Acting your way to the top
Is there anything the world of business could learn from trained actors? Great business leaders, like acting greats, need to communicate with conviction. But can you learn those skills?
Well, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art has launched a course to help business leaders create a powerful presence in the workplace. RADA coach Charlie Walker-Wise gave Vishala Sri-Pathma some tips.
Charlie Walker-Wise: The first thing we have to sort of dispel is the idea that, in any way, we’re helping people to act, or we’re helping them to be dramatic. What we do at RADA Business is we take the skills that make actors excellent communicators and we transfer it to organizational context.
Vishala Sri-Pathma: OK. Give me an example.
Charlie Walker-Wise: An example would be that people have to make sure that they can be heard in a meeting. So we will help people understand the importance of physicality in getting your voice heard.
And what tends to happen is we tend to either over-energize or under-energize. And what we want to find is that Goldilocks spot, so that we are showing up in the meeting in a positive way, without resigning ourselves from it — and that can happen as easily as just slumping back in our chair.
You open up the chest so you’ve got lots of resonance. And those are the really small changes that can make the difference between people hearing you and your point getting lost, and someone making the same point a few minutes later and getting the credit for it.
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