I remember very clearly the first time I did any sort of public presentation.
I was 23 years old. I'd never had to do anything like this earlier in my life. Fortunately, my kids have all had to give presentations and they handle it fairly well.

I was speaking to a bunch of architects; they weren’t very lively, and before the very brief presentation, I decided to tell a joke.

It was one of those “St. Pete meets Jesus at the Pearly Gates” types of jokes. It was going well for the first 30 seconds. I was setting it up nicely, and then… I CHOKED. I totally went blank for what seemed like an eternity.

Finally, I got my feet back under me, finished the joke, got a few laughs from the architects and on I went. I have to admit, it burned me a little bit.
I certainly didn’t want to risk that again.

But, as it happens in life, if you don’t figure it out the first time, somehow you have to repeat it.

So, the next time I was introducing a training class. I had a bad cold and my head was all stopped up. I was snorting fluids (if you know what I mean).
My knees were knocking, I was scared. And you would have been too. There were all of 15 people in the room. What a freak I was. I got finished introducing my guy, sat down and shut up, beating myself up again and said I would never do that again.

So how did I overcome this fear?

I went to a North Texas Speakers’ Association meeting. A guy got up, introduced himself and said he was starting an Improv Comedy group. “Cool”, I’m thinking… maybe I’ll learn how to be funny.

Well, improv comedy and stand-up comedy are about as far apart as the Republicans and Democrats. Both are political parties but, man, are they different.

Here is what happened. We started with really small, somewhat stupid skits. There were 10 of us. We did little things like word associations and finishing someone else’s sentence.

After about 2 months of fiddling around like that 2 nights a week, you get pretty good at making stuff up. (Maybe I could have been a politician after all.)

Then the big show: Friday and Saturday nights at the Greenville Pocket Sandwich Theatre in Dallas, Texas.

Three of us walked on stage and each one of us asked for a Cartoon Character and an emotion. And within seconds we were doing improv; bouncing off of each other like cartoon characters in different and interesting emotional states. As long as you just went with it, it somehow always turned out funny.

What was most important for me: I learned how to laugh at myself, which is the number one thing we all need to do to get over our fears.

What fears did you have and what did you do to move through them?