November 16, 2010
Feeling the Love
I have an interest in public speaking so I’m a member of Toastmasters and have gone to conferences and taken classes to improve my presentations. I find it interesting that with all the training and instruction I’ve received, not one time has anyone ever suggested that to be a good speaker I need to have love. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” (1 Cor 13:1NIV)
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Gail;
-----I am not a good public speaker because I don’t speak from love enough. What I know about public speaking and love I know from the back door because I try hard to convince myself to engage my love for the audience. But every time I get in front of a crowd, I engage my love for myself.
-----What is it to love your audience? What is it to love? Love boils down to one simple fundamental: seeking a defined good. Good gets its definition from two sources and a concept. One source is God. He defines absolutely what is good. Whether actively or passively, an individual, as the other source, defines what is good for himself based on the tastes, interests, and abilities in regard to the needs, desires, and abundance that are all the circumstances of his life. Then, what is actually good for an individual are those things for which the individual’s definitions of good are in agreement with God’s definitions. So attending those things to the fullness of one’s ability is to love. One may not have something for giving to another’s needs, yet still love greatly by desiring and praying for that particular good of another. One may not even know what specific good another needs or desires and yet love greatly by desiring and praying for the concept that good will be in another’s life.
-----An audience has needs and desires for good because it is a collection of people gathered around a desire to hear something good for them, more or less specifically. The more the speaker loves the audience, the more she will know the audience according to the good they seek to hear. If they do not seek to hear good (having itching ears), then the love of the speaker will engage their misdirected desires, and by that resulting attachment, lead them to what they need to hear, if the speaker has loved them enough to know what that is. So, by love, the speaker will prepare her speech in two ways: first to know her audience and where its interests are; and second, to choose information for her speech that will best serve their needs. Then the speaker will selflessly pour information into the interests of the audience as skillfully as a waitress pours coffee into a cup, rather than pouring just anything at a cup.
-----I fail to know my audiences deeply enough to know their points of engagement. That is not love; it is pouring at the cup. Although I usually know them well enough to know their needs and desires, stage fright scares me away from their interests and into my own. That is not love; it is pouring just anything. Key to my whole failure at speaking to an audience is this underlying feeling I get that I am being measured. I have a very difficult time dealing with being measured, because I measure myself to be so short. That ignites explosions of stage fright. So, every attempt I have made to speak to an audience has embarrassingly become about myself. And that is not love.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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