Acting up
They are everywhere. Actors offering an extensive range of business courses, training programs and private coaching sessions in such things as public speaking, communication skills, media training, voice training and interview techniques.
All of them promise access to some of the most outstanding acting, voice and movement practitioners money can buy thereby ensuring a competitive edge to any business presentation. These are people who have spent years learning the actor's craft. They have studied and practiced.
They sing, dance, breathe, speak, vocalise, audition and, having learnt how to do these things through a rigorous and exhaustive training regimen that may have lasted a decade or more, they offer you the same benefits in a mere two days!
And what are the benefits you are being promised? Increased confidence, the mastery of simple techniques that allow you to shine in any situation and an opportunity to bring out the star performer that’s inside you.
What a lot of nonsense! The only benefit most of these actors have been able to deliver for themselves is unemployment. The likelihood of you being able to turn yourself in to a consummate actor in two days is next to zero.
Aside from anything else why does any CEO think that a valid methodology for authentic communication is learning how to pretend to be something you are not?
That said there is something we can learn from actors as CEOs – specifically something we can learn from the world’s most successful actors who also happen to be the world’s worst actors.
Keanu Reeves, Tom Cruise, Paris Hilton, Sylvester Stallone, Hillary Duff, Jessica Simpson, Jean Claude Van Dam… all great examples of incredibly successful actors who have the acting range of a gerbil.
Act like you
So, why are they successful? Because they only ever play one character and that is themselves. They play it well and they play it over and over again. And they get paid a huge amount of money for doing it.
We expect the same of our CEOs. We don’t want you wearing different coloured hats, pretending you are wading through jelly or lying on your back for three hours learning to breathe.
We don’t want you playing different roles or characters depending on the situation. We want you to be genuine. We want you to be you. A CEO who is real and unaffected, who will talk in plain easy-to-understand language and be honest about who he is and where he is coming from.
Keanu Reeves may be the worst actor on the planet but he does a good job of being Keanu and I kind of like him for it.
*images sourced from linked sites
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