Not only is there an individual silence about speaking in
public, there is also a national silence. The problem receives so little
attention you would think it doesn’t exist. For example, there are no public
speaking phobia specialists attached to speech departments in colleges and
universities. There is no National Public Speaking-Phobia Society; even the Encyclopedia Britanica, under the
category of “speech” has no reference to this condition. In the speech
category, although various esoteric conditions and maladies are cited, there is
no listing of public speaking phobia itself, although it has a name:
glossophobia.
Why is it that in the United States—one of the few countries
in the world where freedom of speech is guaranteed by a constitution—fear of speaking
in public is the number one phobia? This is a question I asked every time I
appeared on radio or television during my first book tour. Nobody seemed to
have an answer.
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