Evolve by Challenging Assumptions

I was preparing to give my eighth speech at my Toastmaster’s club. The project was called: Getting Comfortable with Visual Aids. In the past, I had given many speeches using at first an overhead projector and then evolving to using Power Point. In that time, I really enjoyed using visual aids to focus my audience’s attention on specific parts of my talks. I felt very comfortable standing in front of an audience and was very excited that day. On that day, there were two speakers giving the same speech, which typically didn’t happen at my club. When I talked to the other person about their speech, I remember thinking, I hope they let me go first and fortunately I did. When I gave the speech, it went very well. The audience was engaged, I was delivering point after point and there were smiles on everyone’s faces. I thanked the audience, and told the other person that was up next, good luck and sat down.

What happened next was maybe one of the most important lessons I have ever learned in my life, and it challenged everything I thought I knew. The lesson was to not get too complacent with what I believed I knew, and the lesson still sits with me to this day. The other speaker gave a master class in public speaking with a visual aid. The power point slide show was unlike anything I had seen to that point and amazed me with its sleek style. It had well crafted images and used minimal typed words. It was the definition of what a professional speech is supposed to be. The speaker was not only confident, poised, and knowledgeable, but she was also in control of the room as she spoke. After her speech was done, I made sure to be the loudest one applauding. It was a profound learning experience for me, and I knew that I had much to learn going forward.

The first step was accepting that I needed to change what I was doing. I saw not just the next level of public speaking, but a level I didn’t even know that existed.

For those people who strive to be the best, you need to be pushed outside of your comfort zone periodically. You need to be challenged to take on new roles and responsibilities. Once you have completed those, the next step could either be additional challenges, or finding others needing a push and helping them if they are open to it.

Now let’s go back to my speech’s evaluation. The Evaluator told me what a great job I did both with my speech, the visual aid, and my presence. However, the Evaluator also told me to learn the lessons given by the other speaker to improve my future work.

I took that to heart. It was at this time that I became aware of the TED Conference talks and I started to study the habits of random TED and TEDx speakers. I looked at the advice that Steve Jobs gave about speaking which included “Less is more” and “taking the audience on a journey.”

The main lesson I learned that day however was, there is always someone out there that can do what you do, only better. If we can find those people and try to work towards their example, we can get a little bit better each day if we create reasonable goals and a strategy to achieve them.

For me, that means, 1% at a time, however how do you strive to get better? I would be happy to discuss this in the comments below.

Thank you for reading! I appreciate everyone and your time.

Craig