Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  Rubin’s personal knowledge of stage fright began in grade school when, as the narrator of a school play, he became so immersed in the spectacle that he missed his cue and blew his lines. “I was having such a good time watching the play, I forgot I was supposed to be in it,” he said. In his eight-year-old mind, he had ruined the whole production, and though his classmates forgot all about it, he never did. Rubin spent the rest of his school years with his head down, hiding at the back of the classroom, praying that he would not be called on. Mostly, he succeeded. When he graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1969, few of his professors recognized his face or knew his name. Over the next twenty years, he tried psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy, hypnosis, biofeedback, and group therapy—all to ease his terror of public speaking. Nothing worked as well as avoidance, which is why, instead of practicing law, he went into legal publishing, a field in which he assumed he would never have to speak in public again.

  Over the years, Rubin spent so much time in group therapy that he became one of the group’s leader. It was an intensive program for people with a variety of phobias, including fear of heights and enclosed spaces. The approach was based on the theory of contextual therapy: If a client was afraid of elevators, Rubin’s job would be to ride up and down an elevator with him. If a person had a fear of bridges, Rubin would get in a car with him and drive across a mile-long span. But when it came to public speaking—his fear—there was nothing. In 1984, he found David Charney, a Washington-area psychiatrist with a specialty in anxiety disorders. With Charney’s counseling, Rubin began to make headway. “It was a catalytic process of my being able to talk with him on a professional basis, with him being able to address it from the outside and me seeing it from the inside,” he said. “It made me able to manage my symptoms so I could function.” Charney taught him to quiet his internal fear-talk. “You can always engage in that thinking that will provoke the response. It’s the self-conscious thought process. As soon as you become conscious of yourself, focus on yourself, you’ve put yourself in danger. We have to give people a way to prevent them from thinking about themselves.”

  A few years later, Rubin and Charney founded the Stagefright Survival School—Charney lecturing on and dealing with medical issues, including the prescribing of beta-blockers and Xanax; Rubin leading classes of mostly lawyers, diplomats, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, physicians, and teachers. The meetings were sometimes reminiscent of a twelve-step program, and the overlap was perhaps more than coincidental. According to Rubin, “One tragedy in the early days was to see that before they reached us, some of our clients turned to alcohol as a way to self-medicate their performance anxiety.”

  Rubin is a genial, avuncular man with a propensity for thinking out loud and drawing emphatic conclusions. “Everybody who has this anxiety tends to have an obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist sort of personality,” he declared. “As perfectionists, they are intolerant of their own levels of anxiety. They desire at all times to appear totally calm and collected, so their own background level of anxiety is unacceptable to them. Which raises their anxiety even more.” With his own anxiety under control, Rubin opened a private law practice in 2004. Already in his sixties, he wanted a taste of what it was like to actually practice law. He litigated several consumer cases, an experience that both fascinated and horrified him. “Judges, like law professors, can be quite condescending and ridiculing,” he said. “From a performance anxiety perspective, it’s a huge challenge.”

  Gutierrez, for her part, attended Rubin’s classes for six months, always in secret. She never told her fiancé where she went after leaving the office on Monday evenings. Nor did she tell him after they were married. Every week, she stood in front of the group like a recovering alcoholic (“I felt like I should say, ‘My name is Martha Gutierrez and I have public-speaking anxiety’ ”), reading passages aloud from whatever book Rubin thrust in her hands. She learned to slow down and become more deliberate in her speech, a technique that soothed and helped reverse some of the fast, feverish chatter that took control whenever she found herself alone at the podium. She incorporated Rubin’s many tricks, including his suggestion to use “prompting,” jotting a word or phrase in the corner of her notes as a way of distracting herself from the self-conscious thoughts that took over whenever she had to make a presentation. Frog, table, phone, she scribbled in the margins of her notes. To her amazement, it helped. She discovered that when she was in a panic, she had only to stare at the word, to really focus on it and imagine the grain of the wood in the tabletop or the feel of the frog’s skin beneath her fingers. By focusing on something other than her fear, she found that she could stop running. But her Eureka! moment came when she watched a video of herself speaking before a group of her classmates. She wasn’t all that bad.

  These days, she makes presentations to audiences of about fifty, and she knows the time will come when she is expected to address hundreds. “I have improved so much, it’s no longer an issue,” she said. “I’m not a great speaker. It’s something I’ll always have to work on. But sometimes I am so proud of myself, I think I’m amazing! Other times, well … Speaking is not one of my fortes, but now I let it go.”

  Attempts to measure fear of public speaking in the general population have yielded far-flung results, with estimates ranging from 30 to 70 percent. A 2014 survey by the online research and consulting firm YouGov reported that 56 percent of Americans were “very” or “a little” afraid of public speaking. But it wasn’t their top-ranking fear; snakes and heights ranked higher. Among the British, YouGov found the same prevalence of public-speaking anxiety, but that figure exceeded a fear of heights and snakes.

  University textbooks for decades have propagated the notion that “people fear public speaking more than death.” That understanding is based on a 1973 survey by R. H. Bruskin Associates, a now defunct marketing company that identified public speaking as the most common of American fears. In 2010, two researchers in the School of Communications at the University of Nebraska at Omaha decided to follow up on that survey by asking 815 college students to select and then rank their fears from a list that included death, heights, darkness, financial problems, and deep water. According to their findings, 61.7 percent of students selected public speaking more often than any other fear. But when it came to ranking their fears, a slight majority (20 percent) identified death as number one, followed by public speaking at 18.4 percent.1

  Early in his career, James McCroskey, a prolific scholar in the field of communication studies, found a direct correlation between public speaking and suicide. His interest was sparked after he received a phone call one evening in 1965 from a psychologist inquiring about one of McCroskey’s students at Pennsylvania State University. The psychologist wanted to know if the student was scheduled to present a speech the following day. “I informed him that she did [sic],” McCroskey later recounted.2 “I asked him why he wanted to know. He informed me that they had just rescued this student from an attempt to commit suicide by jumping off the top of one of the highest buildings at the university. She had indicated that she just could not face having to give another speech.”

  Alarmed, McCroskey began digging and, with a colleague, persuaded the university administration to release the names of the students who had committed suicide in recent years, along with enrollments in required speaking classes. “There were fourteen suicides recorded, and all but one of those students were currently enrolled in required public-speaking classes at the time of their death. Was this just coincidence? Possibly, but the odds are strongly against it.”

  At the time, many universities had a public-speaking requirement for graduation, but McCroskey’s research convinced him that it should be dropped. In addition to the number of suicides, he was concerned over the issue of “reticent students,” those whose fear levels couldn’t be distinguished from those of their classmates. On further investigation, he concluded that “there may be hundreds or even thousands of stude
nts who drop the course, change their major to one that doesn’t require a public-speaking class, or even transfer to another school that doesn’t have that requirement.” When a few years later, in 1972, he became chair of the Department of Communication Studies at West Virginia University, he ended the requirement and developed an interpersonal communication class that did not include public speaking. Within four years, enrollment in the department had tripled.

  There are virtual reality programs that will take you into an office with a handful of people sitting around a conference table. You’re there for an interview, but the people you’ve come to impress look bored. Don’t freak out yet, though—wait until you get to the packed auditorium. Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Jane McMahon, who uses these programs in her San Jose practice, has had to talk numerous patients down as they sat behind a set of goggles, sweating, hyperventilating, becoming nauseated. The two-dimensional scenery and spectators look real enough to trigger their anxieties of public speaking.

  With McMahon beside them, reminding them to breathe and asking them to rate their anxiety level, their fears often subside, she said, in as few as six or eight sessions. Virtual reality therapy is especially useful for patients who are too anxious to undergo real-life exposure. According to McMahon, public speaking is among the hardest fears to treat—harder than the fear of flying. The dangers of flying are at least definable: In 2012, there were 119 worldwide crashes and 794 deaths. You can read the numbers, put them in context, and plan your next step. But with public speaking, the dangers are subjective, internal, and mysterious: A pause, a stutter, the wrong word, and it’s all over. In the mind of the speaker, he’s crashed and burned. The reality of one’s own performance is distorted as through a fun-house mirror; by comparison, everybody else looks airbrushed perfect.

  “Most people get anxiety when they’re facing their fear in virtual reality,” McMahon says. “And generally, their fear drops relatively quickly if they do cognitive behavior therapy while they’re in that virtual environment. It bridges that gap of talking about it and going out in reality and doing it totally on your own. So you go into ‘reality’ with a therapist there, guiding you, asking you, ‘What are your worst fears?’ Maybe they’re afraid they’re going to look stupid, or they’re afraid the audience will hear their voice tremble. I make sure they have a technique to tolerate the anxiety—some slow belly breathing, while we’re in the virtual reality.”

  For those willing to step out from behind the goggles and into the limelight, there is always Toastmasters, with its 14,650 chapters and 313,000 members in 126 countries. The meetings are free and open to the public, and if you are willing to listen to your fellow toastmasters’ speeches about their trips in the RV, their grandchildren, and their cookie recipes, the rewards can be great. Every meeting begins with Table Topics, where a member directs questions about a topic of his choice to individuals in the audience who must stand and respond extemporaneously. Next come the prepared speeches, which are evaluated by everyone in the room. At the end of the meeting, a grammarian assesses the speakers’ use of language and the numbers of “ums,” “uhs,” and “you knows” to which they resorted. Toastmasters is a low-cost education in public speaking. Its tips are basic yet invaluable. Among them: Know your material. Practice, rehearse aloud, and revise as needed. Use a timer. Know your audience, and greet them as they arrive. Get to know the room where you’ll be speaking; arrive early and make yourself comfortable. Pause, smile, and count to three before saying a word. And don’t apologize for being nervous; the audience probably hasn’t even noticed.

  Toastmasters has spawned many private workshops, each with its own spin. At the Self-Expression Center in Houston, Texas, psychologist Sandra Zimmer, a onetime actress, prods her clients to stand in front of the group and wait, silently, until “something shifts,” as she puts it. Eventually, she promises, usually within a few minutes, their tension will begin to dissolve. They will relax into their bodies and learn to enjoy being the focus of attention. Because, according to Zimmer, stage fright is really just a fear of feeling in front of other people. She believes that the very act of standing up before a group is infantilizing. “The feelings that get stirred up when we are the center of attention make us vulnerable,” she says. “The secret is to focus attention into your fear, into the sensations of tension in your body.”

  Her perspective bears resemblance to the Freudian view of performance anxiety as a reversion to infantile behavior, based on a dread of exposing oneself, of being naked and helpless in the eyes of the world. “The secret is to focus attention into your fear, into the sensations of tension in your body,” Zimmer says. “Stage fright is passion energy that’s stuck in the body and that’s not being allowed to flow through. I once thought you had to thoroughly understand your issues to heal them, but now I believe healing is just a matter of having the freedom and permission to experience the emotions that got stuck in the body.”

  If it was easy, Tom Durkin might still be calling the Triple Crown. For thirteen years, he was the signature voice of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes, the three most coveted events in thoroughbred racing. He chucked it all in 2011, saying his mental health was more important than his career.

  To be a horse-racing announcer was all he had wanted since his childhood days at the track in Chicago in the 1960s, first accompanied by his parents and later playing hooky with friends. But it wasn’t the horses that piqued his interest so much as the announcer’s booth, where Phil Georgeff, “the voice of Chicago racing” during the 1960s, sat and called the winners. Durkin stared up at his idol, wrote letters to him, asked for advice. Being at the track and hearing that voice—that was the height of excitement for Durkin, who related his story one afternoon while on his way to Belmont Park racetrack, where he still calls the winners.

  At St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, he majored in theater because he thought it would help with his race announcing. Postgraduation in 1971, he called races from the back of a pickup truck on the county fair circuit, working his way up to modest tracks in the South and Midwest. By the time he was thirty-five, he was calling the Breeders’ Cup Classic, one of the nation’s premier races. He saw himself in every way (“genetically, emotionally, environmentally”) as a performer.

  But within a few years, he began to suffer anxiety attacks that brought waves of nausea whenever a big race neared. The potential for error lurked everywhere. Once, upon arriving at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, for the Breeders’ Cup, he discovered that a rainstorm had turned the track into a muddy course. He feared that when the race began, the horses would kick up enough mud to obscure the colors of the silks, the colorful jackets that distinguish one jockey from the other. Durkin had memorized the colors and now he was terrified that he would be unable to make the correct call. How was he to know which horse was which? With each new race came a new fear, reminding him of the dire warnings of the nuns from back in his Catholic school days: “Any mistake will be on your permanent record.” The anxiety only magnified after he signed with NBC in 2001. It should have been a cakewalk: a weekend of work for a six-figure income. But instead of 120,000 people in the bleachers for the Preakness, he was now broadcasting live to an invisible audience of 20 million. “What’s it like to be one easy mistake away from being a national joke?” a sports reporter asked him.

  Tom Durkin (Courtesy of New York Racing Association)

  It was an offhanded comment, but it touched a nerve. The question suffused his nights, filling them with dreams so transparent that they hardly required an analyst’s interpretation. In one, a cruise ship sailed down the final stretch of Churchill Downs, blocking his sight of the charging horses. The jockeys fell off their mounts and waged a tug-of-war, while a barbershop quartet sang and Durkin raged from the sidelines, “You can’t do this! This is a horse race!” He tumbled out of his booth and landed on an awning eighty feet up in the air. “Watch out, mister!” a little boy shouted. “You’re w
ay off the ground.”

  Durkin tried medication, analysis, prayer, breathing exercises, hypnosis. He read widely on the subject and developed an affinity for Sir Laurence Olivier and his late-in-life stage terrors. Before each racing season, Durkin trained like a marathon runner, abstained from alcohol, and shed a good twenty pounds. “Believe me, I was a monk,” he told one reporter. He had come close to quitting once, calling the president of NBC Sports to give his resignation and then abruptly changing his mind. This time, he stuck to his decision. He would continue to call the smaller races at Belmont, Aqueduct, and Saratoga, but at sixty-one, he was finished with the pressure of the big races. Ending our conversation, he explained his change of heart to me like this: “Let’s say you’re hitting your head with a hammer. The first thing you do is mask the pain, so you take an aspirin. It still hurts, so you put on a football helmet. But it’s still hurting. And it’s hurting so much your brains are rocking back and forth. At some point, you realize, ‘What if I didn’t hit myself with a hammer?’ ”

  The ancient Greeks had a word for this kind of sudden reversal in self-understanding. They called it “anagnorisis,” or recognition, the instant when a person discovers his or her mistakenness. According to Aristotle, anagnorisis characterized the highest form of drama. It is the moment that all great novels turn on, the moment when the character realizes how mistaken his or her sense of reality has been.3 One thinks of Pip in Great Expectations, his worldview shaken when he discovers that his life’s fortune was the behest of a miserable convict. Or Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet realizes that everything she thought about Darcy was in error and that his pride is not nearly as bad as her prejudice. Or, for that matter, of Raskolnikov, the impoverished student of Crime and Punishment, who murders an elderly pawnbroker and recognizes that his theory of the “great man,” exempt from the laws that dictate human interaction, is wrongheaded.