Impromptu speaking

Attended a workshop about impromptu speaking last night and really enjoyed what I had been taught. It was not the first time I attended this kind of workshop but perhaps the speaker yesterday gave me something more impactful and inspired me to think not only on the ways of making myself a better impromptu speaker but also in a bigger picture, how to change from a quiet introvert to an outgoing and more sociable extrovert who is usually seemed to have better communication and interpersonal skills. The speaker showed us the comments given by his teachers on the report cards to show that he was not good at interacting and socializing with people when he was in schools but what happened after his graduation encouraged him to improve himself and his own efforts made him an excellent communicator and professional trainer of sales and interpersonal skills.    

 

Three useful formulas to prepare an impromptu speech that he shared – PREP, Pendulum and 5W1H. PREP is about how a speech can be structure and organized by using the formula of point (agree/disagree) + reason + example / elaboration / story + point (summary / restatement / conclusion). Pendulum is about giving the listener the freedom to make his own decision by analyzing certain things in detailed without bias. 5W1H is about using “What, Who, Why, Where, Which and How” to ask questions and generating the content of an impromptu speech. In addition, there are two more tips. Firstly, for a topic with a long and complicated title, speakers should only focus on a few key words and avoid explaining the title at length to avoid misunderstanding and make full use of the time. Secondly, if the topic is something very specific that a speaker without prior knowledge on, “reframing” technique could be used in preparing a speech in short time. By “chunking up” a certain topic, things tend to be more general and with that, we could link the existing topic to something that we are more familiar with. The speaker gave a good example by sharing with us how Mr.Tony Tan, the ex- president answered a question raised by someone during the presidential election, “What was the biggest mistake that you ever made in your career?”

“Practise makes progress” We can only progress in what we are learning if we constantly make an effort to practise it. The speaker shared with us how he made use of his toilet time to practise his impromptu speech by using the quote of the day on the newspaper as the title. And only by repeating the practise numerous times, he made a breakthrough in his skill. Lacking of motivation, I must admit that I put almost zero time to practise my impromptu speech even though I always want to improve myself. An impromptu speech needs only a few minutes and it does not cost much of my precious time, I believe I can afford to repeat it a few times per day under the same topic. There will be an impromptu speaking competition on 6 March 2018, 13days from now. I want to challenge myself how much can I learn and progress in delivering an impromptu speech if I put in real effort every day. Let me start from today to make a difference!

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Small wins

A paragraph I read this morning inspired me how should I make changes and improve my communication skill…. “A man said that he found new friends among whom he could practice being gregarious. “When I do make the effort to overcome my shyness, I feel that it is not really me acting, that it’s someone else,” he said. But by practicing with his new group, it stopped feeling like acting. He started to believe he wasn’t shy, and then, eventually, he wasn’t anymore.“ …When people join a group of people where changes seems possible, the potential for the changes to occur becomes more real or in simpler words, the surrounding make the changes easier to happen. Now for me it seems a wise choice to attend the culture and language exchange every two weeks, meeting new people give me a chance to do something that I do not normally do in office or at home. In fact, I feel good doing something which is not all about me as I think that starts me on a different path. With that, I could step out of the comfort zone and practice being gregarious through talking, mingling with people or as a listener listening intently to their conversations. Also, I could apply the tips that I have learned from the self-help books through trial-n-error in order to find out what is ill-suited and also the stuff that is workable in communicating and socializing with people of different backgrounds.

By doing the same things again and again, with much hope, sooner or later, I could be someone who I always strive hard to be. In fact, I am really excited every time I have a really enjoyable conversation with a stranger. I called the good experience a small win. Once a small win has been achieved, forces seem to be set in motion that favors another small win. After repeating it for a few times, the small wins actually fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach. Just like once people learned how to believe in something, the skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Therefore, the change of “key” habit may bring spilling effect and causes unexpected changes that are not anticipated at the beginning. However, since we don’t know which one is the key habit that can trigger the changes, I think that we have no choice but try one by one (it might sound stupid to change everything at once, but my point is changing one habit after another) We are lucky enough if we can tackle the “key” habit in just a few tries or else, we don’t lose  anything by making changes for better.   

I hope I can continue to work on my communication skill until end of this year instead of practicing it only for a short period of time and after the initial burst of enthusiasm wear off, slip back into my old habits - compromise with the status quo and with less willingness to interact with others.

**With ideas and lots of quotes from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

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Mythologizing natural talent lets us all of the hook

My lacks of confidence, determination and ability to express myself seem to be the biggest obstacles at my current stage of life. I don’t have the courage to try and do lots of things due to the lacks and indirectly I put a low ceiling on what I might do for my life. 

 

The younger generation is a generation that is full of new ideas and know perfectly well how to express themselves, thanks to the development in the teaching approaches and educational system. Gradually, the younger generation will occupy more percentage of job market and perhaps after 5-10 years, some of them will be in management or decision making roles. As a middle-aged man who was trained under “spoon-feeding” and less idea-oriented educational system, how I am going to survive and continue fighting for what I want in the coming years? This is a question that I really need to look into. It’s not too late to start thinking about ways to deal with it now instead of thinking about it 10 years later when I will be forty plus and any abrupt changes in life are more difficult. At that time, the competitive and winner-take-out working environment nowadays will surely become tougher for people like me, it will be hard to survive without the ability to quickly climb the learning curve of any skill, be it a technical skill or interpersonal skill.

 

I think that I am not talented or perhaps I am just a borderline gifted person. Sometime people tend to mythologize natural talent and tend to praise someone because of his talents in performing something phenomenally well so that they can get themselves off the hook and relax into the status quo without thinking of the possibility of performing as well as him. By letting themselves be persuaded by the word “divine”, they are more willing to accept the fact that they are simply lacking of the natural talents to do what the talented people capable of doing, no matter how hard they try, since they are just ordinary human beings.

 

Everyone has his very own yardstick to measure his achievement in life and one’s achievement may be nothing in the eyes of others. One should not overemphasize talent and underemphasize other things which are as important, like efforts and hard works. The fact that there is a gap between potential and its actualization and most people always behave below the optimum cheer me up a bit. I ask myself “Am I possible to do something by pushing my potential (if I have) to the extreme use?” After many years working in the industry, I came to appreciate in doing something over and over again, and enjoy seeing something that was never natural become almost second natural. I think I am not lacking of the capacity to learn something new and then perform it well. What I need right now is better strategizing my plans to better prepare myself for the challenges ahead. Of course, absorbing more ideas and make them part of mine is one of the practicable ways to go ahead……

**With ideas and lots of quotes from Angela Lee Duckworth: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance

 

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Real life or online conversation exchange

Attended a language exchange section last night. Again I was inspired by some of the new friends that I meet there. After talking to a few people, I started realizing that how mundane my daily job seemed to be and how urgent I should look for another job that can provide me some opportunities to upgrade my technical skills and interact more with others. I am kind of stuck in my current jobs. There were people from different countries with diverse background and life experiences. They shared what they were doing and how they came to here to work and live since most of them were expatriates. I don’t have many opportunities to discuss with others in topics other than something related to the industry that I am working with. People shared something like the recent scientific development in medical field or an insider’s information about how interviews of a big IT company were conducted…I was intrigued by what they said and for me, what they said was something really helpful that could help me to jump out of my very own small world.

Not only the topics and the content, but the accents and the ways they presented their ideas that interested me a lot. American, local and even Indian English could be heard the whole night. Talking to them and trying to learn and perhaps imitate their accents, ways of presenting an idea and body languages were something important in developing my soft skills that I could hardly find in my office and existing social circle. How nice it would be and I could not imagine how big the impact would be in my life if I could have an intellectual conversation with different people everyday, even it was just a 10 minutes conversation. Took a look on the language learning mobile application that presently exists in the market, I believed that it was possible to do it. I would like to try to talk to strangers using the app in a daily basis with a plan like below. The first and second weeks, we would discuss more on the general topics like language learning, travelling, food and even family. After that, it is time to discuss more about the topics that people may have different opinions on and I would learn how to be a listener and listen to their reasons of taking certain stands in certain topics. If the person is still cool and keen to share what is in his/her mind, we would move on to more complicated topics about religion, politics, races and etc. I am not really sure how many people can reach the third phase if I kick start my plan mentioned above by talking to 100 strangers. No matter how the results would be, it is better to try and find out.

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A good speaker

If you have a dream but you  do not take any action then you are just a dreamer. On the contrary, if you have a dream but you never stop looking for ways that can help you to realize your dream even that means lots of hard works, compromises and even sacrifices, then you are a doer. The most distinguishable difference between the former and later is that the doer is always moving towards the correct direction but on the other hand, the dreamer is standing on the same spot admiring the dream from remote distance and taking no action, nor desire to realize it. Very often with all kinds of excuses which cause procrastination.

I was excited every time I was listening to a persuasive, informative and eloquent speech. I paid tremendous attention to the speaker, scared that I missed out even nuggets of information that he or she was trying to convey to the audience, not only through the speech but also the body language, tone, facial expression and even the aura. I felt that I learnt something every time I finished listening to a speech like that and I could not help thinking that what would I do if I had been the one who was standing on the stage and giving the speech to all the audience. Whether or not, I would be able to perform as good as the speaker. In fact, I wanted to be like them – going through the speech preparation stage, speech rehearsal, speech delivery and then finally, evaluations and suggestions from some professionals. The process is then repeated again by using the lessons learnt on the previous speech.  I didn’t have much confidence on my own public speaking skill since I didn’t use it at all in my professional life ever since my graduation. But, I know that it cannot be the excuse that hinders me from improving myself. Whenever there is an attempt to extend the limitation or break the boundary of comfort zone, pains and struggles await. But, after facing it bravely and forcefully getting used to all the pains and struggles, we feel less resistant doing the things we have once thought very hard. Never stop extend our limits even inch by inch, only keep on extending the limits that the boundary will be torn apart and will not be connected to form a comfort zone. I foresee my turn to go through the same process experienced by the speakers in coming future and in fact, I can’t wait for the time to come, believing that only by going through the process again and again, I can achieve what I am really looking for in my life and be a good speaker that I always dream of.

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Talking to others on tuesday's night

It has been quite some time since I met a group of new acquaintance and talking to them under all kinds of conversation topics. It has been raining a lot these few days and in fact I didn’t feel really motivated to attend today’s meet-up as I was really in a rush and I didn’t even have time for my dinner. I knocked off at 530am, travelled by bus for 90 minutes to reach the town center and then I must walk really fast to cover the last 1 kilometer between the bus drop-off point and the meetup point crossing at least five traffic lights. The new acquaintances ( I should not call them “friends” since I didn’t have really deep interaction with every one of them in such a short time of 1 hour 45 minutes) I met today were composed of local and foreign expatriates working here, with various nationalities ranging from France, US, Japan to Chile.

I really enjoyed participating in any conversation with topics that I didn’t discuss frequently with my colleagues and friends or something which was totally new and unheard of to me. It was a good opportunity to interact with people from all walks of life and with different types of thinking. Many of them are working in IT related industries and they shared some details of what they were working on currently. The outside world is huge and is full of thrilling things that always welcome anybody who dares to embark on an adventure to explore deeper. My comfort zone is simply tiny and too limited for a modern city dweller like me. With only a few close friends and after working in the same industry for 10 years, I somehow feel that I am losing touch with the world in many aspects. My world revolves around only a few things – job, family, language and perhaps myself even I always hope that I want to have a lifestyle, at least different and more diverse from my close friends and also the colleagues I meet every day in office. Incredible though it may seem, in just a night, the persons that I talked to make me start thinking more about my current lifestyle. If I had not been there tonight, very likely today would have been a very normal weekday’s night and brought no impact and generate no ripples on my mind and no thrill to my mundane life. I am glad that I made a right decision to attend the meetup.

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First sentence in greeting others

How to make others think that you care about their time and you are willing to go extra to help them to save their precious time? One of my colleagues, let’s call him T, whenever he wants to ask somebody a question or say something, he starts his question with something like “Hello, Joey, do you have a minute? I would like to update you about XXX” or “Hi. Are you free now? I would like to disturb you with some questions about XXX” Very usually, he gets what he wants at the first attempt. 

I am not an opportunist that is good at manipulating people in order to stand out and gain personal attention from the bosses but I really like the way T approaches people as very often people in the office are too busy with their own stuff that they cannot spare even a minute to do other things and by starting a conversation with such opening lines, actually he tries to convey a message that he really cares about somebody’s time and indirectly, he find himself the best timing to communicate with people. Asking a favor at an inappropriate timing is likely to be turned down and so do good suggestion at wrong timing. The keyword here is “Timing”.

Perhaps, for me, this is one of the must-learn communication skills in order to survive or possibly, prosper in this office jungle. I believe nothing could ever go wrong with it. To make myself more confident and to brush up my communication skills, I would like to make it a rule and a self-punishable crime when the first sentence that comes out from my mouth every time I start talking to someone is not something similar to T. I hope that with this skill, the listener and whoever I would like to talk to can feel that his or her time really matters to me. And thus, he or she is more willing to discuss something with me, answer my questions and most important, do me a small favor. Haha.

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