[NicknamedBob]

"Yah. Let's see: I'm no longer plying the trade I learned in college, instead doing the two things I hated/feared most in school -- writing and speaking. In order to do that, the stay-at-home claustrophobe has to spend way too much in airplane steerage class in way too close proximity with strangers, almost always to other time zones, frequently to places where I don't know either the food nor speak the language.

Yah. I'm eating it up."

I gravitated to public speaking, and other forms of communication, not because it was my strong point, but because I considered it my weakness. I was determined to overcome my childhood shyness.

[Monkey Face]

...I was determined to overcome my childhood shyness.

So was I! Now, crowds don't bother me. I see them as a body and not as individuals. It has its benefits.

If I thought about them as individuals, I'd NEVER speak up with more than two people present! LOL!

[darkangel82]

I was shy too. I hated public speaking and still hate it.

[Mycroft Holmes]

I used to work at a place where we were required to give a 20 minute talk every 3 months or so. The reason the talks were 20 minutes was from the old Calvin & Hobbs cartoon where Calvin remarks “Anything you can’t explain in 20 minutes isn’t worth knowing.”

This seems to be true for some values of explain.

I was once a guest at a Rotary club and their scheduled speaker, a fire chief, failed to show. My dear wife volunteered my services so I gave an unprepared talk on the various kinds of “electric paper” that people were playing with at the time. I had fun and people asked relevant questions and told me after that they understood and enjoyed the talk. They invited me back a couple of months later to do a prepared talk about quantum cryptography.