Putting the Dread Back in Public Speaking
If you wander down the hallways of some of our best hotels in the early hours of any weekday morning you cannot help but notice how much talking is going on.
In the Labrador Room there is a fellow holding court on the The Six Rules of Final Success.
In the St. Bernard Hall another fellow is pointing to the screen and detailing the Nine Fundamentals or maybe the Eleven Necessities.
One floor down in the Great Dane Mix Seminar Space there is a gal roving the room, pointing to each member of the audience and asking them to name off, in alphabetical order, the Fourteen Essentials, The Twenty-Three Provisos, and The One-Hundred-and-Two Barriers to Ultimate Fulfillment.
Experiments have been underway whereby social scientists will travel to the depths of the Amazon rain forest, the wilds of the Russian steppes, or the wasteland of the Sahara in the middle of a sandstorm and:
Set up a wide table with a white tablecloth upon it randomly within the wilderness
Neatly align rows of chairs facing the table
Put upon that table a podium
Put behind that table a projection screen
And put near the back a plate of Danish and an urn of coffee
All this among the howling sandstorm and chatter of the jungle and what not.
Notably, when they examine the spot the next morning they will discover that people are politely sitting in the chairs, the Danish have been devoured, the coffee drained, and a speaker is at the front of the room is itemizing The Eight Nevers, The Baker’s Dozen Always, The Nine Permissible Maybes.
At the hotel — I’m back to that now, we have left the steppes and rainforest and desert behind — if you were to walk by as these meetings get underway you would see these speakers leap from their seats once they are introduced and bound to the front of the room.
Their eyes sparkle with enthusiasm, their voices have the tone of cool command, their body language speaks of personal confidence and sureness of the message they are about to deliver.
This has to stop.
Consider the dangers that lurk for the unwary listener.
You know how it is. You wander into the room and are treated to a summary of The Seventeen Ultimate Realities, then you get the urge to go out and see if there’s still some coffee in that big silver urn out in the hallway, and then mosey back in when the speaker is reiterating the Four Necessary Subtractions, and it isn’t until she is nearly finished that you realize that you have stumbled into a different seminar entirely.
There is no telling the damage that can result when your average citizen ends up walking around with such an internal brew of Postulates, Necessities, Fundamentals, and Non-Essentials all jumbled up and out of numeric order.
The problem is not with the audience, the problem is with the speakers.
They aren’t afraid enough of public speaking.
Are these really the kind of people we want spouting off at the front of the room telling everybody what’s what? People who don’t have sense enough to be frightened out of their minds?
The fear of public speaking dwells deep in our DNA, or should at any rate.
In the caveman era the brave fellow who went to the front of the stone dwelling-place to tell the rest of the tribe that they ought to move south a bit before winter came again might have had a good idea, but it was made clear to him by way of audience feedback and clubs shaken in a suppressed rage-like manner that if he was wrong, then he would be fed to the next saber-toothed tiger that wandered by.
“Better make this good, my friend,” would be the unspoken message in the eyes of his audience.
This is a circumstance that makes a man choose his words carefully, and consider if he really knows what he is talking about, and while at the front of the room shake like a lone leaf on a scraggly tree in the face of a chill wintry gust.
The soothsayer in any of a score of societies who felt himself compelled to head to the front of the tribe and confidently predict an eclipse and by so doing feels he ought to be named some of demi-man-god, might have faltered halfway through and suffer a certain quivering of the voice when he considered that if he was wrong then he would boiled, pureed, and eaten as the second entrée at the next village feast. The gentleman will certainly be keeping his eye on the sky going forward.
The court jester, to take a final instance, who stands in front of the king and realizes that he will lose his head if he doesn’t keep the guffaws coming wonders if he is really in the right line of work after all, entailing a certain lack of oxygen in his lungs which affects his delivery.
No, the species comes by this fear honestly and it has served its evolutionary purpose of keeping many a person alive who was just about to go to the front of the room and explain it all to everyone once and for all and with a certain amount of gusto when a still small voice in her head whispers, ‘maybe not. Perhaps when you just think about it for a while, maybe not. In fact, let’s just sit here and let someone else get beheaded if they’re wrong.’
Today’s modern speakers, the ones who leap from their chairs and dash to the front of the room that I speak of, they are more to be pitied than censured. They just don’t know any better.
Since childhood they have been assured that they have something important to say. At every occasion of public speaking during their youthful years they are showered with affirmation. They are told constantly to be secure in the knowledge that someday they will be asked to recite the Nine Something’s or the Seven Pearls or the Fourteen Jewels and when that time comes they should happily sprint to the podium and get right to it.
Like I say, they don’t know any better.
The old ways have fallen into disuse, the classical methods of instruction.
In those times, be it a classroom, a church gathering, a Boy’s Club or 4-H meeting, it was made clear to you that you were not facing a friendly audience.
These people out in the crowd didn’t want to be here. They didn’t want to be here at all.
Given the choice they would be about their busy day at the farm pond, the miniature golf course, the science fiction shelves of the local library branch, or simply sprawled out on the living room sofa.
Instead, they have been dragged or otherwise coerced into this hot room for who know what length of time to listen to who knows what kind of folderol. Your folderol as it turns out.
You know how the human mind is under these circumstances. It looks for a scapegoat, someone that the crowd can fix its ire upon. Someone who can plausibly be said to be blameworthy in this whole fiasco of a ruined day. The thought leaps from mind to mind without a word like torches being lit by a baying crowd of angry peasants, and within seconds the crowd has turned into a mob, hungry for vengeance.
Right about then is when you inch your way to the front of the room.
Who knows what it is you have decided to talk about. You certainly don’t.
It might be North American Mollusks, the Secret Janitors of the Natural World! It might be What I Did on my Summer Vacation Which is Either Not Much or is Entirely Made Up! It may be a demonstration of How to Tie a Sailor’s Slipshod Shank Knot With Only Your Teeth!
As I suggest, it doesn’t matter. If you ever knew a thing about these subjects, they have evaporated on your journey to the front of the room, a journey that by every internal estimate of time is taking just about as long as it took Magellan to circumnavigate the globe, if in fact he was the fellow that actually did that. You’ve forgotten that too.
In any event, by way of thinking about Magellan and a thousand other thoughts you have entirely forgotten the topic of your talk, how to speak or even think in your native language, and your purpose, if any, for being on the face of the planet.
It is meditations like these that continually have you saying to yourself, ‘what is my topic?’ or in a searching mood, ‘why is my topic?’ or even ‘what does the word topic mean?’
The cold fear that acts as a vise upon your internal organs as you turn to face the audience, who seem to have used this period of time to — figuratively — gather pits of rotting vegetables which they are weighing in their hands as if to estimate the force and arc of the path that will best connect the moldy cabbage or dripping tomato with your head, is something that you vow to never forget.
And as I am suggesting, this is all to the good.
You will be that much more reluctant in your mature years to dash to the front of the room certain that you have the answers, and start rattling off your Elevens and Fours and Sixes and Nines.
The person who has wondered at some point in his life, “what does the word topic mean?” is much less likely to organize a entire speech around one.
All is not lost for the these misguided souls however.
We can train these people away from this path they are on.
We can ensure that they knock over the easel on the way to the front of the room, and that they deliver a punch line to the joke about the atheist and the priest and the rabbi that walk into a bar that rightly comes from the joke about the parrot, the antelope, and the zebra that met at the watering hole.
There are classes to design and schedule on “Losing Your Breath 101,” and “Saying Umm and Errr Repeatedly, A Protocol of Best Practices,” and “The Well-Timed Fainting Spell.”
A best seller, if properly marketed, could be made of “Listening to Your Inner Sheer Terror,” if given a presence on the daytime talk shows, and might just be the type of book that sweeps the nation.
It will not be a sudden reversal of these dangerous trends, but might be the first faltering steps on a journey of recovery.
We can only hope. Our ears have earned a little peace and quiet.
