We face many fears in our lives. People are afraid of all sorts of things: from seeing spiders to talking to other people. In fact, psychologists say that social fears are the most common. According to experts, 77% of people are afraid of public speaking. So why are social fears so widespread?
The psychoanalyst Alfred Adler wrote that when we were children, we felt helpless because we depended so much on our parents. And this fear of helplessness and powerlessness might stay with us forever.
While we are growing up, we are creating an image of ourselves. We hear what people say about us and we analyze that. But in many cases, we judge ourselves in the process. We focus on the judgement more than what we learned. In other words, we tend to remember negative things about ourselves rather than the positive.
That is one of the reasons social fears appear later in life. We think that we are not good enough to give this presentation, to speak with the boss, to go to that interview. So how can we solve this? Remember, how you played when you were a child and how you pretended that you were a doctor, a firefighter, a magician, etc? Alfred Adler suggested doing the same. Before giving a presentation, pretend that you are a person who is really good at public speaking, for example, Barack Obama. It is called “acting as if”. If you are acting as if you are a very confident person, you will behave as a confident person.