Speaking in public? Some helpful hints…
I’m not much of a newspaper reader, but I did pick up the Work section of last Saturday’s Guardian, which had been left on the seat of my train home from Gathering Momentum. The front page advertised a guide called The secret to public speaking. Once you cut past the decision to hang the whole thing on a recently released film, there’s some useful hints and tips.
January 30, 2011 @ 12:22 am
It’s something activists aren’t good at, beyond a small bubble of people who do a lot of it (and some of them aren’t quite as good as they think they are). The point is, it’s incredibly daunting to do it to a large group of strangers, so what *could* happen is for smaller scale opportunities to be available to people, who know that they will later receive friendly feedback and further mentoring. But too often in my experience, people are thrown in the deep end. If they sink, they are “scarred for life”. If they swim, they get better, but still have lots of bad habits that they can’t see and nobody else corrects… And there’s the gender thing too- as a rule (often broken, but still a rule), women tend not to be taught to have that confidence, and so you get lots of men on panel discussions etc etc…