Chapter 41 How to deal with surprises in speeches

Even when a speaker is well-prepared, surprises can occasionally arise during a presentation.Now let’s assume that there is a speaker who is giving a speech to a group of church audiences. In the middle of her speech, her mind suddenly goes blank.In an instant, her self-confidence disappeared in confusion and frustration. Maybe, give her some more time, even fifteen or even ten seconds, and she might return to normal again.But this short ten seconds, in front of the audience, is a terrible disaster for a speaker.So, how to save all this?A well-known U.S. senator offers us a way to learn.Once, when he was in a similar predicament, he asked with a smile if his voice was loud enough that the audience in the back row could hear him clearly.He knew that he was a "drunkard who doesn't care about drinking", and he was buying time for himself. As a result, during this moment of pause, he recovered his thoughts and talked freely.

Perhaps the best salvage in such a sudden state of mind, however, is to proceed from the last word or phrase of the sentence just said, or the idea it contains.Naturally, this would go on endlessly like the Tennyson.Suppose a speaker is giving a speech on business success and finds his mind bogged down after he says, "Because of a lack of enthusiasm for work, most workers are passive and unmotivated." The last word is "active," so you should use this as a starting point to form a sentence.Maybe you don't know what to say, and you don't know where to end it, but if you go on anyway, it's better than catastrophic silence.

Being proactive means being creative and getting things done on your own, rather than just following orders. Yes, this approach is not a terrific one, and it won't make a speech go down in history, but it does avoid obvious embarrassment.For another example, the last phrase of the speech is "follow orders", and we will start with this meaning and continue to elaborate: endlessly informing, guiding and ordering workers who have no thoughts of their own is the most annoying thing one. As far as we are concerned with this aspect, we should now remember another aspect, namely: imagination.Imagination is absolutely essential.Solomon once said, "Without imagination, nothing exists."

When we come to a standstill, we have to act on both sides at the same time, for example: It is indeed a pity that the competition of commerce dwindles the number of workers every year.This is a pity because: If workers were more committed to their profession, more ambitious, more enthusiastic, they would move from failure to success; but the fact of business failure shows that this is an illusion.etc. When a speaker deviates from his central idea and utters these clichés, he should try to recall what has been temporarily forgotten.This method of continuous linking, if not interrupted in time, will eventually lead the speaker to talk about such frivolous things as the price of raisins, pudding, or canaries, but it is still invaluable in gaining time in the first moments of oblivion. It's helpful, and it has proven to save many speeches from the brink of failure.

In this chapter I have shown how we can improve our methods for obtaining vivid impressions, repeating memories, and connecting facts.But, as Professor James points out, memory is essentially an association, and there is nothing we can do about our general and fundamental faculties of memory; we can only improve our memory in relation to certain related and systematic things Level. For example, if we spend our entire day memorizing quotations from Shakespeare, we may increase our memory of literary quotations to an astonishing degree, and each quotation may remind us of something more .But even though we remember everything from Hamlet to Romeo, that doesn't help the factual material on the memory cotton market.

Let us summarize below: If we apply the principles mentioned in this chapter, then we will change the way of memory and improve the efficiency of memory; on the contrary, even if we memorize 10 million pieces of knowledge about baseball, it will not help the securities market. A morsel of knowledge.Because these unrelated knowledge cannot be linked together. "Our mind is essentially an associative machine.