If you are not trying to be something different from yourself, there is no more occasion for embarrassment than if you were talking in your office to a party of your own people--none whatever.
It is trying to be other than one's self that unmans one.

Be your own natural self and go ahead.

I once asked Colonel Ingersoll, the most effective public speaker I ever heard, to what he attributed his power.

"Avoid elocutionists like snakes," he said, "and be yourself." [Illustration: AN AMERICAN FOUR-IN-HAND IN BRITAIN] I spoke again at Dunfermline, July 27, 1881, when my mother laid the foundation stone there of the first free library building I ever gave.
My father was one of five weavers who founded the earliest library in the town by opening their own books to their neighbors.

Dunfermline named the building I gave "Carnegie Library." The architect asked for my coat of arms.