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When and how to use a microphone…

How many times have you seen a speaker fumbling with a microphone at the beginning of a talk?

They seem uncomfortable with the alien object and then look hopefully at their audience: “Do I really need to use this?”

Here’s the thing: An audience will always say ‘yes, use the microphone’ because they have been in too many presentations where they could not hear the speaker. Especially at the beginning of a talk, they have not yet adapted to the speaker’s voice and personality.

The microphone, however, has nothing to do with hearing and everything to do with the speaker’s ability to enclose the audience in their own presence. The power of a speaker’s voice is simply a function of the power of his/her presence. By assessing vocal ability, one really assesses a speaker’s ability to invite an audience into their way of seeing things and to embrace the entire audience with their presence.

The awkward fumbling with the alien object (microphone) and the pleading question as to whether or not to use it, just makes the audience feel certain you will not be able to accomplish this. They feel they must save you from embarrassment and themselves from battling to follow and so they answer ‘yes, use it’.
Whether or not the speaker can actually grow their presence to embrace them, the audience cannot know. Only the speaker knows if they can do that.

How do you know if your voice and presence will carry??

In a room the size of a double garage with about 50 people, most speakers can do it. It takes special speakers to do it in larger rooms with larger audiences. You need not worry about microphones ever again in that size room with that size audience and no other noise (coffee machines or lawnmowers in the back ground).

In a larger room, with a larger audience, or with background noise, you need to work your voice. If you don’t know how, use a mic. But PLEASE, COME EARLY AND TEST IT! When the audience arrives, you must be ready. No sound tests, no fumbling. You must feel comfortable with the extension and at ease with using it, so your audience will have confidence in your ability to invite them into your presence through it.

How do you establish vocal and personal presence effectively?

You have one of two choices:

1. Ease into it by making small talk for a sentence or two to let them get used to your voice, your accent and personality (even if they know you, people need this time to adjust). If you were unsure of anything that you could not test without the audience, like the effect of their bodies on the acoustics, this is your chance to find out and adjust.

2. Come in with immediate power and confidence.
That means you decide beforehand to use the mic or not. You capture them from the get go. You do that with an upright, open posture, deepened breathing, eye contact, a resonating voice and an empathetic energy. In short you use the Confident Speaker’s ABC.

Book now for our workshop on the Confident Speaker’s ABC. 11 November in Cape Town.

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Also see our other November workshops:

09 Nov – Team Innovation Read more

10 Nov – Improvisation Skills for Coaches (NEW) Read more

17 Nov – Customer Interaction (NEW) Read more

18 Nov – Story Strategies for Facilitators (NEW) Read more

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Presence exercise: What I need to say…

Goal:

• Helping participants to become more present
• Practice listening and awareness skills

Overview:

In pairs participants share with each other what they need to say to be fully present. The sharing participant’s exact words are then mirrored back to them by his/her partner.

Time: 5 – 10 minutes

Number of participants: In pares or triads

Game flow:

Ask the group to divide in pairs or triads. Tell them that each person will get a turn to tell their partner/s what they need to say to be fully present. They should start their sentence with “what I need to say to be fully present is….” Their partner must then mirror their exact words back to them by starting their sentence with “I hear that what you have to say to be fully present is…” The person mirroring then may ask whether he/she heard correctly. The Sharing person may then add detail that the mirroring person missed or mirrored incorrectly. The mirroring person then without apologising mirrors the bits that they missed. When the sharing person is happy that the mirroring person got everything they thank their partner by saying “Thank you for listening” and the mirroring partner replies with “Thank you for sharing”.

Tips:

Ask them to share any thought or feeling that is pulling them either into the past or the future that is preventing them from being present. They only have to share what they are comfortable sharing with the other person.
It is important that the person mirroring does not give an interpretation of what they heard, but try to use the exact same words as far as possible. The other person in the group can then add if any detail was not mirrored back to the speaker. The exercise is not so much about saying what you need to say to be present, but being listened to fully without judgement.
Demonstrate using a personal example. Not only will this help the participants to understand the exercise better but it will help you to feel more present and build trust between you and the participants.

Debrief questions:

• How did you experience the exercise?
• How was your listening different than usual?
• What did it feel like being listened to like this?
• Did this exercise help you to become more present?
• Why or why not?

Notes:

When we listen to people like this we help them to become fully present. In essence, what we are doing is accepting them and showing them that they are welcome and worth being listened to. And as you focus and listen to the other person you also become more present. So it is being listened to as well as listening that helps one to become more present. This exercise was adopted from Imago relationship therapy, a style of dialogue aimed at restoring connection between partners ,by guiding them to the present moment. It was developed by American psychologist, Harville Hendrix.

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Why do we lose our creativity when we grow up?

Have you ever watched small children play? I’m always astounded by their imaginations and creative ideas. We’ve all been creative as children, but why or how do we lose this creativity?

Recently I listened to a talk by Eckhard Tolle called “The Journey within”. In his talk he says that creativity doesn’t come from thought but from a place of stillness. I tested this theory by asking my wife, who is the most creative person I know ,what happens just before she gets a creative idea. After a brief moment of silence she said in her metaphoric way of speaking, “There is stillness. It’s like the wind dies down and there is this moment of utter quiet and then the creative ideas come like a cloud burst. First just one large drop falls into the dry sand then it is followed by this shower of creativity.” “What is the wind?” I asked. “Its thoughts” she replies. I concluded that Eckhard is right. A creative idea isn’t a thought that you manufacture in your mind by trying really hard. The term “creative thinking” is therefore an oxymoron. Isn’t it unfortunate that school only taught us to think and not to be creative by not thinking?

It is also crutial that you trust your own creativity. All people are creative; we just lose it over time. The good news is we can reclaim it. The first step is to be still, and trust. Improv helps one to do this. A great improv game that helps to develop this trust in one’s own creativity is called Freeze Tag. In this game 2 people start a scene. At any moment anyone else can say freeze and tap out one of the players. He/she then takes that player’s position and starts a new scene in a completely new context justifying the position. A variation of this game is called Pimp Freeze Tag. In the variation an outside person calls freeze and tell the participants who should go in and replace another player. This way you don’t have time to think about what you want to do. You just have to trust yourself and see what arises. Participants in my improv class often comment that it is easier to come up with something good if they didn’t have time to think about it.

The next step is to trust the other player that they will take your creativity and do something with it – accept it and build on it (“yes and” it). I believe that the reason why we are afraid to trust our own creativity is because we are so use to other people rejecting our creativity and not accepting it. We all know how much rejection hurts. For most people it is not worth taking that risk anymore, so they label themselves as uncreative to protect themselves from rejection.

Now it’s your turn. Become still. Focus on the sounds around you. Become aware of your breathing. Write down in a comment below what arises.

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Improv class 2.3 – The cure for our semi autism

The theme of last week’s improv class was “be affected by what you hear”. We started the class with a relaxing exercise, focusing on the sounds we heard around us. This was followed by a name game called “George” that I learned at the IO theatre in Chicago. After that we played the famous Keith Johnston game called “Its Tuesday”. In this game participants pair up. One player says a random line such as “It’s Tuesday” or “you are wearing a dress” or anything. The other player over accepts the statement and reacts very emotional. The reaction increases until it reaches absurdity. In some cases the player might even die a comical death. This exercise was followed by an exercise that I learned from Armondo Diaz at last year’s Applied Improv Conference. In the exercise one player says a random opening line. The other player must react in a way that shows that the other player’s statement is important to them. In other words they react with a strong emotion. The reason why they had a strong reaction becomes the focus of the scene.

The application of being affected by what you hear went through my thoughts the whole week. And then I decided to Google it and see what pops up. The article that drew my attention the most was about Autism. The one thing that struck me was that autistic children are not affected by what they hear. Often parents of autistic children will at first think that their child is deaf because they don’t react to their names or sounds such as a door closing. The child does hear but is just not affected by the sound. It is as if they hear but don’t register the sound because of some process in their brain that is not functioning properly. It sounds a lot like the statement that we’ve all heard so often from teachers, “you hear, but you don’t listen.” The article reports that, “Hearing without listening is useless to produce intelligent social interaction. The value of hearing is measured in the ability to listen and respond to auditory information. If an autistic child can not listen and respond intelligently their hearing is useless.” Isn’t it true that we all suffer from some form of autism? Hearing but not listening? Why is that? I believe it is because we are not present when we are listening to others. We are up in our heads, worrying, thinking about other things. This state of being up in our heads I believe is very similar to the autistic brain processes not functioning properly. The article about autism ends of with a form of treatment that can help autistic children to improve their malfunctioning brain process. It is called monaural speech development. The rest of us can also improve our semi autism by learning to be more present and less up in our heads. The treatment for this I call Improvisation.


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Improv class 2.1 – Present yourself

After the completion of my second 6 week “introduction to improv” class, participants expressed their interest in a level 2 class. This really excited me, and last Monday we all boarded a train on a new journey. The library where I usually taught the class flooded, so we had the class in Pane E Vino, a very cosy Italian restaurant across the street from where I live. The warm fireplace set the stage for everyone’s creativity to ignite.

The theme for the first class was presence and awareness. I started the class with a relaxing exercise to help everyone get rid of all the thoughts of the day that held them captive from the present moment. An easy way to help you become present is to listen attentively to all the sounds that you can hear around you. Another way is to focus on your body by becoming aware of your breathing and the life inside of your body. For the most of the class we played a game I call Pattern circle, a very simple game with a lot of learning. I think we could have played that one game for a whole day. We ended the class with a game called Monster talk. In this game 3 players play one character and have to talk in unison. It’s exactly like the lyrics in that song by The Supremes that Phil Collins made famous, You can’t hurry love… it’s a game of give and take. You have to talk slowly and give and take the control. And of course you have to be present, aware and really listen to each other. Hmmm… sounds a lot like love doesn’t it? So yes doing improv can even help you in your relationships.

Last night was the second workshop of my level 2 improv class. Again we started with a relaxing exercise to get everyone present and aware. Being present, aware and in that state of stillness free from thought is crucial for improvisation, since creative ideas don’t come from thought. Recently I listened to a talk by Eckhard Tolle called “The Journey within”. In his talk he says that creativity doesn’t come from thought but from a place of stillness. I tested this theory by asking my wife, who is the most creative person I know ,what happens just before she gets a creative idea. After a brief moment of silence she said in her metaphoric way of speaking, “There is stillness. It’s like the wind dies down and there is this moment of utter quiet and then the creative ideas come like a cloud burst. First just one large drop falls into the dry sand then it is followed by this shower of creativity.” “What is the wind?” I asked. “Its thoughts” she replies. I concluded that Eckhard is right. A creative idea isn’t a thought that you manufacture in your mind by trying really hard. In last night’s class Liezel also commented that you need to trust your own creativity. That is also very true. All people are creative; we just lose it over time. The good news is we can reclaim it. The first step is to be still, and trust. Improv helps one to do this.

We also played Freeze tag last night. In this game 2 people start a scene. At any moment anyone else can say freeze and tap out one of the players. He/she then takes that player’s position and starts a new scene in a completely new context justifying the position. For a second round I said freeze and told them who should go in and replace another player. This way they didn’t have time to think about what they wanted to do. They just had to trust themselves and see what arises. Everyone commented that it was easier to come up with something good if they didn’t have time to think about it. I really enjoyed Olaf and Minki’s scene that went from a hair dresser to a convict sitting in an electric chair.

The next step is to trust the other player that they will take your creativity and do something with it – accept it and build on it (“yes and” it). I believe that the reason why we are afraid to trust our own creativity is because we are so use to other people rejecting our creativity and not accepting it. We all know how much rejection hurts. For most people it is not worth taking that risk anymore, so they label themselves as uncreative to protect themselves from rejection.

We ended the class with a game of “Whose line is it anyway?” In this game 2 players each get 2 random sentences written on a piece of paper. At anytime during the scene they have to read one of the sentences and incorporate it into the scene. Everyone played this game extraordinary well, accepting the offers and incorporating it. Each scene was worthy to be performed in front of a paying audience. Thanks for everyone’s participation, I enjoyed it tremendously.

Now it’s your turn. Become still. Focus on the sounds around you. Become aware of your breathing. Write down in a comment below what arises.

Now it’s your turn. Become still. Focus on the sounds around you. Become aware of your breathing. Write down in a comment below what arises.

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