The easiest way to spot an insecure public speaker is to look for someone who is dumping an endless supply of facts and details, but without the context of real examples and stories. Insecure speakers are afraid of looking stupid, so they always overcompensate by larding excessive facts into their presentation.
The insecure speaker uses the sea of facts as a protective covering to mask his or her insecurities. Only it doesn’t work.
The insecure speaker is so deathly afraid that his boss will say “hurry up and get to the point” that the speaker is afraid to stop to give examples or stories to flesh out the key points. The other biggest fear of the insecure speaker is that he or she will be asked a question that can’t be answered. So the speaker reasons that if he can just dump out the answer to every question in the speech and before the question can be asked, he can save himself from embarrassment.
This is dubious logic, but it is one that I find dominates most large corporations. The trouble is that this is an entirely defensive and negative mentality. This mindset views as speech purely as a potential landmine, never as a positive opportunity.
Speakers with this attitude are always trying to merely escape from a speech; this is pessimism to an extreme. The goal for any speech should be to communicate and spotlight a handful of key messages. Period.
So if you are nervous and you are tempted to data dump, remember, you aren’t fooling anyone.
