Nobody Improves Alone
By Dara Halloran · Community & Practice
Everything worth knowing about public speaking has been written down, repeatedly, for two thousand years. Much of it is free. A good deal of it fits on a few pages.
And yet very few people get much better by reading it. That should tell us something about where the real constraint sits.
Three things you cannot get from a book
An outside view of yourself. You do not know what you look like when you speak. You do not hear your own filler. Your internal experience of your delivery and the room's experience of it are two different recordings, and you only have access to one. Someone has to tell you.
A reason to do it this week. Speaking improves through repetition, and repetition is effortful and easy to postpone indefinitely because nothing breaks if you skip it. A time and a place that exists whether or not you feel like it removes the daily decision.
Calibration. Left alone, people misjudge where they stand, sometimes harshly and sometimes not harshly enough. Watching people at your level, slightly above, and slightly below is one of the cheapest ways to find out what "good" currently means for someone like you.
Why self-assessment is not enough
The third point has a substantial research literature behind it. In a 2004 review, David Dunning, Chip Heath and Jerry Suls gathered evidence across health, education and the workplace and concluded that people's assessments of their own skill are, in general, only modestly related to their actual performance.1 People tend to be more optimistic than the evidence warrants, and the errors are hardest to see from the inside, because the knowledge needed to spot a mistake is often the same knowledge needed to avoid it.
For a speaker, this shows up in specific ways. You think the opening was rushed and nobody noticed. You think the middle was clear and half the room was lost. You cannot hear your own pace the way a listener does. No amount of careful reflection fixes this, because the missing information is not in your head. It is in theirs.
Practice that improves you has a particular shape
The research on expertise points the same way. In their influential 1993 paper, Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer distinguished deliberate practice from simply doing an activity a lot.2 Deliberate practice is effortful, aimed at specific weaknesses, and comes with feedback, usually from a teacher who can see what the learner cannot.
Most people's speaking practice has none of those features. They give a talk when they have to, get no specific feedback, and give the next one the same way. That is experience, and experience alone tends to plateau. The ingredients of deliberate practice, a target and an outside view, are the ones a room of other people supplies.
The specific value of slightly-better peers
There is a trap in learning from experts. An expert's advice is often correct and useless to you, because it addresses a problem three levels past the one you have. A world-class speaker telling you to "trust the silence" is right, and of little use if your current problem is that you rush your opening because you want it to be over.
Often the most useful person is someone about half a step ahead. They remember the problem you are having, they solved it recently, and their solution was designed for roughly your constraints.
This is the argument for a mixed-level room rather than a masterclass. On any given evening you are half a step ahead of someone and half a step behind someone else, and both of those relationships are doing work. A review of research on presentation courses found something in the same spirit: in the one study that compared them, watching a peer present raised students' confidence where watching an expert did not. There is more on that in the design principles for presentation courses.
Being watched changes what you practise
There is a second, quieter effect. When you know a room will see it on Wednesday, you prepare differently. The amount may barely change; the attention does. You notice the weak middle section. You cut the story you cannot land.
Jennifer Lerner and Philip Tetlock reviewed the research on accountability, the expectation that you will have to justify yourself to others.3 One of its most consistent effects appears when people know they will face an audience whose views they do not yet know, and have not committed to a position. In that situation they tend to think more carefully and more self-critically in advance, anticipating objections before anyone raises them.
That is not social pressure making you anxious. It is a deadline making you honest. Left alone, we are extremely good at deciding the shaky part will probably be fine.
Four people and a recurring time
If you have been trying to improve alone, the highest-leverage change is finding four people and a recurring time. Another book or another framework will do less.
It does not have to be a formal club. Four colleagues, a room, forty minutes, every second Tuesday, everyone speaks for three minutes and gets two specific pieces of feedback. That is the whole apparatus. Everything else, such as scoring, structure and curriculum, is refinement on top of a room with people in it.
Three rules keep it working:
- The time is fixed. Nobody decides each week whether to meet.
- Everyone speaks. A group where some people only watch turns into an audience for the confident ones.
- Feedback is specific. One moment that worked, one thing to try. The shape is in feedback someone can actually use.
This is also the logic behind how Exprea is built: live sessions in front of real people every week, battles against other members, and mentors who are a little further along. The recordings and the measurements help, but they sit on top of a room with people in it, not in place of one.
References
- Dunning, D., Heath, C., & Suls, J. M. (2004). Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education, and the Workplace. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(3), 69–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00018.x
- Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363
- Lerner, J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Accounting for the effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 255–275. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.2.255