This is a follow-up to the original piece.
Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa wrote: Well, if you are an introvert, your brain goes haywire with the great stimulation given by larger audiences (an introvert’s mind needs less stimulation to have the same level of understanding about a situation). Controlling it is more important, according to psychologists, before thinking about the points given in the blog. Only when the stimulation is controlled you can control other things. That is why introverts try to hide behind something, look at their papers or at the screen instead of the audiences in the initial stages. They try to reduce the stimulation by doing so.
I would be grateful to you if you could give tips on how to reduce this ‘too much stimulation’ issue.
Hi Krishna – an excellent point! My experience with students suggests that there are surely “types”, such as those you call introverts, who dislike being the focus of attention and whose brains experience an exaggerated response that powerfully influences their bodies and behavior in public presentations and similar situations. Usually giving them help requires close observation, then developing an individual plan of practice that addresses specific behavioral symptoms – like those mentioned in the earlier post. This will take time and patience. Here, too, it can be useful to help them focus on the content of their presentation, and this is a theme to be covered in a future post. That said, I’m not a psychologist, and some types of anxiety clearly have very deep roots that need to be addressed therapeutically before any satisfying “cure” is really achieved.
But still there are things that can help: It’s crucial to try to define the parameters of the problem as precisely as possible. Are there any situations in which the person manages to handle their anxiety? Are they equally affected if they give the presentation to two or three close friends, or their lab? Is one of the issues trust: with people they know, does a fear of disapproval or a negative response disappear? If they can handle small groups, then this can become a cornerstone of practice. They need to give the talk as often as possible in such settings in a way that helps them internalize the positive effects and extend the experience to situations with larger audiences.
Personally I learned something about this through music. My first violin teacher, Lewis Hoyt, said that one of his teachers had always told him to imagine the heads in the audience as cabbages! Later he began studying through a new method which took exactly the opposite approach – enjoying the presence of an audience and fully engaging them as human beings in your personal music, work, or story. Over the long term, if one can manage it, this tends to work better than pretending like they aren’t there.
Your point about “control” reminds me of the student I discussed in point 9 of the original article – where the issue was managing all of the ideas bombarding his brain and the flow of the content. A few simple strategies to ensure that you can stay on track (point 8) and won’t get lost go a great way toward reinforcing confidence. The trick is to extend them to behaviors that are really hard to control: blushing, stammering, shaking, etc.
Each speaker needs to build on the strengths she/he has and use them to support areas of weakness. Can you tell a joke? Can you tell a funny little personal story about something that happened during the project? If some weird little accident happens, can you improvise and get people to laugh? There are lots of potential methods to change the atmosphere – disasrming a stressful situation – which can almost instantly relieve a lot of the tension. As a teacher or speaker you may have to dig deep into the rhetorical repertoire to find something that works, but there’s often something there to draw on.
A lot more needs to be said about this; I’ll keep thinking about it, and the comments on the piece have been extremely helpful in pulling out essential points for consideration. I’ll be teaching several courses over the next couple of months and will be able to report more specific examples from actual practice.
If you like these pieces, you might be interested in the article:
If you’d rather enter the bizarre, twilight world where science collides with humor, check out the Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases, or the text of a talk I gave in Oslo in 2015, plus everything else in the categories “Hilarious moments in science communication” or satire.
And if you haven’t yet seen the most popular post so far from this blog, check out the “God” article: “Even God’s first paper got rejected.“
Good Science Writing 