Making a Storytelling Connection

The June issue of the Communication Currents web magazine from the National Communication Association has an interesting article by Trudy Hanson on Making the Storytelling Connection. It includes many links.

One link discusses the five languages of storytelling, which also apply to public speaking.

That issue also contains other articles about Communicating about Sex Education Through Stories and Is Technology Killing Storytellers?

The century-old photo shows children at a library listening to a legend.

Public speaking fears in Winnipeg

Back in 1993 three researchers (Murray F. Stein, John R. Walker, and David R. Forde) at the University of Manitoba did a telephone poll about fear of public speaking. It was done as part of an annual community survey using a sample of about 500 people in Winnipeg. Results were reported in a 1996  article, “Public Speaking Fears in a Community Sample - Prevalence, Impact on Functioning, and Diagnostic Classification” published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. You can read the abstract here.

167 of the 499 people said they were much more nervous (or uncomfortable) than other people about speaking to a large audience. These 34% were considered to have a substantial fear of public speaking.  Another 24% of the 499 said they were somewhat more nervous than other people. (Only 59 of the 167, or 12% of the overall sample, rated themselves as that nervous when instead speaking to a small group of familiar people).

Those with a substantial fear of public speaking reported having the percentages of five anxious thoughts (cognitions) shown above.

People with a substantial fear of public speaking also reported it having the serious impacts shown above.

They also tried to describe when the fear of speaking started, and found that 50% had it by age 13, 75% by age 17, and 90% by age 20. I’d previously mentioned those results agree with more recent ones using a larger sample.  

In 2003 a press release and a report from Emory University (in Atlanta) about using virtual reality therapy for fear of public speaking mentioned data from that survey as background information:

“The fear of public speaking is common in up to 88 percent of individuals with social phobia, and 34 percent of people in the general population.”

More recently on eHow that result was restated as:

“In 2003, Emory University reported that 34 percent of people panic at the thought of speaking in public...”

Finally, on May 31st at Woman’sDay that result was described as:

“According to research from Emory University, the fear of public speaking is prevalent in up to 34 percent of the general population.”

That’s not just a horse of a different color - it’s completely mythical. By now it’s lost when, where, and who was responsible for the survey. (I emailed Professor Rothbaum at Emory to check if they had done a survey there, and they hadn’t). The Woman’sDay quote already was repeated on June 14th by Bill Burniece. The moral is to check the source before spreading a fictitious statistic.

Public speaking isn’t opera

Last week I saw a blog post by Allison Shapira about how public speaking is not opera. She pointed out two of the biggest differences. First, in public speaking you typically are responsible for creating your material. In opera you are interpreting words and music written by someone else. Second, a speech is like an enlarged conversation, while an opera is a performance. An opera singer seeks perfection, not just excellence. He or she is often is helped by a hidden prompter. Many aspects of public speaking are similar to opera though, as shown in the following table.

Therefore you can learn a lot about speaking from watching and listening to someone who has sung opera. When I joined Capitol Club Toastmasters I encountered Jim Poston, who had a Masters in Opera Performance from the Boston Conservatory.  He had been a TV news anchorman both in Laredo, Texas and Boise, Idaho. Jim told us some amazing Midwestern tall tales, including one about getting away with murder.

He’s a graduate student in Department of Communication at Boise State University, where he’s working on his second masters degree. Jim also is on the adjunct faculty of the department of Communication at the College of Western Idaho. This summer he’s teaching Fundamentals of Oral Communication.

The image of an opera singer is from here.

Is your speech freshly ground or stale from a jar?

Freshly ground peanut butter is great when compared with the staler, sugary stuff that comes out of a jar. (I get mine at the bulk food section in the WinCo Foods supermarket downtown). Similarly, a freshly prepared speech with your own content, tailored for a specific audience, is far better than a stale one borrowed from other sources.

On Tuesday I gave an Introduction to Stainless Steels and Corrosion at the NACE Intermountain Section meeting in Salt Lake City. I’d previously spoken to their Sun Valley Symposium in January 2010. Only 6 people in the audience (mostly officers) of 30 had heard my presentation before.

I had updated my discussion of service environments to include the drinking water for the Salt Lake City metro area. Their surface water sources are mountain streams and melted snow, but during the summer they also depend on ground water from wells. Each stainless steel can tolerate a certain chloride content (depending on temperature) before crevice or pitting corrosion becomes a problem.

Professor Stephen Boyd has discussed several ways for keeping your speech material fresh.

Learn to ignore these audience behaviors

Yesterday Gideon Rachman’s blog at the Financial Times discussed The art of public speaking. He previously spent 15 years at The Economist, and now also writes a weekly column on foreign affairs. Gideon discussed how some people do unnerving things that you should learn to ignore:

“....When speaking about the future of Europe at St.Antony’s College, Oxford, a couple of months ago, I was hugely disconcerted to see a woman, sitting near the front, who kept screwing up her face in disagreement and contempt, as I droned on. I became convinced that she was a professor of economics, appalled by my ignorance. Later, I made inquiries and I discovered that she was actually a former graduate student from the 1960s, with pronounced left-wing views and a very mobile face, who comes to almost all public events at St.Antony’s.”

“When I gave a lecture at the London School of Economics, also this year, a member of the audience fell asleep and began to snore noisily. I caught the eye of his wife, who was sitting next to him, and she shrugged and looked embarrassed. Every now and then she would nudge him and he would fall silent – only to start up again a few minutes later. It really is quite difficult to rise above this sort of thing.”

On Tuesday I spoke at the NACE Intermountain Section meeting in Salt Lake City. My topic was an introduction to stainless steels and corrosion. I’d given basically the same presentation at their Sun Valley Symposium in January 2010. Before I began I asked the audience to raise their hands if they had attended the other meeting. About 6 of 30 did, and I told them it was OK to go to sleep, but not to snore.

A river full of business information

The Harvard Business Review (HBR) magazine hosts a blog called The Conversation that provides a constant stream of excellent business information on many topics like communication, presentations, managing yourself, personal effectiveness, etc. I look at it the whole river via Google Reader.  

Yesterday they had a story by Nick Morgan on Why You Must Rehearse. It’s a cautionary tale that’s both hilarious and pathetic. There also was a post by Dorie Clark on How to Recover from a Blunder.

The day before they had a post by Jerry Weissman on how Misdirection is for Magicians, Not Presenters. He gave advice about when to look at your slides. In May Jerry posted A Presenter’s Guide to Remembering What to Say.

There also have been posts by Whitney Johnson on The Essence of a Great Presentation, Ellen Galinsky on Getting Beyond Fear, and J. D. Schramm on How to Overcome Communication Fears.

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture...

What were you doing on the evening of September 16, 1963? My siblings and I were sitting on the sofa in the family room. We were watching the premier episode of a new science fiction television show. The picture on our 1950 black and white set had lost horizontal and vertical hold, so as usual it needed to be very carefully adjusted back to normal. My younger brother Tom got up and began walking over to the TV. He froze when he heard an eerie, echoing, Control Voice solemnly intone:

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity.

For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits.”

You can watch a YouTube video of that opening here.

I wonder how many other people whose TV sets really needed adjustment were petrified the first time they heard that eerie voice at the opening for The Outer Limits. 

What have you tried as a compelling opening for your speech?