Week 13 Post 2

Glossophobia may sound more like a fear of lip gloss than of speaking but it is a real problem for prospective speakers. About 25% of people say that public speaking is one of their biggest fears. That is probably because glossophobia is multifaceted. The four main contributors to it are physiology, thoughts, situations, and skills. Human physiology is such that fear magnifies itself. For people who view their audience as even slightly threatening, the autonomic nervous system may magnify that fear causing public speaking to seem like an unperformable task. Human thoughts cause problems because people naturally are more critical of themselves than other people are of them. Speakers also often overestimate the importance of their speech and how judgmental their audience is going to feel towards them. A key way to deal with negative thinking is for a speaker to switch their view of delivering an address from performance oriented to communication oriented. This means that the person feels less as though public speaking is a task requiring specific inherent talents and more as though public speaking is a general every day conversation just with more people watching. Another factor contributing to glossophobia is the situation in which a speech is given. Speakers will feel more anxious if they don't have much experience with speaking, if there is a high degree of evaluation on the speech, if there is a status difference between the speaker and the audience, if they're presenting new ideas, or if they're in front of a new audience. The final factor which will cause people to be more nervous about speaking is skill. The more a person practices, the more skill they will have at speech. The more skill they have, the more confident they will be. The more confident they are, the easier it will be for them to counter anxiety from physiology, thoughts, and situations.
This proves that speech is a skill rather than a talent because someone who doesn't have the talent of singing, for example, can't really learn how to become a good singer. On the other hand, someone who is literally physiologically hardwired to be a bad speaker can be taught to be good and learn how to overcome their fears. That shows unequivocally that speech is a teachable skill rather than an innate talent.

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