Week 10 Post 1

An Interview with Gus Lanz

Gus Lanz is a very successful competitive speaker. In November of 2019, he won The Glenbrooks tournament; the largest speech tournament hosted by a high school in the United States. His competitive success, however, is not what makes him so impressive. What makes him impressive is that Gus and his family moved to the United States from Venezuela when Gus was in 5^th grade. English is his second language after Spanish. He has clearly overcome more barriers to becoming a good public speaker than most people will ever encounter so I sat down with him last weekend to discuss what barriers exist to be a good public speaker and how to overcome them.

M: Hi Gus, thanks for sitting down with me!

G: Happy to help!

M: Alright, lets start off slow, what kinds of barriers are there to becoming a good public speaker?

G: Well, I’d categorize the barriers most people face into two groups. Internal barriers and external barriers. Internal barriers are things that we have within ourselves, you know, like anxiety about talking in front of people or like not speaking the language your audience speaks. External barriers are stuff coming at us from the outside world like bad governments stopping free speech or not having enough connections to get a good platform.

M: Alright, which one do you want to talk about first?

G: Let’s go internal.

M: Cool, what do you think is the number one internal barrier to being a good public speaker?

G: Probably stage fright. People are so worried that they’re going to say something to embarrass themselves or that people will judge them that they’re willing to be silent in order to avoid that.

M: So how can we combat that? Aren’t most people dealing with anxiety just born that way?

G: Yep! They are born that way but there are still things that can be done to fix the problem. For one thing, preparing for a speech well in advance will help allay the fear of embarrassment, if not get rid of it entirely. It’s hard to fear something going wrong if you’ve done it perfectly so often that doing it correctly seems rote already. It also helps me personally to reframe the situation in my mind. If you’re doing public advocacy, you know, speaking at a protest or talking to your legislators a lot of the time they, you know, your audience are already going to agree with you and won’t care how bad you [expletive] up as long as you are still saying something they agree with. If you’re speaking in a classroom capacity, I almost guarantee you that everyone who would be judging you for messing up is so worried about messing up their speech that they’ll totally miss your presentation going badly.

M: You also mentioned earlier not speaking the same language as your audience. How did you overcome that barrier to becoming a good public speaker?

G: Well I was luck to be in a very multicultural environment when I came to the US, you know, here in the Miami area so I partially learned how to speak English through just like living in the city I lived in but it also helped that my ESL teachers and my speech coaches were often the same people so when I had problems, I could just like go to them and ask what a word meant. Like I very specifically remember a round of debate when I was in seventh grade where the [expletives] debating us could tell we didn’t speak English that well and so they were using words that I don’t even know if they knew what the words meant and the last straw for me was one of them asked something in cross like if we even knew what ‘extrapolation’ was and I called them out for being abusive {debate term for intentionally changing the framework of the debate to put an unnecessary burden on the opposing team} and the judge agreed with me. What I really realized there is that judges and, you know, people as a whole don’t care how well I speak the language as well as I’m fluent enough to get my point across and not look like a [expletive] doing it.

M: Yeah that seems totally true. Have you seen similar problems with external problems?

G: Well the external problems are much more complex and often don’t occur in competitive speech due to the intentional inclusivity of our community. The main external barrier to success I’ve seen, you know, competitively is the lack of acceptance for accessibility aids for disabled kids due to fears about them cheating and that’s just totally not fair. I’ve actually had a few teammates email tournaments sections of the ADA code and tell them to allow their accessibility aids or be sued and it totally worked though so I think we’re getting better.

M: If not competitively, then where are you seeing these external barriers?

G: You know, in the real world. Hong Kong, Caracas, Tehran, up until this summer Khartoum. Anywhere that people are trying to protest an authoritarian regime, the regime will try to silence their voices. The only way to overcome that barrier is to spread the message outside of the state-controlled media. It may also be a better plan to just not speak publicly about the problems being faced and protect your identity rather than facing the anger of the regime.

M: Ok, one last question: is public speaking a skill or a talent?

G: Oh, definitely a skill. I don’t think that, like, talents or whatever can really be blocked and repressed the way that speech can be and often is. Right? Like you can stop someone from having a skill which is what happens a lot with speech, but you can’t really stop them from having a talent.

M: Hey, thanks for sitting down with me Gus.

G: No problem, good luck with your presentation!