Being a professional speaker, I occasionally run into people who have been taught various “rules” for “correct” public speaking somewhere. One of the most common of these “rules” is that
“One should never say ‘um’.”
Well, at the risk of being crucified by speaking coaches everywhere, let just say this:
The “um’s” don’t matter.
There are really only 3 rules for effective/successful performing, and they are:
1) Is the audience having a good time?
2) Is the audience having a good time? and
3) Is the audience having a good time?
Something that rarely gets discussed in the arts/ performing world is the oh so- common “trap” of what I called “the curse of the perma-teacher.”
People who only make money by teaching (and are not professional practitioners who occasionally coach apprentices) always have to come up with systems that offer you an easy path. (After all, if they didn’t, why would you buy their service?) “Just follow these rules,” they say, “and you will succeed without the pain of failure, embarrassment, or difficult new self awareness.”
As a young bass player I was inundated with teachers who endlessly emphasized the eradication of wrong notes. If you don’t know any better (and I didn’t), that approach sounds terribly logical and well-intended, but there’s a catch: in reality, it just serves to eat away at your self confidence and distract you from the task at hand. It presumes that the audience is only interested in the lack of error. This is nuts.
You cannot serve 2 masters, and if you are constantly trying to succeed “on the cheap” by following a set of rules given you by some teacher person, you start to depend on your loyalty to those rules. Following the rules becomes the primary goal. You tend to lose confidence in your own real-time problem solving skills. Worse, you stop listening to customers.
This teaching philosophy has literally killed the classical music business, where they focus so much on precision they have completely forgotten about audience connection. And their audience numbers reflect that. Same thing in schools where kids lose interest and drop out. The “system” takes precedence over results.
(Perma-teachers thrive on the concept that “you can’t go out and do this in the real world until you have become perfect here in my lab.” We’re all scared to death of being hooted at or looking foolish, so this sounds like a good idea. “Um’s” are a common habit and an easy
target to arbitrarily say “this is wrong and you should never do that,” when in fact most people who haven’t had the traumatic shaming experience of being told this common speech pattern is “wrong” don’t notice them at all.)
Trouble is, once you get into the perma-teaching mobius strip, you end up never leaving the lab. They are motivated to keep you forever in student mode.
My bass teacher (who played in the Boston Symphony and only taught on the side) once said, “No one cares how you play a note. You can play it with your nose if you want. All that matters is getting it played.” I never forgot that.
One of the reasons I wrote “Principles of Applied Stupidity ” is that there is a great deal
of shaming side-effects of these teaching “systems” that claim to have worked out the easiest path to success. They never actually work, tho; ridding yourself of all mistakes will not make you a compelling performer. The Beatles often sang out of tune and John Lennon forgot the lyrics in “Please Please Me.” No one cared.
At some point, performing is about psychologically taking your clothes off in front of the audience, with no guarantees that they will like what they see. It’s frightening, but there is no other way. There is no way to learn how to connect to an audience except by trial and error.
So watch out for the people who wish to sell teaching services by shaming your imperfection. It’s the world’s second oldest profession. And don’t get me started on those people who think a speaker should not “use their hands.” Yeesh.
So next time someone tries to pull that game of “pay me to fix all your terrible imperfections and spare you any chance of failure or embarrassment,” tell them that your pal Justin (who is
in the guinness book of world records as a performer, by the way 🙂 says “Nuts. All that matters is if the audience is, um, having a good time.”
© um, Justin Locke
