Read Confessions of a Public Speaker Online
Authors: Scott Berkun
Tags: #BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Skills
Confessions of a Public Speaker (16 page)
After years of studying
learning theory, the science of how we learn, I can tell you
this: most of what you need to know is easily learned from what happened
to me in 1989 when I almost killed three people.
The long list of very stupid things not to do in life includes this:
making a left turn into three lanes of oncoming traffic, during a driver’s
test at age 17, in NYC, in your grandmother’s old car, during rush hour,
while suddenly realizing you never practiced making a left turn into
traffic. And in 1989 I did it with predictably disastrous results. Less
than a minute into my driver’s exam, when asked to make a left turn, I
waited behind the car in front of me and then executed a clever move:
mimicked the exact action of that car. But the Ford Mustang I followed
flew through the intersection several seconds faster than my grandmother’s
old Honda Civic could manage. Whereas he beat the oncoming traffic and
roared on down the road, I ended up directly in the path of a speeding
18-wheel Mack truck.
I remember the look of surprise on the truck driver’s face as he
slammed on his brakes. He wasn’t angry—he didn’t have time to be. Instead,
he had the focus of adrenalized self-preservation, using every inch of the
pedal to discover exactly how effective those brakes were. In the same
instant, there was a scream from Mr. Dinko, the scrawny test examiner in
the passenger seat. It was a girlish cry of shock, fear, and helpless
outrage at the sight of the truck heading straight at him. The clipboard
he had been staring at moments earlier flew from his hands across the
dashboard, as he screamed something I couldn’t understand. Despite being
the cause of the chaos, I was surprisingly calm. After all, I’d never done
this before. Maybe making left turns into traffic always felt like
this.
The truck, after skidding into the intersection and dropping boxes
of cargo onto the street, stopped a few feet from the front right corner
of my bumper, the bumper of a car entirely in his lane. The intersection
was blocked and traffic stopped in both directions. Soon there was
shouting and pointing, somehow mostly at the truck driver, and he, like
all good New Yorkers, yelled in return. I sped away, not fully aware of
how close I’d come to killing three people in a head-on collision. I was
so confused that I didn’t understand why the examiner was in a rush to get
back to the test center only 90 seconds after the
driving test began. Left turn, right turn, left turn, he
yelled. In the parking lot, with Mr. Dinko screaming as he fled the car, I
finally realized I’d failed my driving test. For weeks until I could take
the test again, I lived in shame among family and friends—all of whom had
passed the test on their first try.
Somehow, I passed the second time. And when I got home, relieved as
can be to put it all behind me, my older brother took me aside and said,
“You are going to learn to drive stick shift.” To which I confidently
replied, “No fucking way.” I wasn’t stupid. The last thing I wanted was to
attempt
learning something else related to driving.
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. And teachers, ironically, are terrified of being ignored by
their students, explaining their often totalitarian and self-defeating
behavior. In my case, knowing friends and adults who hadn’t grasped how to
drive stick shift, I didn’t want to risk more failure.
But he insisted. He told me to trust him. And down the street we
went to his shiny ’84 Honda Prelude, the coolest car any of our friends
had. That Prelude was his life. He shoved me in the driver’s seat and put
the key in the ignition. And what did I do? I reached for the door handle
to escape. It’s one thing to nearly crash your grandmother’s car, but if
you crash your older brother’s car, he’ll beat the crap out of you for the
rest of your life. I scrambled for excuses—I’m too busy (lie), I’m tired
(lie), my feet hurt from the road test (bad lie)—but before anything good
came to mind, he said these invaluable words: “The clutch is your
friend.”
How could the clutch be my friend? The clutch is the weird pedal
that almost no one I knew could figure out. The clutch was why kids who
tried to learn stick shift lurched around the high school parking lot,
stalling their cars while onlookers laughed. The clutch was a thing of
evil, a thing to be feared. The clutch being my friend made no sense. What
next, Mr. Dinko is my friend? The SATs are my friend? “What the hell are
you talking about?”, I asked. And he said, “Trust me, the clutch is your
friend. It’s there to help you. If you get stuck, just push it all the way
down and you’ll be OK. If you know this,
learning to drive stick isn’t hard.” I gave him a long look.
Was this a trick? But my brother wouldn’t do that. Not with his car. Not
with me in the driver’s seat
of his car. So, I said to myself, “OK, maybe the clutch is
my friend. Let’s see what happens.”
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.
What magic did my brother possess that my driving instructors did
not? Before we can sort that out, we have to explore why teaching is
almost impossible and how what he achieved is rare.
I’m skeptical about teaching even though I do it for a living. For
every good teacher you’ve had in your life, how many bad ones did you
suffer through? Would you say the ratio of good to bad is 1 to 5? 1 to
10? Even in my story above, I suffered the larger failure of three
months of professional driving instruction, plus my part-time
instructing father, and I still was not prepared for the actual driving
test. Or perhaps I failed them. Either way, most attempts at teaching
fail. Blame the teachers, blame the students, or blame them both, but
most attempts do not satisfy anyone.
I’ve taught in many formats. Semester-long university courses,
full-day seminars, half-day workshops, tutoring sessions, lectures,
on-the-job employee mentoring, even drunken barroom tirades, and I can
say the odds of learning in any situation are slim. In any moment in any
learning environment, where there’s one person “teaching” and a bunch of
people “learning,” I’d wager that 5% are asleep and 25% are thinking
about sex. Another 30% are daydreaming about something else entirely. Of
the remaining 40%, some will be in the wrong room and others will be
distracted by text messages or emails.
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And of the tiny percentage of people truly
paying attention, how many will understand what the
teacher is saying? How many will remember it the next day? And
of those, how many will even try to apply what they
learned in their lives?
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?
If you set about trying to teach, whether through lectures,
classes, or even writing, you will be doing one
of the most difficult and frustrating things a person can
do with other people. Do not watch films like
Dead Poets
Society
with Robin Williams or
Stand and
Deliver
with Edward James Olmos. These films do not show the
misery and boredom that went on in all the other classrooms, where dull,
uninspiring teachers fail distracted students day after day after
mind-numbing day. Nor does it show all the bad experiences the teachers
endured and fought through to become the (semifictional) brilliant
teachers the films portray. Ever wonder why many schoolteachers seem so
tired, so mean, so burnt-out on life? They didn’t start that way.
Teaching anything year after year, while watching so many students
struggle to grasp your lessons, eats away at your soul and can’t help
but overtake the love that drove you to teach in the first place. Most
schoolteachers don’t even have the chance to burn out: 50% of
schoolteachers in the United States do not last more than five
years.
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In the United States, most teachers are paid so little to
do so much.
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More optimistically, the particular individuals in a room who
are distracted change over time. So, while I do think 30% of people
are distracted, it’s not the same people all the time. The attention
of the room is always changing.
There is some very good news: when it works, teaching is one of
the most rewarding experiences there is. Seeing an idea you’ve explained
be understood and successfully applied by someone is unlike any other
pleasure in life. Even knowing you’ve reached 5 people out of 100 is
worth the disappointment of not reaching the other 95. Had you not shown
up that day, you’d never have even reached those five. And maybe the
person who would have shown up to teach had you chickened out would have
only reached three students, or none. Sometimes in life, 5 out of 100 is
above average. Besides, there is no alternative to the challenges of
teaching—if you want to impart ideas and knowledge, it’s the only game
in town.
And despite my skepticism and my fluency in depressing statistics,
I believe anyone can teach anyone anything. But I mean this in a
specific sense. If you have two dedicated, reasonably intelligent
people, one interested in teaching and the other wanting to learn,
something great can happen. Think master and apprentice, mentor and
protégé.
For learning, small
numbers win. The success of this one-on-one method is
proven throughout history; many so-called prodigies were tutored by a
parent or family friend (Einstein, Picasso, and Mozart all qualify).
Yes, they had amazing, inherent talent, but they were still privately
taught by people invested in their learning. Teaching is intimacy of the
mind, and you can’t achieve that if you must work in large
numbers.
Basic math supports this. If I lecture to 5,000 people, I can’t
know much about any of them. People have different learning styles, and
when I speak to an audience of 5,000, I have to average out those
differences. I can generalize and make good guesses, but I’m
distributing my energy across the entire group. Some lecturers are very
good at these guesses, and their concepts resonate with large numbers of
people. These lucky few would make for good entertainers or comedians.
But for most, it’s only as the audience gets smaller—100, 50, 5, and
perhaps optimally 1 single student—that a teacher’s real power surfaces.
You can inform a group of 5,000. You can entertain them. You can offer
them new ways to think or ideas to consider, but you can’t teach them
skills or give them a personalized experience. My brother could not have
taught me how to drive stick shift if he were lecturing to 4,999 other
people as well. It would have been impossible for him to simultaneously
sit in the passenger seat in every one of those cars and watch what each
of us did, not to mention give each of us the exclusive attention we
would need to learn something new.
With a small group, a good teacher can study each student and
determine what she knows, what interests her, and what she fears. Based
on that knowledge, the teacher makes adjustments to improve the odds of
getting his students over the four challenges I listed previously. A
smaller
number of students makes it easier
for a teacher to be an
active, responsive leader; lecturing to a large audience
usually requires the instructor to play out a rigid and predefined set
of lessons, no matter how little the students understand. Lecturers are
fond of saying, “Are there any questions?” to a sea of 100 faces, as if
the people who feel lost are willing to embarrass themselves in front of
the others who seemingly get it. It’s not a forum designed for in-depth
one-on-one interaction, which is what has always been necessary for
teaching to happen.
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.
This old
quote comes up often, and it’s a good one:
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and
I understand
.
It’s attributed to
Confucius, but as is true with many famous quotes, it’s
been told so often by other famous people—such as Benjamin Franklin
and Jean Piaget—that they are often credited with the saying instead.
Strangely, despite this idea being thousands of years old and having
enthusiastic support from brilliant people, few public speakers apply
this wisdom. The reason: as difficult as lecturing is, giving
the audience things to do is much more difficult.
The best research on learning suggests that the necessary shift
is to switch from a teacher-centric to an
environment-centric model. Most teachers focus on their
lesson plans: what to include in their lectures, what textbooks or
software to use, or where in the room they should stand. The teacher
is the center of the universe. 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 has to get out
of the way; instead of being the star, he is the
facilitator who helps students gain experience. 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
.
For people who have spent years trying to be great public
speakers, this opposes what all their hard-earned confidence suggests.
They’ve been fighting to be the center of attention and are proud of
the various skills they’ve attained for doing so. 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.
All solutions to this problem start with the teacher being
comfortable doing things other than lecturing. One possibility is to
create exercises for your students to practice specific skills, then
divide them into small groups so they can collaborate and apply the
ideas explained in the lectures to situations similar to those they’ll
face in the real world.
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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.
Even with large crowds, there are ways to invite people to let
you know when they’re lost. 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 about to tune out. A speaker who wants to teach should see
this kind of question not as a sign of failure, but as an opportunity.
They’re getting real-time information that at least one person isn’t
following, and if one isn’t following, odds are good that others
aren’t either. If you want real feedback on how to make your material
better, find that person after the class and investigate: was there
another way to reach him? You have nothing to lose by asking a student
the simple question, “How could I have made this lesson more effective
for you?”
One tactic is to make your audience members’ minds feel
active even if their bodies are not. Our brains have
mirror neurons
, and though we don’t fully
understand how they work, they respond when we see people do things in
exactly the same way we would if we were doing them ourselves. This is
why when some men watch the Super Bowl on TV, they mimic the tackles
and catches as they sit on their couches. Or why people cower in fear
when the guy with the hockey mask jumps out from behind the curtain.
When people watch a football game (or an axe-murderer), their neurons
fire in exactly the same way they would if the observers were actually
playing football (or being chased by an axe-murderer). This has been a
shocking discovery for scientists, but it makes sense given our
activity-prone brains. 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.
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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.
In
What the Best College Teachers Do
, Ken
Bain writes:
Teachers have argued that students cannot learn to
think, to analyze, to synthesize, and to make judgments until they
“know” the basic facts of the discipline. People in this school of
thought have tended to emphasize the delivery of information to the
exclusion of all other teaching activities. They seldom expect their
students to reason (that will supposedly come after they have
“learned the material”). On their examinations, these professors
often test for recall, or simple recognition of information (on a
multiple choice test for example)
.
If instead of learning from my brother, I had taken a course on
driving manual transmission automobiles, the instructor would have
taught me about how transmissions work, the history of transmissions,
why they have five gears, the names for each and every part of the
dashboard, and on and on. Often what we’re taught in school is from an
academic and theoretical view of the world. Teachers and academics
tend to be people who like to study things, so they naturally
encourage their students to study them as well, including things that
are better learned by
doing
rather than
studying.
Focusing on facts and knowledge makes it easy for the teacher to
stay in control and at the center of the experience. In reality, the
ability to do something only has a limited relationship to the
quantity of knowledge you have. Simply because a teacher knows the
names of all these things doesn’t mean it has any value to the student
or to the skill the student is there to learn. If I’d taken a course
on driving manual transmission, it could be weeks before I got in a
car, or months until the final exam when I could prove that I knew
what to do. Instead, in the first minute of day one, my brother put me
in the driver’s seat and began his teaching from there.
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.
Finding and simplifying
insights requires humility, something rarely attributed
to experts and public speakers. Keep your hard-earned
knowledge in mind, but simultaneously remember how it felt to be a
complete novice. It’s rare to achieve this balance, but it’s what
makes a teacher great. 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 a pleasurable thing.
If when I got into my brother’s car, I had started screaming at
the top of my lungs, what should he have done? If he behaved like most
speakers do, he’d have continued on with his lesson, never
acknowledging my problem. People fall asleep in lectures or stare off
into space, but speakers keep right on going. They can get away with
this because lectures are a passive experience for the
audience.
But if you follow my advice and make the learning process active
for your students, they will respond in some way. And that’s when your
real work begins. If the supposedly brilliant insight you offered
bores them, or they don’t understand the exercise you planned, what
then? The challenge of teaching becomes observing your students,
knowing how to respond, and making adjustments to suit their
needs.
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 learning something along the way. Good teachers listen as
much as they talk, improving their material based on what they hear
and studying to see if it had the positive effects they hoped. 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.