The Fear That Wasn't About Public Speaking

I don't know exactly when I started believing I wasn't good enough. Maybe it was when my parents split up. Maybe it was a season of discipline from a mentor or a teacher that landed at the wrong moment. By middle school, I would have done almost anything to feel important, to feel accepted, to feel like I measured up.

For a group of kids around me, the shortcut was drugs and alcohol. I learned if I did what they did, I'd be accepted by them. Experimentation turned into abuse in high school and addiction by college. I was arrested more than once and lived with the consequences of chasing that feeling of acceptance for years. Eventually I surrendered my life to God and asked Him for help.

I'll confess, giving my life to God didn't immediately undo the belief underneath the addiction. I just traded one coping mechanism for another. Through my twenties, I chased career success instead, because I noticed the adults around me didn't approve of substance abuse, but they did approve of wealth and financial freedom. So I flipped a switch and chased that instead. I hit the goals and earned the success. For a little while, I felt acceptable. Then came the same old question: is this all there is?

A mission trip to Haiti put that question in a different light. I met people there who didn't know if they'd eat that day, and yet they were more spiritually and relationally fulfilled than I was. On the flight home, I sat with the contrast between my own success and the poverty I'd just seen, and decided to find a way to serve people through our real estate businesses instead of just building them.

That decision started with giving a percentage of our business income to Project LampLight, the nonprofit we founded in 2015, and then giving more through our church as the years went on. Generosity opened something in me and started to loosen my grip on building wealth for its own sake.

But the old belief hadn't left, it had just found a new house to live in. Around the same time, I started coaching with a mentor and getting invited to conferences where they'd rank your business against your peers in the room. I found myself striving to be number one again, chasing the same old feeling of being important, of being acceptable.

Then I was asked to speak at one of those conferences. I said yes before I understood what I was agreeing to. I didn't know I was deathly afraid of public speaking until the anxiety attack hit. I got on my knees and asked God for help, again, and found a therapist online who specialized in the fear of public speaking.

She walked me back through some of those childhood interactions, slowly, over a number of sessions. Her conclusion wasn't complicated: somewhere back then, I'd decided I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't important, and that belief had crystallized into something quietly driving nearly every decision I'd made since. My real fear was never the stage. It was failing in front of a room and proving that old belief true.

As she helped me reprocess those memories, I started to understand something I hadn't really believed before: what my neighbor or my peers think of me doesn't change anything about me. If they think I'm amazing one minute, that doesn't make me amazing. If I'm a disappointment to them the next, that doesn't change anything about me either. What I am and who I am was never a function of what they think, or what I have, or what I do.

I began journaling and praying through that truth daily, for years. Slowly, the belief underneath everything shifted, from “I'm not good enough” to “I'm a beloved son of Christ, loved, saved, and died for.” My worth was never tied to what I have, what I do, or what people think of me.

To be clear, I'm still on this road. The old thoughts still surface sometimes; they just come and go now instead of running the show. But receiving that truth is what let me stop making decisions out of fear and start making them out of freedom, one small step at a time. I no longer carry the fear of public speaking, or of failing in front of people, the way I used to.

I'm not pushing this on you, I'm just challenging you to consider it: what lie might be quietly driving your own decisions, and what would it take to trade it for the truth?

Thank you!

-Dave Hooke.