One girl was nervously touching her skirt while telling a poem. As she was getting more and more nervous, she was clenching harder the fabric on her skirt on the level of her hands. Squeezing the fabric during the poem, eventually she pulled the skirt up to the level of mini-skirt. I really enjoyed the poem.
Another “British scientists” were researching the topic of public speaking and the stress related to that.
Whoever you’d ask – everybody’s afraid of public speaking. Wet palms, stuttering (specially if you’re not a native speaker), unfocused eye sight and other “benefits”. People definitely don’t enjoy public speaking in general. Especially stressful is the part that everybody SEES how nervous you are. And.. since people are so dependent on the opinion of others, they worry the most not about feeling like shit, but looking like a nervous shit in front of others.
The research was stating that stress is not as noticeable for others as for the person performing. People simply overestimate how freaked out they look like.
I definitely can’t disagree. Damn performances in musical and dance schools were making me feel doomed and depressed. It’s not like a care what people would think.. but I was still stressing out. This nightmare was continuing until I ended up having to make some important speech from the stage. I was so frightened that I can’t even remember what the speech was about. The Earth was trembling from my shaking knees, my hands were freezing, my eyesight couldn’t focus on a single face even if my life would depend on that. All quite typical. After the 10 minutes of shame on the stage, I ran away to the crowd and what did I hear? If I summarize – I did well and all that. How can it be explained?
Nobody sees anything. It’s happening only in the person’s head. Actually the biggest part of person’s life happens only in his head. Others simply don’t see it, don’t care to see it, as always.
No-one’s trying to look inside and figure out what’s happening. They’re just blind.
Wet palms and shaking knees are just made up by person’s own insecurity which is hiding things nobody cares to see.