Speaking Well – Part 1

With this entry, we come to the first thing that comes to mind for most of us when hear the word “rhetoric”: public speaking. Though I’ve stressed throughout that “rhetoric” includes any kind of persuasive communication, it was first and has longest been practiced in this form. Public speaking also acts as a microcosm of the Renaissance Man approach: it is multi-faceted, requires diligent practice, and becomes a deeply personal and individualized endeavor the more you pursue it. With that said, let’s jump in.

The Main Hurdle: Fear

Many folks struggle with public speaking. They find it hard and unpleasant and don’t know how to do better. It turns out the biggest reason that we have trouble with public speaking is that we are afraid. Most of us get nervous whenever we have to speak to more than a handful of others. Apparently it is one of the most common fears, and even folks who have gotten past that fear for the most part might feel it again if faced with a much larger or more intimidating audience than they’re used to. To deal with this fear, it’s helpful to understand why so many of us feel it so strongly.

Why We Fear Public Speaking: the Stakes Feel Very High

As far as we can tell from archaeology and history, for most of the deep history of the human race, our ancestors lived in small bands. One thread of evidence for how big these bands might grow was discovered by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar looked at different primate brains and noticed a correlation between the size of their pre-frontal cortex and the size of their typical social group. He proposed that human brain size, as well as evidence from experiments that test memory, indicate that the “Dunbar’s Number” for our species is somewhere around 150 – 200 people. That seems to be the upper limit on how many people you can remember in your head as actually distinct people, rather than just vaguely familiar.

What does this have to do with a fear of public speaking? Well, if you’re living in a band where you’re only ever going to meet 150 people in your whole life, then speaking to 20 or 30 people (or even just 10) is a substantial fraction of every human you will ever know. Screwing up, pissing these people off, earning their scorn or mockery, that might mean you lose status, or key resources, or in the extreme case, that you might be exiled, which would be almost certain death. So, the stakes for getting it right (or more importantly, not messing it up) were very, very high.

Now, you might say “but we don’t live in such tiny groups anymore, and the stakes for giving a consulting presentation aren’t nearly so dire. So why am I scared here and now?” Well, you may know that speaking to a moderate-sized group doesn’t have a chance of resulting in certain death, but your monkey brain doesn’t. It hasn’t kept up for the last few hundred thousand years and is stuck in the world of 150-person bands, and so can’t help but interpret any threat to social status at that scale. And when it detects a threat by its out-dated criteria, it only has one trick in its bag: the physiological stress response.

The Physiological Stress Response: One Weird Trick to Keep You Alive

I was being a little unfair to our monkey minds a second ago, as the physiological stress response is really the only response your body has to anything it perceives as a threat, and “threat” can come from a literal bodily threat, your conscious mind ruminating on all the things that might go wrong, or as above, from subconscious processes better tuned to our evolutionary environment than the world of today. So, whether there’s a tiger in the room or an audience, your body has the same reaction: it turns on the sympathetic nervous system, what’s colloquially known as the “fight or flight response.” This response is fantastic if you need to punch or (more likely) run away from a sabertooth tiger. You start breathing shallowly to get more precious oxygen, which your heart obligingly begins pumping faster and faster to your muscles, already tensing up to take action, and to top it all off, your various glands pump all kinds of crazy hormones out, like adrenaline. As I said, all of these sub-parts are practically helpful for physical threats, but if they kick off when you get up to speak, it’s much less helpful. Your voice tightens up and/or goes breathy, you can’t remember what to say because your adrenaline-fueled brain is too busy scanning for threats, you fidget nervously to do something with muscular tension, and so forth. Unfortunately, all of these responses are regulated subconsciously, so what are we to do?

Well, when I said subconsciously just now, you might have thought “hey, wait a minute, what about breath?” The breath is usually regulated subconsciously, but you can consciously control it, and of the different mechanisms of the physiologial stress response, it’s the only one where this is true. That means that we can take control of our breath to slow down and eventually reduce the stress response. When we breathe quickly and shallowly, that further reinforces our body’s impression that something dangerous is happening and to keep the adrenaline flowing. On the other hand, as our breath slows and deepens, the rest of the system gets the feedback that maybe it’s not needed anymore, and so starts to reduce its intensity. Any way of taking a deep, slow breath will help, but adding in a bit of structure to make it mindful both gives you something to remember and focus on, but will also have a greater effect.

The Four-Fold Breath Uses Your Entire Breathing Cycle to Calm You Down

The technique I recommend, the Four-Fold Breath is one kind of what is sometimes called “box breathing.” The basic idea is that you count for each of four phases of breathing: breathing in, holding the breath in your lungs, breathing out, and holding your lungs empty. That’s one reason for the “four-fold,” but there’s also another: in this particular technique, you slowly count to four for each step, like this: “in, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four.” The written word is poorly suited to conveying timing, but one technique I learned for counting seconds in my head when I was a paratrooper is to count “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand” (when we jumped out, we counted to four, because if our parachute hadn’t opened by then, it meant something was wrong). “Mississippi” is also a classic, of course. You can even count slower than one second each, but you don’t want to count so slowly that at any point you feel like you are gasping.

Now, obviously, this is not a technique that you can start doing in the middle of a speech. It’s value shows more clearly right before the speech, when you start to feel stage fright (it also works excellently as a warm up for meditation, and can itself be a form of meditation). The broader idea of taking a deep breath to calm your nerves can be used in the moment, though. At a place where you want to take a pause anyway, use it to take a nice, deep breath, and then begin speaking again on the outbreath. These breathing techniques are incredibly helpful in dealing with stress and anxiety, but they’re not going to do everything. For that, we need to bring in the really big guns: practice.

The Answer: Make Bravery a Habit through Practice

Setting aside some minor variation due to inborn talent, the key difference between an effective public speaker and a less-effective one is how much practice he has. Public speaking is a skill, and every skill improves with consistent, effective practice. It may seem straightforward enough that practice will make us better at public speaking, but the link with eliminating anxiety brought on by speaking might not seem so obvious. It works like this: most of us are not so much afraid of attention in itself, but rather we are afraid of getting negative attention, brought on by our screwing up. So, if we become justifiably more confident we won’t screw up thanks to consistent practice, we come to fear screwing up less, and thus to fear speaking less.

Remember above where I said speeches in front of groups feel very high stakes, even if they are not actually? Well, the way to disabuse our subconscious of this deeply built-in assumption is to demonstrate to it over and over that we can give a speech and have nothing bad happen. I find it useful to compare this process to the treatment of phobias through exposure therapy, because essentially, that’s exactly what we’re doing. If you’re inexperienced at public speaking and afraid of it, I do not recommend booking a thousand-person lecture hall and just winging it. That’s the equivalent of taking someone afraid of snakes and throwing him into the Egyptian temple from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead, you want to start small, push yourself just a bit, see that it goes pretty well, and then next time push yourself just a little bit further.

What that might look like with public speaking is this: first, prepare a speech to deliver in front of a small group that you know and trust, like a handful of your friends. Then, once that goes well, maybe give a presentation to your team at work, or in front of a class or club. Then a larger, less familiar group, and so on. The analogy often used in training and teaching circles is “crawl, walk, run.” So, we know that we want to practice to get over our nerves, but what should that practice look like?

Deliberate Practice: Getting Better Intentionally

Have you ever heard of the “10,000 hour rule?” Originally identified in research by psychologist Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcom Gladwell in Outliers, the idea is that what makes someone an expert is that he has practiced in his field for 10,000 hours. This is used in motivational circles to convince folks that all they need to do to become great is to practice enough. The trouble is, not all practice is created equal. If you spend 10,000 hours noodling around on your guitar, you’re not going to become Eddie Van Halen. Instead, if you want to get good, you need deliberate practice. As described by Dan Coyle in The Talent Code, for practice to be “deliberate,” it needs to have three characteristics: 1) a focus on a narrow subset of the broader skill you want to improve, 2) a clear standard for whether you’re doing it right or not, and 3) prompt feedback on whether you’re meeting that standard. Let’s dig into each of these a bit.

Focus on a Subset of the Skill: Most skills that we care about are big and complex and involve putting together lots of sub-skills. To be good at soccer, you need to able to run, dribble, shoot goals, coordinate with your teammates, and so forth. If you want to play guitar, you need to be able to finger different keys, strum, have a sense of timing, and more. Likewise, with public speaking, you need to figure out what to do with your voice, the words you say, and your body (more on these in a minute). Deliberate practice is where you pick one of these sub-skills and focus on just that. Sure, it’s important to sometimes “put them all together,” in soccer, you don’t only do shooting drills, you also play scrimmages, but most of your practice time should be devoted to more specialized drills if you want to improve as much as you can. One tip I give is to take this focus even further by exaggerating what you’re working on. Say you’ve chosen the volume of your voice as the sub-skill of public speaking you want to work on. So, you memorize a short speech and record yourself saying it and you listen to the recording to see how loud you are. Rather than just trying to be a little bit louder, I’d recommend you try to be as loud as possible, shouting even. Does that mean you should shout when you give a real presentation? No. But that will tell you more quickly whether you’re focusing on what you mean to or not.

Have a Clear Standard: Once you’ve selected a sub-skill to work on, you need to know whether you’re doing it right or not. For some skills, this is easy: if you’re playing the guitar, you can hear if your notes are off, in basketball you can see whether your shots are going into the basket or not. For others, it’s a little tougher: was my tone of voice as “warm” as it should be? Is this pace of talking too fast or just right? For more qualitative skills like this, it’s incredibly helpful to have a knowledgeable coach that knows what good looks (or sounds) like. If you don’t have the luxury of a coach, the next best thing is to record yourself and then watch/listen. Often, even if we don’t know what good feels like, we can still see or hear it from outside. Which brings us to feedback.

Prompt Feedback: You have narrow sub-skill to focus on and clear standards of whether you’re doing it right or not, now you need some way to know whether you’re meeting the standard (or not). Feedback is most useful when it’s immediate – as soon as the ball bounces off the rim, you know something was off with your shot. Likewise with public speaking, if you have a coach or a recording, you want to hear how it went right away, then do another repetition. To facilitate this, I recommend finding a “bite sized” way to practice the sub-skill you want to work on. For public speaking, this looks like preparing a ~30 second speech and then delivering it, getting feedback, and then trying again to incorporate the feedback.

Strategic Practice: Increase Your Capacity to Perform

There’s another lens for looking at practice that I’d like to share with you, which is distinguishing between “strategic” and “tactical” practice. Strategic practice is what we engage in when we want to raise our maximum level of skill. It’s what you set out to do over the next year or three, hoping to see noticeable improvement over that time. If you want to go from never breaking a sweat in your life to running a marathon, that’s gonna take some strategic practice. Much of strategic practice will be the kind of deliberate practice we talked about above. The point of methodically stepping through different keys on your guitar frets is not to get good at doing that for itself, it’s so that when you have to make quick changes mid-song, it’ll be second nature. You don’t go to toastmasters for the speeches you deliver there, you do it so that when you’re speaking “when it counts” you’ll feel more comfortable. Besides intentional deliberate practice sessions, though, there’s another aspect to strategic practice, which is giving yourself more opportunities to do the thing you want to work on in your day-to-day life. Say you want to get healthier, and so you set a step goal for every day. You could reach that goal by going to the gym and getting on the treadmill for an hour a day, but you could also make it a habit to take the stairs, park further out in the parking lot, and walk instead of drive for some of your errands. With public speaking, this might look like asking your boss if you can deliver part of the regular updates for the team during recurring meetings, or joining a club that will require public speaking, or meeting your friends once a week to deliver a prepared talk on a subject you’re all interested in.

Tactical Practice: Execute at the Top of Your Current Capacity

If strategic practice is about increasing your skill level, tactical practice is about making the most of what you’ve got right now. Let’s say it’s Monday, and you’ve heard back from a potential customer that they’ll be willing to hear your pitch on Friday. You’re not going to become Steve Jobs in five days, but you can practice the pitch until you’ve got it down backwards and forewards. You draft an outline, tape it to your bathroom mirror, and every time you brush your teeth, you practice it. By Thursday night, you’re delivering the speech to your cat while you cook dinner. Come Friday morning, you walk into the potential customer’s office as ready as you’ll ever be to give this particular pitch. Maybe you’re a great speaker, or maybe you’re just okay, but you’ll perform at the top of whatever your current level is.

It’s tempting to assume that tactical practice is less important than strategic, but I would caution against jumping to that conclusion. Tactical practice is one of the best techniques we have for combatting anxiety. If you can honestly say to yourself “I gave this speech to my mirror flawlessly an hour ago, the only difference is I’m about to have an audience,” it’s a lot easier to clamp down on the anxiety that the audience brings. If you practice for this particular speech, and then it goes well, that creates a virtuous feedback loop for feeling ready for the next speech, and so the tactical practice feeds the strategic practice.