This post was most recently updated on June 20th, 2017

According to a survey, people fear public speaking more than death. And the no.1 fear in the world is Public Speaking. The term best used to describe it is known as “Glossophobia.”

Can you imagine that people also fear public speaking more than height or insects? That’s crazy.

Just stand in front of a group and open your mouth. That’s it. What’s there to fear?

If you are thinking like that, then you are probably wrong. People hate speaking in front of people and they can make any excuses in order to prevent that. Trust me because I have done that too. And after successfully overcoming this stupid fear and speaking confidently, I identified few 2 major reasons why we fear public speaking so much.

Everything you want is on the other side of fear – Jack Canfield.

1st reason why we fear speaking in public.

We are humans and humans are social animals. We love showing our good things to others, sharing our progress to others and we even love sharing weaknesses of others but, we hate sharing our weaknesses and failures with others.

We want others to love us. We want others to only see good things about us. And when that doesn’t happen, we get sad and angry. So we try to avoid those circumstances and public speaking is one such activity where we have to speak in front of many people and we are constantly worrying about what others will think about us if we made a mistake and made a fool out of ourselves.

2nd reason why we fear speaking in public.

We need validation from people but this same validation is stopping us from becoming a better speaker. We don’t want to sound stupid in front ofother people. When we allow others to judge us or make their opinion about us more than our will to speak what we want, we give away our powers to them.

So these are the 2 biggest reasons why we fear speaking in public- We want people to like us and don’t want to sound stupid in front of them.

Here’s another article on why we fear public speaking if you are interested.

Here are few books to help you remove your fear of public speaking.

In coming posts, I’ll share about the common fears of public speaking and how to overcome it.