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gallabytes comments on Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm trying to understand fear of public speaking, because that's an emotion I appear to lack entirely.
So if you have it - a little or a lot - can you tell me if it is better when your audience is paying full attention, versus when they're somewhat distracted, looking somewhere else, versus when they're not listening at all but looking at their cellphones or something?
What does it feel like when someone is silently looking at you with a blank expression, and how does that feeling change depending on whether you're speaking?
Mild fear here, I can talk in groups of people just fine, but I get nervous before and during a presentation (something for which I have taken deliberate steps to get better at).
For me at least, the primary thing that helps is being comfortable with the subject matter. If I feel like I know what I'm talking about and I practiced what I am going to say it usually goes fine (it took some effort to get to this level, btw), but if I feel like I have to bluff my way through everything falls apart real fast. The number of people in the audience and how well I know them both have noticeable effect as well, but what the audience is doing has almost no influence at all.
The one exception to this is asking questions, if I have a good answer to a question my mind switches from presentation mode to conversation mode, which I am, for some reason, much more at ease with. (Note: This doesn't work on everyone, some people instead get way more nervous, so don't take this as an encouragement to start asking questions when the presenter seems nervous.)