It is no use pleasing yourself if you do not please others, and as a rule general contempt is the punishment for self-satisfaction... To speak and at the same time listen to yourself cannot turn out well... At every sentence they look for applause or flattery, taxing the patience of the wise.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
There is a specific failure in speech that has nothing to do with content: the speaker who is audibly enjoying himself. The tell is in the small habits, the pause after a good phrase, the "as I was saying", the glance around for a reaction, the sentence extended because it is going well. The room registers all of it as a request for applause and responds with patience rather than attention. The cure is to move the attention outward: speak to be understood rather than admired, watch the listeners instead of your own performance, and stop the moment the point has landed (maxim 105 keeps it short).
Practice
- Watch for the applause pause; if you are waiting for a reaction after your good lines, you are performing rather than communicating.
- Cut your favourite phrase from every important talk. If the point survives, the phrase was decoration.
- Judge your speaking by what listeners do afterwards, not by how it felt while speaking. The two are frequently opposite.
Use this when
- Use this in presentations, teaching, and any setting where you speak often enough to develop mannerisms.
- Use it in writing too; the sentence you are proud of is the one to check first (the same clever-scan this project runs on itself).
Ignore this when
- Don't strip all pleasure from speaking; enjoyment is fine when it is shared rather than solitary.
- Don't over-correct into flat delivery; the fault is self-audience, not energy.
A picture of it
His student evaluations had slid for three years and nothing in the content explained it; he knew the material cold and delivered it fluently. Reading the forms properly, he found the recurring line: "clearly loves lecturing." A colleague recorded one class and watched it back with him. Ninety seconds in, it was visible: the pause after each good phrase, the glance for a reaction, the sentence stretched because it was going well. He was the only person in the room enjoying his sentences, and the room had known it for years.
Speak to land the point, not to hear it land. Only one of those is audible to the room.