Tag Archives: public speaking

Martin Luther King? Meh.

11 Tuesday Feb 2020

Posted by in Character and Competence, Purpose and Service, Uncategorized

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This afternoon I will be giving a talk to members of an organisation celebrating the Third Age, with no idea of the numbers – although 104 13-year-olds is my record.

If you recall, last Thursday I proposed and encouraged the concept of Third-Person Teaching to readers, and this ‘giving talks’ is the result of my adherence to the idea. Many moons ago I was offered the opportunity to teach self-development material to my peers, and the one experience that I lacked was public speaking. I knew the material but I’d not really been heavily involved in speaking to large audiences and I knew that I wold be expected to do exactly that if I entered the world of training. I knew the stuff – I just hadn’t preached it afore.

My first port of call was a local Speakers Club, which welcomed me and over the next few months developed me. But it was Day 1 that amazed me.

I was asked to introduce myself, and so I did. And as I sat down I remember thinking, “That was GREAT!” Admittedly, the subject I had spoken upon was my favourite – me – but their encouragement and a feeling (on my part) that my presentation had ‘flowed’ imbued within me an enthusiasm for speaking. Which was just as well because they volunteered me to talk for two minutes on ‘sycophancy’, the sods. Blew them away.

There is a theory that people fear speaking in public more than death. I recognise that speaking with no preparation and with no notice can be challenging, even though that last one’s happened to me three times and I have more than coped. But if you know your subject and how you are going to put it across – have fun doing so! If you can talk in a group of three – and we all gather around the water fountain and gossip – then you can talk to a group of a hundred. You just have to ‘not whisper’.

I encourage you, therefore, as part of your professional and personal development, to go to a local speakers’ club and see just how ‘normal’ the members are – normal, yet able to enthral an audience with both prepared and ad hoc speeches.

You may never have to make a training presentation, but I’d gamble that you all have clubs you might wish to direct, children whose weddings need your input, best man speeches to deliver – public speaking is common, and it is not hard.

But a very important consideration is this – when you have to prepare a talk, you learn. When you learn, you discover new ways of thinking, and you start to develop an open mind that sees through waffle and ‘the reality of the matter is’ and realise that some public speakers are just semi-professional liars. You also realise that although Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech was magic, his delivery was a bit OTT. He’d get marked down at Speakers Club, I’m telling you.

The only caveat I have is this.

Gestures are encouraged at Speakers Clubs. Appropriate gestures. Not this constant hand waving seen by people sitting down on panel shows. For goodness’ sake people, you’re not lecturing or acting, you’re just answering a bloody question. Hand waving is not required.

Another benefit is you stop saying, “I mean” and “Sort of” and “Kind of” and “obviously” because you start to think before you speak, instead of after. Oh, wonderful thing!

If you just learn that, people will be grateful.

“Conduct a Conversation” isn’t a literal instruction.

12 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by in Character and Competence, Time Management, Uncategorized

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Communication.

Habit 5 of The Seven Habits® is specifically directed towards that major part of human existence. If you were to read ‘The Book’ you would receive a comprehensive explanation of how successful communication works.

On a course I used to run (as a licensee of The Springboard Consultancy) called Navigator®, one of the modules was about communication and, more relevantly here, about barriers to communication. Obvious examples included language, culture and context, but I have discovered a new one, one which also goes some way towards confirming how we humans have a tendency to become conditioned to mannerisms like modes of speech and language and adopt them unthinkingly.

Remember Covey’s first Habit, Be Proactive? Its main thesis is that there is a space between stimulus and response, and our failure to utilise that space results in blind compliance with whatever becomes the norm in our environment. This blind compliance results in everyone acting ‘the same’ having given no thought whatsoever to the consequence of that new behaviour.

At the moment, combining the two lessons of reactive response and barriers to communication, I have an observation which I hope readers will share. Primarily with the BBC Politics Live to start with, then everywhere else.

It is this.

For some reason, and it is more noticeable with young ‘speakers’, people on the television have developed a habit of waving their hands about when talking. It was one or two, now they’re all at it.

In itself, a controlled gesture that is designed to emphasise a specific point in a sentence is fine, even welcome and natural. But emphasising every single word with a pointy/downward-claw/pleading gesture made with both hands (yes, Miss Swinson, YOU) means you have emphasised NOTHING.

What is more, while you are waving your hands around, the camera or eye that is focused on your top half can only see your hands waving around and it can’t see what expressions your face is making. People who are hard of hearing (or who are in a room full of screaming kids) and trying to lip-read just can’t.

In other words, what you are trying to say – and it may be important – is lost in a whirr of randomly-wriggling digits and limbs.

I recall the old days when news presenters just spoke with a mic in their hands and I’d agree that was visually dull. But now they’ve been trained to ‘be more expressive’ they’ve gone banzai-nuts and can’t stop moving about. It’s like watching Sir Simon Rattle conduct Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

There is a happy medium.

Might I make a suggestion?

It’s still considered a bit contentious, because some professional speaking clubs don’t like it, but if you put one hand in your pocket, you reduce the sillier gestures by more than half, and the other hand finds a natural rhythm in terms of gesturing that enhances, not obstructs your presentation. (But keep the pocketed hand still…… that’s a whole different distraction.)

This doesn’t just apply to political panels. It applies to any presentation that you have to make, and ‘Hobbs’ Law’ makes the speaker “100% responsible for communication”.

If the audience can’t hear you because all they can do is see your agitated hands, then it’s your fault if they don’t get the message. And a missed message wastes time. Lots of it. Time that has to be spent repeating the message properly.

If Jo Swinson hadn’t been waving her arms about, perhaps she could have been PM tomorrow.

(Sorry, I just spat my own coffee…………….)