By Allison Musante, Staff Writer
PLAINSBORO Becoming an effective speaker and adept listener takes practice, says speech coach Eileen Sinett. It’s why she is launching a new program at the Public Library with a three-fold goal: to develop public speaking, community engagement and cross-cultural conversation.
Ms. Sinett is the founder of DEPTH Delivering Exceptional Presentations that Heal a trained group of public speakers who will share personal stories with an audience open to the public. With 30 years of experience as a speech coach for individuals and companies, Ms. Sinett is bringing her expertise to the table to facilitate discussion among English-learners and English-speaking mentors.
”Many native English speakers find it frustrating to listen to someone who has a heavy accent,” she said. “There’s a tendency to cut someone off or being unable to interrupt to say, ‘Wait, I didn’t understand that,’ on both sides. Everyone should know how to listen to people from other cultures, learn the etiquette of how to interrupt or clarify, how to express themselves and how to repair communication when they don’t go through.”
Beginning Thursday, sessions will be held from 7 to 8:25 p.m. every second Thursday of the month at the library on Van Doren Street. Sessions will begin with a 15-minute story from a speaker or two one of Ms. Sinett’s clients and then the audience will break out into small groups to share thoughts and reactions. Anyone interested in communication, storytelling and diversity is welcome to join the audience, she said.
The first speaker will be Jeff Savlov, a family therapist and principal of Blum and Savlov LLP. She said future speakers may include someone who has overcome a near-death experience and someone who has overcome a handicap. The theme will be overcoming adversity and managing diversity by discussing issues that hit home, she said, such as health, education and family.
”They will be stories of human interest that can appeal to anybody,” she said. “I’ve seen it happen in my ESL classes between people of Spanish, Indian, Chinese cultures and so on, when I ask, for example, what was it like to take gym class in grade school? Everyone has their own experience and they compare the differences of say, what the uniforms looked like.”
The outcome, she said, is win-win.
”ESL speakers often don’t make a lot of opportunities to engage with native speakers,” she said. “People who speak English as a first language need to learn how to listen differently and ESL people need to risk more expression. We need to strike a better balance and the result is more dialogue, more ease and more knowledge.”

