My First Public Speaking Experience, and Other Tales from $\mathrm{H}\#\$\$$

Here are two pieces of pertinent information for this issue’s installment of the Editor’s Round Table:We editors thought we would hash this out a bit, and here are some “first time” stories about our feeble attempts at public speaking from our distant past.

On a fall afternoon in 1986, I found myself in an amphitheater-like lecture hall in the Washington, DC, area. The occasion was to share what I was learning about quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) in the design and construction industry to some sixty-five professionals. My talk was entitled “The Effective QA/QC Program: How to Do It.” Everything was going just fine—I had a notebook tucked under my arm, coded to remind me to “go back to p. 27” as I went through the material with the audience. I had tested slides that I could control with a remote, and we even had a wireless mike.

Then the participants started to arrive. With the biggest smile I could muster, I went up onto the stage, into the podium space, and did “busy stuff.” Then I looked up. I froze. Each and every face was targeted right on me—or so it seemed. I wanted to be invisible; the idea of fainting occurred as a good option, but I wasn’t certain how to do that. “So,” I thought, “this is how I am going to die!” I clutched my notebook and placed it on the podium, and in so doing knocked off my eyeglasses. As I stood up, the miracle happened, right there, right then, right in front of the sixty-five people. I could not see them. Without my glasses, they were each just blurs from the first to the last row. Suddenly I was filled with joy, my memory kicked in, and I delivered an empowering talk that many audience members came to the podium later to thank me for. One said, “It seemed like you were looking right at me most of the time.” Well sure I was, as I had read somewhere that if you focus on the midlevel of an audience, occasionally turning your head, everyone will have that same feeling. For awhile, at my next seminars, I remembered to leave the glasses in my pocket.

—Bill Hayden

I was a junior in high school and the chaplain of our Key Club at Pensacola High in the Florida Panhandle. The Kiwanis Club in Fort Walton Beach asked that we send a representative to their meeting as a way to get students involved with the parent organization, and I was tapped to go. Being the chaplain, I was also asked to provide the invocation for the start of their meeting. I had never given any kind of talk before in my life and was scared to death as we drove down Highway 98 along the Intercoastal Waterway, which we called “the Sound.” One of our local Kiwanians from the Pensacola Kiwanis Club was driving and it was just the two of us. He tried to make polite conversation while I desperately fumbled with some three-by-five cards on which I was trying to scribble some notes for my short invocation speech. I must have seemed quite stupid to this man since I was so absorbed in jotting down some legible notes on the cards that I hardly paid any attention to his attempts at conversation and would simply nod or mumble “uh-huh.”

It was a very long hour getting to Fort Walton and the club meeting. By the time we arrived, I had a few words written down, but there was very little order to any of the thoughts necessary for a creditable speech on those cards. As I remember, I started out trying to decipher meaning from words I’d written on the cards and ended up with my family fallback position of “Lord, thank you for this food and for this company; please let us be ever mindful of the needs of others,” and perhaps a few additional remarks from my family dinner table, all followed by an “Amen.” That was the best and most welcome “Amen” I ever heard or ever will since it meant that my speech and it’s accompanying terror was over. I resolved after that experience never to speak again and as far as I know I never have . . . you can ask my friends if you don’t believe me.

—Chick Glagola

I don’t remember the first time I spoke in public, but I do remember my first Toastmasters speech, which was a whole four minutes and thirty seconds of sweat and feeling like a deer in headlights. Luckily, I didn’t burst into flames, but more importantly, I was not embarrassed and the encouragement I received from the group kept me coming back.

My keys to public speaking were learning to relax and to practice as often as possible. My wife’s canary never relaxed. He seemed to have two thoughts: Can I eat it? and Will it eat me? That’s normal for a canary, not for a person. But my mind acted like that canary’s when it came to public speaking. The connection came from a fellow project manager, Joe, who was giving me advice on how to deal with the constant stress of a customer rep whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to embarrass and berate everyone in his weekly project meeting. Joe’s advice was, “He can’t eat you, so why worry?” Seemed like perfect logic to me, so I borrowed it for my speaking. Naturally, I still get a little nervous or tense before a speech, but I tell myself “they can’t eat me,” and to date the crowd hasn’t turned on me and thrown me on a spit.

Toastmasters was key in developing my confidence in public speaking. The club provided regular, planned, and unplanned speaking opportunities as well as feedback on distracting habits (ring twisting was my favorite). Toastmasters also had a great positive effect on my ability to run meetings, which I found to be even more beneficial in my day-to-day job as a project manager and later as a business consultant.

—Paul Bryant

The first speech topic takes me back to seventh or eighth grade in parochial school. The building was old with hardwood floors. I wasn’t very big but my feet were and I wore huge shoes with hard soles. Because we were seated alphabetically, I was in the last row at the back of the classroom.

The second worst thing that could happen in school was to have the teacher call on me to come to the front of the classroom to recite, to her and my classmates, a hymn verse or a Bible passage. I remember the clump-clump-clump sound after I fearfully rose from my desk and walked toward her.

The absolute worst thing that could happen to me in those classes was finally getting to the front of the room and then having to turn around and face my classmates and recite the verse or passage. Somehow I survived. Perhaps it was those early negative experiences that instilled in me the fear of speaking. Accordingly, I only did it when I absolutely had to.

However, my view of the value of speaking changed when I entered college. I recall diligently working on an exercise in a freshman engineering graphics class, when the dean suddenly interrupted our instructor. He burst into the classroom, requested our attention, and said something like: “The four forms of communication are speaking, writing, mathematics, and graphics. You should strive to be competent in all of them. Thank you.” From that defining moment on, I realized the importance of communication and committed myself to developing those skills.

As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” I do this as a student of speaking. I am often saddened by the dumb things that smart people do when they give presentations. Examples are lacking enthusiasm, looking at the screen rather than the audience, not practicing and therefore searching for or stumbling over words, and exceeding the allotted time.

I am pleased that ASCE, in developing the civil engineering Body of Knowledge, is putting additional emphasis on acquiring communication knowledge and skill while future civil engineers are in college and serving their prelicensure internship. My teaching and practice experience leads me to conclude that when smart young people are informed about the importance of speaking and other forms of communication and are shown how to do it, they will rise to the occasion. They, their audiences, their organizations, and our profession will benefit tremendously.

—Stu Walesh

Today I am very comfortable speaking in public, and actually a lot more so than engaging in small talk at parties (although if the small talk is about bridges, then it’s easy). Awhile back, a friend suggested that I join a Toastmasters group at lunch time. The format of giving little speeches in which everyone commented and critiqued worked well for me. Now I have no problem going up in front of groups with little notice. Another thing that’s helped me is teaching classes. Standing up in front of a classroom for an hour or more is like giving a little performance. When I first started doing it I was mortified and had a lot of stage fright. Now I’m much more comfortable, although there is still a moment five minutes before show time when things are pretty tense. The key for my becoming comfortable is a combination of practice and opportunity.

I don’t remember my first public speaking gig. I do remember one of the earlier, really big ones. I was invited to give a keynote speech at the Abaqus convention in Rhode Island. It was at one of the mansions in Newport. We had a formal lunch, and everyone was dressed to the nines in the beautiful ballroom. After dessert, it was my turn to get up in front of four hundred people and speak. I decided to try out my best Rhode Island jokes, things like: “This is supposed to be a state? You get on I-95, and five minutes later you’re in Connecticut.” Fortunately I also had better Rhode Island jokes than that. After the audience got over the shock that I was dissing their state, they started laughing with me instead of at me, and the speech went well.

—Brian Brenner

It was on a cold and rainy Saturday in the fall of 1967. I was one of four students selected by the teachers, the nuns of the Sisters of Charity, to represent St. Margaret’s Elementary School at a speech contest for seventh and eighth graders held at a large Catholic high school in the Bronx. The theme was to choose a well-known speech, memorize it, and deliver it convincingly. I chose American patriot Patrick Henry’s speech, the one that ends with, “Give me liberty or give me death!”

I didn’t win the contest that day. I didn’t even make it past the elimination rounds. But when I got home, I recall looking out of the window of my bedroom. It had been a stressful day. The rain was pitter-pattering, straining past the mesh screens of the aluminum storm windows. My thought at that moment was a melancholy hymn that the good sisters had taught us recently, with words I still vividly recall: I see raindrops on my window. Joy is like the rain. Laughter runs across my pain. Slips away, and comes again. Joy is like the rain.

It’s not clear how this first experience will help anyone else become a better speaker, except maybe to say there ought to be similar opportunities provided to students in engineering departments to get them over any initial fears of public speaking. Since then, there have been a number of other speaking “firsts” for me. But one particular “first” does provide a helpful complement to my story, and this is from the Spring of 1999, when I was running for the school board in the small town of Sharon, Massachusetts, where I now reside.

I attribute the following piece of advice to Andy Nebenzahl, my attorney friend and campaign manager. (Yes, this was serious stuff!). He compared speeches to giving closing arguments at a trial, and said something like, “Remember, there’s always going to be three speeches: The speech that you prepare, the speech that you give, and afterward, the speech you wish you had given. So throw away your notes and stop reading your speech, and deliver it from the heart.”

With this perspective, his point was that one should prepare as best as one can, but not to worry so much when it came time to actually give the speech. Who but yourself would really know the exact phrasing or the words you had intended to say? Delivering a speech with eye contact, conviction, and heart is much more effective, and will usually go a long ways toward mitigating any words one might unintentionally flub.

And yes, this time I did win the election!

—Sam Liao

My first public speaking, or perhaps I should just say “speaking” experience, does not date as far back as other writers of this anecdote have reported. Oh no, I am not trying to compare my age with the other writers. The reason has something to do with where I come from and the education style I had experienced before accepting the challenge of speaking in front of an audience. I received my undergraduate education in India, a fact of which I am really proud as it has enabled me to reach where I am today. In India I worked for government agencies for seven years, during which time I was required to do all the work in my native language. Although all my education after middle school was in English, for seven years after my undergraduate education I hardly exercised English speaking or writing, which played a role in the experience I am about to share with you.

I do not remember the exact date but it was winter, in the spring semester of 1993. I was a student in a graduate course called “Embankment Design” at the University of Missouri–Rolla. The instructor informed the class that near the end of the semester everybody had to make a presentation on a topic of their choice but related to embankment design and construction. Like most of us do routinely, I procrastinated and did not pay attention to this assignment until a couple days before the date when the class was supposed to present. Then the sweats started. Phones got busier as we were calling each other. This was the first time I realized why people fear more about public speaking than “you know what.” Luckily, I found the topic without much problem because I had worked on a similar project in India. However, the “how in the world am I going to speak in front of the class” fear was looming all around me. Presenting in English was like salt on the wound. Deep breaths were not helping. Then a friend of mine, who had gone through a similar experience, came to the rescue. One important thing important he told me was “make sure you know your topic very well.” Since it was a class presentation, we were allowed to prepare visuals for use during our presentation. Well, there was no way out of it because I did not want to fail the course. I rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed all the way until my name was called. Oh yes, I did not listen to those who presented before me because my head was oriented toward one and only one direction—my presentation.

I heard my name and started walking toward the front of the classes. I did not want to show any distress so I pretended to walk very comfortably, but believe me, my heart was pounding like a jackhammer. The early nineties was still the age of transparencies. So I took my transparencies out, placed the first one on the projector, and introduced myself to break the ice. Amidst shaking violently inside, I took a deep breath and started presenting the material. I became so engaged into my presentation that I completely forgot that I was presenting to an audience for the first time. The time passed away very quickly and I reached my “thank you” slide in no time. I looked at my watch: I took five minutes more than the allotted time of twenty minutes. At the end of the class, my classmates and the instructor told me that it was an excellent presentation and that I did an outstanding job in presenting it. How it happened was a mystery to me at that time.

Today, I am proud to say that I am a successful teacher who speaks in front of different audiences, sometimes tough audiences, almost every day. I have been named an outstanding teacher at all levels—department, college, and even university. I feel comfortable speaking, of course, in English. However, I still feel a slight anxiety before every class, which I overcome by reviewing the material to be presented fifteen minutes before the class, irrespective of how many times I have presented the same material in the past.

While reflecting on my first presentation and all subsequent experiences, I would like to add the following thoughts, which may be helpful to the readers of this story.

—Sanjeev Kumar

In 1953, I was the president of Vigor High School’s Future Engineer Club. I was scheduled to introduce our keynote speaker at our annual banquet. Sitting at the head table, our club adviser and the speaker gave me information to use in my first trip to the podium. I listened, did little prior preparation, and did not take notes. I was very confident, but unprepared.

I approached the platform and the mike and looked out at all my student club members and friends. I froze; the only thing I could remember to say was, “I want to introduce Bob,” and I sat down.

I learned a valuable lesson: Prior preparation is the key to success.

Schools should be the place where we have our students participate, present, make mistakes, and learn. It is the educator’s place to ensure that positive feedback is continuous and to raise the students’ expectations.

I recently received an award form the Construction Industry Institute at their annual conference. Taking the microphone and speaking to over six hundred executives from our industry requires considerable thought, research, and rehearsal to make the remarks seem off the cuff, yet very thoughtful. It requires a complete understanding of the audience, their level of knowledge, and level of attention being displayed by the audience at that time. My comments were modified minutes before delivery considering the contents and details of the other speakers presenting before me and the tone and depth of the MC’s introduction. I never read a speech, but prepare five to six bullets and structure my remarks around the bullets. Experience in speaking verifies what jokes, stories, and remarks work.

My award was a leadership and service award, so consequently the theme was leadership. The theme of my comments were that the overly controlling and micromanagement styles have people “having to do things,” whereas a leadership style has people “wanting to do things.” The efficiency of organizations is so much better in the “want to” environment. If your message is wisdom then the key is to realize that the presented wisdom is the message and if the audience does not understand the logic behind the wisdom, the message will not be received. Table 1 is the model I share and discuss with my students. In reflecting on how wisdom is developed, there is a need to understand the process steps. Individual learning may happen in these steps.

—William Badger