Spreading the Transforming Power of Improvisation
Applying improv activities to business: Public Speaking coaching
Although most of my improv related work is used in teambuilding and communication trainings, I'm also a coach in public speaking skills (http://www.PublicDynamics.com) as an offshoot of my involvement with the National Speakers Association.
Coaching clients come to me with an assortment of needs which may include speech structure, improved storytelling ability, help with memorization, adding humor, using body language more effectively and so on. For all of my training through NSA and elsewhere, nothing prepared me more in being helpful to my clients than my improvisation background. Improvisers either know or develop the skill to create reaction in their audiences through a combination of good use of voices, faces, bodies, and finally, the words. Great lines, be they scripted or improvised, are wasted when not channeled through good use of voice, face, and body. My goal for my clients is to help them make that happen...and then see if maybe the words need to change, too! (Realistically, they almost always do because once we bring the piece to life, the words that are less in sync start to stand out and we find better ones.)
A good example of my implementing this was with a man I'll call Frederick. Frederick had a passion for speaking on a certain aspect of new age theory that he felt had been critical in making positive changes in his life. These theories, which he had researched intensely and implemented whole-heartedly, had brought much more peace into his life. The problem that he was being rightly critiqued for was that this inner peace was coming across as blandness rather than as a joy. His face looked dead and his voice was only slightly more lively.
One of my frequent teaching methodologies is a reference to a pendulum, where the far end of the pendulum is called 10 and the low end is called 0. A zero is no attempt at all to do well − not caring to put any effort in at all…completely “phoning it in”. Think showing up for work when you have the flu just because the minimal job must be done. A 10 is pushing yourself to such an extreme that you almost have to feel like a lunatic on stage, far far outside your comfort zone. Think Robin Williams in the late 70s (and if you don’t know what that looks like, rent it!) That makes 5 a basic comfort zone for most people: adequate, but not exciting. My goal in coaching is to push them in my office to get as close to a 10 as possible. Do I want them doing their speeches at a 10? Goodness, no! But I know they’ll never be as crazy on the platform as in my exercises. The point of pushing them near a 10 is so that, when the pendulum of comfort zone swings back, it might stop at 6 for a while. And then 7. And now we have improvement in their energy.
I had to be honest with Frederick. I couldn’t even call his comfort zone a 5. It looked like a 2. Remember Ben Stein as the teacher in “Ferris Bueller” or on “The Wonder Years”? That was Frederick. To get him to most people’s 5 was going to be an effort. As I suspected, there was something in Frederick’ past that makes it hard for him to be very expressive and show joy. We discussed the issue in great generalities since I'm not a therapist − just enough for me to get the ramifications. I let him know that I understood that this was difficult, but that he had to get that an audience won’t know or care about his past. All they were going to see was someone looking deadpan up there. We either had to work on the problem in two ways: 1) look at adding material that truly gave him more joy than other parts so that he’d brighten naturally in those sections and 2) help him find a way to fake it during the rest of the program until he could get more comfortable showing it from the heart. And this is where improvisation came in.
We played with a number of techniques to get his voice and face to show higher energy. A number of them did help to some degree, but the exercise that made the most difference is my own variation on one called “Small Face, Big Face”. In this, the first step is Small Face. One imagines all of his facial features being pulled toward the tip of his nose, making for the smallest possible face. I'll sometimes have the client put their thumbs and index fingers on four “corners” of the face and gently push inward to really get the feeling before lowering their hands. I do the same myself. We have a short conversation as people with very small faces. If they know part of their program by heart, I'll have them deliver it that way, stopping them if their face every starts to get bigger so they can correct it. In reality, we’d never use Small Face in a presentation, unless it was to create a character. We practice Small Face so as to set the 0 on the pendulum so we can contrast it to Big Face.
Once they have mastered Small Face (usually pretty easy so long as they don’t get the giggles from it), we reverse the process. All facial features move far from the nose. Again, the pulling outward with the four fingers helped convey the feeling and gives the client a muscle memory of what he is trying to achieve when the hands are lowered. We talk in Big Face, trying for a 10. It’s so ludicrously large feel that no one should ever speak that way, but it brings out energy, vocal variety, body movement and more that we can try to maintain as we allow our face to retreat to a 6 or 7.
This method helps a great number of people. While Frederick was not coming close to a 10 in Big Face, he was achieving a 6; a huge improvement, but we could not let the pendulum swing back at all! This is a lot to ask of a person because he felt ludicrous at a point that looked quite natural. For Frederick it was a struggle to believe that that could look good. So I brought out a mirror and had him repeat the Big Face exercise while physically holding himself there with his hands. Once he’d solidified that 6, I told him he could drop the hands and keep talking so long as he lost nothing of the look in his eyes, cheeks and jaw. He made a valiant effort, needing prompting at times when he started to lose it.
Once we stopped, we reviewed.
Milo: How did that look to you?
Frederick: It didn’t look like me.
Milo: I'd have to agree. But let’s move past that face. If you were in the audience, would you rather listen for an hour to that guy or the the man who walked in my door forty-five minutes ago?
Frederick: (after a pause) The Big Face guy is way more interesting, isn’t he?
Milo: He definitely is. Did the Big Face guy look unnaturally big?
Frederick: (with a little smile) Only on me!
Milo: Right. But your audience doesn’t need to know that. You need to practice Big Face until you can get past the point of thinking it must look crazy even if it feels so inside. Because it looks immensely better than how you started.
Frederick practiced numerous sections of his program using Big Face, with my permission to look in the mirror as often as he needed to, in order to gain confidence that he did not look silly at all. When he finally showed the section to his wife, who knew nothing of what we’d practiced, her eyes bulged.
“In all our years of marriage, I've never seen you look that animated over anything. You looked so vibrant!”
Frederick continued to struggle with the feeling that he was being a little phony, but responded positively to the reminder that all he was faking was a manifestation of the joy he actually felt for his material, not the joy itself.
Speaking, done well, is a performance. Improv is just another great tool to get one to the next level.
− Milo Shapiro, public speaking coach.
Business events using improvisation: http://www.IMPROVentures.com
Coaching, keynotes, and training
about PUBLIC SPEAKING: http://www.PublicDynamics.com
Coaching clients come to me with an assortment of needs which may include speech structure, improved storytelling ability, help with memorization, adding humor, using body language more effectively and so on. For all of my training through NSA and elsewhere, nothing prepared me more in being helpful to my clients than my improvisation background. Improvisers either know or develop the skill to create reaction in their audiences through a combination of good use of voices, faces, bodies, and finally, the words. Great lines, be they scripted or improvised, are wasted when not channeled through good use of voice, face, and body. My goal for my clients is to help them make that happen...and then see if maybe the words need to change, too! (Realistically, they almost always do because once we bring the piece to life, the words that are less in sync start to stand out and we find better ones.)
A good example of my implementing this was with a man I'll call Frederick. Frederick had a passion for speaking on a certain aspect of new age theory that he felt had been critical in making positive changes in his life. These theories, which he had researched intensely and implemented whole-heartedly, had brought much more peace into his life. The problem that he was being rightly critiqued for was that this inner peace was coming across as blandness rather than as a joy. His face looked dead and his voice was only slightly more lively.
One of my frequent teaching methodologies is a reference to a pendulum, where the far end of the pendulum is called 10 and the low end is called 0. A zero is no attempt at all to do well − not caring to put any effort in at all…completely “phoning it in”. Think showing up for work when you have the flu just because the minimal job must be done. A 10 is pushing yourself to such an extreme that you almost have to feel like a lunatic on stage, far far outside your comfort zone. Think Robin Williams in the late 70s (and if you don’t know what that looks like, rent it!) That makes 5 a basic comfort zone for most people: adequate, but not exciting. My goal in coaching is to push them in my office to get as close to a 10 as possible. Do I want them doing their speeches at a 10? Goodness, no! But I know they’ll never be as crazy on the platform as in my exercises. The point of pushing them near a 10 is so that, when the pendulum of comfort zone swings back, it might stop at 6 for a while. And then 7. And now we have improvement in their energy.
I had to be honest with Frederick. I couldn’t even call his comfort zone a 5. It looked like a 2. Remember Ben Stein as the teacher in “Ferris Bueller” or on “The Wonder Years”? That was Frederick. To get him to most people’s 5 was going to be an effort. As I suspected, there was something in Frederick’ past that makes it hard for him to be very expressive and show joy. We discussed the issue in great generalities since I'm not a therapist − just enough for me to get the ramifications. I let him know that I understood that this was difficult, but that he had to get that an audience won’t know or care about his past. All they were going to see was someone looking deadpan up there. We either had to work on the problem in two ways: 1) look at adding material that truly gave him more joy than other parts so that he’d brighten naturally in those sections and 2) help him find a way to fake it during the rest of the program until he could get more comfortable showing it from the heart. And this is where improvisation came in.
We played with a number of techniques to get his voice and face to show higher energy. A number of them did help to some degree, but the exercise that made the most difference is my own variation on one called “Small Face, Big Face”. In this, the first step is Small Face. One imagines all of his facial features being pulled toward the tip of his nose, making for the smallest possible face. I'll sometimes have the client put their thumbs and index fingers on four “corners” of the face and gently push inward to really get the feeling before lowering their hands. I do the same myself. We have a short conversation as people with very small faces. If they know part of their program by heart, I'll have them deliver it that way, stopping them if their face every starts to get bigger so they can correct it. In reality, we’d never use Small Face in a presentation, unless it was to create a character. We practice Small Face so as to set the 0 on the pendulum so we can contrast it to Big Face.
Once they have mastered Small Face (usually pretty easy so long as they don’t get the giggles from it), we reverse the process. All facial features move far from the nose. Again, the pulling outward with the four fingers helped convey the feeling and gives the client a muscle memory of what he is trying to achieve when the hands are lowered. We talk in Big Face, trying for a 10. It’s so ludicrously large feel that no one should ever speak that way, but it brings out energy, vocal variety, body movement and more that we can try to maintain as we allow our face to retreat to a 6 or 7.
This method helps a great number of people. While Frederick was not coming close to a 10 in Big Face, he was achieving a 6; a huge improvement, but we could not let the pendulum swing back at all! This is a lot to ask of a person because he felt ludicrous at a point that looked quite natural. For Frederick it was a struggle to believe that that could look good. So I brought out a mirror and had him repeat the Big Face exercise while physically holding himself there with his hands. Once he’d solidified that 6, I told him he could drop the hands and keep talking so long as he lost nothing of the look in his eyes, cheeks and jaw. He made a valiant effort, needing prompting at times when he started to lose it.
Once we stopped, we reviewed.
Milo: How did that look to you?
Frederick: It didn’t look like me.
Milo: I'd have to agree. But let’s move past that face. If you were in the audience, would you rather listen for an hour to that guy or the the man who walked in my door forty-five minutes ago?
Frederick: (after a pause) The Big Face guy is way more interesting, isn’t he?
Milo: He definitely is. Did the Big Face guy look unnaturally big?
Frederick: (with a little smile) Only on me!
Milo: Right. But your audience doesn’t need to know that. You need to practice Big Face until you can get past the point of thinking it must look crazy even if it feels so inside. Because it looks immensely better than how you started.
Frederick practiced numerous sections of his program using Big Face, with my permission to look in the mirror as often as he needed to, in order to gain confidence that he did not look silly at all. When he finally showed the section to his wife, who knew nothing of what we’d practiced, her eyes bulged.
“In all our years of marriage, I've never seen you look that animated over anything. You looked so vibrant!”
Frederick continued to struggle with the feeling that he was being a little phony, but responded positively to the reminder that all he was faking was a manifestation of the joy he actually felt for his material, not the joy itself.
Speaking, done well, is a performance. Improv is just another great tool to get one to the next level.
− Milo Shapiro, public speaking coach.
Business events using improvisation: http://www.IMPROVentures.com
Coaching, keynotes, and training
about PUBLIC SPEAKING: http://www.PublicDynamics.com
Tags: building, communication, community, cooperation, creativity, improv, public, speaking, team, teambuilding
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Al Caramatti -
Excellent Milo! Thank you so much for putting this together and sharing it with the rest of us. You've provided a very helpful blow-by-blow account. I've picked up in clear language:
(1) the reason for getting together, (2) what difficulties you saw the client was facing, (3) how you went about evaluating and working with those specific issues, and (4) even a bit about the results (at least in the short-term; who knows how much this guy will continue to grow now that he's made a crack in this area of difficulty) . This is a great contribution, and I appreciate your work in putting it together in a form that's useful to others!
Best to you, bud!
Al Caramatti
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