Tag Archives: Michael Parker

A Lesson in reading.

There is little left to say about the wedding. The reviewers set aside cynicism, and apart from sour comment on a few fashion gaffes, they heaped deserved praise on the Middletons, individually and as a family. It is almost impossible to imagine the pressure they were under to perform on the day. And, putting the experienced Royals in the shade, they rose to the occasion to the manor born

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The least remarked upon was 23 year old brother James whose reading of the Lesson, a difficult passage from Romans, was remarkable.  Whether coached or well advised, his delivery was compelling as he resisted the temptation to be rushed and spoke with surprising confidence. As one journalist noted “he was (pause) at least (pause) audible (look up, breathe) throughout (pause).”

The ability to pause and to look up is essential if you want to be listened to. In reading the verses he only glanced down when he wasn’t speaking. This meant he held the attention of his audience (pause!) of 2 billion. If he could do it under this pressure, can there ever be any excuse for reading a script in a pitch?

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The Bishop of London gave a superb address. He too made no apparent use of his notes and the power of his delivery was a combination of a great voice, pitch and pace, and  his eye contact with his congregation. The Dean, by contrast, chose to read the prayers, which presumably he knows well, keeping his head down as if avoiding the cameras. Not so easy to listen to.

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Prince Harry needs a good start.

Prince Harry’s speech as best man is the most anticipated since the TV debates a year ago. Then it was Nick Clegg who, in his opening remarks in the first of the debates, took the fight to Cameron and Brown and ‘won’ that all important initial encounter. He was confident, engaging and surprising. (Less so today.)

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An article in the Daily Telegraph by Iain Hollingsworth is offering the Prince advice. This ranges from consulting google for ready-made speeches, to jokey one-liners through to ‘freeing the inner voice’ by chanting Sanskrit.

The best advice came from Caroline Goyden of Loud and Clear on the hardest part of any speech, getting to your feet and starting. She tells people who are consumed with fear the same thing as directors tell actors: “You only have to have the first line in your head.” The rest – if it has been rehearsed – will follow.

Once on your feet, plant them firmly, make eye contact with a few friendly faces, count to three and breathe. “The golden rule is to slow down,” she says. “And pause before a punch -line.” 

The Prince would do well to listen to Caroline and also check out two recent posts,  The start!  and  Pause for effect.

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Team, do you like each other?

In a perceptive article a couple of years ago Martin Jones, writing in Campaign magazine, said that three questions were uppermost in client’s minds when assessing a pitch. Since, as head of the AAR, he had been on the receiving end of some 600 pitches, helping clients through the selection process, his opinions are worth listening to. The three questions:

“Do I like these people?”  “How hungry are they for my business?”  “How much do they like each other?” It is the last of these that is often overlooked.

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Generally members of a team do get on, one hopes, but what matters is how they are perceived on the pitch. One of the commonest problems is when individuals “identify more with the functional area they come from than they identify with the team”.* In football it is Barcelona more than any other that harnesses great skill as a team. They are not a bunch of disconnected talented stars.

In a competitive pitch, when the adrenaline is flowing, it is easy for functional specialists to wax lyrical on their ‘chosen subject’, not realising  how the perception of team, and the ‘liking of each other’, will suffer.

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In practice, particularly when team members from different disciplines may not know each other well, the solution is decent rehearsal time with an ‘outsider’ looking for evidence of teamwork . Remember that “none of us is as smart as all of us”.(Ken Blanchard)

 *This reference taken from the book– Team Talk, by Anne Donnellon

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Rehearsal for the better.

For actors rehearsal is a necessity, an essential part of their professional life, as it is for business folk who pitch. Or as it should be. Here are some thoughts on rehearsal from “Acting for the Better”, an excellent book by Mary Hasbury. It is aimed at actors but the thinking holds true for the pitch.

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“Rehearsal is when the real work is done. The play has to be brought to life and become sufficiently fluent and polished to present to an audience”. It is what the  audience take out, not  what you put in.

She discusses various other aspects of rehearsal. For example:

” Give roughly the same amount of rehearsal to scene endings as you do to the beginnings.” In a pitch,  work on hand-overs!

” Remember that it is in rehearsal that positioning and groupings are worked out. Only the director ‘out front’ can see what the picture looks like to the audience.”  The pitch rehearsal without someone ‘out front’ achieves little.

“Rehearsal is the time to try out degrees of emotion, how best to use pauses, when to shine and when to fade into the background. Then when it comes to the actual performance, you reproduce everything that you have evolved and developed in rehearsal.”  To perform at your best, you must rehearse.

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Twenty Twelve and ‘how not to’….

 The monster that will be the Olympics drives towards 2012 like a tsunami of achievement but one area it does lack is humour. In fact, ill-tempered competition is threatening the true competition to come. Lord Coe vs Lord Moynihan over money, Tottenham vs West Ham over the stadium, David Bedford vs LOCOG over the marathon and Corporate Sponsors vs the rest of us over ticket availability.

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By contrast, the BBC 4 comedy ‘Twenty Twelve brings nicely observed and well acted light relief. Tonight’s episode features Dave Wellbeck, an Olympian chosen as an ambassador to tour schools as a spokesman for the ‘Raise the Bar’ programme. Unfortunately Dave is the world’s worst presenter.

If you missed it, then as light relief from the serious business of pitching check out Dave’s amusing ‘how not to’ on BBCiplayer!

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