I am the Organizer for an upcoming TEDx event (TEDxChapmanU) and have spent the last two weeks working with some incredibly talented and successful people who will be speaking this Thursday. Most are well-known leaders in their professions. Most have daily responsibilities that positively impact our lives. Most have spent plenty of time giving speeches to peers within their industries, to investors, to students, and to the general public. Yet the one thing most of them seem to have in common right now is – they’re unusually nervous about their upcoming TEDx talk. It’s very surprising, then again, not.
TED and TEDx talks can be tricky. They are meant to be jaw-dropping ideas worth spreading in 18 minutes or less. Speakers are encouraged not to talk about subjects they normally speak of. They are usually being recorded and judged by the curators at TED to see if their talk is good enough to make it onto the TED website, which has millions of viewers daily. So, yes, there may be a reason for some heightened nerves. But I would like to know which is more anxiety causing – giving a TEDx talk, or writing a blog?
What? How could I compare these two communication efforts? Am I crazy? Maybe, but I can only speak for myself. Being in the advertising and marketing business for 30 years, I’ve done my share of writing. From tv scripts, to websites, to marketing plans and more. But the responsibility of writing a blog post, at least once a week, is the last thing I look forward to on my To Do list. I do just enough public speaking to know what it takes to prepare and deliver a talk. But once I get it down, and share it a few times, it gets pretty easy. I don’t have to write a whole new speech every week. All I have to do is improve it when I want to. No, I don’t really have a fear of public speaking. But I am freaking scared to death of public writing!
Blogs are all over the place. People seem to write about anything and everything. And while the Seth Godin’s of the world usually offer useful posts, let’s face it, most blogs are boring! Most blogs are written by people who love to write, but don’t necessarily have much to say. Or, if they’re like me, they have a lot they want to say, but once they start writing they lose any sense of decent thought. It’s worse than writer’s block. It’s writer’s void. The worst part is, once you start a blog, you might actually get people subscribing to it and then guess what happens? They expect you to write something regularly. WHAT IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY? I know, I know, guest bloggers. But that’s a different topic.
My point here is just to share the somewhat humorous comparison between fear of public speaking and fear of public blogging. The age old statistic says most people’s biggest fear is public speaking. Which keeps most poor speakers from doing it. Thus we tend to get good talks from talented speakers (even if they’re nervous). But maybe a lot of us bloggers should admit to a fear of public blogging. Maybe some of us shouldn’t be blogging. Just because we know how to type doesn’t mean we know how to write. Maybe we should act on our fear, shut up, and leave blog writing to those truly skilled at communicating something important via the written word.
Gee, did I just write my last blog post?
