The late, great, Michael Warren Powell gave me an enormous gift during an audition. A mentor, teacher, and dear friend, he reminded me to make the positive choice. In theater this means that one’s character must have hope, that no matter how futile the given circumstances, no matter how colossal the obstacles, our character believes they will get what they want, that their intention is attainable. If we give up hope, there is no play, no action, no story.

This is true in life, as well. In order to continue, to persevere, we must believe our goals are attainable, that our dreams are possible. Tillich called this, “the courage to be.”

The day MWP gave me this gift, I was auditioning…Read on.

Remember the urban legend of the mother picking up a VW Bug to save her baby?  That act is pure intention with immediacy and high stakes.  That mother’s action, thought, behavior, voice, and words are completely aligned.  Her Big Why, her overarching purpose, may be to raise an adult that will contribute to the world.  Her immediate intention is simply to save her child.   She is not thinking about herself, her own safety, what she might look like, or what others might think of her.  Her focus on wholly on the child, the other. She takes immediate action in a matter of life and death.  The highest stakes possible.

The above scenario has elements that we can translate into helpful tools for any speaker: role (mother), given circumstances (child under car), purpose (to care for this vulnerable human), intention…Read on.

When we set a clear intention for a talk, we infuse our words with purpose and clarity. Another technique that theater folks love to help crystalize our focus is immediacy: why is this topic vital right now, in this exact moment? Why can’t this wait one more second? In public speaking, immediacy can transform our message from being simply engaging to being utterly captivating. Immediacy brings a sense of vitality to the moment. Immediacy is what draws in an audience, what makes them lean forward and stay present. It’s a spark, an urgency that says, “This is important, and it’s important right now.”

Whenever we speak in public we ask ourselves…Read on.

When I asked my daughter about her Fall classes, she said she was excited about them all! When I asked for more particulars, she explained that one teaching fellow asked the students to, “Please come into class confused. The reading is hard, the language archaic, but just do it anyway and come to class confused.” I so love that! It reminds us that our intention for the classroom is “to learn,” rather than “to impress,” “to sound smart,” “to get a good grade.”

I worked with a woman who was top of her field, but found herself suddenly unable to speak in a continuing education class of her peers. She came to me to find her voice. She said...Read on.

In this series about rehearsal using the five senses, we’ve talked about using sound, taste, sight, and touch. This last rehearsal prompt, invites us to use the sense of smell in rehearsal. There is a wonderful saying in the movement practice, the Nia Technique: “smell the moment.” As speakers, in that liminal space just after we’ve rehearsed and warmed-up and just before we open our mouths to speak, we take a breath and smell the moment. We look into the audience, read the room, take in the faces, the space, this specific, particular, unique, exact moment. This is perhaps my favorite moment, when we are ready, alert, and waiting, peeking over the precipice, through the curtain, our hand on the door before turning the knob. I remember waiting back stage in that liminal space. I was listening to the audience, their chatter and laughter, the programs murmuring, the chairs scraping, the ushers ushering, the expectation and delight. One of the actors asked if I was nervous. I said...Read on.

It may sound counter-intuitive, but as communicators, we must go slow to go fast. As a speed-speaker, I can attest that when I speak quickly, my audience is lost. When I breathe and scaffold my communication, the audience comes with me. Many things contribute to my hare-like tempo: anxiety, an internal sense that I should hurry up to make space for others, and the disconnection from my audience that results. Admittedly Type A, I like to check things off of my list, get this conversation or talk over with. Talking without stopping is also correlated with domineering—not leaving space for others, controlling the interaction. But of course, if the purpose of communication is to have an impact, to create relationship, to share, then simply skipping through those precious moments without connection is a waste of everyone’s time. We leave our audience baffled and bored. So how do we slow down?…Read on.

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” — Gustave Flaubert. I love this quote from Flaubert. It makes me think of the small, repetitive movements of a farmer moving along a row of earth, planting seed after seed after seed, orderly and regular. The farmer knows that this calm and mundane routine will coax wild roots to descend and twisting tendrils to wind their way skyward.

All of the work we do together—in blog posts, trainings, coaching sessions, key notes—has the same message: prepare, become fluent, then play.

In the workplace, this means…Read on.

One very strange feature of virtual communication, aside from needing to look into a camera lens in order to have “eye contact,” is that we are asked to look at OURSELVES while interacting with others! It’s distracting, to say the least. Unnerving! And, did I say, distracting? Whether working with my clients on in-person or virtual communication, we use skills and techniques that consciously put our focus on the other, on the audience. So having our own visage mirror us, woo us, pull our focus, tease and antagonize us, adds a challenge to virtual communication. It’s hard to be present. And can make us feel anxious. So what can we do about the distraction of ourselves on our computer screens? Read on…

A friend recently said she was having a hard time fitting into the corporate world after leaving academia. She said she was “trying to be more professional.” When I asked what that meant, she said, “Somber. Serious.” She had been on a panel and found herself laughing, challenging, and enjoying the repartee. Reports are that she thrilled the audience with her wit and brazen candor. When we force ourselves into any external idea of how we should be, we end up with a two-dimensional, rigid, stock character. Rather than forcing ourselves into an idea of what a “professional” looks like (or sounds like!), I work with my clients to allow a free and alive presence, that is also appropriate to the situation. Many of us fear that if we are authentic, we will be inappropriate. Not so. As long as we are clear about…Read on.

This is just ridiculous. Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with this. Ludicrous. Is the point to dehumanize our audience so we feel superior? To humiliate them? To infantilize them? Make them less threatening? Why do we think of the audience as an adversary to begin with? And how indeed do we hope to force ourselves to see something that isn’t even there? Should we ignore the dressed audience? Look away or over their heads? Squint? Sheesh. What a waste of everyone’s time to focus energy on what isn’t there when we could be falling in love with our audience, including our audience, giving a gift to our audience, engaging, embracing, dancing, playing with our audience. If we are scared, as most of us are, of speaking in public, there are many, many wonderful skills and techniques we can use to help us enjoy our time in the limelight. The basics are…Read on.

There is a myth out there that public speakers must be WILDLY ENERGETIC!!!! Like Tony Robbins. ALL THE TIME! Some people caffeinate, put on loud music, jump up and down, frantically pump themselves up for every talk. They will actually say, “I need to be anxious to have a good performance,” and worry if they are calm. I promise you, a caffeinated, anxious, intensely pumped up performance is not a great performance. What distinguishes a talk or performance is…Read on.

Is this how we want to leave our audience? Propped up and stifling a yawn? It’s true, there’s no stated rule that says talks must be boring (unlike the oft touted rule that talks need to “be redundant”). But in many cases my clients feel an unspoken expectation to be boring. They believe that lectures should be full of jargon. They believe that keynotes should be long, “high-level” (unspecific), and demand nothing from the audience because we all know that keynotes come after lunch and people need to digest. In recent weeks I have heard:…Read on.

Have you ever been in a meeting or presentation where the topic of concern is derailed by just one question or issue? This is what I refer to as a “Rabbit Hole;” we are sucked into the vortex and the work that we hoped to accomplish vanishes along with our patience. Many of my clients experience Rabbit Holes when presenting to audiences with a variety of differing interests, often doused in strong emotions, and perhaps lacking the technical expertise of the presenters. To be clear, Rabbit Holes are part of every important negotiation! And the points that people bring up are valid…they just can’t necessarily be addressed and resolved in the allotted time. And some issues are simply not solvable. Here is an example of a meeting filled with potential Rabbit Holes…

“Never work with animals or children.” —W.C. Fields. Last week we talked about focusing our attention on the speaker while sharing the stage. Wise performers have always known that they will easily be upstaged by both children and animals. Why? Because children and animals do not know that they are performing. They are simply being. And that simple state—guileless, egoless, effortless and unexpected—is riveting. How can we be the cat? How can we have that ease and presence? Read on…

The great Russian director, Stanislavski, created the modern acting methodology while working with playwright Anton Chekhov. The two were interested in creating theater that was human, rather than performative. The Group Theater brought his method to the US, which quickly gave birth to the many schools of method acting, all of them still preeminent today: Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen’s HB Studio, and Sanford Meisner, to name a few. Aside from giving us the “objective” or what I refer to as the Intention, Stanislavski gave us the “beat.” Lore has it that he was saying, “this little bit and then this little bit,” but to an American ear is sounded like… Read on.

In grad school at Smith School for Social Work, we spent time thinking deeply about our own experiences, beliefs, histories, psyches, so that we would not project them onto our clinical clients, but would own them and see our clients more clearly. By knowing ourselves, we can better help others. Good boundaries come from knowing what is our issue and what is our client’s issue. We can gain clarity about our own intentions and boundaries by asking the simple question…Read on.

Last week I wrote about high and low intentions for those in public service. For those of us who are not in public service, our intentions may not be so aspirational, but the rule of thumb still guides us: intentions that are FOR others are high intentions; those intentions that boomerang the attention back onto ourselves are low intentions. Imagine we are interviewing for a job. Or hoping to make a sale. It might be tempting to choose a LOW intention: To get the job; To make the sale; To make them like me; To impress…Read on.

I often have clients who come to me wanting to control their emotions.

“I want to be confident.”

“I do not want to be anxious.”

“I want to be strong.”

“I don’t want to cry.”

“I want to be relaxed.”

“I don’t want to shake with fear.”

“I want to be vulnerable, but not too vulnerable.”

I’ve even had a speaker say they wanted to make themselves cry during their talk. At a certain moment! Orchestrated emotion! Watching someone “try to cry” is really painful.

I get it, we are all afraid of either being hijacked by our emotions or we want to project a certain emotion or state of being.

This, like worrying about what others think of us, is something we can let go. Trust me.

There are two reasons it is a fool’s errand to try to control our emotions…read on.

I’m going to say two things that may seem completely contradictory:

1) The audience, the other, in any communication, is our raison d’etre, our only reason for communicating.

2) Wondering if the audience likes us, is a red-herring; whether they like us or not is irrelevant. We are not there to be liked. We are there to communicate something and that thing, is what is important.

A few years ago I found myself standing just outside the spotlight, costumed, made up, warmed up, and about to walk on stage for the first time in over 20 years. My thoughts were something like:

“Shit. Shit. The dress is riding up my butt. I don’t remember my first line! Is that the critic sitting there? What if they hate me? What if I’m awful?”

Then I remembered…Read on…

We’ve been digging into John Gottman’s work, specifically what he calls The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or the four behaviors most correlated with toxic relationships.

Last week we looked at Defensiveness.

This week we look at Criticism. Criticism is a global attack, often using words like, “never,” “always,” and often invites defensiveness. Gottman makes the distinction between criticism and complaint: “A complaint focuses on a specific behavior, but criticism attacks a person’s very character.”

I’d like to add another distinction between “complaint” (a specific request) and “complaining” (whining). Whining did not make it into the Four Horsemen, but it sure is a connection killer, if you ask me.

See if you can distinguish between criticism (global personal attack) and complaint (direct request), below. Read on…