Two curses all serious speakers must cure to be successful - and how

Last Friday was Friday the 13th. My readers in the West will instantly recognise this day due to the Western superstition of any 13th day falling on a Friday being believed to be an unlucky day. This is so common that it has its own name - the curse of Friday the 13th. Well, I am not superstitious. However, there is another type of curse that can affect you as a speaker and prevent you from presenting your best. And it has little to with luck.

This article is about two speaker curses and how to cure them.

The two curses are one

You don't know what you don't know

I have heard and said this to myself so many times now that I take it for granted. But I recently learned that it is, in part, an expression of a formidable mind trick.

To help explain, let me take you back to 1999. It was not just the golden age of boy and girl bands or camouflage cargo pants, but also a year of some interesting work in social psychology.

In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published what would go on to become an important and influential paper -  Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

That title just says it all, doesn’t it?

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Here is what their work yielded in a nutshell:  People who know less are overconfident because they overestimate their own abilities—they don’t know what don’t know.

And people who are more knowledgeable tend to be under-confident because they understand the limits of their knowledge—they don’t know what they don’t know.

But, like with all good stories, there’s a twist. The people who underestimate themselves as a result of their knowledge – the under-confident competent as I call them—have this view because they think everybody else knows as much as they do.

Like the authors put it:

"the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Regardless of where you fall, your mind is likely to trick you. This has since been termed the Dunning-Kruger effect. I call it the Dunning-Kruger Curse.

This is where you, Dear Speaker, come in.

The curse of knowledge

A person has the curse of knowledge when they know something and have forgotten (or struggle with) remembering what it is like not to know. That is, they assume (and communicate) as though others had the same knowledge as they do.

As a speaker under this curse, you will likely talk over your audience’s head because you will assume that they know as much as you do. Or at least, you will assume that they know enough about your subject—a baseline—for you to move them forward.

For many speakers, this baseline that they assume is just that – an assumption. They don’t take steps to get to know their audience enough to establish a real baseline.

The cure for the curse

It is simple – get to know your audience. If you already work with them, this will be easy. If you are speaking to a new group, ask what they already know about your subject. Have they been trained already in the field? Are they peers or pupils? Always ask. Even if your presentation is mostly for entertainment, knowledge of the audience’s taste will give you a heads up before preparing your material and a leg up when you step up to present.

The Curse of ignorance

Speakers under this curse are overly confident in opinions and points that have not been verified or even thoroughly thought-out. They don’t know what they don’t know.I have heard it said that a half-truth is more dangerous than a lie. Maybe because it is more likely to be believed. For our purposes, as a speaker, we must be aware of the limits of our knowledge. We cannot be experts in everything. There is a time and place acknowledging that we do not know enough about something to speak confidently to it. Speaking confidently is one thing, speaking correctly is another. And they can be, unfortunately, completely separate from one another. Like Daniel Kahneman says,

…declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

The cure for the curse

Be honest with yourself about the limits of your knowledge and strive to push those limits by continuing to study your subject.Realize that things are almost always more complicated than they seem initially – don’t fall into the trap of building an entire presentation on only one isolated piece of information.Question your assumptions as you craft your presentation. With every core point, ask yourself – “what is the assumption behind this claim? Is it valid or verified?”

How to handle the Dunning-Kruger effect (Curse)

Again, we don’t know what we don’t know. However, I have found that doing the best with what I know while being open to learning has been very beneficial.

For example, when I speak to audiences, I not only work to ensure that my content is sound, I also try to find out how much the audience knows about the subject already. This helps me avoid the traps of talking above or below their heads. That is being either too advanced or basic to be of any value.

It is likely that whatever decision you are making will benefit from some degree of deliberate reflection. Know that confidence is an important attribute to success so don’t let what you don’t know stop you from speaking your truth with confidence.

Just do the background work so that you present your best.

Until the next post, speak with skill