Despite the fact that public speaking remains an important and relevant skill in our modern age, I mean, you never know when you ll need to give a toast at a wedding, pitch an idea at work, or champion a proposal at a city council meeting? Most of us get very little instruction these days in how to do it effectively. Fortunately, my guest says we can look to the great orators of the past to get the public speaking education we never received.
00:08:12.920There's always going to be hung juries.
00:08:14.520They could never have a hung jury because there's 501.
00:08:17.500So they thought things through in a way that I think somehow we didn't back in the 1770s and came up with a working thing that worked for centuries.
00:08:28.560But it was all based on public participation and public speaking.
00:08:33.120Standing up on that little rocky hilltop, which was kind of a sounding board.
00:08:37.540It was a good place for you to speak loud and everybody could hear you.
00:08:41.540And so that's, I think, at the threshold of our Western tradition of a participatory life in your community, in your democracy, in your city, whatever it may be, where you have a privilege and an opportunity, but also a responsibility to make your voice heard.
00:09:02.920And that's why Athens, it just fascinates me to this day.
00:09:08.280I look to the past for insights and wisdom and interest, but I still think we have a lot to learn about getting our American population actively engaged in our democracy.
00:09:20.400And they did it through that open forum of public speaking.
00:09:25.360And what did Demosthenes do in that open forum of public speaking?
00:09:30.480Well, he was a skinny little kid, and he was never going to be a great general.
00:09:35.120So he, and also, let me just give you the background on his life, because it's such an interesting one.
00:09:46.200And after his father's death, everything was left to him.
00:09:49.820But his father's male relatives embezzled all the money, took it all away, invested it elsewhere for themselves.
00:09:56.300And he found himself, when he became of age, a man ready to launch his public life in Athens, his career as a citizen, a pauper.
00:10:07.360And all of the older men in the family didn't want him to have a public voice, because he would call them to account and demand his own money.
00:10:16.380So he'd been brought up without the kind of engagement with other people and so on.
00:10:22.180So he thought, at last I could speak in the assembly.
00:10:52.180And he would run up hills declaiming speeches that he'd memorized while he ran up the hill until he could run and still speak the speech without being breathless, without stumbling on the words.
00:11:06.700He would go down by the seashore, and he would find smooth pebbles that the sea had worked over, put them in his mouth, and then while the waves were crashing on the beach, try to declaim passages from Homer's Odyssey or famous passages from the plays of Aeschylus or Sophocles at the top of his voice with pebbles in his mouth to get over his stutter,
00:11:30.720to work his tongue around the pebbles until he was elocuting clearly, but also projecting his weak little concave chest.
00:11:40.520He built himself up, and he could project then over the sound of the waves.
00:11:45.560And I should say right now, as a technical point for all our friends who are listening who are interested in public speaking, yelling ain't projecting.
00:11:53.420Projecting is finding a way to make your own head kind of a voice box that amplifies your voice as you send it out into the air, and that's what he did.
00:12:02.980And that's what he had to do when he ultimately became first a lawyer and would stand in the great open public forums of the Athenian law courts.
00:12:11.260Everything was open air in Athens so that everybody could come.
00:12:14.260As I've said, juries are 501, and each one got to hear you if you're the lawyer defending somebody.
00:12:20.040And in the first case, he defended himself.
00:12:22.960He went, presented himself to the justices, and took his uncles, who'd embezzled all of his fortune, to court, and convinced the jury that he was in the right, they were in the wrong.
00:12:34.320Well, he won the case, but they'd spent all the money.
00:12:47.200Did he become a statesman of any sort?
00:12:48.520He ultimately became the head of state of Athens at the most dangerous time in the city's history.
00:12:56.600There was a great power up to the north that we're all familiar with now, Macedon or Macedonia, still an important mountainous northern region of Greece.
00:13:11.300They had gotten rid of their own kings centuries earlier.
00:13:14.960They had gotten into that democracy where every citizen had an equal voice and an equal vote.
00:13:20.740And their great enemies, the Persians, were always led by their great kings.
00:13:25.820And the two that really tangled with the Athenians were King Darius of Persia, who sent the Persians to invade Athens.
00:13:33.880And the Athenians repelled them at the Battle of Marathon.
00:13:37.140And then Darius' son, King Xerxes of Persia, who sent a thousand Persian ships or Persian-owned ships to try to capture Athens by sea.
00:13:48.800And that was when they fought the Battle of Salamis, and we still have, thanks to a Greek writer named Herodotus, some of the speeches that were given by the heroes of that time in Athens.
00:14:00.840A great man named Themistocles, who, like Demosthenes, was on the outside.
00:14:06.420Themistocles was the only Athenian who thought, we can beat these Persians.
00:14:10.760We just need to not face them on land where they can overwhelm us like an avalanche.
00:14:35.220It was all because of the speeches of this Themistocles, who believed in fight rather than surrender or flee.
00:14:43.680And these were the kinds of old speeches, in this case recorded by the Herodotus narrative, that Demosthenes steeped himself in.
00:14:52.620Not just law court, where he would make money initially and win back his own purloined and embezzled fortune from his wretched guardians, but ultimately rise to become the head of state of his own city and try to prevent Athens' conquest by the Macedonians, by King Philip and his son Alexander.
00:15:11.960And I think the big takeaway from Demosthenes was this idea that public speaking is a physical act, and he had to get in shape physically to be an effective public speaker.
00:15:21.640And oftentimes I think we typically think of public speaking as sort of intellectual, which it is, but you can't forget that this is also an embodied physical act, so you have to be in shape to do it.
00:15:30.880I couldn't agree more, and every aspect of your body comes into play.
00:15:35.760Your eyes, you've got to look at your audience, and you can't pick one person.
00:15:40.200You've got to feel by the end of your speech, everybody in that hall has felt you looked at them once.
00:15:46.040And I think if you've got to read the speech, many places have it set up now, if you talk to them about it, where your text that you need to read will be projected, and you can still be looking out into the group of people, the audience, the crowd, the folks who've assembled to hear you.
00:16:05.000But there is the text of your speech on a little board or tablet or screen in front of you, and you can get through it.
00:16:13.940Some of the people listening may be able to remember how moving it was at John F. Kennedy's sunny inauguration ceremony when Robert Frost was reading one of his last poems, that aged poet laureate of America.
00:16:26.960And the sun was so bright on his pages that he couldn't read his own poem clearly, and he just stopped trying to and then began to recite it from memory.
00:16:38.520But the fact that it was the spoken word, that it was a drama of communication from someone who was there trying to speak to you, trying to share things of great importance to him or to her, whoever would be speaking, that's what I think rivets the attention, and that's what builds memories that last in a way that a typical television broadcast just doesn't.
00:17:01.620Public speaking is personal to everyone who's listening to you, and you've got to combine that broad oratorical roots to the crowd, to everybody, with moving your eyes around.
00:17:16.120Try to make everybody who's there feel you looked at them once.
00:17:20.560We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:17:27.000Well, in a guest lecture you bring in to help people understand the importance of delivery and eye contact and how you move your body when you public speak is Patrick Henry.
00:17:37.360How was he a master of delivery in public speaking?
00:17:41.600Patrick Henry, for those folks who've joined us, let me remind you, he is the one who helped launch the American Revolution with the famous rallying cry,
00:17:53.980It was part of a longer phrase, I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
00:18:04.080So he was allowing for that democratic principle, I may be in a minority, but I know what I'm going to do.
00:18:10.480I will die in the trenches in this cause.
00:18:13.660Well, that was one of the things that made the revolution happen.
00:18:17.720We have to remember what a near-run thing that was.
00:18:20.620It was only about 50-50 among the English-speaking colonists of the British colonies in America, whether they wanted to really fight Mother Britain,
00:18:30.860the greatest sea power in the world and far outnumbering them.
00:18:34.600But it was those early speeches that did it.
00:18:37.380And Patrick Henry's was one of the moments when somebody held a match to the little fuse on the cannon and blew that shot right out that was heard around the world and certainly all around America, give me liberty, give me death.
00:18:54.360So I talk about him in my course as how famous he was for his body language, shaking his fist at the heavens and an anger at the tyranny of the British.
00:19:05.440And when he cried, give me liberty or give me death, I think we would consider this overdoing it these days, although we are not trying to liberate our country from a foreign oppressor.
00:19:15.400But he was standing astray of the stage in front of his little seat there in the house of, I guess it's the equivalent of the colony of Virginia legislature.
00:19:29.900And as he cried out that final phrase, he struck his heart with his fist, raised the other hand in the air, and then cried out, give me liberty or give me death, and then collapsed back into his seat as if he'd been struck with a blow rather than just, oh, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
00:20:08.140But another, I think, something you attack that you see people do when they give a speech is they try to start off their speech with some sort of joke or self-deprecating comment about how they're terrible at public speaking.
00:20:20.920So they're trying to use humor as a way to get in.
00:20:23.260If they're nervous and maybe they feel that they can laugh it off, then things will kind of be a little more smoother.
00:20:30.280But often those jokes fall flat in public speaking.
00:20:34.100Why does humor often fall flat in public speaking?
00:20:37.000Well, I want to say, first of all, I think there are different approaches.
00:20:40.400And if it calms you down to tell a joke, tell the joke.
00:20:47.320If it helps you launch, and above all, if the joke relates to the message of the speech, which not all opening jokes do, then don't rule out the possibility of using one.
00:20:59.620But I think in some ways, jokes are always somewhat trivializing.
00:21:04.780And I think most public speaking, it's an occasion that matters or you wouldn't be doing it.
00:21:10.780And what I want to convey is not humor and aw shucks, we're all in this together, we're just plain folks.
00:24:35.900That's a real powerful moment for any group.
00:24:38.800I've even seen moments at memorial services where the most memorable thing was an enormous roar of laughter from the whole group
00:24:47.900at jointly remembering a remarkably humorous moment in the life of the deceased person that that person was proud of
00:24:56.540and liked to brag about or liked to recite or remind people of.
00:25:01.140So humor may have a place in almost any speech, but it should always be like a spice, a dash, a little element that you add as a thing to emphasize, spark, refocus attention, or release tension itself.
00:25:19.520So I'm seeing a theme here with the Patrick Henry delivery and the Will Rogers humor.
00:25:24.740It's like these things are used to create a connection between you and the audience.
00:25:28.540That's what public speaking is all about.
00:25:31.420That's why it differs from sitting down at your lonely word processor, typewriter, pad of paper with your pen in hand,
00:25:37.180and just writing in the silence words that you will know will be read ultimately by others.
00:25:42.400In that case, you've just got to craft the words that carry your tone, your message, your sort of focus and where you all want this to go.
00:25:53.820You're steering the thoughts and attitudes of the reader purely through words.
00:25:58.540Public speaking allows you to do it much more person to person.
00:26:01.740And we all know body language can overrule anything you say.
00:26:07.320I was, I once read a really interesting book on body language, I was still a teenager, and it told me things that I've never gotten over.
00:26:17.520One was that people who touch their face while speaking at a moment of tension or something, obviously if you've got a little itch or something to brush off, you're going to touch your face.
00:26:28.180But touching your face is a defensive thing.
00:26:32.640You're bringing the hand up, and it means whatever they just said, it's something that's a slightly problematic statement for that person who's saying it.
00:26:41.440To touch your eye can sometimes mean, I can't really see this myself, but I sure hope you can.
00:26:45.740To pull your ear is, I hope you're hearing this because there's a problem here.
00:26:52.460Any touching of the face is a sign of insecurity, of a double meaning, of a sense that the speaker is not 100% with or behind or convinced by the statement they're making themselves.
00:27:03.880So, always keep your hands away from your face, away from your ears, your face, mouth, nose, neck, anything.
00:27:12.000You can use them, you know, raise a hand, fist out, make a point, whatever, with the index finger, but do not touch your face.
00:27:20.120Now, when it comes to the more macro question of how to organize your speech, you're a big believer in organizing things into threes.
00:27:25.960Why is there power in talking about things and organizing things in groups of threes, and who is an example of an orator who employed this tactic?
00:27:34.700I believe the human mind is satisfied by three.
00:27:41.540One of anything, one example, one statement, one fact, is an isolation.
00:28:13.220And so, if you think of your own presentation, you want a beginning, you want a middle, which is the substance of the speech, and you want an end.
00:28:20.760Those three parts, the tri-part element.
00:28:22.900I used Paul, the apostle Paul, who's probably more responsible than any other single person for making Christianity the, obviously, after Jesus, for taking up the words of Jesus, who he never knew.
00:28:38.300And as a man named Saul, who was not Christian at all, a persecutor of early Christians, had a vision on the road to Damascus, according to the tradition.
00:28:49.620And then became, I think, because of his eloquence and because of his great gift at turning thoughts and beliefs into memorable words, that he's one of the builders of the whole success.
00:29:03.640That Jesus' message became something that millions of people through history have turned to, adopted, followed, or argued against and fought.
00:29:16.420And I think the three that I always remember is, now there are by these three, faith, hope, charity, or love, but the greatest of these is charity.
00:29:27.380That word charity that I also said could be love, it's a Greek word we can't say in one English word, agape.
00:29:33.500If you spell it out in English, agape, well, that is what it means in Greek.
00:29:37.520Open, like an agape mouth or an open window, but it means open, tolerant, welcoming.
00:31:57.100Why don't we remember the really famous speaker guy, but we remember Lincoln's short speech?
00:32:02.680His name was Horton, and he was the main speaker.
00:32:05.420He was a person who was respected by all, and he had been asked to do the memorial tribute, the speech that would be a tribute to all of those who fell at Gettysburg.
00:32:17.960And Lincoln was insistent that it be a non-political, non-ra-ra union speech because Gettysburg was, as far as I can remember, that may be the battle that led to the most American deaths of any single battle.
00:32:31.840At any rate, there they are on the field at Gettysburg, and because it's near where some of my family live, Gettysburg, Virginia, from an early age, I was taken to the battlefield, and we would just walk that field.
00:32:45.500And we would go to the place where Lincoln and the others gathered for those addresses at the end.
00:32:51.200And I was fascinated to read because I sure didn't know when I was a kid.
00:32:54.120The Gettysburg Address was not the big deal.
00:32:55.940He was a little afterpiece, and so the big two-hour oration went on.
00:33:03.160In those pre-media days, our ancestors had a stronger stomach than we do for direct public speaking, listening to a person with attention for a couple of hours.
00:33:13.340We don't have any trouble watching a movie for two hours.
00:33:15.920They brought that same kind of attention to a public speaker.
00:33:19.040Even a preacher or an inspired prophetess or whoever, they were willing to listen at great length.
00:33:25.960So Lincoln came without knowing what he was going to say, and this is the tradition, and that he scribbled notes on what he was going to say while listening to the main speech.
00:33:39.920And that when he was over, he got up and read the immortal words of the Gettysburg Address a few minutes.
00:33:51.800I don't know that anyone has ever recorded the crowd's response.
00:33:56.480It may have been so somber that the effect he had was just silence and then everyone dispersing from this field of sorrow.
00:34:05.040So, but Horton, the main speaker, walked over to Lincoln and was heard to say, Mr. President, I wish I could feel I said as much in two hours as you said in two minutes.
00:34:19.800And hats off to the speaker for his insight, his awareness, his humbleness, and his admiration for Lincoln.
00:34:27.080But for putting his finger on something, you can encapsulate something big in a small space if you give it the right form.
00:34:36.280Everything needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.
00:34:39.100Read through the Gettysburg Address for yourself.
00:34:42.140You see how Lincoln's evocation of the situation, what brings us all together on this field of battle, the middle part about the stress.
00:34:50.900We are caught in the, we find ourselves here on this field of the battle in the midst of a great civil war.
00:34:55.560And then that final ending, which is dedicating ourselves to the cause for which they died, taking them as examples to follow, making them live not just in a sort of, oh, I remember way, but as examples, as these sort of figures written in fire in our imaginations of we can be that too.
00:35:18.680We can do that too, and if we do give that last full measure of devotion as they did, any cause can prevail.
00:35:27.560So it's a mechanical thing I'm talking about with Lincoln, but his words have the power because of the structure, that tripartite, three-part structure that he used, a powerful call to attention, an equally powerful, but now somewhat more cerebral, thought-provoking middle,
00:35:50.440and then a finally power in a summing up, turning back to the subject, the fallen, all of these soldiers who gave their lives, and focus then on the subject, not on the speaker, beginning, middle, end.
00:36:08.780And it's not a long speech, two minutes, but I think his audience felt, and certainly Horton, who gave the main speech, felt he had created the sense of something vast in those two minutes because they'd been on a journey with him through those three parts of opening the door, taking the view, and then reflecting on the message.
00:36:30.080That's what I would recommend, and anything you're doing, even if it's just a financial report, have a beginning, have the middle that's the substance, and draw it to a conclusion that reminds your listeners of what mattered.
00:36:43.800And also keep in mind, more isn't often better. In fact, less is often better.
00:36:48.080Well, and that is what the honored main speaker that day was pointing out to Lincoln. I wish I could say as much. He felt he'd said less.
00:36:54.860He felt that Lincoln, by boiling down to the heart of the matter, had left the people feeling the greater message in the way that the main speaker, who had to talk for two hours, everybody expected it.
00:37:09.340I mean, he had the harder row to hoe, but he was such an insightful person.
00:37:14.440I think that's a beautiful thing that he said to Lincoln, that the president had said more, that the brief could be more powerful, and it was partly because of its gravity, its memorability.
00:37:24.860Well, John, this has been a great conversation. We've talked about some of the guest lectures you bring on in your lecture on the art of public speaking.
00:37:32.020Where can people go to learn more about your course, The Art of Public Speaking?
00:37:35.360Well, it's available to you from the Great Courses Company. They have a mail order and online presence. I think now you can download them all, which was a technology that didn't exist all those decades ago when I would truck out to Chantilly, Virginia for session after session from my home base in New Albany, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky, and spent some very happy times working with them.
00:38:00.660I'm a guy who likes team efforts, and I'll say one other thing about public speaking. Think of it always as a team effort. Don't be isolated and lonely about it. Try things out on other people. Learn from other people and make the audience feel like you're all in this together.
00:38:15.380It's not you haranguing or lecturing them or teaching them that it's a conversation. Even if they don't ever get a Q&A at the end, even if they never raise their hand, try to make it a conversation, and you will relax yourself.
00:38:31.140You will find the right way to put across your points, and they will not only enjoy it, they will remember it.
00:38:38.380Well, John Hale, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:38:42.800My guest today was John Hale. He is the lecturer of the Great Courses course, The Art of Public Speaking, Lessons from the Greatest Speeches in History. Check that out at The Great Courses. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash public speak, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:39:26.060And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it.
00:39:36.560As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you not only on the list of the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.