Audience Adaptation Paper

Taylor Cook

COMM 101- Fundamentals of Public Speaking Audience Adaptation Paper February 18, 2013 In the TED video that I watched, the subject was about “Body Language” and was twenty-one minutes and three seconds long, but the speaker stopped officially talking at twenty minutes and fifty-four seconds into the video. The speaker, Amy Cuddy, had very interesting points about how a person’s power pose, powerful/ prideful or curled into a ball and timid, can influence themselves on how they think and feel about themselves.

She also made the point that our bodies change our minds and that power posing for a few minutes really change your life in a meaningful way. Throughout the video I was a little unimpressed with her delivery on the subject. She did not seem to “do as she preached. ” Her personal appearance was fine. She was dressed in all black except for her undershirt was teal which made her fade into the background except for her pop of color. She also hunched quite a bit and did not stand as properly or formally as other public speakers I have seen. Her body language was okay.

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When she showed what a power pose was, which was supposed to look like Wonder Woman, she did it not very convincingly and looked better and more “at home” doing a shy and timid pose. She did do a lot of walking up and down the stage to keep an eye on her audience and to keep them paying attention to her. This did work because when they would put the camera out to the audience, they were all intently in tune with what she was saying. Throughout the speech I did not feel much of a volume change until the end when she had gotten emotional with a story she chose to tell about herself and later on a student much like herself.

This volume change is of course not a good one because you should not ever pick something to talk about that creates reoccurring feelings. This could make you really hard to understand through the crying or you could not be able to finish through your weeping. Her rate of speech was never too fast, but at points was really slow due to trying to find the right words to say to her audience. She kept saying “um” quite often and stumbled over what she was trying to say next. After the first ten minutes, she had said the word “um” over fifteen times.

After the ten minutes, I quite focusing my attention on that and tried to focus on her main points and ideas about our body language. As Amy Cuddy’s speech progressed, she did not pause as much as she did in the first half of her speech. The best segment when she was truly flowing was when she started to talk about lab research she had done to prove her point that higher powered people are twenty-seven percent more likely to gamble than low powered people. They also have a twenty percent increase of testosterone than low powered people.

High powered people had a twenty-five percent decrease in Cortisol, while low powered people had a fifteen percent increase. She seemed really happy with her proven results and it showed the way she spoke. Her language was very proper and articulate, except for her “um’s” of course. She did very well at pronunciating each thing she said. She did not have any dialect, so she was really easy to understand. While speaking, the only gestures she seemed to make were with her hands.

She would either point to the screen behind her to show her research or notes or fiddled with her hands in front of herself. She rarely used anything else than her hands to symbol anything or to point something out. From the very beginning her eye contact was spot on with the audience. She opened with a camera on the audience to see how everyone was sitting. When she started to point out what she saw, the entire audience began to realize they were being analyzed. Everyone sat up straight and fixed their overall appearances.

Overall her presentation was not terrible, but it was not perfect either. Her aids throughout are what I believe made the presentation a somewhat success. Her notes, questions, and graphs on her slides for the audience not only showed proof of her research, but preparation. That is the key trait that I had seen in her, which was quite ironic since she said that it was her weakness. My favorite phrase that she used throughout the seminar and what I know I’ll definitely pass along is “Don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it until you become it. ”

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