Tips On Talking

You can talk faster than an audience can listen. I attended a large birthday celebration at which several people spoke. One man took the microphone to relate some amusing anecdotes about the birthday person. What I could catch was funny. The problem was that it all went by so fast that I missed a lot of it.

Even if the speaker’s diction is clear (which it often isn’t when people speak quickly) effective speaking takes time. The listener’s brain must register sound waves, decode them into discernable sounds, piece together those sounds into words and then weave the words together to create understandable concepts. Yes, it only takes a split second, but it does take time. Your listeners want to catch what you are saying. They want to travel with you mentally, not have to run to keep up.

In my last article, I talked about enjoying the pauses, giving yourself a moment of silence in which to think without filling in with “um” or “you know”. Pauses benefit the audience, too, because that’s when they have time to absorb what has been said. If you are someone who speaks quickly, pauses are even more important. They give your listener’s brain time to catch up. Speeding ahead with no pauses leaves your audience in the dust, and they stop listening.

The “talking too fast” villain is usually nervousness, isn’t it? The presence of adrenaline, the “fight or flight” hormone, in your bloodstream, speeds up your heart rate. Unfortunately it can also speed up your mouth. That’s because it slows down your perception of time. Everything seems to be moving in slow-motion. I fell off a horse once, and the jolt of adrenaline as I felt myself slipping gave me time to think, quite calmly, “This can’t be happening to me!” before I hit the ground. What seemed slow to me was actually happening very fast. So it is with speech.

Another fast-talking villain is familiarity. We know what we’re saying, so it sounds clear enough to us, and we just rattle it out. I find this is particularly the case when people tell me their name, either in person or on the phone. They know their name; they’ve said it a million times. But I don’t know it. For me, it’s new information. If it comes at me too fast and all run together, I miss it.

Humour, especially, requires pacing, pauses in significant places. If you are telling an amusing anecdote, don’t be in a rush. Give your audience time to enjoy it, and the humour will come through.

A speaker must connect emotionally with the audience for their ideas to be heard and considered. Without that connection, the path to the listeners’ thinking mind is short-circuited and their attention wanders. Emotional connection takes a little time. If the words are going by in a blur, it simply doesn’t have time to happen.

Those who say, “I just get nervous. I can’t help talking fast,” are unwittingly making their own concerns more important than those of their audience. You need not be a victim of habit.  If your primary interest is the quality of your audience’s experience, you will be motivated to make whatever changes you need to slow yourself down a bit. Besides, it’s enlightened self-interest. You want them to understand you!

My first strategy, always, when I feel a build-up of adrenaline, is to slow down. Move slower, walk slower, eat slower, talk slower. It calms me and brings my perception of time back into perspective. Another strategy is to breathe slowly and deeply. If you talk fast, when you pause for breath, take the time to inhale fully before you resume speaking. Do it consciously. Part of the problem with people who speak too quickly is that they are not aware that they are doing it. Listen to yourself. Ask for feedback from friends – people who will be lovingly honest, not just flatter you. If you are conscious of what you are doing, you are empowered to change it. It does take practice, but you don’t have to get caught in the speed trap.

“How can I stop saying ‘um’?” my friend asked.  Her talking is liberally sprinkled with this non-word. She knows it, and she knows it detracts from the impact of what she says. Someone else I know asks, “Right?” after every couple of phrases, as if constantly asking for approval. “You know” is a very common verbal habit, and “like” is almost ubiquitous among young people. Like many habits, verbal patterns become so deeply ingrained that we don’t even notice we are saying them.

Just as repetitive physical habits like pen clicking and jingling keys are distracting, so are repetitive verbal habits. We all say “um” or “you know” now and then. That’s not a problem. It becomes a problem when read more…

Too Much Information

In my teens I had a piano teacher who loved to talk. She would illustrate points in her teaching with long anecdotes about people she knew but I had never heard of. Sometimes the people in her stories were socially prominent or highly placed in the musical field. It mattered to her to mention details about them, and I suspect she derived a sense of importance by proxy when dropping their names. What she didn’t realize was that I didn’t need all that detail in order to get the point of the story. In most cases, I didn’t even need to know  the people’s names. I endured those stories rather than learned from them.

What my teacher didn’t realize is read more…

Every morning my husband John and I take a brisk, 3 km walk. We go straight up the steep hill opposite our house (a “shock start”) continue to the top of the next hill, then turn around and come back. (By golly, by summer’s end, I’ll have the body of a twenty-year-old!) We go early, before it gets too hot. It’s lovely to be outside, and it sure beats walking on the treadmill, which is our Canadian-winter option.

The only downside to this morning jaunt is an insect called the deer fly. Shaped like a mini delta-wing aircraft, this little guy takes a serious chunk of flesh with each bite. Out here in the country, he and his buddies are legion! This morning, John and I wore bug-protective hats that cover our heads with netting. It was a little warm, but much better than continually batting our hands in front of our faces. read more…

People who’ve taken private lessons in any field have a significant advantage. In order to survive the constant correction, they must learn to separate their performance from their sense of personal worth.

Take music lessons, for example. The process goes like this: the student works on a piece of music, practicing it at home, and performs it for the teacher at the weekly lesson. The teacher listens with a sharp ear for technique and expression, praises progress (presumably) and makes suggestions for improvement. The student never expects to hear, “That’s perfect! There’s not a thing you could do to improve it.” At least, not until it’s performance-ready, and even then… (In fact, I did have a teacher like that in my first year of university. After singing my songs for him, he simply said, “That’s lovely, dear.” I was so frustrated, I switched universities!) The successful student knows that the process of perfecting a piece of music, and the coaching that goes along with it, is simply about skill level, not about who he or she is as a person. read more…

For the past month, I’ve been in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, sorting through my mother’s clothes and belongings. Six months ago, just a week after I had visited, she was incapacitated by a stroke. When I returned on this trip, we had some wonderful and precious lucid moments together, before her health went suddenly and steeply downhill. It was almost as if she had been waiting for me. Her final journey took 11 days, and she had excellent palliative care.

As I was clearing out the house, I took bags and bags of her clothes to a charity re-sale outlet. (Canadians will be familiar with Value Village — it’s my favourite store!) It took just a few moments to unload it all from the car, and then suddenly it was gone. Just like that! The same thing happened with a load of “stuff”. (“Pack rat” doesn’t even begin to describe my mother. I think that happened to a lot of people who grew up in the Depression Years.)

How can a lifetime of stuff disappear so quickly? read more…

The speaker stood at the front of the room and held up a $100 bill. “How many of you would like to have this?” he asked. Of course, every hand went up. He then folded the bill in half. “Now how many?” Still, everyone. He folded it again and again until it was a tiny square, each time asking how many people would like to receive the $100 bill. Every time, the answer was unanimously affirmative. Then the speaker opened up the bill, scrunched it into a ball, threw it on the floor and stomped on it. Once more he asked, “How many of you would like to have this $100 bill?” Every hand went up. “You have just shown your understanding,” said the speaker, “that no matter what I threw at this bill, it’s intrinsic worth has not changed. It’s the same for you.”

One of the biggest reasons people fear public speaking is that they fear criticism. Such deep concern about other people’s opinion stems from a lack of assurance in one’s own worth. I’m convinced that the reason we fear another person’s negative view of us is because it makes us assume a negative view of ourselves. When someone has a low opinion of us, we lower our own opinion of ourselves. What’s at issue is our relationship with ourselves. read more…

Waiting is the worst! If you’re like me, the hardest part of a speaking event is the time before it begins. Your desire to do a good job is strong; your adrenaline is building up, but as yet you have no outlet for the nervous energy it creates. Once you have begun to speak, you are fully engaged, and your adrenaline is being put to use. But until that time, your butterflies can feel like a flock of pterodactyls in your stomach!

Butterflies are a good thing. They give us a sharper edge, an extra boost of energy to take us beyond our day-to-day level of expression. A speaker needs that extra energy to bridge the gap between the stage and the audience, to reach out and make a connection. She needs to be larger than life. Butterflies help to make that happen, but only if they are “flying in formation”. If the adrenaline build-up in your system goes beyond a certain point, the harmless fight-or-flight mechanism devolves into “freeze”. read more…

Extreme fear of public speaking is very common. I don’t know the specific figures, but conventional wisdom states that it’s most people’s Number One Fear.

I’m reading a book called, “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Norman Doidge, M.D. His chapter on using brain plasticity to successfully treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) makes me wonder if a similar approach could lessen fear of public speaking. The brain is an extremely complex organ. A short article like this can provide only a broad general idea, but it may be useful to summarize some of Doidge’s points.

Neuroscientists have shown that the brain adapts, evolves and literally re-wires itself in response to the conditions it faces. This plasticity of the brain exists not just in youth, but throughout an animals’ life. Doidge expresses the two key laws that govern brain plasticity as these: 1) Neurons that fire together wire together, and 2) Neurons that fire apart wire apart. read more…

Have you noticed that some people look apologetic when they stand up to speak? It’s as if they are saying with their body language, their face and their tone of voice, “Forgive me for having the presumption to stand before you. I know I have nothing to say, and nobody really wants to hear from me.” They stand on one foot or swivel their body from side to side. Maybe they hide their hands behind their back or raise their eyebrows in that “Please don’t shoot me” look. Perhaps they mumble or speak in a monotone. Remembering the years when I did this, myself, I’d say it’s an unconscious defensive strategy. “I might not be good at this, so if I apologize in advance, you won’t be too hard on me.” read more…