Educational articles

Marija Zamarytė / Photo by V. Makovskaja

As a teenager, when I was 14-15 years old, I used to recite poems. And already then I noticed an interesting thing: when I spoke, when I read poetry, people reacted very differently: they cried, they rejoiced, they laughed, they wondered.... When I recited the same lines. They subjectively heard what I was saying. And it was so vivid for me! I felt a strong connection with those people...

Then came the next chapter - a career as a public speaker in the USA, where I learned how to influence others. After those meetings, I would leave feeling happy, but what used to be alive inside me during the speeches was gone.

Why?

Public speaking comes in two forms: automatic and resonant.

In the first case, the speaker deliberately conveys to the listener what is important to him, what he supposedly believes. He communicates what he wants to communicate. Listeners, in most cases, are not receptive to this because they do not feel the resonance, they do not feel the connection, they are simply bombarded by the speaker's knowledge. It is true that this kind of talk can be influential and persuasive, but the listener is, in a sense, roboticized. This means that some new thinking program, some new algorithm, is installed in the human being, e.g. "buy my product". The speaker has a programmatic effect on the listener by taking away the living part - the listener's own insight. There is no longer a moment when the listener begins to hear the speaker as a human being.

When does a subtle, lively connection between the public speaker and the listener begin? How does the mutual interaction come about?

Different principles apply here. Firstly, you cannot have the aim of influencing someone else. As a speaker, you have to open yourself up - to people and to unknowing. There has to be a resonance between you and others. Above all, you have to stop being afraid of people, because the desire to influence others is a disguise for the fear that they will not obey you, that they will not do what you want, that they will not support you. When you open yourself up to connection and unknowing, you become fragile. This is always disarmament. It means that you may not know something, that you may not be liked by everyone. And you don't have to like them, because people are free to like or not to like.

Second, live public speaking is about seeking value or meaning in three ways:

 -what I, as a speaker, get out of it (no matter what level);

 -what the audience gets out of it, why it makes sense for them to be there;

 -what I get out of it (in a more subtle way), in terms of some larger value that is important to me.

If those three aspects come together within me: I am here live, they are here live because it is relevant to them, and there is something meaningful around us that can emerge during the talk, - then there is a sense that we are all equal, we are all searching, and in the end, we are all coming away from the meeting with some new insight.

Excerpt from the radio programme "The Future Gene". Host. Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė