Quora Answer: Do You Think Some People are Born to be Excellent Public Speakers?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Do you think some people are born with a talent to be excellent public speakers?  Or is this mostly learned?”

The art of public speaking requires several diverse skills, from a command of language to psychology, to having wide general knowledge.  People may be born with one or more faculties or inclinations that may advantage them over others, but it does not make them public speakers of calibre without the hard work and experience of mastering the variety of skills needed.  According to Aristotle’s Rhetorike, rhetoric rests on a triad: ethos, pathos, and logos.

Ethos

Ethos is the credibility of the speaker, such that when he speaks on a particular subject, he carries the gravitas and the life experience to back what he says.  A man who has never married would not be taken seriously speaking on the difficulties of marriage.  A speaker only addresses issues he is familiar with, and never claims authority on matters beyond his ken.  Ethos, once destroyed, is difficult to restore.  Ethos also compounds over a career, since an audience extends credibility based on a speaker’s track record, not merely his opening sentence.  A speaker who has been proven right in the past earns the benefit of the doubt on a new claim.  One who has been caught overreaching loses that benefit permanently, regardless of how sound the new argument is.

Pathos

Pathos is the understanding of the psychology of the audience.  Whilst ethos concerns knowing yourself, pathos concerns knowing the crowd you are addressing.  No one knows this innately.  It takes experience and current knowledge to judge a crowd, and to understand their emotive anchors, what outrages them, what makes them sentimental, what moves them to melancholy.  Pathos also shifts by room.  A speech that lands with a factory floor of workers will not land identically with a boardroom of executives, even addressing the identical subject, because the emotional anchors differ by audience, not by topic.

Logos

Logos is the ability to formulate a cogent, coherent argument for or against a position.  No matter how good an argument, how sound the logic, how compelling the case, without a sound ethos and pathos, it will be dismissed.  The process of thinking clearly is the most difficult skill to learn.  Formal education has not equipped most people to think rigorously, and adults must often rediscover this skill, well after schooling has finished.

Historical Proof That This is Not Innate

Demosthenes, the greatest orator of ancient Athens, was born with none of the natural gifts a great speaker requires.  Plutarch, the Greek biographer, described his early voice as marked by “a perplexed and indistinct utterance and a shortness of breath, which, by breaking and disjointing his sentences, much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke.”  He stammered.  His voice was weak.  His first appearance before the Athenian Assembly failed outright, and the crowd mocked him.

He did not accept this as fixed. He built an underground room to practise without interruption, and shaved half his head so public embarrassment would keep him confined to that room for months at a time.  He spoke with pebbles in his mouth to force clearer articulation past his stammer.  He ran uphill while reciting verse to build breath control.  He delivered speeches on the seashore, forcing his voice to project over the roar of the waves.  Archaeologists have since found caches of unusually smooth, mouth-sized pebbles near ancient Athenian beaches, consistent with generations of aspiring orators following his method.  Every element of his training targeted a specific weakness rather than repeating what he could already do comfortably, the principle behind what modern performance psychologists now call deliberate practice.  By his thirties, this same stammering, mocked young man delivered the Philippics, speeches still studied 2,400 years later, rallying Athens against Philip of Macedon.  Demosthenes proved, in the fourth century BC, that communication is not a talent bestowed at birth.  It is a skill, built deliberately, regardless of where a person starts.

Two Further Examples from Recorded History

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill carried a speech impediment into adulthood and rehearsed his wartime addresses with obsessive care, timing pauses to the word.  His natural delivery required that discipline to become the “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech history remembers.  Martin Luther King Jr. built his own oratorical command through years of sermon delivery inside Black Baptist churches long before the March on Washington, developing the call-and-response rhythm that let him abandon his prepared text entirely once Mahalia Jackson called out for him to share his dream, and still land every phrase.  Neither man was born already capable of the speech that made him famous.  Both built the capability first, in rooms nobody was watching, the same discipline Demosthenes practised alone on an empty beach twenty-four centuries earlier.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters