5 Essential Life Skills You’ll Learn From Debate

Who said debate club kids were nerds? Debate kids probably.

The first skill on this list is the most obvious one. Debate is a sport that pushes you to speak. The average person has very few chances in their lives to practice public speaking due to a general lack of opportunity. Research on children and public speaking shows us that the social awareness of children who are exposed to public speaking more often ranks higher than the children who aren’t. 

The basis of any communication, in general, relies on public speaking skills, and anyone ranging from prospective politicians to soccer coaches to fast-food workers requires this skill in day-to-day life.

Good public speaking is required for any position of power in society and giving kids the opportunity to build up this skill sets them up for the ability to become a leader.

The way debate strengthens this skill is by encouraging students to defend their position in a real-time setting, requiring them to sound confident and speak in a persuasive tone.

The second essential life skill is confidence. Much like the public speaking skills we just discussed, confidence is a gained trait for many people rather than one that they are born with. 

Debate has a special way of automatically validating debaters’ voices by giving them equal opportunity to speak and express their ideas. This perceived validation by judges, teammates, and coaches slowly builds up the self-confidence of debaters and kids will find themselves asking “if I could debate about how to decrease bullying, why can’t I do a presentation about it at school?”.

In my personal experience, I found that practicing speaking in a controlled environment such as debate classes or debate clubs surrounded by supportive friends and classmates makes it comfortable to practice your skills and try new things.

Rhetoric is the cornerstone of persuasion. Persuasion is one of the most overlooked essential skills. Research shows that teaching critical thinking boosts inventiveness and possibly leads to an increase in IQ.

Critical thinking is necessary to be persuasive since you need to make sense for people to believe anything you claim. Anything from writing a persuasive essay for school to writing your thesis or even asking for a raise at work. 

Rhetoric is an essential skill for children and adults alike to become team leaders. Debate is a sport of persuasion and there’s always a misnomer that debate is simply just whoever’s opinion or argument is better wins. This is not necessarily the case, when you take a look at high school and postsecondary level debate, the most important voter when it comes to debate is persuasion; how well an argument is presented and explained.

Think of it like this: you can tell someone a fact but without citing the sources, the facts can be characterized in a different way and not be as persuasive as you’d hope. But if you can explain every part of why the fact is the way it is, explaining the intricacies and why logically something works, it’ll sway most people.

Teamwork makes the dream work. I know it’s an overused statement but without a functioning relationship with your teammate, even the best debaters are unable to perform well.

When you create a real bond with your debate partner, sometimes you don’t even need to communicate with them verbally. You just know and trust your partner to do what you need them to do. 

The reason teamwork is so useful in day-to-day life is obvious. The lone wolf lifestyle may be enticing to some, but it is crucial to building up relationships with everyone around you including your family, friends, coworkers, and even strangers.

One hidden gem of being in the debate circuit is also that you make plenty of friends who all strive to make a change in the world. Many of my best friends I met at debate tournaments and those friendships run deep.

While debating at tournaments may be stress-inducing, the debate community is one of the safest places. Judgment is virtually non-existent as almost every tournament has an equity team who makes sure that every debater, judge, and observer’s rights are protected as well as ensuring a safe space for people of every background. 

Even in debate classes, one of the goals for coaches is to build up confidence so that debaters can see pressure or stress as something they can overcome rather than an insurmountable wall.

Stress is unavoidable in life no matter what your path is. Learning to manage stress through the means that you already have self-control, productivity, and self-assurance is prevalent through any debate experience.

The times that I felt like I was pushing myself the most were the times right before a debate round where I felt anxious but when I started associating that anxiety with excitement to debate again, I felt much better about every other stressful situation in my own day to day.

All in all, high school debate made me who I am today. I’m much more self-assured and much more confident in who I am and want to be even if I am a bit more argumentative now.

Giving yourself or your child the essential life skills to become a leader is incredibly important in the exceedingly competitive world. If anything in this article was enticing to you, you can check out our Youtube channel for a demo class video or learn more about our debate program.