In this series on rehearsing using the five senses, we have covered SOUND and now move on to TASTE. Yes, taste. How do we taste the words? We play with the words in our mouths. We practice tasting the words whenever we use technical terms, terms of art, jargon, foreign words, acronyms, and names. It’s also helpful if we find ourselves tripping over certain words or phrases. When in the play, The Other Place,by Sharr White, there was a particularly sticky phrase I could not pronounce without slurring, tripping, or dropping the words. It was a simple phrase, “What good would it have done?” However, I could not get it out of my mouth. In my warm-up before walking onto the stage, I added a practice of…Read on.

If I can survive it, so can you.

Too many years ago, I was in a wonderful play, The Other Place by Sharr White. I loved this play and the woman I had the honor to portray. She is a scientist who studies early onset dementia. And, unbeknownst to her, she suffers from early onset dementia.

For this role I was on stage for 90 minutes, an unreliable narrator hoping to find her long lost daughter. The other actors disappear into the audience when not on stage. My words trigger the next scene. Or not.

In previews, I lost my way…Read on

What’s at stake when we do not communicate our vision directly? As leaders, it is our responsibility to hold the vision and communicate it clearly and often, while also trusting our teams to be expert in their own realms. If we do not find this balance, we risk misunderstanding, internal squabbles over siloed priorities and resources, and wasted time and energy spent moving in the wrong direction.

As an actor in a play, I see things subjectively, from my character’s point of view. The theater director holds the vision, sees the big picture. They are two different jobs. The director has to allow the actor to discover and develop their character within the vision and world of the play as the director sees it. This is a tricky dynamic, but an important one for all leaders to balance.

Many years ago I was in a profound and disturbing play called Thatcher’s Women about the women who took up prostitution in the 1980s during Thatcher’s reign to support their families. I played two characters, both sex workers. The sets were dark and moody with female body parts protruding. The feeling for the play was bleak, cold, and raw. We did a lot of exploration, visualizations, and exercises to “find” our characters. As my characters revealed themselves, the one who lived on the streets, really came alive for me. I saw her as gritty, messy, punk rock, sassy, sleeping in train stations and waking up with cigarette breath. Maybe not the most original image, but she emerged this way. Despite witnessing my character’s journey in rehearsal, I got the sense that the director didn’t like where I was going. Nothing I offered worked for her, yet she gave me no direction. Her slight look of contempt said it all. I felt negated at every turn, but my questions only received vague hints I could not decode. A week before opening I received my costume: I was to wear bubble-gum-pink fishnets, purple leather shorts, a multi-colored, sequined bustier with my hair teased high, red lip gloss, and an enormous pink bow. Where did this technicolor caricature come from?

Read on….

The theater director and father of modern acting technique, Konstantin Stanislavski, used the term “objective,” to help actors focus on playing an action, rather than pushing for a state of being (“to persuade” vs. “to be upset” see “To Be vs. To Do”).  I like the term, “intention,” rather than objective because I find it more direct. Stanislavski believed that we always have an intention, even if we are not aware of it.  That is what makes us behave in wonderfully quirky, positively human ways. We always want something from the other characters in the play and we always want something from the other people in our lives.  That is our intention. If we do not choose a clear intention, we can default to intentions that are not helpful, undermine us, focus our energy on ourselves, and leave us expressively flat and disconnected.

We communicate our intention, not our words.

This is really important. 

Imagine a person saying, “I love you,” while sneering.  What message do we get?  Read on to learn how to use intentions…

In this photograph of Fatma, you get a sense of her presence. She is one of the few people I know who has a balance of both magnetizing in and radiating out. Her voice is lyrical, musical, calming, and exquisitely beautiful. It is light and rich at the same time. Her voice pulls one in, like smelling a flower. And, as you can see in this picture, her eyes radiate out. She bathes us in her presence.

Rather than thinking of people as introverted or extroverted, I think of people as either radiating out or magnetizing in. Both are powerful ways of being in the world. And all of us can play with both energies.

Personal presence is personal. Unique. And should be. It’s what makes people forever fascinating. Nobody should try to be less themselves. And though it’s wonderful to play with many behaviors in order to stretch ourselves or break habits, it’s also important to embrace our essential presence.

Read on for more on radiating out and magnetizing in…

In my work I often get push-back when I insist that my clients do what I call Extreme Preparation, which includes everything from what to say, to what to wear, and tons of practice. I get it. I do. There is a lot of fear around digging in deep. First, we may not know how to prepare, what to do, how to rehearse, what questions to ask, what skills and techniques to employ. Also, there is a real fear of losing that ineffable sense of being fresh. “I just want to let it happen. When I rehearse, it just gets stale.” I hear ya. The trouble is that when we do not prepare fully, we are counting on luck. We are crossing our fingers and hoping that the stars will align and the talk or presentation or interview or hard conversation will be brilliant! And sometimes it all does come together. Phew! And other times, it just doesn’t. It’s hard to be consistent when we do not have strong undergirding.

If you feel stale when you rehearse, it’s not because you rehearsed, you feel stale because you didn’t rehearse enough.

This week, set aside time to prepare for any important, heightened or weighty communication you have coming up.