Two good recent articles about opening a speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are two good, brief articles about opening a speech from earlier this year at the web site for the National Speakers Association. One is by Patricia Fripp on April 9, 2025 and titled Your First Thirty Seconds: Arouse Interest in Your Subject. She says:

 

“Transport the audience to a different time and place

 Stories are always a crowd pleaser

 Interesting statistics or little-known facts

 A powerful quotation

 A question”

 

Another is by Mark Sanborn on July 2, 2025 and titled Start Strong: How to Open a Speech the Right Way. He says to:

 

“ 1]  Promise a benefit

   2]  Pique interest

   3]  Relate a personal experience

   4]  Be a contrarian

   5]  Make a challenging statement

   6]  Use humor”

 

The cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Finding joy at work

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some long, excellent publications about finding joy at work. For example, there is a 42-page pdf white paper by Jessica Perlo et al. in 2017 from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) titled IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work. It describes:

 

“The importance of joy in work (the ‘why’).

 

Four steps leaders can take to improve joy in work (the ‘how’).

 

The IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work: nine critical components of a system for ensuring a joyful, engaged workforce (the ‘what’).

 

Key change ideas for improving joy in work, along with examples from organizations that helped test them.

 

Measurement and assessment tools for gauging efforts to improve joy in work.”

 

And there is an article by Alex Liu at the Harvard Business Review in July 2019 titled Making Joy a Priority at Work. Another article by Megan Dalla-Camina at Psychology Today on December 12, 2023 is titled 6 Ways to Find More Joy at Work. 

 

And there is a 60-page pdf article by Amanda Cornett and Jeannine Herrick from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) in July 2024 titled Joy in Work Implementation Guide. On page 8 they mention nine key areas:

 

Physical and psychological safety

Meaning and purpose

Choice and autonomy

Recognition and rewards

Participative management

Camaraderie and teamwork

Daily improvement

Wellness and resilience

 

A section on page 47 about Spreading Joy begins:

 

“Joy deserves to be spread to others. You can create a ripple effect that starts with your team and then spreads to others. Be intentional and plan for how you will spread and scale your efforts. A workplace culture that prioritizes JOY IN WORK will typically use a layered approach continuously thinking through how the implementation steps look differently for SELF (the manager), INDIVIDUAL STAFF, TEAM, and the overall ORGANIZATION. If you’ve been successful with your SELF, STAFF, and TEAM what do you do next to spread it to others and throughout the ORGANIZATION.”

 

The cartoon was cropped from one at OpenClipArt. 

 

 

Aphantasia means not having a mind’s eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I got and have been reading a 2025 book by Adam Zeman titled The Shape of Things Unseen: A new science of imagination. There is a Google Books preview to page 43 of it. On pages 13 and 14 he says:

 

“But Keat’s acute sensibility is deeply puzzling to the 2 – 3 percent of us who turn out to lack imagery entirely. The existence of people whose ‘powers’ of visualisation ‘are zero’ was noted by the remarkable Victorian psychologist Sir Edward Galton in the 1880s. But neither Galton himself nor his followers pursued this intriguing lead. In 2015, with colleagues in Edinburgh, I described 21 people who had always lacked a mind’s eye [Adam Zeman, Michela Dewar, and Sergio Della Salla, Cortex, 2105, Volume 73, pages 378 to 380: Lives without imagery – congenital aphantasia], coining the term ‘aphantasia’ to denote this variation in human experience: we had borrowed Aristotle’s term for the capacity to visualize, phantasia, adding an ‘a’ to indicate absence. The public interest that followed came as a huge surprise: after five minutes on breakfast TV discussing the work, I watched emails dropping into my inbox many times every second. One of the most memorable came from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Blake Ross, the co-creator of Mozilla Firefox, who wrote a feisty Facebook post about his realisation that he was aphatasiac: ‘If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. And mom’s face? Of course. You experience this differently, sure. Some of you see a photorealistic beach, others only a shadowy cartoon, Some of you can make it up, others only ‘see’ a beach they’ve visited. Some of you have to work harder to paint the canvas. Some of you can’t hang onto the canvas for long. But nearly all of you have a canvas. I don’t. I have never visualiszed anything in my entire life. I can’t ‘see’ my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought ‘counting sheep’ was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this. And it is blowing my goddamned mind.’

 

Many others wrote along similar lines – one contact wrote of ‘the amazing click of realization we all get when we first heard about it.’ There turned out to be a substantial community of aphantasic folk who had long been trying to articulate this quirk in their psychological nature and were glad of a term with which to describe it.

 

We shall return to the recent discovery of aphantasia. For now, the existence of folk who get by perfectly well without a mind’s eye – indeed in some cases, like Blake Ross’s, without any conscious sensory imagery at all – underlines the huge variability of our imaginative experience and inner lives. This helps to explain my teenage puzzlement at a lively but hazy recollection of the gallery: I have average imagery vividness, but it extends across the sensory spectrum – I can see in my mind’s eye, hear in my mind’s ear, walk with my mind’s legs with reasonable ease. When I recalled the gallery, I precisely imagined being there – the feel of the boards beneath my feet, the still gallery air, the scent of canvas, a certain mood, as well as the look of the paintings. The ability to re-experience events in this richly integrated way – much as we experienced them in the first place – is a key source of our sense that our recollected or imagined memories are ‘true’, even when the fine details prove to be elusive.”

 

There also is a magazine article by Larrissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker for October 27, 2025 titled Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound. And there is another 20-page pdf article with 165 references by Feiyang Jin, Shen-Mou Hsu, and Yu Li in Vision on September 22, 2024 titled A Systematic Review of Aphantasia: Concept, Measurement, Neural Basis, and Theory Development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Yet another article by David J. Wright et al. at Frontiers in Psychology on October 15, 2024 is titled An international estimate of the prevalence of differing visual imagery abilities. They surveyed 3049 people with the results shown above on a bar chart. Just 1.2% had aphantasia. Another 3% had low imagery -  hypophantasia. 89.9% had normal visual imagery, and the other 5.9% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A second bar chart shows similar results just for 887 Canadians in that larger sample. Just 1.7% had aphantasia. 3.6% had low imagery -  hypophantasia. 89.1% had normal visual imagery, and the other 5.6% had high imagery – hyperphantasia.

 

Still another article by Rish P. Hinwar and Anthony J. Lambert at Frontiers in Psychology on October 14, 2021 is titled Anauralia: The Silent Mind and Its Association With Aphantasia.

 

The cartoon was assembled using images for an eye and mind from OpenClipArt.

 

 

A Change This manifesto and a book by Laura Huang on trusting your gut feel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a ChangeThis manifesto by Laura Huang on July 30, 2025 titled Trusting Your Gut Feel: Listening to What Whispers, Not What Screams. It also is presented as a 9-page pdf. In large orange lettering she says that:

 

“Intuition is the process that leads to a final moment of recognition that we call our gut feel.

 

Gut feel is fully and absolutely effective in the right contexts – inadequate, even damaging, in the wrong ones.

 

Gut feel is the result of data plus experience, colliding and combining to create a remarkable reaction, not unlike the nuclear reaction that occurs when atoms collide.”

 

Laura refers to her 2025 book, You Already Know: The science of mastering your intuition. There is a brief Google Books preview ending on page 13.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 3 starting on page 23 is titled Gut Feel Is Sensed in Three Ways and is subtitled Water presents as a liquid, solid or gas. Our gut feel manifests in three forms too. On page 28 there is a 2x2 table, my color version of which is shown above.  It shows her three types of intuition based on priors and prompts: Jolt, Eureka, and Spidey Sense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 4 starting on page 33 is titled Gut Feel Doesn’t Lie and subtitled For complex and chaotic problems, gut feel can always be trusted.  On page 51 there is a table, my version of which is shown above, describing how to solve four types of problems: simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her Chapter 8 starting on page 101 is titled Emotional: How Do I Feel That?  and subtitled Our embodied gut feel is honed when we perceive where in our bodies we physically feel signals. On page 112 she has a 2x2 chart from another article describing The Emotional Circumplex, my color version of which is shown above.  

 

The cartoon came from OpenClipArt.

 

A gruntled Rat in a cartoon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Pearls Before Swine cartoon by Stephen Pastis for November 10, 2025 has the following dialogue:

 

Pig: Hey, Rat. How you doing today?

 

Rat: I’m pretty gruntled.

 

Pig: What’s that?

 

Rat: It’s the opposite of ‘disgruntled.’ It means ‘happy. Contented.’

 

Pig: Why doesn’t anyone ever use the word?

 

Rat: Because we’re also so busy being @#@&#*@ disgruntled.

 

Pig: I’m gonna start being gruntled.

 

Rat: Good luck.

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gruntled as an adjective meaning in good humor: happy, contented. And it also has another web page about Uncommon Opposites. Turb is an archaic word. Here are twenty dis-words and their root words:

 

Dis-Word            Root Word  

 

disadvantaged   advantaged

disaffected         affected

disallowed          allowed

disappointed      appointed

discerned            cerned

discontented      contented

discovered          covered

disgraced            graced

disgruntled         gruntled

disheartened     heartened

disinfected         infected

dispensed           pensed

displaced            placed

disposed             posed

dissolved            solved

distanced           tanced

distinguished     tinguished

distorted            torted

distressed          stressed

disturbed           turbed

 

Back on June 9, 2013 I blogged about Playing with words like kids and had another version of the graphic shown above. 

 

Brad Meltzer gave the 2024 spring commencement speech at the University of Michigan about making magic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On May 4, 2024 Brad Meltzer gave the 2024 spring commencement speech at the University of Michigan about making magic. There is an article about that speech by Katie Kelton at the University of Michigan Record on May 4, 2024 titled Commencement speaker shapes how magic provides insight to shape lives.

 

You can watch a 20-minute YouTube video of it titled Brad Meltzer’s 2024 Michigan Commencement Address – Make Magic. And it also is published in a 2025 book by Brad Meltzer titled Make Magic: The book of inspiration you didn’t know you needed. On Page 26 he explains that:

 

“Of course, that sounds absurd – real magic doesn’t exist. But when you ask professional magicians, they’ll tell you there are actually only four types of magic tricks. That’s it. Put aside illusions and escapes – there’s just four types of tricks:

 

1]  You make something appear.

 

2]  You make something disappear.

 

3]  You make two things switch places.

 

4]  And finally, you change one thing into something else.”

 

The cartoon wand was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

A YouTube video ranking almost two-dozen common public speaking tips

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today my Google Alert on public speaking led me to a 25-minute YouTube video from November 7, 2025 by Vinh Giang mistitled Ranking Every Public Speaking & Communication Tip! He ranked each of those 23 from best to worst on a seven-point scale, as I have shown above in a version of the table he developed in the video.

I agree that “Imagine the audience naked” is one of the worst tips. But he ranked “Avoid filler words completely” at the third level from best, while I regard it as some of the worst advice – as is to “Just be yourself.”   

You never could rank EVERY TIP without making a video that ran forever! A thoughtless video title is just as bad as a thoughtless speech title.  

 

There also is another version titled The Best (AND Worst) Public Speaking Advice RANKED. 

A little book about 101 Seeds for Library Joy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

At my local Ada Community Library I found and read a little 2025 book by Rebecca Hass titled 101 Seeds for Library Joy. There is a 16-page pdf sample. And there is an article by Catherine Hollerbach at PublicLibrariesOnline on September 24, 2024 titled Spreading Joy at the Public Library. Six entries from the book are:

 

Page 17:

“WRITE A BULLETED LIST or craft a vision board USING THE PROMPT ‘THERE IS JOY IN…” HANG IT UP OR SAVE IT so you can refer to it often.”

 

Page 30:

“PLAY WITH WORDS. Make a list of words that resonate with you and try writing a haiku.”

 

Page 46:

“WRITE DOWN a quote THAT INSPRES YOU and place it somewhere you will see it often.”

 

Page 64:

“Look up the Feelings Wheel and explore the range of positive emotions in it.”

 

Page 80:

“Go to the Children’s Department in your local library and read a recommended children’s book.”

 

Page 101:

“The poet Toi Derricote wrote, JOY IS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE. Journal about how your joy is, OR COULD BE, AN ACT OF Resistance.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Feeling Wheel is from an October 1982 article by Gloria Wilcox on pages 274 to 276 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. My colored version for its inner circle, and just a Joyful Wheel are shown above.

 

A cartoon of a librarian was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Get speechwriting help by talking to a rubber duck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The November 2025 issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Ben Guttmann on page 6 about speechwriting titled Talk It Out and subtitled How explaining a problem to a rubber duck leads to solutions. He has a quotation from a paragraph on page 95 of the 1999 book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas:

“A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else. The other person should look over your shoulder at the screen, and nod his or her head constantly (like a rubber duck bobbing up and down in a bathtub). They do not need to say a word; the simple act of explaining, step by step, what the code is supposed to do often causes the problem to leap off the screen and announce itself.”

 The following paragraph (not included in Ben’s magazine article) adds further:

 “It sounds simple, but in explaining the problem to another person you must explicitly state things that you may take for granted when going through the code yourself. By having to verbalize some of these assumptions, you may suddenly gain new insight into the problem.”

 There also is a Wikipedia article titled Rubber duck debugging. And there is an article by Scott Hanselman on December 10, 2020 titled The Art of Rubber Ducking or Rubber Duck Debugging which describes how:

 “You'll find that getting the problem outside your head, via your mouth, and then back into your ears is often enough to shake brain cells loose and help you solve the issue.

 Rubber Ducking also is great practice in technical communication! Have you ever given a technical talk? There's actually not much distance between explaining a technical issue clearly, correctly, and concisely and giving a talk at a user group or conference!”

 Another article by Max Florschutz at UNUSUAL THINGS on June 14, 2021 is titled Being a Better Writer: The Rubber Duck. Still another article by Charlie Rapple at The SCHOLARLY kitchen for April 24, 2025 is titled Rubber Ducking for Research Communication: Why Explaining to Nobody Helps You Explain to Anybody.

 

 

The Year I Stopped to Notice is a delightful little book by Miranda Keeling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I obtained and read a delightful little 2022 book by Miranda Keeling titled The Year I Stopped to Notice. It could have been subtitled The Joy of Noticing Little Things - which are what can make a speech memorable.  That book has 177 pages and is just 4-7/8’ wide by 6-1/2” high. There is a Google Books preview through page 32. Her introduction begins:

 

“You might be reading this because the cover looked cheerful, or you’re frantically searching for a present for a friend. You might just be marking time in a shop because it’s raining outside and you don’t want to leave yet. Whichever way you found yourself here, hello.

 

It’s the small moments, like the one you’re having right now, that make up this book: a woman in a shop opens a book and reads the introduction. Perhaps she is wearing a yellow dress. Her brown hair is curly. It is swept up with a silver clip in the shape of a shark. It is chilly in the shop, and she places the book down to take a knitted green cardigan out of her bag and put it on. The wool is thin at her right elbow. Perhaps a man reads this page. He sits at his laptop in a café, looking at the book online. He has dark red hair. His hands on the keyboard are freckled. He is avoiding work. Underneath the café table a small elderly dog sleeps across the man’s foot – the dog makes short whining noises at something in its dream, Perhaps one of these people is you. Perhaps you are completely different.

 

Days can feel long, and years fast. Our lives are full, yet at the end of the day when someone asks us what we did, we can barely remember. This book is the result of me stopping to notice the details and finding that ordinary life is extraordinary in its own way. If you’re someone who can find the big picture a little overwhelming and need moments of peace in the storm, or who loves the busy, layered fabric of life and just wants some of it captured to enjoy over coffee, read on.

 

Everywhere I go, I record what I notice: snippets of conversation, images, an atmosphere. I have been captivated by the everyday since I was very small. I grew up in Yorkshire, the Netherlands, America, and London. As my mum and I walked around these places, she would often interrupt a sentence to say: ‘Did you see that?’ I loved the times it turned out that we had spotted the same, small thing. At art college I studied glassmaking. I made miniature sculptures – if you looked closely at them, you could see worlds of colour inside. I carried a notebook everywhere, Then, about seven years ago, I began writing them down instead. Not everything I see is lovely. I live in the world. But that is not what this book is for. You will find the melancholy and the surreal here, but that’s as far as it goes.”

 

 Here are a half-dozen examples from the book:

 

Page 9 from January:

"Little boy on the train: Mama?

His mum: Yes?

Little boy: I never see you brush your hair.

His mum: I do a lot of things you don’t see.

(Pause)

Little boy: Like flying?"

 

Page 44 from March:

“A man on the train sighs as, having meticulously arranged his lunch on his little fold-down table, the woman from the window seat beside him needs the loo.”

 

Page 65 from May:

“A man has stopped on Oxford Street and stands in his socks, as he pours what appears to be green and pink confetti out of his shoes.”

 

Page 117 from August:

“A man outside a yet-to-open piano shop signals frantically to the woman inside to let him in. This is clearly a musical emergency.”

 

Page 137 from October:

“A little girl on a doorstep manages to negotiate eating an entire piece of toast while having her coat put on by her mum.”

 

Page 164 from December:

“Like an opening fan, five people at a bus stop lean sequentially to the left as they try to read the number of the bus coming up the road.

 

There is a 24-minute YouTube video at Carers UK on August 26, 2022 titled Stopping to notice with Miranda Keeling. And there is another newer book (I have not read) from June 2025 by Miranda Keeling titled The Place I’m In: What I see when I stop to notice, which again has a preview at Google Books. Miranda also has a podcast titled Stopping to Notice.

 

Back on February 28, 2014 I blogged about Speech topics from near your neighborhood, and paying attention to things - like a gold Buddha statue sitting on a white concrete bench next to the driveway of a home.

 

The train sign came from here at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Give people a picture to teach them about health

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief and useful article by Pernilla Garmy in the Journal of Research in Nursing on October 23, 2025 titled Reaching beyond words: supporting self-care through visual health education. She says that:

 

“From my own experience as a nurse and educator, I know that there is no single educational format that works for all patients. Some people benefit from verbal dialogue, others prefer detailed written materials. But for many, visual aids are a crucial complement. Pictures can clarify, engage and motivate – especially when literacy is limited or when energy and focus are low due to illness, stress, or comorbidities.

The fact that this resource is printed – not digital – also matters. A physical object can be held, browsed at one’s own pace, and brought along to consultations. It does not require a smartphone, internet access, or digital skills; which may be barriers for some groups. At the same time, digital tools may be more effective in other contexts. The point is: healthcare professionals need a flexible set of educational tools, adapted to the needs, abilities, and preferences of each individual.”

 My PowerPoint cartoon was assembled from those of a nurse and a pain scale at OpenClipArt.  

 

 

A joyous Book of Delights by Ross Gay

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 25, 2025 I had blogged about An intriguing book by Ross Gay with 14 essays about inciting joy. Before that, in 2019, he had published another little 274-page book with 102 essays titled The Book of Delights. There is a preview through page 24 at Google Books. His preface says:

 

“One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights.

 

I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year; begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules mad it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day. 

 

Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up. For instance, I traveled quite a bit this year. I often write in cafes. My mother is often on my mind. Racism is often on my mind. Politics. Pop music. Books. Dreams. Public space. My garden is often on my mind.

 

It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me! Because it is rude not to acknowledge your delights. I’d tell them that though they might not become essayettes, they were still important, and I was grateful to them. Which is to say, I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows – much like love and joy – when I share it.”

 

There is an article by Christina Cala at npr codeswitch on August 19, 2021 titled How Ross Gay Finds Joy in the Smallest of ‘Delights’. And there also is a four-minute YouTube video at AlgonquinBooksTV on November 6, 2018 titled The Book of Delights by Ross Gay where he reads from #80 Tomato on Board and #96 The Marfa Lights.

 

The very brief Essay #56 on page 154 is titled My Life, My Life, My Life, My Life in the Sunshine. It is about the 1976 Roy Ayers song Everybody Loves the Sunshine, which you can listen to here (and find the lyrics). Ross says:

 

“Which delight landed in my lap from the open window of a passing car, and is simply (although the plaintive synth chords and watery triplets betray somewhat the simplicity) an argument for the sunshine, which, true, maybe I am the choir, but I like the argument for its simplicity, which is that everybody loves it , and everybody loves it, and folks get brown in it, and folks get down in it, and most convincingly to me, and that which elevates it to the metaphysical, even the holy: just bees and things and flowers.”

 

The 1974 mural by Dieter M. Weidenbach came from here at Wikimedia Commons. 

 

An article busting ten myths about charismatic speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 29, 2025 I blogged about What makes a speaker charismatic? There is a long, detailed 31-page pdf article by Jan Michalsky and Oliver Niebuhr at Acta Universitasis Carolinae in 2019 which is titled Myth Busted? Challenging What We Think We Know About Charismatic Speech. It has over a hundred references! That article discusses the following ten myths:

 

Myth 1: Charisma makes a difference.

 

Myth 2: Charisma is a divine talent of a few gifted people that only surfaces during a crisis.

 

Myth 3: Charismatic communication is the expression of a charismatic personality.

 

Myth 4: How we say something is more important than what we say.

 

Myth 5: Lower voices are more charismatic.

 

Myth 6: A clear pronunciation supports perceived speaker charisma.

 

Myth 7: Filled pauses are bad for perceived charisma.

 

Myth 8: Belly breathing and an upright posture support speaker charisma.

 

Myth 9: A charismatic performance requires intensive training on the part of the speaker.

 

Myth 10: Engineers are less charismatic.

 

My image was assembled by repeating and modifying one of a carved figure at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia.

 

 

What makes a speaker charismatic?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines charisma as:

 

“a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader)”

 

An article by Nick Morgan at Public Words on May 25, 2021 titled What is Charisma? says that:

 

“It is the expression of strong emotion, emotion directed outward, not inward.  It is focus – focused emotional meaning.  It is awareness of your audience, not obliviousness to it.  And it is energy in service to the moment, the message, and the audience in front of you.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A blog post by Clark Masterson on September 9, 2023 titled A Formula for Charisma says it is Presence + Power + Warmth (as shown above via a Venn diagram). Another blog post by Gary Genard at his The Genard Method on November 17, 2024 is titled Six Easy Ways to be a Speaker with Charisma. He advises to:

 

Make eye contact to gain trust with listeners.

Smile to increase everyone’s enjoyment.

Tell personal stories that listeners can relate to.

Talk to one person, then to that one person [at a time]…

Energize your voice so you reach every listener.

Enjoy yourself.

 

An article by Caren Schnur Neile on pages 16 to 18 of the July 2010 issue of Toastmaster magazine is titled Charisma: The Magic and the Menace. There also is an article by Richard Reid titled Charismatic Public Speaking: Techniques for Delivering Powerful Speeches and Presentations that Captivate Audiences. And there is another 18-page pdf article by Richard Reid at Pinnacle Wellbeing titled Become a More Charismatic You.

 

My cartoon of a speaker was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons – with an eagle from OpenClipArt.

 

Stephen Krupin talks with Dan Heath about what it’s like to be a speechwriter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a brief article at BENNETTink titled Friday Flashback – an Obama speechwriter speaks with an example from a Memorial Day speech. It was written by Stephen Krupin.    

 

And there is a 33-min interview (and a transcript) with Dan Heath at BEHAVIORAL scientist on September 10, 2025 titled What It’s Like to Be…a Speechwriter. There is more about Josh Wheeler in that Memorial Day speech at 13:05. And at 27:40 he mentions using text-to-speech software to check whether the spoken words sound right.

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

An intriguing book by Ross Gay with 14 essays about inciting joy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because the title for this blog begins with Joyful, I sometimes look up book or articles about the topics of joy and delight. There is an intriguing book from 2022 written by Ross Gay titled Inciting Joy: Essays. Google Books has a preview of just the first two essays. The first essay ends:

 

“Now that we’ve defined joy, and concluded it is important, there are two guiding inquiries in this book. First, I mean to investigate what practices, habits, rituals, understandings -you know, the stuff we do and think and believe – make joy more available to us. What in our lives prepares the ground for joy. I mean to try to find out, in other words, what incites joy. And second, I intend to wonder what the feeling of joy makes us do, or how it makes us be. I will wonder how joy makes us act and feel. That’s to say, I wonder what joy incites.

 

Per the first question – what incites joy? This book is a profoundly incomplete effort, and though I talk about pickup basketball and skateboarding and school and time and gardening and Luther Vandross’s cover of the Dionne Warwick hit ‘A House is Not a Home,’ I thought about but didn’t have time to dig all the way into joy and architecture, or joy and sex, or joy and the amateur, or joy and play or memory or foraging or parenting or libraries, etc. I offer them to you.

 

Per the second question – what does joy incite? – I should say, I have a hunch, and that’s why I think this discussion of joy is so important. My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unbounded solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow – which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow – might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.

 

And it’s why I’ve written this book.”

 

 Titles for his essays and their starting page numbers are:

 

The First Incitement [1]

 

Through My Tears I Saw

(Death: The Second Incitement) [11]

 

We Kin

(The Garden: The Third Incitement) [28]

 

Out of Time

(Time: The Fourth Incitement) [43]

 

Share Yor Bucket!

(Skateboarding: The Fifth Incitement) [57]

 

Baby, This Might Be You.

(Laughter: The Sixth Incitement) [66]

 

(Dis)alienation Machinery

(Losing Your Phone: The Seventh Incitement) [82]

 

Free Fruit for All!

(The Orchard: The Eighth Incitement) [94]

 

Insurgent Hoop

(Pickup Basketball: The Ninth Incitement) [112]

 

How Big the Boat

(The Cover: The Tenth Incitement) [137]

 

Went Free

(Dancing: The Twelfth Incitement) [171]

 

Grief Suite

(Falling Apart: The Thirteenth Incitement [176]

 

Oh, My Heart

(Gratitude: The Fourteenth Incitement) [230]

 

There is a 19-minute interview (and transcript) by Brittany Luse at NPR It’s Been a Minute on February 21, 2023 titled Ross Gay on inciting joy while dining with sorrow.

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.