The more I analyse authority in everyday interpersonal life the more I hate speaking with a tone of authority or professionality, especially when doing ‘public speaking’.
I use that tone sometimes when needed and I slip into it out of habbit but it is not how I want to speak to strangers or friends. I get much more pleasant connections with people and create much more space for sharing when I am openly awkard, fumbling and improvising as I go along.
And now some people try to give me advice on how to do public speaking, how to steady my voice and not flap my hands and I’m like “no, I can do that. I’ve done that. I can be a model public speaker. I don’t want to. I prefer not to be or sound like an authority.”Makes the speaker more approachable and their information more warmly received to remove the formal clinical air
I feel like it’s more than that though. I could sound warmly approachably knowledgeable and authorative. I’m not aiming for that.
I want to not sound more knowledgeable than my audience so that my audience feels more qualified to contribute, criticize me, admit not knowing something etc.
I’m trying to unlearn the ‘how to convince people’ and learn ‘how to share thoughts in ways that make it easy for people to make up their own minds about those thoughts and encourages people to share their own thoughts’. Turns out the best result often comes from showing all my clumsy vulnerable disorganized self when I’m speaking.
QueerAnarchism 