CHAPTER 2
Feared More Than Death
There’s a “survey” quoted by almost all presentation training companies. The gist of it is that when people are asked what they fear most, public speaking is the highest out of all the replies. It’s higher than death, which is number two. This supposedly academic piece of research is used by most trainers to say “At a funeral, would you really rather be in the coffin instead of reading the eulogy?” In fact, I can find no evidence that the survey really exists. There are a lot of these surveys that are regularly trotted out by professional speakers; most are pure invention, but they put some pseudo-academic veracity to a universal truth, usually the result of a dinner conversation made credible. ...
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