Showing everyone that public speaking is your bag

You can buy a tote, beach, or gym bag from cafepress to let the world know that you love public speaking. They have several other types like:

PUBLIC SPEAKING
SUPER POWERS 

Public Speakers Do It
In Front of an Audience

WARNING:
PUBLIC SPEAKER
WITH AN ATTITUDE

“Public speaking is easy”
(with a green image of George Bush)

(Square Symbols)
Eat
Sleep
Public Speaking

(Round Symbols)
Peace
Love
Public speaking

They also have some less happy ones like:

Ask me about my Social Anxiety

There is no “I” in anxiety.
Oh, wait, yes there is.
Oh my God oh my God!

Phobias Tote Bag - the ABC’s of Phobias     
(from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America)

Spouting Nonsense - the very first Spoutly is awarded to Brian Tracy

After watching the Emmy Awards on September 22nd, and hearing about the latest Nobel Prizes, I’ve decided to start handing out an award to those who spout nonsense. It is called a Spoutly.

 Brian Tracy has cranked out a cartload of motivational books. On October 7, 2013 he posted a two-minute YouTube video on how to Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking that says:

“According to the Guinness Book of Records, 54% of American adults rank public speaking ahead of the fear of death among life’s major fears.”

That claim sounds specific, authoritative, and references a well-known publication. It is hard to refute conclusively, given that he didn’t bother to identify which year or edition it supposedly came from. (When I looked in Worldcat I found that the 1994 version for The Guinness Book of Records was  the 40th edition).

A caption on that YouTube video invites you to go to his web site and download a free chapter of his 2010 book No Excuses: The Power of Self-Discipline. On page 109  of that book it instead says:

“According to the Book of Lists, 54% of adults rate the fear of public speaking ahead of the fear of death.”

Why doesn’t the reference in the video match the one in the book?

On June 6, 2011 I blogged about How to recognize a fictitious statistic, and noted that claimed 54% does not really appear in the Book of Lists (which instead says 41%). It is a ManBearPig statistic - half man, half bear, and half pig. Mr. Tracy also had made the same claim on page 42 of his 2008 book, Speak to Win: How to Present with Power in Any Situation, which also warned on page 19 that:

“Poor preparation before an intelligent, discerning audience automatically downgrades your credibility - your ethos.”

On January 1, 2013 I blogged about That mystical 54% of adults who fear public speaking, and noted that on a CD in a set called Public Speaking Survival Kit he had said:

“Everyone grows up with a fear of public speaking. In fact, according to surveys and the Guinness Book of Records and the Book of Questions and Answers, 54% of adults fear public speaking more than they fear death. That’s how much there’s fear for public speaking.” 

When I looked in the current Guinness World Records 2012 book at my local public library I found no index entry for either fear or speaking.

The spouting whale for the Spoutly is derived from the Arms of Baron Ackner.

This year POWERtalk International celebrated its 75th anniversary

That public speaking organization began back in 1938 as a women’s organization, the International Toastmistress Clubs (later acronymed as ITC). Toastmasters International was founded in 1924, but it remained all male until 1973.

A decade or so after Toastmasters began to admit women ITC began to decline. It began to admit men, has been renamed and relocated, but as POWERtalk International it still is around. You can read the new president’s installation address here.

Back in 2009 I blogged about Two sides of a coin: Toastmasters International and POWERtalk International. I saw a May newspaper article from New Zealand about the anniversary.

Does it matter who said that?

Of course it does! A well chosen quotation lets you express an idea using pithy words borrowed from someone credible. But, preparation is vital before you use one.

In his Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic on October 6th Zach Weiner wickedly suggested that a fun activity would be to go through a motivational speech and change the source for all quotations to history’s villains. His example was to switch the one shown above from Tony Robbins to Stalin. I looked in the Yale Book of Quotations and found three more that easily could be changed.

Josef Stalin actually said that.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said this.

Adolph Hitler said that. 

A poll done in Providence found 41% of adults feared public speaking

Halloween is coming in three weeks, so it’s time to scare people with surveys about their fears. I ran across results from a telephone poll of 500 adults done by SurveyUSA for WLNE-TV in the Providence, Rhode Island area back on November 10, 2005. They asked just this single question:

“Do you personally have a fear of public speaking?”

in with five about sex offenders and another topic. 

Results are shown above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). 41% feared public speaking, 58% didn’t, and 1% weren’t sure. The sample was 53% female, and 46% of them feared public speaking, while only 37% of the males did. There was not much effect of age. 42% of those aged 18 to 34 feared speaking, 40% aged 35 to 54 feared it, and 42% of those age 55 and older feared it. Ethnically the sample was 87% white, and 41% feared public speaking. Of the 6% Hispanic (just 30 people), only 31% feared public speaking. (The rest of that sample was 4% black, and 3% other).

The 41% found in this survey very close to the 40% found by the 2001 US Gallup poll. I am not sure why this poll data was released on Veteran’s Day of 2005.

When I think of Providence, I think of the fictional town of Quahog based on it, which is the setting for the adult TV cartoon show Family Guy.

Hiding data in a Harlequin PowerPoint chart

In his Make a Powerful Point blog on October 4th Gavin McMahon asked Are you chart smart? 3 stupid charting mistakes. The second mistake he showed was a Harlequin chart with unnecessary multiple colors (a different one for each bar) like in the costume shown above.

That vertical bar chart also had vertical captions, which are undesirable since they force your audience into tilting their heads sideways to read them, as is shown above in a painting. This posture is known as the Goren Lean (from Vincent D’Nofrio’s portrayal of Detective Robert Goren in the TV show Law and Order - Criminal Intent).  

PowerPoint has lots of options for making bad charts. An example is shown above. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). Data for it came from an August blog post. I’ve redone it using vertical bars, each both with a different color and texture, and a water droplet background (which looks more like a sponge). The vertical axis should be labeled percent, but I left off that helpful detail. I also left off the title that identified the data and source. And, of course, the vertical captions are in the silly Comic Sans font.

A better version with horizontal bars and captions is shown above. You don’t have to lean to read it, and you can tell what it’s about.

The Harlequin image came from Wikimedia Commons. You can see other versions of the Goren Lean here.

Now we’re only number 46!

On September 15th I blogged about being number 44 on Public Speaking 101: The Top Online Resources, a web page list at the Masters in Communication web site. Now an updated version of that list has 103 entries, and I've slipped down to number 46. Should that list now be called Public Speaking 103?

I looked a bit further at their web page with a Detailed List of Campuses that have a Masters in Communication Program, and am even less impressed by their level of detail. For the state of Washington just three universities in the Seattle area were listed, but they missed the University of Washington (who came to mind since on August 31st in Seattle they clobbered the Boise State University football team 38 to 6). They also missed Washington State University.

In the bay area of California they just listed California State University East Bay, but missed both San Jose State University and San Francisco State University. They also missed the University of California campuses in Davis and Santa Barbara.

Don’t rely on a single list. Look around, and you’ll probably find another.For public speaking blogs, look at Alltop Speaking.