The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner

The main thing I got from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Fear is that fear and anxiety aren’t just individual problems; they totally impact the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers.

Fear can be like a dance, often involving other people

Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I’ve always been susceptible to having other people’s anxiety dumped on me, but it’s only now that I’m learning to recognise when this is happening.

This book helped me identify such a situation once when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster’s club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises I had learned during my acting classes to help deal with fear right up front.

Two of the big things that people are afraid of when learning public speaking are forgetting what they wanted to say, and looking foolish. My own experience was that when I first joined Toastmasters, I was trying so hard to be perfect that I wasn’t connected with the audience. My perfectionism and fear of what other people think took over. I was so worried about getting my speech wrong that when I got up to speak, my anxiety took me right out of the moment. My focus was on me rather than my audience. It wasn’t until a club meeting one night where I actually did get it wrong and forgot what I wanted to say, that I was able to get past this and be more authentic, more present, and a much better speaker.

Actors face the same problem whenever they feel self-conscious, and it makes for terribly fake acting that is unpleasant to watch. So I decided to use some activities from my acting class which involve taking a risk, looking foolish and then being rewarded for it. I knew that I would be taking a bit of a risk by including this activity in the training course, but I felt it would make the course even more valuable for the participants.

While preparing the agenda I discovered that my assistant would be the woman who taught me public speaking on the very same course when I had done it three years prior. I was aware that she might not be entirely comfortable with what I wanted to do; she’s been involved in Toastmasters for many years, and even ran a business teaching communication skills. She had helped and encouraged me a lot, was a model Toastmaster and had a lot more public speaking experience than I did. My fear of being judged harshly and failing in front of an authority figure kicked in.

Toastmaster’s general philosophy is that if you teach people public speaking skills and get them to practise in a safe, supportive environment, their anxiety dissipates gradually over time and their self-confidence builds naturally. While this is largely true, I saw a lot of experienced speakers in the organisation who either still looked very scared when they speak, or appeared somewhat aloof when speaking, despite all the skills they had. And I found them hard to listen to. I thought a complementary approach would be to deal with the anxiety up-front and be as authentic as possible from the start instead of trying to cover up inadequacies with a bunch of techniques. Learn skills to enhance the delivery of our message, but start off by being real, and  even vulnerable.

In the week preparing for the course, I considered whether to take the risk of using something experimental in a Toastmasters course ostensibly run by our local club. But I realised that I was really just trying to avoid either feeling insecure in front of my assistant, or feeling upset if I got criticism instead of encouragement. That would certainly push my buttons and expose the insecurities I inherited from growing up with a critical mother. I wanted to create a safe place for people to learn by experimenting without being punished for it, and not consider anything a “failure” when it’s really all just a learning experience. If I was to walk my talk, I could hardly baulk at taking a risk with the course content while preaching to my students how they needed to be prepared to take risks if they wanted to learn to be powerful, authentic public speakers.

So I took the risk: I invited the students to attempt to recite a poem that they couldn’t possibly memorise in the time allocated, forget what they wanted to say, then jump around like a monkey (or any other animal of their choice!), and be rewarded for all their “failure” and “foolishness” with caucus applause and acceptance from the audience; rather than the condemnation their inner critic was expecting. I also recommended the best books I knew about the importance of connecting with people emotionally like [intlink id=”3818″ type=”post”]Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman[/intlink] and being in-the-moment like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, as these are key attributes of powerful public speakers.

After the first of the two days, my assistant pulled me aside and said: “I was mortified with what you taught them. All that talk about fear was very negative. If you teach them the skills, that all deals with itself. Having them acting like monkeys was ridiculous. And The Power Of Now isn’t a Toastmasters book. We don’t recommend that sort of material.”

The feedback seemed extremely negative and critical and I felt very discouraged. I thought the first day of the course had gone down pretty well, and the participants certainly all seemed to get a lot out of it; although I wouldn’t know for sure until the course evaluations were done at the end of the second day, two weekends later. Until then, I’d just have to hope that I’d done the right thing; and ended up losing quite a bit of sleep worrying about it.

Then things got worse: While preparing the agenda for the second day of the course, I got emails saying that my assistant had reported what had happened to the club committee, and they were very concerned. They wanted to make sure that I stuck to a fixed agenda, and used the standard course evaluation form to gather participant’s feedback. Even though this was pretty much what I had planned, it felt like a reprimand.

In reality, the agenda mandated by the committee wouldn’t work unchanged because it was based on a different number of people, the official manual didn’t exactly match the structure the club traditionally used for the course, and I still needed to include the teaching material that we hadn’t yet covered. So I nervously rang my assistant and said:

“I sense a lot of anxiety coming my way from you over this.”

“Yes”, she replied, “I do feel very anxious about it. I really felt uncomfortable when you had them jumping around all over the place, and not following what we normally do. I didn’t like it at all.”

I realised that I had triggered my assistant’s anxiety, and it was now coming my way. After so many years of using skills to hide her own anxiety instead of being vulnerable about it, me saying that it’s better to deal with it up front was too confronting. I couldn’t imagine her jumping around like a monkey; she’d be too worried about what other people thought; which was exactly the point of the exercise.

With the issue of her anxiety out in the open, I could relax a bit and prepare the agenda for the second day of the course without taking so much anxiety on board myself. I reassured her that I wasn’t planning anything so outside normal Toastmasters education for the second day of the course, and I think we both ended up feeling a lot better after this conversation.

On the second day, I had a different assistant. Things were going well initially and the course participants were having a great time learning to overcome their fears through preparing and delivering short speeches about their lives, and learning to deliver impromptu speeches. At one point when a discussion about how to connect better with the audience came up, my new assistant spontaneously said: “I really recommended Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power Of Now”. I laughed inside at the irony.

When the course evaluations were done, the feedback was extremely positive. One of the participants even said that she specifically appreciated the extra things that I had included in the first day of the course, which she could see most other presenters would not have been able to do. She was grateful for the very exercises that had made my assistant so uncomfortable, and caused me to question myself.

My intuition had been accurate and the risk I took paid off. It made for a rather uncomfortable couple of weeks, and caused me to question whether Toastmasters is really the right environment for what I want to do. Our fears aren’t always easily dismissed; our fear that other people won’t like what we do may be well-founded. But the risk of making someone else uncomfortable isn’t a good reason to cop-out of doing something that seems right. For a while there I was really doubting myself; I was prepared to deal with the anxiety of the course participants, but I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with anxiety from my assistant. Ultimately I learned to trust myself better and go with my intuition. I would not have had this lesson had I not taken the risk, and dealt with the resulting fallout.

Harriet Lerner’s book helped me piece this puzzle of shared anxiety together by seeing it as a kind of social dance. I think women will probably find it more helpful than men; some of the examples are a bit female-oriented. Still, I got a lot out of it. I haven’t come across any really good books on fear and anxiety written by men; they all seem to be by women. Perhaps us guys are too scared of dropping the male bravado to write a book on fear.

If fear plays too big a role in your life, I still recommend you deal with it up front rather than hoping that it’ll just go away in due course. This book is an easy read, and a step in the right direction. Buy it on Amazon by clicking here.