Fear is a lie!!!! Fear is purely there to paralyze us. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself and all we can do is to turn these fears into possibilities. Stage fright is an anxiety, fear, or persistent phobia which may be aroused in an individual by the requirement to perform in front of an audience and a lot of people suffer from this. This is not a disease seen in one in million but most of us suffer from it. Even I had stage fright. I’ve always had stage fright, and not just a little bit, it’s a big bit. Actually it didn’t really matter until I joined college. That’s when I started to have presentations, public speaking and met this ugly Mr. competition. I wasn’t a dumb kid though, I think out of box, come up with great idea and my friends appreciate me for that, I generate good ideas and inputs when I listen to people talk, but just thinking isn’t enough. I had all these stories and ideas, and I wanted to share them with people, but physiologically, I couldn’t do it. I had this irrational fear.
On my 3rd day of college I took a vow to stand up to this fear and face it, man to man. There was this professor, funny guy he was, he called me to speak on a topic. Well that was my chance and I gathered my confidence and went up on the classroom stage to speak and I started smiling. Smiling helps the speaker to connect with the audience but there is a twist here, I just couldn’t stop smiling. Well come on there was 40 students sitting in front of me. And they all looked angry, I didn’t know all then. But still I decided to speak on the topic.
I still don’t remember what I blabbered on that day and why all of them broke into laughter, but I never stopped talking, I continued my speech. I was quiet embarrassed on that incident. I made a fool out of myself. What would they think about me, what would the girls think about me? I was thinking too much.
I went back to hostel and this one girl, she recognized me from the class, from my speech. She said, it was fun listening to me talking there and it was different. That’s when I had an epiphany. And I remember it really well, because I don’t have a lot of epiphanies. All I had to do was just connect to the audience. Speak out. All I had to do was say something that exploits my nervousness and I spoke things that actually grabbed eyes from the audience, and it obviously requires a lot of practice and research. I studied fear and found a cure instead of cribbing about it. I still suffer from stage fright but I choose to fight and I win all the time.