The Power of Silence

Vicki's comment, as usual, is worth a post.

When Vicki pays attention to what her voice is telling her - not to talk - she's right on. Our bodies do pick up on energy that is antagonistic, or self-aggrandizing, or a wall that can't be breached. Silent energy, but nonetheless powerful in it's message that communication is not possible.

Several decades ago I attended a leadership workshop for entrepreneurs where I was stunned to learn that one of my talents was not to talk, but to observe and then summarize what everyone else had said. What? I was a performer, a teacher. I had thought I was failing because I hadn't contributed to the discussion.

As soon as we're enrolled in school, our grades suffer if we don't participate in class discussion. We learn to attach a value to talking, and to believe that we won't be valued in a business meeting, for example, unless we talk. So what a great lesson to learn in that workshop that observant silence was a talent.

Thinking about silence led me to dig up an old article on that subject:

"I'm curious if one can own the silence between songs in a strong way.  To recognize that the silence is good and important.” (A question from the lead singer in a local rock band.)

Most people, not just performers, think of silence as an empty space that has to be filled. Musicians have the opposite problem: the symbols for silence in a musical score are called “rests,” leading us to think that we should drop out, that if we have a whole page of rests, we might as well pick up a book.

Silence is more than the absence of sound. We use “dead silence” to describe a problem with an electronic device, but we also use it to describe a shocked silence or an embarrassed silence. So silence has an emotional content. We differentiate between “a heavy silence” and “a soft silence.” So silence has a discernible density. We can use silence to agree or disagree with an argument or a vote. So silence can have a meaning that is recognizable and recorded in the minutes of a meeting.
If silence has emotional content, density and meaning, then silence is neither a void nor a rest, but a form of communication.
 
Silence is used as a powerful tool by professionals in many fields. A theatre director may ask the actors to take a “beat” after a line. He intends to use a moment of silence to draw the audience’s attention to the previous line, to make it more important. A film director will often use silence, rather than music, to heighten horror  or suspense. A trial attorney may use a nonchalant silence, implying that she is finished with a witness, before she turns and throws her “zinger” question.

The directors are using silence to heighten the attention of the audience; the attorney is using silence to relax the attention of the witness. Performers can also use silence both ways.

How a performer uses silence is a matter of style. An orchestra conductor may want complete silence before she begins, and will wait and wait and wait on the podium until she can feel that she has it. John Nelson, on the other hand, rushes on stage, picks up his baton, and gives the downbeat, gathering the audience through speed and his own energy.

Some performers will use silence after a song in order to prepare the audience to move from, for example, sadness and loss, to the upbeat song that will follow. Others want to move as quickly as possible into the next number. Still others want to use patter or tell stories to bridge numbers.

Some performers will use silence to release some of the audience’s attentive energy at the end of a set or performance. Others will finish big, with the expectation that the audience’s response will release energy.

Performers can use silence to pick up, hold, and release an audience. They can use silence to communicate with an audience–Pay attention here! or Wait, here comes the laugh line! They can also use silence to gather information from the audience–Is it an uncomfortable silence? Is it an on-the-edge-of-the-seat silence?–and can respond accordingly.

Because silence is a form of communication, both performer and audience can “own” any silence during a performance. But because performance is a specialized form of communication, the audience will be more comfortable if the performer is in control of the silence, is using it with intent.

That intent will determine how “good and important” a silence is.  

Believe with Your Body

As a past president of Winston-Salem Writers (at 163 members, this group may be the largest local writing group in the country) I've been asked what I thought of a board member as a possible future president.

My reply was, "She's heavily corseted." I wasn't sure exactly what I meant until I saw a TED video last week. That speaker reminded me of the possible president, and I got to watch her for twenty minutes and analyze why she was so offputting.

What she had to say was worthwhile enough for me to forward the link to someone. Her delivery, however, led me to believe she wasn't personally trustworthy. She was eloquent, smiling pleasantly, evidently a practiced public speaker, but she came off as a phoney.

Because she was involved in what she was saying only from the neck up. She was indeed a talking head, completely disengaged from her body.

We tend to think that our beliefs are in our minds but, unless we're also believing with our emotions and our bodies, we're not believable.  

Passionate Presentations

I saw a performance Friday night by “Authoring Action.” About 30 teenagers reciting, singing, dancing the words they had authored. 

I saw tears running down the cheeks of a teenage boy rapping a poem he’d written. And I was reminded, again, of the importance of passion in our presentations.   

I hope we’re in the post-post-modern era of the arts. I hated the post-modern period, probably because I didn’t fit into it well. I didn’t enjoy self-referential, cynical, let’s-have-a-laugh-at-the-past, emotionless performances. I wanted passionate performances.

Passion isn’t fully back in fashion yet, but it may be on its way. I’ve blogged about the clues I’ve been finding in, of all places, the business world. A CEO said in an interview that he’s fortunate that he loves the business he’s in, that he’s passionate about it. The author of an essay about business journalism advised writers to tell a story, rather than trying to explain the facts. She recognizes that readers will probably not remember or understand the facts, but they will remember the story that captures the meaning of the facts.  

We can’t tell a story in our presentations unless we go deeper than the words, unless we find the story we want to tell. We can’t tell a story well unless we are drawing upon our senses–our sight, our hearing, our senses of touch, smell, and taste. Our senses produce both emotion and action, not only in us, the storytellers, but in our audiences.

Here’s one of the definitions of passion in the Oxford Universal Dictionary: “In psychology or art, any mode in which the mind is affected or acted upon . . .” 

If we are presenting our ideas from our senses, our audiences can respond from, and their minds will be affected by their senses. 

 We don’t get good at giving presentations unless we are passionate about the story we’re telling. If we are passionate about our presentations, we will get good at giving them.            

Why present any idea if we are not intending to affect the minds of our audiences? Why present without passion?

Going Too Far is Almost Enough

“That was a great exercise. Why didn’t we start with that one?”

This was a comment at the end of a workshop on “Presenting Yourself.” Made after an exercise in which I’d asked the participants to exaggerate all the presentation techniques they’d learned in the last 6 weeks. “Go too far,” I’d said, knowing after 35 years of teaching that they wouldn’t.

At some point in the process of becoming members of a functioning society, each of us has been warned “to quiet down,” “to be seen and not heard,” “don’t draw attention to yourself,” and the like. Those are the demands of the schoolroom, sometimes the family dinner table, and enforced when we’re part of many audiences. But not when we’re on stage.

There the opposite is true. No audience will be comfortable unless their leader, the performer, is larger than the audience. Unless the performer’s energy is larger, gestures wider, voice more authoritative.

Fortunately, all the workshop participants understood, after the exercise, that “going too far” was only the beginning of a good performance.        

The Hook

Public speakers are encouraged to begin with a "hook," a line that will engage their listeners. I heard a speaker last week that so engaged me that I noticed several times I was leaning toward her. I have no idea what her first line–her "hook"–was. It certainly wasn't a joke, which is so often recommended. I also found myself making small noises of approval, somewhat like an "amen, sister," at a church service. I hadn't interested in her subject; in fact, I had only attended the event out of a sense of duty. So how did she get me to respond as I did? First, she was passionate about her subject, and passion is a prime communicator. Second, she involved us directly in every step: She had found a research treasure trove at the Duke library. Were any of us Duke alumni? Her research subject had lived on such-and-such a street in Raleigh. Were any of us from Raleigh? Did we know that street? Third, when she couldn't remember a name, she asked us for the name, without any embarrassment over her lapse of memory. Most important, she treated the event, not as a lecture, but as a communal gathering of intelligent people with whom she was sharing her passion.  

Stage Presence

The manager of an events venue told me this week that he'd decided that the difference between a hobbyist and a professional was stage presence. That he liked to encourage performers who were just starting out, but had begun to realize that they were never going to move up to his main floor venue if they didn't know how to communicate with their audiences. And that he saw the same problem with fine artists when he staged an art show. "They don't know how to talk to potential buyers," he said. "It's all about presence."

Technique vs. Communication

I watched a classical guitar player a few weeks ago. I say "watched" rather than heard because no matter how often I tried to force myself to listen to the music, I found myself watching his hands instead. Marvelous technique. How does he manage to do that? Wow, look at those hands move. I can still mentally see the performance, but I can't hear it at all. How great it would have been if he had included the audience in the music.

The Critics

Richard I. Garber commented here about voluntary/involuntary audiences. Yes, indeed, I refer often in "Speak Up" to the differences between the two and how they need to be treated. But how do we treat the 1 or 2 members of a voluntary audience who are there to critique or distract or who knows what? What do you do when you can see your competition in the audience and know that they're there to criticize? I didn't have an answer until a few days later when I attended an orchestra concert at which a group of conservatory students in front of me wanted to make sure that everyone knew that they, too, were brilliant musicians. No matter how loud their comments, they only affected 6 people at most. The rest of the audience–probably 800 people–remained attentive to the stage. Although one would ordinarily treat the show-offs as an involuntary audience, their effect was so minimal that they weren't worth consideration. At a presentation I did a few days ago, one man arrived early, took a seat at the back of the room, and began to read a newspaper. He read his paper for the next hour and a half. I have no idea why he was there. But his disinterested energy was far outweighed by the enthusiastic energy of the larger audience and, therefore, didn't deserve special treatment.

BEING WHO YOU WANT TO BE

We all know that public speaking terrifies more people than snakes, spiders, or airplane trips. Those who are the most terrified of public speaking itself, are terrified of taking a class to learning how to speak in public without being terrified. I led a workshop on "Writing after 50" this weekend at the Blue Ridge Bookfest, and one woman told me she had been afraid to write because of what she might find out. But it had occurred to her that if she wrote about her fear she could write a different ending. Yes, I said, and you could create a character that isn't you to live through whatever frightens you. So why not create a different persona to speak in public? We create different personas all the time in our daily lives. Hopefully, we present a different persona at work than we present to a child, a different persona to a lover than to a father. I have a chapter about creating a performing persona in Speak Up: The Public Speaking Primer. One of the exercises asks the reader to choose characteristics they want their performing persona to have–confidence, to be respected, etc.–and then to use body memories of a time when they were confident, and a time when they were respected. Sometimes workshop participants will realize that they don't really need one characteristic that they thought they were missing in their everyday personality; always do they realize that they really can create who they want to be.

Don't Tell Me What to Think

The last issue of Zoetrope: All Story has one of the best short stories I’ve read in years–”Rothko Eggs,” by Keith Ridgway. The narrator, a teenage girl, liked art that’s “empty.” “Really good artists” left a lot out so that “she could take her own things into the painting.” She didn’t like an artist who didn’t leave much room and was just “trying to look like he had amazing ideas.”

I went to a performance recently that didn’t let me take anything into it. I was told what to think about the theme; the emotions expected of me were obvious. I was being presented to, preached to; there was no room for me in what was happening on stage. I predictably responded by refusing to think or feel as instructed, and left the performance angry.

I also saw recently a production of Sondheim’s Assassins. To my mind, it’s theme is that presidential assignation attempts are the logical extension of the American dream, the way to become “somebody.” That’s a crazy statement, and yet I walked out of the theatre accepting it as rational. Because I was allowed to laugh at the idea, to bring my own experiences to bear on it, to think about it.

Communication vs. Content

“We’re communicating on a human level: The content isn’t important anymore.”

That’s a quote from an interview with Nick Kendall, a violinist with Time for Three, in the Indianapolis Star. Nick is wrong about the content not being an important part of the success of Time for Three. I’m a huge fan, and it’s just plain fun to watch these classical virtuosi, technically some of the best in the country, break into Irish fiddling, reach over and play each other’s instruments, and act like serious clowns. He's exactly right, however, when he says that the content becomes less important than the communication. I’ve written in Speak Up: The Public Speaking Primer about a high-school-age actress who was given an unfortunate set of lines: “In 1865, . . .”; “Then in 1890, . . .” and about a dozen more. She played those lines so engagingly that I didn’t notice until afterward what terrible writing she’d been given. “Commune” in all its forms is a variation of the word “common,” something that is shared. We communicate when we talk together, when there is a mental or spiritual exchange. We can also participate in a mental or spiritual exchange when the medium is not words, but music or dance or even silence. Communication at the human level is what all performances should be about. If we’re not communicating when we perform, we ought not to be on a stage.

Audience Feedback

Another argument for not “projecting” to an audience:

I wrote in my last Community Arts Cafe column that when we involve the audience in a presentation, rather than projecting at them, we can pick up valuable information. I used, as an example, a reading that I gave from When Last on the Mountain, an anthology that I co-edited. I had thought that the eponymous piece would be a great ender. Very inspiring, I thought. Wrong. I could feel from the audience that it had not been inspiring, but a big downer. So I looked at my watch, noted with “delighted surprise” that we had time for one more, flipped through the book and landed on a piece that left them laughing.

I had a similar experience a few weeks later. I was reading the first 5 minutes of a new short story at an open mic. I’d had 7 other writers critique it, had revised it many times, and had thought it wasn’t the greatest story ever, but good enough to send out.

The first page went well–laughter in the appropriate places–but during the second page, I heard a voice in my head saying, “This is so banal.” A voice, not one of my own thoughts.

So I took the story to my best critic and, without telling him why, asked him to read the first 3 pages. He immediately told me what was wrong with it. So now I have to rewrite the whole story, and I’m embarrassed that I ever sent it out.

Audience feedback is a marvelous thing.

Writers Reading

I went to hear 5 writers reading their work last week and, though all 5 were present, I ended up hearing 1-1/2 of them.

I got a coughing fit, which I do when I don’t realize that I’m angry. The knees of the publisher sitting next to me were jumping out of control. Because we couldn’t hear most of what was being read to us.

Always on the side of the performer, I’ve tended to blame the sound system for my hearing problems in that hall. But not this time. Not after being able to hear 1 out of 5 clearly.

What went wrong? Let me count the ways:

Did they practice with the sound system? I doubt it.

They rushed, giving us no time to hear a word before they went on to the next one. An audience of 100 people needs more time to assimilate what it hears than does a group of 6.

They were not sharing the work with us. They were reading into an auditorium with people in it.

They were not reliving the stories they’d written. They were just reading the words.

1 of the writers avoided all these problems. She was engaged in her stories; she embraced the audience; we heard every word.

Did I mention that I was sitting next to a publisher? His knees stopped jiggling. He said, “I need to sign her.”

"Control" of the Diaphragm

I was looking forward to seeing “The King’s Speech” (my field, after all) until I read that Lionel Logue wrote, after his first consultation, that Prince Albert had poor control of his diaphragm.

No kidding! If we could control our diaphragms, no one would ever hiccup.

Back in college I had a singer friend who was very proud of her diaphragm, which she would display. What she was showing off was what looked like a role of fat below her ribs. Her vocal teacher had told her that that was her diaphragm.

The word “diaphragm” is bandied about by voice and speech teachers who don’t have a clue what the diaphragm is–a horizontal set of muscles between the lungs and the guts. A muscle set that gets pushed down by the lungs when we inhale, and that gets pushed back up the guts when we exhale. A muscle set that gets pushed around, not one that we can “control.”

At least two prominent voice coaches advise bouncing one’s voice off one’s diaphragm. They don’t explain how this can be accomplished anatomically. Nor do they seem to realize that, in advising a student to bounce a sound anywhere, that student is likely to tighten some muscles in the throat to act as the bouncer.

Claim the Job

Another inspiration from The New York Times business section: This time a man hunting for another job describes his transformation from question-answerer to question-asker.

His interpretation of the change is that he became more assertive. True. My interpretation is that he recognized that he had more power, and therefore more responsibility, in a job interview than he had thought.

A job interview may be conducted one-on-one, but it nevertheless involves many aspects of public speaking.

Claim the job, just as you would claim the stage. In the interviewer’s mind, the subject of the meeting is the company and its needs and how well you fit both. Too often, the interviewee thinks the subject of the meeting is him or herself.

Do I need to say that when the speaker and the audience are not in agreement in their expectations, they’re off to a bad start. I once talked three friends into attending a film that had been billed as a romantic thriller. So much blood and violence that one friend left the theatre, and I pulled my sweater up over my face and missed the crucial murder. No one would talk to me on the way home.

“When we claim . . . the job as our own, we begin to fall in love with it. We nurture it, care for it, give it our full attention. When we focus on our material, we find the courage to live through the anxiety of performance, and the drive to learn how to perform it well.” (Speak Up: The Public Speaking Primer (Press 53, 2010), p. 104.

Tell a Story

Read Chrystia Freeland’s essay, “How to Succeed in Business Journalism,” in the August 22d issue of The New York Times Book Review. I could quote here 2 or 3 full paragraphs, changing no more than a phrase or two, and make them directly applicable to public speaking.

I’m going to quote, instead, from Speak Up: The Public Speaking Primer, where I give advice to public speakers that is similar to Freeland’s advice to business journalists.

“Humans are storytellers. We try to understand our lives and the events around us by creating stories. Until we learned to scratch symbols that represented our words, we told our history, our beliefs, our warnings, and our fears in stories, in parables, and in myths.

“We remember best what we hear or read in story form.” (p. 11)

And,

“In our culture, we often believe we are oriented to the bottom line and that facts are the only reliable bases for decisions. Human brains, however, are not as well equipped to work mathematical of logic problems as they are to make judgments based on intuition and experience. . .

“An attorney asked me how he could get a jury to understand the complex financial instruments that led to the recent economic collapse. He said, ‘I spent days trying to work through them myself. Finally, one night at two a.m., I got it. So how do I reduce all the work I had to do into something a jury can understand?’

“By telling the jury that story. Tell them the process that led to your discovery. Tell them about the wrong paths you went down, and your frustration, and how stupid you felt. Give them a chance to empathize with you. They might not fully grasp all the complexities themselves, but they’ll feel a connection to you and to your side of the argument.” (pp. 75-76)

Are You Ready?

The New York Times business section is providing more advice that can be applied to public speaking. In the October 10 paper, Howard Schultz, chairman, president, and CEO of Starbucks, was asked for his advice to new CEOs.

He said that very few people coming into the job believe they’re qualified. Every time we speak in public, it’s a new situation. Very few of us believe we’re qualified, or have rehearsed enough for this new subject or that new audience.

So, his advice about insecurity? Use it as a strength, not a weakness. Let people see that you’re vulnerable, and you’re showing them that you’re human.

Translating that paraphrased statement for our needs: So what if you make a mistake or two? Steve Allen once said that a performer would have to fall off the stage into the bass drum before someone noticed. I’ll add that if you do fall off the stage into the bass drum, hitting the cymbals as you go, everyone in the audience will be thrilled that they were there to see it, and will buy more tickets with the hope that you’ll do it again.

Apologies Not Accepted

When I was growing up in the midwest, a hostess cooked twice as much food as her guests could eat, and then apologized for whatever she presented or had failed to present: “I don’t know what happened to the corn pudding;” “My cake didn’t rise like usual;” “At least I remembered to take the Jello salad out of the refrigerator this time.”

Dinner began with assurances from the guests about the quality of the corn pudding, was interrupted with the story of the missing salad, and ended with a slight argument over the lightness of the cake. Not leaving much room for conversation about politics, or even the weather.

I attended a presentation this week that followed that pattern. The presenter began with a story about having failed to appear at a presentation the week before, and segued into an apology for having arrived late with disorganized materials. He said several times that if his wife/business partner were there, she would be able to better explain this concept or answer that question.

Why apologize as you’re serving the corn pudding? If the guests had previously loved the hostess’s corn pudding, now they’re forced to reconsider. Maybe it doesn’t taste that good after all, or maybe their taste discrimination is off.

What is the value of telling an audience, in detail, that you forgot to keep an appointment? Are we going to trust anything else you say?

Last month I heard a band member say, halfway through a performance, “and we’ve only practiced twice.” Now the audience is sitting there reassessing the entire evening: “Maybe it was more ragged than we thought.”

Virtual Meetings

The “Career Column” in the 9/26 issue of The New York Times was devoted to professional virtual meetings. Good advice was given: don’t eat potato chips during the meeting; take your headset off before you head for the bathroom; don’t wear stripes.

But, as I thought about why virtual meetings can be so deadly and why we would have to be warned not to eat potato chips, one of the answers was because it’s not a “real” meeting. We’re not meeting; we’re not able to pick up, assess, build on, or counteract the energy of others.

We’re advised in the column to “use the same kind of body language and facial expressions as in a face-to-face meeting,” which implies that a virtual meeting, like a virtual world, is theatre and requires the suspension of disbelief. We need to “act” as though we’re in a meeting, even though we’re not.

If all the participants were acting (or pretending), then potato chips and bathrooms would no longer be issues.

But we would still have the problem of technology usage. If we look at the camera and talk to the microphone, we are substituting pieces of equipment for the people we would be looking at and talking to in a meeting. The speaker must also be an actor, speaking through the technology with his or her imaginary audience.

Creativity and Aging

A truth that I hadn’t known before came out of my mouth yesterday.

I have a client who’s probably in his 60s (I’ve never asked), with a good deal of physical pain, recent knee surgery, recent mouth surgery–the list goes on. He performs poetry professionally, but we always warm up first with vocal exercises.

I said, Your voice sounds as though you’re about 32. Then I heard myself say, Inside you is a healthy body.

Then I had to figure out what I’d said. What I could “see” was an inner “lining” of his body that was in a vibrant, young, healthy condition. If that were not so, it’s aural manifestation would not have been vibrant, young and healthy.

So what I’m wondering is, Is that what any creative activity does for us? Keeps us young? Not just “young in spirit.” Might creativity actually keep some parts of our body young?

That’s what some recent research on the relationship of creativity and aging is saying–less visits to the doctor, less falls.

Worth pondering.