Hide and Seek
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“Only connect.”
E. M. Forster
Ours is a culture of shame. Just ask John Bradshaw and the other pundits of co-dependency. Very few Americans grow up without acquiring a burden of childish guilt, embarrassment, or painful remorse from the natural missteps and faux pas of youth. We carry them everywhere, like Morley’s chains, except they dog our steps in this life, not the next. These fetters snare us when we rise to speak. This is the fearful risk we meet in the eyes of every audience: we might mess up.
“Mike Landrum stiffly played a stiff young man.” That was my review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer after a performance in summer stock. I was eighteen years old and, yes, a bit stiff. It’s a sentence that has found a home in my mental “cupboard of shame” for over forty years. There is little compensatory satisfaction in the thought that I have probably outlived that reviewer. The words still sting.
Actors are the easy targets for shame, putting ourselves on display with our eager egos. But of course, we are not alone. That is the fate of all who aspire. The Japanese have a discouraging proverb: “The nail that sticks up gets pounded down.” They are a culture so rigidly shame-based they have made suicide an accepted means of redemption. The relationship a speaker, or any performer has with the audience, pivots on his or her fear of shame and their choice of strategies to overcome that fear.
There are two basic strategies: You can Hide or Seek. You can put on armor, build a defensive persona, and get some distracting audio-visual aids to hide behind; or you can seek rapport with the audience, take the greater risk of remaining vulnerable, and open yourself to them. This reflects a dispute that has been going on in the community of actors for at least the past half century: whether an actor should work emotionally or technically. The technicians like to work with the externals, ignoring their actual feelings and providing the appropriate indications of the character’s emotional life. In other words, faking it. For those who work internally, the genuine emotional life of the actor trumps these pretenses and creates a greater rapport, or belief, in the audience.
Speakers face a similar choice. Here, technique has morphed into technology, which is most apparent in the TelePrompTer, PowerPoint, and other computer-generated tools. But there are subtler, non-technological ways a speaker can use technique, such as the development of a performance mask. An experienced speaker who has found a successful speech and delivered it over and over for a period of years, will find that the speech follows its own well-worn groove automatically. He or she will become stuck in the ruts created by constant repetition, and rapport with the audience will diminish or disappear.
A telemarketer or salesperson who works from a set script, will create an automaton-like delivery. Often these people will develop this style intentionally, go through training to achieve exactly the same inflection on certain words in the script. At this point speaking has become a lifeless, mechanical thing; the listener is no longer relevant. These speakers don’t even seek rapport, only sales. Amazingly, they must get them or the practice would not persist.
The rapport seeker knows that the truest communication occurs between human beings directly. Keeping in touch with the audience is primary to this speaker. While the analogy for the technical speaker might be a tape recording, or a puppet show; the analogy for the rapport seeker could be a dancer, or jazz musician. Her focus is on interaction and responsiveness. Dancers move in a flow of action and reaction to the many variables around them, the music, their partners, the ballroom, the observers and so forth.
I have recently experienced an interesting concept called ‘Speaking Circles.’ The invention of a former stand-up comedian and screenwriter named Lee Glickstein, Speaking Circles operate from the premise that your vulnerability is your strength. The way it works is simple and effective: a few people (not more than 8) sit in a circle and agree to be entirely supportive of one another. Criticism, advice and instruction are off limits. Only positive, encouraging and supportive feedback is allowed. Their chief objective in speaking is rapport; they seek to listen to one another with selfless generosity, and in doing so, they reach a deep, harmonic, understanding we seldom find in conventional speaker-audience relationships.
I am impressed with Glickstein’s book “Be Heard Now,” which I recommend highly and unhesitatingly. He teaches the importance of listening skills, especially in the speaker, who must make an effort to receive communication from the audience. Long-time readers of this newsletter will recognize a favorite theme of mine.
But there are ditches on both sides of the road. Glickstein does not address the problems facing the speaker in the normal course of business presentations, where questions of time, clarity, purpose and objective must be met. In the everyday world, the audience is not there for the speaker’s benefit, but the other way around. There are times when nothing will serve but meeting their expectations. This requires a certain technical facility, even a working knowledge of PowerPoint.
The best method is a blend of these two styles of speaking. We need to be in touch with our feelings, and the audiences’, but we need to maintain enough detachment to accomplish our objectives. Too much feeling and we become self-indulgent, too much technique and we become robotic. All things in moderation, the Greeks taught. There are techniques essential to the success of any speech, which can and should be learned and practiced. It would be a shame to ignore them.
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Something to Ponder
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
-KahlilGibran, mystic, poet and artist (1883-1931)
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© 2003 Michael F. Landrum
