December 12 Meeting Update

We had a great casual get-together yesterday, with delicious snacks. We missed a lot of you! We know it's a busy time of year, and we hope that your preparations for a wonderful holiday season are in full (and smooth) swing.

One of our members was preparing for a presentation, so our conversation was centered on how to handle public speaking. Some excellent suggestions were:

1. Take time to pause and regroup if you need to. You'll probably need only a few seconds, even though it might feel like you're taking minutes. Don't worry about how long it takes. Just do what you need to do to get back on track.

2. Use body language (natural, not exaggerated) to communicate in order to take a little pressure off your speech.

3. Go at your own pace. This can be a big challenge in our fast-paced world. One member shared one way to go about it: tell the person you're speaking to, "I will go slowly because that's what works for me."

We also talked about the martial arts principle of taking control of a situation (a speaking situation or any other kind) and neutralizing conflict. When someone is angrily shouting at you, you can say, "I will listen without interrupting you to what you have to say. Then I'll tell you my side of the story, and ask you to please listen to me without interrupting me, and we'll see if we can resolve this."

I think this is a really beautiful idea. Sometimes, however, you can't always put it in practice. In that case, extricating yourself from the conflict without escalating it any further may be the best you can do.

At the November meeting the question came up why some people stutter when they speak but not when they sing. One member brought in an article from the University of Iowa Stuttering Project website, which offers some answers:

There are a few reasons why people don't stutter when they sing. One is called easy onset of speech, or easy voice, or smooth speech. This describes the way you sing. Think about it; you generally use a smoother and easier voice when you're singing versus when you're speaking. Speech therapists actually use the easy onset strategy when helping people who stutter.

Another reason...is because words are more prolonged (and less apt to be stumbled over) when they're sung rather than spoken. Music is an activity in which you use the right side of the brain (language uses the left), so when you sing music, you're no longer using your left brain (and probably no longer stuttering).

Happy Holidays everyone, and we hope to see you all in the New Year!