After my last post, a few people wrote to me to say (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Thanks a lot. I was about to start a career/hobby in public speaking, and you just scared the crap out of me. You’ve destroyed my confidence and my self-esteem. I hate myself now. My wife just left me because of your post. I’ve lost my fortune, and it turns out that my house, although I didn’t know it before, seems to have been built on a volcano, and although I can’t directly connect you to it, I suspect that the negative energy you pushed across the net last week had quite a bit to do with pulling the cosmic strings that resulted in the beast going from dormant to potentially active. You’re a very bad person. I hope you die in a freak inner-city walrus stampede."

Fear not, my friends. The truth is, the talk I gave which led to the post wasn't really all that bad. What's happened, and the reason I wrote that post, is I've hit that point that anybody hits once they've been at something long enough: I've lost some perspective.

If you're a beginning speaker, your chief quality, inexperience, is a strength and a weakness.

It's a weakness because it means you're definitely going to make some mistakes during your first few talks. It's inevitable. Even people like Don Box, Chris Sells, and Scott Hanselman (the three best speakers I've ever met) biffed a few talks early on.

That inexperience is a strength as well, though, because it also means that you're going to be forced to experiment, which could lead to some interesting experiences for you and your audiences – it will help you develop style.

Eventually, though, as I was saying, you'll lose some perspective. It happens. Once you arrive at a level of familiarity with a subject, or once you've become skilled enough at a craft, parts of it become, for lack of a better word, "invisible" to you.

Think about your mornings. Do you remember your preparations for work? Do you remember the specifics of brushing your teeth? Do you remember how much toothpaste you had left? Did you do things in a different order than usual? The answer to most of these questions is probably "no" unless you've recently changed your routine to accommodate for some other change in life (like the discovery that your house was built on a volcano).

But, if you had walked into your bathroom this morning and spotted a cadaver, would you have remembered it? I think so.

You even would have noticed if something had been only slightly off with your morning. For example, if you realized only after it was too late that you were out of toothpaste, it's something you would have registered. It would have pissed you off. You would have punched the mirror out of frustration, cracked it, and cut your hand in the process, resulting in scars that would forever remind you of that one stupid day when you ran out of toothpaste.

You’re so familiar with the experience that none of it requires conscious thought unless something goes wrong. The result of only being There while something is going wrong is that you’re probably only going to remember the biff. If the biff, then, is the only thing you remember, then it’s going to seem like the most vivid part of the experience.

In other words, even if your shower goes off without a hitch, and even if you manage to get dressed without hurting yourself, the only part of the morning routine in question that might stick out is the part where you ran out of toothpaste. It’s what you’ll remember and take with you.

To put it another way, think about it in terms of chess. When most people first start playing chess, they move pieces without much understanding. It’s a necessary part of the process – you’ll sacrifice plenty of rooks in the first ten moves of your first few games just to learn that it’s pretty stupid to move rooks early on – the center pawns are where the action typically is at the outset of a game. Making those mistakes, and then stopping yourself from continuing to make those mistakes, is learning.

After a bit of that, you might progress to the point that you have the opening game down pretty well. You still have to pay attention, but much of the first ten moves or so are pulled from memory rather than the present situation on the board. The middle and end games still demand that you focus and think, but the beginning is a snap. This is a fun place to be – you feel confident about your understanding of the mechanics of the game, but you’re still not an expert, and you still have to work at the process.

If you keep this up in a manner we might call obsessive, and if you’re good enough, you might one day reach a point of ability with the game that puts you in the upper ranks. You’ll be an expert, and it’s at this level that the “game” completely changes. If you want to compete at this level, rote memorization of book moves and historical games will play a major role in your success. You have the mechanics down – it’s now just a matter of making sure that you don’t make any blunders.

Your interaction with chess is now much more about the result than it is the process. Your chess-trained brain goes on a sort of autopilot, referencing a vast internal database of information that helps you make your next few moves.

If you’ve made it this far, then you’re not going to make any more blunders. You aren’t going to biff it. You’re going to make mistakes that only a few other people on the planet would understand or notice. However, when you make those mistakes, they seem huge – to you.

Public speaking is no different.

When I started, I was just pushing rooks and pawns to see what would happen, and I got my ass kicked by the first few situations in which I found myself.

After a few months, I learned much more about the structure of the craft. I stopped making huge blunders and moved on to tiny oopsies.

After nearly two years of doing it regularly, I’ve mostly stopped the tiny oopsies. I feel like I could get up in front of an audience now and talk about anything for at least a couple hours without breaking a sweat. When I screw up now, it’s usually, nine times out of ten, something that only really matters to me. It’s blunders so tiny that hardly anyone would notice if I didn’t draw attention to them. I still have the occasional major screw-up, but not often. My disappointment with a talk is now more about not living up to my own standards. Audiences still seem pleased with the information they get – I’m the one who thinks the talk could have been much better.

So, if you were scared off by my last post, and if it put a few butterflies in your tum-tum, then don’t worry. During your first few talks, you’re going to make some mistakes (you will, will, will). During the next few, you’ll feel pretty damned good about the job you’re doing. During the next several thousand, you’ll start to notice things like the negative effect barometric pressure in Alaska might be having on your talk in Florida, and then you’ll start writing posts like this one. Until then, don’t sweat it too much.

I didn’t mean to scare anybody :)

Public speaking, if you’re into it, is a lot of fun – even on the bad days.

Word up.