I am no stranger to public performance, and I have never once had stage fright. But . . . when I became “professional speaker” (or maybe I should say “in my ongoing process of becoming,” as I keep learning new things every day), I had one big anxiety, which was, what if I go on stage in front of a thousand people and . . I have a cold? Like a bad cough?
I asked some other people in the biz, and I got the usual CVS list of chemicals and drugs to use. But then yesterday I had to speak to a big crowd out in Worcester, and folks, I don’t mind telling you, I was sick as a dog. The night before I got maybe 4 hours of sleep, as I couldn’t lie there for more than a few minutes without a wretching cough ripping my larynx out of its socket. “How am I going to get through this?” I asked myself.
Well I loaded up on cough suppressant and breath mints and I had a bottle of water at the ready, but as I was introduced, well, an added element appeared:
Adrenaline.
There was even more adrenaline than usual. The crowd was not was I was expecting. I seem to recall high school kids being a little older than this, plus there were a few hundred parents as well as kid brothers an sisters in tow. A real mix. Must . . . parse . . . phrases . . . carefully.
So I got up on stage, with bottles and drugs and breath mints at the ready, but . . . once the show started, amazingly, all my cold symptoms just . . . disappeared.
I have heard stories of people hopped up on drugs not feeling broken bones, and certainly a shot of adrenaline will clear your sinuses very quickly. And this is what happened to me. I did not even so much as have an “ahem” the whole show. It was a miracle. For 30 minutes, I was cured.
So a demon of the mind has been faced down. The fear of having a problem solved it. There is a joke in here somewhere about the only thing I’ll have to fear in future is lack of fear itself . . . as the fear of having a problem, and the excitement of doing the show, has its own chemical impact of pumping me up and suppressing various cold symptoms, at least momentarily.
I can’t believe I got through that, I am sitting here coughing and sneezing like you wouldn’t believe.
To all who attended, thanks very much, that was fun. – JL
