I’m on the phone with Tom from the Southern United States who has a very compelling story. Thank you for helping us out here, Tom. Would you be kind enough to explain to the audience what you were experiencing when you first contacted me? Well, I had, I guess, what you’d call a severe fear of public speaking and being a senior executive in my field, it was starting to manifest itself in ways that were potentially going to really affect my job. When people think about public speaking, they think about getting up in front of 50, 100 or 200 people. But I was in a position where it was starting to affect me severely in meetings of 10 or 15 people sitting around the conference table.
And, you know, the fear and the anxiety that was leading up to potential opportunities where I might be called on to speak, whether I knew I was going to speak or not, were the anxiety leading up to something as informal as a 30-second update was really negatively influencing the quality of my life. Could you explain the details of what you are actually experiencing and going through? Well, let’s say, for example, that my boss had come to me and said, hey, next Tuesday, I’d like you to give an update on a program. And the program would be something that I had sponsored, was very familiar with, had a lot of knowledge of.
And my immediate thought was, how can I get out of this event? And looking for ways immediately with my boss to try and find conflicts either in my schedule or maybe somebody else should do it, or these would be things that I would be very good at talking about, but would spend a great deal of energy trying to get out of. And, you know, obviously, I wasn’t very successful getting out of those events. And so for the next two weeks, probably no day went by that I didn’t think about it and obsess about the fact that I was going to have to perform and provide an update. During your experience with anxiety, were you feeling any physical symptoms? Absolutely. I mean, everything from my heart racing, to feeling uncomfortable, to just an extreme level of fear that, I mean, I’m a guy that spent a couple of years as a military policeman.
I served on a SWAT team. I played semi-professional football, and I can’t tell you that there’s anything I’ve ever done that created me feeling this uneasiness. I mean, it was severe fear. And a lot of anxiety and physically would manifest itself in getting hot and voice potentially shaking. And my face turning red, and, you know, it was miserable. You do have a very high-level position in a very successful company. How was this impacting career issues and your lifestyle in general? Well, I think from a career standpoint, I had been very good at managing the circumstances and avoiding certain circumstances to where it hadn’t affected me tremendously, but with the new position of responsibility I had, I could see that there was going to be an increased number of these opportunities.
And I actually had to fairly severe what I’d call breakdowns in front of my peers, in front of partners and clients, where I was physically unable to talk. And the anxiety and the stress was so high that when I was called on, I couldn’t speak. And basically had to excuse myself and buy some time and kind of pull myself together. So, you know, I thought it was the end of the world when that happened. In reality, what it was, was the wake-up call that I needed to get some help and I needed to see what was going on inside. And I think, can I not, you know, run into you? I tried everything from, you know, the books and the tapes and practice your speech and all the stuff, the top 10 stuff that you see on the intranet.
It just wasn’t working. And I knew something else was inside me that was causing this problem. Okay, now what you’re talking about right now is what the average person who’s going to listen to this interview is going to find very important because typically, these people will try things that look as easy as possible. People are looking for the quick fix. And you accomplished your objectives in a pretty short period of time, relatively. But can you explain what that, without getting into specific details for yourself? I mean, we all respect confidentiality here. But can you give the listeners some kind of understanding of the deeper kind of work that you have to do to remedy your situation? Yeah, you bet. I mean, you know, I myself was looking at the, you know, make sure I have a good opener and practice my lines and memorize my speech.
And all that really did for me is kind of fuel the obsessive tendencies that I had. And for me, what it really boiled down to in simple terms is I had experienced a couple fairly traumatic events in my childhood that manifested themselves in me having a real negative reaction to adrenaline. And when that, you know, anxiety or adrenaline rush would hit me where a normal person could turn that into a positive thing and begin to and on top of the world and use that in a positive way, I was associating it with bad things that had happened in my life. And it was crippling and having just the opposite effect on me and my performance.
Very interesting. For the sake of relativity, I do this in all my interviews on a scale of one to ten. If you started at a one with your public speaking performance anxiety, the obsessive worry, how it was impacting your mood, all these issues. If you started at a one going up to the number ten, where would you put yourself at this point? I would say I’m at about probably eight and a half, nine. I think I’ve got a little work to do, but the quality of my life and the things that I’m doing on a daily basis have just improved dramatically. Do a little more on that, please? Well, I think that probably the biggest thing that’s happened is I’ve got numerous opportunities where I’ve got to engage people and talk to folks.
Sometimes it’s informal on-site. With people I barely know. Sometimes it’s more formal with clients and partners. And I’m probably in a situation to do something like that several times a week. And I would say for the most part, I’ve completely forgotten about those feelings of fear and anxiety and avoidance. And how am I going to get out of it? And what am I going to do? And what am I going to say? And I’m really able to focus now on the content and being prepared to talk about the subjects and what I need to do. I’m finding myself getting excited to be there wanting to be front and center, wanting to be the guidance that’s presenting and driving and leading. And it’s just a real exciting place to be.
That’s wonderful, exciting. What are you currently doing with your adrenaline? The thing that’s really probably worked for me the most, I think I’m going to be one of those guys that always has some adrenaline. I’m a pretty excitable guy. I’m pretty intense. And I think that I’ve come to the realization that that’s part of who I am. That’s always going to be a part of something that I’m going to deal with. And when I feel it coming, instead of the fear setting in and oh my gosh, I’m going to crash and what’s going to happen and what are these people going to think. I just kind of say to myself, you know, and I’m really jacked up to do this. I’m excited. This is good. And I’m learning to turn that energy into, hey, it’s coming. I’m going to be excited for a minute.
And that’s okay. And I’m going to use that excitement to deliver some passion and some emotion on the topic that I’m dealing with. You know, I don’t think it gets any better than this quite frankly. 30 seconds more. Is there anything else, anything along the way of advice that you would give to someone who suffered from what you did? I think it’s imperative that you get with somebody that can understand the root and the severity of your problem because if you have a fear of public speaking, you’re going to be able to get the root of your problem. Because if you have a fear of public speaking, more than likely it doesn’t have anything to do with your ability to talk. It doesn’t have anything to do with how much you practice or prepare or the things that you commonly see on the Internet or in books because those are things designed to help you be a better speaker.
They’re not things designed to help you overcome your fear of speaking. And I wish I would have done this 30 years ago. I’m so grateful that I found the place that I could go to and really find the problem and the quality of my life has been a lot better. Tom, thank you very much for sharing. Thank you.
