Vaporize your Fear of Public Speaking
Tom Stone
Vaporize your Fear of Public Speaking
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © Tom Stone, 2012
All rights reserved.
Published by Great Life Technologies, Inc.
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Carlsbad, CA 92011
(760) 277-5801
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
Contents
Journey to Emotional Competence
Introduction
If you are reading this book it is probably safe to assume that you have some fears associated with public speaking. This is actually no surprise as most surveys on fears indicate that the fear of public speaking is the number one fear in the world. Typically, the fear of death takes second place, interestingly that the fear of public speaking would be a bigger fear than the fear of death. The question is why is that?
Our first step will be to provide you with an intellectual framework that will make you comfortable with what we are going to be doing to resolve the true underpinnings of what causes the fear of public speaking. To understand the real underpinnings of why it is that the fear of public speaking is so strong for people we can use a set of insights called the Core Dynamics of Human Conditioning.
This model is something that I developed over many, many years of very in-depth research. I was looking for the deepest level of what causes problems in human life. The way that I discovered these insights was by making a deep exploration of why we as humans seem to be so poor at being able to resolve issues like trauma and anxiety.
In 1993 I had an opportunity to learn how to test the body’s reaction to different kinds of input. It’s a simple system of presenting something to the body and seeing how the muscles respond, whether they contract or don’t contract. You might be familiar with this method. It is usually called muscle testing or kinesiology. I found it quite fascinating and useful and I eventually started a practice in which I used this method to guide the process of helping people identify and remove barriers to having the life that they want. What I found was that sometimes people would have issues that we would not shift or if they did shift then the next week the problem might be back.
Being someone who likes to be successful, I was inspired to include in my inquiry questions to see if we had missed something or if we needed more information or needed to go deeper. What I became interested in finding was the deepest causal level of people’s problems. I began calling what I was doing Human Software Engineering. It was all about debugging and upgrading people’s inner human software.
As I added this additional step into my process of asking if we needed to go deeper with the testing I found that sometimes I had no clue as to what that deeper thing might be. So I would scratch my head and discuss it with the client. We would use our intuition. We’d use the muscle testing to get a sense of what was the right direction to take. We would inquire and inquire and I gradually started to hit on these amazing, very penetrating insights into the nature of our preverbal human conditioning. This is the stuff that happens to us before we have language.
The Core Dynamic of Resisting Feelings Things Fully is caused by getting emotionally overwhelmed when we are very young. I’ve yet to meet anyone who liked being emotionally overwhelmed. In fact, we hate it. It’s so terrifying, so uncomfortable that we make a decision long before we have language that we are just going to do our best to avoid such experiences. We seem to make a decision at the level of feeling to put a lid on accessing our natural capacity to feel things, just in an attempt to mitigate or avoid being emotionally overwhelmed. It’s a very simple observation and this shutting down our access to our own innate capacity to feel seems to be quite universal.
This preverbal “decision” turns out to be a set up for becoming really lousy at resolving thing like fear, anxiety, trauma and any kind of intense emotional experience. We become essentially emotionally avoidant or we could say, and please don’t take it personally, emotionally incompetent. I say don’t take it personally because everyone has this deep form of preverbal childhood conditioning.
We are not very good in handling the emotions that we have. This is the fundamental set up for why it is that we end up becoming fearful of things and unable to resolve the fear. This was one of the very first insights I discovered in my inquiry into why people are not good at resolving emotional pain and fear. It’s a very simple and powerful insight. While it is kind of obvious sometimes it is the simple and obvious stuff that evades us.
Journey to Emotional Competence
One of the motivations that lead me to try to find deeper answers to why we are not good at resolving trauma and fear was a bizarre personal experience I had in 1993, right after I had learned how to do the muscle testing techniques. I was living in a small town in Iowa and on the evening of December 7, 1993, just weeks after I learned muscle testing, I went to answer my front door and there was a stranger standing there. As I began to open the door, he pulled out a large handgun. I found out later that it was a .44. As I slammed the door and locked it, he stepped over and shot through the big oval decorative glass. The bullet hit me in the chest, ricocheted off the lower edge of a rib and went down through my diaphragm, right between the two lobes of the liver, and then ricocheted off the pelvic bone just missing major nerves and arteries along the way. It somehow missed the intestines, maybe because I was leaning over trying to slam the door, and it lodged in the bone behind my fifth lumbar.
Now this is a .44 caliber handgun. It’s not trivial. It’s a big bullet. Hunters use them for killing bears. I didn’t die obviously. I am still here. The guy turned around and left. All he wanted to do was shoot somebody. We will get into the story about that another day.
In any case, I survived it and had two surgeries. During the first big abdominal exploratory they couldn’t get the bullet out so I went back three months later and they took it out from the back by removing a little bit of the right wing of the 5th lumbar spine. While I was still in the hospital bed after the first surgery the assistant surgeon came by to check on me. He asked how I was doing and then he said, “Tom you know you’re really rather lucky” and I said, “Excuse me. I just got shot in the chest. Explain what you mean by lucky” he said, “Well, if you’re going to get shot in the chest at close range with a .44, 1 in 100,000 people would survive such an assault and 1 in a million would come out of it without any loss of organs or limbs as you’ve done” I said, “Well, in that context, I understand what you mean. That makes sense”.
Needless to say, I had post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and although I didn’t know it was called that at that time I had all of the symptoms, nightmares, flashbacks and startle response, etc. I couldn’t go answer the door for about a year, as you can imagine. So I had my own anxiety and trauma to recover from. I tried the medications for one day and they turned me into a zombie. I said, “Okay, that’s enough of that. I’m not going that direction”.
Both my parents had been in the social sciences. My mom was a social worker and my dad was a sociologist. So they had sent me to see a psychologist for some emotional challenges that I was having while I was in high school. I had experienced traditional cognitive therapy. I knew that was not going to be of any help. So I went on a journey of looking for real answers to heal myself. On that journey, I started to discover the insights that lead to the Core Dynamics model that I will explain in the next chapter. The need to find a more effective way to heal from my own trauma was certainly one of the motivations for looking more deeply. I wanted to find things that were truly curative, that would really resolve the problem and not just suppress symptoms. This insight about resisting feeling things fully led me to really understand why it is that human beings are so lousy at resolving intense emotions.
Core Dynamics
The other very fortunate that happened is that I was able to discover and develop some new techniques for being able to do the exact opposite of what we are deeply conditioned to do. That is, instead of going away from where the energy of a feeling is intense, learning how to dive right into the center of it. Now to the 3-year old inside of us this does not sound like such a good idea. But it turns out that there is a special way to do this that makes it really, really easy and I am going to share that with you in this book. So that’s a little bit of a background as to how these insights about the Core Dynamics started to develop.
There is another Core Dynamic at the basis of the fear of public speaking. It’s the one called Looking for Yourself Where You Are Not.
Looking for Yourself Where You Are Not is something that we do based on another aspect of our very, very early preverbal conditioning. When we are in the womb, all our needs get met automatically. I call it “5-star womb service”. Please forgive the pun, but it certainly describes our experience. While in the womb it would seem that we don’t experience physiological needs. We get all of our needs met automatically. This is, of course, wonderful, but when we come out and the umbilical cord is cut, there is no more five-star womb service. Now we get the experience of having needs. We need to eat. We need our diaper to be changed. We need to be cuddled. We need attention and warmth and clothing. They are simple needs but we definitely have them.
But now we have to let our needs be known so that someone will come and take care of whatever it is that we need. We have a one-word vocabulary, “Waaaah” and we use this vocabulary very fluently. We experienced that if we make enough noise, somebody comes in and checks it out and looks for what it is that we need. We can’t tell them what we need, of course. We don’t have language yet and so we just make noise and somebody gets it and we get changed, we get fed or we get what we need.
As long as we get what we need in a reasonable timeframe, everything is okay. We settle down and we’re okay. But what seems to be universal is that sometimes our needs are not getting met in a timely enough manner. You know, Mom’s in the bathroom for 10 minutes at the wrong time. There’s no nanny. Dad’s at work. No one’s there to meet our need and we’re crying our eyes out.
So what is the inner experience of this little tyke, this little infant? The inner experience is if we had language, it would go something like this. It would say, “My needs are not getting met. I feel desperately the need to get my need met. It feels like if I don’t get my need met, I’m going to die or worse and this is really, really bad. So I’m just in a desperate place here”. There’s this feeling also, “I don’t get the distinction of Mom yet. I was just inside of Mom for 9 months. Mom still feels like the part of me that meets my needs, like an extended part of me. I’m so identified with Mom that it feels like she’s a part of me”. When we have this situation, we have complete dependence and complete identification. What happens is we have this feeling that a part of me is missing. Now, this happens over and over and over and over again, even in the best of households.