Some years ago, there were some protests near my house in Istanbul. So I grabbed my camera and figured I’d see how close to the action I could get. I didn’t get very close before the tear gas turned me away…

That day, I learned that a spray bottle filled with milk and crushed-up antacids will make you feel nice and fresh and ready for more. So the next week I got a little closer to the action, close enough so that I was surrounded by so much of the gas I couldn’t even see the buildings on the other side of the street.

“No worries,” I figured, “get yourself to a sidestreet where the gas thins out, take a quick spray from the bottle, and everything will be cool.”

Toastmasters is kind of like that. There are some good things about it, and yes, there are some things about it that, well, I haven’t been a Toastmaster for years, and there’s a good reason for that.

But there’s one thing I have no doubt about, and that is that Toastmasters is the best form of exposure therapy I’ve ever seen. You get up there to speak the first time, and you’re scared to death. You get up there to speak again, and again, and again, and again, and six months later you can talk to crowds of a hundred and be perfectly cool with it.

It’s like that line in the movie Fight Club: “A guy came to Fight Club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.”

So if talking in front of a group makes you nervous, get thee to a Toastmasters club, and piss your pants in fear as often as you can.