Toastmasters, Aristotle, and the Essential Art of Rhetoric
Episode Stats
Summary
When John Bow learned that his reclusive cousin who had lived for decades in his parents basement had moved out and gotten married at the age of 59, he was extremely surprised. What made him equally surprised was how his cousin had finally launched his life. It hadn t been meds or therapy, but instead he joined his local Toastmasters club.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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when john bow learned that his reclusive cousin who had lived for decades in his parents basement
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had moved out and gotten married at the age of 59 john was extremely surprised what made him
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equally surprised was how his cousin had finally launched his life it hadn't been meds or therapy
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instead he joined his local toastmasters club duly intrigued john set off on his own toastmasters
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journey as he details in his book i have something to say mastering the art of public speaking in an
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age of disconnection today on the show john shares how he discovered that the ethos of this
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non-profit organization parallels the tradition of rhetoric espoused by the ancient greeks
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especially by aristotle and why the ability to speak whether in the context of giving a formal
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speech or simply having a conversation continues to be such an essential skill in the modern age
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in my favorite part of the show we discuss how our ideas of authentic speech can actually get in the
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way of expressing our authentic selves we then turn into techniques for better speaking that john learned
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from joining toastmasters and how toastmasters ultimately transformed his own life after show's
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over check out our show notes at aom.is slash toastmasters all right john bow welcome to the show
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thanks brett i'm very very excited to be here so uh you wrote a book called i have something to say
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mastering the art of public speaking in an age of disconnection and this book is part memoir part
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experiential journalism and also just showing research about public speaking and specifically
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how toastmasters teaches the art of public speaking and you went through the whole process there i'm
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curious what led you to joining a toastmasters group and doing a deep dive into the art of public
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speaking i should preface anything i would say by saying that my whole life i hated public speaking
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i hated the idea of anyone learning to do public speaking or anyone teaching me to do public speaking
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i just thought it was the most artificial or phony or stinted kind of thing you could do
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so what led me to discover the subject or find a different way into it was a total accident
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in about 2009 i was doing an oral history about love and i interviewed a step cousin of mine who
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was a recluse in rural iowa and he had lived in his parents basement until he was 59 and then he got
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married and so everyone in my family would kind of snidely gossip about him and wonder what in the
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world had happened so when i became a journalist and i was doing this oral history i asked him
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dude how did you go from being a guy who plays with a model train set in your basement to someone who
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could be married and i just assumed that he had gone to therapy or seen a shrink or gotten on meds or
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something something psychiatric and instead he said i joined the toastmasters club i was told they're a
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very nice place to meet people and somehow he had joined toastmasters and he wasn't even a great
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toastmaster he gave six speeches or something and he somehow was transformed enough by that experience
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to then begin talking to women or the woman who would eventually become his wife and i just thought
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this guy converted from being totally offline socially to get back into the mainstream of public
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life of social life without psychiatric intervention without psychiatric methods and it was purely this act of
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joining a civic group and learning to speak that performed this miracle so i was really intrigued
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i started thinking about his experience and toastmasters and i started researching toastmasters here and there
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and i started realizing oh they have this whole way of teaching people to speak and this is a thing
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and it goes back to this greek invention of speech training and i started becoming intrigued by the fact that
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the greeks invented speech training about 10 minutes after they invented democracy and it tied into all
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these things that i was really concerned about like you know the partisan war going on in america in general
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alienation people being very disconnected socially these days and people being very divided and all these
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trends like you know civic engagement declining people's trust in public institutions declining so i had this
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aha moment where i realized god if you could tie all of these things together it's almost all connected
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to our lack of speech training because when you learn how to speak you learn how to connect with people
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and if you don't learn how to speak you kind of by default get disconnected from people
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no so that's interesting i want to talk more about the consequences of us not teaching public speaking or
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rhetoric but before we do let's talk about toastmasters in general i think a lot of people
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have probably heard of toastmasters maybe they had a friend talk about toastmasters what is the
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history of toastmasters like who formed it why do they form it and what's the state of the organization
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today toastmasters was founded in 1924 by a guy named ralph c smedley who was a director at the ymca
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director of adult education programs and in the 1920s you were seeing this huge migration of farm
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people rural people moving into cities because farm work was becoming mechanized so at one time
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something like 80 percent of americans were employed doing farm work or related work suddenly
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all of those jobs went away so these people who lived in small communities where people knew each
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other by reputation suddenly had to move to cities and have meetings in big large growing companies and
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corporations and most of them sucked at it and were terrified by it so this smedley guy realized what
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a big favor he could do to help people learn how to do it because it was stunting their personal life
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and their work life and he played at it a couple times with versions of it that didn't work before he came
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up with the iteration that finally became toastmasters but he envisioned it as a laboratory of free speech
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where people could come and bring anything that they needed to work on in their work life or private life
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you know wedding speeches funeral speeches and stuff and run them by their fellow fellow citizens so it was
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from the very beginning a non-profit club where people could kind of go at their own speed and he really
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emphasized this learn by doing approach it's not highly theoretical there's not a ton of reading you just keep
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doing it and practicing these isolated technical components of speech and then you get evaluated by
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your fellows oh and then what's the state of the organization today i mean i'm i imagine it was
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probably really big middle of the 20th century has membership declined or has it held pretty steady
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well membership worldwide is bigger than it's ever been the club grew in popularity i'm not sure if it
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peaked or what's going on with us membership i think it's doing okay after a dip but globally it's there are more
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members than there have ever been there are clubs in most countries around the world and you know again
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there's a non-profit and it's pretty they meet in you know you guys met in a grocery store
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lobby area they meet in libraries it's like salt of the earth civic from the ground up type of organization
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i mean i wrote and i wrote and i had to take so much of it out of the book but i was fascinated by
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the spaces where toastmasters meet because if you think about american life everything's become so
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privatized and there's this whole underground network of spaces that are public or quasi public
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where clubs like this are still meeting and there's still this kind of world going on that's very uncool
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unhip and it's not featured in the media but we met in the community room of the byerly's grocery store
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in st louis park minnesota and there are community rooms like this all over the country and i've seen
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other toastmasters chapters meeting on air force bases and chamber of commerce offices places like that
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that you kind of never think of yes this is a very like a toquevellian democratic self-improvement
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society the officers aren't getting paid to do this they just everyone just shows up because they
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really believe in this idea of helping people improve their public speaking and you talk about
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how it seems like what the toastmasters are doing is they are carrying on the legacy of rhetoric or
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rhetorical education that the ancient greeks and romans used you talk about how the greeks pretty
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much invented rhetoric shortly after they invented democracy because rhetoric was what allowed you to
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participate in democracy it's not like our sort of democracy where you know we just go vote and
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that's pretty much it democracy in athens was very if you're going to participate you had to get up
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there and talk and speech and persuade what was the rhetorical education like in ancient greece and
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rome and then maybe we talk about why did we stop teaching that systematically in the west
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so after they invented democracy it immediately became necessary for the people who were citizens
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to speak in public so before the invention of democracy it was illegal it was prohibited activity
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and suddenly it became required activity for a lot of people and even when you weren't required to do it
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you still kind of had to do it because if you were bad at it people thought you were uncool and lame
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and didn't want to do business with you and didn't want to marry you
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and so really you had to go to these forums and talk about should we invade sparta or not
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and if you were lame at it like that was it no one took you seriously another thing that happened
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with the invention of democracy were trials the invention of a trial by a jury of your peers and
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back then trials were like gladiatorial matches and there was no procedural process really you could
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accuse anybody of anything and then suddenly you'd have to go to court and there would be anywhere from
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200 to 1500 plebs and they'd be drunk and eating and laughing and jeering and so you and your accuser
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would just sort of battle it out verbally and again if you lost or if you were bad at public speaking
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which most people were just like now you could lose your house and your flock of sheep and whatever
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property you had and so in the middle of all that this lawyer in sicily wrote like a short manual
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teaching people how to conduct themselves during trials and it was just this basic thing saying here's
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where you stand here's when you shut up here's how you should present your case and in a weird way
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it was really the first time anybody had ever stepped back from the daily act of speaking
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and apply theory to it and apply rules to it and realize oh you know when you look at people when
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you talk they believe you more than if you don't or if you break your jokes or your stories into three
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parts somehow they make more sense than if you don't why is that what are the rules for good
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speech what are the things about speech that make it not work and so suddenly it was like splitting the
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atom open or something this thing that no one had ever thought about suddenly became the source of
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incredible power and schools spread it up all over athens with philosophers and teachers rushing in
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to teach different angles of speech like how to do introductions or just logical ways to defend
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yourself in an argument there are like eight or 12 different paths you can take or something
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people exploited stuff like verb tense and there are these crazy little language hacks that you could
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take advantage of and most of us know some of it but we've never been taught all of it and we've never
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been taught just you know rigorously drilled at it so very quickly it became the most popular subject
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everyone realized that in a world of democracy talking is the main weapon we use every day in
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everyday life to get ahead and to get influence and so in the end it wasn't called communication
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or public speaking it was called rhetoric and the definition of rhetoric was the study of all
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available means of persuasion and so at some point there are you know dozens or hundreds of different
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schools in athens and aristotle comes along and in a typical aristotelian way writes the one book
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the one comprehensive systematic analysis of rhetoric and he's just you know aristotle is insane just
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everything he does like this is it this is the one way that you can see this issue and he said this is
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what rhetoric is this is what it's useful for this is why you need to know it and he kind of carved out
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these rules and theories of what it is and ever since then those were the basis those were the core
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of all western education for about 1800 years 2000 years but from the beginning of rhetoric there were
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people who said why do we need to learn this this is kind of like the art of bullshit this is like the
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art of spinning the truth why should anyone who speaks the truth need to spin it and plato for
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example wrote two treatises against rhetoric saying this is a false art this is a black art and aristotle
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had been plato's student and aristotle was the one who really refuted that and said look in a world of
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crazy people and in a world where people are really irrational and don't pay attention to facts you need to
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learn how to deal with that you need to learn how to be persuasive so that the good ideas can sort of
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rise like cream to the top and he said something very daunting very challenging aristotle said that
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ideas that are true and ideas that are good should be easier to prove than their opposites so if people
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who have the bad ideas or people who are lying win and they prevail against the first group of people
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then the first group of people have only themselves to blame they should have learned how to present
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their case better and so if you think about anyone who ever worked in an office environment
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where the loud person or the interrupter or the charismatic person always wins out over the smart
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person you think about that you think well smart person you're supposed to learn how to be more
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persuasive it's on you anyway so this argument about whether rhetoric is good or not persisted really
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throughout its entire life and while it was hugely important for people to learn it always had its
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detractors and about two or three hundred years ago there were a series of things that kind of chipped
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away at it and i would say that number one was science and the scientific approach to everything where we
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started prioritizing what i call hard knowledge or hard skills over rhetoric which is sort of the mother
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of all soft skills and then yeah i mean you could see throughout the renaissance rhetoric was an
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important part of a man's education but even you saw rhetoric as part of a college curriculum when you
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became a freshman you had to take rhetoric at a lot of the colleges up until about you know the
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early part of the 19th century and then you saw it kind of go away we stopped doing that and you make
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the case that not only is this making us just bad at public speaking and people will be like well who cares
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if i'm bad at public speaking if i sit at a computer and just type in data in a spreadsheet why does it be
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good at public speaking but one of the bigger cases you're making in this book and you alluded to it earlier
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is that you think that our lack of rhetorical education the the education of how to speak publicly with
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others could be one of the causes of the disconnect we're seeing in our culture not only with the
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political rancor but also just people feeling lonely alienated just all that stuff you hear about in
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news articles all the time you think maybe the lack of public speaking education is contributing to
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that how so i grew up with zero zero sense that public speaking is a thing and so as i grew older and
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got weirder and more not introverted but just i read a lot i read a lot of religious books and
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philosophy books and stuff like that and i felt like i couldn't connect with anyone and those ideas
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for me were just sort of private i guess i got this idea as i grew older that these ideas were
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inexpressible and people are too dumb to understand me or the flip side of that is i'm too dumb
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to express myself and i just grew up kind of thinking well that's normal that's how life is
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and if i had had this training i would have learned oh you can express anything you just have to
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do the work like there's a skill set here and even though i'm a writer and i learned how to put that
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stuff into writing i had a huge divide between what i could write and what i could say and i think
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without wanting to stretch that too far i think most people grow up thinking i can't express myself
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no one's listening if i bump into the slightest bit of conflict it's going to be horrible it's going
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to blow up and turn into this big drama and what the greeks really intended was to prepare students
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for the fact that life is combat like life is the hunger games and it's this verbal hunger games going
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on in your family and at work and in the public square and that's good that's a good thing so it's
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like free market capitalism if you like the ideas behind that or you believe that the market always kind
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of goes the right way or something in the end if you like this idea of the same thing on ideas you know
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the ideas that are best will eventually prevail as long as everyone is endowed with the skill
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to be able to articulate them and so you know aristotle articulated this thing he said this
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skill of rhetoric is the basis of civilization it's the basis of our homes it's the basis of our town
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square this one thing is in the middle of everything it's the quintessential human skill it's what makes
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culture and morality and everything else the law politics everything flows from this ability to argue
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and he sort of saw human existence as this ongoing argument hey look at me hey what about my way
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oh you like your way better oh well what's fair let's figure it out and so if you can't participate
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in that you're kind of cut offline from the central activity of being human and i've seen these really
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cool analogs to it like i was reading this thing by hannah arndt in a book called the human condition and
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she talks about how in latin for example to die the verb to die meant to die socially to leave the
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company of humans it wasn't your own individual physical body dying it was you leave the game you
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leave the the race of everybody jostling and fighting and arguing and having fun doing it and so i think
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really all of these things come together with speech education if you have kids growing up and staring at
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their screens but they're too timid or unskilled to connect with their peers and have arguments about
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anything without freaking out where do they go from there no and i think another thing as you were
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talking that may have contributed i thought of this as you were talking that may have contributed to
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the chipping away of public speaking education and particularly in america is we have this idea of
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authenticity right like whatever's inside of you that's the real you and if you have to practice
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at it and think about it then that's not authentic but there's been thinkers that you quote there's one
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richard sinnet he wrote the fall of public man he makes this intriguing case that no actually this idea
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of authenticity it's actually preventing us from being our real selves because you have this idea well if
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i don't have to think about how to present my ideas inside of me then you're never able to do so
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and as a consequence you can't become who you want to be and you can't connect with others
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i think this is very shallow unexamined sense of what authenticity means i know for me i just thought
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if i was ever nervous or something made me feel awkward that meant that i wasn't supposed to do it
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so if it made me feel awkward to go do a book tour and talk about a book that i had worked on for years
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that meant that public speaking was stupid i never could turn it around and look at myself
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and ask the question well wait a minute this is your authentic self you spent years working on this
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book you know about slavery or about this or that because i was really passionate about my subjects
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so for me to not be able to speak well about the things i care about is actually much more
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inauthentic than me feeling stupid or awkward about learning to make my points better and i think
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you see that all around in different areas i just think if you have everybody trapped inside their
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minds and they're unable to speak up they're unable to have conflict that can't be said to be
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some big vision of authenticity i think authenticity means that people are really
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skilled at articulating their their position in a public way for others to criticize and others to
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moderate and i think there was this huge argument also from the beginnings of rhetoric and the greeks
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does learning rhetoric learning to practice rhetoric make you a better person or not and there was this
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one famous rhetorician more famous at the time than aristotle named issocrates and he said learning to
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speak in public will basically make you a better person and improve your sense of discernment and
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judgment and i think that's fascinating it's not always true but i think the point is if you learn
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to get your points of view out into the world then people will tell you hey that's crazy or hey i like
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what you're saying but that one part of it is crazy so people can push back on you and by not being
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locked inside your own private little world chuckling to yourself about how authentic and great you are
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you have to put yourself out there and people will push back and tell you when you're being wrong or
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stupid and so you grow and you actually get more authentic in a kind of a group way by partaking in
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that process yeah i think people when they think authentic communication what they end up doing is
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they just throw like the firebombs hey there's this thing here's real talk and they just say something
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that they didn't even really think about it they just said the first thing on their mind and it just blows
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up and it's not good communication and i imagine if they would have thought about things more it would
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have been more effective but we have this idea well you know it's authentic communication has to be
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just whatever i think at the top of my head and that's whatever my emotions say that i'm just going
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to say that and aristotle and these ancient greeks and even the toastmasters would say uh no that's not
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authentic communication we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors
00:23:10.800
and now back to the show okay so learning the art of public speaking not only will help you in your job i think
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most people when they think about improving their public speaking they're thinking about how it can
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improve their lives professionally they have to give a pitch or speech or something like that but
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you're saying no it actually carries over just to your day-to-day everyday conversations it allows
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you to connect better with other people communicate better with other people so let's dig into like
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this toastmasters process how they're teaching the art of rhetoric and the 20th and 21st centuries
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you mentioned that active participation is an important part of the toastmasters experience
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you have to actually get up and i mean they don't force you to do this but they highly encourage
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you to get up and give speeches to get better so tell us about your first time you show up at this
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grocery store community room what was your first experience like giving a speech in front of these
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toastmasters i have to say i was more terrified to give my first toastmasters speech than any other
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public speaking occasion in my life i was once on the daily show with john stewart and that was
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pretty terrifying but this toastmasters speech at the community room at the byerly's grocery store
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in st louis park minnesota it was probably about three times more terrifying and it's precisely
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because i was studying my own inability to connect with other people and i had signed up to write this
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book about it and i was really bummed that i had to go to toastmasters and i knew i had to go through
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it but every other time i'd spoken in public i just kind of erected all of my defensive barriers
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and i kind of cruised through it with clenched fists and i would use humor and i don't know what
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else i used to get through it but here i was supposed to make a much more earnest undefended
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attempt and i sucked at it i completely whiffed i was so far off and i didn't know why i just felt
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like i was you know walking on a floor covered with marbles or something i just you know they're the
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most forgiving welcoming environment you could ever imagine in the world and so it wasn't them
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it was just me overthinking everything to death and also trying to write about it at the same time and
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look at myself and monitor myself while i was going through this process but i guess what i did wrong i
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was trying to be cool in my first speech the instructions for the first speech were just to
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try to connect with your fellow group members and without knowing it i was trying to impress them
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or show them how weird and original i was and that's a very different purpose than trying to
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connect with people or trying to share with people and so just from the get-go i was doing the wrong
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thing in the wrong way without knowing it and it was excruciating i came home from that feeling like
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i'd just been physically beaten up three times and what was your feedback like so after every toastmaster
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speech there's a period of feedback so what was the feedback like on your first speech and as you said
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these people it's like the most forgiving place you can be but i imagine some of it stung so what was
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that process like i can't remember the feedback so much i know there was kind of a very polite
00:26:19.300
sort of like hey dude good try that first one's hard for all of us they're not gonna they're not
00:26:26.700
gonna say like whoa you have obvious psychological problems that were on full reveal i think for the
00:26:33.540
first speech they don't give you a lot of technical advice but after that it starts to get pretty
00:26:37.420
technical which is super helpful and really changes the way that you think about speech but for that
00:26:45.260
first one you're just kind of winging it and you just got to get it over with you got to get it out
00:26:49.020
of the way and it seemed like the first thing you struggled to overcome with your learning the art of
00:26:54.860
rhetoric at toastmasters was you can call this morbid self-consciousness you had right yes just
00:27:01.360
thinking about yourself and how you looked and how can i be cool and how can i be original
00:27:05.100
and what toastmasters does it hammers into you to the point this is goes all the way back to the
00:27:10.880
ancient greeks is when you are formulating a speech when you're trying to speak to somebody
00:27:15.580
instead of thinking about yourself you should always be thinking about your audience so how did
00:27:21.760
that experience the first time you gave a speech in toastmasters how did that help you start
00:27:26.420
thinking less about yourself and more about your audience i didn't realize this till later on and
00:27:32.840
i didn't quite realize this only through toastmasters i also got it by reading aristotle's book about
00:27:38.160
rhetoric 15 times and in that book he said something the audience is the beginning and the end of public
00:27:45.100
speaking and the first time you hear that it sounds like an observation and you just shrug and be like
00:27:50.300
okay that makes sense but what i didn't realize is all those things in public speaking training
00:27:55.320
that you come across that say you need to think about the audience they really mean you need to
00:28:00.720
think about the audience and so me typically and i think most people when we go into a presentation
00:28:06.580
we're thinking oh my god people are going to think i'm nuts people are going to know that i'm an idiot
00:28:10.480
whatever i'm not ready for this okay then i'm going to stop thinking about myself and think about my
00:28:15.200
material i've got to lay out these 15 slides and these 15 charts and graphs and whatever
00:28:20.460
and so aristotle's thing and really most speech training what they really want you to do is think
00:28:25.660
about where people are going to be sitting how old are they what time of the day is it how much do
00:28:30.680
they know about you or your subject and so just from the beginning you can bypass all this crap about
00:28:36.100
yourself and your material and focus on them that's what they call it public speaking and it's really
00:28:42.840
all about just getting rid of the 90 percent of your thoughts or whatever percent that aren't about
00:28:48.900
them and just thinking how can i help them how can i deliver the information they need to hear and
00:28:54.980
want to hear instead of getting lost in all of this stuff about my anxiety and blah blah blah my
00:29:00.840
millions of facts and data points and what's also interesting is that not only will that help you
00:29:05.760
overcome a lot of the stage fright a lot of times if you just start you shift the focus to the audience
00:29:10.240
to think about yourself it'll help you get over maybe some of that stage fright a lot of people have
00:29:13.560
about public speaking but this idea of just thinking about your audience this carries over to
00:29:18.180
day-to-day conversation like a lot of people who are shy we actually did a whole series about shyness
00:29:23.740
a lot of shyness is caused by this extreme self-consciousness and the solution that you know
00:29:29.320
if you go to a therapist i'm really shy they'll say well don't think about yourself so much it's like
00:29:33.460
think about the other person ask questions about them and be interested in them and that will help you
00:29:37.060
overcome your shyness and the same thing happens in public speaking the simplicity of this
00:29:42.980
aristotelian command to think about the audience first is it's really literal anyone can do it so
00:29:49.640
who am i talking to i'm talking to a 37 year old egyptian blah blah blah phd from montana you know
00:29:56.960
whatever you just it's not like you have to conjure up some kind of fake warmth or fake charisma you
00:30:04.060
really just start with this physical questioning of who am i talking to why are they here how can i help
00:30:10.800
them what do they want how can i explain my points in a way that fits into their kind of cognitive
00:30:16.380
universe or lexicon and i think that for me is the big breakthrough i don't even know if that's what
00:30:23.160
aristotle intended when he said his thing about the audience but that was what i got when i combined
00:30:28.820
toastmaster's approach and aristotle's approach and for me that was really the thing that allowed me to
00:30:35.320
stop being so anxious it's just realizing i don't have to do anything clever here i don't have to be
00:30:42.680
some magically non-anxious person i just have to think who are these people where are they sitting
00:30:49.580
how can i help them and this whole audience first this is going to pretty much shape everything you do
00:30:55.140
and how you organize your speech how you present yourself the words you use we're going to talk about
00:30:59.720
that so that's a nice segue this idea of organizing your speech and one of the exercises that toastmasters
00:31:05.520
has you work on is creating a speech and organizing in such a way that you get to the point as quickly
00:31:12.720
as you can and then make sure it's clearly understandable like what your main point is
00:31:16.360
was this hard for you to figure out when you first started doing this
00:31:19.320
that one was the so that the first toastmaster speech was just this general kind of do whatever
00:31:25.980
you want introduce yourself and try to connect with your crowd right second one was about
00:31:31.160
organization how do you organize a speech and they just wanted to get across the idea that you can't
00:31:38.140
just go up there and go blah blah blah blah blah blah blah from the beginning to the end it's much
00:31:42.000
much better if you say today i'm going to talk about blah blah blah i'm going to talk about it in
00:31:46.000
three parts and they had this kind of schema a set of schema you could use so you could say today i'm
00:31:52.560
going to talk about travel and i'm going to give examples in spain italy and russia or you could
00:31:58.700
say today i'm going to talk about travel i'm going to talk about travel for young people travel for
00:32:02.740
middle-aged people travel for old people they just gave you these different schema like problem
00:32:06.860
solution cause and effect and the point was at the beginning of a speech you need to give your
00:32:13.060
audience a roadmap for where you're going to go and then you follow the roadmap now let me kind of
00:32:17.500
combine that teaching with the next toastmasters exercise that i did because that in my mind
00:32:22.000
combined with this one they talked about forming your purpose before you talk to people every
00:32:28.140
speech that we do there's a social purpose to it and so i combine this notion of purpose and
00:32:33.580
organization so that my takeaway from this is when i give a speech i have to organize it into different
00:32:38.660
parts and i need to let you know how each of these parts of my speech are going to affect you or what
00:32:45.560
each of the parts of my speech is going to do for you so you have it very clear in your head i'm not
00:32:50.340
just up here on stage babbling i'm here to teach you something that i hope is useful for you and let
00:32:56.720
you know at every turn i'm not just babbling up here because i like myself or like my voice i'm
00:33:01.620
actually trying to give you something useful that you can use and did this carry over to you just
00:33:06.220
your everyday conversations beyond public speaking totally i shut up more i think i talk less than i used
00:33:13.440
to that's one good thing for the world you know i think a lot of times we all talk just to hear our
00:33:20.000
own voice and we like to be right i noticed how many times i tried to say things to be interesting
00:33:26.720
or original instead of just to help people you know if you read buddhism there's this very strict
00:33:32.080
commandment on right speech only say things that are true and only say things that are helpful
00:33:37.480
i think i'd read that many times before but now i live up to it much more often when i'm talking to
00:33:43.220
people i pay much more attention to my timing am i talking to them at a time when they're receptive
00:33:48.460
to what i'm saying because maybe i'm brilliant and maybe i'm saying something in a perfect way
00:33:53.300
but i'm catching someone at the exact wrong time that's a fail that's not going to get me a good result
00:33:58.660
if i am rushing and there's something in my tone that sounds makes me sound like a jerk
00:34:06.320
i can pause a little bit better than i used to be able to and weed that out i can avoid repetitions
00:34:12.540
i can avoid repeating the same thing as a way of bludgeoning people to get them to agree with me
00:34:17.400
i didn't do a lot of that in the past but now i definitely don't do it i think i can also narrow
00:34:22.820
down my answers when people ask me something i answer on point instead of letting my point drift
00:34:28.260
and i think people feel a lot better served when you do that because they really know oh you're
00:34:34.140
talking to me you're addressing me you're giving me your honest best thinking instead of just going
00:34:39.300
all over the place okay so toastmasters it gives you this it feels artificial at first of how to
00:34:43.520
organize your speech but if you follow it it's all about helping the other person person you're
00:34:48.240
speaking to understand what you're trying to say like you're trying to help them again this is all
00:34:52.860
about the audience first another thing that toastmasters helps you work on is reducing your
00:34:58.220
filler language and using more vivid and precise language what is that like and was that an issue
00:35:04.700
for you using the filler words and things like that toastmasters has a series of reports at the end of
00:35:10.460
every meeting so they have the grammarian and they have the ah counter and some others and the ah
00:35:16.880
counter goes around the room and tells the number of ahs and ums and likes and you knows that everybody
00:35:23.820
who participated used so during a few notice how i just said so during a few of my early meetings they
00:35:32.480
would go around the room and that person had three and that person had six and that person had two and
00:35:37.160
that person had four and then it got to me and i would have 17 and i could tell you that happened
00:35:43.800
twice and then it never happened again and of all the painful things about public speaking not just
00:35:50.240
when you're doing it but when you're listening to other people do it that filler word thing is it's so
00:35:55.180
painful when you're uh listening to uh someone go uh it's just agony and you realize they're taking up
00:36:02.620
20 of their speech time with this kind of lazy ungainly thing you know and as a speech coach that's one of
00:36:12.820
the easiest things i can train people out of because whether you're going to toastmasters and you have
00:36:18.880
some ah counter show you how badly you're doing or you learn by some other method it's one of the
00:36:24.960
easiest things to weed out you just learn how to be more intentional when you speak and you can actually
00:36:30.660
slow down and right now i'm giving an exaggerated version of that but you can do it without the
00:36:37.580
exaggerated version and skip the ahs and ums and so's and likes so imagine if you could get 20 percent
00:36:43.920
more potent in your speech just with one little trick for those who don't want to join toastmasters
00:36:50.600
to get the uh counter there's software out there now it's online it uses artificial intelligence you
00:36:56.060
speak into your computer and then it'll analyze your language and it'll tell you how many uhs and ums
00:37:01.800
and likes that you used and what percentage of that you've used it'll even tell you how fast you're
00:37:07.020
speaking i know a lot of people that's another issue with public speaking is speaking too fast because
00:37:12.540
you get nervous and you just want to get blah blah blah blah blah and toastmasters one of the
00:37:15.900
things they tell you is like you got to slow down because again audience first it will help your
00:37:21.040
audience understand you better it is one of the hardest things for people to learn that they
00:37:25.760
everyone thinks time is money and that they're doing their audience a favor by hurrying things up
00:37:31.420
but it doesn't really work that way i think the way you help people is by editing out all of the
00:37:36.680
lame parts of your speech or presentation and then you can afford to speak more slowly but everybody's
00:37:43.960
brain i think is so overcome by by messaging and data everyone is very very numb these days and if you
00:37:53.020
can actually speak in a way that reaches people and isn't hard to understand and you explain your
00:38:01.320
concepts really clearly using a voice that is clear and an organizational plan that is clear and
00:38:07.760
examples that are clear and you've already taken the trouble to contextualize them so that it's easy
00:38:13.020
for them to understand on their own terms they will appreciate you a lot more but also just understand what
00:38:19.180
you're saying people won't necessarily always agree with you but at least they'll understand what
00:38:24.400
you're saying and you'll walk away from every whether it's a personal encounter or a work
00:38:29.260
situation you'll at least feel like people got you and you did a good job of explaining yourself
00:38:34.900
and if that's the only outcome you get from speech training that's a great outcome you will no longer
00:38:40.440
feel so misunderstood you'll no longer feel like the world is dumb for not understanding you because
00:38:46.180
you will have explained yourself so another issue that toastmasters helps people address when they're
00:38:52.820
doing public speaking is body language what did you learn about the importance of body language and how to use
00:38:58.280
it when speaking at your toastmaster meeting the subject of body language gave me the heebie-jeebies
00:39:03.620
more than almost anything else because it felt creepy to me or cringy or uncomfortable to think i'm
00:39:08.680
supposed to move in a certain way and some of the instructions said you know put your shoulders back
00:39:13.700
and have your feet so many inches apart and i just put my foot down and i was like no way am i gonna do
00:39:19.880
that and then i kept reading the toastmaster stuff and also aristotle and they both said the same thing in
00:39:25.960
different ways they said anything you do that is distracting from your message is bad and anything
00:39:32.060
you do that enhances your message is good and once i saw it through that lens or that angle it became
00:39:39.460
much easier i don't know just to relax and think about my body language a little bit i'm probably never
00:39:44.740
going to be some big super emotive dramatic you know theatrical speaker i'm from the midwest we don't do
00:39:51.440
that but i do understand if you're clenching your fists together or you're you know your hands are
00:39:56.680
stuck in your back pockets or something like that you're hunched over or you're not making good eye
00:40:00.520
contact like it it's distracting to people so even if you're talking about some green solutions that's
00:40:05.320
going to save the world if you're on a stage people are going to be thinking wow this person looks
00:40:09.320
really uptight so you don't want to distract from your message and really that's as far as i usually
00:40:14.860
need to go with most people i just if i'm working with people i get them to understand what they look
00:40:22.420
like and how it's distracting and without needing to coach them on every little thing i think that
00:40:27.980
problem kind of takes care of itself does this go to aristotle's idea of ethos the body language aspect
00:40:33.440
totally i'll back up and say aristotle and his book about rhetoric talks about how everything we do
00:40:40.920
is an attempt to persuade people around us of something small or large it doesn't have to be
00:40:45.740
insidious or anything and when we do that we use facts and we use emotions and we use character which
00:40:52.240
he called ethos and so ethos is kind of like what you know about me from googling me or looking at my
00:40:59.440
resume or whatever but it's also just how well i explain my information and so if i'm staring at my
00:41:05.220
shoe the whole time i'm talking to you i'm destroying your ability to receive my information
00:41:11.380
because you're watching me freak out and stare at my shoe if i explain things in three really clear
00:41:17.020
parts which are designed to really tell my story and make my point in an interesting way you're going
00:41:24.080
to receive my information and remember it longer and be more likely to act on it and all of this comes
00:41:30.520
back to not just like the brilliance of my point or my data or my logic it's the brilliance with which i
00:41:36.520
express it to you and for you yeah i think for aristotle ethos was probably the most powerful
00:41:42.980
persuasive i would call it tool in rhetoric he's not to say that logos or facts are not important or that
00:41:51.460
emotions are not important but for him if you really want to be persuasive it all came down to ethos
00:41:56.680
aristotle said that of the three sort of channels or tools of persuasion ethos is by far the controlling
00:42:04.480
factor and i think that's where it runs totally counter to modern intelligence and modern education
00:42:10.200
because we've been so conditioned to think that facts are great data is great big data science that's
00:42:14.900
going to save the world and we're not learning public speaking and rhetoric in school and so you have
00:42:21.240
all of these smart people who are unable to make their point and i think this is really interesting
00:42:27.500
in aristotle's book about rhetoric he kind of admits that he hates rhetoric and that he wishes we lived in
00:42:33.880
a world where everything was like geometry and logic could win out but he said that's not the world we live
00:42:38.940
in and you know there are a lot of people who will just never respond to the most logical argument
00:42:43.200
you can make and so this thing about ethos and studying ethos and studying how it works and how do you
00:42:49.320
convince people was really designed to help smart people learn to get their points across you know
00:42:56.120
it's not about acting confident or losing your anxiety it's about just arranging your argument
00:43:00.860
in a way that people can actually understand yeah because when you organize your thoughts well
00:43:06.280
it goes to your ethos or character because people think well if you talk with clarity you're intelligent
00:43:12.300
you know you're a competent person and going to this idea of people emphasizing facts too much in our
00:43:17.700
i think our modern idea of information transmission you have a chapter it's called facts are stupid
00:43:23.760
things and that's the point you're making it's not that facts aren't important facts are important
00:43:29.120
logic is important you need to have a logically sound argument but i think oftentimes when people
00:43:34.660
talk in public what they immediately do is they just what are all the facts i'm just going to collect
00:43:39.500
as much data as i can and then i'm going to present it in a powerpoint presentation and just read it off
00:43:44.720
and i'm going to give them the truth and that'll be enough and aristotle and the toastmasters will say
00:43:50.940
no that's not you can have all the data and facts that are there but if you can't persuade people with
00:43:57.500
it then it's all for naught i think what we really really have lost sight of is the fact that public
00:44:02.500
speaking is about the public and it's a social interaction not a data transfer it's a great thing
00:44:08.960
from evolutionary psychology by jonathan hate where he's talking about how monkeys when they were
00:44:14.960
evolving the groups the larger groups of monkeys won out over the smaller groups of monkeys so your
00:44:20.700
ability to be in a big group of monkeys and know who's in your group and function within a group was
00:44:27.220
a more primary skill than your ability to read an excel spreadsheet for example or just you know to go
00:44:33.040
through the fine points of someone's logical argument you needed to know this tribal thing
00:44:37.540
and so for me public speaking what's really going on there's people just looking at you
00:44:42.640
eyeball to eyeball and thinking is brett a reasonable dude does brett make sense is brett crazy is brett
00:44:49.260
like this furtive guy staring at his shoe or does he seem like a guy i'm going to want to do business
00:44:54.960
with and so all of this stuff about ethos is really you could call it if you want to shift it into
00:45:02.100
the gear of sort of social cognition and neuroscience and all of that it's all about teaching you to
00:45:07.440
look at your audience and explain things in a way that let them know that you're a reasonable person
00:45:12.720
and you're able to focus on their needs for a few minutes instead of staring at your powerpoint
00:45:17.560
and what i see you know i work with a zillion clients now and a lot of them have these very data
00:45:23.120
heavy presentations they have to give and they'll turn their butt to their audience and point to their
00:45:27.620
deck and read on a screen the very information that their audience is reading so what does that
00:45:34.400
tell the audience it tells the audience i think you're dumb i think you're so dumb that you need
00:45:38.420
help reading it doesn't say i'm smart you should trust me it says i'm a bore i'm not tuned into your
00:45:47.000
needs you know and you have smart people all over the world doing this every day not knowing that it's
00:45:52.900
failing on some animal level what we want from one another and what we expect from one another
00:45:58.400
so i mean you went through this experience at toastmasters you learned a lot when you look
00:46:03.640
back on it how did it change your life going through this toastmasters at a community room at a grocery
00:46:09.260
store i am not kidding i know that this makes me sound silly but for me it was like a religious
00:46:16.760
conversion experience i just i went from being a guy who thinks public speaking is dumb
00:46:21.700
and learning about public speaking would be dumb and super uncool to realizing it's the most profound
00:46:28.060
training or experience you could ever have short of some kind of religious experience
00:46:33.160
and i'm not kidding it's to go from thinking that the world is dumb and no one understands me
00:46:39.660
to realizing oh i'm simply poor at expressing myself if i slow down and i learn some of these
00:46:46.680
techniques i can make myself understood wherever i go and people might disagree with me but at least
00:46:53.980
they'll know me and that's a big step up so that alienation that i grew up with and i was really
00:46:59.480
a bad boy and a rebel and a you know i was very very detached from the world for many years
00:47:05.420
so for me to find a way to reconnect to the world and then also help other people reconnect to the world
00:47:11.040
even without using any kind of religious or therapy kind of terminology or practice just
00:47:17.260
language training speech training it totally changed my life it totally changed the direction of my life
00:47:22.820
it changed what i do for a living it changed my optimism about the state of the world and would
00:47:28.620
you encourage other people to join toastmasters oh i would encourage people to do it like their life
00:47:34.240
depends upon it i think it's the shortest thing you know you you don't need to spend years of your
00:47:40.040
life doing you can spend a few hours and it will radically change the trajectory of your life and
00:47:44.860
the beauty of toastmasters said it's almost free the last time i checked it was 55 twice a year or
00:47:51.980
something so that's a lot cheaper than just about anything else out there yeah it's cheaper than therapy
00:47:56.940
it's a lot cheaper than therapy well john this has been a great conversation where can people go to
00:48:02.340
learn more about the book in your work i have a website which is johnfboe.com but also you know
00:48:10.600
you can look at my book on amazon or anything like that i've got a couple of articles that i've written
00:48:15.800
the thing about the book is it's kind of like the prequel to public speaking it's like why you should
00:48:20.940
learn to speak in public it doesn't really try to teach you how to do it but i wrote an article for
00:48:26.280
a magazine called psyche and the editor was great he beat it out of me in a way that was really helpful
00:48:31.940
that just lays out a straightforward way to start thinking about public speaking all right well john
00:48:38.360
boe thanks for your time it's been a pleasure well thank you brett yeah it's been a pleasure talking
00:48:42.500
to you too my guest name is john boe he's the author of the book i have something to say it's
00:48:47.140
available on amazon.com you can find more information about his work at his website johnfboe.com
00:48:52.260
and bow is spelled b-o-w-e also check out our show notes at aom.is slash toastmasters
00:48:57.060
we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:48:59.660
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:49:10.860
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00:49:14.620
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the continued support until next time it's brett mckay reminding you to not only listen to the
00:49:45.280
aom podcast but put what you've heard into action
00:49:47.700
aom podcast and i'll see you next time it's brett mckay