Playing Yourself

The Public Speaking Double Bluff

I am standing in a wood, at the edge of a pool. I drop a pebble into the water, watch the rings dissipate. When they do, I drop the next pebble. Like anywhere I go in my head, I’m more aware of the place than I am of me. It’s the pebbles, not myself, I’m here for. I don’t drop the next pebble until those rings have faded to stillness. Then, in goes the next.

I’ve been using this pool for as long as I can remember. Rather than race through your lines (if you’re acting) or information (if you’re giving a speech or being interviewed) or offering all the multiple directions a conversation could go (if you’re interviewing someone else), drop one thing into the silence, let the rings dissipate around that. The space between is where the thinking happens.  

This wasn’t necessarily how I experienced my earliest performances (say, The Wicked Fairy, aged 6, at primary school), It was how I was thinking by the end of Youth Theatre (Hilda, the Ugly Duckling’s sister, aged 18) but the most important place I used this wasn’t on a stage. It was beside one. The place the penny (not just the pebble) dropped about how communication and performance fit together was the first time I knew I needed to play myself.

That place was one of the first primary schools where I ran drama clubs. I was standing at the side of the hall, listening to the head teacher introduce me. I’d recently left university and, if I’m honest, felt closer to being one of those identically uniformed and identically poker-faced, cross-legged children staring up from the floor, than to being one the smattering of adults seated around the edges of the (suddenly enormous) room. What was going on in my head went along the lines of “Oh God, what if no one wants to do drama club? What if they don’t like me? What if they realise I shouldn’t be here?” and all the other things impostor syndrome screams so eloquently as we stand at the edges of our comfort zone. Then it was time to start walking. It was also the moment I thought, “What if… I get to choose who I am and what this is?”

That was how I walked onto that stage, with a quiet smile for myself as for them; how I took the time to lock eyes with every child in the room before, still in no hurry at all, I asked, “Who here knows what drama is?” and watched every pair of eyes returned my interest and focus right back, as every hand in the room went up. Those poker faces became animated and welcoming when that was what they saw. It’s not because they were children that the technique worked. It was because they were human. The vocabulary changes according to who you’re talking to, but the not-so-secret ingredient is taking the time to see them: to connect.

That double bluff against impostor syndrome works like this: “What if I were the person everyone out there thinks I am?” You commit, and decide, to show up as the person the audience knows you are and – whisper it – are absolutely correct. All I did was speak as the person everyone in the room except me knew I was, because that’s the thing about impostor syndrome: convincing as its argument can be that everyone has been deceived about you, that they will realise their mistake and blame you for it, it’s actually the audience who know the truth. You are that person they see you as; you do belong there, talking to them.

We don’t have to limit ourselves to the opinions of the voices in our head and call that reality. Two years before that assembly, the director of studies at my theatre had told me “I never thought you had any real talent” in my tutorial and at that time I remembered his words far more than I remembered the professional director I worked for the same year who called me a “a natural”. The only truth that matters is the presence we’re willing to bring to the room. That’s who we are: not what other people may have thought before but how we show up in the world. When I’m talking to an audience now, whether that’s one-to-one, a panel, a lecture, writing an article, narrating my audio essays, on Instagram Live or anywhere else, it’s not about how many people are watching or what they might be thinking. If my focus were on the mental detritus of others’ previous opinions, then it’s not on the road ahead, the reason any of us is here: the destination of the journey is who we’re talking to, getting the message out of our head and into theirs. It’s being of service in the moment. Playing our role authentically. Which means, as Stanislavski said, “loving the art in yourself and yourself in the art”. We are showing up for a reason, and we serve that goal by focusing on it rather than ourselves: the message, and not ourselves as the messenger. Focus on who you’re talking to and why, and you connect with them authentically. Connect authentically, and you communicate authentically.

Here’s why we’re likely to speed: fear. Here’s why we’re likely to crash: speed. We want to get there as fast as we can so the journey is as short as it can be. Here’s the result: less connection, less emersion, no enjoying the journey and therefore a greatly reduced enjoyment in the destination. I’m not saying standing in front of an audience is easy. It isn’t – at least, until it is. Focus works like any other kind of muscle memory: it gets easier when it gets to be a habit. The more emersed you let yourself grow in connecting, talking to and not talking at the audience, the easier it is. Not because it’s easy. Because you’re better at it. Drop one pebble at a time. It’s the pebbles, not ourselves, we’re here for.

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