Public speaking is anxiety producing. This is true for people who've been giving speeches and presentations for years. Everyone feels some anxiety within them. In fact, if you don't feel the anxiety is when you should really worry. We've all seen those professors who stagger out on stage with a withered sheaf of papers and read them to us and you know they feel no passion. The trick is turning anxiety into positive energy. I want to talk a little bit about fear and anxiety, abstractly, just for a little bit because I think it's important to understand. It's important to understand why we're afraid and what we do when we're afraid. In my mind, the fear of public speaking is both rational, who wants to stand up and be judged? And it's also irrational because in the end, it's just words, it's just standing up and saying what you have to say. I thought a little bit about fear, and the best thing I've read is by a motorcycle racer. His name is Keith Code and the book is called A Twist of the Wrist, and I put it up online, and I want you to download it and read it with me or get it up on your screen, so I'll wait. The passage is called Survival Reactions. The enemy is tough but limited in number. Roll-off the gas. Tighten on the bars. Narrowed and frantically hunting field of view. Fixed attention on something. Steering in the direction of the fixed attention. No steering, frozen, or ineffective, not quick enough. Too early steering, braking errors, both over and under braking. Everyone has had all the above happen to them. Are they automatic? Take tightening on the bars as another example. Do you command your arms to tighten up, or do you find they have done it on their own? Do you choose to have your attention narrow and target fix? Did you over-brake on purpose? Whether for real or an imagined reason, anything that triggers one of the above survival reactions, such as quickly shutting the throttle, hitting the brakes on a turn, holding the bars too tightly, is an attempt to reduce or avoid injury. None of them will work in harmony with machine technology or rider control. In the following chapters, we will see how to defeat them. Now this isn't a course on motorcycle racing, though I wish it was. This is a course on how to manage fear and I think Code has three things to teach us here. One thing is he labels survival reactions of things we do automatically, when we're in, an andrenalized situation, when our fight or flight reactions kick in. Our body and our mind, they do automatic things. Now in Keith Code's context, he says that these automatic things interfere with machine technology. So a motorcycle is designed to go around the curve. It's only when we do these things like snap the throttle shut that the motorcycle gets upset and that makes our situation worse. Our survival reactions, our instinctual reactions end up making the situation chaotic. They do the exact opposite of what we want to do. The same is true for public speaking. Look, motorcycling and public speaking are both high pressure situations. The pressure is on to perform and you don't get a redo. In both, our flight or fight instincts kick in and we stop making choices and start taking actions. Those actions can cause chaos. This is why fear is both rational and irrational. It's rational because the reactions are trying to help us, that's a rational thing. It's irrational because they make the situation worse. What Keith Code has to teach us Is that there's nothing to fear but fear itself, and yet fear is a very real thing.