Speaking With Eyes

I was a theater major in college. I quickly learned that there is a stigma that accompanies this.

The biggest misconception about acting and its training is that it is about learning how to lie—that the craft is all about deception. I understand where this misconception comes from, but I have found that acting, at its heart, is about the opposite.

Realistic acting training is about heightening your awareness of self and others and learning how to express your most truthful and honest self. It is about freeing up your choices in language and movement so you can more effectively communicate anywhere along the continuum of controlled to emotive.

Basically, acting training cranks your communication ability up. It helps you to see and hear more things people do, including yourself, so that you both have more choices and can react to more input.

As an educator, this is my major appreciation for the craft and study of acting. It is not so much about acting as about performance, specifically, increasing communication performance.

The great actors are great because they can communicate so well. One thing they have is the awareness to make choices that the rest of us do not know exist. Actor Michael Caine digs into the art of communicating by focusing on two things we can do with our eyes.

To summarize a couple tips:

1. When communicating, blinking weakens you. "Increased blink frequency reflects negative mood states such as nervousness and stress." (John L. Andreassi) To avoid pinning your eyes open with clothes pins, train yourself to maintain open eyes in key moments. (I know a wonderful communication trainer, Michael Grinder, who has trained himself to keep his eyes open for more than 30 minutes at a time.) You can see the difference if you look in a mirror and speak without blinking for 20 seconds, versus the standard a half dozen blinks.
2. Only look in one eye—don't switch eyes as you make the eye contact with people. (For a large group, this could translate to make eye contact with individuals in the group for several seconds a piece as you speak, versus darting your eyes around the whole group every second or less). Maintaining steady eye contact in one spot conveys confidence to the entire group.

How valuable could it be if more education training was about communication training, and that it took cues from master communicators in all avenues?

Talent Assessment

I just spent a couple recent Saturdays with about 40 education trainer hopefuls. Witnessing talent in motion is a beautiful thing.

I've been doing these tryouts for a decade now, and there are three basic groupings of people who attend them: (1) people who are naturally talented group communicators; (2) people who have the desire but not acceptable talent; (3) people somewhere in the middle - either not as talented and/or lacking some sort of desire to really throw themselves into the requirements of being a group communicator.

These three groupings are general, and could be broken down more regarding skills, knowledge, rate of learning, creativity, humor and all kinds of areas, but it seems that there are always about 1 in 3 applicants who are naturally gifted for facilitation and presentation work. The big question that continues to arise is How do you know?

How do you know when someone is a great facilitator? What makes them great? How much is subjective and style preference? Is success quantifiable? Testable? Why do some people see a non-talented group communicator and think he is good, while others vehemently disagree?

Motivated To Excel

I just saw the movie Breach last night. It is about Robert Hanssen, the real life story of the most destructive spy against the US government who has ever lived. Chris Cooper played Hanssen. Although I have seen little of him, I always enjoyed Chris Cooper's acting. But after Breach, he is without question one of my favorite actors.

The movie was good, but what really got me hooked was watching a couple short DVD documentaries in the extras. Considering how much Hollywood fluff is out there (models > actors, bodies > minds), Cooper's devotion to his craft is inspiring.

This is what Cooper did to get ready for his role:

1. Watched the only ten-second film clip of Hanssen available to him an ungodly amount of times
2. Incessantly interviewed the real life FBI operative who knew Hanssen best
3. Read "seven or eight" books on Hanssen
4. Spent two weeks prior to the film rehearsing with his primary actor partner in the film

In my work with facilitators, presenters, and teachers, I would estimate about 15% of the people I know are as committed to their work as Cooper (he is an Oscar winner, after all). I wish I could say I knew a lot of people with these habits, but when it comes down to it, massive devotion to one's work is unique. Other things take precedence: family needs, health concerns, TV - many things both important and ridiculous.

I am on the hunt.

Judge Me

One topic that frequently arises amongst my colleagues and me is how to evaluate facilitator / public speaker talent.

I came across an article in Scientific American from a couple years ago that was about how we judge people - specifically, how we can more accurately judge them based on 'blink'-like observations. Although much of the article is based on a person's environmental choices (like how they keep their house), the study provides some fascinating pieces of information.

One point is that a person's appearance has little to no validity on intellectual abilities, but we all have mental models (filters with which we see the world) that change how we judge others based on their appearance. To truly get an accurate intellectual picture of a person, Peter Borkenau's studies show that we need to listen to someone read out loud for only three minutes to construct a rather accurate image of his or her mental capacities. (I assume this means standard academic intelligence areas such as linguistic and verbal capacities.)

I wonder how other successful companies who hire presenter and facilitator talent hire.

Master Of Her Domain

Jenny Severson is talented.

She has a genuine, intelligent quality about her that I have seen since we first met, working together at a SuperCamp program in Illinois back in 1994. Since then, she has developed into a sought after educational presenter and consultant.

Last week I had the chance to hear her present information on group and personal motivation, which was a treat-and-a-half because she is so well read and does her homework (versus typical motivational speaker syndrome).

Key points I took away both during and after thinking about her presentation:

1. Motivation is increased by surrounding oneself with people who give us an emotional jolt
2. Some people have an incorrect mentality of: 'The beatings will stop when the morale improves', that decreases motivation
   
3. Principles: level one is to know them; level two is to do them, level three is to be them
4. It can be good to feel regret over decisions made - this can motivate us to want to improve

I also took away some observations on great presenting, like the value of having a repertoire of stories and the ability to tell them in varying lengths of available time. When a person deeply understands Beginnings, Middles, and Ends of communication, they better know how to engage and end conversation markers on emotional upswings, for example. They can also generate and quickly 'grab' examples from their mind that relate and support the conversation at hand.

Also, Jenny treats her time with the audience as time within a bigger picture, not time about her. She related her dialogue and points to points made earlier by other speakers and audience members - not toss off relations, but meaningful, thoughtful ones. This is an advanced move, as beginners are naturally too focused on themselves to go outside their own head much.

When I listen to and watch a truly masterful public communicator, it focuses my thoughts, letting me think and dwell on a topic in a more organized fashion, going along for a ride with someone who brings freshness and life to it.

Thanks, Jenny.