Do you hate spiders like I do?
Posted on April 24, 2012 by Keith Hill, One of Thousands of ADD ADHD Coaches on Noomii.
Fear of interviews and public speaking can make things difficult when looking for a job, or doing presentations at work.
I wish I could say I feared nothing, but I can’t. Spiders creep me out. Unlike most people, however, I can tell you exactly where I got this fear. Imagine being three years old and playing on the preschool playground. The teacher blows the whistle and tells everyone that it is time to come inside. On a whim, you decide it would be fun to run from the teacher, so you take off around the side of the building. There is about 2 feet of space between the building and the fence and you barrel down this makeshift tunnel, looking behind you to see if the teacher is catching up. Running full bore, you turn your head forward just in time to come face to face with a huge, hairy, brown spider, sitting in the middle of a web stretched between the side of the school and the fence. You can’t stop. You run face first into the spider, the web, and your destiny of spider hatred. A remember rolling on the ground and screaming as the teacher tried to get the web off my face. All I could think about was, “Where the spider was, and what was it going to do to me.”
In hind sight, the spider was most likely just a surprised and freaked out as I was. It most likely jumped off me and ran for the nearest corner, but that didn’t matter. That spider had become larger than life for me. Since that time, I have learned that most problems appear to be larger than life when they initially occur. Over time, our imagination can make them bigger and bigger still.
I’ll bet you view presentations and interviews like that. Fear, nervousness, procrastination, they all seem to grow legs and get bigger. However, you don’t have to let these problems tie you up in a web that you can’t escape. The magic isn’t in “just getting it over with.” The magic is in learning how to handle the challenges associated with speaking, and coming up with strategies you can apply again and again to squash these fears and challenges. Consider it “Mental Bug Spray.”
I still don’t like spiders, but at least I know how to deal with them when they crawl out from the shadows. Don’t let fear and past experiences with speaking keep you bound, scared, and crying on your playground of life! Go to www.wordsmithondemand.com for superior interview and speech coaching!
