As the Dragons’ Den presentation approached for the Applied Imagination students, I decided to design an intervention focused on strengthening narrative agency. By narrative agency I mean giving people control over the process of creating and structuring a talk.
I kept returning to a hypothesis I’ve been forming about public speaking anxiety. It often comes from three different places.
- The first is trauma or past negative experiences, which is a psychological field I cannot and should not enter.
- The second is physiological anxiety: accelerated breathing, shaky voice, and the usual reactions of the body. That part is manageable.
- The third comes from a lack of control. Many participants have told me they simply do not know where to start. They feel there is no structure, no roadmap, no sequence they can rely on. Without that, the process feels abstract, and stepping in front of an audience becomes much more vulnerable.
This third point is where I want to focus. If people understand why a scene belongs in minute three rather than minute four, or why a certain moment follows another, they stop depending on memorization. They start relying on logic, sequence, and meaning. The presentation becomes a chain of ideas they know by heart, not because they memorized it, but because it makes sense to them.
My goal is to help them build, deconstruct, reorder, and experiment with the structure, so they genuinely feel in control. When someone tells a personal story, they do not struggle to remember it; the causal links guide the memory. I remember reading that memory improves when information is organized in causal sequences, although I can’t recall the exact source. What matters is that this principle fits naturally into narrative work.
Giving people agency over the process may reduce anxiety more effectively than any memorized script. That is the direction I want this intervention to take.