E76 - Public Speaking, Acting, Performance & Self-Esteem (with Andy Laithwaite)

Andy Laithwaite is an actor and the co-founder of The Actor Inside, a company which delivers training to companies and organizations on public speaking and performance.
Using the lessons learned from drama training Andy and his team help people to improve improvisational skills and and on the spot problem-solving, develop better vocal presence, gain composure in front of an audience and improve listening, collaboration and leadership skills.

In addition Andy also dose 1:1 coaching to provide a more individualized approach to manging anxiety in performance situations, handling burnout and becoming more authentic when relating to others. 

In this episode we discuss:

• The fear of public speaking and some evolutionary reasons why this fear is so common.
• What  acting and psychotherapy have in common.
• The importance of spontaneity.
• Andy’s approach to helping people improve their performance skills.
• Why trying to hard and self-criticism can become self-sabotaging behaviours.
• The importance of authenticity when communicating.

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi - Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast

If you would like to enquire about an online psychotherapy appointment with Dr. Alex, you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com

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Transcript

 Welcome back to the Thinking Mind podcast. Today I'm in conversation with Andy Slaithwaite. Andy is an actor and the co-founder of The Actor Inside a Company, which delivers training to companies and organisations on public speaking and performance, using the lessons learned from drama training. And he and his team help people to improve improvisational skills and on the spot problem solving, develop better vocal presence, gain composure in front of an audience, improve listening, collaboration and leadership skills, and gain techniques for camera and in-person communication. In addition, Andy also does one on one coaching to provide a more individualized approach to handling burnout, managing anxiety and stress in performance situations, and becoming more authentic when relating to others. In this episode, we discuss the fear of public speaking and some evolutionary reasons as to why the sphere is so common. What acting and psychotherapy have in common. The importance of spontaneity and his approach to helping people improve their performance skills. Why trying too hard and self-criticism can become self-sabotaging behaviors. The importance of authenticity in communication, and much more. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and related topics. If you like it, there are a few ways you can support it. You can share it with a friend. Follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you happen to listen. Give us a rating or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. In addition, I am now offering one on one online psychotherapy sessions, so if you're interested in that, you can check out the email address in the description. Thank you for listening and here's today's conversation with Andy Slaithwaite. 10s Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Welcome. Thanks very much for having me. Can you tell me a bit about who you are, what your company does? Yeah, of course. So I am an actor originally by training and the company that I run on set up actor inside, we help people kind of get over anxiety around doing presentations, public speaking, difficult conversations, webinars, all these, uh, you know, challenging communication contexts through reapplying the tools that professional actors get given in as part of their professional training. Mhm. It's a it's a very widespread problem isn't it. Public speaking. People feel very anxious if they have to perform. Do you think it's becoming more common. 1s Oh gosh. It comes in many different forms. There's obviously a lot of speculation about like contemporary generations being progressively more anxious. All of these related, uh, mental difficulties with socializing, uh, being more prevalent in the modern age that we're in. But it's difficult to know from, like, first hand. I can't say that I've studied the the grand dame. You're not an epidemiologist. I know, unfortunately. It's funny because I thought since Covid everyone was an epidemiologist. Yeah. Yeah, it really took off, didn't it? Yeah, yeah. Armchair epidemiology. But, um. But no, I couldn't possibly comment. Well, what are the problems you frequently run into? You must deal with people a lot, I guess. Individuals and groups. Yeah. It's so in terms of the one of the main core things that we look at or I suppose, like conceptual approaches is this idea that in all of what a lot of these difficult communication contexts have in common is that at root, there's a whole. 2s Untapped area of your communication potential, which you're estranged from because of the anxiety associated with having an audience with the stakes involved in the particular pitch or conversation. And that means that whereas if you were trying to do the same thing or do the same speech with a trusted friend, it would go perfectly, seamlessly. As soon as you apply the tension and the pressure of being watched, of kind of feeling like you need a particular result or return, then it's like all your natural pre-existing skill goes out, out the window. So a very big part in all of these different areas that have this in common, what we're looking to do is develop people's ability to, uh, familiarize themselves with the discomfort involved, to lean into the discomfort involved, to better regulate their own nervous system as they do so. And there's a whole bunch of different techniques involved in doing that. It's it's like low key exposure therapy, just doing lots and lots of practice and different kinds of practice. So practicing if you want to get more relaxed, speaking off the cuff, you practice speaking off the cuff and you find that will be less triggering as a result. You've obviously got more like direct methods of anxiety management, like preparatory relaxation, like breathing and and mind body awareness, as well as moving into the actual doing of the presentation or doing of the whatever it is like webinar like moment to moment awareness of your breathing, your pacing, giving yourself opportunity to breathe. And. And collectively. The aim of all of these different tools is to help you get out of your own way and get back in touch with the the natural skill that you already possess when you're relaxed. And then once that takes place, there's a whole bucket of additional skills and tools that you can begin to apply which further hone those skills, like awareness of your voice and variety and pitch and adequate support from, uh, kind of looking at your body as a, as an instrument and playing that instrument better, but from the inside, if you will. Uh, so awareness of body language as well. And, and the relationship that that will have not only on you but also on your audience and and how. That will draw your listener in and help them feel more connected to you. Build rapport and in the process, obviously the quality of what you're doing improves. But. 1s Further to that, if you're getting better feedback, then you also relax more and then it becomes a whole system where really what you're looking to do is hack into like a positive cycle of momentum building rather than what most of us experience, which is the opposite. It's like we get in front of people, we go eek! And. There's this kind of experience of almost like the the full scope of our awareness just begins to narrow and narrow and narrow until we feel like we're a rabbit in the headlights, and it's very difficult to get out of that once we're there. So we're looking to hack the same process, but move it in the opposite direction. Yeah, I think what you said is really interesting, and it really resonates with my experiences of making this podcast, which essentially I don't know how Onion and Rebecca feel, but essentially feels like long term exposure therapy. And I think what you said in the beginning is extremely important. And I'd like to underline that, which is. People are cut off from themselves, and as a result, they're not accessing the resources they could access when they're performing or speaking publicly, publicly. I think most people think when they're in some kind of performance situation or to be good at performance, they have to do something extra. They have to become someone else. They see someone who's good at performing, like a Brad Pitt or someone who's really good on a podcast, and they think, I'm not that person. I'm cut from a different cloth. Whereas I think what's really insightful about what you said is you have the potential, but you're cut off from it because of because of anxiety and other reasons. Can you expand a little bit more on that? Yeah for sure. I think you've put it really nicely. So you have a number of different approaches to performance and acting. The the approach that you've described is the one that resonates most with me as well. And it's that idea of the untapped potential which in order to access it, it's not necessarily just about being relaxed, because the problem with that approach is that that can then catastrophize the feeling of tension, and then you get in your head because you're like, oh, no, I'm not relaxed and get more and more tense and you're just kind of like and also you have no control over how you feel anyway, right? Exactly. And that can be down to things like whether you've had caffeine that morning, one too many coffees or whether you slept well the previous night, let alone obviously like these situations where it's a room of people you've never met before and you're doing material for a job that you really want. But there are a number of very interesting and formative experiences for me at acting school which underlined this approach, where I remember in one of my, uh, we had this like short film project as part of my two year training, I did the postgrad training and I was really, really, really keen to do well in this. And it meant a lot to me. And there was this one scene at the end of the film where I was having a very emotionally intense confrontation in character with one of the fellow actors, and. 1s I remember just trying and trying and trying and it was like the you're like, you're not getting it on the first take. So you're like, okay, I'm going to try harder and then you're not getting it on the second take. So you try even harder and you just get tighter and tighter and tighter, like physically tight. And that physical tension obviously, then feeds back into your nervous system and further reinforces that sense of threat. And then you it's like everything just begins to narrow and be cut off. Like your ability to recall your lines goes out the window as well. And then there just came a point where I essentially just like gave up, like physically like let go. And then it was like floodgates open. 1s Tears for days and well, not literally days, but it felt like that in the moment. And from this place of complete ease as well. And I've had a number, an increasing number of these kinds of experiences which are almost like, um, you're grateful when they come, but because you can't force them to an extent, it's like manna from heaven. It's like sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. But. 1s It's almost like this. Uh. 1s Quite amazing, like spiritual experience of feeling like the performance come out of you rather than having to draw it out and. There are differing degrees of that, and I think often the performances that compel me the most are the ones that feel that like it's really coming from that deeper place and it's a more authentic place, it's less forced. And the same holds true for communication in general. And in talking to people and seeing people pitch or present or be on a zoom webinar, whatever it is like, I think you you can really tell and it also makes it. A whole lot more sustainable from the perspective of the performer if you're not having to. Like, force it every single time. Because if you are and you're being called on to do like ten performances a week, or intense scene after intense scene, or like a really busy, like, um, filming slate, you're just utterly exhausted. Yeah, I heard there was a director who does a lot of takes. It's the director of Fight Club, the Zodiac films. Yeah. David Fincher, David Fincher. My understanding is he does loads of takes. He does make an act to do 80 takes to generate the effect that you describe. So they're so exhausted it just comes out of them. Yes. Yeah. And it's it's very funny like the different ways that different directors and artists involved, um, try to, uh, encourage this state to come about. It can also help, like having minimal set like or minimal people on set. Um, so that you have that 1s sense of it's a lot easier to cry without loads of people waiting on you to cry in the room, obviously. So. Or like, um, I know Clint Eastwood. Something that he does is in his films as a director. He doesn't have cuts between scenes wherever possible, so he will just leave the camera rolling. And the theory there being that it takes away that sense of like on and off and that sense of like, oh, I've got to bring something extra because we're doing the scene now rather than having that more easy. Slightly more playful, relaxed approach into it. And I'm fascinated by this because there are so many parallels between what you're describing and psychotherapy. So in psychotherapy. Spontaneity is very important because really in life spontaneity is very important. And when I see clients for sessions, the number one thing they always say at the start of the sessions, even if they've been doing therapy for a while, is I don't know what to say. I don't know how to start. And it's very counter-intuitive because most things in life we have to approach them, or we try and approach them in a linear, structured, logical manner. A to B to C to D. We don't think of things in a spontaneous associative sense, to our detriment, because spontaneity and association, as Freud discovered, is how you become more aware of things that you weren't aware of previously, how you become more aware of your unconscious. And it doesn't just work in psychoanalytic. Freudian therapy works in different kinds of therapy. And so clients come to therapy and they're like, I don't know what to say. The what they what I advise clients to do is speak your mind and then let your mind go to the next thought and then to the next thought tangentially, without any regard for it's making sense, or it being a good thing to say in therapy, or it being insightful or even necessarily important. And inevitably, when they can do that and relax, as you're saying, and just let let them talk, let the words come out of them rather than forcing it. It always goes to a useful place. And then at the end they always say, I can't believe we started here and finished there. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's I mean, an image that comes to mind which reinforces that is this idea of like. A seed growing organically from within, rather than being drawn out or pre-planned or driven from the top down. And there being something very special about that process when it's so visibly from a spontaneous inner life, which is a revelation even to the person who is producing it, rather than something which is very much premeditated and thought out. And that's not to say that there isn't scope for a lot of really helpful preparation. And one of the most actually, I find helpful forms of preparation is kind of like a mishmash of the two, both the premeditated and the spontaneous. So what you're doing is doing. Repeated iterations of improvising, so that in the process you're basically saying coming in with a blank slate at the very start saying, look, it doesn't matter what you say, it really doesn't matter. Just say whatever you whatever comes to you in the moment. We're not looking for quality here. We're just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks and doing that again and then doing it again. And each time that you're coming at it, re approaching it with that sense of like, whatever just happened, it's there if you want it, but also throw it away and. So you build up your confidence not only in your ability to come at things spontaneously, but you also have developed this library of expressions. 1s Formulations of the concepts of the ideas that you're looking to put forward, that are there to draw on in a, you know, like a bucket of Lego bricks kind of way. But each time that you're coming at it afresh, or it's almost like you're dismantling the Lego bricks, putting them back in the bucket. But the bucket is much fuller than it was before. Yeah. So I found that to be incredibly helpful, both personally in my work of like prepping an audition or even prepping a workshop or anything really, like prepping for this podcast. And you say even for writing, writing coaches say the same thing. If you want to be a writer, you know it's not about writing perfectly. It's about sitting down every day on most days and having an apportioned amount of time to write. Not necessarily to write well, but just to let your hand move across the page or let yourself type. Allow yourself to write six mediocre pages of whatever it is you're writing. And then from that filter out the gems. See? Okay, what from these six pages is actually valuable. And even if there's not much valuable, what did I learn about the writing process? But the writing process itself should be spontaneous. That's why we have editing. Editing can take place after the fact to allow for the writing to be spontaneous. And similarly, doing a podcast like I have no idea, I planned some questions I'll prepare in between, but we specifically do the podcasts in a way where we don't know necessarily how things are going to go. So you get that balance between preparation and faith kind of thing and where they interact. And really interesting things can happen. Yeah, and that's where you very much feel like the spark of life. And it's it's quite funny because. This is, I think, the basis of one of the reasons why a lot of actors, their worst nightmare, is appearing on stage or on screen, next to live animals or babies, because they are truly in the moment and truly spontaneous. And they have this chaotic, spawn like, unfiltered spontaneity that audiences cannot but help watch almost exclusively like I went and saw. So it's a jealousy thing? Yeah. Jealousy thing. But also like you, you're you're desperately trying to it's the same state that comes naturally to them. And you're, you're wishing that you could do the same thing with your performance. And yet if you've done the show however many times, or you've been directed in a certain way, it can be quite difficult to find that sense of spontaneity within structure, especially if the lines have been, you know, pre given to you as they are in, in theater scripts. So it's a real challenge to try and like have that same sense of spontaneity within a given structure that an animal or a baby has naturally, by virtue of the fact that they, they have no pre given structure other than maybe being told to like stand there and they've been trained to stand there. Yeah, it's, it's very hard acting. There's lots of ups and downs in it's competitive. People are fighting for a few spots. How does a person manage that? Those ups and downs, I guess. Is it down to developing some kind of core confidence that's more immune from validation? External validation? Mhm. I think in an ideal world, yes, very much in practice. Different people have different methods. I think for me one of the most helpful tools has been self-compassion. And that goes through even within the acting process itself. Like I am someone who likes and has habitually, I guess, been conditioned to like doing quote unquote, a good job. And the flip side of that is that you trip yourself up, you get in your own way because you're holding yourself to a very high standard, or it adds a lot of tension of associated with expectation and performance anxiety connected to that and great elation when you get good jobs, but also really quite intense frustration and despair when, unfortunately, for the most time, as a professional actor like you don't get most of the jobs that you go for. If you even have the opportunity to go for those jobs in the first place. Because it's an incredibly saturated industry and the opportunities for the majority of people in it are few and far between. Most of the time, even the process of getting representation and getting an agent, it can feel like you're really knocking on thousands of doors and nobody's answering. And then even when you get in and you get that big break with a big agent that you think is going to open all those doors, you then sit on the books and for whatever reason, you're not their priority right now. And it can feel very frustrating, the sense of lack of control and lack of agency. And so in the context of that, like, I think for me, self-compassion has been a real, a real godsend, a real valuable thing to to cultivate just that sense of like. I don't know. Patience. Holding your like an integrity and sense of, uh, self approval, which is based less on how other people value the output that you produce, even though that's obviously very nice to get that feedback and more to do with your moment to moment. Like, I don't know, it's just like, even if I could push a little bit more right now and I feel like it would make the output better. It's like by doing so, I'm leaning into a more a kind of sense of internal pushing where I'm feeling more at odds with myself. It's like lacking that sense of compassion, and that can become a very slippery slope over time. If you're constantly resorting to that same pattern of pushing yourself like long term, it just leads to burnout, you know? Yeah, I've been thinking about these concepts a lot, especially last year, and I. The difference between, let's say, confidence and self esteem or what is healthy self esteem comprised of, where does self-compassion fit in? And what I've landed on is that I think people need to embrace a kind of paradox. Some conflicting ideas one. One idea is that you should go into the world. You should engage. You should take risks. You should challenge yourself. You should develop new skills. You should try and be better. And with when you do that, you'll succeed sometimes and fail sometimes. You win some, you lose a lot. And this will have its ups and downs. And then I think simultaneously a person should have self-compassion. And I would define that as kind of a basic sense that irrespective of the results you get from the world, you're a worthwhile person, you have value, you belong in the world, you have a place. And at a glance, those ideas are contradictory. But I think if you can learn to embrace them and know when to lean into the challenge and when to lean into the compassion, then you're a bit more dynamic. And obviously it's sustainable because like you said, you burn, you burn out. If you're all challenged, you'll burn out. If you're all compassion, you never do anything. Yes, for sure. And actually, even for me, something that I've found very useful as a framework is that sense of like self-compassion as a as a motive for action and engaging in challenge. So acknowledging that. I feel good. When I'm growing, I feel good. I feel pleased when I am getting that nice feedback from other people. And so working towards it and leaning into that growth and leaning into those challenges can itself also become an act of self-compassion. And I feel like that can then. Very much. 1s Influenced the tenor of the action that you're taking so that it's less it's applied. You are applying yourself, but it's less like strained. It's less like like live and death, you know, life and death. Um, and that for me has been something that I've found really helpful and, and continue to, to lean into. It's kind of like, you know, every day is a school day. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully it is. Yeah. And a lot of people might think about the idea of learning to perform, whether it's in the workplace or in their personal life. They might think of learning to, to perform in a kind of cynical way. And they might think perhaps they would associate it with wrongly, I believe, associated with inauthenticity. Can you speak a little bit to the importance of learning how to make a so-to-speak good performance, whether it's at work or in your personal life, or when socializing, even in a relatively small interaction? Mhm. Yeah, for sure. This the whole debate around authenticity is super interesting. Because I think it's a very understandable. Drive or desire. And we've most of us will have had those experiences where we feel like we're socializing or we feel like we're doing some kind of professional performance or personal performance where it's like performance with inverted commas, like it feels. It feels very. Distant from ourselves. Just like Faust. Like. Whatever result we're going to get from that isn't necessarily going to be the result that we fully want, because it's not really us like, or any praise that we get from that isn't really going to be relevant to us, because it's not us or we worry we're going to be manipulative. Yes, yes as well. And. Something that I found, which is quite interesting, is that. 1s I. I believe. It seems that a big part of that feeling of inauthenticity is. Can be ascribed to lack of familiarity. So when at acting school, you are. Um, learning to let's say let's take one. Like a spatial awareness example. So in you have various different forms of theatre where the audience might be directly in front of you. It might be that the audience is all around you, like in the round. And if you're performing in the round, you have to make sure that as you're performing on stage, you are constantly moving and shifting the. The moneymaker, as it were, like the front of your body and your face in the most expressive areas, so that everybody gets an equal turn of seeing you in the audience, or more or less. And when you're doing that and trying to program that in for the first few times of like working in the round, it it can feel very what we would think of as inauthentic because it's unfamiliar, because it's yet to have become practiced to the point of not requiring a large portion of the mental ram of your, of your brain, of your psychology, so that it feels like excessively deliberate. And it actually what then happens over time by persisting through that and having seen this process play out enough times in enough different areas, is that it becomes second nature and something which no longer feels, quote unquote, inauthentic, because you've given yourself the opportunity to transition from unconscious incompetence to what is essentially like unconscious competence, but via conscious incompetence and unconscious competence. So it's an interesting process. And you see it the same thing with public speaking, for instance, or presentations with things like filler words like ums and ers and likes and kind of in the initial stages, trying to get on top of that can feel incredibly. Deliberate to the point of. 1s A huge distraction because a very large portion of your brain is just going, don't say, um, don't say, um, don't say um, while you then have only 10% left to be like, oh, what am I talking about? And how am I getting this across? But with practice and with time. The proportions shift so that you go, oh, performance mode 5% switches on in the background, which says, oh, watch out for fillers. Make sure you're facing the audience. This, this blah blah, blah. And the other 90% can now take care of the actual meat and potatoes of engaging and just being present with the task. Yeah, I think you're right. I think the lack of familiarity, people don't like that feeling. It makes them feel uncomfortable. Yeah, they want to avoid it. And I think people have to learn that if they are going to adopt a new set of skills, there has to be that period of. It's feeling strange, what you would call conscious incompetence and then conscious competence. Those two middle stages where it feels very strange that you. 1s Doing something in addition to try and get to try and engineer a certain result. And I also think in addition to that, there are people who. Maybe they probably because of their personality, they feel very strongly that authenticity is important. And anything you do to try and manipulate your signal that's going out to the world, they feel it's wrong or deceitful in some ways, which I don't necessarily agree with. I kind of think of it as the difference between the quality of a product and its marketing, and you can have a great product, but if it has terrible marketing, no one's going to see it or use it. And it's also true that irrespective of the quality of a product, the marketing can be deceitful. So these kinds of skills can be used in the wrong way. Yes, but obviously there's tremendous scope to use these skills just to transmit, just to transmit the actual quality of your abilities at work, for example, or the quality of your character if you're socializing or things like that. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if everybody is playing the game and you can play it with integrity, then it makes sense to do it, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. What's the kind of process you take someone through? Let's say you're seeing someone for one on one coaching. What's the kind of pro how do you approach, uh, helping them with public speaking, with performance, with social skills? Yeah, it's a really good question. It starts with figuring out what their goals are and what contexts they're looking to develop in. 1s And making sure that you're responding to those so that you know you want the training to feel as targeted and relevant and efficient as possible, even though what you're looking to do is establish a context of playfulness and safe space where people can very much experiment and just make sense and make mistakes. At the same time, a lot of people that I'm working with, they're in, uh, you know, they already have 1,000,001 other things that they want to do. And if you combine that with the sense of. 2s Usual discomfort or dislike that we associate with going through that phase of conscious incompetence. Then you want to make the process as feel like it's as efficient as possible for them. And. Welcoming as possible. So that they actually want to come back because they can see the value of the sessions. You're also working on things which are directly relevant in an applied way. A lot of the time, what the bulk of the session will end up looking like is going, okay, so. What is it that you've got coming up in the next week or a couple of weeks? Let's have a look at that. Let's practice that. So we're saving you homework at the same time rather than being like, oh, go away and do all of this additional prep, it's like, no, we'll we'll do it here. And what I'm going to ask you to do is if you have time, obviously there are other things that you can be doing, but the main thing is just like bringing forward the lessons and experiences that you have here and combining them with your awareness for when you're doing this presentation and future presentations out in the world and normally like. 1s Through the process of this practice on a session by session basis. I will. It's important to know what people think they want out of the sessions and what their weak points are. But. A lot of the time, that doesn't necessarily fully correlate with what I see as the areas that they could develop on are so. Both are entirely necessary. And actually, quite often people really underestimate their abilities to do things effectively. And that then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where again, they then approach it with more tension. They get in their own way, more so 1s they turn up. I asked them to. Just give it a go, whatever it is. Often approaching it from a more spontaneous angle. So without a script, if they can, if they feel up to it. And I might notice that, you know, first and foremost, they're nowhere near as bad as they say that they are, and helping them recognize that there is that tendency for us to, uh, get in our own way by undervaluing the quality of our output. And. Added to that, I'll then still in the process, like the purpose of being there is to develop and hone further. So maybe I notice that they're using a lot of filler words. Maybe I noticed that there isn't much range in their voice. Maybe I noticed that actually. The the thing that seems most relevant there and then is just like encouragement and maybe relaxation techniques and conceptual underpinning, whatever it is, it's very much the beauty of 1 to 1 is that it can be fully bespoke. But you also there's a lot of sensitivity involved because. 1s And I experienced this a lot at acting school. It's one thing to notice, as the outside director or coach or workshop leader, how you think someone's performance could be improved. And it's another thing entirely to know when is the best time and how is the best way to deploy that direction and advice. I mean, you've just you've just hit on one of the most fundamental problems of psychotherapy, which is how often you're sitting opposite your client. And you think. On some intellectual in some intellectual sense. I could just verbalize what I think, and you could be wrong. But let's say for the sake of argument, you're right. It's not your job as the therapist to brutalize someone with insight. And too much insight too soon is actually a bad thing. Yes, yes for sure. And it's like I was on, um, an acting job quite recently. Where? I was working with a guy who was directing me, and he was a lovely guy. I really liked him. And, um, I did a performance and then he was like, that was great. Just be funnier. And you're like. Well with feedback like that. Like I definitely it puts you in this like second guessing kind of mode where you're like, oh, that wasn't funny enough. So now I need to try to be funny. And you know, you're not going to be funny if you're trying to be funny, like, most of us have had some experience with that. And I think that was a really nice case of just like the best of intentions being. 1s Uh, somewhat bluntly applied. And so, for instance, like a good case in point, is the voice, like a lot of the time, the monotony that comes through in people's voices when they're presenting is a symptom of the tension, because. There is something. About. Emotional. 1s Are visibility involved in having full range in your voice? It's more vulnerable. It shows what you're involved in, what you're actually enthusiastic about, and if your main priority is get out of this situation alive, then a lot of that kind of shuts down and goes away. So you can reclaim it. Yes, by doing awareness exercises around like range and pitch and. And tackling it very directly. But. 1s Again. And this links back to what we were saying quite early on in the podcast. One of the most effective things that you can do is actually just help the person relax. And then so much of the expressivity and the voice follows through by them wanting to be doing what they're doing, like they're enjoying it, and they're able to find that organic enthusiasm in saying what they're saying and communicating these ideas, which then fills the voice with that natural expressivity. But you've done it in a very roundabout, tactful way. Rather than just being like, you need to vary your voice more, mate and that and that's like often where you see 1s inadvertently created public speaking robots. You know, someone goes, oh, I need to. Good public speaking consists of moving my arms thus and in this way it consists of the power stance. And we've all maybe seen those like hilarious images of this going slightly awry at various different party conferences over the years. It's and all of these like theoretical approaches to good presentation, get applied in a top down. Way when really all there, for the most part hinting at is what comes naturally from the bottom up. If you are relaxed, and then if you can combine that with a sense of like awareness to further hone and add icing and cherry on the cake, then to me that seems to create. 1s Uh, performers who are much more compelling to watch because they don't have that sense of like. 1s Excessive deliberateness about them. Mhm. That's another point I want to emphasize. Your voice will narrow and shut down if you feel you're under threat. Mhm. And one thing I'm curious about, have you ever thought about this or the other acting schools from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Mhm. 1s Yeah, I, I mean, I find psychology fascinating and. 1s Have simultaneously. Like there's a lot of people who do performance who aren't really interested in what's going on underneath the surface. They're just interested in doing the thing and they just do it. But for me, simultaneously, I've, I've had this interest in the, as you say, like the evolutionary like background and psychological mechanisms behind what's going on. I'm aware that I'm currently in a room of psychiatrists, so I want to stay in my lane. But it's, 1s you know, one of the main things that maybe comes to the fore is just how. 1s Visceral and survival like this situation seems to most of us when we're put in it. And you know, there are so many like, stats on how widespread and how intense public speaking fear is. 1s You know, taking all of these with a pinch of salt. But, you know, the idea that for the majority of people in the US, the most more people fear public speaking the most in comparison to death, like it's intense and. 3s When you're in that rabbit in the headlight situation, it does have all the feeling of of being like chased by a sabertooth tiger, you know, like really harking back to just a. Completely awry. Hacking of a of your nervous system, which would otherwise be meant to keep you safe in these genuine life and death situations. 1s But. Right now is completely irrelevant and utterly unhelpful. And so you have to work to reclaim that ground from a system that is doing its best to help you based on evolutionary history, but it's just taken a really bad wrong turn. And through coaching and workshops and whatever you you help people to consciously and unconsciously like reroute the nervous system so that it doesn't have that, uh, sense of equation between public speaking and sabertooth tiger. Absolutely. There's a reason why the fear is so potent. Because in our hunter gatherer past, if you were talking to a whole group of people, we were only in tribes of, let's say, 50 to 200 people anyway. So if you're talking to a group that size or larger and they're all stopping and staring at you and listening to every word you're saying, it was a high stakes situation. By definition, some would argue, perhaps it's a situation where you have to defend yourself to the tribe. That's a possibility. But but even if it's not that kind of situation, it's still high stakes. Because if you live amongst the same 150 people your whole life, it's extremely reputational. Like anyone from a small town knows, reputation is everything. And so in a situation like that, the wrong sentence or something said in the wrong way, or someone insulted without meaning to can have a very strong bearing on your life course. And so we have this hangover where? For speaking to 150 people at a conference. Now, we might never see them again, and it's much less important. And one of the wonderful things about modernity is we're much more free to make mistakes, but our limbic system doesn't know that. And so in some ways, our limbic system is smarter than we are. Yeah, but still, it's something to be taken into account. I think the first people, the first thing people should know about the fear of public speaking is it's rational. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah for sure. And. And simultaneously at the same time. Just because it is, it doesn't mean that we there isn't scope to. 1s Now knowing what we know. And not just about the brain, but actually about like the output, the quality of output that follows different modes of mind as applied to the task. There's no reason why that shouldn't inform how we approach it. So I mean, like there's a lot of analogies with martial arts, for instance, with between performance art and martial arts. This idea that. 1s If you go into a combat martial arts situation and you are too rigid at the wrong moment, then you can't literally roll with the punches, you know? Whereas by staying loose and staying present and not over tensing and and gearing up for a fight, then you you're you're going to survive much better. And that actually involves cultivating and training and ability to. Run counter to that first impulse of reactivity. And so you can simultaneously acknowledge that, yes, on a reputational basis, it might well be rational, but I might argue that even back then, even though it's rational from the point of view of the limbic system, it's not rational from what we know about the quality of the performance that then ensues. If you're acting from that place, and we've seen enough like, elite sports cases to know that actually a huge part of unleashing that capacity, that potential for performance is about like getting nurturing a relationship where you are aware of your reactivity and you sit with the discomfort of not doing anything on the basis of that reactivity. And instead, and in the process of doing that, you retain a lot more of that innate talent that you have when you are, uh, not under pressure and more relaxed. Yeah. I guess the strategy of shutting down, whether it's narrowing your range of voice, which is kind of a subtle manifestation or stooping over or being quieter, that strategy is ultimately a low risk, low reward strategy. Like if you if you do that in a public situation, you're unlikely to say anything dumb. You're unlikely to expose yourself, but you're reducing your likelihood of winning, whatever that looks like in that situation. So it's kind of a retreat from life. It's a fear based response, right? Yeah. For sure. And and also it's it's funny because. 1s The. 1s We can often have a tendency to see these instances of threat as being finite and eternal. So if I get this presentation wrong, I will never be able to do another presentation in which I put things right, you know? And the reality is that because it is not literally life and death most of the time, even if we do put our foot in it, if we're able to come back again with that sense of flexibility, with that sense of self-compassion, with that sense of presence, then the likelihood is that we'll be able to put it right. And so you begin to see and trust the process of staying flexible and staying present, because you trust that you can deal with it through the process of applying that. What's the most common goal people come to you with for one on one? 3s I would say. 2s There's there's two which are kind of intimately connected. Part of it would be I want to do this better. Like I want to do presentations better, like public speaking, better webinars, better difficult conversations, spontaneous conversations. Better. But. I think underlying that most of the time what it is is the second part, which is I want to feel like I'm less in my own way. They wouldn't necessarily express it like that, but I want to feel. Less inhibited. I want to feel more flexible. I want to feel more able to improvise and roll with the punches. I don't want to have to spend the hour before the presentation looking over the script that I've written and then finding as soon as I get there that the script goes out the window because the computer isn't working and I don't have my slides, and then feeling like a complete ass because I am utterly unable to deal with the UN. Unexpected, the unknown, the unforeseen. And so. And a fundamental level. You're. People are looking for an enhancement of their well-being. And a lot of the time through this training, that is precisely what you can offer. But. 1s A really important component of that is accepting the discomfort involved, not only in the learning process, but also in the anticipation of new scenarios like. And even as an experienced performer, I will routinely get like significant symptoms of anxiety when I come into performance contexts, new and old. Whether that's like that feeling of real deep in the pit of your stomach kind of nerves, or whether that's a narrowing of the voice or whether that's, you know, being in an audition room and you're holding a sheet of paper with the words on for the script, and your hand is shaking, and it obviously makes a very audible sound, and everybody can see it and you can see it, and it's this, these moments like that where. It's like a crossroads. You kind of go, okay, I feel this habitual desire to slap myself on the back of the wrist and and say no and say, this isn't good enough, sort it out. But I know where that leads. And I know that's only going to make everything worse. 1s And so instead taking the road which is yielding, which is going ha, I noticed this. I also noticed my temptation to do something with this, to repress it. I may even notice that I have repressed it, but at any stage that I'm able to step back and yield to kind of what is. And I suppose like be vulnerable is a nice term to maybe put on it. Then I can interrupt what can otherwise feel like that runaway train sense of. One thing egging on the nervous system even more, even more, even more. And then just getting to that point where you're running on pure adrenaline, you you might still do a good performance on the basis of pure adrenaline, but it's, in my experience, a it's not sustainable. And B, uh, more often than not, I'm. I don't leave feeling good. And. So even though it's difficult and involves discomfort. 1s Yielding to this sense of vulnerability and being seen to be vulnerable, which is a big thing as well. 1s For me. I've been down the opposite road enough times to know that actually, like, I want to stick on this path even though it's uncomfortable because I know that net, my well-being will be improved. So even though people come to you wanting you to enhance their well-being, and you can say that you will do your very best and you will, it doesn't mean that things are just going to be like roses thereafter. So interesting to think of adrenaline as a coping strategy to avoid real vulnerability, and I think this translates from performance just into everyday life, where so many people seem to be addicted to having a stress response, a really stressed out response to relatively mundane everyday annoyances. And they talk about it as though, you know, stress is something that's befallen them. I am stressed, stress has come on to me. And that's true at a glance. And until you work with them in more depth and then you realize actually stresses the response they're choosing, because even though they find it unpleasant, unconsciously they'll choose it over vulnerability, which can. Often prevent the situation from happening in the first place. So an example might be one sister asking another sister to help them out. That's too vulnerable the fastest. They would rather just take on everything and do everything, and then be really stressed out as a result. Because to choose the second path would involve a bit of vulnerability. Yeah for sure. And you know, it's interesting watching, uh, some people, even myself on different days or different moments. There can be, let's say they've just been sitting, relaxing on the sofa, scrolling on their phone, and they feel like they need to get up and do something. There can often be that sense of like kicking things into gear like that, right? Slap the legs. I'm getting up this like injection of force and belief that you need to inject force in order to get anything done. It's like treating yourself like a horse that needs to be slapped in order to get it to move. And increasingly for myself, again, this relates back to this sense of letting things emerge. You're still. 1s Like. I suppose from the framework of self-compassion. Looking at alternative motivations to getting up and doing that don't involve being at war with yourself. Yes, exactly. So. And and it might mean that it takes a little bit more time for that genuine motivation to come. And sometimes that can feel like a real luxury. But when you have the time to not beat yourself with a stick in order to get anything done and to wait on those more like self compassionate motivations. 1s Then I've found that it's it's been very fruitful in the long term in, in bringing about. A broader quality of life. Yeah, my trick for that is if there's a task that I know I would need to muster a certain amount of force to get myself to do, rather than to master that force in a kind of aggressive way, as you mentioned. I just lighten the task. And then so, for example, if I know I should go to the gym, but I don't really feel like it, I make a deal with myself that as long as I get into the gym door, then I've won. I've succeeded knowing that obviously once I'm there, then I'm probably in the mood to do whatever I was going to do anyway. And if I'm not, then I well, I'll do five minutes on the treadmill. Yeah. And inevitably, once the blood is flowing, or once you write a sentence on a page, or once you do the first, first five minutes of the podcast, then it's much easier. It's actually harder to stop than to keep going. So I kind of, um, trick myself. Yeah, for sure. I do the same thing a lot, and it. 2s It is just like removing that burden of ego. Ideal of expectation of should, of, um, whatever it is that makes the task seem so insurmountable when in reality. 2s If you can just do even a fraction of it, it's still going to be better than not doing it at all. So if you can just say just do some and don't, it doesn't matter really what the quality is or how long it is. Just do some because some is better than none. Then like you say, you end up doing it and then you're like, ah, you know what? This isn't so bad. Maybe I'll lean in and maybe I'll lean in and and that relates back to this sense of in the coaching sessions or in the workshop sessions, a really big mechanism is just saying like, just like do it. Like it doesn't have to be good. If anything, that's irrelevant. Just give it a go, see what comes out, and we'll work from there. And that's the only place that we can work from. And at some point we can sit here and theorize about the process of doing it. But at some point, the only way that you can improve riding a bike is by riding the bike. And that will come by cumulatively spending more time on the bike. So even if it's just 30s on the bike, let's start with 30s and go from there. Yeah, get on the bike, everyone. Yeah. Uh, speaking of the workshop, you're now going to do a workshop with myself, Ana and Rebecca. Thanks so much for joining us and spending some time with us today. Where can people find you? Learn more about your company and the work you guys do? Yeah. Best place would be to head to our website, which is Dot Actor Insider. Com and if anybody has any questions then feeling free to get in touch via the contact form there. Or you can email hello at Transcom. Perfect. Thanks so much. Thank you. 11s Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've got any feedback, as always, do get in touch. If you enjoyed the episode. Why not give us a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? Because it really helps other people to find us. If you want to get in touch, you can find us on Instagram or Twitter, or you can drop us an email. And if you value the show more generally, why not buy us coffee? Thanks so much!