Being able to express oneself appears to be a gift but its not, it’s a skill… and skills can be learned and practised. I’ll bet Paul Keating spent lots of time learning to speak well and he certainly practised it as often as possible. Whatever shade of politics you are, you have to admire his words here as he compared members of the opposition to fireworks.
“Some of you are old enough to remember cracker night, I’m sure. I sometimes think of my opponents sitting on the front bench as crackers, with Hewson the skyrocket. And Howard, always with such promise. He always reminded me of that thing called the flower pot. Now, I don’t know if any of you remember the flower pot, but that was the one which always promised a dazzling performance. You’d light it up, and it had multicolours, and it did a show for you but, often, when you lit it up, it went fffftttft, a bit of a spark… there was always a bit of a show and then there’d be a bit more, and a bit more, then finally it fell away to nothing. That’s really very typical of his contribution.
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“Then there’s McLachlan, our establishment friend, who was supposed to have come to Canberra with a big bang. I always think of him as the bunger, you know, the big red bungers? The strong, silent type capable of a big bang. You light it up, everyone stands back, and then the wick goes down and everyone’s waiting… and they keep on waiting… and that’s it, it doesn’t go off.
“And then there’s Bronwyn. She reminds me of the Catherine wheel. We used to nail them to the fence and they’d take off, spreadeagle the kids, burn the dog, run up a tree, and then fizzle out going round in circles.
“So that’s our friends in opposition. Bitter, burnt out and accident-prone.”
How about that?
You may never become as masterful as Keating but purposeful and proper practice will produce the performance you want. Resolve to increase your speaking abilities to make listening to you great and easy to understand.
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