“Vonn” came to me wanting to be more effective as a speaker. His material was fairly well-organized (okay, we worked on it some, but that wasn’t the real issue). The real problem was that Vonn’s presentation style was flat, emotionless, and bland; he admitted that he could see his audience members zoning out…and I could see why.
While I certainly knew I wanted to work on voice techniques with him, the priority would be working on facial expressions. To be blunt, it almost looked like someone was supplying the voice while Vonn moved his jaw slightly to the words. What was interesting, though, is that unlike most clients I work with, Vonn didn’t look that stiff because he was nervous presenting. I had noted, right from our first in-person conversation, that Vonn conversed like that as well, with virtually no motion in his cheeks or eyes to reflect what he was talking about. The real irony is that Vonn’s topic was the significance of people following their passion!
As we worked together, I showed Vonn how to be more expressive in many ways with his voice and how to show that level of expression in his face. The difference was tremendous! Such a breakthrough! Or so I thought!
“Milo, I don’t think I can do this.”
“Sure you can. You just did! Maybe you need to see how good it looks.”
I suggested something I rarely do: we used a mirror (see my previous column, Why The Mirror Is Not Our Friend In Public Speaking). I put the mirror off to his right side and said, “Start out speaking directly to me and then slowly turn to the mirror and see how it looks. Try not to drop all that I’ve been showing you as you see it in the mirror, even if it appears strange to you.”
To his credit, he not only spoke the first few sentences with excellent, expressive facial and voice variations, but kept up the lively style through ten more sentences while speaking toward the mirror.
“So, how did that guy in the mirror look to you?”
“He looked powerful and impassioned.”
“Yes!” I celebrated.
“But I can’t do that. It’s not authentically me.”
That threw me. I took a moment before I replied. “Vonn, I know you care about your message or you wouldn’t be here with me right now. Between how you’ve been doing it and what you just saw in the mirror, which version do you think they’re going to get the message better from?”
“The second one,” he said without hesitation.
“Yes. Vonn, you’re not dating these people. You’re not becoming their new friend. You’re delivering a message to them that you care about and that you want them to be excited to act upon. If you hold back because it feels different from how you see yourself, you’re undermining what you could be doing for them.”
“But it doesn’t feel like me.”
“I just don’t think they’re going to care about that if they like the program better. Do this: Go home and try it out on your wife without explaining any of your feelings about it first.
Vonn went home and asked “Doreen” if he could show her what he’d been learning from working with me. She sat on the couch and he launched into his usual material, but more like the guy in the mirror.
“Omigosh, Vonn! That was so much better! I really felt your passion for the material more than ever! Yes!”
“But it doesn’t feel like it’s authentically me.”
As if I’d cued her, she replied, “I don’t care about that. I’m an audience member. I just want to love what I’m seeing. That’s your issue and you’re letting it stand between you and your audience’s experience.”
In the end, Vonn pushed himself to try “Mirror Man” with an audience…and it was a success. He told me that he came to realize that seeing it as a performance, rather than himself talking, helped his audience relate to the material better, and he just needed to expand his comfort zone around that.
“Remember, Vonn,” I joked, “no one ever watched Brian Cranston as Walter White in Breaking Bad and thought, ‘Meh…I don’t feel like that was authentically Brian.'”