Do What You Can’t Do By Pretending You Can
by How can we get the resources to conquer our fears? Make that big presentation or speech? Dive off the high board at the pool? Ask someone out on a date? Stand up to the office bully? We can borrow some of the techniques used by professional actors and small children: pretend.
Stage Fright: Fear of Public Speaking
For over three years now I have been working with professional actors at an institution for the continuing professional development of professional performers. One of my most popular classes at the centre is a workshop dealing with stage fright. You might think that professional actors are the last people in the world to suffer from this condition: in fact it is endemic in the profession. Stage fright can strike at any time in an actor’s career. Laurence Olivier was at the height of his fame, acting in and directing a play at the National Theatre in London when he started to worry about forgetting his lines. He was so affected by stage fright that he was unable to continue his stage career for a considerable amount of time. Daniel Day-Lewis was similarly affected.
In fact, stage fright is common among professional actors and musicians. The search for a treatment has encompassed medication, hypnotism, psychotherapy, relaxation techniques, meditation and a host of main-stream and alternative therapies. While no one person’s stage fright is exactly the same as another’s, I have found one technique to be very successful in treating this condition. Pretend to be a person that does not suffer from stage fright.
Modeling
We all know people who excel at the things they do: they might be excellent salespeople, successful with the opposite sex, exceptional communicators, bungee jumping adrenalin junkies always trying something new and exciting. One of the most exciting developments in corporate training involves the concept of modelling excellence.
It works like this: in any large organisation devoted, for example, to sales, there will be people who excel. People who consistently outsell others and can always make a pitch and close a deal. The concept of modelling comes from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a discipline developed in the ’70s by Dr Richard Bandler and John Grindler. They looked at people who were pre-eminent in their field and dissected what is was that they did that made them successful. How did they talk? What kind of non-verbal communication did they use? What sort of language patterns did they use? They then found that other people could be taught to use these techniques to improve their success. In other words, by subjecting the good salespeople in an organisation to deep scrutiny, then by teaching others to copy what they are doing, you can increase the effectiveness of the whole sales force.
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