We have all done it. Well, we may not have done it, but we have seen it happen. We’ve seen someone speak to a group of people and appear one way, and then present themselves in a totally different way in a one-on-one setting. Or we might have even been that very person.
Dr. Simon Raybould, the Director of Curved Vision says that “faking it” on stage is not uncommon in the least, even for expert speakers. As a specialist trainer in making presentations, he is used to dealing with people who are different off stage than they are on it.
His message tells us why people are inclined to act differently on stage. Could it be the nerves we get before speaking in public? Is it because we are presenting on a subject not directly connected to our message? Or could it be that we don’t want to let the audience into our personal lives? Finally, is being a different person in a presentation setting a good or bad thing? These are the questions he ponders upon in this article in an upbeat and irresistible tone.
Gain Simon’s insight on “Faking It” by checking out his entire post below or go to his website for the original!
by our Presaholic guest-blogger, Simon Raybould
Faking it
Faking it on stage that is… So if this post has turned up in your search and you’re disappointed ‘cos you were looking for something else… tough luck!
A short while ago a friendly acquaintance of mine (a professional, full time speaker) expressed surprise that he’d just been speaking to someone who was a different person on stage to off it. He couldn’t wrap his head around that. For me, as a specialist trainer in making presentations, that comes as no surprise – most expert speakers are different people on stage.
Why are people different when they’re presenting?
There are a number of different reasons for this.
It’s a matter of nerves
A lot of presenters are nervous. In fact, most (if not all) of the best ones are. If you go on stage and deliver a presentation ‘being yourself’ you’re exposing yourself to ridicule etc if you’re not very good. (And by ‘on stage’ I don’t just mean as a professional speaker – just standing at the front of the board room counts as being on stage). One very common way around this is by wearing a metaphorical mask on stage – that is, by very consciously ‘performing’.
By wearing a mask you can pretend to yourself that it isn’t “you” making the presentation and so it doesn’t matter so much if things go wrong. In short, nervous presenters often hide behind a ‘performance persona’… and it’s hardly unknown for actors, dancers and stand-up comics to do the same thing. In fact, my personal experience is that the majority of speakers I’ve trained have used the mask technique at some point!
You’re a subject expert
That means you’re talking about a researched topic, not from personal experience. (What I mean by that is that you’re not giving a talk which is at it’s essence autobiographical.) While that doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to be a different person on stage, it makes it a lot easier to do so.
For a subject matter expert, there is no intrinsic, automatic link between them and their presentation and this frees them up to be the kind of person on stage that they believe the audience is most likely to respond to. As a personal ‘confession’, I’ve done this myself – sometimes I judged the audience as being more responsive to a ‘biiiig, dominant’ personality and other times I felt they needed someone who was more ‘collegiate’ in their approach: in each case, that’s what they got. My job was to get the content of the presentation over, not to allow my personality to be an issue.
The speaker is an introvert and/or shy
(Side note – introversion and being shy aren’t the same thing!)
A lot of speakers I know and have trained simply don’t regard their personal life as anything to do with the audience. They feel that, like all introverts (as Jung defined them) their personal life is exactly that – personal: only a select few intimates have the right to have access to their personal life. One way of keeping audiences away from your personal life is to provide them with a mask on stage – something which looks personal enough and realistic enough for the audience to respond to but without being the real thing. So long as it’s credible and so long as the content is good enough, what’s the harm? It’s simply the way an actor approaches their role.
The risk only arises if they introverted speaker can’t maintain the mask long enough or thoroughly enough.
Good, bad or indifferent?
It’s not a problem. Well, not automatically, at least.
If it bothers the audience and it makes them less able to take your message on board it’s a problem. If it doesn’t it isn’t. Simple as that.
Most speakers don’t speak to audience’s of strangers though – that’s the domain of professionals. The vast majority of presenters speak at work – to people they know at least a little. In that kind of situation it needs thinking about as it can confuse people a little. Suddenly shyKenfromaccounts turns into a larger than life demi-god…. and it unsettles people!
If ‘wearing’ a ‘mask’ means shyKenfromaccounts can stand up and talk to people by wearing the mask of Fearless Wonder Man and his content is worth hearing, that can only be good, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment