It may sound stupid but I started playing kendama a couple of weeks ago and my attention/focus has clearly gone up since then.
Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
61–70 of 106 posts
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#62For me the best training exercises to learn to speak better are high pressure events. I don’t mean crowds where you are fending off stage freight. Solving for stage freight is implicit to solving for high stress generally. I mean there is some epic outage at your mega corp employer and all eyes are on you to fix the problem sort of pressure. Let’s call this soul crushing pressure coupled with time pressure and doing…
This has been my experience as well.
When I worked in military SAR, interruptions in service provision (i.e. aircraft breaking down, or lack of crews, etc.) very quickly attracted attention of some very senior brass.
The people who couldn't give simple answers to direct questions, who couldn't articulate a coherent plan to get back in business, were the ones who floundered.
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#63Unfortunately it comes (mostly) from knowing your audience. You can get into training design and it will help a fair bit, especially if your setting allows for interaction with audience, which lets you check if they 'know' something. It will not, however, do as much as practice.
Unfortunately again, knowing your audience comes from talking to them a lot. Best public speakers tend to be saying the same thing for years (hundreds of hours of saying a specific story, for example).
There is no objective encoding. Cultural component tends to be bigger than expected.
Your model is, largely, wrong. Firstly you want to be able to model minds of your audience, secondly you want to be able to provide information that shifts that model into a model that you want them to have. Only then 'thinking clearly' comes in.
Your model could work for teaching people known well agreed upon steps in a field they know nothing about and one could get better at it with practice. Unironically get on twitter (or tiktok, I guess) and practice delivering one specific message.
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#64I used to take the Chicago Metra and ride in the vestibule to exit the train quickly. The same 8 people would always be there every day but this gentleman, "Gary", would always carry the conversations. People were just drawn to him and I was in awe of how he captivated us with his stories. I was able to study him for a couple of years and came up with a list of how he was able to hold our attention: 1) Gary spoke lou…
Fascinating. History repeats itself I guess - truly great ppl don't need to write themselves down anything. Others will do it for them.
Thanks for sharing :-)
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#65No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#66It helps to have 3 key points that you want your audience to take away from your speech. Not more. And then tailor everything to drive home those 3 points. One of my favourite speakers who's really good at this is Larry Lessig, see his talks on YouTube, some of them are absolute classics.
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#67I highly recommend “The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking” by Barbara Minto. It will change the way you think about communication, especially in a business context.
Summary: https://untools.co/minto-pyramid
Looks like a simple concept, what's in the other 170 pages in the book?
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#68I used to take the Chicago Metra and ride in the vestibule to exit the train quickly. The same 8 people would always be there every day but this gentleman, "Gary", would always carry the conversations. People were just drawn to him and I was in awe of how he captivated us with his stories. I was able to study him for a couple of years and came up with a list of how he was able to hold our attention: 1) Gary spoke lou…
The way you described it made me feel that you either learned a lot from Gary or are you are Gary itself in a huge plot twist. Very entertaining story, like a meta-answer.
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#69Just practice incessantly and understand that silence is a tool.
In HS, I did debate and speech competitions, and my favorite was extemporaneous speaking. There'd be a few rules around each round, but the gist of it was you'd pluck a topic from a broad range from a hat, and you had 5 minutes to go back to your desk, and do anything you wanted to prepare to deliver a speech on it -- you could glance at materials that you brought (magazines, newspaper clippings, etc) and write down up to 10 words on a little index card. Then you just walked into a room and delivered your speech to a judge who had absolutely no context about what you were going to speak on.
After enough of this, the biggest change I noticed was just the feeling of confidence, and believing that yes, in fact, I could do it. The other unexpected lesson I learned is the power of silence. Even the best of speakers will, at any given time, not have the right words or phrases come to them immediately. The REALLY good ones allow themselves the gift of silence when that happens. One example which immediately comes to mind is the steve jobs q&a where the guy says he doesn't know what he's talking about. While he is thinking about how to respond, the complete silence that steve allows himself, the sip of water, is just so powerful. You are watching him incessantly, and are sure to be hanging on to every other word he says. I'd contrast this with Elon Musk who, despite brilliant, is not a very compelling speaker at all, at oftentimes will mumble his way through to an answer instead of pausing before offering a full coherent thought.
Re: Ask HN: Exercises to think, then speak, more clearly?
#70Join a toastmasters asap.
The public speaking exercises will get you want you want