Making a point while keeping your cool

The start of the New Year has found me immersed in revisions of my play It's My Party!,  in rehearsaI now for a March production in Louisville (details below). I'm also working on coaching new speaking clients and prepping for returning ones. In the background, I've been catching bits of the impeachment hearings on the radio. Talk about three very different communications modes! Yet there are similarities: all involve crafting and delivering a narrative to make a point.

I've heard effective speaking from several of the House managers at the Senate trial. But outside the chamber, hallway interviewees and on-air commentators drip partisanship and rancor. As a result, many citizens trying to follow this important event find it tiresome or tune it out completely.

If only these speakers knew the strategy I first learned in theatre and now share with my clients: Walk people through the story you are telling, connect the main dots, but don't spell everything out for them. Don't tell them what to think! Playwrights (and speaking coaches) call this trusting your audience; give them sufficient information, but don't serve everything up to them, predigested and on a platter!

Give listeners space to make their own connections. If they refuse to believe you, or even refuse to listen, no amount of pushing the message at them, speaking in words underlined and bolded for emphasis, will convince them. You don't make your point shouting or sneering. This is not a good sound, a good look, or an effective way to communicate. It belittles listeners. It patronizes then. It turns them off.

That's why revisiting the recordings of Marie Yovanovich and Fiona Hill as part of the House managers' presentation was so refreshing! With their cultivated voices and step-by-step storytelling, they gave details that were shocking, even harrowing. But they never forced that on us. They let us make whatever emotional connection we wanted. They wisely let their powerful stories speak for themselves.

I appreciate it when a speaker trusts me, not only by what she says. but how she says it. And I listen more. Which leads to understanding. My prayer for our leaders in this time of political turmoil is that they will someday trust their audience.  But I'm not holding my breath!