I was watching my 18 month old son playing at the weekend. By ‘playing’ I mean causing general mayhem around the house. And I don’t mean to suggest I don’t play with him often – I just for once sat and watch HOW he was playing. You know what – he’s a persistent little bugger…
And that was what is fascinating when contrasted to the behaviour of adults. You see, he has absolutely no fear of failure. Not a jot.
He will try anything that he thinks of, and if it doesn’t work then he will try again until:
- he succeeds;
- he thinks of an alternative; or
- he get bored/removed by his Dad.
This is the main reason that we have a gate at the top of the stairs, and a pile of CDs at the bottom – the prevention of one experiment, and the result of another.
So what is different about the way he approaches a new situation and the way we do? It can’t be ‘base instinct’ why we hate public speaking, when my son, and his peer group in general are happy to yell at random old people in the supermarket. It can’t be ‘in built self-defence’ why we give things one half-hearted try before giving up, when a toddler will spend three hours trying to feed raisins into a DVD player.
“But it is easy for them – they don’t know any different” I hear you say. Well, that is a meaningless statement. The only thing that they have in their head is “I wonder if this is possible”. Full stop. They make no attempt to predict the outcomes and consequentially scare themselves off trying in the first place.
And that is the nub of it – they start at the problem with an open mind. They take what they see and think “Okay, let’s have a go”. Now let’s go back to that public speaking engagement…
You are worried about it. You are VERY worried about it. Why? Because:
- People will laugh at you not with you
- No one will hear you
- You’ll look silly
- They’ll make fun of you
- The world will end. But very slowly. So that it is worse. And stuff
And what has lead you to believe all these things? It is unlikely to be your vast experience of public speaking as such experience would either make you good at it, or bad enough to not accept the offer. No, you think these things are the most likely outcome for no other reason than you have trained yourself to always take the safest option.
By ‘you’ I mean ‘me, you, us, and the over 5’s’. By ‘trained yourself’ I mean society develops us in such a way. And by ‘safest option’ I mean that you appraise every situation with ‘what is the worst that can happen’, then believe that as the most likely outcome.
Now I am not suggesting for a moment that you are able to un-learn this conditioning – it is there to protect us once we are sufficiently mobile to not be better off relying on whoever may offer help. But what we can do is be conscious of this process going on.
For example, I don’t mind public speaking at all. This is mainly as I don’t think about it before I stand up and speak. Yes I prep. Yes I write (some) of what I going to say. But I don’t rehearse, I don’t run through the speech in my head every night, and I don’t discuss it at length with people in advance. It is the mental equivalent of that other childhood skill – putting you fingers in your ears and singing “la la la, I can’t hear you, la la la”. So there you go a again – the kids are usually spot on 
So then, what are the raisins YOU are not putting in my DVD player? And why not?
