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storytelling with data podcast: #86: speak so others listen

·38 min·2 clips

Discomfort is contagious, and confidence can be projected through body position before the words change.

1. Storytelling with Data podcast #86, "speak so others listen," centers on practical speaking habits that make data presenters easier to hear and trust. 2. Cole, the host, draws on his work with high school seniors, university students at Northwestern, and a future leaders program to explain why the topic matters. 3. The episode asks how to speak with executive presence, self-assurance, and "owning the room" without sounding rehearsed. 4. Cole opens with Eloise, his nine-year-old daughter, who looked at the camera, enunciated clearly, and "owned her words" in a self-assessment video. 5. He contrasts that with his son Dorian, who confidently introduced himself and the titles of his piano pieces before a competition. 6. Cole says those moments did not happen by accident and argues that great communication requires deliberate practice. 7. A workshop with 17 high school seniors becomes the main case study for the episode, because they are preparing TED-style talks for hundreds of parents, teachers, community members, and peers. 8. Cole asks the students to rate confidence from 0 to 10 and says many of them start around 5 or 6. 9. He connects their nerves to his own early banking job in credit risk management, where presenting to the chief risk officer left him "a shaking leaf." 10. The episode treats filler words as a speaking version of graph clutter and separates them into verbal pauses, hedging phrases, and transition crutches. 11. Cole says "ah," "um," and "uh" often show that the brain is still searching for the next word, so a pause sounds more thoughtful. 12. He says hedging phrases like "kind of," "sort of," "really," "very," "I think," and "you know" make a speaker sound unsure. 13. A copy editor's advice to never write "sort of" stuck with him because it forced him to stop weakening his own advice. 14. He identifies "so" and "right" as transition crutches and says he sometimes puts a Post-it note in his line of sight with a red X over the offenders. 15. Cole also says that if a filler word slips out during a presentation, it should not derail the whole talk, as long as it does not take over. 16. A future leaders session highlights contrast in speaking through tone, pitch, pace, volume, posture, and movement, including the idea that a beautiful graph will fail if the speaker cannot talk through it well. 17. The episode's tone is instructional and workshop-like, with frequent live audience prompts and direct coaching. 18. Cole repeatedly uses concrete exercises, including standing up, slouching, recording audio and video, and reading back three times. 19. People who present data, teach, interview, or speak publicly will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners who want entertainment over practical communication drills may skip it.

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