Somewhere, there is an excellent blog on this topic (but I can’t find it any more) but it struck me that this was a topic which could benefit from a little more formal treatment – hence this post and the next one. (I’m not giving detailed techniques in these articles, by the way, just chewing the fat….. :) Think of them as conversation pieces…)
I’ve “worked in theatre” on and off for a long time and even now, though most of my income is corporate presentations training, I still do a fair whack of it. There’s an irony that the day’s theatre-pay for an 18 hour shift will be the same as two hours pay from one of the big corporate clients. So why do it? Well that’s the key to one of things we in business can learn – attitude. The second key thing we can learn are specific techniques. I’m going to talk about them in two short articles – but I’d be really interested in your responses too; my experiences are pretty much limited to touring theatre and skewed towards the technician side of things….
Techniques
Actors learn to use their voices and to present themselves well. If you can’t get an audience to empathise with you, you’re dead.
Obviously that’s a key skill for anyone in business who has to make presentations. By that I don’t just mean the formal stand-up-and-talk style that we all think of as doing a presentation – I mean things all the way down to presenting a progress report at a meeting, sitting down with a potential client for the first time or even answering the phone.
Not long ago I got a private message on Ecademy from someone who’s just read my voice production book (Little Big Voice, Piquant Ltd, 2000), saying how pleased they were to learn something new and how they’d not expected to, as they were already a professional speaker. Yet the technique my co-respondent was referring to came from the metaphorical day one of drama school - and yet the effects were simply “stunning” at her next public speaking engagement! Talk about skill transfer from theatre to business presentation-making!
There’s an old saying that if you can fake sincerity then you’ve got it made. Call me cynical but actually faking it isn’t hard. It’s just a matter of learning how to breathe, how to stand and which words in a sentence to stress. Communicating and presenting at work is just the same: it’s all about being straight and honest.
Most of my income these days is from working by corporate training who want to be able to make better presentations to with their clients and potential clients – the principles of my advice is often the same (the details change!); start by treating your clients as an audience and figure out how to start from where they are. For a theatre Director the task of getting your audience to where you want them to be has three steps:
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Decide where you want your audience to be by the end
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Decide where your audience are now
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Figure out how to get from one to the other
Simple though those principles are, I’m always amazed at how often they’re not applied by anyone trying to communicate – be it selling, researching, promoting, reporting, asking…… whatever. (It’s one of the more common issues we cover in our Telling People courses.) People forget to start thinking about their presentations by asking themselves the second question and they sub-conciously start to make assumptions….
Let’s talk about other techniques - presentation equipment. No theatre technician worth his or her (pitiful) wages is going to be phased by even the latest equipment. You’ll not see one of them flustered when they’ve got to patch their laptop into a new system, even one with wiring that looks like a bowl of spaghetti.
You know what I mean – the presenter you’ve paid good money to come and hear just stands there looking a bit flustered and asks the person in charge “How do I plug this in?”! (For the record, folks, it’s called “patching” not plugging, if you want to sound like an insider. 
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Working in the theatre you learn the principles of making different machines talk to each other and can apply that after on a little thought. No two theatres have the same kit, so you learn the ‘high level’ how to do it
What do you think folks, what other technical skills can theatre bring to the ‘real world’ ? Next time I’m going to talk about “attitude”…..
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