Public Speaking As Energy Transformation

By Lee Glickstein

Lee Glickstein, founder of Speaking Circles® and longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister, teaches how to speak to groups with presence and power.

What looks like "an audience" is really a powerful energy field ready to align with a speaker whose priority is to notice and honor that energy field.

Groups do not respond as well to presenters who place a higher priority on performing, persuading, or delivering a lot of information, than to those who are truly with them.

Anxiety in front of groups—from minor unease to terror—is the inevitable result of the unexamined assumption that public speaking is "me trying to get through to them," or "me against them," which is how it is conventionally practiced and taught.

For a glimpse into the model of public speaking as energy transformation, imagine an acupuncturist, chiropractor, and psychotherapist who have each built good practices and find themselves suddenly presented with golden opportunities to speak at association and educational meetings. Ill at ease with groups, they attend conventional trainings where the assumption is that public speaking is a skill unrelated to the one-on-one transformational capacity they already have. So they practice and polish techniques that may help them cope on the surface with anxiety in front of groups.

But the model of public speaking as energy transformation reflects the reality that one-on-one proficiency in any field can be transferred with ease to groups without learning new technique. The key is to regard an audience as an integrated energy body, breathe with it and align with it. Just as your work (or pleasure) with an individual flows effortlessly and intuitively from presence and breath, your words to a group are meant to flow without trying. Once you access this group-aligned place within you, public speaking is immediately a new universe.

From here, you get to be in the comfort zone of your mastery instead of just talk about it. The acupuncturist penetrates points in the group energy body as precisely with words as with needles. The chiropractor opens and adjusts that body. The therapist "listens a group into existence" with the same expansiveness a client is provided. This model extends to any practice founded on one-on-one proficiency, and to individuals in any field who have good one-on-one rapport.

Developing your innate capacity to transform the energy in a room requires, rather than a new technique, instead that you avail yourself of support to fully experience your anxiety with groups in whatever form it shows up, thus allowing it to lose its power. You can start shifting your attitude in this direction by placing yourself in these scenarios:

 * During the applause after being introduced to a group, instead of girding yourself to deliver your opening sentence with confidence—the conventional approach—you allow yourself to fully receive their attention and goodwill. When the applause ends, you take a full, luxurious breath.

 * Before speaking, you let gravity take you into the same balanced position as when you greet a client, or as a body worker when you first touch them, or a position that is second nature to you from dance, sports, or exercise. From that grounded place, you speak conversationally.

 *You speak to one person at a time as if they were the only person in the world, squaring up with that person heart-to-heart and belly-to-belly, noticing the listening is there before speaking into it, and not leaving to move to another person until you've paused to let the words land.

Once you start on this path of public speaking as energy transformation, the cosmos is the limit.