{"id":32,"date":"2006-09-19T11:03:54","date_gmt":"2006-09-19T10:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2006\/09\/19\/what-can-business-learn-from-theatre\/"},"modified":"2006-09-19T11:03:54","modified_gmt":"2006-09-19T10:03:54","slug":"what-can-business-learn-from-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/what-can-business-learn-from-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"What can business learn from theatre?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<meta content=\"OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 (Linux)\" name=\"GENERATOR\" \/><meta content=\"20050618;8160900\" name=\"CREATED\" \/><meta content=\"20060919;10280100\" name=\"CHANGED\" \/> \t \t \t \t \t<\/p>\n<style> \t<!-- \t\t@page { margin: 2cm } \t\tP { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } \t\tH1 { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } \t\tH1.western { font-family: \"Arial\", sans-serif; font-size: 16pt } \t\tH1.cjk { font-family: \"Lucida Sans Unicode\"; font-size: 16pt } \t\tH1.ctl { font-family: \"Tahoma\"; font-size: 16pt } \t--><\/style>\n<p>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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c hence this post and the next one. (I’m not giving detailed techniques in these articles, by the way, just chewing the fat….. :)\u00c2\u00a0 Think of them as conversation pieces…)<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">I’ve \u00e2\u20ac\u0153worked in theatre\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c <strong>attitude<\/strong>. The second key thing we can learn are specific <strong>techniques<\/strong>. I’m going to talk about them in two short articles \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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….<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\"><strong>Techniques<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">Not long ago I got a private message on <a target=\"_blank\" title=\"Ecademy\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ecademy.com\">Ecademy<\/a> 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 -\u00c2\u00a0 and yet the effects were simply “stunning” at her next public speaking engagement! Talk about skill transfer from theatre to business presentation-making!<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">Most of my income these days is from working by <a title=\"curved vision training\" href=\"http:\/\/www.curved-vision.co.uk\">corporate training<\/a> who want to be able to make better presentations to with their clients and potential clients \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">Decide where you want your \taudience to be by the end<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">Decide where your audience are now<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">Figure out how to get from one to \tthe other<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">Simple though those principles are, I’m always amazed at how often they’re not applied by anyone trying to communicate \u00e2\u20ac\u201c be it selling, researching, promoting, reporting, asking…… whatever. (It’s one of the more common issues we cover in our <a target=\"_blank\" title=\"telling people\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tellingpeople.co.uk\"><strong>Telling People<\/strong> courses<\/a>.)\u00c2\u00a0 People forget to start thinking about their presentations by asking themselves the second question and they sub-conciously start to make assumptions….<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">Let’s talk about other techniques – <em>presentation<\/em> <em>equipment<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">You know what I mean \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the presenter you’ve paid good money to come and hear just stands there looking a bit flustered and asks the person in charge \u00e2\u20ac\u0153How do I plug this in?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d! (For the record, folks, it’s called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153patching\u00e2\u20ac\u009d not plugging, if you want to sound like an insider. :) )<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">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<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-bottom: 0cm\">What do you think folks, what other technical skills can theatre bring to the ‘real world’ ?\u00c2\u00a0 Next time I’m going to talk about “attitude”…..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}