Picture Them Naked

That’s it.  Just do that and your nerves will be settled, those butterflies in your stomach will go away, and you won’t break a leg!  

Have you ever received this advice before?  It’s usually given by a well-meaning person trying to aid a friend with a debilitating loathing for public speaking.  Picture everyone in the audience naked; you won’t feel silly or embarrassed or out of place because, well, now you’re the only one with clothes on!

Ummmmm… have any of you ever actually TRIED this?  Don’t get me wrong, the premise and justification seem sound, but in practice… well, let’s just say that instead of sighing a breath of relief, I find myself kinda grossed out.  Maybe I’m being too literal, but when I try this technique, I picture a huge room full of weird, sweaty, hairy men and women with oddly-shaped body parts, many of whom may not have even showered that morning, or have chunks of deodorant in their armpits, or, heaven forbid, just came from a date with a tub of Vaseline…

Now, luckily for me, I don’t have much of a fear of public speaking.  Do I get nervous before a speech or presentation?  Yeah, sure, but it’s more of an exciting anticipation of what will happen than a fear of looking stupid.  However, as you may have gleaned from my earlier posts, I do have a fear of another situation that paralyzes me similarly to a socially anxious introvert facing a throng of psychological critics: interpersonal conflict.  

I hate it.  I don’t like people to argue.  I drink the “Why can’t we all just get along?” kool-aid like an inmate who has just discovered the Bible.  When conflict situations come up on the fly, I can deal with them well enough, but I literally tremble when I know ahead of time that I’m about to walk into an argument.

So, like so many folks who would rather wallow in the depths of Guantanamo than deliver a 5-minute speech to a group of critical spectators, I avoid high-strung conflict (particularly with those who harbor stubborn opinions) like the plague.  And as have my predecessors, I have made use of popular techniques for downplaying the stress of such a situation like picturing my combatant naked. 

My first attempt at using this technique several years ago worked so poorly that I couldn’t focus on the conversation [argument] at hand, and found myself in desperation reverting to tactics from my long-distant toddlerhood (“I know you are, but what am I?!”).

It wasn’t a shining moment by any stretch of the imagination.  But alas, there is hope!!  I believe I have found a technique that works so beautifully that I decided to devote an entire 6 paragraphs of build-up in this blog post to give it its proper unveiling!

Don’t picture them NAKED

Picture them MUPPET

If you don’t know what a Muppet is, stop reading right now, run to your nearest Blockbuster Video, and pick up a copy of the latest Muppet Movie which, by the way, is amazing.  And then bang your head against a wall for a few hours for having lived in a hole for the past 20 years…

You heard me right: picture them as Muppets.  There is one undeniable truth that will live forever in the case of Muppets: You can't take them seriously.

Now, I wouldn’t suggest outwardly laughing at your audience or argumentative adversary once you’ve implemented this technique, but I’ll tell you this.  If you read my earlier post about my little crying incident, you should know that I had to finish that conversation a week later, and boy was I nervous.  But I speak from personal experience: if you inflate the size of your opposition ’s head, eyes, nose, and ears, add some crazy spikes and tangles to the hair, and then convert it all to fuzzy cloth…. HAhaHAhAhAHA!!!  Sorry, Mr. President, no talk of Swat Teams or nuclear bombs soaring towards my home office can intimidate me now!

Trust me.  Do it.  Go the extra mile and draw it out on a piece of paper if you can.  And then tell me how right I am.

(I’d also like to point out that Muppets are made of cloth and thus can’t be sweaty, dirty, covered in any bodily fluids, or presenting any oddly-shaped ‘parts’.  I win.)