Читать книгу THE ART OF PUBLIC SPEAKING - J. BERG ESENWEIN DALE CARNAGEY - Страница 22

Attention is the microscope of the mental eye. Its power may be

high or low; its field of view narrow or broad. When high power

is used attention is confined within very circumscribed limits,

but its action is exceedingly intense and absorbing. It sees but

few things, but these few are observed "through and through" ...

Mental energy and activity, whether of perception or of thought,

thus concentrated, act like the sun's rays concentrated by the

burning glass. The object is illumined, heated, set on fire.

Impressions are so deep that they can never be effaced.

Attention of this sort is the prime condition of the most

productive mental labor.

--DANIEL PUTNAM, _Psychology_.

Try to rub the top of your head forward and backward at the same time

that you are patting your chest. Unless your powers of coördination are

well developed you will find it confusing, if not impossible. The brain

needs special training before it can do two or more things efficiently

at the same instant. It may seem like splitting a hair between its north

and northwest corner, but some psychologists argue that _no_ brain can

think two distinct thoughts, absolutely simultaneously--that what seems

to be simultaneous is really very rapid rotation from the first thought

to the second and back again, just as in the above-cited experiment the

attention must shift from one hand to the other until one or the other

movement becomes partly or wholly automatic.

Whatever is the psychological truth of this contention it is undeniable

that the mind measurably loses grip on one idea the moment the attention

is projected decidedly ahead to a second or a third idea.

A fault in public speakers that is as pernicious as it is common is that

they try to think of the succeeding sentence while still uttering the

former, and in this way their concentration trails off; in consequence,

they start their sentences strongly and end them weakly. In a

well-prepared written speech the emphatic word usually comes at one end

of the sentence. But an emphatic word needs emphatic expression, and

this is precisely what it does not get when concentration flags by

leaping too soon to that which is next to be uttered. Concentrate all

your mental energies on the present sentence. Remember that the mind of

your audience follows yours very closely, and if you withdraw your

attention from what you are saying to what you are going to say, your

audience will also withdraw theirs. They may not do so consciously and

deliberately, but they will surely cease to give importance to the

things that you yourself slight. It is fatal to either the actor or the

speaker to cross his bridges too soon.

Of course, all this is not to say that in the natural pauses of your

speech you are not to take swift forward surveys--they are as important

as the forward look in driving a motor car; the caution is of quite

another sort: _while speaking one sentence do not think of the sentence

to follow_. Let it come from its proper source--within yourself. You

cannot deliver a broadside without concentrated force--that is what

produces the explosion. In preparation you store and concentrate thought

and feeling; in the pauses during delivery you swiftly look ahead and

gather yourself for effective attack; during the moments of actual

speech, _SPEAK--DON'T ANTICIPATE_. Divide your attention and you divide

your power.

This matter of the effect of the inner man upon the outer needs a

further word here, particularly as touching concentration.

"What do you read, my lord?" Hamlet replied, "Words. Words. Words." That

is a world-old trouble. The mechanical calling of words is not

expression, by a long stretch. Did you ever notice how hollow a

memorized speech usually sounds? You have listened to the ranting,

mechanical cadence of inefficient actors, lawyers and preachers. Their

trouble is a mental one--they are not concentratedly thinking thoughts

that cause words to issue with sincerity and conviction, but are merely

enunciating word-sounds mechanically. Painful experience alike to

audience and to speaker! A parrot is equally eloquent. Again let

Shakespeare instruct us, this tune in the insincere prayer of the King,

Hamlet's uncle. He laments thus pointedly:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

The truth is, that as a speaker your words must be born again every time

they are spoken, then they will not suffer in their utterance, even

though perforce committed to memory and repeated, like Dr. Russell

Conwell's lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," five thousand times. Such

speeches lose nothing by repetition for the perfectly patent reason

that they arise from concentrated thought and feeling and not a mere

necessity for saying something--which usually means anything, and that,

in turn, is tantamount to nothing. If the thought beneath your words is

warm, fresh, spontaneous, a part of your _self_, your utterance will

have breath and life. Words are only a result. Do not try to get the

result without stimulating the cause.

Do you ask _how_ to concentrate? Think of the word itself, and of its

philological brother, _concentric_. Think of how a lens gathers and

concenters the rays of light within a given circle. It centers them by a

process of withdrawal. It may seem like a harsh saying, but the man who

cannot concentrate is either weak of will, a nervous wreck, or has never

learned what will-power is good for.

You must concentrate by resolutely withdrawing your attention from

everything else. If you concentrate your thought on a pain which may be

afflicting you, that pain will grow more intense. "Count your blessings"

and they will multiply. Center your thought on your strokes and your

tennis play will gradually improve. To concentrate is simply to attend

to one thing, and attend to nothing else. If you find that you cannot do

that, there is something wrong--attend to that first. Remove the cause

and the symptom will disappear. Read the chapter on "Will Power."

Cultivate your will by willing and then doing, at all costs.

Concentrate--and you will win.