Remember the urban legend of the mother picking up a VW Bug to save her baby?  That act is pure intention with immediacy and high stakes.  That mother’s action, thought, behavior, voice, and words are completely aligned.  Her Big Why, her overarching purpose, may be to raise an adult that will contribute to the world.  Her immediate intention is simply to save her child.   She is not thinking about herself, her own safety, what she might look like, or what others might think of her.  Her focus on wholly on the child, the other. She takes immediate action in a matter of life and death.  The highest stakes possible.

The above scenario has elements that we can translate into helpful tools for any speaker: role (mother), given circumstances (child under car), purpose (to care for this vulnerable human), intention…Read on.

Great leaders compel others to struggle together towards a shared vision.

Great leaders work for the good of others; mostly, for those who have the least power.

Therefore, great leaders must be great communicators.

Politicians and those in the public eye often have a team of advisors who prepare them for debates, press conferences, media interviews, and speeches. These advisors focus on things like strategy, speech writing, and talking points. When I work on such a team, my job is to make sure that the speaker’s message is congruent with the speaker’s delivery. I focus on how the content is performed through expression, gesture, body-language, and voice.

Any of you following this blog know that my work with clients is not prescriptive; rather, our work focuses on freeing the speaker to be their full selves—alive, powerful, at ease, appropriate, and riveting. Rather than using a list of rules (“stand like this,” “don’t do that,” “lean in here”), we work towards…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…