Aristotle was seldom accused of being a warm, fuzzy type of guy, but one of his biggest insights into language theory was that people listen for one reason alone: for their own wellbeing.
You might think that you’re giving a progress report about your team’s customer-satisfaction database app or a pitch for your amazing new start-up, but your audience will usually be focused on an entirely different topic: their happiness.
Whether you’re facing a large crowd, a handful of colleagues at a conference table, a job recruiter over Zoom, or trying to hold your own during a family fight, the all-too-common experience of speech anxiety can feel like a frustrating act of self-betrayal. You wish to share your knowledge, beliefs and feelings. Yet the moment you decide it’s time to communicate them, the words don’t seem to come out of your mouth,
Think about our usual ways of describing the problem: ‘I’m shy.’ ‘I suffer from speech anxiety.’ ‘I just don’t know how to be myself in front of a group.’ We often act as though the problem stems from a psychological or emotional shortcoming within us.
After years of watching our looser-tongued peers express their ideas and passions, it’s easy to become resentful and alienated. These negative feelings can reinforce our original reaction: There’s too much stuff inside of me that I can’t express! There’s something wrong with me.
Given the importance of clear, effective speech, you’d think we’d spend lots of time learning to do it in school. Yet for most of us, at least in the West, education consists of 12 to 20 years’ reading, writing and solving mathematics problems on paper. As our society has become increasingly knowledge- and information-based, rhetoric and speech instruction have fallen almost entirely out of favor. Many of us graduate unprepared to practice the central activity of our lives, and speech remains the most important subject we’ve never thought about.
This diagnosis would have seemed utterly baffling to the ancient Greek educators and philosophers who invented language theory in the 4th century BCE, and then taught it to virtually every student in the West for 2,000 years until a couple of centuries ago. From the ancient perspective, public speaking, like writing or, for that matter, military prowess, was considered an art form – teachable, learnable, and utterly unrelated to issues of innate character or emotional makeup.
To them, the idea of expecting the average, speech-ignorant person to be reliably eloquent would be like expecting an untrained adolescent to perform like a seasoned warrior on the battlefield. Their take holds true today – it’s unrealistic to expect yourself to be competent, much less masterful; in an art form you’ve never been taught to practice.
Under the larger discipline of rhetoric (the study of persuasion in all its forms), students in antiquity spent years acquiring a strategic understanding of how to temper logic, emotions and words with poise. Speaking well depended upon learning how to analyse all sides of an argument and assaying all possible avenues of commonality with one’s audience before expressing an opinion.
Similar to our approach to reading and writing today, speech training was a comprehensive, critical approach to knowledge, with an additional emphasis on psychology and social interaction.
The average person today speaks around 16,000 words a day. If you consider the role of speech in family life, social interactions and on the job, it’s easy to see that now, as much as ever, the ability to communicate effectively is the single most critical skill we possess.
So how might one learn in a hurry from the Greeks about speaking to an audience without anxiety? I’ll skip the tips about where to stand on stage and how to use PowerPoint, and instead use this Guide to outline the most radical and useful element of ancient language theory. You’ll learn to speak in public – to any audience, anywhere – not by mastering your emotions, but by paying better attention to how others listen to you.
Think about the audience
Without any training, ‘speech preparation’ for many of us too often begins with a swoon of anxious, self-flagellating, self-centered predictions: I hate public speaking. This is going to be a nightmare. Everyone’s going to know I’m an idiot. Modern approaches to public speaking typically begin by addressing these anxieties (Imagine your audience naked! Adopt a series of power poses to produce confidence chemicals! Take a beta-blocker!)
If this is you, your next step is probably to think about your material. You have a data-set of information (figures for the Q4 sales meeting; bachelor high jinks for the upcoming wedding speech, and so on) and you grapple with how to arrange it.
The Greeks, in contrast, didn’t start with beating anxiety or with organizing the speech material. They insisted that ‘the public’ is the most important part of public speaking. As Aristotle argued in c335 BCE in his Art of Rhetoric (the world’s most authoritative treatise on public speaking), the audience is the beginning and the end of public speaking.
What might at first seem like a rather obvious, if overly broad suggestion is, in fact, a simple, easy start toward comfortable public speaking. When you have a speaking engagement ahead, start your preparation by getting a pen and paper (or open a file) and list the most literal, concrete things you know about those you’ll be talking to. It might help to answer the following questions:
- Who will be listening?
- How many people will there be?
- How old are they?
- What race and gender are they?
- What do they know about you and your topic?
- Why are they gathering to listen to you?
This initial step takes minutes and demands nothing profound. If possible, ask the person who invited you to speak why they did so. What’s your audience expecting? Are they coming for a special occasion? The more you train your thoughts towards the needs and reality of your audience and away from the chaos of your anxieties, the more you’ll know how to connect with them.
Before you begin writing your speech, think about your purpose. Are you speaking to entertain, to inform, to persuade, or to inspire? After deciding, find a way to express your specific goal in a single sentence: As a result of my presentation, I want them to know X and do Y.
Defining the purpose of your speech in this way allows you to sift through the many interesting, funny or meaningful ideas that might come to mind, but that ultimately have nothing to do with your audience or your talk. As your talk becomes more relevant and engaging, you’ll find that the fear of babbling and disconnectedness that so often accompanies ‘public speaking’ will lessen.
In his Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle enumerates the things that make people happy: health, family, wealth, status and so on. It seems like a bizarre tangent for a book on public speaking, until you grasp his point. Your success as a speaker, regardless of your subject, depends on demonstrating to your audience that you’re paying attention to the one thing they care about most. You see them, you get them, you’re paying attention to their needs.
In other words, whether you’re talking about tax policy or ways to reduce your carbon footprint, your audience cares less about the rightness or logic of your points than they do about how your ideas will improve their lives.
Making an audience happy has little to do with adopting an in authentically ‘fun’ or peppy manner of speaking so much as demonstrating on every level that you’re speaking for their benefit, not your own. If you’re forced to give a boring sales report, for example, you can demonstrate your attentiveness by being mercifully brief and clear. The point, in the end, is to show respect for your audience’s time and attention.
You’d never invite people to a piano recital, then fail to rehearse for it. Leading a Zoom meeting or presentation of any kind without some practice is equally ill-advised.
Speech teachers throughout history have been divided about whether it’s better to write out every word of a speech, then memories it, or to make a simple outline consisting of broad strokes. I think you should go with whatever suits you and, either way, once your speech is drafted, here are some useful practice tips:
- Practice in front of the mirror or on video. If it feels stupid or even excruciating, I sympathies. But enduring a few awkward run-throughs will ultimately be less painful than taking centre-stage, then failing to say what you mean in the way that you mean to say it.
- At a minimum, memories your introduction and conclusion. These two parts of a speech are typically the most treacherous. Fix them in your mind, allow your mouth and tongue to develop some cognitive sense-memory for saying them, and you’ll be far less likely to get lost, mid-speech.
- Time your speech to make sure you’re within bounds.
- Finally, tweak your speech as you rehearse. Your gestures and vocal tone will undoubtedly convey shadings and attitudes originally expressed by the words you wrote in your text. Use rehearsal to spot beats and entire passages that feel redundant. Likewise, as you notice filler words such as ‘um’, ‘like’, ‘y’know’ and mushy jargon-talk that sounds lame and lazy coming out of your mouth, lose or replace them with more heartfelt, vibrant expressions. As with every other part of speech preparation, your goal is not merely to talk, but to invest your talk with genuine meaning – for yourself and your audience.
- Speech anxiety is a common and frustrating experience. You might blame yourself for lacking the right ability or disposition, but the issue has little to do with your emotional makeup, and everything to do with basic speech training.
- The ancient Greeks recognized public speaking as an important, eminently teachable art form. Training in rhetoric was a fundamental aspect of education for centuries.
- Borrowing from the Greek approach, begin preparing for any speech by considering your audience. Who are you talking to? What do they know about you and your topic?
- Define your general goals. Is your speech intended to inform, to entertain, to persuade, or to inspire? Next, define your specific purpose in a single sentence: As a result of my talk, I want them to know X and do Y.
- Think about what’s in your talk for your audience. In terms of subject matter and delivery style, how can you show them that you’re not just prattling away, you’re speaking their language and focusing on their wellbeing?
- Don’t expect eloquence to flow without rehearsal. Practice your speech and aim to memories your introduction and conclusion.
In 4th century BC, Greece, prior to the invention of Athenian democracy, public speaking was virtually forbidden. However, with the advent of elections, trials and other public forms of debate, speaking to groups of people became a common and, in some cases, required activity. The ability to express one’s opinions to one’s peers became an essential component of social and political life, a means for keeping public discourse from being hijacked by loudmouths, liars and charlatans, but also the surest route to wealth and power.