There are men and women who live on the back porch of their souls, and when you walk up on the front porch and knock on the door, they take a long time to open up. You can hear their footsteps echo as they come cautiously down the hallway of their lives. They open the door a crack, wedge their faces forward, and ask you what you want.
I spent a day with a thoughtful presenter whose wit and vitality was there, but it was far back in her persona. She had great depth, it seemed to me, but not much surface appeal. She needed more surface!
All communication has substance, structure, and surface. Most speakers have a ton of substance. What they need is structure and surface.
Surface is a bunch of things. It’s the look and feel of the PowerPoint slides. It’s the hair, clothing, and style. But mostly it’s the ability to manifest on the skin what transpires down in the depths.
“They do not love that do not show their love,” said William Shakespeare, and I say I need to see temperament and conviction in a speaker.
I am not talking about theatrics, or histrionics, or vocal volume, or “sawing the air” and “tearing a passion to tatters.” What I need to see and hear is a high degree of intention in a speaker–enough intention to warrant my attention.
My client, this wonderful, sensitive person with much to say, was considered very effective in small groups but ineffective in large settings, and her career depended on her ability to connect with large groups.
I asked her to stand still, as though her feet reached into the ground and her head was tangled up in stars. I asked her to look only at the people in the back row, and look at each one of them for long periods of time.
I asked her to use her voice as a long arm–to imagine her hand on the shoulder of her listener in the back, and tell him what he needed to hear.
I asked her to reach into her mind with each inhaled breath, and only speak when the long arm of her breath had found and grasped the exact words she wanted to say.
I asked her to throw fire with her hands, like a wizard or a witch. Zeus could throw thunderbolts. Why couldn’t she imagine throwing sparks and beams of light with her intention? She could make those in the back row feel her gaze (I told her); she could touch them with the intensity and clarity of her thinking.
As someone said to me, we need to make the people in the back row feel as though they’re sitting in the front.
That’s more than arm waving and shouting. That’s radiating through the skin your desire to get your point across.
Few listeners will care if the speaker doesn’t care. To paraphrase The Bard, “They do not care that do not show they care.”
We need a surface!