Toastmaster

Last year I saw a therapist who tried to teach me how to talk really loudly. She made me stand up and say my name with abandon, “so the plants on the porch can hear!” I was beginning a teaching job and the idea of speaking in front of a group filled me with childlike panic. We worked on envisioning my anxiety as a boat that was drifting away. She held my arm in her hands and counted down from ten, doing some “light hypnotism.” She began to act somber and her eyes became disturbingly enormous. “It’s normal to feel nervous,” she whispered. “Everyone feels nervous. But you don’t have to. Why bother?”

Her office was on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue townhouse and had a ceiling window, a bed, and a large bowl of special-looking rocks. When I told her I wanted to be a writer, she said, “Oh my god, I love writing. I took a class with Michael Cunningham in Italy!” and pulled one of his books off her shelf and made me look at it. Then she told me to practice projecting a few frequently used words like hello, really, do, go, right, and great. She made me stand up and introduce myself to an imaginary class several times. “No one really listens closely to what we say,” she said, as encouragement.

My mom found the therapist for me after I got hired to teach a course called Verbal Communications. The job was at a junior college in Manhattan known for its advertisements on subways: images of handsome people in suits, shaking hands and networking. Originally, I was supposed to teach writing, but there was a department shortage and the dean, who was desperate for teachers, asked me to take on public speaking instead. “Speaking and writing—it’s really the same principle,” she said. I nodded and told her I’d done oral reports in high school. I didn’t tell her that I did these reports by rapidly reading my note cards in a small, strained voice without looking at anyone. She handed me the course textbook, Public Speaking: Connecting You and Your Audience.

The book opens with a flood of reminders that it’s OK to be nervous. The authors quote a statistic that I’ve now read in more than a dozen different books and articles: more people are afraid of public speaking than of death. They tell a story about a girl who lived in Indiana and was so bad at talking that when she wanted pizza, she made her mom, who lived in New York, order it for her. The book’s suggestions for dealing with speaking...