Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old girl, volunteers for a cruel and deadly contest to save her younger sister from certain death. In a post-apocalyptic future, teenagers from twelve districts are compelled annually to fight each other in gladatorial contests, while a nation's population is forced to watch.The contests are savage. Each young person's end is bloody, painful, or both. But Katniss has an advantage: she is a hunter, skilled with bow-and-arrow in the daily struggle to feed her widowed mother and sister Primrose.
Katniss can send an arrow through an apple at twenty yards and make it look easy.
She may be a reluctant player in The Hunger Games. But she is well prepared to compete with the vicious, much larger male contestants eager to dispatch her as quickly as possible.
What performer could resist the temptation to show off her talent in such a role?
Serving Yourself
Jennifer Lawrence is the 21-year-old actress who plays Katniss in the wildly popular movie "The Hunger Games," and resist that temptation she does. Instead, she plays Katniss with "calm and grace," as the Wall Street Journal's critic Joe Morgenstern puts it.
In doing so, she serves up a lesson for all of us who perform in speeches and presentations. The lesson is this: serve the story you're telling; serve your message; serve the people it's your job to change for the better.
Serve.
The temptation for each one of us is to do the opposite: to consciously excel, to show off, to seek glory, to talk our way to a large speaking fee. Audiences, not usually composed of stupid people, see through us when we try such a thing—if not immediately, then soon enough. If there's a better way to destroy our own credibility with our listeners, I haven't heard of it.
Serving Others
In my theatrical career, first as an acting student in the U.S. and the England, then as an actor on the New York Stage, I grew to admire one thing above all others: actors who served the play rather than themselves. Any actor worth his or her accolades recognizes instantly whether this selfless quality exists in another performer. As professionals in business, the nonprofit arena, government, and all our other careers, we need to do the same in the presentations we listen to day in and day out.
More than that, we need to follow the lead of Ms. Lawrence and others like her.
You know who these people are: in social justice, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi; in stage and film performance, Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep; in music, Joni Mitchell and Adele; in philanthropy, Bono and Oprah Winfrey.
And in business, government, law, healthcare, religion, sports, science, and education?
That's your assignment, if any one of those fields is your passion. Watch those who do so and emulate them. Then serve your message, and the audiences who hunger to hear it.
