One of my favorite proteges is a great guy named Franco. At fifteen, he was an amazing talent. But he tended to tighten up at major speech competitions.
We were at the national championships, in Dallas, and I needed to rid him of his one last inhibition. I knew he could place top six in the nation, out of 220+ entrants, but I needed a ruse to help him believe in himself.
So, I took him to a mobbed hotel lobby, so packed with noisy guests that walking to the elevators was difficult. I sat myself down in the center of the crowd, placed Franco at a distance from me and said: speak; ignore the people walking in front of you, talking over you, and staring at you.
And he did. He spoke to me, over, under, around, in between people, for two straight hours. At first, boy was he annoyed, but after a while he got into a groove, and even rose above the clamor.
The point? I created, for Franco, a far greater disturbance than he would ever encounter in a formal speaking situation. I proved to him that he could adjust and overcome.
He then said to me, without provocation: "Wow, after that, talking to people in a room is kinda' easy."
I'm proud to say that he placed sixth in the nation that year, and first in the nation the following year!
SO, CREATE YOUR OWN HOTEL HELL. SPEAK THERE. IT WILL MAKE A CIVIL SPEAKING SITUATION A PIECE OF CAKE.
I never heard this story! I can see Franco doing that. No wonder he rose so quickly from a high school sophomore to a national champion speaker.
ReplyDeleteI remember that day vividly! And it WAS Hell :)But it was certainly a defining moment in my forensics career. (It was pretty funny too. I remember some of the confused faces of the passersby :)))
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