Pillar 3: The Path to Mastery (5 Articles)
Intelligent Experimentation: How to Find Your Unique Voice (After You’ve Learned the Rules).
Hello, everyone. This is Ubong Essien, CSP, and the Dean of the School of Eloquence.
Experimentation is the third and final leg of the learning process, but it is a step most people flip into the first. This is the difference between a master and a novice: the master engages in Intelligent Experimentation.
When you begin your journey via the experimentation route, your learning curve becomes far more steep and takes a lot longer . The informed speaker, however, experiments with precision:
- The Encasement of Education: Formal education provides the necessary encasement—the protective and guiding structure—so that within it, you can safely find your unique path. You know the rules, so you know which rules you can deliberately break for effect.
- The Search for Style: After formal learning, intelligent experimentation allows you to iterate and evolve your own unique style and approach. You are no longer blindly copying a speaker like Barack Obama; you are testing which techniques connect better with the nuances of your own context.
- The Final Refinement: Intelligent experimentation is using practice and performance to deliberately try new rhetorical devices, new movements, or new vocal tones to see what kicks and what triggers your most authentic delivery. It is the final polish on an already strong foundation.
Stop being an uninformed experimenter. Submit to education and association first, so your final phase of experimentation is intentional and effective.
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