Going Beyond Fear - English version

I was leading a business workshop on stress the other day with one of my colleagues from Millennium. There were about 25 people in the room and we were asking them why people become so stressed in situations like public speaking or speaking English with a native speaker (a common fear for Brazilians).


We got the normal responses to our question: fear of making mistakes, trauma from childhood, shyness. But then I told them about a conversation I’d had with Dr. Norberto Keppe about fear of speaking or presenting. "Any attitude of doubt or mistrust, any nervousness or fear," he said, "Represents opposition to your own gifts and talents."

So there is much more going on here that what we have all thought.

When we’re afraid of speaking in public (or in a second language) what’s going on below the surface is a deeper attitude that we don’t notice. This is the inevitable conclusion drawn from the science of psychopathology started by Freud and completed by Norberto Keppe – we actually have attitudes against our own development. This situation must be understood if we’re to move forward in our lives.

Let me use an example. Let’s say you have a public speaking presentation to give next week. In starting your preparation, you notice that it’s suddenly very difficult to find the time. You’re procrastinating like crazy and finding a million other things to do. You check your email every 5 minutes, you play 100 games of solitaire on the computer, it suddenly seems the perfect time to organize your files from 1992 – the same files you haven’t looked at since …you guessed it … 1992!

You stall and stall, but finally, in an all-night marathon of preparation the night before, you manage to finish your PowerPoint presentation. The next day, when you stand up to give your talk, you find yourself rambling incoherently or forgetting important things you wanted to say. You’re unclear and unfocused, far from the effective presenter you would like to be.

And you make the inevitable conclusion: "I hate public speaking!" You state this for anyone who’ll listen. "I’m too afraid." And every time another opportunity to speak in public presents itself, you break out in sweats and lose sleep – and work very hard to avoid the opportunity.

But you’ve made a classic mistake here by blaming the wrong thing for your problem. Public speaking is not the culprit; it’s simply a giant mirror. What the public speaking deadline brings is a lot of consciousness: you’re not as organized as think you are, you have a habit of procrastinating with the important stuff in your life, you have difficulties expressing your ideas clearly and concisely.

These are attitudes that exist irrespective of the situation, and you’ll never be able to resolve them if you don’t see this deeper aspect. And what’s important for this discussion is that these difficulties can, and usually do, show up in other areas of our lives as well – like accepting promotions or new responsibilities, going to job interviews, speaking a second language.

To really move past this and progress in our lives, we have to deal with the underlying counter-productive attitudes that lead us to procrastinate and delay. This is something that relates to our relationships with the world, and it’s through addressing these inner demons that we achieve success.

This is the wisdom that comes from the science of Analytical Trilogy that we use every day in the classroom here at Millennium, and it can make an incredible difference to your learning of a language and improving in many areas of your life.