Speech and Debate – Personable or Pretentious?

Have you ever realized how often you sell? No? I am not surprised. When I asked this question, your mind immediately flipped to a well dressed man, with perfectly quaffed hair, a briefcase, cheesy smile, and a deceptively charismatic disposition. This is not what I am referring. I am not referring to the selling of product for financial gain. What I am referring to, is, as Daniel Pink calls it, the act of moving others. Moving, in this sense is being defined as the act of persuading or convincing others…or in other words, selling, which according to Pink, means “[t]o convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.” Now let me ask the question again and see what your answer is. How often do you find yourself selling? The answer is probably a little bit higher now. This is true because we find ourselves persuading people all the time. In fact, persuading others is one of the most natural human impulses that exists. If that is true, than ie becomes very important that we know how to do it well. This leads me to the topic of this post: Speech and debate.

If you grew up in the modern American education system, than you likely have a certain image about debate kids…awkward, cringy, nerdy, unsociable, and certainly, pretentious. I want to combat this view of the standard debate kid, and show that speech and debate is one of the best ways to learn sales. having been a debate kid myself, I know first hand how charming, and charismatic a speech and debate background can make you. In fact, I will go so far as to say that the most conversational people I ever knew were kids who grew up doing speech and debate. That being said, I did notice a pattern among kids in that community, and that was that often times they did take on the persona of a greasy salesman. Often, during debates, students would become uncomfortably cocky and forcefully smiley. They would start talking to the Judge as if they knew better. While I understand the importance of using Ethos to your advantage, it never works to act better than those you are trying to persuade. While this theme did play itself out with plenty of debaters, I noticed one fascinating trend with these individuals…they didn’t win. In fact, those who won, were those who could learn how to personalize themselves, and not just preach to the judges as if it were a Sunday morning in a baptist church.

One more common thread that I noticed among those debaters who won, was that they knew how to cross examine well. In other words, they knew how to ask good questions. Daniel Pink says: “In the new world of sales, being able to ask the right questions is more valuable than producing the right answers. Unfortunately, our schools often have the opposite emphasis. They teach us how to answer, but not how to ask.” Those schools often do have debate programs that can allow you to learn how to ask questions. My recommendation, if wanting to become a great salesman is to join one of these clubs and begin asking questions that get to the heart of an issue, expose the lies that undergird it, get people to admit to themselves what they do or don’t believe or want.

To conclude, while speech and debate kids can be known for some awkward and poor attributes, the truth is that,  debating allows students to filter out poor selling strategies on account of what wins and what doesn’t. This instills an innate and subconscious selling ability in him.