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The day after Katie Weatherston arrived back in Ottawa from competing at this year's women's world hockey championship in China, the 26-year-old Olympian began what might prove to be the most important training program of her career.
It had nothing to do with slap shots or stick handling. Instead, Ms. Weatherston found herself surrounded by entrepreneurs and aspiring
CEOs, all of whom were looking to punch up their podium skills at a public speaking course offered by Dale Carnegie Training, an international business training company.
"Our speaking coach said a lot of people are actually more afraid of public speaking than dying," says Ms. Weatherston, who took home a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in 2006.
Gold medalist Katie Weatherston credits a public speaking course for improving the speaking and business skills she uses at her hockey school. (Brigitte Bouvier for The Globe and Mail)
Canada's national team athletes are expected to inspire both on and off the field, and are often invited to speak to schools and corporations across the country. But just because they are naturally gifted athletes does not mean they are naturally gifted public speakers.
So it is no surprise, says
Jasmine Northcott, executive director of AthletesCAN, the association of Canada's national team athletes, that the
governing bodies of amateur athletics in Canada place
such a high emphasis on
providing athletes with public speaking training.
"Athletes, especially when you win a gold medal, you're expected to speak and share your story," Ms. Weatherston says. "The first thing I had to do was go back to my high school and speak right after the Olympics. That's kind of expected of you, whether you like it or not."
To help athletes give inspiring speeches, and to further their careers after sport, AthletesCAN has been providing scholarships to Dale Carnegie's "effective communications and human relations" course since 1995.
"When an athlete is going through their competitive career, they may not be able to get the same work experience that their peer group may be getting, so they have to look at how they can build their skills in the environment in which they are, and certainly public speaking is an excellent skill that would serve anybody well," Ms. Northcott says.
While the emphasis of the course is on learning to become an effective communicator, the 12-week program also teaches students principles of how to deal with and lead people, skills that will serve them well when they retire from sports.
"We still use speaking a lot as a tool to engage people and, yes, people do get better at it. But our focus is more about how to succeed, how to work as a team, how to succeed in business, how to get people working with you and how to have the confidence to go after what you want," says Kevin Crone, CEO of the Dale Carnegie Business Group. "We help these athletes to see a bigger picture of the future and where they're going."
When Newfoundland's Brad Gushue won a gold medal in curling at the 2006 Winter Olympics, he was flooded with public speaking invitations, the majority of them paid engagements. The better a speaker an athlete is, he says, the more likely they are to continue to receive those invitations.
"There's probably about a year-long window after the Olympics where you're going to get speaking opportunities," Mr. Gushue says. "I think having the Dale Carnegie course allows athletes to open that window for a longer period of time."
The 28-year-old took the course last fall to tweak his public speaking skills.
"I do a lot of public speaking and a lot of corporate events, and just wanted to find a way to be a little bit more comfortable when I'm up in front of people and a bit more confident when I speak," he says.
It has also helped in his other career. For the past two years, Mr. Gushue has worked as a partner in a small financial services company.
"When you're meeting with clients and meeting with other people and doing seminars, the public speaking becomes very big. It definitely helps in business," he says.
Ms. Weatherston, who for the past four years has run the Superior Edge Hockey School, credits the course for improving her business skills, especially when it comes to dealing with clients.
Ontario's Minister of Tourism, Peter Fonseca, certainly knows the benefits of solid public speaking skills. A former marathon runner, Mr. Fonseca represented Canada at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Ga.
Prior to the games, he took the Dale Carnegie course through AthletesCAN. After he hung up his running shoes, he put his public speaking skills to work as a consultant and, following that, as a politician.
"It really helped," Mr. Fonseca says. "I think the best thing about the public speaking course was that it helped in terms of giving you more self-confidence to be able to do it."
Some athletes are looking for that self-confidence as they approach the biggest stage in sport.
Brittany Laverdure, a 26-year-old wrestler in Calgary, will be heading to China for this year's Olympics. The last thing athletes want to worry about is not knowing what to say when approached by reporters hungry for a comment.
When a microphone is thrown in an athlete's face during the Olympic Games, "you want to be confident in your speaking abilities," Ms. Laverdure says. "You don't want to end up going, 'Ummm, yeah, uhhhh.' "
