Rhetorical Training with Katja Schleicher

Learning to talk properly? Well, one might expect that it’s just as easy as driving a bicycle because one does it daily. We as participants of the “The message, the audience and me” rhetorical workshop at the Youth Summit got disabused this day. One of the first tasks, to present ourselves and talk about what we’d expect from the workshop was a perfect example of many different varieties to talk about similar topics. All of us were there at the Youth Summit for the same reason: Saving the climate. The ways to express that to an audience in an interesting, catchy and to action leading way of all the 16 participants changed a lot throughout the day. Mrs. Schleicher told us about the key to win every audience: connect and make yourself trustworthy by not just only mindfully chose your words but also using your personal experiences and feelings. First of all we all had to learn how to break big issues like e.g. justice, equality or love down into smaller aspects. The smaller the aspects the better the audience could connect to them in their daily life. By mentioning personal stories, believes and finding similarities with the audience was one of the important tasks for us. The next main topic was to balance our body language and our words. No matter how powerful the speech itself was, if the body language told the audience something else the connection could not be made. A perfect way to understand the importance of a self-confident appearance was by listening to one another’s speeches in different languages. Even though not all of us were able to understand the words, the message itself was visible within the speaker’s body language. Our first aim, to understand one another better in the end was definitely achieved. Creating a better and more powerful connection and learning about different strategies to do so was much more fun than we expected, thanks to Mrs. Schleicher, who was able to make us all feel comfortable immediately due to her positive and straight forward way to teach. It has been a really interesting and helpful workshop for us. Now we all are well prepared for more powerful ways to start talking and continue planting.

Lea Langrock