Over and over again, when people are asked what terrifies them the most, “speaking in public” comes out near the top of the list each time. I can understand why; it is pretty damn intimidating. The problem is, there are some jobs out there where you have to speak in front of people. And I’m not even talking about the obvious stuff, like TV announcer, or someone who decides they want to run for a political office. Even a small-town political run will have someone step up in front of their peers and speak in public, and it makes a lot of folks nervous.

But there are jobs where you don’t expect it. Suddenly, your desk job in front of a computer requires you to give a presentation to a room full of supervisors. Or, in this case, you have a soldier working in the Intelligence section.

Most people don’t equate Intelligence work with public speaking; in fact it would be reasonable to assume that they’d avoid being up in public as much as possible. But the opposite is true– working in Intel involves a lot of briefings, and in fact these are briefings frequently given to people that are higher rank than you.

Not only that, but you have to be able to speak with authority and knowledge on any particular subject, and you may even have just found out you were doing the briefing a couple hours before. No wonder some people get a bit nervous under pressure and fall back on those verbal “umm’s” and “uhhh’s” (many of us don’t realize how much we do it until we hear a recording of ourselves).

No wonder some people would rather try to evade a hungry bear in the woods than take on a public speaking position.