Double Flying Dutchman

Public speaking has always been a tough nut for me to crack; and, rather like an especially frugal squirrel, it is also a nut that I prefer to hide away until some future date. The problem is that I tend to say things like that previous sentence, which can often bewilder and vex an audience whose collective mind is already number and bruised from the effort of trying to concentrate on the tedious speeches of those rubber-lipped orators who preceeded me at the lectern. Give me an opportunity - a metaphor or similie with which I can run barefoot and gibbering through the fallow fields of incomprehension - and I will gladly wander from the script of any subject you care to pick and into the enchanted forest of inchoate irrelevance.
Oddly, I am often in great demand for such events. I can only suppose nobody notices. Or perhaps they don't really care?

Comments

[The Misspent Life]

That is my favorite kind of speech, although perhaps I am biased since I tend towards the same problem. Conversations with friend often end up after several minutes with me stopping mid-thought and them looking at me with a blank look still trying to connect the dots.

My problem is less with public speaking, as I find I am quite facile in that regard, but rather in the written word. I clutter my writing with so many parentheticals and side comments that it is quite difficult and time consuming for me to write anything that isn't rambling, but if I can easily babble on for pages and pages in no time at all.

If people ever complain, simply remark that it is a sign of genius.

[KHH]

I have the opposite problem: writing clarifies my thoughts moreso than speaking. When I speak I tend to be thinking and talking at almost the same rate, so that confuses people sometimes.

My latest thing I do in conversations with people is to challenge their belief systems and get them so angry at me that they realize the hypocrisy in their own lives. It's not fun to do that because it costs a lot emotionally for me to do that, but it is very interesting to see how that plays out and you can learn more about your own belief system. It is nice to do it to law students especially first year ones which I did two weeks when I was visiting one of my friends at Georgetown.

By simply mimicking and throwing back their lax and relativistic thought process, you can really offend those students, which is a decent wake up call for them.

The amazing thing I find in public speaking is that I can tell people the truth all the time, and they won't believe it whatsoever. They assume I am "joking". It's great to insult people seriously and they assume you are joking about it. Of course, subconsciously they can pick up on that, but I find that they tend to rationalize those thoughts out of the body.

Oh, I graduated with psych degree, but for obvious and ethical reasons I decided not to go to psych grad school as I'd probably turn into some form of rogue/mad psychologist. Better to go into business instead and get paid to do that.