Finding Your Voice

I’ve been going through an old file looking for blurbs that would work on the public speaking book jacket, and have been struck by the number of former clients who thanked me for “finding my voice.”

That phrase usually has two meanings: that they found their natural speaking voice, and that, having found that voice, they used it to speak up.

We learn to speak by imitating our primary caregiver. Not just by imitating the sound, but by adjusting physical musculature in order to produce that sound. My daughter’s kindergarden teacher sent me a note, warning me that something was wrong with the child’s voice–she spoke at too low a pitch. I’m a contralto, my husband was a bass. Yes, she spoke at a low pitch, but not “too” low.

Little thought seems to be given to voice training in theatre programs in this country. Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Stewart–their voices were distinctive and instantly recognizable–but today one actor’s voice sounds pretty much like every other actor’s voice. I said as much to the Dean of a university program. He agreed, but said, “Where do I find the teachers?”

Performance Readiness

I’m back. When I write I find that my focus is so internal that I should be wearing a sign–one of those reversible “Open”/”Closed” signs–and I ought not be allowed to drive.

My focus for the last month has been on the revision of my public speaking book. Which is more or less finished (I’d love to tinker some more, but . . . ), so my mind is more or less “Open” again and I’m back in the world.

I was late starting my monthly column (www.communityartscafe.org), didn’t even pick the topic–performance readiness–until yesterday.

And then I got a call this morning from a former student that dropped that subject neatly into my lap. She had sung at a wedding last weekend. I asked her how it went.

“Not well,” she said. “Something strange happened in the ceremony and I was so startled that I forgot the words and had to make something up.

“I’d written a new song for them, and it wasn’t in my bones yet. I should have rehearsed more.”

Lack of rehearsal, wasn’t the issue. When she explained what the couple had done, which was so odd that trying to explain it would take an hour, I saw 2 other performance elements at work.

First, she couldn’t have possibly been prepared for such a bizarre happenstance.

Second, she was too emotionally involved in the ceremony. She wasn’t thinking of it as a performance.

Weddings are like that. Funerals, too. We have to think of them as performances, have to put some emotional distance between ourselves and the event.

Surround Sound

I love first-time performance experiences. I had one yesterday.

This was a performance of Rumi poetry in which some of the poems used piano and vocals. Both the reader and the singer are my clients.

During one of the poems I heard the word “waiting” coming from behind me. I always sit in the back row so that I can feel the audience response, so I thought someone standing behind me had said “waiting.” I turned around–no one there.

I heard it again, turned around again–no one there.

Then I realized that the words had been said by the singer on stage, even though the sound had seemed to come from behind me. So I checked to see if there were a speaker on the floor or mounted on a wall–there wasn’t one.

I’ve never encountered that phenomenon before, and am not sure how to explain it. She had been trained not to “project,” so she wasn’t consciously bouncing the sound off the back wall.

My guess is that she had gotten more deeply into the poetry and the music by that time, and had involved us, the audience, more deeply, so that the words seemed to be “happening” among us rather than recited and sung to us.

Nifty!

An Interview is a Performance

I had an e-mail this morning from a friend whose son, with a brand new MBA, is having trouble with interviews. “He gets anxious, can’t seem to talk, or to get his breath.”

My daughter had trouble with interviews when she first graduated. She had bought a navy blue suit for the process, had wiped her wet, sweaty hands on her skirt and discovered, to her horror, that her hands were blue.

The anxiety symptoms may be different, but the antidotes are the same. Here are two:

Breathing: The body has 2 modes of breathing; the normal mode, when sleeping, say, and the stress mode. When we're in the stress mode, our breathing is intended to close off the throat in order to give us upper-arm strength. Then we panic, and concentrate on where we feel the constriction - in the chest and throat. This is NORMAL - THE BODY IS GOING TO DO IT DESPITE US. However, we can override that breathing mode.

At home, lie on your back and observe your breathing - observe, don't try to do anything - feel the abdominal muscles expand and contract. Then sit on a chair, place your elbows on your knees and observe your breathing - feel your back muscles open and contract. Now sit up in a chair, as you would in an interview. Find a posture in which you can feel both sets of muscles expanding and contracting. Practice this breathing, and your muscles will remember how this feels - you'll be able to move more quickly into this mode eace time you repeat it. Then, before you go into an interview, practice your breathing. If your mind switches into "what am I going to say?" switch it back to breathing.

Objective: If you focus on the interviewer, rather than on yourself, your anxiety will be reduced. If your objective is to find out whether this job would be a good fit for you, rather than to prove that you will be a good fit for the job, your anxiety will be reduced.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

I am audience oriented. Performance is audience oriented. If there’s no audience, there’s no performance.

I used to be focused on technique. I learned the hard way that no one cares that you dance well, or sing well, or that your band has created a new genre, if you’re not communicating with your audience.

Why don’t conservatories get this? Or business schools and universities, for that matter?

When my first public speaking book came out, I was paired with a communications professor from Rowan University for a radio interview. He told me before we went on the air that Rowan had just established a course in public-speaking as a graduation requirement.

“Marvelous,” I said.

“Where do you think I’m going to find that many adjunct public-speaking professors for $2,000 a semester?”

That was fifteen years ago, so the situation must have improved, right?

Except that I recently found a blog where professors who had just been told they were to teach a public-speaking course at various institutions of higher learning were asking, “Anybody out there know a good book I could use?”

We have a communications industry that contributes over half a trillion dollars a year to the U.S. economy. Universities have recognized that preparing their students to communicate might be a good idea. But those same institutions are not regarding public speaking as a discipline; they’re assigning professors from other disciplines to teach that “necessary” public- speaking course.

About a third of the answers on that blog, presumably written by public-speaking teachers, were variations of, “You don’t need a book; they just need to practice.”

Excuse me? Practice what?

A piano teacher doesn’t say, “This is a piano, kid. Now sit down and practice.” A football coach doesn’t introduce his team to each other, and then tell them to go on the field and practice.

Thank You's

When I write my monthly column for Community Arts Cafe, I try to be positive–writing about what works in front of an audience, rather than what doesn’t.

But it occurred to me this morning that perhaps I could be as negative as I feel when blogging.

So, I get irritated when performers say, “Thank you,” as soon as they’ve finished a song or a speech, before the applause begins. What are you thanking us for? For listening to “poor little you?” Ugh!

Applause is the traditional way for an audience to say, “Thank you.” They get to say it first.

Then you get to bow, or applaud back, or say, “Thank you” back. Not before.

The View from the Mountain

Stage fright is reduced a great deal when public speakers learn that their audience is not the adversary. That the performer’s responsibility is to take care of and nurture the audience. And that an audience is most comfortable when it’s treated as a unit, rather than as an assembly of individuals.

Why had it never occurred to me to say, as I did to a client on Friday, that focusing physically and mentally on the entire audience is more comfortable for the public speaker as well?

If you’re communicating with an audience as an entity, the actions of individuals become incidental, not distractions. The man in the front row who falls asleep, the man twelve rows back who is looking frantically through his program as though he’s wandered into the auditorium by mistake, a crying child, four young women on the left who are literally bent double laughing and the man on the right who’s not laughing.

All these become merely a part of the larger landscape. As if one is standing on a mountain and notices smoke rising from a chimney in the valley below, the shadow pattern on the next mountain, and the movement of the clouds above. Each of these form a part of the view from the mountain; no single of them need distract one from the panorama.