Why Rehearsing Alone Won't Cure Your Fear of Public Speaking

Most people who fear public speaking rehearse harder, alone, until the words feel safe. On the latest Students Incorporated episode, host Midnight, co-host Lucy, and student guest Sarah of the International Community School of Bangkok argued that rehearsal is only half the answer. The other half is changing what you believe the audience is doing while you talk. Recent research suggests they're right.

The episode called public speaking "the skill school never really teaches." Then the students performed a bad speech and a good one on the same topic, back to back, and took both apart.

Two speeches about sloths

Sarah went first, playing the worst case on purpose. Her speech on sloths opened with "hi guys," wandered through "they live in trees and yeah, trees," claimed sloths sleep "like 20 hours per day or something," and ended with a sudden "Thanks for listening. Bye."

The hosts noted that opening with "um, hi guys" signals a lack of confidence before the content starts. The delivery was flat and repetitive, the ending abrupt. "We want every segment to lead smoothly into whatever is coming next," one host said. "Tie up the information with a nice pretty bow, so to speak."

Lucy did it right. She opened with an image instead of a greeting: "Imagine spending up to 20 hours a day hanging upside down in the high canopy of a rainforest, barely moving a muscle." She framed the sloth as "one of nature's most misunderstood creatures," explained its slowness as a survival strategy, and closed by hoping listeners would "leave today with a new appreciation for taking things slow."

Same animal, same facts. One version, the hosts said, sounded like an expert taking you into a rainforest. The other sounded like "a random person off the street who has no clue what they're saying." Midnight had opened the episode with a sloth fact and a wink: "Did you know that I just caught your attention enough for you to keep listening?"

The difference was in the notes

Afterward, Sarah admitted she had written out every word and was "just trying my best to read off it," losing her place throughout. Lucy had reduced her notes to short bullet points and memorized the rest.

A full script feels safe, but every glance down breaks your connection with the room. The students shared two ways to get off the page.

The 5-5-5 method

Read the full script aloud five times. Write it out by hand five times. Then repeat the cycle, looking at the script as little as possible. Recording yourself helps catch problems with speed and pronunciation. One loop, the students said, is usually enough.

Chunking and active recall

The faster option: read the piece aloud twice. Divide it into "beats" wherever the topic or tone shifts. Write down only the first letter of each word and practice rebuilding the lines from those initials. Add natural movement and real vocal tone, then run the whole thing from memory.

The last step: get some sleep. "Yes, I'm serious," the episode said, since sleep helps move memories into long-term storage.

Fear of the audience, and the spotlight effect

Rehearsal handles the words, not the fear. Sarah broke that fear into three layers. The cognitive layer is worrying your mind will go blank, negative self-talk, catastrophizing, and fixating on tiny mistakes. The physiological layer is a racing heart, shortness of breath, shaking, dry mouth, and nausea. "It's your brain sensing a threat and then flooding your system with adrenaline," she said. The behavioral layer is pacing, talking too fast, avoiding eye contact, and clinging to notes. For her, the mix "really just depends on the crowd."

One host offered the advice that helped most, warning that it might sound harsh at first:

"Most of the time, people do not care as much as you think they do."

Think about your own time in the audience, the host said: are you hanging on every word of a lecture? For most presentations, the goal is just getting the message from point A to point B. "Once you realize that, the pressure drops immensely."

The students named it the spotlight effect, a bias in which a speaker overestimates how much the audience notices, judges, or remembers their small stumbles.

In a well-known 2000 study by Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich and colleagues, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, students walked into a room wearing a T-shirt printed with the face of singer Barry Manilow, a deliberately embarrassing choice. According to Cornell Alumni Magazine, the shirt-wearers guessed about half the room had noticed. The real figure was less than a quarter.

Practice in private barely helps

The strongest outside evidence the episode cited came from Macquarie University in Sydney. According to the university's summary, Associate Professor Carly Johnco and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology testing exposure-focused cognitive behavioral therapy for fear of public speaking. They recruited 249 people with moderate to severe speaking anxiety and split them into three groups, each working through harder and harder speaking tasks. The final test was a 10-minute speech on a topic drawn from a hat, with no preparation time.

The first group practiced in private. The second named specific fears, like the audience laughing, and reassessed how likely those outcomes were and how they would cope. The third also treated each speech as an experiment testing whether the feared outcome happened, then reflected afterward.

Private practice helped least. The third group did best, slightly ahead of the second, and both groups focused on changing how they thought about public speaking outperformed the group that just rehearsed.

"It's not just about doing it," Johnco said in the university's write-up. "It's about making sure we're focusing on what we're learning by facing our fears." She added that "avoiding public speaking actually makes our anxiety worse in the long run."

That fits the sloth demonstration. Lucy's speech didn't land because she practiced more lines. It landed because she stopped treating the audience as a threat and started treating them as people she was taking somewhere.

How common the fear really is

The hosts cited a 2026 SpeakWise report: an estimated 75% of people worldwide fear public speaking, roughly 40 million American adults live with some form of it, and only about 10% truly enjoy it. As the students read it, the report also ties the fear to fewer promotions and lower earnings over a career.

Estimates vary. Chapman University's Survey of American Fears found in 2023 that 28.7% of Americans were afraid or very afraid of public speaking, just behind sharks. Johnco's own estimate puts significant fear at as many as one in three people.

The students' point was empathy. If nearly everyone shares the same nerves, a shaky voice or a long pause deserves patience, not judgment.

Why it matters past the classroom

The episode also highlighted Speak, a documentary covered by CBS News that follows Esther Oyetunji, the first three-time national champion in Original Oratory, and four other high school competitors. Competitors write, research, and memorize a roughly 10-minute persuasive speech that names a social problem and argues for a solution. One competitor, Sam, said it helped him prepare for job interviews and handle uncomfortable conversations respectfully.

The students also counted down ten famous on-stage stumbles, from Rick Perry's 53-second blank in a 2011 presidential debate to the 2017 Oscars envelope mix-up that crowned the wrong Best Picture, proof that even very public mistakes are survivable.

Their closing advice works on stage and off. Drop the idea of perfection and aim for connection. Listen, ask follow-up questions, and stop to clarify when you need to. "You won't please everyone," the episode said, "and that's okay."

← Back to all posts