I’ve been thinking about acting and speaking this week, and so naturally a study talking about the neuroscience of acting caught my eye.  What happens when an actor gets into a role?  It turns out that she suppresses activity in the pre-frontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with self-awareness, amongst other things.  So actors do lose themselves in their roles, at least as far as neuroscience can determine at this point.

I had particular reason to think about this study and the activity of the pre-frontal cortex recently working with two very smart clients rehearsing their speeches.  Both very different in terms of content and approach, but they had a similar issue in rehearsal:  moving from the presentation as a recitation of facts to a felt, experienced story.

It’s not a trivial shift.  You’re moving from thinking about the speech, trying to learn and remember your lines, to delivering your lines as if you were living them in the moment – like a conversation you’re having with the audience.

There are a variety of ways to get to that point.  Some people memorize the whole speech.  That’s not my favorite approach, because of the pressure the speaker feels to get every word right, and the self-criticism that results when a word goes wrong.  After all, the audience doesn’t know what you haven’t said, so a better way to think about delivery is that there are no mistakes, just new approaches.

Of course, that works better for speakers who do know their speeches and are comfortable ad-libbing in the moment.  But speaking is filled with Catch-22s like that.  You want to know the speech so well that you’re comfortable with the material throughout and you can nail a moment without hesitation even if the audience or the technology throws you a curve.  But for most people, it works better not to memorize, but rather to know the structure of the speech thoroughly so that you can talk the points, in order, flawlessly, and slightly differently each time.

You want to be aware of where you are at every moment of the speech so that you can respond in the moment to the ebb and flow of the audience’s attention.  But you also want to lose yourself in the topic, just like an actor losing herself in the role.  You want to suppress the pre-frontal cortex and have it hyper-aware at the same time.

Catch-22.

In the end, what is really essential is to be able to access your emotions and to connect those with your material.  So that you’re not reciting lines, but speaking felt truths, truths with emotion behind them.  Moving your focus from your pre-frontal cortex to your amygdala and hippocampus in neuro-scientific terms.  The moment when a speaker goes from speaking lines to connecting to their truth is a very powerful one for me as a coach and is another Catch-22.  You can’t get there without a lot of rehearsal, and yet it needs to feel like you’re speaking the words for the very first time.

Living in those paradoxes is the essence of the enduring appeal of public speaking and why I find the world of keynote speaking so absorbing.