We had a global scientific meeting at work last week and I was lucky enough to have been selected to give one of the scientific presentations. It was a good opportunity to get up on stage in front of several hundred fellow scientists and present some of the research that I've been involved in.
I'm always a little surprised at how much some people fear public speaking. There's the old Seinfeld quip: “According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
I guess I'm the opposite of most people. I feel more comfortable speaking or presenting in front of large groups. A lot of this stems from my experiences in high school. I was part of the speech and debate team which helped train me to speak in public. In debate, you have to prepare and give a speech arguing against your opponents with only a very short amount of time. One of the most rigorous competitions was Extemporaneous Speaking, where you have to prepare a short timed speech after being given a topic only thirty minutes advance. This really forces you to minimize the two biggest speech problems---you have to be clear and fluid in our language as you don't have time for umms and errs. You also don't have time to fully memorize a prepared speech (which in my opinion is the worst type of public speaking as it sounds robotic and unnatural).
Another aspect is that giving a speech in front of a large audience almost feels like a performance to me. I was a first chair violinist in our school symphony, so I became used to performing in front of large audiences. I think that a lot of this comes from the fact that I enjoyed playing the violin---when you enjoy performing and speaking, then I think you naturally become less nervous.
As a result of that experience, I don't get too nervous speaking in public. I think that I do give a pretty good speech. That's not to say that I'm a perfect speaker---due to my debate training, I sometimes talk to fast (gotta cram all those points in time!) and I have been told that I do tend to over-gesticulate with my hands. Still, after my presentation, I was mixing with the crowd and met with a person who was a member of local Toastmasters organization. He complimented me on my presentation and speaking skills and even thought that my hand gestures were good, so I felt validated. However, he did mention that I midway through my presentation, I apparently unconsciously started doing a slight kick back and forth with my foot. I remember this and it was probably just me getting into a rhythm, showing how I treated this more like a performance.
All of this is not to brag and say that I'm better than other people---in fact, probably completely opposite to most people, I feel more comfortable talking to larger groups rather than smaller ones. Deep down, I am clearly on the introvert side of the scale and I do think that I am inherently shy. With larger groups, it becomes easy for the audience to just become an anonymous wall, but with smaller groups it's harder to hide and become impersonal. I don't think I will ever be the social butterfly or the schmoozer, although arguably those skills are more important than scientific skills for long term success---history is littered with examples of brilliant but isolated scientists who were never able to achieve their true potential. All of the standard cliches about networking are all true. It doesn't matter how smart you are if no one knows who you are. And if you don't know anyone.
As a tangent, this is a problem that I've seen with many professors in academia. Many of them have a strictly scientific background. The problem is that managing a research group or a class requires strong management and communication skills---in a word, strong business skills. I have worked with many professors who had extremely poor social and management skills and it can have dramatic consequences in group happiness and success. One of the things that I appreciate from my work is the opportunity to take extracurricular training classes in leadership, communication, and project management. There is a real emphasis on developing both your scientific talent as well as your management talent, and in fact there are two equivalent tracks for promotion with a managerial and scientific ladder. After attending some of these leadership training classes, I asked the speaker if any professors ever attended their classes---not surprisingly, very few did.
My current position requires extensive collaboration and teamwork. You have to build your network to advance, so I've been working on improving those types of personal skills, but it is an area that I have to focus on developing. It's too bad that there was no high school club for this, although in hindsight I suppose all of high school was training for this...
No comments:
Post a Comment