Study shows: debate training increases confidence

Mikey Mioduski (00:05.893)
Welcome back to Presentation Thinking, aka the Storytellers Study Club. This is Mikey Medusky, your co-host, and I'm joined by my co-host, your favorite, Molly Gagan, out west. What's going on?

Molly Geoghegan (00:19.311)
What's up, Presentation Nation? Mikey, I'm really excited to be going back to school with you today. Storyteller Study Club is going to the classroom. I got a new little notebook, highlighter. What are we, yeah, I'm excited to have a little bit of my academic hat on today and focus on a cool study that you found for us to get into for the nation.

Mikey Mioduski (00:24.88)
Yeah, that's right.

Mikey Mioduski (00:33.073)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (00:42.885)
right. We like to keep the beat on all things that might, you know, pertain to us as communicators, advancing our presentation capabilities. I was perusing Harvard Business Review, no big deal, Molly. I like I got the physical edition and I was flipping through it and I saw this interesting little little quip about debate training helps people become better leaders. Maybe that sounds obvious, but

Molly Geoghegan (00:58.693)
Peruse, yeah of course, you do that all the time. Wow, that's cool.

Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (01:13.209)
Interestingly, there's like a newer experiment that was conducted by a group. One of them is faculty at MIT Sloan. And the paper that they put out, what was it called, Molly? It's Breaking Ceilings. Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. And I don't know, it kind of caught my eye because,

Molly Geoghegan (01:37.605)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (01:41.547)
I hadn't seen this. I think we see a lot of, there's like improv workshops and certain things that leaders have to go through that may or, I'm sure it's helpful, but I wonder if there's gonna be a growing trend around debate practice and training. And it got me thinking, I think we had interviewed Rukma, who's a product marketer at Google, and she said that she was so comfortable on a stage because, and we asked her why, and she's like,

Molly Geoghegan (01:53.997)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (01:58.084)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (02:03.877)
Google.

Mikey Mioduski (02:09.845)
because my parents made me do debate club growing up. so I think this one kind of struck home with the presentation thinking world.

Molly Geoghegan (02:12.153)
Yeah, yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (02:17.389)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was looking at their definition, we'll go through some of their definitions of words, but debate is defined as an organized argument or contest of ideas in which participants discuss a topic from two opposing sides.

in many ways a presentation is its own like assertion of ideas and it's a story and it's I love the organized argument or like collection of those ideas because that is something I wrongly just asked Mikey before we pressed recording because I think you're a really great presenter and I was like didn't you do Debate Club like just very confidently but just to be clear neither Mikey or I have done Debate Club I did theater you did surfing not kidding

Mikey Mioduski (02:51.685)
Wish. Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (02:59.847)
Yeah, but I'm making my daughters go into debate club. This is for sure, like especially after reading this, some of the benefits that might come out as it relates to leadership.

Molly Geoghegan (03:03.021)
Yeah. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (03:10.757)
Totally, and this is something, I'm chronic people pleaser and I had trouble with any sort of conflict and I remember the first person at a professional workplace that I was really intimidated by and I didn't know how to communicate well because I was so used to being like.

relatively liked and like a confident extrovert and just letting my social capital kind of get me and they reference some established previous studies right like people that take social capital classes or people that are more extroverted have this sort of like more confidence in a professional sense they have some established like pieces at the front of the study so I thought that was interesting but when it comes to like actual leadership emergence as they reference like moving forward in your work and then addressing any any level of conflict or any

interpersonal stuff. I remember being so floored. Yeah, I just didn't know how to handle that at all. And I really wish I would have had some debate chops, not in like, again, this is not aggression and we'll get into that, but it's like just being able to kind of, yeah, feel confident in asking questions or, you know, asserting your own ideas or opinions, whatever it is. So I think it's definitely, and this is fresh, you know, if people are looking at leadership development initiatives for 2026, like this study.

Mikey Mioduski (04:03.974)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (04:29.191)
just came out in November of 2025 and was probably conducted, it took over a year, so probably in, you know, don't know, like 2023 to 2024. So pretty cool.

Mikey Mioduski (04:37.051)
Yeah. And it's interesting. And there's a couple of new terms in here, new to me, like phrasing, like leadership emergence, which they define as the process through which an individual becomes influential, irrelevant others in a manner that involves the implicit or explicit granting of the leadership role. there's this thing called leadership emergence, which is basically, yeah, think about

Molly Geoghegan (04:46.061)
Yeah, what's that?

Molly Geoghegan (04:51.193)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (04:57.263)
That's right.

Mikey Mioduski (05:01.979)
you know, the trajectory of someone's career and at which point did they emerge as a leader? And I think that what they are, what drove them to do an experiment is like, great, like we know that's a thing, but there's not a lot of evidence as to like, what causes a leader to emerge, you know? And so they wanted to, I think they had a theory maybe that debate, maybe they, I don't know the exposure to debate club that, you know, some of these have, it sounds like one of the,

Molly Geoghegan (05:04.602)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (05:20.056)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (05:31.815)
one of the experimenters was, you know, and facilitates like debate coaching. So obviously maybe there's a little, you know, yeah, there's an inside edge there that they've got. But yeah, I could see a reason to wonder if this might help, you know, with some leadership emergence.

Molly Geoghegan (05:36.589)
Mm-hmm. Those interests.

Molly Geoghegan (05:50.305)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and they address in the beginning, if you've been in school, you know how like, they're like, what is your research telling us that hasn't been said before? So they address at the beginning some knowledge gaps, right? That could debate training be a theory-based intervention, meaning like this could help, this could pivot someone's predisposed knowledge and feelings and just general, you know.

Mikey Mioduski (06:00.23)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (06:17.462)
professional presence and help them. is it, can we connect debate training to leadership emergence, which might be just fine for us and moving up.

kind of in the work world. And then third, there's no connections to is there any difference between gender, ethnicity, whether this person is a US citizen or not. So we're gonna hear how with it they conduct two experiments, but both of them are assigned at random and we'll kind of see if there is any connections with those factors. Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (06:51.271)
Okay. And then what's the role of the word assertiveness in this, Molly? Like, that is probably one of the key words.

Molly Geoghegan (06:58.797)
Yes, definitely. Well.

withholding my spongebob reference to the insertive versus assertive spongebob. Hopefully millennials will catch that. They define assertiveness as an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly while maintaining respect for others. So that is a little bit differentiated from direct communication, which prioritizes the message, but maybe not people's feelings. We've all been with like a really blunt direct communicator. And while that can be admirable,

Mikey Mioduski (07:02.727)
Yes.

Molly Geoghegan (07:30.567)
Sometimes it can be a little, maybe it's a little sharp, maybe that becomes the intimidating person in the office. So assertiveness is that person that's able to really express their ideas but is maintaining a lot of respect and holding the space for other people as well.

Mikey Mioduski (07:45.339)
And then importantly, they do write that it's not immutable, but assertiveness is because it's an adaptive communication style or a behavioral tendency. It can change over time. It's malleable and therefore trainable. So I think that's an important notion as well to add.

Molly Geoghegan (07:59.619)
Yep, trainable, yes trainable. So cool, yeah. So if you're a leader of a team and you're thinking about leadership development, if you have a hard time expressing yourself, read out. As Marcel Deschel would say, let's keep going. So how do they set up experiment number one, Mikey? This one is the big kahuna.

Molly Geoghegan (08:23.941)
I really wish I had a printer for this to highlight all the little bits. Do you have it printed? I'm jealous. Oh, God. I should've gone to the library.

Mikey Mioduski (08:37.925)
Yeah, of the two experiments, the first one, what they call a longitudinal, this is all within one Fortune 100 company, which had around 150,000 employees. And this, guess, a longitudinal field experiment, does that by nature just mean it's like over the span of time? OK, yeah. They've got a cool horizontal timeline visual where they kind of

Molly Geoghegan (08:47.461)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (08:57.551)
Think time. Yeah, right? Right? Like that's, yeah, that's what I would cut from that too. These researchers with their names.

Mikey Mioduski (09:07.331)
selected actually they they were allowed to like advertise out to a group of around 5,000 members in their Asian employee resource group and they advertised free opportunity for a nine-week debate training and of you know people signed up for that I Believe and then they put them through the nine-week debate training But I think how did they I you know, they they tried to make sure it was from different levels, you know

Molly Geoghegan (09:16.421)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (09:34.277)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (09:34.801)
There's sort of the level one through 10 type employees to not just pick the people who are maybe already near the top. don't know really how they accounted for that, Molly.

Molly Geoghegan (09:37.444)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (09:43.225)
Totally, I think it was assigned at random. there's, 471 people selected from this company. And a couple of factors within the company that they say are ideal for this experiment is that the job levels and titles within this company are super clear. And there is sort of a hierarchy kind of method for defining who's reporting to who. And for promotions and moving along in the company, there is a level of.

Mikey Mioduski (10:02.267)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (10:10.377)
leadership confidence and as they define it assertiveness to be like moving along aka leadership emergence. So they're like this will be perfect for us. We're in we're going into an environment that's already defining this as important in in like professional development. And so we want to like go ahead and get in there, you know, men, women, US citizens, non US citizens, important to note this first experiment is all

Mikey Mioduski (10:16.261)
All Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (10:35.735)
Asian participants though. And that's something that I think this group of researchers is really focusing on. Of course, it's always good to get like distinct, I think, data from specific groups so we don't just have like, you know, I think oftentimes research just kind of falls into like the quote unquote default white group. So it's really interesting. They introduced this concept of the bamboo ceiling, which I hadn't heard of, similar to the glass ceiling, but you know, number of studies have found that East Asians in United States tend to experience a bamboo

and leadership partly due to their low assertiveness. So we explored whether debate training would be more or less effective for East Asians. And I think that's just, yeah, important to call out as this is like focused on, this first one is focused on Asians.

Mikey Mioduski (11:17.255)
And it seems to be like one of the areas of focus for Jackson G. Liu over at Sloan, the faculty. Yeah. And so Molly, you're saying like there were 471 in the group. Did half of those go through the training or 471 did the nine week debate training and then the other, the control group did not do anything basically.

Molly Geoghegan (11:21.093)
For sure, this group, this crew.

Molly Geoghegan (11:30.031)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (11:37.176)
Mm-hmm.

Correct, yes. Over the course of an 18 month period, they measured. So they first got the group into the nine week training right at the beginning of this. So if you were assigned the debate training, boom, you're in. And then the control group, yeah, just didn't receive training and just kept going about their thing. they sent, but the control group was given these various surveys to, so at the very beginning, they get to measure themselves. They take an assertive analysis with a three item scale. on this, this is one of those things, Mikey, where, what do they call that? A Likert scale.

on a scale of one to seven, do I strongly disagree, strongly agree on these questions? One, I speak up and share my views when it is appropriate. Two, I am willing to engage in constructive interpersonal confrontations. And three, I am able to stand my ground in heated conflict. So kind of like, yeah, you're like these like, quote unquote, like these are the bigger questions. like how, and for myself, I'm like, I know I would totally answer pretty.

Mikey Mioduski (12:08.967)
Yeah

Molly Geoghegan (12:33.765)
pretty neutrally, I'm like kinda, like a little bit, like I'm willing to speak up but I'm not like standing my ground in heat conflict, I don't love it, I'd be pretty low on that, I'm like thinking about how I would rate myself. And so they give everybody this regardless of if they got the debate training or not at the beginning, so they get that differentiation, right?

And then the other little arm of this is they get a survey of their confidence and feelings at work. So, you know, they framed the survey as one about career development. They didn't mention it being related to the debate training. They didn't want to bring people into that quite yet and keep it as neutral as possible. So they're getting all these kind of establishments of like their self-evaluation of assertiveness, their confidence and feelings at work.

And then, of course, the third arm of this, they're calling these waves, I'm calling them arms, is the actual leadership advancement. So, you know, after a year of, you know...

It's a nine-week debate training. let a year go on. There's a couple of performance reviews happening specifically with this company. What was the actual leadership advancement? So 88 of the 227 treatment group participants, aka people that got the debate training, advanced in the leadership level compared to just the 59 of the 218 control group participants. So that was just 27 % versus the 38%, pretty significant, over 20 %

Mikey Mioduski (13:57.799)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (14:00.983)
difference there. So their hypothesis was supported with that. So again, you know, if you were in the debate training, were 20, I think that's yeah, 22 % more likely to be advancing in the leadership levels that were over that 18 year period. They've got a nice little here, we'll flash this up on the YouTube, but they've got a nice little longitudinal timeline, right? Year one.

Mikey Mioduski (14:15.525)
Awesome. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (14:30.511)
company review, year two. And then they took these focal measures at the end as well. So, cool to see.

Mikey Mioduski (14:37.369)
And the increase, like what's cool about the approach to measurement too, was revisiting this after another 15 months. What they found, notably, were some of those answers to the assertiveness scores did not diminish even after the 15 months. thus, it might even have a lasting impact thanks to the debate. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (14:48.037)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (14:55.855)
Yes.

Molly Geoghegan (14:59.599)
There was some longitude, yeah. Especially if these people, and again, this was in an environment.

like this Fortune 100 company where it's valued and rewarded to have these kind of characteristics. So it's that container where that already is like kind of reinforcing it. I'd be super curious to see it in like, if this is a Fortune 100 company, like what does it look like in a startup? What does it look like in a, you know, kind of like, I don't know, like a steel workers union or something, you know? Like literally though, I think it's important to kind of, that'd be really cool to start getting into, yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (15:21.744)
huh.

Mikey Mioduski (15:26.597)
Yeah

And they call out that this, they needed to go a little further with Experiment 2 because I think they acknowledged that group one self-selected. So my question would be like, well, aren't they kind of driven people anyway who would want to opt for a two hour training on Saturdays for nine weeks? So I think there might be a little selection bias in that this group is probably the overachiever type who are probably prone to.

Molly Geoghegan (15:40.89)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (15:45.88)
Mm-hmm.

I was gonna say it's pretty intense.

Molly Geoghegan (15:53.647)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (15:57.475)
Mm-hmm. Sure.

Mikey Mioduski (15:58.781)
go on to leadership advancement. But I think they tried to open that up a little further, right, with Experiment 2 by broadening and generalizing. So this was more of a randomized mix, is that right? And twice the size.

Molly Geoghegan (16:04.281)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (16:11.169)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. And yes, yes, well, don't know if it's gonna, the humanized potential contamination from the treatment group to the control group, we did not share any training slides and videos with the attendees, like, because it was on Zoom. So.

And they were also instructed to, yeah, they were instructed not to discuss any of this training content with their colleagues. So that's kind of an interesting little thing. But I definitely think for sure with each research thing, there's limitations and they do call that, have a whole section there at the end, but just important, yeah, limitation, bias maybe with like people that were like nine weeks. It was a two hour, yep.

Mikey Mioduski (16:32.685)
cool, gotcha.

Molly Geoghegan (16:50.565)
Yeah, two hour Zoom training on Saturdays for nine weeks. It's pretty intense, fair work, work stuff. So, yeah, I think so. Took place on Zoom at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Saturdays. Yeah, you can see the training syllabus. They link it, the supplemental table. yeah, so yeah, very cool to see. They've got a nice little graph at the end there, little bar graph, before getting into...

Mikey Mioduski (16:56.892)
Yeah. that was Zoom also? Okay. All right.

Mikey Mioduski (17:07.538)
Yeah. cool. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (17:19.597)
Experiment two and experiment two Mikey took yeah Twice the size of people almost a thousand people

Mikey Mioduski (17:23.378)
Yeah, 975 participants. And yeah, this sounded fun. So they have like a 60 minute Zoom with three person teams. And they assign one person, goes off and does a 30 minute debate training. One does a cultural training and one just gets free time, which is funny. And then they brought them back together and they were able to sort of measure who felt.

Molly Geoghegan (17:35.907)
Yeah, three percent team.

Molly Geoghegan (17:41.893)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (17:46.454)
Yes, yeah, exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (17:53.748)
how they would rate themselves or did others rate them on a student?

Molly Geoghegan (17:56.761)
Well, they did, yeah, both I think. was like, so after the hour, so you get the 30 minutes of like cultural training, 30 minutes of free time, or 30 minutes of true debate training. And they call that person that gets the debate, and this is randomized of course.

the focal person of the three prong groups, right? And imagine doing, I mean, this is groups of three for almost a thousand people. This is a lot of like data that they're inputting into Zoom here. So I'm sure they had the pro version of Zoom going on. But after that, they bring them in for a group activity. I thought this was so funny. This was like an established thing of like figuring out who's leading is they have them design freshmen orientation activities together. So for the next 30 years.

minutes or whatever, they would have people like and so they'd observe, they'd have people watch back these recordings without knowing any of the context and observe who is yeah the more confident, maybe the more leadership or more keen to share their ideas on designing these freshman orientation activities and yeah without a doubt the focal person, the person that had received the debate training just you know moments prior was the person that

Yeah, demonstrated the most. Quote, what are we gonna say? Leadership emergence. And yeah, so they say how the assertiveness was measured. People watched those videos and simply observed. And then participants, of course, rated themselves and their groups on the assertiveness scale. Again, those questions of like, am I likely to stand my ground in heated conflict? How likely am I to share my ideas in a group? That kind of thing. So.

Mikey Mioduski (19:13.436)
Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (19:31.069)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (19:32.547)
This really, this part in particular, Mikey, reminded me of a few of the studies we've seen on TED Talks, but particularly Amy Cuddy's study of...

Mikey Mioduski (19:38.952)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (19:44.549)
super poses, power poses, how just changing your body for a full 10 minutes before going into an interview or a quote unquote stressful meeting or something that's happening at work can increase your confidence levels. There was another one, I'm trying to remember, there was a Ted Talk where people watched videos of, I don't know if it was an interview or a stressful situation, or was something that was like, there people that watched the

Mikey Mioduski (19:46.631)
Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (20:10.534)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (20:14.503)
and people watched the confident videos and the people that watched the confidence videos were more confident. I can't remember who that was. I'll have to find that. Yeah, but interesting to just know that what you're experiencing is like, I don't know, I'm starting the day so I have a blank slate or something. But if I was in a bad mood in the afternoon and we came to do this, maybe I'd be distracted or something. I don't know. Anything can affect your...

Mikey Mioduski (20:17.394)
Yeah. I forget which one. huh. I love those. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (20:37.943)
I think maybe that's just an assertion in general, but like anything could affect what you're doing next. But if it's debate training and you're going right into a, like a sort of a leadership opportunity, yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna help you.

Mikey Mioduski (20:45.288)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (20:49.852)
Yeah. And these aren't conclusions, but these were some of their guesses as to why debate training would increase assertiveness and therefore leadership emergence. There were five reasons. First was getting up on a stage and debating publicly pushes individuals out of their comfort zone in a way that makes them actually less scared to do public speaking. So it reduces.

Molly Geoghegan (20:53.699)
Yeah, assertions.

Molly Geoghegan (21:04.857)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (21:12.857)
Yes.

Mikey Mioduski (21:18.748)
fear of public speaking first. They also then guessed it increases like confidence and persuasive communication. Sure. Teaches them to stand their ground diplomatically, which is important in a disagreement, you know, not getting bulldozed over, but also being nice, not just like bulldozing the other way, which gets people to like, like the likeability thing is also important, right. In leadership. And then because

Molly Geoghegan (21:39.831)
Yeah, yeah. No worries if not.

Molly Geoghegan (21:45.306)
Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (21:48.349)
Debates generally have a really short like strictly timed like two minutes you're on You got to be brief and clear so brevity and clarity come up and then fifth Verbal eloquence again because it has to be crisp clear and concise Reducing filler words and all that so yeah, these were just some of their the reasons they thought it would help and it seems like it did you know, like if these are some of the I don't know how much you can learn of those things in 30 minutes, but at least you get some of the

Molly Geoghegan (22:04.143)
risk.

Molly Geoghegan (22:11.769)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (22:17.082)
Mm-hmm.

Mikey Mioduski (22:18.354)
I don't know, you start hanging out in the barbershop type idea.

Molly Geoghegan (22:21.705)
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, if you're questioning again, like what you just said there, Mikey, like the reason we're talking about this as presentation thinking is like that can translate to the... I'm watching myself do it. Lack of filler words, more confidence in what you're saying and clarity. Yeah, concise clarity. That's so helpful for when you're presenting your ideas. We talk about presence on the stage a lot and we talk about just feeling...

Feeling like you can be off script, but know what you're saying, right, is such a tricky thing for speakers. And that's what separates those like professional keynoters from folks that just do it once or twice a year kind of thing. And that's where that muscle is so hard to flex, you know. And I think the big difference with this second experiment too, because it was just this 30, well, an hour long activity essentially, but they focused less on formal leadership emergence, like as in getting promoted, moving up along the

Mikey Mioduski (23:18.952)
Mm.

Molly Geoghegan (23:19.007)
because they had time, the 18 months to measure that in the first one, to informal leadership among groups. So that's the more interpersonal and perceived confidence. it's, they say, it's, quote, furthering our understanding of leadership emergence. And that's like the comms piece that we talk about a lot in B2B.

Mikey Mioduski (23:37.93)
Isn't that cool? that's like the unofficial leadership is sort of the seed to getting recognized as the leaders. Like it starts organically, grassroots, and assertiveness. I like this. They said it signals competence. You know, when someone speaks more crisply and assertively versus like kind of someone who's a little meandering, you start to wonder like, do they know what they're saying? And so yeah, that association with competence.

Molly Geoghegan (23:46.242)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (23:54.436)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (24:02.893)
Yeah. I can't, yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (24:05.742)
and assertiveness is really important. And yeah, it's like, whether you get the title now or later, it does start by kind of just winning the influence of others.

Molly Geoghegan (24:16.922)
Yeah.

Economy of how to win friends and influence others. Yeah, totally. There's a reason that book was so trendy, right? Economy of language is something that people use in the writing world where it's it's really respected not necessarily end all be all but definitely in copywriting as well. Like the longer your subject line the less likely people are gonna click your email the longer your amblance and I am such a sucker for rambling sentences and I think editing was one of the most important skills in writing and getting stuff just

Mikey Mioduski (24:20.04)
Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (24:26.782)
Mm.

Molly Geoghegan (24:47.335)
as concise and crisp, clear. I loved your three Cs there. Let's bring those back.

Mikey Mioduski (24:52.315)
And Terry Zuplatt, author of Say It Well, who's Obama's speechwriter for a long time, he'd say every speech, Obama's like, great, now make it shorter, like 10 % shorter, 15 % shorter. So it can always be trimmed, right?

Molly Geoghegan (24:55.269)
Terry.

Molly Geoghegan (25:08.013)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yes.

Yes, I think Emma Stratton, make it punchy. This relates to so many of the greats, quote unquote, the books we've read. She's like, yeah, write your idea, cut it in half. What's the one word, what's the two words that your message is actually trying to convey? So again, it just kind of, it all speaks into that same umbrella. And I suppose, know, Mikey and I, two certified people pleasers, could assign ourselves a little, we've wanted to sign up for Toastmasters for a while, right? Presentation Nation, so maybe we-

Mikey Mioduski (25:16.775)
Yeah

Molly Geoghegan (25:43.063)
We get a little debate training and we let you guys know how it goes. We've done a master class. And they do say at the end, like, what does this mean for the world? What are we offering this research for? And they quote, like, leadership development program market had an estimated value of 81.

Mikey Mioduski (25:46.729)
Totally.

Molly Geoghegan (26:01.635)
billion dollars in 2024 and was predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10 percent, 10.3 percent from 2024 to 2034. So over the next, it's 2026. We're two years into that. Consider debate training as like part of, you know, part of your, part of your leadership development, you know? Like it's can be a stale, a stale space as people, I'm sure, especially in a hybrid world, you know? So.

Mikey Mioduski (26:02.889)
Okay.

Mikey Mioduski (26:20.709)
huh. Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (26:27.611)
I mean, yeah. And if you made it out of high school, you maybe took speech class. I did take debate class. Like it was like speech too, you know? But damn, I really regret not having done a debate club. Like Andrew Yang and some other presidents that were called out in the article. Proof. Yeah. Yeah, but that's a big market. And totally, if you know of a good debate training program, please throw it our way. I'd love to look into it.

Molly Geoghegan (26:36.974)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (26:40.974)
Me too.

Molly Geoghegan (26:45.253)
Yes, they do. Yeah, totally.

Molly Geoghegan (26:54.841)
Yeah, definitely. think, yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (26:55.795)
So their conclusion, Molly, was like, did they prove their hypothesis? I believe across an 18 month longitudinal field experiment and a Zoom experiment, individuals who received debate training had higher leadership emergence as a function of increased assertiveness. Boom, they did it.

Molly Geoghegan (27:00.534)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Molly Geoghegan (27:05.497)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (27:11.769)
Yeah, very cool. Boom. Yeah, totally. And they've got like, yeah, this is really cool. They get into that general discussion and they're like, with all of their hypotheses, like, yeah, this did what we thought even more so with the longitude like holding out over time, having those effects like take place. I'd be curious to reevaluate the almost a thousand individuals from experiment two who just got the quickie 30 minute debate training and like how that has affected them over time to revisit.

They maybe get a little more funding for that, I suppose. it was very cool to see. And then notably, the other thing they were trying to figure out, is there any difference between men, women, ethnicity? In Experiment 2, they do open up the ethnicity. It's not just Asian folks in Experiment 2. And there's no significant difference at all between men, women. I don't think they measure age. I was curious about age. Just because I think generationally, this is different. That'd be a hypothesis I have.

with how people communicate generationally. And Gen Z, like not having as much in person, like literally like exposure to like socializing. I don't know, that's just an assertion, but it's an assumption. But yeah, cool to see, yeah. We contribute to the blah, blah. I thought I had my good quote, sorry, but I don't.

Mikey Mioduski (28:24.009)
Ha ha.

Molly Geoghegan (28:35.311)
But yeah, great to go back to school. Yeah, I think.

Mikey Mioduski (28:36.595)
For presentation thinkers, do you have experience with debate? Is this something that a leader might look into? think we'll try to dig up some of the resources for any trainings out there that we know of. I would love to bring one into story camp. if you're, again, let's try to see how we can embrace some of this debate skillage. Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (28:50.883)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (28:55.107)
Yes. Ooh. Yeah, like a live interaction and story camp with this. Yeah, totally. And I think this is an emerging space too. They say, here's the quote I was like, this present research is among the first to provide experimental evidence for leadership emergence, intervention. So overall, our research suggests that debate training can increase individuals leadership emergence in US organizations. Important to note that.

Mikey Mioduski (29:07.357)
I know.

Mikey Mioduski (29:22.825)
yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (29:23.397)
They do say assertiveness value might not be valued everywhere in every country by fostering their assertiveness. Boom, and then they've got over 100 references and that was crazy. So that's the end.

Mikey Mioduski (29:33.319)
Yeah. Well, it's fun food for thought. Again, you can just kind of Google breaking ceilings, debate training.

Molly Geoghegan (29:41.889)
Mm-hmm. Well, by, Jackson Liu, Michelle Zhao, Hu Lao, and Lu Doris Zhang. Thanks to this crew. It definitely seems like that's their niche, right? Researchers also have a niche. Important to note, yeah. But Mikey and I are going, we're going back to school. It was fun to, fun to revisit. Or we had to add some academia to this, to this space.

Mikey Mioduski (29:44.647)
No. Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (29:49.459)
Yeah, shout out. Some smart peeps.

Mikey Mioduski (29:55.889)
yeah.

Indeed. Yeah, yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (30:08.327)
Yeah, really glad I have a black and white printer. made it easy for highlighting.

Molly Geoghegan (30:12.163)
Love that. And you're getting the Harvard Business Review in print. Okay, let's throw that in the spice cabinet. Subscribe to the HBR. Go ahead. Shout out to our sponsor. That would be such a good one. HBR. And speaking of like just in general, soft skills pay bills, Mikey. Something to plug in the spice cabinet.

Mikey Mioduski (30:16.093)
Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (30:20.327)
Yeah, shout out to our sponsor, HBR. Pretty cool.

Mikey Mioduski (30:30.311)
Yeah. Well, Molly, Story Camp, as you know, I'm a co-founder. I'm running it more actively now. And we have some exciting stuff. We have our kind of flagship event. Our Story Camp camp is slotted for November 3rd through 6th. It's going be Boulder, Colorado at the historic Chautauqua Grounds. The coolest part, Molly, well...

Molly Geoghegan (30:37.989)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (30:52.355)
It's so beautiful.

Mikey Mioduski (30:56.169)
the people who are coming. We have one really cool speaker lined up so far. More to come. Yeah. We're going to save it. then and then but like I don't know if you've been to the Chautauqua, Molly, but there's all those individual cabins. So it'll be we're leaning into the camp side of this. Yeah. Where you like attendees will get to sleep in their own cute little cabin and we'll have a nice central gathering area where we'll come together and learn and hang out. So.

Molly Geoghegan (31:00.837)
don't even know, I don't even know you guys. Presentation Nation, could, yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (31:13.785)
It's camp. It's really camp, yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (31:20.568)
Mm-hmm.

Molly Geoghegan (31:25.379)
Yes, yes. I can vouch. Yeah, I can vouch I've stayed there. Super comfortable and cute. And you can walk to everybody's little cabin and there's like, yeah, the common space. There's a beautiful park. And then of course you're surrounded on the West side by boulders, stunning flat irons, rock formation. Yeah. And if you aren't familiar, mean, Terry Zuplatt, former Obama speechwriter, Montana Von Fliss, Amy Cuddy, we're all at the previous story camp, our inaugural one out in parks of Utah last year.

Mikey Mioduski (31:25.769)
It's going be fun. November, Boulder.

Mikey Mioduski (31:30.717)
Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (31:38.868)
my gosh. Yeah, right there, right in the backyard. Immense hiking.

Mikey Mioduski (31:51.933)
Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (31:54.647)
So this is like, this is the real deal you guys. Second annual, let's go. November 3rd through 6th. We will link that in the spice cabinet. I'll link the study. And I mean, if these guys, these researchers were to have some kind of walkout song, Mikey, have you given it any thought?

Mikey Mioduski (31:58.793)
Cool. Yeah. StoryCamp.com.

Mikey Mioduski (32:11.451)
No? Have you? Yeah.

Molly Geoghegan (32:13.251)
No, I'm thinking in real time, let think. Confidence.

you

I have one, my obvious one. always go in for the, when I can't think of it. Demi Lovato has the Confident song. What's wrong with being, what's wrong with being confident? Do do do, you know? It's good. That's what I think, that's what I'm going with. So we'll see if they like it, yeah. But I'll have to find their, where are, they're from MIT. We should have said.

Mikey Mioduski (32:39.261)
Yeah, that would actually be a really good one.

done. Sign it. Yeah.

Mikey Mioduski (32:50.729)
Could you imagine coming to the Journal of Applied Psychology conference and they're rolling up to that? Yeah. I could see it. That would be great.

Molly Geoghegan (32:55.237)
and blasting the Demi Lovato pie. That's what I'm saying. I think that would actually be fun. And they're from MIT, so I should have given credit. The school probably really wants to take credit for some of these guys too. So I'll find their educational email and let them know. But thanks for joining Presentation Nation. It's always fun to go on a back to school deep dive here. Mike, let us know what you think.

Mikey Mioduski (33:10.131)
that.

Mikey Mioduski (33:17.395)
Yeah, dig into that debate stuff. Good luck with your presentations and communications. And Molly, yeah, go ahead.

Molly Geoghegan (33:25.923)
And if you've, yeah, if you've got an interesting study to pass our way that we could equally get nerdy and excited about, send it our way, molly at GhostRange.com. I'm always open.

Mikey Mioduski (33:38.889)
All right, we'll talk to you next week. Until then, keep on pitching.

Molly Geoghegan (33:42.981)
key bone pigeon.