against a “worst-case scenario” happening by being prepared to cope with or combat the event.
Once you’ve imagined the worst-case scenario, walked yourself mentally through your “best possible response,” or gathered information that negates or minimizes the possible fallout if the worst-case scenario comes true, she notes, “it appears that the actual effect of the fear is minimized considerably.”
I will definitely work on this technique as I practice presenting in the two weeks remaining before the big day.