Change is good
Just got done interviewing Colleen Coy, a dancer in Madison Opera's "the Pearl Fishers" which we're seeing Sunday. The interview will go on fameorfamine.com , but would really work better as a podcast. Thinking of going with something other than podshow, though. Could try podcastReady except for a silly bias against one of their shining stars...
"The theater group improved significantly more compared to the control group in each of the measures (there was much less variance in the psychological well-being scores than in the other tests, so those small gains are significant). For problem solving and well-being, the theater group also improved significantly more than the visual arts group. The theater group also had the lowest drop-out rate of any group: All theater participants attended all 9 sessions, while 8 of the 44 visual arts students dropped out, despite the fact that all participants said they enjoyed the sessions."
According to this article, training in theatre arts makes you smarter. I believe sexier, too. Then again, I'm biased. I took several improv comedy workshops about a decade ago, and I've never had any class that I used so MUCH in later years. All sorts of games, techniques, not to mention the basics like projecting the voice and comfort in public speaking.
Wish we could use this to put some arts BACK into our schools....
Kathy Sierra posted an entry about public speaking tips that struck home today. I consider myself an accomplished speaker (at age 8 I was giving a talk before about 800 people for a church gathering. I'd written it myself, and did it from memory. Since then, nothing's really made me nervous.) but I could see quite a few things in her list that I needed to polish up.
The one that especially comes to mind is this section:
How many talks do you see where the speaker has multiple bullet points and slides just on their background? I did it once because I thought it would help people understand the context of my talk, and it did NOT go over well because:
A) Nobody cares
B) Bullet points do not equal credibility
C) Nobody cares
D) You already HAVE credibility going in... you don't have to earn it, you just have to make sure you don't lose it.
E) Nobody cares
She's so right. Nobody cares. I'll even go a step further and say that nobody cares because everybody knows somebody smarter than you. In fact, they may even be that person smarter than you. I've co-presented on the topic of jealousy with my girlfriend, and she and I both got into this particular area of presenting after attending a conference and walking out of a particular session saying "Hmmm. We could do better than that."And so we did.
The thing is, they aren't there to be enlightened--they're there to hear YOUR particular spin on whatever subject it is. And telling them how special you are is not going to work. To quote Kathy quoting a standard writing/performing axim: Show, don't tell.
Don't tell them why they should listen to you. Just talk, and let it be obvious.
