Speaking Up Is a Career Skill, Not a Personality Trait
By Joel Asante · Career & Business
"I am just not a natural speaker."
It is a common thing to hear from someone about to start practising. It is usually said flatly, as a settled fact, the way someone might mention being short.
It deserves taking apart, because it does real damage and it is not accurate.
What people mean by it
Unpacked, it is usually one or more of:
- I find it uncomfortable
- I do not enjoy it
- I have not done much of it
- I have watched people who found it easy and concluded they had something I do not
Notice that only the last is a claim about capability, and it is an inference from very limited evidence. You did not see their first attempt.
Discomfort, dislike, and inexperience are all real. None of them is a statement about ceiling.
The parts that do behave like traits
To be fair to the claim, some things are stable, and the research supports that.
Baseline arousal. Some people run hotter in front of a group. Michael Beatty, James McCroskey and Alan Heisel argued in 1998 that communication apprehension, the general fear of speaking to others, is largely an expression of inborn temperament rather than something learned.1 That view has critics, but it fits a broader finding that personality traits are partly heritable.2 If you have always felt more nervous than the people around you, that is probably not imagined.
Preference for reflection. Some people think better with time and produce their best material in writing. Also stable, also fine.
Enjoyment. Some people will never like it. That is allowed.
But look at what is on that list: how it feels, and whether you enjoy it. Whether you can do it well is a separate question. Plenty of capable speakers dislike speaking and are uncomfortable throughout.
What practice changes
Even the feeling moves more than people expect. Amber Finn, Chris Sawyer and Paul Schrodt studied 140 students in a required speech course, some of whom were given brief, repeated exposure to an audience.3 Their results fitted the theory that when anxiety falls within each talk, it falls across talks too. Practice does not change where you start, but it changes the shape of the curve. The full account is in the study write-up.
And skill responds to the ordinary ingredients of learning anything. A 2015 review by Stan van Ginkel and colleagues pulled together research on how students develop presentation skills in higher education.4 The principles it set out are the familiar ones: chances to practise, examples to learn from, and feedback. Nothing on the list is a personality.
What is trainable
Almost everything the audience experiences:
- Structure: the biggest lever, and pure technique
- Opening and closing: rehearsable to the word
- Pace and volume: adjustable with practice and honest feedback
- Filler reduction: often a byproduct of getting comfortable with pauses
- Handling questions: a small set of moves, refined with reps
- Recovery from mistakes: largely a function of having made mistakes before
None of that requires extroversion. Quiet, well-prepared speakers are common, and the preparation is what the audience notices.
A worked example
Say you are an engineer who has been asked to give a ten-minute talk at a team offsite, and your first reaction is the sentence at the top of this post. Here is what changes if you treat it as a skill instead:
You stop asking "am I a speaker?" and ask "which of the trainable parts is weakest?" Probably structure, because that is where most first talks go wrong, so you build the talk around one claim. You write the opening and closing word for word and rehearse those two pieces until they are automatic. You give the talk three times to a recording, listen back once, and fix one thing each time. You still feel nervous on the day. The difference is that the nerves are now attached to a talk that works.
Why the belief is expensive
Because it ends the inquiry.
"I am not a natural speaker" is an explanation that requires no action. It converts a skills gap, a thing with a known path, into an identity, which has none. And because it prevents practice, it becomes self-confirming: no practice, no improvement, more evidence for the belief.
Ten years of that is not a personality. It is ten years of avoided reps.
Common mistakes
Waiting to feel ready. The comfort tends to come after the practice, not before it. See confidence is a byproduct.
Copying a different temperament. Trying to sound like the loudest person in the room usually goes badly. You do not have to sound like a TED talk, and a calm, plain delivery is a style of its own.
Practising only in your head. Reading notes silently is not rehearsal. Speaking is a physical skill and has to be done out loud.
The more accurate sentence
"I have not done much of this yet, and it is uncomfortable while I am learning."
Both clauses are true, neither closes anything off, and the second one is what learning any physical skill feels like.
Nobody says "I am just not a natural driver" after four lessons. They say they are learning. Speaking is a similar kind of skill (motor patterns, timing, judgement under mild stress, improving with reps and feedback), and it happens to be one where we have collectively agreed to describe beginners as though they were a category of person.
A small drill
Once a day for a week, speak for sixty seconds out loud, alone, on any topic, and record it. Listen back to one recording at the end of the week and note one thing you would change. That is seven reps more than the belief would have allowed.
References
- Beatty, M. J., McCroskey, J. C., & Heisel, A. D. (1998). Communication apprehension as temperamental expression: a communibiological paradigm. Communication Monographs, 65(3), 197–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637759809376448
- Vukasović, T., & Bratko, D. (2015). Heritability of personality: a meta-analysis of behavior genetic studies. Psychological Bulletin, 141(4), 769–785. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000017
- Finn, A. N., Sawyer, C. R., & Schrodt, P. (2009). Examining the effect of exposure therapy on public speaking state anxiety. Communication Education, 58(1), 92–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520802450549
- Van Ginkel, S., Gulikers, J., Biemans, H., & Mulder, M. (2015). Towards a set of design principles for developing oral presentation competence: a synthesis of research in higher education. Educational Research Review, 14, 62–80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2015.02.002