Review Buku I Have Something to Say - John Bowe

According to the National Institutes of Health, 74 percent of Americans suffer from speech anxiety. One often hears that “Americans fear public speaking more than death.”

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Americans participating in public or civic groups or clubs (like Toastmasters, but also, for example, bridge, clubs, political groups, religious organizations, and the PTA) has dropped by 75 percent. Recent surveys find that 65 percent of American millenials “don't feel confident” in live social interactions. Eight out of ten feel “more comfortable” texting or chatting online than conversing face-to-face.

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Over a third of Americans say they “never” socialize with their neighbors (a figure that's risen 50 percent in the last forty years). A 2012 study conducted by scientist at University of Michigan found that college students today demonstrate 40 percent less empathy than their peers from the 1980s. These trends, it seems, are mutually self-reinforcing. In a series of long-term studies by noted University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, loneliness and self-centeredness offer off each other, creating a positive feedback loop: Our increased self-absorption leads to decreased skill at reading social cues, which then leads to an increase in social slights and mishaps, and hence to difficult, dissatisfying social relations. The harder we find social relations, the more we withdraw from them, further limiting opportunities to “practice” the skills of social relations....

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“Hey, man,“ he said, shaking my hand, bro-style, “Whe're gonna get some Vita Coco. Wanna come with?” As we strode through the aisles, passing the produce and coffee products, Milter asked, “How'd your Icebreaker, go, John?” I nearly choked. It hardly seemed the time to vent my ruminations about the decline of civic discourse in America, nor my personal fears of voicelessness, so I shrugged and mumbled something like “Ahhh-it-was-ah-well.”

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By mumbling at times instead of speaking clearly, I rendered, say, 10 percent of my words incomprehensible – hard for my audience to connect to. By slouching, cowering, and grimacing – calling attention to my discomfort instead of my story – I diminished our connection still more. By dropping in words and phrases in basic French (never mind that I was self-deprecatingly trying to reenact my own ignorance of French at the time of the story), I chipped away still further at any sense of connection. By blithely omitting any explanation for why I'd taken such a dangerous journey in the first place (didn't everyone in their twenties have a death wish?), I made it hard for them to relate to the story – and to me.

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My step-cousin Bill von Hunsdorf grew up in Dyersville, Iowa, an arcadian hamlet of some thousand families surrounded by a sea of corn. In elevent grade, Bill asked a classmate to prom. She said no. Bill responded by moving to the family basement – and staying there for the next forty-three years.

He went to church now and then, but mostly he lived the life of a recluse. He taught himself to speak German. He learned to play several Chopin sonatas. He spent a decade building a model train set that wound through the entire space, gracing every bend and junction with miniature juniper trees, Old West buildings, and painstakingly detailed figures of human beings.

On the three occasions that I'd meet him, Bill engaged in pleasant, if eccentric, conversation. But he remained the most socially isolated person I'd ever known. As family members reported over the years, 'he'd never been on a date, never...

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Reed, I'd learned, worked for a prominent national bank, leading a technical sales team. Like a lot of Toastmasters I'd met, she'd entered the workforce as an engineer, then proven herself so capable that she'd been promoted into management, where, unexpectedly, her lack of people skills proved a stumbling block. Her current position often landed her on stage to lead product demonstrations before hundreds of sub ordinates, a task she'd never relished. Like me, she'd never aspired to be a talker, an explainer, the kind of person who charmingly, articulately chatters away onstage. But as her boss had made all too clear, her job depended on it.

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In approximately 335 B.C., Plato's former student, Aristotle, would publish a series of lecture notes known as the Ars Rhetorica, precisely in answer to the question. We learn rhetoric, wrote Aristotle, not in order to lie better, but because learning to see arguments from all sides and learning to see the constituent components of persuasion aid us in disarming those who would manipulate the masses.

...

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The next morning, during a furious downpour, I picked up the phone and called Susan Cain, author of the best-selling book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. I'd messaged her through her website and explained my book's mission, and she'd kindly agreed to an interview. Cain's book would eventually spend years on the New York Times best-seller list, fulfilling her childhood dream to be a ..

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One Friday in mid-August, five weeks after joining Toastmasters, I was sitting at my desk, waiting for a call from Toastmasters alumnis Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, former owner of the Detroit Tigers, and one of the richest men in the world.

...

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For most of the twentieth century, the term “public speaking” was nearly synonymous with Dale Carniege, author of numerous public speaking books and the best-selling self improvement book of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936. Carniege’s lessons boiled down to a simple precept: The key to success is a sunny, bubbly disposition:

You don't feel like smiling. Then what? Two things. First, force yourself to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune or sing. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.

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Whether we're championing our sincere beliefs, conning someone out of their fortune, or making everyday chitchat, there are three means, wrote Aristotle, by which we seek to persuade our listeners:

Logos – facts

Pathos – the emotions we stir up in our audience as we lay out our facts

Ethos – our character

Of these the most important – by a millionfold – is ethos: character.

In real life, “character” refers to our bona fide moral qualities – the stuff people know about us, our reputations, and so on. In public speaking, however, the term refers purely to how people percieve us. This includes our “genuine self” insofar is our audience knows who we are, but it also include the degree of credibility we create through the competence with which we present ourselves and our information.

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Like most modern public speaking methodologies, Toastmasters suggests opening a speech by “grabbing” one's audience with something dramatic and vivid. You might, for example, begin with a surprising personal anecdote: “Ladies and gentlemen. Ever wake up to find yourself in the middle of a swamp, naked, with for of your rugby buddies? Uh-oh! Been there!” You can pique an audience’s attention with a startling, wow-I-never-knew-that statistic: “Ladies and gentlemen, this morning, as we sit here enjoying our pastries and coffee, thirty-four hundred kite boarders around the world will get skin cancer.” You can boldly commence with a start quotation from a famous person: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the words of Selena Gomez...”

...

Like many tips for novice public speakers, the advice makes sense – until you try it. The device (at least, in my head, as I imagined using it) felt forced and sales-y. ..

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Twenty-four hundred years ago, Aristotle, the world's greatest authority on the subject, described it a little differently. In public or private, he taught, we speak for one reason: to persuade. Speech, in his view, was a grand and ceaseless argument. In the bedroom, the boardroom, or the public square, this endless competition – my point of view against yours, ours against theirs – was actually “a partnerhip.” It was the collective collaboration through which we develop and adjust our ideas about the foundations of civilization: justice, law, morality, and culture. To study the art of speech was more than merely learning to speak well or prettily. It meant exploring the basic operating system of human nature, the means by which we assert our identity and ultimately resolve questions of good and bad, true and false.

Isocrates, Aristotle’s more successful contemporary and one of Athen’s most famous speech teachers (with whom Aristotle almost never saw eye-to eye) agreed with him on this: Speech was the quintessential human activity. For Isocrates, eloquence was intertwined with good action and larger notions of citizenship. If there was a single art form the mastery of which could make us wiser, more just, and more useful to our fellow citizens, it was public speaking.

If these ideas today seemed pie-in-the-sky, I'd interviewed hundreds of Toastmasters who seemed to prove his point. Learning to give speeches had transformed their lives and made them better, happier people.

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I loved the broad idea that speech training could serve as medicine, healing the shy, connecting the disconnected, and mending our fractious, decaying society. Public speaking seemed like a profoundly useful and positive thing for other people to learn.

As for me, well, like most Americans, I was terrified of public speaking.

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When I'd called my cousin Bill a few weeks earlier to tell him I'd joined Toastmasters, he'd mentioned that, in his opinion, shyness is little more than selfishness. “Call it modesty or bashfulness, if you will,” he d said. “But my underlying problem was thinking too much about myself and how others see me, instead of considering them and how they hear. “ I'd found his thoughts interesting, ...

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APPENDIX

Five Steps to Help You Give a Great Speech

Many readers open a book like this looking for simple guidance about surviving their next speech, report, or presentation. Here, for your benefit, is the briefest possible outline of how to do so.

Step 1: Think about your audience.

In the words of Aristotle: The audience is the beginning and the end of public speaking.

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