I Have Something To Say

A veteran journalist reveals how learning a few simple, ancient techniques can help us overcome our fears of public speaking and profoundly change our lives.

The average American speaks 16,000 to 20,000 words every day. Our education system teaches us, from the age of five through our late teens and even into our twenties, how to read and write. Why are we no longer taught to speak?

In 2010, while interviewing hundreds of Americans about their experiences with love, award-winning journalist John Bowe spoke with his cousin Bill, a recluse who lived in his parents' basement until the age of fifty-nine. Bowe was curious how Bill had broken out of his isolation, found love, and become happily married. Bill credited his turnaround to a nonprofit club called Toastmasters, the world's largest organization devoted to teaching the art of public speaking.

Fascinated by the idea that speech training seemed to foster the kind of psychological well-being more commonly sought through expensive psychiatric treatment, and intrigued by the notion that words could serve as medicine, Bowe researched the idea of "speech training" back to the teachings of the Ancient Greeks, who invented the discipline of public speaking 2,300 years ago. From the birth of democracy until two or three centuries ago, to be educated meant learning how to speak well (in addition to reading). Today, 74% of Americans suffer from speech anxiety, and social scientists studying loneliness, social isolation, and political divisiveness paint a picture of a nation that no longer seems to talk to itself very well.

Bowe set out to learn for himself what he'd gathered from so many others: When you learn to speak in public, you undergo a profound transformation that has little to do with standing at a podium. Through his own Toastmasters journey, he discovers much more than how to overcome nervousness and give a decent speech. He learns that anyone (okay, almost anyone) can become eloquent by re-discovering the basic, old-school communication techniques for paying attention to other people, and learning to connect.