The other day I was searching on iStockphoto.com for some images to use in a presentation about public speaking. When I put in the search phrase, “Public Speaker”, I got back more than three thousand images. That vast majority of them showed some variation on a person screaming into a megaphone or bullhorn.
Is that what we do? Do we scream at our audiences? I don’t think so.
Granted, the cliché is partly the result of lazy photographers reaching for the first visual metaphor they can think of, but beyond that, perhaps the common perception of someone who speaks out is that we’re noisy blowhards who just love the sound of our own voices, usually at high volume.
Sometimes it’s true, yet just as the best salesmen aren’t pushy or underhanded and the best bosses aren’t tyrants, good speakers don’t scream, shriek or bellow. They draw the audience in with stories, images and emotion, build a supporting scaffold of reason and logic and send them home or back to their offices thinking, and drawing the right conclusions on their own
That’s the image of an effective public speaker, one that knows how to deliver the goods. Then again, it’s hard to take a picture of that.
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