LINK TO Source TALK
MARCH 15, 2015 BY KEVIN BARNEY
Today was ward conference, and as is typical in ward conference sacrament meeting, we had two speakers: the bishop and the stake president. Both of their talks were excellent, and they both happened to do the same thing in such a way that I thought there was a lesson there for good public speaking that I commented on at the beginning of my Sunday School class.
Without fanfare, the bishop began by telling a personal story. He explained that this was a story about how children sometimes don’t understand the weird things their parents do. As background to the story, he painted a word picture of the place he grew up. His was a very large family in a very Mormon neighborhood, the kind of place from which people rarely moved, so by the time you get to high school you have a lot of shared history. And he explained that typically in his mind he had two groups of friends: one was school friends with whom he interacted mostly in the school context, and the other was personal friends, with whom he interacted in the ward, in each others’ homes, on weekends, and so forth.
One day during dinner his father casually mentioned that Allen (name changed) had had his wisdom teeth out and so he had stopped by and given him a milkshake. This jarred the youthful version of the bishop, because Allen was a school friend of his; why in the world would his father have done such a thing? How did he even know this young man? His separate spheres were colliding in a way with which he definitely was not comfortable; in fact, he was mortified by his father’s actions, just randomly showing up at a fellow student’s house to give him a milkshake. This was very embarrassing for him personally, and he couldn’t understand it. He filed it away in his brain under “random stuff our parents do to embarrass us.”
Many years later he was at an event where he ran into Allen’s older brother. And this brother commented to the bishop about how much their family loved his dad, who had been their home teacher for some period of years. And all of a sudden the gaps in the story were filled in. When the milkshake gift occurred, Allen’s family wasn’t even in their ward, and his dad certainly was not his hometeacher at that time. But his dad had been the family’s hometeacher years before, and had maintained a loving relationship with the family for all of those years since, even without the formal calling. And all of a sudden the bishop understood his father’s actions, and he now filed the episode in his mind under examples of long-term, loving service.
From there the bishop went on to give the rest of his talk. When it was the stake president’s turn, he did something very similar, without any other introduction beginning right out of the gate with a personal story, riffing to some extent off of the bishop’s story. And the fact that both speakers had done the same thing made me realize there was a great lesson on effective public speaking here that I could share with my Gospel Doctrine class.
Too often when we begin a talk, we feel the need to dance around for a bit. We tell stories of how we received the assignment, we try to be self-deprecating about our (very limited) abilities as a public speaker, we try to frame the topic by reading from the dictionary, and on and on and on. What I loved about the talks today was that there was none of this dancing around–they went straight into the stories they were going to use to frame their talks.
Further, they did not tell the stories of some high church leader. We make a mistake when we assume people will care more about some high leader’s stories more than our own, I think. For one thing people are likely to have heard the high leader’s stories before, while our own are much more likely to be fresh. For another thing we know and presumably love and care about the people in our ward who give talks, so we have an inherent interest there in their personal stories.
For me, whenever someone tells a personal story over the pulpit, I inevitably perk up and pay close attention. I put the phone down and listen, because personal stories of people we know in the flesh are just inherently interesting to us (or at least they are to me). And when you give a talk, half the battle is getting the congregation’s attention right out of the box. And for me, there is no better way to do that than through the power of a personal story.
MARCH 15, 2015 BY KEVIN BARNEY
Today was ward conference, and as is typical in ward conference sacrament meeting, we had two speakers: the bishop and the stake president. Both of their talks were excellent, and they both happened to do the same thing in such a way that I thought there was a lesson there for good public speaking that I commented on at the beginning of my Sunday School class.
Without fanfare, the bishop began by telling a personal story. He explained that this was a story about how children sometimes don’t understand the weird things their parents do. As background to the story, he painted a word picture of the place he grew up. His was a very large family in a very Mormon neighborhood, the kind of place from which people rarely moved, so by the time you get to high school you have a lot of shared history. And he explained that typically in his mind he had two groups of friends: one was school friends with whom he interacted mostly in the school context, and the other was personal friends, with whom he interacted in the ward, in each others’ homes, on weekends, and so forth.
One day during dinner his father casually mentioned that Allen (name changed) had had his wisdom teeth out and so he had stopped by and given him a milkshake. This jarred the youthful version of the bishop, because Allen was a school friend of his; why in the world would his father have done such a thing? How did he even know this young man? His separate spheres were colliding in a way with which he definitely was not comfortable; in fact, he was mortified by his father’s actions, just randomly showing up at a fellow student’s house to give him a milkshake. This was very embarrassing for him personally, and he couldn’t understand it. He filed it away in his brain under “random stuff our parents do to embarrass us.”
Many years later he was at an event where he ran into Allen’s older brother. And this brother commented to the bishop about how much their family loved his dad, who had been their home teacher for some period of years. And all of a sudden the gaps in the story were filled in. When the milkshake gift occurred, Allen’s family wasn’t even in their ward, and his dad certainly was not his hometeacher at that time. But his dad had been the family’s hometeacher years before, and had maintained a loving relationship with the family for all of those years since, even without the formal calling. And all of a sudden the bishop understood his father’s actions, and he now filed the episode in his mind under examples of long-term, loving service.
From there the bishop went on to give the rest of his talk. When it was the stake president’s turn, he did something very similar, without any other introduction beginning right out of the gate with a personal story, riffing to some extent off of the bishop’s story. And the fact that both speakers had done the same thing made me realize there was a great lesson on effective public speaking here that I could share with my Gospel Doctrine class.
Too often when we begin a talk, we feel the need to dance around for a bit. We tell stories of how we received the assignment, we try to be self-deprecating about our (very limited) abilities as a public speaker, we try to frame the topic by reading from the dictionary, and on and on and on. What I loved about the talks today was that there was none of this dancing around–they went straight into the stories they were going to use to frame their talks.
Further, they did not tell the stories of some high church leader. We make a mistake when we assume people will care more about some high leader’s stories more than our own, I think. For one thing people are likely to have heard the high leader’s stories before, while our own are much more likely to be fresh. For another thing we know and presumably love and care about the people in our ward who give talks, so we have an inherent interest there in their personal stories.
For me, whenever someone tells a personal story over the pulpit, I inevitably perk up and pay close attention. I put the phone down and listen, because personal stories of people we know in the flesh are just inherently interesting to us (or at least they are to me). And when you give a talk, half the battle is getting the congregation’s attention right out of the box. And for me, there is no better way to do that than through the power of a personal story.
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