Just wrapped up a winter hat hairstyles video shoot (coming up soon; the style pictured above is #5: The Bad Hair Day Solution). Right now I’m eating lunch and going through the stacks of paper sitting on my “desk” (a.k.a. our dining room table, sorry Kendrick), and came across an article that I tore out of OK Magazine a few weeks ago.
Now, I’m not usually a big article-clipper, and I don’t usually get my life lessons from tabloids…but this Q&A with Jenny McCarthy hit home so much that I wanted to save it. And share it with you.
Here’s the relevant part:
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve ever had to overcome?
Public speaking. I was terrified of it in college. I even changed my major from special education to nursing to avoid a public speaking class.
How bad was it?
I’d throw up. Even when I started in this business, I could perform in front of a camera, but I’d shut down in front of a live audience.
How did you overcome the fear?
I realized that when you face your biggest fear, it’s your biggest life lesson. I had to decide: Do I run, or do I face it? I just faced it. If I threw up on camera, I threw up on camera. I just kept going.
I think that’s awesome, and as much as I loved Jenny McCarthy before (which was a lot), I love her even more after reading that interview. Mostly because she’s possibly the last person in the world who you’d ever expect to hear say that they have a fear of public speaking, and I admire how candidly she’s able to talk about this particular challenge.
In fact: I suspect that her very willingness to talk about her vulnerabilities might have been a big part of how she learned to be okay with them.
My very first “acting” job, if you can call a Frosted Flakes commercial “acting.” Posted for no especially good reason other than that I think it’s funny and I’m pretty sure you’ll remember it if you were of TV-watching age in 1994.
I’ve written fairly extensively about the degree to which my stage fright (or performance anxiety, or fear of public speaking, or whatever you want to call it) affected my life and my career back in the day. It wasn’t there in the beginning, when I just felt like a kid doing something fun, with very few expectations attached…but over time, as I felt stakes begin to rise, it grew worse and worse until it reached a point where, similar to Jenny changing her major, I based decisions – important ones – around my desire to avoid the spotlight.
While I’ve mostly overcome this anxiety (through a combination of coping mechanisms and honest examination of what my fears were rooted in) to the point where public speaking – on camera, in person, et cetera – is a major aspect of how I make a living, the truth is that it still pops up from time to time. I still stand there, seconds before a camera is turned in my direction or a host announces my name, and…panic.
I want to be anywhere but there, and in that moment I know, deep down, that I cannot do it, whatever “it” is.
And then I do.
Do it.
And how I make my way through these moments nowadays is almost identical to the process that Jenny described: I stop and think to myself “What is the worst thing that can happen here?” Usually the answer is “I turn red” or “I forget what I wanted to say.” And then I tell myself that those things may happen, and if they do, that will be fine. Because it will be. I love what I do, and facing my fear, however scary, was – is – more important to me than running away.
When you stand up in front of a camera, or in front of a crowd, you are not there because someone wants you to pretend to be a perfect person who never slips up, or shows humanity, or reveals genuine emotion: you’re there because you’re you, and because you is who someone wanted to see, for whatever reason.
If you throw up, you throw up. And then you just keep going.
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