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Last September Doug Staneart, the CEO of the Leader's Institute, described what he claimed were the Top Five Myths About Public Speaking Fear and Stage Fright. His Myth #5 caught my attention. Here’s what he says (I’ve divided it into smaller paragraphs and added italics to highlight his very dubious discussion of Toastmasters):
“Myth #5: It Takes Years to Become a Great Speaker
Public Speaking is just like any other skill in that when you practice and have a success, you feel more confident about yourself and you get better next time. So the key to becoming a great speaker fast is to have a series of successes quickly.
Toastmasters is a great organization, but a lucky speaker might get a chance to give five speeches in two or three years, and there is a good chance that not every one of those speeches are going to be winners. So, after a couple of years, a Toastmaster won’t see a great growth in public speaking skills.
When you go to a class at a University or Junior College, you might get to speak three times in a 12 week class, and after each speech, you’ll get the dreaded constructive criticism. So that way will take a while as well.
However, if you want gain presentation skills quickly, find a way to deliver four to six presentations with a really good coach in a short period of time. Ideally, if you can do it in a couple of days, you’ll grow quickly.
However, I’ve seen people have a lot of success by setting up a series of weekly speeches at the office or as a guest speaker at a Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce meeting to get practice.”
Now, I may not know as much about public speaking as a professional speaker like Mr. Staneart, but I sure know more about Toastmasters than he does. His numbers don’t really add up. How do I know? I just finished two years as Vice-President: Education for The Capitol Club in Boise. My role included making up the schedule. Also, I’ve watched people’s public speaking skills grow greatly in just a year.
What would we need to assume in order to come up with only 5 speeches in 3 years? Suppose we chose to attend a large club that only met every two weeks. Assume there were 30 members in the club, and 25 meetings per year. If there only were two speakers per meeting, then there would only be 50 speeches per year. Then, on the average, a member could speak 50/30 or 1.67 times per year, or 5 times in 3 years. Note that is for an average member, not a lucky one. If there were only 20 members then an average member could speak 2.5 times per year, or 5 times in 2 years.
Do clubs meet every two weeks? No, many meet every week. I looked on the Toastmasters web site and found clubs within 25 miles of the 83706 zip code for The Capitol Club, and the 76164 zip code of the mailing address for Mr. Staneart’s company. There are 26 clubs listed for 83706, and 22 of them (85%) meet weekly. There are 106 clubs listed for 76164, and 87 of them (82%) meet weekly. In a 30-member club that meets every week an average member could speak TWICE as often, or 10 times in 3 years.
Then I looked on the Toastmasters web site for 20 states, and counted what percent of the clubs met weekly. There were huge variations as follows: West Virginia (7%), Vermont (9%), Wisconsin (11%), Delaware (12%), Maine (21%), Hawaii (22%), Kentucky (38%), Louisiana (42%), Alabama (46%), New Hampshire (50%), South Dakota (55%), Mississippi (59%), North Dakota (58%) Wyoming (69%), Utah (74%), Oklahoma (75%), Arkansas (79%), Idaho (82%), Montana (88%), Alaska (97%).
The Capitol Club has three speakers scheduled per meeting, or 150 per year. With 30 members that would mean on average that you could speak 5 times in a single year (not in three years) or THREE TIMES as often as Mr. Staneart claimed. We average 20 to 25 active members, so it’s actually more like 6 to 7.5 times per year. Based on my experience people can speak way more frequently than the lower limit Mr. Staneart claimed.
Some clubs that meet at lunch time have shorter meetings, with only two speakers. Clubs that meet early in the morning or in the evening are more likely to have three speakers. But wait, there’s more.
If you want to speak even more often, then there always is the option of being proactive and asking to be a guest speaker at other Toastmasters clubs. For example, on December 30, 2009 we had not one but two guest speakers from Boise Club. That was a rare event, but it does happen.
We meet at lunch time on Wednesdays, which is the most popular time slot here in Boise Six clubs meet then. But, there are another 16 weekly clubs that meet at other times. About half of the clubs use the Easy Speak online planning software, so you even can check the Calendar and find their meeting schedules online.
So, if you want to learn public speaking relatively quickly (and inexpensively), check out some nearby Toastmasters clubs. Ask them how many speeches they schedule for each meeting.The basic Competent Communication manual has ten speeches. Ask how long it it taking their members to complete that manual. The answer may only be a year or two, not the four to six years you would imagine from Mr. Staneart’s claim.
We need to think globally when finding information. Admirals and generals always talk strategy before they get bogged down in the details of tactics. In the July/August 2001 issue of Online Karen M. Drabenstott discussed Web Search Strategy Development. She described six strategies; I have added four more.
Which strategy is best depends on whether the topic is complicated or simple. Complicated concepts have multiple facets. For example, the concept of dinner contains an appetizer, soup, salad, main dish, side dish, dessert, and beverage. The 10 strategies are:
1. Guess and Go. Men don’t stop and ask for directions! Who needs search engines? Just guess and type the address into the web browser. (Homer Simpson always uses this strategy).
2. A Shot in the Dark. Type one word into a search engine like Google, hit return, and hope. This occasionally works for loaded words like schadenfreude or Guadalcanal.
3. Bingo. Use a search engine. Describe a concept using the reporter’s menu of who, what, when, where, and how.
4. Everything But the Kitchen Sink. Use a search engine to describe the facets of a complicated concept with one giant phrase. This sounds great, but it usually doesn’t work the first time.
5. Take a Big Bite. This is how sharks eat. Use a search engine to describe some facets of a complicated concept with a phrase. Look at the results, then modify the phrase to narrow things further.
6. A Little Help From Our Friends. Use subject directories to get started on an unfamiliar topic. Take advantage of other people’s experience. Start with a few great sites rather than oodles of the mediocre ones you might find using a search engine.
7. Pearl Growing. Like Oliver Twist you can ask for more. If you look at the list of results from a Google search, you will see the word Similar in blue to the right of some web addresses. You also can flip the search over, and use Google Advanced Search to search for pages that link to a page you have found. If you found a book by an author, you can check to see if he also wrote any magazine articles (or vice versa).
8. Find Someone Who Cares. Look for an Expert on the topic, and then contact him or her by email, phone, or in person.
9. Let the Fish Swim to You. Use Google Alerts or Google Reader, and similar tools to keep updated on interesting topics.
10. No Stone Unturned. This is how we handle big questions, like a graduate school thesis, changing careers, or starting a business. First we do everything we can think of. Then we think some more, and do some more.
One of the most powerful and easy to use features of Google is the Advanced Search screen. Don’t be intimidated by the word Advanced - it actually should be called something friendlier like Helpful. When you fill in the blanks the top line shows how your search is being constructed when we follow the instructions to “Find web pages that have...”
For example, if we put the words public speaking into the box labeled the exact wording or phrase, then Google puts quotation marks around it.
If we use some combination of “all the words,” “one or more of the words,” or “But don’t have any of these unwanted words,” then Google builds a Boolean search for us.
Another powerful option lets us limit the File Type. For example, Acrobat portable document files (.pdf files) often are used for magazine articles or presentations that originally were either in PowerPoint or Keynote. We can also find files with the Microsoft Office formats for Word documents (.doc), Excel spreadsheets (.xls), and PowerPoint presentations (.ppt). Yet another option lets us search inside of a web site or domain. Google often does a more thorough job than the search feature built into a web site.
But wait, there’s even more! Additional features are revealed when we click on the blue line at the bottom of the screen.
One line lets us limit our search based on how recently a page was updated: a day, week, or month ago, etc. Two other very powerful options let us broaden our search based on specific pages.
The first lets us look for pages that are similar to a page we have found. Another lets us look for pages that link to a page we have found. This flips the search over, and changes our perspective, like an acrobat doing a somersault.
Suppose we decided to look up dolphins (the aquatic mammals) with a Google search. In the top twenty results we will find four pages about the NFL Miami Dolphins football team (other large mammals who wear uniforms). Now that we know that those two concepts overlap, what can we do about it?
Many of us learned some Boolean logic when we encountered “new math” in school. (Some found that so painful they would like to forget about it.)
There are three operations (or connectors) used between phrases: AND, OR, and NOT. In search they are used as follows:
What words must appear?: AND (+)
What words (synonyms) might appear? (OR)
What words must not appear?: NOT (-)
When we look at a Venn diagram we will see that the overlap (shown above in green) represents Miami AND Dolphins. If all we wanted was the mammals like Flipper, we need to ask for Dolphins -MIami.
In the next post we’ll see how to painlessly use Boolean logic with Advanced Google Search.
When we use a search engine like Google, one of the simplest and most powerful tactics is to put quotation marks around phrases to specify exactly what we want.
Let’s look at a two-word example. Suppose we had been talking with our aunt Wanda from Warsaw about furniture. If we look up “Polish furniture” on Google, we will get what we want. But, if we forgot the quotation marks, we might as well have been looking up furniture polish, a very different (and much broader) concept.
Without the quotation marks we will get 6,680,000 results. With them there are 430,000 for “furniture polish”, but only 63,400 for “Polish furniture.” Putting the terms in order as a quoted phrase narrowed the search and gave us about a hundred times fewer results.
The photo shows the famous inventor Jan Szczepanik with some Polish furniture.
To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. The Google search engine works so well in most cases that it is easy to forget that it won’t do everything. Even in the world of fasteners there also are nuts and screws. We really need other tools as well, metaphorical wrenches and screwdrivers.
One other very useful tool is a subject directory. When we are starting to research a new topic, we really need a few good reliable sites rather than ten million mediocre ones. Subject directories are trees hand built by people that contain the good stuff. Yahoo started out as a subject directory, and there is still one there. Google also still has a directory hidden away. About.com is yet another commercial directory. The Internet Public Library is an excellent noncommercial directory.
Another useful tool is a metasearch engine. Metasearch engines send a search several different places and then organize the results. Yippy and Ixquick are two examples. Yippy started out as Vivismo, and then became Clusty. Reference librarians keep up with these constant changes.
A few vey helpful web pages show us a whole box of search tools. The Boise Public Library has a Search the Web page, and the Internet Public Library has a Search Beyond IPL2 page. When we want to lose the habit of always just Googling, we can set either of these as the home page for our web browser.
We also need to have a search strategy to avoid getting lost in the details. The University of California at Berkeley search tutorial has an excellent web page about this topic.
A well chosen quotation can inspire your audience with borrowed brilliance. But, an inappropriate quotation can annoy or enrage your audience. Know before who you stand.
In late May, Leslie Linevsky blogged about how a keynote speaker blundered by quoting Henry Ford at the annual installation of officers for a Jewish philanthropic organization. Ford was well known for his anti-Semitic views, and was revered by Hitler. Back in the 1920s Ford owned a newspaper called the Dearborn Independent which spewed such notoriously vile propaganda that it was successfully sued for libel. Ford was admirable in some other respects. He preserved a lot of American history in his museum.
Thirty years ago in his book Speechwriting: The Master Touch Joseph J. Kelley mentioned another occasion where a group had a long memory. He was preparing a speech to be given in a Pennsylvania mining town, knew there were many members of the state police from there, and asked his client if he should mention them. His client said to avoid that topic. Almost a century earlier the state police had been derived from the coal mine police. Back then there had been bitter conflict between those police and labor, particularly the Molly Maguires. At least one descendant was still trying to get a posthumous pardon for an executed ancestor.
