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In our lives and endeavors, we naturally have the opportunity to speak, and to speak powerfully, influentially, and beneficially.
This speaking may be in the work of health education or development with individuals and groups of various sizes, or in these settings with other aims in mind.
In any case, to underscore and help you master this crucial opportunity that we all have – across nearly all the moments of our lives and interactions with others – I would like to spend a moment exploring and contrasting the important phenomena or practices of private speaking and public speaking.
Overall, and as summarized in my Private Versus Public Speaking graphic, both private speaking and public speaking involve speech or communication that is careful, attentive, idea-rich, and again potentially quite powerful. In each case, elevated skill and foresight are brought to life and our interactions, and in processes that always must be learned and practiced. This of course is even as some of us may have an easier time with private speaking, public speaking, or both.
Private speaking, in a few words, can be defined as close or confidential conversation with others, and also as conversation that frequently seeks to uncover, disclose, elicit, or enable insight or learning. Private speaking is the intimate natural communication of counselors and confidants, whether this is deliberately so or not, and whether one’s audience is a single person, a group, or a large auditorium or media platform. Compared to public speaking, private speaking often is less acknowledged or celebrated today, even as it can be as potent, important, and aiding to us all. Notably, private speaking is different from private speech, a term psychologists use to describe personal, and potentially communal, self-talk.
Public speaking, in turn, regularly is the better recognized and more widely recommended member of these twin and naturally complementary modes of skilled, careful, and often creative communication. In public speaking, we seek to communicate broadly or generally, pointedly so compared with private speaking, and thus often in ways that are more declarative or conclusive. Given this, public speaking commonly is bolder or more projected, relatedly more tailored to people in general than people in particular, and thus a common communication tool of social leaders and advocates. Importantly, people who focus on public speaking may neglect private speaking, just has skilled private speakers may do the reverse, and in all prove less effective as communicators and in their endeavors as a result. Crucially, this is even as both forms of skilled communication may be mastered by us, and fluidly intermixed.
As highlighted in the graphic, skilled private speaking and public speaking each can be contrasted with what we might think of as private and public stating, expressing, or verbalization. With this doubtless less familiar term, I simply mean communication that is less skilled and careful, typically more reactive or autonomic, and as such often more conventional and transactional too. Private and public stating, or statement-making, of course are natural and useful modes of communication, but equally are subject to natural limitations or barriers in their potential for power, influence, and impact in our lives and groups.
As a study in these four archetypical modes of communication, and the continuous two-dimensional model they form in total, consider explaining my graphical summary and its key ideas to others, first individually and then with a group. You likely can sense immediately that this effort might be more hurried and superficial, and thus perhaps less insightful and aiding, or instead more careful, creative, and lasting. Similarly, you perhaps can see that various skilled and impactful presentations of the graphic might be more individualized and private in approach, more generalized and public, or a combination or interweaving of the two. Again, and often less intuitively, this is in both personal and communal settings.
Let me end this brief discussion by encouraging you to explore this important set of ideas, and by suggesting the now likely intuitive conclusion that we each can and typically should practice and cultivate our abilities at private and public speaking. Whatever your personal circumstances and particular endeavors, these twin and entirely natural communication skills are likely to serve you and others. Notably, this always is amid the inevitable, but also superficial or less potent, stating or statement-making that makes up much of daily life – and perhaps more than we may realize at first, and find optimal in time.
As always, I am happy to respond to your comments and questions.
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
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