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With boiling water comes steam, and bad motivational analogies. After two of them it perhaps is time to contact the Analogy Police, for a warning that next time they will take away your poetic license.
On December 30, 2009 I blogged about how the inspirational book 212 Degrees: The Extra Degree was where inspirational vapor clashes with reality. That book confused temperature and the amount of heat required to boil water. At 2:54 in their accompanying video there also is a call to action which says that:
“You are responsible for your results. And it’s time to turn up the heat.”
That statement may seem obvious if your experience with heat transfer is limited to watching pots or teakettles boiling on your kitchen stove. But, it is not how the boiling heat transfer process always works. Chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, and metallurgists all know better.
When you look at the section on boiling heat transfer in the Wikipedia entry under heat transfer you will see that there are two very different types of boiling. The more familiar one is called nucleate boiling, but there also is another one called film boiling.
If you keep turning up the heat in an industrial boiler you eventually change over to film boiling. During film boiling there is a blanket of vapor covering the surface which insulates it from the liquid and greatly reduces heat transfer. You can see film boiling on your stove at home if you put a drop of water on a hot pancake griddle. When it is hot enough for the drop to dance around without evaporating quickly, then you are watching film boiling. Film boiling also is discussed in the Wikipedia entry under the Leidenfrost Effect. A more technical discussion appears in one section of the Wolverine Tube Handbook. So, once again inspirational vapor clashes with reality.
My father taught chemical engineering for twenty years. When I was a teenager he told me a story about how film boiling could seem completely counterintuitive. Back in the 1930s he was hired by a glue company who wanted to cut costs and increase production. He looked at their process, and told them to turn DOWN the heat. They were skeptical until he told them why that would help. After they did their glue production soared. Their warehouse began to fill up until their salesmen managed to get more customers.
Asking people to turn up the heat sounds pretty silly when peak daytime temperatures currently are hitting above 100 degrees. Maybe it is time for a big glass of iced tea instead.
Last Saturday I spoke about Finding Information at the Toastmasters Leadership Institute for District 15. I was assigned a meeting room with excellent facilities for projecting images. On Thursday evening I got to see it for the first time. The chairs would be set up in a U shape as shown above.
There was a projector mounted on the ceiling and an 8-foot wide screen on the back wall. The keyboard and display for the desktop computer were on a credenza located at the back of the left wall. There were Ethernet and display connections for a laptop computer too. Also, in front of the credenza there was a lectern that could easily be rolled anywhere. I was warned that the projected image was bright, so the best lectern placement would be on center, in front of the projector beam as shown by the letter A.
Usually I try to have my laptop computer or a desktop computer on a table next to the lectern. Then I can easily glance to the side, look down at the display and see where I am without constantly turning completely around to watch the projector screen. Most of my slides are simple enough that I don’t need to turn and point to them. In this room the cables would not reach as far as A, so instead I brought along a small rear-view mirror.
I have a little $15 bicyclist’s mirror that mounts on the frame of my eyeglasses. With just a slight turn of my head I can see behind me. Other people have folding travel mirrors for makeup that could be placed on a lectern or table. Either type of mirror can substitute for having a computer display, and eliminate the tendency to stare at the screen instead of concentrating on the audience.
On Saturday morning I loaded my presentation, plugged in my wireless remote, and moved the lectern. The bottom of the screen was 2-1/2 feet above the floor. However, the lectern was over 4 feet high and so it would have blocked the screen for some of the audience. I rolled the lectern back, and planned to speak from the room center without it.
The 100 participants had a choice of five sessions. The other four topics apparently sounded much more interesting, and only a half dozen people appeared. The audience all fit along the back row of chairs. So, I went to plan B, put my notes on the end of a table, turned about 30 degrees to the left, and spoke without needing the mirror this time.
Figuring out who has influenced us is both interesting and fun. I Write Like is a web site with software that classifies text and matches it with one of fifty well-known authors. If you cut and paste a sample of your writing into a box, it will tell you who it thinks that you write like.
When I tried putting in the text from my recent blog posts, it told me that I mostly write like David Foster Wallace, a novelist who I do not remember ever reading. Here are five other people I supposedly write like, and the dates of the blog posts:
Dan Brown: June 11th, July 3rd
William Gibson: June 1st
James Joyce: July 2nd
Ursula K. Le Guin: July 12th
Kurt Vonnegut: June 5th
I heard about the web site in a blog post by Karen Blakeman, who also found that she writes mostly like Mr. Wallace. Guy Kawasaki also mentioned it, and linked to an interview with the author.
It probably is only a matter of time before there is similar software that would classify video and tell us who we speak like, including our body language. We could hope that we resemble famous speakers like:
Winston Churchill
Steve Jobs
Barrack Obama
Ronald Reagan
Tony Robbins
Unfortunately, we also might resemble other characters we have seen on television like:
Barney Fife
Matt Foley
Peter Griffin
Reverend Timothy Lovejoy
Yosemite Sam
Eventually speakers will encounter rooms with a variety of proportions and challenges. We just have to learn to grin and roll with the punches. On July 1 Lisa Braithwaite blogged about coping with a very deep, narrow training room, almost like a lane in a bowling alley.
Once I got the very opposite - a wide, shallow room. A technical society held their dinner meetings in the party room at a restaurant. The member who brought the Carousel slide projector grabbed the wrong case, which contained a long focal length lens designed for a much larger room. To get an image to focus, the projector had to be in the back right corner of the room with the screen in the front left corner.
As usual the remote control for slide advance and focus was on a long cord, but not quite long enough to reach the screen. When I tried to point to a slide, I wound up with both arms outstretched awkwardly. My right arm with the pointer was high in the air, and my left with the remote was low. This is the famous hieroglyphic dance pose from the video for the Bangles 1986 hit song Walk Like an Egyptian. It clearly was time to give up and let someone in the audience run the projector.
Last Saturday morning I attended the semi-annual Toastmasters Leadership Institute (TLI) for Divisions A and B here in Boise. It was held at the SuperValu corporate offices (formerly the Albertsons headquarters). The primary purpose for a TLI is simply to provide training for club officers filling the following seven roles: President, Vice President- Education, Vice President – Public Relations, Vice President – Membership, Secretary, Treasurer, Sergeant at Arms. About a hundred members attended, mostly from the Boise area but also including people from both Twin Falls, and Elko, Nevada.
The TLI began with a keynote speech followed by two breakout sessions. The first breakout session had the usual club officer training, The second breakout session offered a series of bonus topics:
Providing Feedback in Difficult Situations
Lead, Follow, or Don’t Get in the Way Too Much...Observations and Suggestions for Volunteers
Club Building Blocks: Planting, Tending, and Growing a Blue-Ribbon Toastmasters Club.
Finding Information
What Makes an Event Great
I spoke on Finding Information. My title began as How to Deal with Change - Continual Learning, but then got narrowed down and made more specific. My presentation was an updated version of one that I had given at one of the educational sessions at the District 15 Spring Conference in Boise back in May 2008.
I particularly enjoyed the keynote speech by Dwight Edwards. He began by joking that he isn’t tall - the rest of us are short. Dwight is 6’8” tall, and played college basketball for the University of Hartford. He also has an MBA and is a training manager at Hewlett Packard. Dwight was a guest speaker at Capitol Club last December. His keynote speech on Saturday was very impressive. He discussed growing up as a black inner city kid in Connecticut, being the first one in his family to attend college, and realizing the importance of communication skills in a career.
Taking an introductory class in public speaking at a college is like going on a bus tour. You’re part of a large group, and the professor is doing the driving. Like a tour, before you start you can see a description. You can check the catalog, look at a syllabus, and even look in the textbook.
Attending a commercial workshop is like hiring a guide with a luxury car. You are part of a small group, and will get a more personalized experience. You can see more of what you want in a shorter time, and get a very smooth ride, but in return you will pay more.
Joining a Toastmasters club is like driving your own 4x4 vehicle on a dirt road. You get a road map (the manual), but it’s up to you to take the initiative, decide how fast to go, and find your way.
Which will be best for you? That depends on how much time versus money you can devote to your journey.
You can find a balanced discussion comparing the pros and cons of those three options in a magazine article by Renate Zorn published in the Fall 2001 issue of Canadian Manager magazine called PUBLIC SPEAKING PROGRAMS: Finding the Right Fit.
UPDATE April 23, 2012
Using a speaking coach is like waving down and hiring a taxi. It’s quick and may be very effective - if you have limited time. However, it can get very expensive if you want to go far.
It’s very simple. Everyone gets to stand up and speak in some role. That is true whether you are in Portland, Oregon or Pune, India.
There are three speeches on the schedule at one of our club meetings in Boise. However, there are many other volunteer roles involved in running the meeting. The eight that change for each meeting are the Ah-Grammarian, Timekeeper, Toastmaster, General Evaluator, three Speech Evaluators, and the Table Topics Master.
Table Topics is the impromptu speaking part of the meeting. The Table Topics Master ask questions, and club members get to stand up and answer them with a one to two minute off-the-cuff speech. He usually begins by asking the members who have not already had another role. Then he asks any guests if they would like to try. Finally, if there is time, he asks other members.
At the end of the meeting everyone walks out the door feeling good. They all got to stand up and speak, they got applause, and whatever fear they once had about speaking in public just got a little smaller.
Last year Nick Morgan pointed out that the most important rule for success in public speaking is to have fun. The fun goes up as the fear goes down.
