A terrible way for getting confident to speak in public

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On June 21, 2024 Zach Weinersmith published a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic titled Star with the following captions:

 

“In closing, I wish to note that every asterisk used in this 

   presentation was a different photograph of my anus.

I increased the contrast until they just looked like stars,

   but knowing their origin is what gave me

   the confidence to speak to you this evening.

Thank you, goodnight, God bless you all,

   and the question marks were actually my balls.”

 

That’s much worse than the old advice I blogged about on July 30, 2009 in a post titled Who said to picture your audience naked? There also is an article by Chamin Ajjan at CNBC Make It on June 7, 2024 titled ‘Picture your audience naked’ is bad public speaking advice that ‘doesn’t work in real life’ – here’s what to do instead.

 

Naked audiences and Savage Chickens

Recently the silly advice to imagine your public speaking audience naked was the subject for one of Doug Savage’s wonderful, single-panel Savage Chickens cartoons. I think of Doug as being the Canadian follow-up to Gary Larson and his Far Side. The talking block of bean curd in this cartoon from October 23rd is known as Timmy Tofu. Back on February 11, 2009 Timmy wrote a valentine saying “I want to see you naked.” At first I thought Timmy was a desktop computer tower. When he gets drunk he does too, as seen in a January 8, 2009 cartoon. Doug has published a couple other cartoons about motivational speakers on March 13, 2009 and February 4, 2008.

Speaking of naked audiences, there is a footnote on the bottom of page 3 of Scott Berkun’s new book, Confessions of a Public Speaker regarding my previous blog posts about that fun but useless bit of advice coming from Sir Winston Churchill. It reads:

“I asked more than a dozen experts, and while none knew the origins of the advice, Richard I. Garber tracked down a mention in expert James C. Humes’s book The Sir Winston Method (Quill) connecting Churchill to it.”

My first blog post seems to be the only place on the entire web where a cartoon containing full-frontal nudity was used to discuss this topic.

Winston Churchill also can be blamed for advice about rehearsing in front of a mirror

In a recent blog post titled Never Imagine Your Audience Naked (and other speaking myths debunked) Aileen Bennett said that: “…Churchill apparently never gave a speech without practicing in a mirror first...” When I commented that he also gets the blame for imagining the audience naked, she replied that much of the public speaking advice in the UK is rightly or wrongly attributed to Churchill.

Is that old practice habit used by Sir Winston Churchill good advice? Not really. It wasn’t a terrible idea for seeing what your gestures and body language look like, back when filming yourself would have required a camera operator and a long wait for processing.

On page 77 of The Confident Speaker, Harrison Monarth and Larina Kase say about practice to:

“Make it as realistic as possible. The mirror is also a helpful tool, but to see what you really look like, a video camera is better.”

On page 70 of his book, The Elements of Great Public Speaking, J. Lyman MacInnes says:

“Do not rehearse in front of a mirror. You’ll spend far too much time and energy looking at yourself rather than concentrating on content and delivery, all the while forgetting that you’re actually seeing things backward in any event.”

You can play back a video recording repeatedly to focus either on looking at your gestures or listening to your voice. In another post I pointed out that Stephan Pastis even made fun of using a mirror in one of his cartoons.

Maybe the only way to get rid of that advice about practicing in front of a mirror is to point out that Churchill’s old nemesis, Adolph Hitler, also: “…perfected his delivery by rehearsing in front of mirrors and carefully choreographing his display of emotions.”

Was Churchill just joking when he said he imagined the audience was naked?

In my previous post on this topic I quoted from page 17 in Chapter 2 (Fear is Your Friend) of James C. Humes’s 1991 book The Sir Winston Method that:

“By the way, Churchill, as a psychological antidote, used to look out at his audience and imagine that they were all naked.”

Mr. Humes continued by saying that:

“Actually Churchill worked out a more practical formula to master fear.”

You can read his book for details of the rest of his Churchill-based advice in the following three paragraphs, titled Mask Your Mannerisms, Don’t Make Excuses, and Master Your Material.

So, Mr. Humes clearly didn’t think much of just imagining the audience naked. (Neither did Denise Graveline in a post on her The Eloquent Woman blog on this August 26).

But, was Churchill being serious when he said that? Perhaps he was only joking. It certainly is possible that people have been passing on as serious advice what originally was intended as a joke. Maybe that’s why Winston is barely smiling in the picture shown above.

In a very long blog post on The Mysterious Dread of Public Speaking Mark Dillof claims that:

“Dale Carnegie recommends, in one of his primers of public speaking, that the fearful speaker imagine that each and every person in his or her audience are sitting there stark naked.”

He doesn’t say which one though. I looked, but couldn’t find it by a Google Book Search either in The Art of Public Speaking or The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking. However, in the 2007 book Get 'Em Laughing: Public Speaking Humor, Quotes and Illustrations by E. Gene Davis, on page 70 he said of his wife that:

“…She told me it was an old trick learned many years ago in a Dale Carnegie Public Speaking course. She was told to imagine that her audience was naked.”

So, perhaps the same advice was promulgated by someone in the Dale Carnegie organization.

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill imagined that his audience was naked

Back on July 29 Scott Berkun, who is writing a book called Confessions of a Public Speaker, asked for research help on his blog. He wanted to know who first suggested that speakers imagine that their audience was naked.

He said that he had looked in Ron Hoff’s 1992 book I Can See You Naked: a fearless guide to making great presentations, but that although Mr. Hoff debunked that advice he did not offer a source for it. Scott asked: “If anyone can dig up a reference, or even a source older than Hoff, definitely let me know.”

That same day I answered Scott’s exact question via a comment on his blog post. Using a Google book search I pointed out that Dorothy Sarnoff, in her book Speech Can Change Your Life, 1970, said on page 199 that: “Winston Churchill overcame his early fear of audiences by imagining that each of them was sitting there naked.”

I also referred him to two other more recent books which turned up via Google:

Dorothy Leeds, PowerSpeak, 2003, page 33, “Winston Churchill liked to imagine that each member of the audience was naked.”

G. Michael Campbell, Bulletproof Presentations, 2008, page 109: “Winston Churchill is said to have controlled his nervousness before a speech by imagining his audience naked.”
-->The next day I posted on this blog. In the next few weeks I did not hear back from Scott. Then, on August 18 Lisa Braithwaite posted on her Speak Schmeak blog that Scott had emailed her and asked her (and her readers) for further help. She quoted Scott’s email as saying that one reader of her blog (me) had dug up some mentions of Churchill, but they're from books with no references. Note that the question now has been changed to ask for more. She did not answer his question, and had no replies to her post so far.

I found it mildly hilarious that Scott didn’t ask me if I could get any further on the topic. However, I posted another comment on his blog and pointed out that I did not find the naked audience topic in either of two books: Churchill By Himself (the definitive collection of quotations) edited by Richard Langworth and The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill edited by James C. Humes. I suggested that Scott should ask the Churchill mavens (particularly Humes).

James C. Humes has made a career from his books on the topics of public speaking and Churchill. I have a copy of his book Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln (2002).

Dorothy Leeds book, PowerSpeak does not have footnotes or a list of references. It does have a bibliography though, which includes two other books by James C. Humes, Speaker's Treasury of Anecdotes About the Famous (1985), and Podium Humor (1975). Churchill certainly is famous, and would be expected to show up in a book of anecdotes.

The Boise Public Library did not have that anecdotes book, but the Nampa library over in the next county did. Neither local library had Podium Humor. I requested the anecdotes book, but when I got the 1978 version was dismayed to find it did not mention naked audiences. However, I got several other Humes books from the Boise Public Library.

Page 17 of James C. Humes’s 1991 public speaking book, The Sir Winston Method (subtitled the five secrets of speaking the language of leadership states that:

“By the way, Churchill, as a psychological antidote, used to look at his audience and imagine they all were naked.“

He doesn’t provide a reference or footnote, but probably can be trusted since he also wrote a biography called Churchill: Speaker of the Century (1980). So, I am pretty sure that Winston Churchill gets the blame fame for imagining the audience naked.

When did he come up with this antidote? He was elected to the House of Commons in 1900, and obviously would have been speaking there. Then he became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. So, it could easily be over a century old!

What can we learn from this search? First, it matters what search strategy or strategies you use. Second, the answer may not come from the most obvious place. Third, it may not come from the most obvious person. Lisa is better known than I am, but neither she nor her readers delivered in this particular case. Fourth, it’s not all out there on the Web – at some point you will need to step away from the keyboard and actually look in books at a library.

Who said to picture your audience naked?

In a post yesterday on his Speaker Confessions blog Scott Berkun asked where the questionable advice about picturing your audience naked came from. He said he had already tried the following and come up empty:

1.Asked Toastmasters International Headquarters
2. Tried various Google/Internet searches
3. Looked in over 50 books on public speaking
4. Asked some presentation experts

I took a crack at his question, and found an answer via Google Book Search. It makes sense, since that source was someone very well-known for his mastery of public speaking.

In Dorothy Sarnoff’s book, Speech Can Change Your Life, 1970, on page 199 it says that: “Winston Churchill overcame his early fear of audiences by imagining that each of them was sitting there naked.”

A similar quote (with two additional celebrities) also appears in Dorothy Leeds book, PowerSpeak, 2003, on page 33: “Winston Churchill liked to imagine that each member of the audience was naked. Franklin Roosevelt pretended that the members all had holes in their socks. Carol Burnett thinks of them sitting on the commode.”

I much prefer Franklin Roosevelt’s image choice. By the way, the cartoon above is a color version of the only nude image we have sent outside of our Solar System (the little plaque on the Pioneer 11 spacecraft).