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by Matthew Bass.
Original Post: Why Geeks Need Public Speaking
Feed Title: Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/career20
Feed Description: Jared Richardson and Matthew Bass are writing a book about refactoring your career through learning, writing, speaking, and networking. This blog will document their progress.
If you know anything at all about public speaking, your perception of it is probably that it's a playground for salespeople, marketers, and trainers; an outlet for extroverted businesspeople to practice their presentations to upper management. This is certainly true, but there is another audience that can gain enormous benefit from learning and practicing public speaking: software developers.
Let's face it, we software developers are not thought of as your typical public speaker. But there is room us to learn this skill. There is room to push ourselves to do something that will not only benefit us personally, but help the people around us as well.
As developers, it's very easy for us to sit in our offices all day and avoid as much human contact as possible. Such conditions make activities like extemporaneous speaking or presenting to a large audience very difficult. Organizations like Toastmasters or local user groups come to the rescue by providing an outlet for practicing such speaking.
The environment in these groups is friendly and welcoming enough to make developers feel comfortable getting outside our "coding cocoon." Yet at the same time these groups challenge us to learn how to communicate more effectively.
We've all heard the old saying, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." When it comes to speaking, though, "it's not what you say, it's how you say it!" It’s difficult to stand in front of a crowd and explain what we do for a living, or give an educational presentation to a roomful of other developers (many of whom may be far more knowledgeable than we are about the topic we’re speaking about). Speaking under these challenging circumstances puts the way we communicate in a whole new perspective. It forces us to think about how other people hear us and adjust our message accordingly.
We’re software developers. We’re proud to claim that title. But we should also be proud to claim the title of public speakers. The experience we gain practicing this skill will continue to benefit us and the people we know long after the software technologies of today have disappeared. That’s something worth pursuing.
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