I was on vacation this past week with several families who have traveled together for years. One of my friends’ sons (who I’ve known since he was a little boy) is now in a job that requires him to speak in public. He asked me if I liked public speaking. I told him that after all this time it still didn’t come naturally to me, but I had learned to deal with my nervousness and fear so much so that, yes, I did like it. He wanted to know if there was a moment when it started to turn around for me, if there was some trick I could share with him. So I showed him this bit of writing from a chapter in my book, Marrow:

WHEN I FIRST BEGAN speaking and teaching I was so nervous before each event I could barely think straight. I was in that jittery state of mind one evening, sitting backstage at a conference where I was to give a talk. A well-known psychiatrist was sitting with me; he was slated to present after I spoke.
“Are you OK?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’m terribly nervous.”
“Oh, I used to be nervous before I spoke. But now I’m not.”
“How did that happen?” I asked. “And how can it happen to me? And soon?”
“Well,” the man said, “a couple of years ago, I was sitting backstage, just like you, marinating in my own sweat, and there was a priest or a monk there—a little old guy in a brown robe. He must have noticed how panicky I was. He came over to me and said something I never forgot. It changed everything for me. You wanna hear it?”
I nodded.
“This is what he said: ‘They don’t need you to perform for them so they know how good you are. They need you to love them so they know how good they are.’ You want me to write that down?”
I said yes, and I still have that piece of paper. I keep it in my purse and I come across it at the oddest times. Maybe I’ll be fishing around for my phone, or looking for a pen at work, and I’ll find the scrap of paper and read it. And once again, it will encourage me to connect with my deepest motivation no matter what I am doing. “They don’t need you to perform for them so they know how good you are. They need you to love them so they know how good they are.”