Public Speaking: Get rid of the ‘um’ and word-fillers; hire an actor

I’m a little critical.  I’ll admit that.  It runs in my family.  I come from a long line of critical women.  They all seem to cling to life, too, so they can criticize a little more on their way out.

I expect to live to be 107.

As an actor, I’ve been trained to observe life, people, and situations with meticulous care.  This means that I notice the way my mom says “ruff” when she means, “roof.”  Or the way my friend clicks her tongue against the top of her mouth in a little “tsk” every time she’s about to speak.  Or the way my dog stretches in a perfect yoga pose every morning in the middle of the door frame so the door is sure to close on her.  It always does.

I also notice when a public speaker has signed a contract with the word “um” and promised to use it every other moment, when his hands bought real estate in his pockets and when he’s multitasking like nobody’s business to speak to the crowd while also treading a hole in the floorboards on his way to China.  It’s annoying.  It’s distracting.  But it’s also fixable.

I always thought if I couldn’t be an actor I should be a public speaking coach.  Or a spy.  Since the CIA still hasn’t called, I’ll talk about how to avoid being nervous, tense, and uninteresting in front of a large crowd of people.

Breathe

I had a professor at Syracuse who mainly said two things in class.  The first, “Could you breathe before you speak, please?”

Breath allows oxygen to enter the body and helps my muscles to be less tense.  It also allows the words I’m saying not only to form and make sense, but to be heard.  So, instead of saying “um” like I have Tourette’s syndrome, I pause and take a deep breath before I continue.  I’m pretty sure my audience appreciates that.

This doesn’t mean that everything I say is broken up with a breath such as, “Hi (breath) I’m (breath) Jana (breath) and (breath) this (breath) – ”  People will think I’m hyperventilating and call an ambulance.  It means that if I’m finding my next thought, I don’t have to fill the silence with “um,” but i can breathe in a short pause and segway to the next thing.  If I’m saying something worth hearing, the audience will be riveted enough to breathe with me before I move on.  Which leads me to…

Knowing what I’m saying

The second thing my Syracuse professor said was, “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”  If I don’t know what I’m saying, the audience won’t either.  The most important question I can ask before I get up in front of a crowd is: what do I want the crowd to take away from my talk?

Maybe it’s three things, maybe it’s one thing, but I have to know what I want them to take away or I will wander around on tangents about my grandma being a photographer and my great grandma being a painter, race through points I’m familiar with – but the audience isn’t – like “motivation,” “tactics,” and “stakes” and ultimately reach the end of my speech without a point or conclusion, “Uhh… I guess that’s it.”

If I have a point, I have something worth sharing and, therefore, something worth hearing.  It’s so much easier to get on stage when I have something worth hearing to say.  So I…

Really say it.

This is a tricky concept, but when mastered, it is the most effective tool in public speaking.  Maybe I know a lot about a certain topic and I can talk about it for hours, but if I just go through the motions of saying what I want to say without connecting to my audience, without making eye contact, without letting the words land, without pausing and breathing… if I don’t really say the words to the audience like I might say them to a friend in a coffee shop, I’m not really saying anything at all.

I might as well get up and recite the Gettysburg address, but we all know Daniel Day-Lewis would be much better suited for that.  It’s about forming a relationship with the audience so that even though I’m the only one talking, I know they’re with me because they’re laughing or they’re smiling or they’re nodding their head in response.  I’ve grasped them.  It also doesn’t hurt to “smize” – and yes, I’m using an America’s Next Top Model vocabulary word here (Tyra Banks would be proud).  Smizing is when I bring my smile up into my eyes so that my eyes are alive and the passion for the subject I’m speaking on is just radiating out of me.  If I’m really saying something, I probably have something to smize about.

I say all of this as though I’ve mastered it.  I haven’t.  You can probably count how many times I say “um” in our conversation the next time you see me and completely call me out on my crud.

Maybe I’m speaking in longing of Utopia, wishing we could all speak a little better or that we would take the time to speak.  Maybe I wish we’d stop texting our words and look each other in the eyes to communicate them instead.

Maybe I’m just super critical of everyone else  — especially myself.  I don’t know.

Maybe.