Fears forgotten

I gave a presentation at work today to a couple hundred people through the strange experience of live webcasting. There were maybe 80 people watching from the same room as me and everyone else was at one of our field locations, watching via video and sending in comments and questions through internet chat and telephone.

When I was selling myself toward this job before it quite properly existed about a year ago at this time, I remember surprising myself by volunteering that I don't mind public speaking, and then surprising myself again by realizing in my head that I wasn't embellishing. I really don't mind public speaking, and when did that happen?

(In my office we speak about Myers-Briggs personality type a lot, and I find the stuff fascinating. I'm an INFP. You?)

So I gave this presentation today. It was about 25 minutes and to our agency's managers and supervisors, all of whom surely have been members of that cohort longer than I. It went well and it was well received and I finished tired in the way I always feel after engaging with lots of people, but not depleted in the way I used to feel when such an action would have terrified me.

And this is so interesting to me, because I was the shyest kid you ever did meet and growing into adulthood I went to great lengths to avoid public moments. And then somewhere in the time of the past decade where I had a quiet job that demanded very little visible attention, the thing that most terrified me ceased to terrify me when I wasn't paying it any mind.

I had to catalog other major changes, things I would have described as foundational to my personality, and I can only come up with two: I no longer completely loathe tomato sauce (although I'd still choose anything with a cream sauce or butter sauce or pesto or no sauce over something tomato-based). And I'm not as bothered by the color yellow as I used to be.

I still can't bite into a water chestnut, for what that's worth, and I'm trying to think of another thing that terrified me but nothing ever scared me as much as the spotlight. And I wonder if maybe for this disappearance of fear I have you to thank, letting me write to you here steadily for seven years, facelessly, just characters to a screen and that you find my words after the fact is confidence-boosting without confrontation or real-time assessment. You're a very reassuring group, you know. I never found any blog trolls, just love and support.

So I ask with a smile, what else can you fix for me?