The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking

by Dale Carnegie

When Mr. Ghent spoke of the pleasure his newly acquired skill in public speaking gave him, he touched upon what I believe (more than any other one factor) contributed to his success. It’s true he followed the directions and faithfully did the assignments. But I’m sure he did these things because he wanted to do them, and he wanted to do them because he saw himself as a successful speaker. He projected himself into the future and then worked toward bringing that projection into reality. That is exactly what you must do.

Concentrate your attention on what self-confidence and the ability to talk more effectively will mean to you. Think of what it may mean to you socially, of the friends it will bring, of your increased capacity to be of service in your civic, social, or church group, of the influence you will be able to exert in your business. In short, it will prepare you for leadership.

“In almost any subject, your passion for the subject will save you. If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it. If you wish to be good, you will be good. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich. If you wish to be learned, you will be learned. Only then you must really wish these things and wish them with exclusiveness and not wish one hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.”

Learning to speak effectively to groups brings other benefits than merely the ability to make formal public speeches. As a matter of fact, if you never give a formal public speech in your life, the benefits to be derived from this training are manifold. For one thing, public speaking training is the royal road to self-confidence. Once you realize that you can stand up and talk intelligently to a group of people, it is logical to assume that you can talk to individuals with greater confidence and assurance.

Try your best to develop an ability to let others look into your head and heart. Learn to make your thoughts, your ideas, clear to others, individually, in groups, in public. You will find, as you improve in your effort to do this, that you—your real self—are making an impression, an impact, on people such as you never made before.

The will to succeed must be a vital part of the process of becoming an effective speaker.

So, to succeed in this work, you need the qualities that are essential in any worthwhile endeavor: desire amounting to enthusiasm, persistence to wear away mountains, and the self-assurance to believe you will succeed.

Before you can begin to develop your conversational skills you must have confidence.

So almost all that was said in the first three chapters of this book will be useful in giving you the security to mix with others and to voice your opinions in an informal social group. Once you are eager to express your ideas even on a limited scale, you will begin to search your experience for material that can be converted to conversation. Here a wonderful thing happens—your horizons begin to expand and you see your life take on new meaning.

Now we enter the area of the communicative process as it affects our jobs. As salesmen, managers, clerks, department heads, group leaders, teachers, ministers, nurses, executives, doctors, lawyers, accountants, and engineers, we are all charged with the responsibility of explaining specialized areas of knowledge and giving professional instructions.

Our ability to make these instructions in clear, concise language may often be the yardstick used by our superiors in judging our competence. How to think quickly and verbalize adroitly is a skill acquired in presenting speeches of information, but this skill is by no means limited to formal speaking—it can be used every day by every one of us.

When we learn any new thing, like French or golf or speaking in public, we never advance steadily. We do not improve gradually. We do it by waves, by abrupt starts and sudden stops. Then we remain stationary a time, or we may even slip back and lose some of the ground we have previously gained. These periods of stagnation, or retrogression, are well known by all psychologists; they have been named “plateaus in the curve of learning.” Students of effective speaking will sometimes be stalled, perhaps for weeks, on one of these plateaus. Work as hard as they may, they cannot seem to get off it. The weak ones give up in despair. Those with grit persist, and they find that suddenly, almost overnight, without knowing how or why it has happened, they have made great progress. They have lifted from the plateau like an airplane. Abruptly they have acquired naturalness, force, and confidence in their speaking.

If you will but persevere, you will soon eradicate everything, including this initial fear; and that will be initial fear, and nothing more. After the first few sentences, you will have control of yourself. You will be speaking with positive pleasure.

I have known and carefully watched literally thousands of persons trying to gain self-confidence and the ability to talk in public. Those that succeeded were, in only a few instances, persons of unusual brilliancy. For the most part, they were the ordinary run of businessmen you will find in your own home town. But they kept on. More exceptional men sometimes got discouraged or too deeply immersed in money-making, and they did not get very far; but the ordinary individual with grit and singleness of purpose, at the end of the road, was at the top.

A few summers ago, I started out to scale a peak in the Austrian Alps called the Wilder Kaiser. Baedaker said that the ascent was difficult, and a guide was essential for amateur climbers. A friend and I had none, and we were certainly amateurs; so a third party asked us if we thought we were going to succeed. “Of course,” we replied. “What makes you think so?” he inquired. “Others have done it without guides,” I said, “so I know it is within reason, and I never undertake anything thinking defeat.” That is the proper psychology for anything from speaking to an assault on Mt. Everest.

The most valuable thing that most members acquire from training in our classes is an increased confidence in themselves, an additional faith in their ability to achieve. What is more important for one’s success in almost any undertaking? Emerson wrote, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” That is more than a well-turned literary phrase; it is the road map to success.

If you put enthusiasm into learning how to speak more effectively you will find that the obstacles in your path will disappear.

There are four ways to develop speech material that guarantees audience attention. If you follow these four steps in your preparation you will be well on the way to commanding the eager attention of your listeners.

FIRST Limit Your Subject

This is true of any subject, whether it be salesmanship, baking cakes, tax exemptions, or ballistic missiles. You must limit and select before you begin, narrow your subject down to an area that will fit the time at your disposal.

In a short talk, less than five minutes in duration, all you can expect is to get one or two main points across. In a longer talk, up to thirty minutes, few speakers ever succeed if they try to cover more than four or five main ideas.

SECOND Develop Rese...

It is far easier to give a talk that skims over the surface than to dig down for facts. But when you take the easy way you make little or no impression on the audience. After you have narrowed your subject, then the next step is to ask yourself questions that will deepen your understanding and prepare you to talk with authority on the topic you have chosen: “Why do I believe this? When did I ever s...

Questions like these call for answers that will give you reserve power, the power that makes people sit up and take notice. It was said of Luther Burbank, the botanical wizard, that he produced a million plant specimens to find one or two superlative ones. It is the same with a...

“I always try to get ten times as much information as I use, sometimes a hundred times as much,” said John Gunther not long ago. The author of the bestselling “Inside” books was speaking of...

A surgeon friend of mine said: “I can teach you in ten minutes how to take out an appendix. But it will take me four years to teach you what to do if something goes wrong.” So it is with speaking: Always prepare so that you are ready for any emergency, such as a change of emphasis because of a previous speaker’s remarks, or a well-aimed question from the audience in the discussion period following your talk.

You, too, can acquire reserve power by selecting your topic as soon as possible. Don’t put it off until a day or two before you have to speak. If you decide on the topic early you will have the inestimable advantage of having your subconscious mind working for you. At odd moments of the day when you are free from your work, you can explore your subject, refine the ideas you want to convey to your audience.

a speech is to be of any importance at all, the speaker should live with the theme or message, turning it over and over in his mind. He will be surprised at how many useful illustrations or ways of putting his case will come to him as he walks the street, or reads a newspaper, or gets ready for bed, or wakes up in the morning. Mediocre speaking very often is merely the inevitable and the appropriate reflection of mediocre thinking, and the consequence of imperfect acquaintance with the subject in hand.”

Charles F. Kettering, whose inventive genius sparked the growth of General Motors, was one of America’s most renowned and heartwarming speakers. Asked if he ever wrote out any part or all of his talks, he replied: “What I have to say is, I believe, far too important to write down on paper. I prefer to write on my audience’s mind, on their emotions, with every ounce of my being. A piece of paper cannot stand between me and those I want to impress.”

THIRD Fill Your Talk with Illustrations and Examples

How can we acquire this most important technique of using illustrative material? There are five ways of doing this: Humanize, Personalize, Specify, Dramatize, and Visualize.

Pictures, Pictures. Pictures. They are as free as the air you breathe. Sprinkle them through your talks, your conversation, and you will be more entertaining, more influential.

Did you ever pause to observe that the proverbs that are passed on from generation to generation are almost all visual sayings? “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” “It never rains but it pours.” “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” And you will find the same picture element in almost all the similes that have lived for centuries and grown hoary with too much use: “Sly as a fox.” “Dead as a doornail.” “Flat as a pancake.” “Hard as a rock.”

Make your eye appeals definite and specific. Paint mental pictures that stand out as sharp and clear as a stag’s antlers silhouetted against the setting sun. For example, the word “dog” calls up a more or less definite picture of such an animal—perhaps a cocker spaniel, a Scottish terrier, a St. Bernard, or a Pomeranian. Notice how much more distinct an image springs into your mind when a speaker says “bulldog”—the term is less inclusive. Doesn’t “a brindle bulldog” call up a still more explicit picture? Is it not more vivid to say “a black Shetland pony” than to talk of “a horse”? Doesn’t “a white bantam rooster with a broken leg” give a much more definite and sharp picture than merely the word “fowl”?

This is true of everyday conversation as well. In fact, all that has been said in this chapter about the use of detail in talks before groups applies to general conversation. It is detail that makes conversation sparkle. Anyone who is intent upon making himself a more effective conversationalist may profit by following the advice contained in this chapter. Salesmen, too, will discover the magic of detail when applied to their sales presentations. Those in executive positions, housewives, and teachers will find that giving instructions and dispensing information will be greatly improved by the use of concrete, factual detail.

Vitality, aliveness, enthusiasm—these are the first qualities I have always considered essential in a speaker. People cluster around the energetic speaker like wild turkeys around a field of autumn wheat.

How do you acquire this vital delivery that will keep the attention of your audience? In the course of this chapter I will give you three sovereign ways to help you put enthusiasm and excitement into your speaking.

FIRST Choose Subjects You Are E...

Almost all speakers wonder whether the topic they have chosen will interest the audience. There is only one way to make sure that they will be interested: stoke the fires of your enthusiasm for the subject and you will have no difficulty holding the interest of a group of people.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, you cannot help but succeed if you choose the right topic for you. One area of topics is sure-fire: talk about your convictions! Surely you have strong beliefs about some aspect of life around you. You don’t have to search far and wide for these subjects— they generally lie on the surface of your stream of consciousness, because you often think about them.

SECOND Relive the Feelings You Have About Your Topic

THIRD Act in Earnest

DELIVERING THE TALK

Would you believe it? There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it. This chapter will deal with the last of these—how we say it.

FIRST Crash Through Your Shell of Self-Consciousness

As Marshal Foch says of the art of war, “it is simple enough in its conception, but unfortunately complicated in its execution.” The biggest stumbling block, of course, is stiffness, not only of the physical, but of the mental as well, a kind of hardening of the categories that comes with growing up.

The problem of teaching or of training adults in delivery is not one of superimposing additional characteristics; it is largely one of removing impediments, of getting them to speak with the same naturalness that they would display if someone were to knock them down.

My point is that once you let your hair down before a group you are not likely to hold yourself back when it comes to the normal, everyday expression of your opinions whether to individuals or before groups.

SECOND Don’t Try to Imitate Others—Be Yourself

There is something besides the mere words in a talk which counts. It is the flavor with which they are delivered. It is not so much just what you say as how you say it.