The Skill You Practice Is the Skill You Keep

Published 14 June 2023 by Beatrix Onwuka

In the first session of Speaking With Authority I ask everyone to speak for ninety seconds about something they know well. We record it. Then, before anything is taught, everybody watches their own clip.

It is uncomfortable. People wince, and one or two say afterwards that they nearly closed the laptop. It is also, by a distance, the single most useful ninety seconds of the course, and I have never found a way to get the same result gently.

Reading about speaking is not speaking

There is a great deal of good writing about public speaking, and reading it produces a reliable feeling of progress that does not survive contact with a room. Speaking is physical. It happens in your breath, your pace, the two seconds you do not fill after making a point. You cannot install those by understanding them. They arrive through repetition, and repetition needs feedback, and self feedback needs evidence.

The recording is the evidence. Almost everybody is running a story about how they come across that is wrong in a specific, correctable way. People who are certain they speak too fast are often at a fine pace and simply never pause. People who apologize for saying "um" say it four times in ninety seconds, which no listener notices, while ending every sentence on a rising note, which every listener notices.

What changes between week one and week five

We record again in the final session, same length, same brief. Watching the two clips side by side is the moment the course lands. The change is visible and it is theirs, which means they trust it in a way they would never trust me telling them they had improved.

The same principle runs through everything we teach. In Writing That Gets Read at Work you rewrite your own real documents rather than exercises, because the difficulty of cutting your own draft by a third is exactly the difficulty you need to get used to. In First Ninety Days as a Manager, students go away with a sentence they have to say to a real person that week, and the next session opens with how it went.

The uncomfortable part is the mechanism

We are careful not to make discomfort a virtue in itself. Nobody learns better for being embarrassed, and a room where people feel judged produces less honesty, not more. What we protect is the gap between what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing. Closing that gap is unpleasant for about four minutes and useful for years.

If you are considering the course and the recording is the part putting you off, that is a reasonable reaction and I would still encourage you to come. Sixteen people all watch their own clip in the same session, and everybody is equally uncomfortable at the same moment. It turns out to be the fastest way a room gets honest.