According to a 2020 study, the majority of people (56.8%) around the world discover as introverted Myers-Briggs Company. Also introverted personality they are often reflective and self-aware, prefer writing reasonably than speaking, and feel drained of being in crowds.
Naturally, many introverts they are not big fans of public speaking. Speaking to an audience could also be an inevitable part of skilled life, but the average introvert probably has no desire to talk in front of a group.
Even the most successful business leaders in the world are not resistant to stage fright.
Warren Buffett, the 94-year-old billionaire chairman and CEO of the conglomerate holding company Berkshire Hathaway, considers himself an introvert. In his biography Snowball: Warren Buffett and the business of life Alice Schroeder admits that speaking in front of crowds made him physically sick.
Image Source: Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images. Warren Buffett.
“I was afraid of public speaking,” says Buffett. “You can’t believe what I would be like if I had to give a speech. I was so scared I just couldn’t do it. I would vomit. In fact, I have arranged my life so that I have never had to face anyone.”
After Buffett graduated from Columbia Business School, where he studied under investor Benjamin Graham, he returned to Omaha, Nebraska. There he saw an commercial for a public speaking course using the Dale Carnegie method.
Buffett was familiar with Carnegie’s 1936 self-help book How to win friends and influence peopleand even signed up for public speaking classes at Carnegie in New York before withdrawing and withholding payment on the $100 check.
Buffett decided to offer the course one other probability in Omaha.
“I took a hundred bucks in cash and gave it to the instructor, Wally Keenan, and said, ‘Take it before I change my mind,'” he recalled in Snowball.
During Keenan’s classes at the Rome Hotel in Omaha, Buffett discovered the key to overcoming his fear of public speaking.
“It works like this You learn to get out of yourself” – explains Buffett. “I mean, why would you be able to talk to someone one-on-one five minutes earlier and then freeze in front of the group? So they teach you psychological tricks on how to deal with it. Some of it is just practice – just doing it and practicing it.”
Practicing in the same conditions in which you’d speak or otherwise perform can enable you succeed in high-pressure situations, said Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist and current president of Dartmouth College Entrepreneur in 2022
According to Beilock, it may possibly also enable you take a step back as the event approaches. Then, at a crucial moment, it suggests a positive interpretation of physiological responses; consider, for example, sweaty palms or a rapid heartbeat, signs of excitement, not anxiety.
“And it worked,” Buffett says of the psychological techniques he learned many years ago in public speaking classes. “It’s the most important degree I have.”
According to Schroeder’s account, Buffett’s certificate of completion of the Carnegie course from January 1952 hangs above the sofa in his office.
Now Buffett stands in front an audience of 40,000 spectators at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, where attendees line up hours before the event to listen to the Oracle of Omaha speak.