The action is the voice, the gesture, the physiognomy, the way of keeping time and setting the pauses, in short, the scenic adaptation, contained but very sensitive, of the whole person and that permeates the ideas he pours, so that these are understood by the listener in such a perfect way that they provoke in all their fullness the desired feelings. "
Oratory is acting
I have always said that oratory is acting, but when I state that I do not mean that a speech must be faked. Euripides, Greek poet, has a phrase with a great deal of meaning:
"It is not what the speaker says, but who he is, that gives weight to eloquence".
Public speaking is a presentation of your essence, of who you are. You are expressing before 5 people in a classroom or 20,000 in a stadium, your ideas, what you think and feel. Therefore, it is not that we are going to lie to them by doing and saying things that are not true, what we are going to do is to transmit all that with more power, more effectively, and theatrical techniques help us to achieve it.
And that is where all this comparison between public speaking and theater comes together: emotions. When you attend a speech, the last thing you want to see and hear is a person with a bulldog face and talking like a robot. We want to feel emotions, we want our feelings to tingle: to laugh, cry, reflect, and even get upset, if that's the case. And if we expect that in a speech, then it is perfectly logical that if it is our turn to present it, we can also achieve all that in our listeners.
Public speaking is performance, yes, but public speaking is also attitude. It is believing that you can. It is believing in yourself, believing in your message. It is to stand in front of an audience, a microphone or a camera and act as if you were the best speaker and communicator in the world. It is being willing to learn and practice always. It's wanting to get better every day. Remember, it is not about faking something that does not exist, it is about using the right techniques and the right attitude to present your message with power and effectiveness.
Don't forget: voice, gestures, pauses, scene, physiognomy, emotions. A whole range of techniques that will allow us to communicate better.
Intonation, nuances and cadences in the voice.
I want you to remember a scene from a movie or novel that you have indelibly engraved in your memory. What did you like most about it, why do you remember it so much, what did the actor or actress express in it? A very well known scene is the one in the movie "Terminator", when before killing the android, he or she expresses the iconic phrase: "Hasta la vista, baby". This four-word expression went down in history not only for the "baby", but also for the way actor Arnold Schwarzenegger said it.
Days after the death of the so-called "Prince of Song", José José, a great youtuber who analyzes and "deconstructs" music (I invite you to visit him if you are a music lover; you can find him as ShaunTrack), analyzes the famous song, "El Triste", and comments in his video that there are many singers who have a nice voice, tune well, but are more of the bunch, because they do not express emotions with their interpretation. The great Mexican singer did, and in the aforementioned song there is a lot of interpretative strength, from whispers, through voice breaks (as if he wanted to cry), operatic nuances, power and more whispers. That is, what in the field of voice, we call: intonation, modulation; or those nuances, candencias, pauses and variations that we impregnate to what we say. Just as the Terminator did and José José did when he sang, this is what we should do when we present our speech.
I usually compare our vocal register to the graph on a heart monitor. The cadences, inflections, nuances and volume of our voice closely resemble this image. We may start by speaking at a standard voice volume. Then we go a little higher, lower again, lower some more until we are almost whispering. We go up and reach a high peak and then go down from bruce, to a standard volume or intonation. I like the image, because in the middle there are lines that simulate a heart: in public speaking, when speaking with emotion, modulations and a good body expression, it will be easy to reach the heart of our listeners. And this does not only apply to the volume; to these ups and downs we inject melodic variations, modulations, as if we were a violin played by a masterful teacher. That is the magic that gives the voice modulations, nuances and cadences.
Pauses and silences.
There are silences more eloquent than words. Pauses are equivalent to commas, semicolons, colons and semicolons in a text. They allow us to punctuate and even give meaning to a word or phrase. Sometimes making a silence allows us to change the speed and rhythm of our speech. It also allows us to make inflections or modulations in our voice and therefore the audience's attention will be greater.
There are several types of pauses.
🤫 Logical pauses: those that are understood to occur. It can be in the transition from one topic to another. Or when preparing something in the middle of the presentation.
🤫 Breathing pauses: those that occur when the speaker runs out of air. They are unavoidable.
🤫 Psychological pauses: those pauses that allow us to give the audience some time for reflection or emotion, after we say something.
Remember, then, that not everything is words and sounds. Pauses enhance something you want to emphasize, capture your audience's attention (in case of distractions) and create a certain solemnity, depending on what you want to express. However, to apply a silence, you need to have a good command of the subject and the situation. Control is vital in this case. This is achieved with practice and experience. Modeling or imitation also helps a lot.
Get excited and emotional.
When you get annoyed and argue with someone, you are the best speaker in the world. Remember that moment when you "sang" your heart out to someone who had you tired and annoyed for some reason? At that moment, even Hitler would have felt intimidated, and excuse me for using such a nefarious example, but if there was something good about Adolf Hitler, it was precisely his oratory, or do you think he reached the top of Germany's power and provoked a world war just because he was handsome? (which he was not). This gentleman spoke with vehemence, he had a powerful oratory, just as you do when you get annoyed. The secret of emotions and their effect on our way of communicating is that when they appear we cannot lie. What we say comes naturally to us. A person in love is believed because his eyes, his gestures and the strength that permeates his words are the product of a genuine and real feeling.
When you speak in public, get excited and you will excite others. If you are monotonous, cold, serious, with no modulation, no nuances in your voice and no gestures, you will bore your listeners. But the emotion should not be feigned (which in some cases is valid), on the contrary, it should be real and sincere. That way the power of your message will have no limits.
G. S. Bilbao
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Original G.S. Bilbao
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