DIGRESSIONS
noun; “a temporary departure from the main subject in speech or writing”
The Puzzle of Presentations
Why We Struggle with Public Speaking
By Preston Phelan
I have spent six years existing in the
fascinating subculture of competitive
speech: four years as a competitor in
high school, and two years as a coach.
I have seen thousands of presentations.
Many were terrible, most were good,
some excellent, and more than a few
gave me chills. These are teenagers. If
overgrown children can master it, why
do so many intelligent, driven, and otherwise successful people have such a
difficult time standing in front of an audience and communicating effectively?
Learning to be a good public speaker is very different than learning most
other skills. Whether we are studying finance, logistics, coding, biology, chemistry or history, we learn by
seeking out experts who can grant us
useable knowledge about the topic.
Absorbing and applying this information is an active, conscious process.
This approach simply cannot apply to
learning speaking skills. There are many
ways to make an effective presentation,
but they all have one thing in common:
they are authentic. Actively, consciously
trying to be authentic is counterproductive. We all have been full-time people for
our entire lives. The danger is in thinking too much, not in lacking knowledge.
In an August 2000 article titled “The Art
of Failure”, Malcolm Gladwell defines
“choking” as what happens when people start consciously thinking about a
subconscious process. In my experience,
this is the most common reason for bad
presentations. Here, Gladwell describes
Czech tennis player Jana Novotna’s meltdown during the 1993 Wimbledon final:
“She began thinking about her shots
again. She lost her fluidity, her touch.
She seemed like a different person –
playing with the slow, cautious deliberation of a beginner – because in a sense,
she was a beginner again: she was relying on a learning system that she hadn’t
used ... since she was first taught tennis,
as a child.”
Doesn’t this sound a lot like what we often see when people try to give speeches?
Page 4 | 1355 | Issue 1 | 15th March 2014
Talented professionals publicly struggling to imitate normal human behavior would be hilarious, if the phenomenon weren’t so universal. But
therein lies the rub: by trying so hard
to become better presenters, most
people just make themselves worse.
Instead of trying to follow a linear
path toward mastery, we should instead be taking a more experimental
approach. We need to learn by doing.
We need to be willing to take a few
risks, fail often and fail gloriously. So
stop reading articles like this one. Get
out there, and turn off that pesky brain
of yours; simply stand and deliver.
Why it’s Hard for Us to
Live Here
By Fernando Arguello
The infamous responses I kept getting: “No foreigners or co-signers accepted,” “Double deposit because you’re
a student,’’ or, better yet, total silence.
As an international graduate student
trying to find a place in this marvelous city by the Bay, I couldn’t help but
wonder if I was the only one having a
hard time finding decent shelter. Being
a foreigner without a credit history, in
addition to no salary, didn’t alleviate
matters. The astonishing thing is that
my fellow young city dwellers had the
same fate. I easily came to the conclusion that if you are young and trying to
find a place in this city you need nothing else than a healthy amount of luck
- although having money goes a long
way.
Unfortunately, this is not the only
problem facing youth in San Francisco.
A more pressing issue is the food industry with markets being sometimes just
as expensive as high-end supermarket
chains. This second problem taps well
into the first one, namely the fact that
you need deep poc kets to secure shelter
and food if you wish to live well. This
food issue is sometimes underestimated
because it leaves youth with no alternative other than buying unhealthy affordable options. The fact that, on the social
spectrum of life, you are limited to meeting techies, only adds salt to the wound
These White Walls
By Angie Quach
These white walls
Are an asylum of the most vibrant brains
The weird, the new and the absolutely insane
These white walls
Are tainted red with their velvet affairs
Of foreign lovers and secrets unaware
These white walls
Reflect the sounds
Of accents, laughs and friends around
These white walls
Open windows of light to our dreams
Of wordly success and career paths unseen
These white walls
Are a lab of experiments in HULT
With the best of memories as a result
for any young city dweller wishing to meet peers
from different walks of life.
Looking back at the past six months, I’ve realized things are still not better, at least in regards
to housing.Yet the city has shown me many new
things and even shocked me once or twice. Considering I grew up in the Netherlands, I can say I
was not expecting to see the things I’ve encountered here, but be assured: you’ll be surprised.
Sadly enough it took me some months to realize how great this city is. The sunsets and sunrises are, more often than not, something out of
a movie. In addition, the hills add more drama
to these heavenly moments and the bay is just
the icing on the cake. Seeing the fog covering the
city is something magical, and more importantly,
these moments that make you stop and gauge…
are free of charge!
1355 is looking for writers!
Interested in being published?
Submit a short story, book, movie or event
review, poem, article, idea, reflection, journal entry, opinion piece or other writing
(maximum 500 words per submission) to:
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Deadline for submissions:
Sunday March 23, 2014 at 11.59pm