“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

—Frederick Buechner--

This practice can apply to any kind of interview where we (feel) we are being chosen for something—jobs, schools, internships. All of these situations set up a power dynamic—the chooser and the chosen—that can rattle us, make us feel desperate, make us feel like we have to brag about ourselves and our accomplishments. We can fall into the “pick me!” mentality, rather than picking ourselves.

Please let that go.

Aside from the basics (to make enough money, to get experience and education), why are we applying for this opportunity? Usually, it is to find a great fit for what we want, what they want, what we have to offer, what they have to offer.

RESEARCH

Well before the interview...Read on.

In this series on rehearsal techniques, we are focusing on using the five senses as a way to play with our content. When we prepare for a talk, an interview, a training, even a tricky conversation, it’s important to surprise ourselves by using techniques that bring out the unexpected. We often think of preparation as simply “looking over” or “running through” the content. This is great for familiarizing ourselves, but keeps our relationship with the content pretty superficial. In rehearsal, we deepen that relationship, giving the content an aliveness, a spontaneity. We’ve talked about hearing the sound of the words, tasting the language, and this week we use sight: we use our bodies to show the words, to move them. We’ve all seen speakers who seem divorced from their bodies, their arms, faces, breathing held tight, rigid, as if they are more electronic speaker than human speaker. By showing the content in our bodies…Read on.

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.

In this rehearsal process, we first start with…SOUND. Of course, communicators must be heard, so sound matters. The mic matters, how we use the mic matters, how we articulate matters, our volume and tone matter. But before we find ourselves on the stage or in a heated conversation, we must rehearse. A rehearsal technique that bakes one layer of life into our communication is to focus on the sound of the words and allow for that sound to inform our performance. In my early twenties, I was lucky enough to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with…Read on.

Imagine a circus performer moving directly from practicing aerial feats in a studio to performing those same feats in a circus tent, in costume, with blinding lights, for a large crowd of rowdy onlookers. Nobody would expect that to work out well. Any performer knows that we need a transition between practice and performance. In the theater, we set aside a full week to be awful: we call it “tech week.” During tech week we are awkward, make big mistakes, lose any spark, while we get used to the props, set, stage, lights, music, sound design, people in the seats, and begin to bring it all together. As speakers and presenters, we can give ourselves this gift. We can do a mock-up rehearsal or two in our own space and, if we are really proactive, a “tech rehearsal” in the presentation space with all the tech—slides, clicker, lights, mic, everything. Here is what a tech rehearsal might look like for a corporate speaker…Read on.

“I know you bought airplane tickets, got a sitter, and booked a hotel, but DO NOT COME. It sucks. I’m awful. Really. It’s embarrassing. My performance is forced and boring and lifeless. I know it started off great, but trust me, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.” My family and dear friends have all received that call from me in the week or two before opening a show. In response they laugh and say, “Aha! You must be in tech week when everything falls apart. It’s going to be wonderful. I can’t wait! See you opening night!” They understand the rehearsal process and know that this phase, where everything falls apart and each line comes out like a thud, is a critical passage on the way to a free performance. It cannot be skipped. This is true for all rehearsal processes, whether we are practicing for an online power point presentation, a TED Talk, or a heightened conversation. But many of us do not know how to rehearse…Read on.

Where are the sheep? The New Zealand farmer who had lived his entire life on this piece of land noticed one day that the sheep were disappearing. The family looked far and wide, but found no clues—no carcasses, no wolves, no traps. It was not until the farmer almost fell into a massive sink-hole that he realized he had to look down in order to solve the mystery of the missing sheep. Alas.

When my husband and I traveled in New Zealand, we went on a (crazy) adventure rappelling 300 feet into that sink hole, past the ferns sprouting from the sides, into the mist, and landing at the lip of an underground river. The farmer now gives tours of his “Lost World.”

To get to the root of things, to unearth hidden mysteries, we have the courage and patience to discover the Lost World. Many questions we ask are horizontal—they keep the conversation safely in our sight-lines…Read on…