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The Passionate Speaker
"Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little."
- Tom Stoppard, British playwrightA Newsletter for Speakers By Michael Landrum September, 2004 – Number 66 The Meta-Skill of Leadership Public speaking has become an increasingly vital activity in the modern world. Each day thousands of presentations are made in business, government, education, religion and the arts. Speaking is an essential tool for marketing, politics, advertising, selling, preaching, teaching, entertaining, informing, motivating or inspiring. The ability to speak well is a meta-skill required by leaders in nearly every field of human endeavor. When the founders placed the freedom of speech first on the bill of rights, they were recognizing its primal place in the life of society. Subtract speech and you take away personal expression of all types in all media. Even mute action and strictly graphic presentations are legally protected by this constitutional amendment. To be a speaker then, is to express oneself to the world, and to be a passionate speaker is to express the most meaningful thoughts and feelings. When I began this newsletter for speakers, I thought in narrower terms than these. My audience, I thought, would be those who actually mounted the podium to speak as part of their work or pleasure. As the project grew so did the subject. I found applications to the speaker's art in many unexpected places – from the Museum of Modern Art to the plains of Africa. I have been gratified to find support from readers who are not public speakers nor do they intend to be. It seems that my net has brought me a second, richer catch than the one I cast it for. Many of these essays turn on personal events and stories about me. It may seem a simple act of egoism, and that is a charge I have heard from some quarters. But these stories and anecdotes serve a larger purpose, I hope. The art of the speaker is a personal one and only by delving into one's personal history, experiences and insights can one win the right to speak on all the topics that a full, rich, life contains. The audience has a right to know the qualifications and evolution of the speaker's point of view. For my own qualifications and evolution, here they are: I grew up in small towns in the west and mid-west; I attended Southeast Missouri State College and then Wayne State University in Detroit for a total of five years; they were followed by a year at the National Theatre School of Canada for training as a classical actor. I served a hitch in the Army and a tour in Viet Nam, and then I came to New York to begin my professional career as an actor. I have worked in the theater, on and off Broadway, on soap operas and in many TV commercials and corporate videos. I have also taught acting, written plays, fiction and magazine articles, directed and produced in the theater. Public speaking has been a late enthusiasm in my life, and my training and experience as an actor provide a special point of view in this new endeavor. I believe that speakers, like actors, writers and artists, have a mission to communicate as well as possible; to me, that means including the personal and specific along with the universal and profound. We can best achieve this by telling stories, making metaphors and drawing parallels from the whole span of our experience. We communicators serve best as generalists, letting our audiences know of the world as it is viewed from other windows. A speech is a relationship, a dialog between one and many, a complex communication of facts, feelings, needs and desires. When a speech works well, when the relationship is a good match and the circuit is closed successfully, then everyone leaves a little better for the experience. While The Passionate Speaker does sometimes focus on the techniques and methods of speaking, its wider aim is to stimulate and provoke the creative imagination of readers and followers of the speaker's art. I believe that speakers are in the vanguard of the human search for meaning, and it is with that view that I offer these essays. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Toastmasters and the National Speakers Association and to the many wonderful members of those organizations who have helped and supported me. ©2004 Michael F. Landrum |
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