Coaching Through an Actor’s Emotion

I came across this quote on an actor’s blog but the book was not referenced… so I cannot give credit where credit is due.  All I can say is, it did inspire me as a awareness coach & life coach to write about that quote:

“Brecht wanted the audience to know his plays weren't reality while Stanislavski wanted his audience to believe they WERE reality.”

“Brecht believed that a play should not cause the audience to identify emotionally with the characters or actions onstage, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the actions on the stage. To do this Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the audience that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By really highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was changeable.”

“Stanislavski on the other hand focused on the development of artistic truth onstage by teaching actors to "live the part" during performance (the first method actor really). Stanislavski proposed that actors study and experience subjective emotions and feelings and manifest them to audiences by physical and vocal means in order to convey reality onstage.”

These quotes took me into my own emotion on how I project myself to my audience and/or clients when I am speaking or teaching. How I come across in the way I talk and the way I evoke my emotion to my audience.

In a way, coaching is like directing someone’s life. In a talk with your audience or client, you can tell them how they should feel or think or you can evoke from them their own feelings and emotions.

I remember when I was in my first coaching class, I brought a list of coaches that had inspired me and I also included friends who were motivational speakers, story tellers and actors. I so wanted to be like them. Coming from an acting background myself, I knew I had a good stage presence. I knew I had no problem being heard in a large room or on stage as I was able to project my voice from a stage to across the room. I knew how to be present with an audience and I know when I had them and when I did not.

What I found out, as a Awareness Coach in front of my audience, is that I needed to be more than an actor. Instead of just delivering my message, I found that I had to go in even deeper and actually get a transformation to happen. To have my audience feel the part or to have them realize what they needed to get out of my lecture, I could not just talk to them. I had to pull from them my play of my story, my talk and my experience. To engage them in their own thoughts and feelings, to collect their own insights and have the shift that can happen when talking to a student or an audience.

So when teaching to an audience or to an individual (who is also your audience) within a conversation, are we just actors playing a role to invoke a reaction or are we Life Coaches who can penetrate even deeper to an audience then Brecht and Stanislavski. Do we cause a transformation within our audience or just evoke a feeling, that is still only at a service level both mentally and physically, instead of tapping into the core of who your audience really is and what it was that brought them to your lecture, class or coaching section?

Another quote, “We are all actors on stage projecting our life as we see it to be.” How then do we see our life as coaches and how do we project ourselves to our audience? How does your audience relate, take away and transform their emotions and their thoughts from what you just taught, or evoked from them that they did not see before?

When speaking to an audience, as a Life Coach, are you coming from Brecht or Stanislavski in your delivery or from your training as a Life Coach? Causing a transformation within your audience is good through an actor’s eyes as well as a Life Coach’s eyes because it is the delivery and emotion that will engage your audience or student.

So the next time, when you are on that call to a student or on a platform speaking to an audience, be in check of what you are telling them. Are you teaching them to just feel your words or are you looking to create a transformation within them? To have them feel the shift from within themselves and to take with them the messages from your spoken words and actions.

Be an actor on stage as well as a Life Coach, speaking from your own emotion, so that your audience can relate to you.

 With Aloha,

Marc Tolliver/ Awareness Coach /Life Coach / Business Coach

http://lifecreationsedu.com/aboutMarc.html