During the more than a decade that I've been teaching public speaking at Cape Cod Community College, I've learned that I'm a rarity. If I tell my students that pubic speaking can actually be fun, they look at me like I've just told them they should try having a tooth pulled without anesthesia.

Most people hate even the thought of public speaking. Survey after survey shows that the number one fear of the American public is public speaking. Being hit by a truck usually comes in about number four. As a culture, we fear public speaking more than death. Which always leaves me with the nagging question - why?

While I have a few theories of my own, I thought I'd seek out the perspective of another adjunct professor at Cape Cod Community College, Eleanor Lopez, who also runs a speech training company called Let's Communicate Better. Eleanor taught for many years at Boston University before coming to the Cape several years ago. Nationally respected as an expert in public speaking training, she has helped executives in such companies as Boston Edison, Digital Equipment Corporation and Shawmut Bank of North America to overcome their fears. I asked her why she thinks the fear of public speaking runs so high in the psyche of the American public.

"We seem to have a distorted view of the role of the audience," explains Lopez. "We see them as the enemy. The firing squad. We fail to realize that the audience is on our side. They don't want the speaker to fail."

Yes, this explanation certainly makes sense to me. I think of the adversarial nature of so much of contemporary communication. Even when we communicate one on one, we're generally preoccupied with who's up and who's down, who's winning and who's losing. We forget that at the heart of the word communicate lies the root "commune" which means to join as one. When we practice communication as competition, rather than as a means of connection, it makes sense that a larger audience would appear to be a more intimidating opponent.

As Lopez points out, much of this has to do with our perception of the situation. "I had a client who insisted he was nervous only in front of a large audience. When I asked him how large a large audience was, he said fifteen people. He'd actually count the members of the audience. At fourteen, he felt fine. Add another person and he'd become a nervous wreck," she told me.