Speaker Courage

Wouldn’t it be awesome to feel completely free and at ease in front of any audience? There’s actually a trick to it, and it’s best illustrated by the protagonist of our story – Robin Williams.

Hopefully, you know who Robin Williams is: many would argue that he was the finest improvisational performer of the late 20th and early 21st century. During interviews, he was a beast – I distinctly remember watching him on covering the Tour de France during Lance Armstrong’s infamous tour win run, and his co-hosts quite frankly had no control of the telecast. Mr. Williams was making quips a mile per minute, and his poor colleagues never stood a chance. He was a genius of improvisation who lived fully and totally in the moment as soon as the cameras were rolling, or an audience appeared before him.

But there was another Robin Williams – the guy who showed up 8 hours before his comedy shows to work the ticket booths, where he would warm up his instrument – kind of like how professional athletes warm up, but for the actor – making wise cracks while folks picked up their tickets to see him! This Robin Williams planned every inch of his stand-up routine. He knew every word he would say, along with where and when on stage he would say it. And then, then he threw all that away and walked out on stage and lived fully in the moment, entertaining thousands in the process.

Most of us don’t have 8 hours to warm up our instruments (or we may not even know how to do so!), as we’re not professional performers, but you can still learn every word of your next presentation or speech. Doing this will free you in front of the audience in ways you never could have imagined. But the trick is that you have to REALLY know it – like with your entire body and being. What does that mean, you ask? Well, it means you should be able to recite it, verbatim, while showering, driving, walking your dog, taking out the trash, and so on. It should flow from you like water. It takes a little work, but all that effort pays serious dividends, preparing you for anything. So, what about letting it all go? Well, there’s a trick to that too…

How in the world are you supposed to “let it all go”? What does that even mean? Well, it means living in the moment with the audience. Ok… Ok… I keep throwing actor parlance at you.

Have you ever been so fully focused on an activity that your brain stopped talking and you just responded, as if by instinct? Maybe you haven’t experienced it, but if you watch sports, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It can happen in any arena of life. Some disciplines of acting have learned to fully harness this innate human quality. Improvisers on stage do it all the time, and their principles can be applied to giving a speech as well.

It starts with embodying the text. That means knowing your speech or presentation so well that you can recite it while driving to the store or walking your dog. That makes the text a part of you, something you employ as needed on a whim, not something you fear will disappear on you at any moment. It takes work and effort – it literally sucks. But you have to do it.

Next, the text must be married to the action. Meaning, if it’s a presentation, then you need to know every click, every move of the mouse, every inch of what needs to be portrayed – forwards, backwards, inside and out. Just like the text, this has to live inside you, so you can smoothly interface with the technology or medium you’re using, adapting it to the needs of your living presentation.

From there, it’s about trusting yourself and learning to listen with your entire body. The audience is alive and must be heeded as well, but doing so without first mastering the text makes the task much more difficult. You will fall into a state that actors call, “Being in your head,” where your internal monologue overrides your preparation.

A baseball player making a diving catch in left field to win the game, or the running back who hurdles an on-coming defender: they are only able to perform such feats because they are fully present in the moment, fully present in the reality of what is occurring around them and thus able to perform superhuman feats. You, too, can tap into your subconscious this way, and it will allow you to do amazing things.

Ever seen a dynamic speaker who seemed completely on point with every word? If you’ve seen a professional play, chances are you’ve been exposed to this before, though you may not have been cognizant of the underlying mechanism – and why would you be? You’re not an actor!

It’s real simple: day 1 in scene study school, they teach that you need an action. What are you trying to accomplish in that moment, and why? What’s your underlying motivation behind wanting to accomplish that action, and why? What is unique about the circumstances or character that inform your responses, actions, and motivations? These are just some of the questions that an actor needs to ask to embody that dynamism.

Luckily, you’re not an actor, and you’re not trying to rally the troops “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Rather, you have a speech or presentation that you’re trying to get through – but the same rules apply. You still have to understand each slide and each moment of your speech or presentation. You need to interrogate the underlying value of each word, each phrase, each slide, and understand the ways that they enhance your message.

Remember, it is your obligation to capture the attention of the audience! They do not owe you that attention, so you must capture them and be so compelling that they won’t want to drop their focus on you. Likewise, you can drive them to their cell phones if you aren’t careful. If you apply this approach rigorously, you will remove all the fluff, and keeping the audience’s attention will come naturally.

Look – I’ve never been trained in giving presentations or speeches. I didn’t go to school for it. When I got my graduate degree, we had a speech and writing class, but I paid no attention during the speech portion of the class and did what I wanted. I ignored lectures, didn’t take notes – the class taught me nothing regarding public speaking. Still, the professor did give out one “perfect” score – to me.

Am I a natural?

Nope.

I’ve spent 20 years studying acting. Beyond scene study work, I’ve delved deeply into a form of acting called Meisner. Meisner was created by Sanford Meisner, a 20^th-century American acting teacher. Meisner was a contemporary of Lee Strasburg and Stella Adler, who each developed branches of the American form of Method Acting. Meisner went a different direction with his approach, putting the focus on external stimuli over internal processes. I could get on my soapbox here about my dislike of method acting, but I’ll spare you and cut to the chase – Meisner is all about responding truthfully and authentically to the reality of the situation in front of you. The work starts improvisationally, and as you develop your skills, text is integrated.

The short and sweet of it is that I trained as an actor for a long time, and I will work with you not as a public speaker or speechwriter but as an actor. The actor’s job is to communicate the deeper meaning of the text to the audience, and so it is for the presenter. The toolkit is the same – just be thankful you don’t have to communicate Shakespeare!

And don’t worry – I’m not going to have you doing tons of acting exercises, either. I’ll just be applying the same methodology used to learn and explore a script to your speech process!