John Bowe - I Have Something to Say: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking in an Age of Disconnection

My step-cousin Bill von Hunsdorf grew up in Dyersville, Iowa, an arcadian hamlet of some thousand families surrounded by a sea of corn. In eleventh grade, Bill asked a classmate to prom. She said no. Bill responded by moving to the family basementand staying there for the next forty-three years.

He went to church now and then, but mostly he lived the life of a recluse. He taught himself to speak German. He learned to play several Chopin sonatas. He spent a decade building a model train set that wound through the entire space, gracing every bend and junction with miniature juniper trees, Old West buildings, and painstakingly detailed figures of human beings.

On the three occasions that Id met him, Bill engaged in pleasant, if eccentric, conversation. But he remained the most socially isolated person Id ever known. As family members reported over the years, hed never been on a date, never kissed anyone, never held another persons hand, never shared a beer with a friend.

During the 1980s, everyone in Bills life began to die: his father, his mother, and finally Karen, the family dog. Bill remained in the family home, year after yearalone. His shyness, long viewed as a harmless quirk, began to seem more like a life sentence of tragic solitude.

In 1992, at the age of fifty-nine, Bill surprised us all by getting married.

I learned through the family grapevine that his wifes name was Debbie, that Debbie was a nurse, that they liked to go dancing, and that they seemed very happy. What no one could fathom, of course, was how Bill had managed to talk to Debbie in the first place, much less propose to her.

In 2010, Bill and Debbie came to Minneapolis to share Thanksgiving with my family. Eager to learn how he had come out of his shell, I made sure to sit next to him at dinner. I asked him: Had he started seeing a shrink? Had he gone on meds? Nothing of the kind. As the turkey was served, Bill credited his turnaround to a nonprofit organization hed joined called Toastmasters. Someone at church had told him it was a nice place to meet people.

The name brought to mind other clubs Id heard of, like the Rotary, the Kiwanis, the Lions. Id seen signs for them posted outside small towns around the country for as long as I could remember. I seemed to recall that Toastmasters had something to do with speeches, but I knew little else about it.

Bill explained hed found a Toastmasters chapter that met weekly at the Dubuque Public Library, twenty miles from his home. He liked it from the start. The members were diverse. The fee was affordable: forty-two dollars a year. To his enormous relief, no one forced him to speak. I didnt have to jump in until I was good and ready, he told me. Which was all to the good, because I was, as you might say, a bit of a delicate petunia.

Toastmasters meetings typically follow a standard order. They begin with the Word of the Week, which introduces a new vocabulary word. Then theres the Joke of the Week, when volunteers stand and tell jokes. Next is Table Topics, when participants speak off the cuff about random topics. Finally, there are prepared speeches, when members deliver four-to-ten-minute talks. At the end of the meeting, volunteer officers serving as Timer, Grammarian, Ah Counter, and Evaluator report on how long each speaker spoke, any grammatical errors they made, and the number of times they said ah, um, like, and other crutch words, then gently offer tips for improvement.

A month after joining, Bill tried his hand at a Table Topic. He sweated, stammered, and shuddered, but resolved to try again. A few weeks later, he began to deliver prepared speeches about technical subjects near and dear to his heart, like how to install a do-it-yourself fuel efficiency monitor in your car. His fledgling efforts, he recalled with a laugh, were far from eloquent, but within a few months, he noted a tremendous improvementboth in and outside of his club.

Hed always felt anxious while talking to strangers. Hed rush his thoughts in a jumble, then become flustered when his listener didnt understand what he was saying. Through Toastmasters, he explained, hed learned to pause before speaking to consider how his words might strike an audience. Instead of going on in his usual, dryly technical way, he began to translate his ideas into less obscure terms. Instead of presuming that his listeners would find his obsessions interesting, he began to explain why they were interesting. As people began to understand him better, he told me, conversationsand even relationshipsbecame more fluid.

By now, wed dispatched the turkey and a raft of Thanksgiving side dishes. The rest of the family had gone for a walk to make room for pumpkin pie, but Bill and I stayed behind. I was captivated by the idea that hed transformed his life simply by delivering fewer than a dozen amateur speeches. Had learning to speak in public cured him of shyness? I asked. Heavens no! he laughed. Im still quite shy. Toastmasters did not exactly make me glib! What I learned, you might say, is a method for connecting with people despite my shynesswhich, I will say, had a profound effect.

One Sunday, he went on to explain, two years after joining the club, Bill drove past a nice-looking woman sitting in a park by the Mississippi River. He knew that the park staged singles meets on weekends, so he pulled over, walked across the grass, sat down next to her, and delivered perhaps the most important speech of his life: Hello. Im Bill. I noticed you sitting here. Its such a lovely day. I wondered if youd mind if I sit here as well.