Paths and Reading The Manual

The complaint was raised on a Facebook Toastmasters group about a new member who was having trouble writing a icebreaker speech because they hadn't picked a path or read the icebreaker project information. Many or most commentators sympathized with the poster, but my response was - I think - a bit more thoughtful:

It seems to me that this conversation surfaced two issues.

One is the issue of picking a path before doing an icebreaker. To some people, including myself, this means making a commitment to something big without having had a sample taste, which to us is irrational.

I appreciate that there's a tool which is supposed to help you pick a path, but investing effort into the thoughtful use of the tool and confidence in the result requires confidence in the overall process, a confidence which for some people requires having a sample first.

Not everyone feels this way, but many do. It is an attitude towards life which is often based upon experience.

In contrast, the old CC manual promised basic competency in public speaking. You do not have to make a choice, you simply execute the program, during which you develop confidence in the competence of the Toastmasters method. At that point you are in a position to make a thoughful long-term commitment by picking another manual.

The second issue is that of reading the directions.

There are people in life who enjoy reading the whole manual before starting their car, and people in life who just want to go for a drive. Both attitudes have their advantages, and people with one such attitude drive the other crazy.

As I understand the attitude of people who believe in reading the manual, if you start on page first and go to page last, you will absorb all the information you need to tell you how to execute the project. You just have to have confidence that it is worth investing your time and doing all that reading, and retain all that information in your head at the end.

As I understand the people who just want to drive the car, investing all that time is a waste. Indexes and Tables of Contents exist for a reason: you can skip ahead to the important parts, and save the extraneous persiflage for later. Rather than memorize a lot of sentences in paragraphs that were written by someone else, you build up a structure of meaning in your brain based upon your understanding of the minimum content of the manual that you need to execute the project.

I have never succeeded in changing one kind of person to the other. It is probably not a good idea to try.

It might be helpful to understand one's own orientation in this regard, and develop a method for coaching a person with another orientation. One method might be to walk through the table of contents with the person that you are coaching, and help them to understand how to use the manual (or online educational resource, if you prefer) to achieve their goal.

Of course, first you have to understand their goal (not everyone wants to be world champion of public speaking or even to add letters after their name!) but that is another topic (well, maybe not; presumably their goal is related to their choice of path, but that takes us back to the first problem.)