You know the actors you admire—the ones who disappear into a role? Learn their amazing secret to create your own memorable performances!
Great actors know how to disappear into a role—and if you want to be a memorable speaker, it’s a trick you need to learn.
Think that’s impossible? It isn’t, especially if you want your critical message to be retained more than the mechanism that delivers it. Let me put it this way: the more your audience pays attention to your mannerisms, body language, and vocal delivery, the less they’re focusing on the important things you’re saying.
Are you too married to your content to be giving your audiences what they need? You may be an information expert, but your job when you speak is to reach and move listeners. To speak more dynamically and influentially, download my free Insights article, “Great Speaking? — It’s About Performance Over Content!”
So let’s take a look at the magic act all presenters should aim to achieve—The Amazing Disappearing Public Speaker.
How to Become More Effective at Public Speaking
We all know that public speaking can be a nerve-wracking business. It can produce everything from mild nervousness to high anxiety and even avoidance behavior. Knowing that all of this is due to a strong desire to succeed in the eyes of others and give listeners what they need—in other words, to realize this is being a responsible speaker—isn’t of much help.
The fact remains: You can be pathologically focused on your performance, seriously damaging your ability to reach an audience!
One thing I learned as an actor was that aiming for a great performance kept me on the surface of things. And that made me unable to create genuine, in-the-moment responses as my character. Such responsiveness to the needs of the moment—i.e, knowing how to achieve mindfulness in public speaking—is your stock-in-trade for an effective performance that genuinely connects with audiences.
The lesson here? — Spend less time putting together content (you’re probably already an expert on it!), and more time working on being comfortable in front of groups of people. In other words, learn and practice speaking completely naturally and without self-consciousness.
How Famous Movie Actors Approach a Role
There are basically two types of actors: Those who show us different facets of the character in themselves; and those who do the reverse, taking aspects of their own personality and planting them deep inside the character. It’s that second category that gives us the performers who disappear into a role, and that we can emulate as public speakers.
The first category gives us Clint Eastwood, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the classic example of this approach: John Wayne. (I would argue, however, that The Duke's film performances are much subtler than many people realize). In the second group we have Matthew McConaughey, Dustin Hoffman, Christian Bale, and Meryl Streep. For these actors especially, their craft means to believe, as deeply as possible, that they are a character. The actor’s “What if”? (If I were this person) allows every response of that character to occur naturally and spontaneously.
The story is told of the great Shakespearean actor Laurence Olivier, who on opening night of Othello in Moscow, was congratulated on his towering performance. “I don’t know what I did,” he replied, “and I can’t do again tomorrow night.” For the two hours’ traffic on the stage, you see, Larry had disappeared, and at every moment the audience saw not Olivier but Othello. If you can disappear that way into not your character but your message, you will be exactly right at every moment in terms of reaching and moving your own audience.
The Day My Father Watched Me Disappear
I learned my own lesson in this regard many years ago. I was appearing in a stage production of Aristophanes’ great comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens go on a sex strike until their men stop fighting the never-ending war with Sparta.
The play is a hilarious romp through Athenian attitudes and sexual mores, and I was playing the leader of the old men’s chorus (which has an ongoing on-stage feud with the old women’s chorus). One evening, my father was in the audience.
I knew that—but I was still shocked to run into him outside my dressing room during intermission.
“Why aren’t you on stage?” he asked. “I’ve been waiting the whole first half to see you!”
I told him I’d been out there, in a number of the scenes.
“Well, I didn’t recognize you,” he said gloomily.
And there it was: the greatest compliment I’d ever received as an actor. My own father didn’t recognize me in a character!
For once, I’d been able to achieve that all-important disappearance into a stage personage. Imagine the same power working for you if you disappear into the message you're delivering with passion and total commitment.
Your audience will get what you’re there to give them—as purely as your message can come through. And you’ll take a weight off your own shoulders in wondering if you’re coming across the way you need to.
