Public Speaking for the 21st Century

High school students in 2015 were proven to be as stressed as asylum patients in 1950 and little has been done to improve the mental states of high schoolers since. This disregard for students is why its so revolutionary when someone suggests that the best way to be a good speaker is to be a good person and to be happy with the work being done. Yet that very suggestion is accurate. The results of the Roosevelt speech team alone have significantly improved following the implementation of a 'happiness before success' policy and people are less likely to quit when faced with the instruction to try to find joy in their work rather than to just be better. This policy is even backed up by science as it places speaking in a communication oriented view rather than a performance oriented view. Valuing enjoyment over success fulfills many of the steps necessary to create a good speech. This relates to speech being a skill rather than a talent because the only thing that people need to b...

An Interview with Ms. Nguyen I’ve talked a lot in the last couple of weeks about how speech is teachable, but I haven’t yet sat down with a speech teacher to discuss it. Ms. Nguyen stepped in as the teacher for our speech and debate team at the end of last summer and is totally awesome. Under Nguyen our team has grown not just in numbers but also in terms of health and diversity of success. (aka we’re winning more stuff than we used and we’re better people while doing it #score) M: Hi Ms. Nguyen, thanks for sitting down with me! You’ve done a lot to grow our team, but what have you found has been the biggest blocker to people joining? N: Probably either students being too busy or being too scared. M: You’ve been able to work around those problems for a lot of our new team members. How did you do it? N: Well when students are too busy, there isn’t much we can do but I try to offer very flexible practice hours in order to maximize the number of students who have access to...

I've never even considered the subject material that I learned about this week before. I don't really have to deal with communication anxiety/glossophobia and so I've never really considered its source. I think this will help me with being a better team leader, coach, and friend to the members of the speech squad who do deal with glossophobia because I will be able to better understand where that comes from and therefore how to best address it with them. I hope that this information will help our team both recruit and retain new members better because often people don't join due to a fear of public speaking and drop out after joining because we can't help them conquer their fear of public speaking. By addressing glossophobia one facet at a time we can be a more helpful and more supportive team. My question for this week would be, "Which cause of glossophobia is most common?" the reason I wonder this is because knowing more about the causes of glossophobia...

Glossophobia may sound more like a fear of lip gloss than of speaking but it is a real problem for prospective speakers. About 25% of people say that public speaking is one of their biggest fears. That is probably because glossophobia is multifaceted. The four main contributors to it are physiology, thoughts, situations, and skills. Human physiology is such that fear magnifies itself. For people who view their audience as even slightly threatening, the autonomic nervous system may magnify that fear causing public speaking to seem like an unperformable task. Human thoughts cause problems because people naturally are more critical of themselves than other people are of them. Speakers also often overestimate the importance of their speech and how judgmental their audience is going to feel towards them. A key way to deal with negative thinking is for a speaker to switch their view of delivering an address from performance oriented to communication oriented. This means that the person feels...

 Link to source for this week:  Why Are We Scared of Public Speaking? It occurred to me that I've talked a lot about how to overcome communication anxiety but I haven't really investigated why it happens. This week is an attempt to rectify that problem. Communication Anxiety's legal name is Glossophobia  and about 25% of people report having it 4 primary factors to this fear 1) Physiology -Autonomic nervous system responsible for fear and anxiety -Audiences can be perceived as a threat, triggering "hyper-arousal" -hyper-arousal magnifies emotions like fear and anxiety, creating a cycle in which they magnify themselves -this can cause a small fear of public speaking to be exacerbated exponentially 2) Thoughts -people overestimate the stakes of communicating their ideas to the audience -people are unnecessarily critical of themselves -performance orientation vs communication orientation --performance=public speaking is a task that requires very spe...

I wasn’t all that surprised by the drill I found this week in the Glencoe Speech book. I’ve been coached by Mr. MacCutcheon before and literally the first drill he ever told me to do was to give a speech about climate change and then had me compare it to Greta Thunberg’s speaking. What I did find interesting was the emphasis he placed on keeping individuality as a speaker. When he was coaching me he very much implied that I should try to change everything about my style of speaking necessary to best emulate whichever speaker he was having me compare myself to on any given day. It makes sense in the context of real life rather than speech competitions though to value individuality over quality speaking because live audiences are much better at telling when you’re being disingenuous than speech judges are. What’s more, while speech competitors are generally ok with changing anything necessary to win, people who aren’t used to competition may be upset or offended when you tell them that t...