ESSENTIAL
ELEMENTS IN SUCCESSFUL SPEAKING
- We never learn anything----be it golf, French, or public speaking--by means of gradual improvement. We advance by sudden jerks and abrupt starts. Then we may remain stationary for weeks, or even lose some of the proficiency we have gained. Psychologists call these periods of stagnation" plateaus in the curve of learning". We may strive hard for a long time and not be able to get off one of these "plateaus" and not realizing on these plateaus and abandon all effort. that is extremely regrettable, for if they were to persist, if they were to keep on persisting they would suddenly find that they had lifted like an aeroplane and made tremendous progress again overnight.
- You may never be able to speak without some nervous anxiety just before you begin. But if you will preserve, you will soon eradicate everything but this initial fear; and, after you have spoken for a few seconds, that too will disappear.
- Professor James has pointed out that one need have no anxiety about the upshot of his education, that if he keeps faithfully busy, “he can, with perfect certainty, count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.” This psychological truth that the famous sage of Harvard has enunciated, applies to you and your efforts in learning to speak.there can be no question about that. The men who have succeeded in this have not been, as a general rule, men of extraordinary ability. But they were endowed with persistence and dogged determination. They kept on. They arrived.
- Think success in your public speaking work. You will than do things necessary to bring success about.
- If you get discouraged, try Teddy Roosevelt’s plane of looking at Lincoln’s picture and asking yourself what he would have done under similar circumstances.
- Qualities essential for the success can be enumerated with four words commencing with G they are “Grace, Gumption, Grit and Guts.”
