Transcription
I've received quite a few requests in the comment section to discuss public speaking tips, perhaps because I've hosted seminars or spoken on stages a few times, and some of you in the audience might have enjoyed my presentations, leading to requests for tips on how to communicate effectively in public. Well, the fundamental skill that forms the foundation of public speaking is what's called effective communication. Let's discuss it here. [Music] Before diving into effective communication, I want to first discuss what has gone wrong in the process of people learning public speaking so far, whether through seminars or classes. I've observed several times that many public speaking materials teach people formulas or templates for how to speak, specific styles, or choices of words or sentences. For example, in a professional context, we need to speak using formal Indonesian, with a clear voice, a firm posture, and start with an opening greeting in a slightly higher tone to convey enthusiasm, and so on. Is this formula wrong? Not exactly, but materials like this, in my opinion, don't build public speaking skills; they rather build the skill of speaking in a specific style according to what's taught in the formula or template. Is that skill useless? Not necessarily. Perhaps you need that style in a specific context, but it's like understanding how to use an iron without understanding how the iron itself works and what its function is. Ultimately, if your learning method is like that, whatever the problem, you'll just iron things. The principle is that a tool, technique, or technology can only be used effectively if you understand its essence or basic concept. In the context of public speaking, the very first and most fundamental thing to understand is effective communication. What is effective communication? Simply put, effective communication is communication that successfully achieves its communication goals. Communication, conceptually, is the delivery of a message from one party to another. This activity can be considered effective if the goal of message delivery is achieved. Remember, the measure is whether the goal of message delivery is achieved, not just whether the message is delivered. What does that mean? Patience. There's a quote I really like from George Bernard Shaw. He said, "The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has already taken place." People often think that once the message is delivered, communication has occurred, meaning there's already communication between them and the recipient. However, a message being delivered doesn't mean the message is understood. A message being understood doesn't mean it's understood correctly. A message being understood correctly doesn't mean the goal of delivering the message has been achieved. So, to achieve effective communication, there's still a long journey from message delivery. If your principle in communication is "the important thing is I've delivered it," then it will be difficult for you to build effective communication skills. To achieve effective communication, at least three steps must be taken. First, our message must be delivered. Second, our message must be understood correctly. And third, the purpose behind delivering our message must be achieved. To succeed in achieving all of that, there are also three skills that need to be built. First is the ability to reason or think logically. Second is the ability to empathize. And third is the ability to use language. I'll explain each one briefly here. First, the skill of reasoning or logic. You need this to connect your communication strategy with the goals you want to achieve from the communication process. Right? For example, you want to teach people English. If you teach them directly in English, that's actually illogical, isn't it? Because, precisely, these people are just starting to learn English, and you're explaining it directly in English. How will they understand? If they already understood, they wouldn't need to learn English from you. They don't speak English, right? Or another example: someone wants to teach people to be more rational and objective in evaluating a message. The way they teach is by coming to a seminar or perhaps their content with hair or clothing style that is too distracting. For most people, they get annoyed with the person first, so they can't even listen to their content or material anymore. Because these people are expected by the speaker to be immediately objective, they won't look at the clothes or hair anymore and will focus on the message itself. But the very message they want to teach is to be like this. That's again, illogical. If people could already be like that, they wouldn't need to learn from that person how to do it, right? So, you need the ability to reason or think logically to determine a communication strategy that aligns with your goals. Next, the ability to empathize. The word "empathy" is often understood somewhat incorrectly. So, actually, empathy can have three forms. First, accurately understanding another person's perspective. Second, feeling what others feel. And third, helping to increase happiness or reduce suffering in others. It seems most people only understand empathy through the third form. In this context, I'm actually emphasizing the first form, which is accurately understanding another person's perspective. So, the point here is you need the skill to understand how others think, their perception of things, including their emotional connection to certain words or examples, so that you can formulate the right way to communicate with your audience. For example, going back to the previous case, when someone wants to teach many people to evaluate a message objectively and rationally, they need to understand what people's perception of such hair, such clothes, such speaking style, such tone of voice might be if they haven't yet learned to be objective and rational. This is so that when they deliver their material, they don't immediately make the audience run away because they are too annoying or not relatable, and so on. That's where they need the first form of empathy, which is understanding the audience's perspective. So, you can't communicate effectively if you see everything from your own perspective. Ultimately, you won't know how your audience perceives what you're conveying, including the way you convey it, the tone, the choice of words. This is very important. Humans have a strong emotional attachment to words, even though rationally and abstractly, words are neutral. Basically, words are neutral, right? But when they are used in social interactions with various contexts, an emotional weight gets attached to them. That's where you need to deeply understand your audience's emotional connection to certain word choices. So, if you want them to feel anger, the word choice should align with that. But if you want them to have positive emotions towards what you're conveying, you might need to avoid controversial or negatively emotional word choices. That's the usefulness of empathy skills in the context of effective communication. Lastly, language skills, obviously. In your communication, you need to use a language that you and your audience both understand. In my opinion, as an Indonesian, you should at least master three languages. First is the language of numeracy or basic mathematics, like numbers, percentages, ratios, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and so on. Second is Indonesian. And third is English. Why do you need to master numeracy or Indonesian? I don't think I need to explain that. The important thing regarding Indonesian is that I want to highlight here: mastering it doesn't mean speaking formal Indonesian according to the KBBI or using Ejaan Yang Disempurnakan in all contexts. In fact, mastering Indonesian means understanding in which context you should use Indonesian, how, when you should be casual, when you should be formal, and also what the meaning of a word is in your audience's eyes, and so on. But what about English? Why should you, as an Indonesian, master English? I'll explain a few reasons why you should master English even though you're Indonesian. First, English is the most widely used lingua franca in the world. So, mastering this language means expanding your audience reach, which in effective communication, adds completeness to your communication tools. Second, you can also look at it from a career perspective. It can be said that all large companies require English language proficiency as a mandatory competency for their employees, including in Indonesia. So, good career opportunities will most likely require you to master this language. Also, not less important are the many great opportunities that require you to speak English. For example, if you have a business and need to find funding, many funders speak English and not Indonesian. Competitions for innovation, studies at the best universities in the world, campaigns or creating movements at a global level – again, you need a language that many people can understand, which in this context is English. And finally, of course, if you want to pursue a career in a global-level institution or multinational companies, you definitely need English language skills. That's why I strongly agree that English should be a mandatory subject in basic education. In my layman's observation, many Indonesians seem to be quite proficient in English for reading or writing, but struggle significantly with spoken language, especially for simple conversations. Even if they can speak English, their tendency is passive. However, in many contexts of English usage that I've mentioned, you need active English skills. So, what now? I'm long past school and university. I'm not young anymore. Is it too late for me to learn English? Well, in my opinion, when pursuing fundamental skills that are truly important, it's always better late than never. So, don't worry about whether you're late or not, or whether you've fallen too far behind. The important thing is, if you want to start now, just start building the skill. Where to learn? Of course, there are many references out there, but I'll try to share one recommendation here. A platform for you to build communication skills in English actively. The app's name is Elsa Speak. This app is in the top five English learning apps and is also invested in by Google. So, from a technological standpoint, it should be advanced, and I've seen that its learning system is AI-supported, meaning it's personalized. It can really adapt to your learning level and what learning style is suitable for you. Elsa Speak has two types of packages: the first is Pro, and the second is Premium. I personally prefer Elsa Premium because it's all-inclusive, meaning you can access all features directly. Now, I want to show you some of its features so you can imagine what you can do in this app and how the learning process works. First, you can learn English from the very basics, like practicing pronunciation. For example, like this: "Nice." You can also practice speaking English in various real-life scenarios. It can provide simulations of real-life scenarios, and you can even customize the scenarios, for example, the context, who you're talking to, what the dialogue is about, and so on. You can customize it or choose from the available templates. After you finish, you'll get very comprehensive feedback like this. Moving on. This feature is what I think is most suitable for practicing public speaking, called Elsa Speech Analyzer, but it's web-based, so it's separate from the app. You open the website, and you can just speak freely in English. Totally free. After you speak like that, you'll get analysis results like this. All these features can be accessed with the Elsa Premium package. Hopefully, this platform recommendation can be useful for you to strengthen your English skills, especially the active part. If you're interested in trying it out, you can click the link I've put in the video description or the pinned comment. Finally, we've reached the end of the video. Thanks so much to everyone who has followed from the beginning until now. Hopefully, after watching this video, you can slightly improve your understanding and ability in communicating effectively. Last but not least, like and share the video. Don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss my future videos. I'm [Your Name]. Let's think critically. [Music]