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Sometimes the goal is a deliberate mismatch. The host wants a challenging presentation that will inform people of opinions they don’t want to hear to rile them up. That’s fine, provided at least the host and the speaker are in agreement and whatever survey is done takes this into consideration. Satisfaction means something very different if the goal was to provoke rather than merely to please.
This points out the real challenge in evaluating speakers. Whoever it is that invites someone to speak to an audience has to sort out: What they (the organizer) want from the speaker. What the audience wants from the speaker. What the speaker is capable of doing. If these three things are not lined up well, the survey will always have problems (e.g., Mussolini in London).
Those last two questions sort out the Dr. Fox dilemma of how well liked speakers were versus how much substance attendees felt the speaker offered them. And if you really want to know the value of a speaker, ask the students a week or a month later. A lecture that might have seemed amazing or boring five minutes after it ended could have surprisingly different value for people later on.
If the goal is to change people’s behavior in the long term, you have to study the long-term impacts of whatever lectures or courses people are taking.
However, it’s quite easy today to get feedback on public speaking. In fact, you can do this right now: Grab a video camera. Open your notes or slides for a talk you know (the Gettysburg Address works in a pinch). Videotape yourself presenting it. Five minutes will do just fine. Imagine you have an audience on the wall opposite you, who you should be making eye contact with, and go for it. Then sit down, perhaps with your favorite alcoholic beverage (or seven), and watch.
If you’re too scared to watch yourself speak, how can you expect your audience to watch you? The golden rule applies: don’t ask people to listen to something you haven’t listened to yourself.
You can delete the video. You cannot delete an hour of wasted time from people’s lives.
If you don’t like what you see, make it shorter. Go for 30 seconds — short, commercial-length material — and practice it until you can do it well. Then add more. If something feels consistently stupid, take it out and repeat. You will always get better each time you practice something, even if it seems otherwise.
When I get feedback from an event organizer that’s difficult to interpret, I’ll compare it with the videotape. I always want to match my sense of how it felt to me to what it actually looked like to the audience.
There’s too much going on when you’re doing an intense activity like sports or speaking to be fully aware of what’s happening as it happens.
If you’re intimidated by critiquing yourself, make the video and give it to a trusted friend who you know will give you honest, constructive feedback.
To try to learn creates the possibility to fail. And I had only recently recovered from a major, near felonious, catastrophe.
Students are always at more risk than their teachers, which helps explain some students’ delinquent behavior. They are afraid of failing, or being criticized and embarrassed in front of the class, so they reject the teacher first.
Within an afternoon, I was driving manual transmission. I even made a left turn safely into traffic. I was the first kid I knew who could do it, and I learned to love it so much I still drive manual transmission to this day.
All successful teachers must consider these four important questions: How many understand? How many will remember later? How many try to apply the lesson in the real world? How many will succeed?
There are three things my brother did that anyone trying to teach must do, and it’s no surprise that they’re easier to do with a smaller number of students: Make it active and interesting. Start with an insight that interests the student. Adapt to how the student responds to #1 and #2. The bad news: applying these rules always takes more time. The good news: any time at all you spend pays off.
The reason: as difficult as lecturing is, giving the audience things to do is much more difficult.
By contrast, the best teachers focus on the students’ needs. They strive to create an environment where all the pieces students need — emotional confidence, physical comfort, and intellectual curiosity — are present at the same time.
The teacher can achieve this through exercises, games, and challenges where he plays a supporting rather than a primary role.
As Donald A. Bligh advises in his book, What’s the Use of Lectures? (Jossey-Bass): If you want to teach a behavior skill, at some stage the student should practice it. If you are training athletes to run 100 meters, at some point in that training they should practice running 100 meters…. You might think this principle is obvious. And so it is to ordinary people. But it is quite beyond some of the most intelligent people our educational system has produced.
This explains why many professors and gurus who are fantastic lecturers are somehow awful teachers. When their “students” leave, they don’t know how to apply anything they heard in the lecture. Given the lecturer’s brilliance, the students assume they are the problem and give up.
My brother did the right thing from the first moment: he put me in the driver’s seat. Whatever happened next would have to happen through me, with his instruction. People never fall asleep if they are at the center of the experience.
In Ken Bain’s excellent book, What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard University Press), he tells the story of Professor Donald Saari, a mathematician from the University of California, who uses the WGAD (“Who Gives A Damn?”) principle. On the first day of class, Professor Saari informs students that they can ask this question at any moment, and he will do his best to explain how whatever obscure thing he’s talking about connects to why they signed up for the course. If your goal is to keep people interested, give them permission to let you know when they’re having trouble following and are
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You have nothing to lose by asking a student the simple question, “How could I have made this lesson more effective for you?”
Even when inactive — say, slouched in the back row of a lecture hall — our brains are so eager to activate, they will respond to the right kind of stimuli.
Good storytellers are said to engage or captivate an audience; perhaps mirror neurons are part of what’s going on.[48] If you can find great, relevant stories to tell or show in short movies, you can get people’s brains firing actively, even if they’re still just seated in the audience.
The phrase, Chapter 9, will stay with me forever. I say it to myself when writing, when planning a workshop, and even before I get on stage to give a big lecture. It reminds me that there is always a way — if I’m as much of an expert as I think I am — to forge a path for anyone to follow into a subject or skill. If I can’t make that path, I don’t understand my topic as much as my ego thinks I do.
It turns out, my brother learned to drive stick the difficult, old-school way. Instead of passing on that misery to me, instead of projecting his own suffering onto me as a rite of passage all drivers should endure, he chose to convert his misery into my delight. Teaching is a compassionate act. It transforms the confusing into the clear, the bad into the good. When it’s done well, and the insights are experienced not just by the teacher but by the students as well, everyone should feel good about what’s happened. It’s amazing how rare it is in many systems for the experience of learning to be
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Even when lecturing, these concepts change how you operate while you’re up at the front of the room. You should build your lectures so it is possible to ask yourself, at different points during the presentation: Do they know this fact or lesson already? Do they need me to explain this point in a different way? Are they saturated with information and need a break or a laugh? Are they too cocky and need a challenge?
And even if you can’t build those things in, nothing stops you from asking your audience, a few days after the lecture (either through the host or by providing a sign-up sheet at your talk where you collect their email addresses): Do they have any new questions now that they’re back at work? Did they use anything you said? What happened? Is there a topic that now, since they’re back at work/life, they wish you’d covered? Can they suggest ways to make the experience they had with you more active, engaging, or interesting?
If you follow this advice, you’ll learn it’s impossible to teach well without learnin...
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A bored teacher is merely someone who’s forgotten he must keep finding ways to learn from his students, even if it’s simply to learn where he has failed them as a teacher.
There are many compendiums of exercises you can buy. They’re handy references. The problem is that off-the-shelf exercises feel just that way to students, and it’s important to customize and develop them to fit the students and the goals of your particular course. Start with Games Trainers Play, Edward Scannell and John Newstrom (McGraw-Hill). Practice exercises with friends before inflicting them on anyone else.
If I know my material, I’ve likely considered your question or been asked it before. The problem is, I can’t answer all the questions my material might introduce. It would be boring for reasons described earlier in the book. By the third or fourth time I’ve given a lecture, I’ve heard 70% of the questions I’ll likely ever hear on the topic. But all questions are good questions. Just because I’ve heard it before doesn’t mean I have a great answer yet, so I’m learning no matter how many times I’ve done it.
I love having friends attend my lectures, but part of me freezes when I see them. Not entirely sure why. You’d think I’d have sorted this out by now, but I haven’t.
If I mention that I’m deliberately telling you things you’ve heard before because you need to hear them again, it would be patronizing. Yet I know old ideas said well have surprising power in a world where everyone obsesses about what’s new.
Volume does not equal quality, but we’re trained to buy by volume. Unless it’s highly interactive, has frequent breaks, and is constructed around real-world situations, not much retention is likely to happen.
Three 90-minute sessions or four 60-minute sessions, with many breaks, is my preferred way to run a full-day experience.
If anything, I think people who are at the center of attention when working — like comedians, teachers, and lecturers — are quieter than average off stage. They, like me, exhaust much of their social energy while working.
If you have an interesting opinion, laugh often, and bring a nice bottle of wine, I would love to talk with you. But all things equal, I’m extremely happy with a good book and a nice view.
There will always be a shortage of good public speakers in the world, no matter how many great books there are on the subject. It’s a performance skill, and performance means practice — and that’s one of the reasons I wasn’t afraid to write this book.
If I see a good speaker, I usually prefer to go and read his blog or buy his book than sit and listen to his entire talk. I’d prefer to buy him coffee or exchange email, where the communication is two ways.
I find the irony of this endlessly entertaining: I’m a public speaker who mostly doesn’t like listening to public speaking.
If I have any secret to being entertaining, it’s that I studied improv theater. There I learned how to see and how to listen. Humor and insight come from paying attention, not from special talents. After I studied improv, my speaking skills improved dramatically and my attitude about life changed. I can’t recommend taking an improv theater class strongly enough.
Making connections is everything. It’s preachy as hell, but lovers of wisdom have an obligation to share. E. M. Forster wrote, “Only connect!… Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.” To love ideas is to love making connections.
This is why people who bludgeon others with knowledge, intimidate with facts, distort intended meanings, and cherry-pick their examples are so easy to hate. They work against progress. “Only connect” is great advice. If you don’t know what you’re co...
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If you can speak a truth most people are afraid to say, you’re a hero. If you’re honest, even if people disagree, they will find you interesting and keep listening.
The feedback most speakers need is “Be more honest.” Stop hiding and posturing, and just tell the truth.
I’m fascinated by ideas of all kinds, in wildly different subjects, and I hope to write and speak about them all. I’m insanely grateful to make a living as a trafficker of ideas. I hope to be able to do it for the rest of my life.
Over the years, I’ve come across some that can help anyone, regardless of how often you speak. Some require help from the venue you’re speaking in, but most only demand arriving early and some extra time.