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First off, when I say audience, audience is somebody who is listening. It could be one person sitting across the desk from you, or it could be a theater filled with people. Anybody who you ask for attention from is an audience, and there is often an inherent value in that interaction based on performance. Performance in the way that we're looking at is about authenticity.
The greatest performers in the world are the most honest ones, the most authentic ones. Performance is in large part about amplifying different parts of your personality in order to achieve a particular goal. We are talking with Michael Port, author of the book Steal the Show, How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life.
It's easy to start something and do okay, but it's the finishing that's the key. Your life is made up of lots of high stakes situations, and how you perform during those moments, and if you fall flat, then your life is relatively flat, but if you can shine when the spotlight's on you, then you get to do big things. That's exciting. The book focuses on feedback, how to give it, how to take it, how to get the kind of feedback that you want.
Recognize that you don't need to be an entertainer to be a performer. That's really important to remember. You just need to be somebody who wants to connect with others and deliver on promises.
Two different ways to reduce your anxiety about performing. They're internal, rather than external. There are certainly things you can do externally. You can try to calm your breath and warm up your body, but ultimately, the fear is inside you. It's not on the outside of you. It's on the inside. There are two ways that we can reduce that fear.
One, we can be better prepared. One of the reasons that we are often afraid is because we are not as prepared as we would like to be. We don't know if we are going to be able to deliver what we want to deliver. If you're prepared, then you tend to be calmer.
Number two; we get a lot more anxious when we get self-absorbed. Once we start thinking about ourselves, and we go, "Oh my God, I look fat in these pants," or "They're going to hate me," or "They're not going to believe anything I have to say," or "Who am I to say this? It's already been said," or any other number of things that we start to obsess on, when we obsess on those things, it just gets worse.
Brainstorm your whole story. Sometimes, it helps recording it, because you were trying to flash it out. If we do it on audio, and then we listen back, and we can write it down, what we said or we can have it transcribed if it's a very long story. It's good to have just a big messy draft, because that way, what we're going to do is we're going to cut. I'm going to try to sculpt it, mold it, because a story has three acts. The first act is the exposition: the time, the setting, and the place. It's the information that the listener needs to know in order to understand what comes next.
The second act is the conflict. It starts with inciting incidence. Something occurs that creates conflict, and that conflict spurs some kind of action, and that action might create more conflict, which then spurs some more action, which the spurs some more conflict. That's where the tension's created.
Then, of course act 3 is the resolution. Resolution is the thing that we're waiting for. It's not always happy. Sometimes it's "they all lived happily ever after," and sometimes it's "they all died in the end." The resolution determines the length of the story, meaning if the resolution is worth waiting for, it's incredible powerful.
