[Tips] Slow Down

One of the common…. not mistakes, not even issues, but, well, things we see… is nervous presenters speaking at a breakneck speed. It is probably a side-effect of all the adrenaline that is surging through the body, perhaps combined with the knowledge that the clock is ticking. Or maybe it is simply born a desire to get off the stage. Whatever the cause, people tend to speak fast when they get in front of a crowd.

Speaking fast has several drawbacks. First, you (as the speaker) are more likely to stumble over your words and become more nervous because you feel that you are making a fool of yourself (you’re not, but you feel that way). Second, speaking quickly makes it very difficult for people to understand you, especially people for whom your first language is not theirs (I have been a chief offender on that one).

But perhaps the biggest drawback of speaking quickly is that it is simply exhausting for the audience. Remember, you set the tone for the audience – if you are bored, the audience will be bored. If you are excited, the audience will get excited. And if you are going at a mile-a-minute pace, well, your audience has to also just to follow along. And that gets tiring.

What brought this on? Well, today I came across a talk by Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame. I love the show, and enjoy sitting and watching it with my kids. And I quite like Adam – he has a quirkiness and sense of fun that comes across positively.

So when I found out he had a TED talk, I watched it right away. It reveals a lot of interesting things about Adam, but for me it was mostly exhausting. I think Adam took three breaths through twenty minutes. Maybe. And two happened while I wasn’t looking. Don’t believe me? Check it out yourself:

See? Exhausting. A wonderful topic, good use of visuals, palpable enthusiasm… but waaaayyyy too fast.

So, unless you can pull it off at least as well as Adam Savage, do your audience a favor and slow down.

[Techniques] Using analogies

The other day I was reading an article about possible water shortages in the future. Now, I have to admit that I have always kind of blown these stories off. I grew up next to a river and 15 minutes from a lake. I went to university about 2 hours drive from a number of glaciers, and the spring flood in town was an annual ritual. My first post-doc was at the juncture of two large lakes, and for my second post-doc I lived on the rainy side of the island of Hawaii.

So the idea of a water shortage seemed to be a bit of, well, fear mongering or something. It certainly didn’t seem real, and although intellectually I could see it being a problem in some parts of the world it certainly wasn’t something that affected, well, me.

But this article quoted a scientist who finally got me to understand, and he did it through an analogy.

In Canada, where I live, we are blessed with abundant water. But the water supply (located in the north, away from the major population centers) was deposited thousands of years ago by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age; this is the water that we are using up and that is not being replenished. The analogy that the scientist made was to consider the water supply as our retirement account. The water initially deposited by the glaciers is the initial principal, and the interest on the account is the water re-deposited by rain. Given this set-up, the scientist made the point that we are currently spending our principal, and the interest is not enough to make up for the spending. The inevitable result – someday we will run out of principal…. water.

I found this to be a powerful analogy in a couple of ways. First, it was easily accessible to everyone – scientist or not – as it relates to a situation that we all have to consider in our financial planning. Secondly, by using this analogy the scientist was able to bypass the skepticism that I held relating to the water supply, and if I accepted the analogy I had to accept (or at least think about) the conclusion – that we do indeed need to better manage our water supplies or risk running our account – and our country – dry.

Those two conclusions show the power of analogies. They can help make a difficult concept easier to understand, and they can potentially help make a contentious point more palatable. Perhaps there are other uses – can you think of any?