The long-running debate on how much of our individual variation as humans is due to our genetic heritage and how much due to the environment mostly comes down to “a bit of both.”  In fact, I saw a meta-study years ago that triumphantly determined that our humanity was 51% nature and 49% nurture.  Or was it the other way around?  Not much daylight between those numbers in any case.  Hilarious.

More recently, a third category has gained proponents.  This category involves unexpressed genes that are influenced by the environment and then come into play.  So, nature affected by nurture.  As a result, the debates can become much more sophisticated, and no one is let off the hook, saying, it doesn’t matter how we treat people (or raise children, or deprive marginalized groups) because it’s all genetic anyway.  That argument goes by the wayside.

Now that your pulses are racing with the politics of our genes, let’s turn to public speaking.  What is nature, what is nurture, and what is nature affected by nurture in our field of communications?  More specifically, how does the nature-nurture-both schema work itself out in the two conversations that make up a speech – the content and the body language?

Let’s take body language first.  In all my years of coaching literally thousands of individuals, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who tell me, and make me believe it, that they don’t get nervous in any shape or form when speaking in front of a significant audience.  (Pause for envy.)  That suggests a strong built-in, nature component for nerves.  So don’t feel bad about feeling bad.  That’s your genetic heritage trying to keep you safe in what looks to it like a risky moment – standing up before a large group of people.  Fear of ostracism from the ancient tribe – that’s our best guess as to why you feel that way in the 21^st century.  That was presumably a death sentence back in the day.

On top of that fundamental reaction is layers of both cultural and individual differences in your reaction to the danger signals your genetic heritage is sending you.  Do you go stoic, or do you rant and rave?  Do you minimize the feelings, or make everyone around you aware of your angst?  On top of that is the work of coaches like me that give you various strategies for dealing with your discomfort and its useful or counter-productive expression.

Beyond your initial response, the fight-flight-freeze response, there are all the ways in which you strut your stuff, more or less successfully, in front of an audience.  Once again, what we see is a base of “nature” – body language that speaks of the basic human animal feelings when one person addresses many – with a topping of “nurture” – significant cultural differences in the way one connects with a crowd, demonstrates authority or its lack, and evinces charisma.  And, of course, your individual variations on those basics are at the top of the expression pyramid, and the most important of all since they are unique to you.

For the content, since the shape it takes is significantly based on culture, we are in the realm of nurture, and nature affected by nurture.  It’s only at a very deep level that we can see some patterns adumbrated that might be arguably based on nature – the need for humans to have a leader, someone to persuade them to act together as a group.  Humans, in ancient terms, were a very weak species compared to the giant scary predators that ruled the earth – the tigers and bears and buffalo we’ve heard about from our scientists.  Only by banding together and learning to work together in small, and then increasingly large groups, could humans begin to dominate the landscape.  We’re more like ants than lions in that regard: powerful as a group, weak as individuals.  But that means having a leader or leaders to get us to work together, and that means public speaking.

So if public speaking seems like a peculiarly modern form of torture to you, reflect that it has probably bedeviled humanity for as long as we’ve been gathering in groups.  Balance your need to say something and the need for your group to hear it against the discomfort that it will cause you and realize that you are participating in an ancient form of human culture that is essential for our survival.

Public speaking may be stressful, but we’ve got your back.