Countless books and magazine articles have been written aimed at ridding people of stage fright associated with public speaking. The Dale Carnegie course and Toastmasters International are some notables in the field. I have suffered from timidity and fear, a deep self-consciousness for years. I joined Toastmasters International many years ago for one purpose: To finally get the nerve to sing in public. As a child, I had such a nice singing voice, that my friends would ask me to sing for them at recess! When I returned home from a trip abroad, my classmates all congregated around my grandfather's garden and again asked me to sing. Yet, as an adult, I became mute. A doormat in many ways. Afraid of my own shadow. What happened?It came about subtly. I sang for my husband, and he enjoyed it while I sang in Hebrew, my native tongue, but became critical when I began to sing in English. My accent, he said. That was enough to shut me down. I attempted to stay on point, so to speak, and sing only in Hebrew in his presence, but that became a contrivance and was unnatural. I now felt stifled. When I sang in front of my mother, she chimed in and I found that distracting. So I piped down. Little by little, my corner was becoming smaller and smaller. As the years went by, the cultural tastes shifted, and popular songs assumed a fancy style characterized more by what seemed to me to be screaming than singing. American Idol became popular, where people were competing for prizes based on who could style his or her song best. I remarked to my husband that even Frank Sinatra could not achieve some of those vocal acrobatics produced on that show! Certainly, neither could I. Nor did I want to. My own singing is folksy, operatic, jazzy. I'm no Mahalia Jackson. Yet in art class, if I should begin to hum, one of my classmates will groan at the first note and beg me with "Oh, please don't start." With such appreciation, it's no wonder I clammed down.
So I determined to overcome my fears, and I joined Toastmasters. After all, public speaking can't possibly be that different from public singing, can it?
What am I afraid of? Singing is sometimes difficult. In some ways, it is just like speaking, with the lilting melodious sounds produced to a rhythm. But unlike speaking, singing engages what is known as the chest register and the head register. And the transition is not only difficult, but sometimes, uhm, unattractive. In singing, the singer sometimes contorts his or her face, either because of the effort required to achieve a note, or because the singer is emoting. Such nakedness is unnerving. Since I'm no Janet Jackson, I feel self-conscious about showing my emotions. I don't know how they do it on American Idol. How do they let themselves go, and not care what they look like? When I watch Celine Dion sing, her eyes half closed in ecstasy, her passion clearly expressed in her singing, I feel nervous. Yet, Celine Dion looks fine. She looks appropriate to the task. She does not look out of place. She is doing what we are expecting her to do. If she were merely standing with her arms at her sides and singing like a child, that would be out of place, and we, the audience, would feel uncomfortable. Yet, I feel like that child on the stage. Stage fright. Bright lights glaring. Eyes staring, judging, evaluating, some patronizing with "oh, how cute!", others distinctly bored, still others downright irritated because it is not their style of music.
How do you overcome this?
The first step is learning to speak. I already know how to speak: I have mastery of the English language, and I am fine in a small group. The difference when standing in front of a group is that the speaker must adhere to a few rules proscribed by the club.
In this blog, I hope to peel away the layers of my fear, and confront my demons, eventually emerging on the other side with considerably more confidence.
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