The work
When what matters is at stake
You have earned your place. You bring vast knowledge, well-honed skills and hard-won authority.
You are in the room and at the table.
You are deeply prepared. You have all the data. You know the arguments pro and con. You are confident. And you know your proposal is the solution.
And again, you are solidly prepared. Speak with authority. Hold eye contact. Don’t rush. Watch your tone. Use your hands. Sit with confidence. Find the moment to enter.
And still, you are interrupted mid-sentence. Talked over. Cut off.
And moments later, you hear your words, your vision, echoed in another voice and only now applauded.
You are in your place at the front of the room.
You know your subject. You have prepared. A brilliantly structured speech. Hooks that grab. Stories that inspire. A compelling ending.
And again, you are solidly prepared. Your gestures. Your movement. Your eye contact. Your pauses. Your pace. Your pitch. Your vocal variety. You have practiced, rehearsed, videoed yourself, watched it back, adjusted, practiced again.
You begin to speak.
And you feel it in your body: the distance between all you are, all you offer, and what they are receiving.
Your words are not landing.
And now, while trying to stay focused on what you came to say, why you came to say it, and the people you came to reach, part of your attention has turned inward.
You are watching and directing yourself.
What if the very effort to consciously manage all those presentation skills is part of what stands between you and the people you came to reach?
What if there is another way?
It begins with your voice.
Not the voice you learned, over a lifetime, to construct for acceptance and approval, to belong, to feel safe.
Not the voice shaped to meet expectations of who you should be and how you should sound.
Not even the accomplished, professional, deep voice of gravitas and “executive presence” you were urged to adopt, and that may have helped carry you this far.
Somewhere along the way, without even knowing it, you may have learned to narrow, contain, soften, lower, brighten, strengthen, polish or otherwise reshape the voice that was yours.
Not because there was something wrong with it.
Because you were listening. Adapting. Learning what the world around you seemed to require for acceptance, approval, belonging, safety and success.
And those adaptations may have served you.
But they are not the whole of your voice.
I spent decades speaking in the very kinds of rooms where your voice has to matter.
Rooms that beg to be held: legislative chambers, courtrooms, corporate and nonprofit boardrooms, broadcast studios.
Then I entered the actor’s training room, stepped onto stages and in front of cameras, and discovered an entirely different way of understanding what allows one human being to reach another.
Your voice is uniquely yours.
But having access to all that it can hold and express is not something you think your way into.
It is something you train.
Physically. In your body.
Through breath, sensation, movement, sound, play and relationship.
Not by learning what powerful communication should look and sound like, but by developing the skills and abilities that allow your voice and expression to arise in response to what you think, feel, intend, and receive from the people in front of you.
This is the work.
And it is a journey. A journey from managing how you communicate to becoming more fully available to yourself, to another human being, and to what can happen between you.
An actor has to do something rather extraordinary.
She must enter words and circumstances she may have rehearsed hundreds of times and allow them to live now.
If she is consciously arranging every gesture, expression, inflection, movement and pause, we see the work. We stop believing her.
So the deeper work of the actor is not learning how to manufacture the appearance of being present. It is training the physical, vocal, sensory and relational abilities that allow her to be present.
To listen. Receive. Respond. Play. Remain open. Be affected by another human being. And allow what happens between them to affect what happens next.
That is why actor training belongs here.
Because you, too, may know your material. You may have prepared and rehearsed it thoroughly.
But when you enter the room, you need to be able to leave the rehearsal behind and meet this moment, these people, now.
The very things actors train in order to become alive, responsive, connected and affecting are the things that allow you to be heard, seen and felt.
The Five Shifts
Your attention shifts from how you are being perceived, how you look and sound, whether you are getting it right, to being fully present with yourself, your purpose, and the people in front of you.
Your attention shifts from taking command of the room and demanding their attention, to giving them yours, becoming genuinely interested in their presence, their responses and their experience, listening, receiving, responding, and allowing yourself to affect and be affected by them.
Your attention shifts from evaluating and judging yourself, second-guessing what you are doing and how you are doing it, to trusting the skills and abilities you have trained into your body, and trusting yourself to meet the moment as it unfolds.
Your attention shifts from trying to conquer, control or conceal your fear, to recognizing, “I know this place. I know how to move through it,” trusting what you have learned in your body, and allowing what matters to move you into courageous action.
Your attention turns from inward to outward, from concern with the impression you are making and what they think of you, to what you came here to do: make an impact in them and for them, and ignite brave, bold action.
This is training.
And always there for you.
A moment of discovery can reveal what is possible.
But what happens when the stakes rise? When the question you did not expect comes? When the room pushes back? When fear arrives?
Through repetition, what was once unfamiliar becomes something you know physically.
You do not have to search through a mental catalogue of what an effective speaker is supposed to do.
This work is not done alone.
You will be guided by a trusted, caring mentor who knows this work from the inside, and surrounded by a small, responsive cohort of women doing the work alongside you.
Because the people in the room are not simply there to support you.
They are part of the work.
They are the people with whom you listen, receive and respond. The people with whom you practice being present instead of performing. The people you learn to affect and allow yourself to be affected by.
Together, you have room to explore. To play. To take risks. To practice. To discover what becomes possible as the work becomes increasingly familiar in your body and increasingly available in your voice.
And week by week, you bring that growing freedom into the rooms that matter in your life.
You are not coming here to become someone else.
You are coming to develop greater access to the voice, presence and expressive possibilities that are already yours.
So that when the moment comes, you are not standing outside yourself trying to remember how a powerful woman is supposed to speak.
