The Vulnerability Hangover

Today I want to talk about something that affects us a lot as speakers. It has even been given a name thanks to my wonderful fellow speaker Yael Geffen. She termed it a “vulnerability hangover”. What is that you may ask?

Well, what we often find as speakers is that we give it our all and sometimes when we do deep and vulnerable storytelling, we really pour out a part of our souls that is a part of our deep story, our deep past. It takes an awful lot of emotional energy to bring that pain, that shame, that anguish to the surface so that we can verbalize it in an articulate way.

But what is the result of that process? The result of that process is often the following day you feel deeply vulnerable after having expressed that vulnerability in words, on stage or on the page.

What I have found in my speaking journey this past four years is that initially when I started speaking, the next day I felt run over by a bus. I spent the whole day thinking, “Oh I should have said that, why didn't I say that, I left that out, I didn't address that”. You can spend the whole of the next day beating yourself up about what you did or didn't do rather than what you learnt. Speaking is a challenging game. Some people feel that it takes more guts to move house, to change countries, do anything other than public speaking.

According to statistics by Forbes Magazine: “The fear of public speaking is the most common phobia ahead of death, spiders and heights. It’s now considered a social anxiety disorder by the American Psychiatric Association and is referred to as Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA) or glossophobia.” Ironically it is those of us in the PSASA (The Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa) who have had to overcome PSA (Public Speaking Anxiety) to become professional public speakers!

So how does one come to terms with the “vulnerability hangover”? You come to terms with it by knowing you're going to crash the next day. Knowing that the possibility exists that after the high of the event, when you think, “Oh I knocked it out of the park, I did such a brilliant job”. Then the next day those words of self-doubt, those voices of the past, start to creep in and say, “Oh what if you've done that differently”?

Here's the root. You don't grow until you step into the arena of being brave enough to face yourself as a public speaker. The only way you grow is by stepping to into that arena time and time and time again. What I can tell you from my journey of the past four years is that every time it gets a little bit easier. You grow a little bit more and you're a little bit kinder about what you did and didn't do.

Your terminology and your language changes from, “I should have” to “I got to”. “I got to practice X. I got to learn Y. I got the opportunity to speak in front of a new audience. And this is what I learned.”

Because the way we learn is that we learn best when we encourage ourselves. We don't learn well when we paralyze ourselves with beating ourselves up. It does not grow our craft and it doesn't grow our ability to look at things in a calm, measured, objective, learning frame.

So next time you have a big presentation or you put yourself out there, know that the following day you might be undergoing some deep processing.

Be kind with it.

Be gracious with yourself.

This is how we grow as speakers. We grow, by doing. Not by reading about it. We grow by riding the bicycle of speaking. We grow by having the courage to not even “make mistakes”, because I don't even call it mistakes. Simply the courage to learn to craft so that we can learn to grow.

If you have that framework, your entire speaking journey, will become one of an ongoing journey of adventure rather than punishment. Adventure out into the next version of you every single time you grow.

After one year, you will look back and say, “Was that me a year ago?

Look at how I've grown.”

You never know, who you are capable of becoming, until you step into the arena.

Alison Weihe

Award-winning Entrepreneur, Speaker, Author and Identity Intelligence Coach

My name is Ali. I am known as an identity intelligence thought leader. Because it took so long to claim my true voice, I became fascinated with the field of identity intelligence and how it relates to conscious leadership and manifestation.

Read more about my journey and how I came to love myself in my book