The fear of public speaking has oftentimes been ranked as one of our top phobias.
Google on the topics of fears; death and public speaking are almost sure to make the top 5 fears.
Why is it that many of us fear speaking in front of an audience? I believe it boils down to an overwhelming sense of self-consciousnesses; afraid of making fool of ourselves in front of an audience; being concern about what others might think of us rather than how we can impact others with what we have to say.
Yet, the ability to communicate; one-to-one and one-to-many is a critical skill-set to our public success.
Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman in their article “The Skills Leaders Need at Every Level” ranked the ability to communicate powerfully and prolifically as one of the top 5 skills that leaders need to succeed.
This is my own observation after two decades in the corporate world: there are no shortage of talented and exceedingly smart people around. But good communicators are in short supply.
Many of us can be so much more successful with better communication skills, especially in front of a group. Unfortunately, majority of us just get by without much fun (and impact) while doing it. Some will avoid speaking at all cost.
Many public speeches are at best mediocre. Hence, many of us have come to expect that most speeches will be boring.
The irony is this: there are individuals who are able to get ahead of their smarter peers simple because they can deliver more impactful speeches and presentations.
Bottom-line, like it or not, we need to speak well.
And, we need to help our child to become better speaker as well.
Its a huge topic. Public speaking training is an industry on its own. In this post, I will focus on one aspect: using acting to build public speaking skill.
A number of years back, I attended a “High Impact Presentations” training by Dale Carnegie Training. During one of the modules, we were given a task to read articles in front of our peers in the most exaggerated and animated manner that we could. The difficulty was this: the articles were utterly dry ranging from astronomy to chemistry and other scientific topics that will put most of us to sleep. The challenge: we need to stretch our presentation as far as we could to the end of the scale in terms of being exaggerated and the benchmark given to us was the actor Jim Carrey. We had fun!
The learning point was this: we cannot possibly be acting like Jim Carrey all the time. We need to adjust our presentations to the level of appropriateness according to the audience and occasion. However, the wider the range we have to play with, the more flexibility we will have as a speaker. In other words, we will have greater capacity to be more interesting.
At the same time, we learned that even a serious presentation such as delivering a scientific paper to an esteemed audience need not be boring as many would come to expect.
That was my first encounter in using acting to improve public speaking.
There was a lecturer when I was a student at the Singapore Polytechnic whom I will never forget. He was assigned to teach probably the driest subject in our computer programming course: Machine Language; aka binary 10011001010. Well, few of us slept during his lessons simply because short as his stature may be, he acted out to us what happened inside a computer system when computers “talk” to each other as if every components involved were alive!
Have a look at this video. This MIT physics professor has taken fun way of delivering his lessons to the edge:
Professor Walter Lewin prepares and dry-runs his lecture before his class like a performance. In other words, like an actor or stage performer.
Actors are trained to use their five senses to focus and have a better sense of self-awareness and environment as well as build their presence; all essential ingredient of a good public speaker.
Actors are trained to prepare for every scene and to be deliberate in their thoughts and actions; that is every gesture and movement has a purpose.
So as parents, consider training up your child’s speaking ability though the craft of acting. It is much more than just an extra-curricular activity to occupy them during the holiday.
I wrote an earlier post about my eldest son’s interest in pursuing acting as a career here. The training he received and his own interest has helped him in his emceeing in school as well. One teacher commented to my wife and me once that when Michael was doing “his thing” on stage, “that was his moment”.
National Education Ambassador, Michael Lee delivering a
Total Defence Day Speech on Civil Defence at Woodgrove Secondary School
Since then, he has attended many more classes at Haque Centre of Acting and Creativity (HCAC). In fact, HCAC offers a Theatre Incubator for Teenagers programme as well as Acting 101 which I can highly recommend. Check out their schedules here.
I think it is reasonable to say that academic excellence alone will not guarantee success in career. Most of us are aware that soft skills are critical as well.
So look beyond just the regular tuition. Build your child’s confidence in speaking before an audience by investing in good quality acting programmes that are available in the market. Your child can become the inspiring leader you see him/her to be.
…And yes, funny man Jim Carrey is not only a great actor, he is great speaker as well and proves here that an often serious event like graduation do not necessary need to be typically solemn like the many that I have attended: