Speak Like a Pro: Actor's Secrets to Dynamic Presentations

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Skillshare course, speak like a P, the actors secrets to dynamic presentations. If you do not know me, my name is Molly, I am a professional voice and acting coach based in London. My job means that I spend a lot of my time teaching some of the world's best institutions. Therefore, I know all of the tips and tricks to help people like yourself up level their speaking skills. The aim of this course is to try to get you to speak confidently and authentically. You do not need to be anyone else in order to perfect your presentation skills. And despite what you may believe, Charisma and confidence is absolutely a skill that is learned. This course is going to take us through some vocal techniques at the beginning, which is going to include things like alignment, posture, articulation. And then it's going to see us into how we put that onto text. We're going to be talking about the given circumstances of your presentation, how to feel more authoritative, how to find more of your body, but also how to maybe become more approachable depending on what feels more or less comfortable to you. Altogether, I'm effectively taking you through some of the key skills that we train actors to be when they are working on their own body and their own instrument, and then when they go into monologue I promise that a lot of these skills are so transferable to every single day. And I hope that you enjoy. 2. Project Video: So let's talk about the assignment. My assignment that I'm going to set for this Skillshare course is going to test you on your structuring skills for the presentation as well as your delivery. One part of the assignment is I would love for you to submit a structure of your presentation and what your objectives are, which we're going to talk about future modules. You should have one piece of paper with your objective at the top, what you want from the speech, and then some subheadings on what your structure is. Remember, we want this to be a story. Even if you want to add some drawings or a story board in there, I would love to see it. The second half of the assignment, which is also an optional one is you can submit a video of you speaking through one of your sections or one of your units of your presentation. You're going to try applying some of the techniques we talk about, and I will be watching over and giving you some feedback. Have fun. Good luck, and I can't wait to see them. 3. Lesson one: Posture and Body: Welcome to the first class posture and body. Why are we starting with posture and body? Well, I always like to imagine that the body and voice is very much like a woodwind instrument. The same way that if you have a flute and you're blowing into the hole and then you are changing your fingering to get a different tone. It's the same way it might happen in our own body. We allow breath in, the lungs expand. Air pressure builds up under the vocal folds. Therefore, they start to vibrate, they exhale and sound is created. The reason we start with the whole body is because just like a musician has to be careful with their alignment in order to best support their instrument, we also need to be careful of our alignment when we support our instrument. It's no good to solely focus on the sound that you are creating. You have to go to the source, which is the diaphragm. I want to teach you one of the best tips and tricks to set up your body to make sure your voice is fully supported, which is the Alexander technique. The Alexander tech comes from a man called Alexander who came up with these directions that we're going to focus on today. In order to do this exercise, you are welcome to sit up, you are welcome to stand, or you are welcome to lie down. What we're going to speak through is what we call the Alexander directions. Now, the Alexander directions are, as the name was suggest, directions that we're going to think about in order to help our alignment. The interesting thing about the body is we always like to think, Okay, sit up straight, stand up to. As soon as I do that, I actually feel a lot of effort and I feel attention coming into the body, which for the actor, for the speaker, we don't want tension kills breath and tension kills sound. So how can we adjust our alignment in a way that feels the most e aseful that feels the most free that allows our breath to come in and out, that's by the directions. For these directions, I'm going to ask you to think about them, but try not to do them too actively. We're just thinking and imagining placing the direction above the head, for example, and we're allowing the body to follow suit. With that, please do grab a mat, lie down, sit on the side of the chair, maybe stand, and allow your eyes to close. Taking a second to just land in the space, allowing the breath in and out of the body. Maybe just giving a big sigh of relief, and maybe just taking a second to land in the space. The mind is going to be rushing from here, there everywhere, but we just want to take a second to land in the now. I'd like you to think about the top of the head lengthening behind you, whether that's the ceiling or whether that's the wall behind you if you're lying down. We're not going to bring our head up. We're just imagining and thinking about the top of the head going upwards, just holding that idea in mind. Similarly, I'd like you to think about the pelvis, so the tail bone of the spine. Similarly, I'd like you to then think about your tailbone so the other end of the spine moving in the opposite direction. We're thinking about lengthening in the top of the head while the tailbone goes in the opposite direction, your spine is lengthening and we're not trying to get the straight spine. We're just allowing this space between the vertebra as we think about this. I then like you to think about your feet going into the floor, whether you're lying down, maybe you want to bend the knees, so they're facing upwards and the feet are on the floor. I'd like you to think about your feet rooting into the floor, almost as if there's a tree trunk underneath the soles of the feet. Maybe you also want to imagine or think about the knees facing the direction you're going in. Maybe imagining there's lases coming out of your knees and hitting anything that you are standing in front of lengthening in the top of the head, lengthening spine, imagining the tail bone going in the opposite direction of the head, feet into the knees forwards. Okay. I'd like you to really think about the space between the head and the shoulders. Maybe you want to think about your shoulders dropping or shoulders facing down. Okay. You may notice that as you think about these things, your body does adapt. Without you trying too hard, your body will lengthen in those places. The last thing I'd like you to think about is releasing the neck. When I say releasing the neck, what I really mean is we love to operate on this angle as human beings. Actually, I want to encourage us to sit back into the spine. This says to our audience, I need you to hear me. I need you to listen to me. I need this. This says to our audience, you can come to me. I trust myself, I trust my body, and I'm open. But I'm not desperate. That is one of the biggest things that's going to help not just that energy of your presence, but also your breath and therefore your voice. We're thinking about our necks almost hinging backwards. We're just bearing in mind that as we speak, we do not need to crane our heads forward. Releasing the neck, top of the head upwards, tail bones in the opposite direction. Feet into the floor, knees facing the direction you're going. For Alexander technique, you would add on some more directions, but for today, I think we're going to leave it at that. I want you to really think about the space that you're holding within everything that we're about to do on this course and every situation you're in, or you need to think about those presentation skills. Take a second to flutter the eyelids open. That's one approach to try to get this alignment. The second approach which I also think helps with alignment is what we use in the acting world when someone needs to play a high status character. When we have a high status character to play in the acting world, it's really important to remember that those who have high status in a film or in theater don't have that status necessarily because they act that status, but it's more so because everyone else in the room is giving them that status. It's how the other actors are responding in the room to the high status rather than the high status itself. Whenever we try to play the high status or play the king or play the queen, then actually, it can come off as quite authentic and quite annoying and cocky. Was if you allow everyone else in the space to give you that status, that's when that status is almost earned in the room. So how can we do this? Well, similarly to how we've just taken our spine. I want to offer you an exercise based off of the archetypes. Now, this is the archetype we use for the king queen and I find it quite effective. Once again, maybe sitting down this time, you can allow your eyes to close. As the eyes are closed, I'd like you to imagine that on one side of the body is a mirror reflection of yourself. Literally, on the left hand side of you, there is another version of you, if you nod your head, if you take your hand up, that version on the left, doing exactly the same thing. I'd also like you to imagine that on the right hand side of the body, there is yet another version of yourself doing the same thing. You are now three times the width of yourself. Notice what that does to the body and notice what that does to your alignment. Similarly, I'd like you to imagine that on top of the body is yet another reflection of yourself. There is now one of you in the center, two of you either side, and someone on top, see what happens to the lengthening there if you imagine the top of the head isn't quite where you think it is, but it's actually a whole other body on top of you. Finally, I want you to imagine that as you can feel your feet on the floor. Think about another reflection of yourself, your soul to soul with yet another person of you. You are three times the height and three times the width of yourself. I love this exercise because this also gives us not just great alignment for breath and for voice and for energy, but it also acts as almost a shield as a protection for ourselves. It feels as though we can enter a space and remind yourself that you are not just you, but you are three times the width and three times the height. I find this is especially important for those who know their habit is to close in on themselves when they are public speaking or nervous. Lastly, if you are thinking, Molly, these are great, but I don't know if I can apply all of these when I'm doing my presentation. I don't know if I'm going to be able to hold it in my brain. One of the simplest things you can do when you're actually going up to present is just think about your feet on the floor. A great imagery is maybe to imagine you are in wet sand and that your feet are leaving this big mark or imprint on the floor. This is going to actively ground you. When we ground the body in this way, we tell our body, we don't need to be nervous, we can stay calm, which we're going to be talking a lot more about in the next session. So ultimately, in order to set up our body before we even think about breath and voice, we need to think about our alignment. Our alignment needs to be done in a way that doesn't cause a lot of effort and actually finds a lot of ease. A way of doing this is the Alexander technique or thinking about these directions. As well as thinking about the archetypes that you are three times the width and three times the height of you to get that status in the space. Lastly, if you want to think of something a little bit shorter, you can think about your feet making that imprint into the sand, which is going to ground the body. I'll see you in the next session for some more tips on how we can calm the body in preparation for presentation skills. 4. Lesson two: Breath: Now that we've done some work on a lining and posture, trying to set up the body in the best way possible. Let's talk about the most important thing I would argue when it comes to voice and presentation skills. Breath. Breath impacts honestly everything and it's become a huge trend in today's society. Even though it's something that's not necessarily new, we've been teaching these techniques for centuries and centuries. It's just starting to re emerge and become repackaged. You have breath that's going to be used for calming the nervous system. Really reminding yourselves that you are okay. You are simply doing a presentation and everything's going to be fine. You also have breath for voice, which is two fairly different techniques that you want to focus on. Firstly, we're going to focus on a breathing techniques for calming down the nerve system. Now, you may be watching this cause because you may be absolutely terrified of public speaking. Maybe you notice that your voice clams up, maybe you notice that you start to hold your breath or that your body starts shaking and you go really high pitched. Whatever that be, let me tell you now you are absolutely not alone, and it probably comes down to your breath. When our body senses any adrenaline, heart racing sweat. It genuinely thinks that we are in a forest fighting a bear for our life. What we have to do is we have to try to counteract that, thank the body first off for giving us that response, but reminded that we don't need it that day. It's not serving us, it's not necessary for public speaking. We're going to focus on breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth, and we're going to focus on extending the exhale. Let's try this. Let's breathe in through the nose for four counts, one out through the mouth. In through the nose out through the mouth. Trying to keep this paste going for me, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. And remember that as we do so, we're trying to really ground the feet on the floor. Maybe you want to think about the Alexander techniques we did last session. Anything that's going to just calm the body. We're going to move into box breathing now, so when we breathe in. I'd like you to now hold the breath. Then we'll exhale and hold. So we're doing counts of four, so in and hold and out and hold. In and hold and and hold. Maybe you've noticed a difference in your body as we've done this. Maybe you've noticed things have softened. Maybe you've noticed that you feel a little bit more released, maybe a little bit looser, maybe a little bit more grounded. Either way, it's really important to actively try to use the breath to help us calm down. If you watch sprinters before a race, you'll probably notice that they do things like that. We they breathe in through the mouth really shallowly and really quickly, and they do sharp inhalation. That's to really get them ready for the race that they are about to do. When we're going into speaking, like I said, we don't want to be desperate for people's attention, we want to sit back into the spine. Therefore, calming the body, grounding the body, especially if you feel a bit nervous is so integral to trying to find your feet. So not only do you have things like that, which are box breathing and extended exhales breathing in through the nose and through the mouth. Let's now talk about dia from mate breathing. What I often find is people do a lot of breath exercises for calming the nervous system because they are amazingly so accessible nowadays. But when they're taking the breaths, it's all coming up into the shoulders or it's all coming up into the chest. When we are coming up into the chest and shoulders like that, it's actually really overwhelming the vocal folds, and it's telling your body, if I don't take this huge breath in, then I'm going to run out of breath eventually. So what we want to do is we want to use the diaphragm. Now, the diaphragm is this huge dome shaped muscle underneath the lungs. As we allow breath in, the diaphragm expands as we allow breath out, the diaphragm relaxes. Now, this motion and you can actually do this with me now, we're going to take our hands like a dome. We're going to place it under the lungs and you're going to breathe in and out. I, you'll notice my hands are contracting and out. This is happening all of the time. Your diaphragm is moving down to allow expansion in the lungs. Okay. You can just feel as you inhale, it expands like a balloon, as you exhale, it comes in. As we allow breath in for these breathing exercises, but also integrating it into your day to day breath, which is why we spend so long so long with it in the actives way because we're retraining the body how to breathe. We want to imagine that the body is breathing from the belly first. And then the chest and then out. It's like a tidelwave that comes into the belly, into the chest and then out. This is going to make sure that you're using the whole breath capacity, which is going to support your voice more, and it also keeps you grounded. It doesn't send us into that fight flight shock like a quick, sharp inhalation will do. Allowing the breath in and out. Let's bear that in mind as we do our box breathing now, so we're going to breathe in through the belly. Hole and out. Hold in hold and out. Hold. That is the type of breathing we want to do when we are speaking. The only difference is rather than blowing out air, we start to speak. We speak on the exhale. Now, let's try to breathe in through the belly and we're going to exhale on aising sound so we're going to breathe in through the belly. Okay. Just allowing the breath in and then shirting out. It's like I'm shaping the air out rather than making a sound, allowing the breath to drop in. Imagine it's so easy. So I'm not sucking any breath in. I'm just allowing the belly to drop in. Don't worry if you can't feel much movement there. It really is counterintuitive. When we think of an inhale, usually, we think, I'm going to suck everything in. But actually, I'm asking for the opposite. You need to expand when you allow the breath in, not suck in. Let's do the same thing now on a Z sound like a buzzing be sound. So we're allowing the breath in. And then you might start to feel some vibration in the body as you do this one more time, allowing the breath in. Lovely. Now let's try buzzing the days of the week. So instead of saying Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we're going to say. Allowing the breath in. Mm. Bearing in mind all of that alignment work we've done, allowing the breath in. Go to speak. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Having that connection from your voice to that belly. This is the source of our sound and our breath is really going to help as you can hear, lower the voice, find grounding in the voice, and help us connect to our impulse to speak. Honestly, 99.9 999 9% of people, I find just when they mastered this skill, it massively increases their presentation skills. You might be in a habit and you might know people who really speak up here or really get their voice up here, and that's because they are not connected. We have breathing for confidence, which is about extending the exhale, breathing in through the nose out through the mouth, and then breathing for voice, which is that diapomsic breathing, making sure we're filling the belly first and then the chest. Now that we've looked at both posture alignment and breathwork, I think it's time to look at some articulation. 5. Lesson three: Articulation: Articulation. Now, if you haven't seen it already, I do have a whole skill share course solely devoted to articulation, but I wanted to give you some of the rundowns. Ultimately, when we think about articulation, it's often confused with putting lots of effort in and speaking in a certain way. Whereas my argument is now that we understand what alignment feels like and how easy breath should feel for voicing, the articulation shouldn't be adding effort and adding tension. If anything, it should be finding release and finding even more freedom within the voice. Articulation really is about energy rather than muscular usage. The muscles that we do want to focus on in articulation are the jaw, the tongue, the soft palate, and the lips. There are some exercises we can do to try to release tension to make sure that we are setting ourselves up in our presentation to the greatest extent. Let's start with the jaw. Now, the jaw has three muscles attached to the skull and they all lie at the back of the face. For the jaw release, I want you to imagine that we have weights at the lower mandible dragging that down. It's it's like a platform is releasing in the jaw. Now, because we're going to do this fairly quickly today, I want you to now release the tongue out on the lower lip. Feel like this. It feels a bit the bear with me because actually, it's a really fantastic release of the articulators. Let's take a line of text or let's for now use the days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Now, feel that release of the, feel the tongue out. Monday through fund. I'm really connecting to this heaviness here. Monday, through the fade fund, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. That immediately feels a little bit easier for me to do just from that 2 minutes it took top like this. So that's one release that I want you to do and I want you to practice your presentation doing in the lead up. Another exercise that you can use as you're practicing your presentation is fairly different where we're still going to imagine those weights and we're still going to allow the back of the jaw to release. But this time, I want you to imagine that you've got a dot of glue on the tip of the tongue, and I'm going to glue the tip of the tongue behind the front top teeth like this. As you speak this through, you want to keep imagining that you've have this release here. A lot of people want to do this. We don't want that. That's really tensing the u which is not going to be helpful. Think about this verticality in the space, show, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The goal of this exercise is to be understood as you do it. Hopefully, the more practice, the easier it gets. Then you can go on to say, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Again, you might find some more ease. So now we've covered a little bit of the jaw and the tongue. If your tongue ever feels a little bit heavier or a little bit like you're having to drag it along. You could also try tongue rolls by brushing the outside of your teeth one way and the other way. That's a great thing to do just before you step on stage just to activate the articulators, remind yourself that you're all working together. Similarly, on this activation train, we can have the lips. I want you to try to pow and spread the lips quite quickly. Or you can similarly try to try some literals. Just like we did with our breath where we were zozing our lines of text, you can do the same with a. Instead of saying, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I'm going to think about that diaphragmatic breathing, and I'm going to go Okay. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I feel like everything has come a little bit more forward. If you can feel those vibrations of sound coming into the lips, that's a great sign that's going to help you with your projection. The last thing I want to touch on when it comes to the articulators is the soft palette. The best exercise I find fp stretch the soft palte for speaking is yawning. Literally, you can even speak on this yawn to do your text. Not only are you opening up the soft palate, which is opening up your instrument, making sure that your vibration has space to project and to feel, but you're also telling your body that you are calm, you are collected, and it's a great addition to the work that we have just done. In general, when we think of articulation, I want you to remember it is about energy, not about effort. Therefore, we need to find a way of releasing the articulators and building energy from there. The way we've done that is by hanging the jaw and thinking about this release in the back of the muscles. Also bring the tongue involved. We've also played with sticking the tongue behind the front top teeth and speaking like this. We've also played with some lines of text or even just isolating those muscles, and we've tried some yawning. Again, if you did want more intensive or more extensive. Again, if you did want more extensive exercises on articulation, you can literally check out my course. That is also out that goes into lots of detail and lots of exercises. So far in the course, we have looked at our body. We have looked at our breath and now we've looked at our articulation. I think it's time to look at the material itself. 6. Lesson four: Who where and what?: So now that you have set up your body, we have the vocal technique totally there. Let's get into the nitty gritty and talk about your presentation or the event in which you're presenting for. Now, if you don't have necessarily something in mind, don't worry, you can apply these techniques to literally whenever your next one is. But this is really also the way that we approach monologues as axes to make sure that we are making out like all of these pre planned stuff are coming to us in that instance. I can't believe these techniques aren't more readily available because honestly, they are really how you get trust across in your presenting skills. We're going to be talking about today who where and what three unbelievably important questions to ask yourself when you are preparing for presentation or text. Who? This is who is your audience. Literally, just naming whether that audience is a boss, whether that audience is the whole company. How many people is that audience? Maybe it's a close friend. Maybe it's people who are very familiar with you, who have heard your voice before, or maybe it's total strangers. But I want you to write a list of all of the descriptive words, who that audience is. Once you have that list of descriptive words, I then want you to ask yourself. That is where is this event going to be taking place. Is it in the office? Is it in an external place where no one has been before? Is it maybe online on Zoom, in which case, what factors might you want to consider there? Perhaps you then want to consider what time this event is taking place. Write down a list of descriptives or bullet points on where this is happening. Now we have decided who and where we are speaking. Let's now decide what. This is the biggie that a lot of people don't often ask themselves don't often ask themselves. I want you to consider what you want out of this speaking event. Perhaps that is to sell. Perhaps that is to convince. Perhaps it's to inspire, perhaps it's to motivate, perhaps it is to educate. Whatever it is, we want to think of one really clear overall objective. This is the overarching want you need from this speaking talk. Now, you'll probably find that there are a lot of things that you're trying to do, but overall, think of that big thing. A way that you can help that is what is the best thing that someone can tell you after this talk? Is it your hyatt? Is it that changed my life? Is it I want to find out more? Whatever it be, what would you want someone to say after the talk and then figure out what that overall objective is for your whole speech? I also want to consider the other two factors of who and where you're speaking. For example, thinking about who you're speaking to might lead you to be more empathetic on the audience. For example, when I'm heading into a big company that doesn't often get physical and voice exercises, I'm often thinking that my objective is really to try to introduce something new to them. Whereas, if I'm heading into a room with actors, where a lot of my techniques are often seen, it's usually to inspire or to motivate them to keep up their craft. Depending on who the audience is and where that event is taking place, often plays a factor. Okay. When you have decided your overall objective, you are literally going to write it down at the top of your presentation, and this is what's going to help you firstly structure everything you want to say. Also, it's going to help us with our voice as well. Click for the next session to see how we can then begin to structure our talk. 7. Lesson five: Structure: Now that we've understood what our overall objective is, it's time to figure out the structure of our talk. Now, there are many different ways we can do this, and sometimes I appreciate you might not always have the authority or the freedom to be able to structure this talk in whatever way you like. But I'm going to offer a few different popular structures they use in writing, especially when writing scripts that hopefully can be helpful to you. Ultimately, when we are structuring any sort of talk, it needs to be some story. Even if it's on something that feels quite boring and not very entertaining, Every time we are engaging with someone, we are telling a story of sorts. When you're structuring your talk, we're going to look at three different techniques to make sure that the story is at the heart of it. The first technique we're going to look at is the hero's arc a really popular story and writing technique. This is the idea that you have the protagonist in the story who is the hero, and the hero goes on some of quest. Maybe they go on a quest because they have an issue. Maybe they go on a quest because it's been a challenge, but either way, the hero sets off on the quest. Now, along the quest, the hero comes onto many obstructions. Maybe they meet some friends along the way. Maybe the friends have to battle some trolls under a bridge. But something happens for the hero that has to go through these trials and tribulations in order to get over to the other side. When the hero gets over to the other side, he may eventually find the princess or slay the dragon or win the pot of gold at the other end of the rainbow. But whatever it is, the hero overcomes an obstacle and presents a solution. Now, this can actually massively be applied to most things that we talk about. For example, let's say I'm a company and I'm pitching to investors. This is a way that I can structure the story of how my company came to be. Let's imagine I have a company that does ironing for people. Perhaps myself as the protagonist, notice that I've really struggled to get my shirts on in time for work, and I couldn't find any dry cleaners that were open on time. Therefore, I set out to try to set up my own business along the way. I found that competitors were doing this and competitors were doing that. Perhaps over the way I came up with lots of some mistakes. Maybe I got the branding wrong. Maybe I got the timings wrong. Maybe I didn't factor in enough finances. But ultimately, I've come up with this product that I really believe in because of those obstacles that I've come. It's the idea that the hero is ending as a different person to the one they started off with, which really gives your audience a sense of trust in you. You've been honest with the trials and tribulations you fought through. They also trust that the person you are now is who they want to put their money in. The second technique is just headlining. Now this is really good for if you have your elevator pitch or you literally have 5 minutes. As the name suggests, a headline is you want to imagine this is a newspaper article. You have literally the headline of what you want to say, and then you have two to three points that back it up and perhaps a conclusion. Perhaps my company is for people who hate ironing, and I have a van and it comes to your house. It does the ironing for you and it delivers your shirts nicely back ready for the new week. If I was to headline this and I was trying to sell someone on it or pitch the idea, perhaps I would say, nobody wants to do their own ironing, so I've come up with the solution. The first line may be, I noticed that as a busy working woman, I was struggling to get all of my shirts ironed on time. Second line. Therefore, I've created this company that will do the ironing for you. Third line, no fuss, no time wasted, perfectly iron shirts. Then as a conclusion, if you had this on a website or if you were doing a talk and you had a presentation, maybe you would have a picture of what you were going to do. That is something where I'm getting my most important points in. It's really important that I'm only doing the most important points for that headline because you have such little time. For me, the most important thing is that it's going to save time and it's going to save energy and it's going to be perfectly done. If you're similarly doing something where you have very little time, what are the three main points that you want to convey? Again, going back to your overall objective, you want out of the session and see if you can headline it in that sense. Lastly, if you're not quite sure if either of those techniques really fit you, all I would suggest to do is with your talk, try to storyboard it. Now, I am not an artist in any sense of the word, but I often encourage clients and myself to literally draw as if you were doing a cartoon off the talk. Let's say I was doing my talk about ironing. Maybe my first box in the storyboard is iron with a cross through it. Maybe the second one is a van knocking at the door. Maybe the third one is someone handing over my shirts freshly iron. Whatever it is, it doesn't need to be complicated, but just having those images is really going to help us structure. What is necessary in the story? For example, with the description I just gave, there probably need to be a few pictures between when the van picks up my shirts and when the van hands it back. I might want to offer a picture of them actually ironing my shirts. That will really help you find the structure and the epson flow. When we're looking at a storybook, we're really going into the emotional aspect of why storytelling is so powerful, which we often forget when it's something that feels very professional or something that is just word. Using imagery and using drawings can be a really great way of reminding yourself, wait, what is the heart of what I'm saying? That wraps up some of the structural techniques I would use to make sure that story is at the heart of what you are speaking about. Again, you might not have the privilege of trying to figure out yourself, but maybe just day to day, see if there were any more chances to tell more of a story when you are speaking. Let's move on to the next class now, which is going to tell you, once you've have your structure and your objective, how can we make sure that our voice is exciting, engaged, and ultimately authentic to us when we are doing the presentation? 8. Lesson six: Action: We have our structure and who where and what we want. Let's go onto another acting technique called actioning. Now, I'm going to adapt this ever so slightly so that it's more fitting probably for your circumstance. But effectively, what I want you to do now is try to unit your presentation. One unit effectively means one source of energy or one source of mini objective if you like. You have your overall objective, what you want them to say to you afterwards and what you really want to convey throughout the whole speech. But now we're going to go even deeper and try to find how we're actually going to get there. Perhaps your structure looks something like an introduction for who you are. Maybe you then set up the problem that you're trying to answer, and then maybe you try to give a resolution, beginning, middle, and end, really simple. Now can you try to think of a mini objective that you want for every single section? For example, for the introduction, maybe you want them to feel comfortable or maybe you want them to trust you. Maybe you want them to like you in the beginning. Now, that's your mini objective. Let's now think about what you want them to feel through that objective. Let's say your many objective in the introduction is to get them to trust you. Maybe then you want them to feel warm or maybe you want them to feel safe. Maybe you want them to feel excited in what you have to say. Once you've decided what tone you like, you can write that word down. It's really important for this exercise to try to think about how you want them to feel. If it's not a transitive verb and it can't fit into the sentence, I want to subth someone, then it doesn't quite work. For example, you might think, well, I just want to explain it. That might be a purpose of what you're doing, but that's not an emotional response. You can't explain someone, but you can inspire someone or motivate someone. Maybe when you're setting up the problem, you want to make them feel like they are heard. Maybe the feeling they need there is they want to feel connected to you in some way. They want to feel like you understand what they're having to say. Try to think of one word and put that in your problem set up. Then lastly, maybe for the resolution, you want them to feel at ease. Maybe you want them to feel excited, whatever it be to help you align with your overall objective. But ultimately, you should have at least three to five different mini objectives and different feelings that you want your audience to feel throughout your discussion. Now we have that understanding in the intellectual brain. How can we bring that into the body and how can we then affect our voice to help evoke exactly what we want. 9. Lesson seven: intentional tone: Now we can try to manipulate the voice and tone in order to go with what we want to evoke emotionally? This might seem like a really extreme thing, but generally, this is what a lot of actors do. Let's say for argument's sake, we want to motivate our audience, we want to educate our audience, and perhaps we also want to connect to our audience. We want our audience to feel connected, educated, and motivated. For each three of those emotions, I want you to sit with them and think, how do I feel when I feel those emotions? When you feel the sense of being motivated, does it feel light or heavy? For me, the sense of motivation feels quite light. It feels quite bubbly and it feels like it exists up here. Maybe when you think about that emotion, does it feel like it's a long sustained emotion or does it feel quite quick? For me, like I said, it feels quite quick. Does it feel like it's moving in a particular direction? Motivated? Does it feel like it moves upwards, forwards, down? For me, Motivated feels upwards. Next to motivated, I'm going to write light, quick, and up. Whereas if we take an emotion like educated, to me educated feels a little bit heavier. It feels more drawn out and it also feels like it's moving downward a little bit more. Next to educated, I'm going to write heavy, sustained and down. Finally, when we think about connected, connected to me again, it feels heavy, not quite as heavy as educated, but heavy in a different sense. It also feels sustained like educated did. But instead of moving downwards, connected feels like it's moving forward as if I'm connecting to someone in front of me. For motivated, we have light, quick, up, for educated, we have heavy sustained down. For connected, we have heavy sustained forwards. Now, that just details the physical action we are going to practice our speech in order to connect to our voice. The amazing thing about the body is the voice will follow the hands. If I try to speak to you like this that I have my palms facing upwards, my voice wants to go upwards. Whereas if I want to make a point and I place my palms facing downwards, then you can hear it drops in my voice. That's what we're going to lean into today. When you're doing your motivation, let's say I'm trying to motivate you by saying the days of the week. I'm going to do an action that is light that is quick, and is up. Maybe it's like a flick or maybe it feels like it's throwing a ball. Hello, everyone. Welcome to today, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm going to practice doing it like this and really connecting to my hands. Whereas when I get to the educated part, maybe I want to imagine like I'm trying to push something down because when we feel educated, we feel like It is heavy, it is down, and it is sustained. Whereas when we're connected, for some reason, it's like I want to pull something towards you, like I'm trying to pull my soul and connect to you in front of me. Can you hear the different tonalities that that is bringing out in my voice? What's amazing is we're making sure that we are being intentional about our delivery. It's coming from an authentic place in our body in our voice, but also we're ensuring that we have variety that is connected to the intention of what we want. Usually when people feel like they struggle with sounding monotone, they just say, Oh, I'm going to try and have more energy and I'm going to try quicker. This is way beyond that. This is making sure that you are adding flavor and color to your voice in order to try to evoke an emotion in your audience. Ultimately, with your mini objectives of different emotions, you should try to change your tone ever so slightly three to five times throughout your speech. Now you might be sat there thinking, Molly, that sounds so fake. You voice changes so quickly. I don't know if anyone's going to buy it. Remember, we're trying to practice in a quite extreme way so that when we then go to just speak it, 20% of that energy will stay in. No part of me is actually asking for you to do the presentation like this? It's just something I want you to practice the presentation with so that when you get to the presentation, instead of doing this, your voice still feels like it's up there. It just doesn't feel as extreme and it feels a little bit more authentic. Once you've actually taken the time to action your speech and align it with your overall objective, we're then adding our voice and tonality to it to make it come alive. Remembering that we're building from our vocal techniques that we found at the beginning of the module. For every emotion, I want you to ask yourself, is it light or heavy? Is it sustained, is it quick, and what direction does it flow in? You're going to come up with a physical action, whether that's a pull, a push, a flick, a jump, whatever it be and practice that part of the presentation while doing that action. Allow your voice to discover new realms. That's really how amazing storytelling happens. You're connected to your voice, but you're also connected to the story. 10. Lesson eight: Practice: Now that we've wrapped up our structure and we've found a really intentional way of delivering our piece and we've got our content together. Now it comes to the most boring part, but the most important, which is practice, practice, and practice. I've already mentioned that when we're practicing a presentation, we want to be doing it on our feet, we want to be doing it with maybe an articulation exercise like sticking our tongue out like this, or maybe we want to be doing it with our actions that we've just found. I really believe in this because usually people can practice just in their head, they write the content and then they just go through it in their brain, no, this is the biggest mistake that you can make. You need to practice it the way you want it to come out. When you are going to a presentation, especially if it's one that's high stakes, your body is going to get nervous. That's because you're a human being and because you care. What we want to do is we want to set ourselves up so that when we go into that presentation, we've got this muscle memory going on and how we say these words. Therefore, when I practice a presentation and when I get my clients to, I get them to always do it, speaking it out loud, literally into a space on your own, practicing it. I get them to do it with either an articulation exercise at least one time all the way through. I also get them to do it with the actions they've chosen at least three times. Obviously, if you have a half hour talk, you might want to chunk that up into five minute segments. But really, try to practice it physically at least three times through before the big day. Then the last thing I would mention is try to practice in front of someone. Now, if you can't find someone, a family or a friend or maybe you don't want to ask someone to watch, I definitely recommend setting up the camera and watching yourself. I know you're all shaking in your boots because this is one of the most hated things. We always hate the sound of our own voice. But I promise you, this is how the actors really get better. Part of the actor audition is self tape, and even on movie sets, they have to watch themselves back to see their performance. Even though it might cringe a little bit at first, it really is how you get better. For example, maybe you set up the camera and you notice that your weight is going side to side. Then you think, what did Molly give us to help counteract that grounding and maybe you want to go back to the beginning sessions of the module to help find your feet on the floor again. Then maybe set up the camera again, you watch yourself and you notice that your voice is sounding a little bit flat. Therefore, you want to up or adjust your actions ever so slightly to make it feel more entertaining. When you allow yourself to watch yourself back as if it's not you and it's just another person that you're observing, it can massively help you learn and improve. Only way you can really get better at presentations is by putting yourself in those uncomfortable positions first off. Well done, if you have volunteered to do a talk when you usually hate it, you're on the right track. Even by watching this video, you're doing yourself a massive favor and congratulations to you for putting some time and energy into your own communication style. I would try to get a full practice in at least five times before the big day. Even if you're practicing all loud in the shower, you need to get used to speaking those words aloud in the order that you like. Nobody gets the big day, you just have to try to calm the nerves, focus on our breathing techniques, and you'll be absolutely flying. 11. Conclusion: That just about wraps up this skill share course, speak like a pro the actor secrets to dynamic presentations. Congratulations to you. I am so appreciative and so proud of you for putting in this time, energy, and effort into working on your communication skills. Like I've said, it is something that is totally learned and totally improved upon. We're not just all born as perfect charismatic confidence speakers. In general, we want to make sure that we are setting up our body and posture correctly. We are making sure that we are breathing to calm the nerves down and breathing diaphragmatically, to make sure our voice is supported. We also want to make sure that we're taking some extra time to release the articulators to make sure that our audience can trust and hear us and our authentic cells perfectly. Then when it comes to the content, we want to really be intentional about how we're going to structure it, what we want our audience to feel. Then we can use our voice to help evoke those feelings throughout the process. Last, but of course, not least, you need to practice, practice, and practice again. If you do have any questions or would like to check out any of my other skill share courses, please do. I would love to hear some feedback if you could leave me a review. I very much look forward to hearing and looking at your assignments in terms of your structured outline and also maybe your video submissions. Thank you so much, everyone. Best of luck with your endeavors, and I can't wait to keep up with your progress. Bye.