Public Speaking For Introverts: The Courage To Speak Softly

Susan Cain begins her TED talk with a suitcase and a nine-year-old girl.

The girl is Cain herself, going to summer camp for the first time, and her mother has packed the case full of books, which seemed entirely natural to her because, in her family, reading was the primary group activity. The camp has other ideas. The counsellors teach the children a cheer, R-O-W-D-I-E, that’s the way we spell rowdie, and when she settles down with a book, the coolest girl in the bunk asks her why she is being so mellow.

She put the books under her bed and left them there for the rest of the summer, feeling guilty about it the whole time.

It is a quiet story about a child and a camp cheer, and it is also the most efficient opening I have watched in years, because by the time she has finished it the audience already understands the argument she has not yet made.

The Woman Who Hid Her Books Is Now On A Stage

Her argument, briefly, is that between a third and a half of us are introverts, that school and work have both evolved to reward the other half, and that a great deal is lost as a result. It is a generous case, made without a trace of grievance, for letting quiet people be themselves.

What makes the talk worth studying, if you dread presenting, is not that argument. It is the fact that she is standing there at all.

She had just published a book about introversion that had taken her seven years to write, and she is perfectly open about what those years were like and what this is like. The writing was bliss, she says, because she was reading, thinking, and working alone. Being out here talking about it is a great deal harder, and not her natural milieu.

She says that once, plainly, and then gets on with it. No apology, no running joke about how terrified she is, no asking the room to go easy on her. One honest sentence, and the audience trusts her for the rest of the nineteen minutes.

What She Asks Everybody To Do At The End

Her talk closes with three requests, and the third is the one that matters here.

Take a good look at what is inside your own suitcase, she says, and why you put it there. Then, occasionally, open it up and let other people see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry.

Which, when you think about it, is a definition of presenting. That is the entire job. You have spent years putting things into your case, the thinking and the experience and the views you have arrived at honestly, and a presentation is the twenty minutes where you open it in front of other people. Nobody is asking you to become a different person on the way to the lectern. They are asking you to open the case.

She Did Not Become An Extrovert To Do It

A piece of research underpins her talk and explains how this is possible, and it comes from the psychologist Brian Little, whose work Cain draws on in her book.

Little found that people step outside their own temperament all the time, and that when they do it for something they genuinely care about, they do it convincingly. He calls it free trait behaviour. He is a self-described classic introvert who lectures with great passion, and his point is that the room does not see through you, because you are not performing a lie. You are spending something.

Watch her, and you can see exactly that. She is animated, funny and entirely in command, and she is also unmistakably the woman who spent seven years happily alone with a manuscript. She has not swapped personalities. She has borrowed something, deliberately, for nineteen minutes, in the service of something she believed needed saying.

Her Grandfather Never Became One Either

There is one other story in the talk that is worth the nineteen minutes on its own.

Her grandfather was a rabbi in Brooklyn, a widower who lived alone in a small apartment surrounded by his books, and underneath the ceremonial role of the job he was, by her account, genuinely modest and genuinely introverted. He found it difficult to meet the eyes of his congregation while he delivered his sermons. He delivered them anyway, week after week, for a lifetime.

When he died at the age of ninety-four, the police had to close the streets of his neighbourhood to make room for the people who came to mourn him.

He did not become an extrovert to reach them. He simply kept opening the case.

Five Things She Does That You Can Copy

The talk is worth watching twice, once for the argument and once for the craft, because almost everything she does is available to somebody who does not enjoy being looked at.

– She opens with a child and a suitcase rather than with her credentials, which means the room is listening to a story before it has decided anything about her.

– She names the difficulty once and never returns to it. Repeated self-deprecation makes an audience anxious. Saying it once makes them trust you.

– She is full of contrast. The pace changes, the volume changes, she is funny in one breath and serious in the next. Quiet does not mean flat, and the range is what makes nineteen minutes of her easy to sit through.

– She uses one physical object and saves it for the end. She walks on holding the case, sets it down behind her, and leaves it there doing its work for the whole talk before she picks it up and opens it.

– Her final line is the softest in the talk. She wishes the audience the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly, and then stops.

Not one of those requires you to be louder than you are.

No Wilderness, No Revelations

One other line of hers transfers directly, and it is the one I would give to any introvert with something in the diary.

Solitude, she argues, is where the thinking happens, and she runs through the evidence for it, from Darwin walking alone in the woods to Wozniak building the first Apple computer by himself in a cubicle. No wilderness, no revelations.

That is not a philosophy. It is a scheduling instruction. The hour you want alone before you speak is not avoidance, and it is not weakness; it is where your material gets its last and best look, and it is the thing you will be tempted to give away first when somebody suggests a coffee. Keep it. Find a stairwell if you have to.

Then go and open the case.

If any of this was useful, please pass it on. Somebody quiet you work with has talked themselves out of putting their hand up for something, because they are certain that being quiet rules them out. It does not. Nobody has told them that yet.

If you are an introvert and would like some help with presenting:

– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.

– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.

– Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.