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From Mimicry to Mastery: Achieving Unique Expression Onstage

Discovering who you are as a performer takes time, courage, and mastery.

On Stage

Public speaking

Stage performance

Writing

Michael

Port

Co-Founder

minute read

Published on

September 22, 2025

As you pursue mastery, take risks, and try new things onstage, you'll discover who you are as a performer and a creative artist.

More than a few aspiring speakers who come to train at HEROIC have told me: “I want to be like Tony Robbins.” Perhaps after witnessing one of his moving, motivational, high-energy performances, they imagine themselves having that same type of influence on their audiences.

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But it’s highly unlikely you’ll “be like” Tony Robbins. At 6 feet 7 inches tall, with a booming voice and size 16 shoes, he’s quite literally one-in-a-billion. He’s unique.

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And you are too. But in order to become the unique, fully expressed speaker that only you can be, you must move from mimicry to mastery, and have the courage to make big choices that are uniquely yours.

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The First Stage of Learning: Copying

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When you’re starting out in any learning process, it’s normal to make choices based on what other people do. When you start learning a new skill, you copy the way someone with experience does it. On a sports team, you’ll mimic the way experienced teammates move. In cooking or baking, you’ll watch videos from accomplished chefs and attempt to emulate them, step by step. The same happens in the speaking industry.

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But let me be clear: I’m not talking about “copying” someone’s intellectual property. Stealing ideas, stories, or frameworks from another speaker is illegal and unethical. The copying I’m referring to here is imitating ways of being, styles, and choices. Things like staging, movement, use of props and visuals, approach to humor, and speech structure.

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This type of copying can help you learn basic techniques that form the foundation of your skills. Of course, for this to be effective, you’ll want to make sure you’re copying the right people. Mimicking someone who’s simply doing what everyone else is doing (or worse, making choices that simply don’t work) neither benefits your audience nor helps you uplevel your performance.

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Don’t Copy What’s Not Working

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In 2003, when I started out in the speaking industry, I kept a log book to record consistencies. I watched as many speakers as I possibly could, and documented what was typical among speakers. Then, I analyzed; I considered: Is what they’re doing effective? If so, why? If not, why are they doing it?

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I realized a lot of speakers did a lot of the same things. The same ineffective things. They copied each other, but they unknowingly copied what wasn’t working.

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For example, many speakers would say something like, “well, let’s get started,” after three to four minutes of onstage fluff and filler. Their “warm opening” lacked structure, consistency, and craft. They had already started their speech, but without a solid opening; they were already off on the wrong foot.

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I also saw hundreds of examples of speakers opening with, “I’m happy to be here.” What's the alternative? “I’m unhappy that I’m here but I’m getting paid a lot of money so I’ll do it anyway.” Don’t say it; show them how happy you are to be there through the quality of your work and your commitment to their needs.

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Looking to the “status quo” for guidance and mimicking something just because it’s what everyone else is doing will often backfire. Learning by copying only works when you’re emulating people who’ve mastered their craft.

Full Transcript

Don't

assume that just because something is prevalent in the speaking industry, it’s effective. (Often, it’s not.)

make sure you're copying the right people and the right things when you’re in the first stage of learning.

Test Your Choices Early On

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Let’s say you want to uplevel your speech’s opener. You find six or seven quality speech openers that engage, pique curiosity, and captivate the audience. You watch them over and over, deconstruct them, and figure out why they work. Then you start to craft yours based on a similar structure or organization.

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You’ve successfully copied a speech opener. Or have you?

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There’s only one way to know: you’ve got to test it.

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When it comes to speech content, many speakers just assume their opening, story, or teaching points will work. But often they don’t test their assumptions. Especially early on in your speaking career, testing your material and your performance choices in front of real, live audiences is vital. The real-time feedback you get will show you what’s working and what’s not.

Don't

assume that just because a speaker is “successful,” they’ve tested and refined all of their performance choices.

remember that there’s no one approach that works in a creative field; each decision you make will lead you to the next one.

The Prerequisite for Creativity

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As you develop more proficiency and craft in your speaking skills and start to see which choices are working and which aren’t, you’ll start to make bigger, more creative choices. But before that happens, you need to have a contextual understanding of the craft. If you don’t have the foundational skills necessary, creativity is just a guessing game.

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However, when you put in the time necessary to master the fundamentals of speech writing and stage performance, when you know the structures, the frameworks, and the methods, creativity flows naturally from your knowledge of the craft.

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When I was first learning martial arts, our instructors expected us to do exactly what they did. They didn’t want us to improvise, because doing so could create hard-to-break bad habits. Instead of improvising and wasting time learning the wrong things, I learned the foundational skills through observation.

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Proficiency didn’t come after a few months of training, it came after years of dedicated practice. Once students were proficient—and by proficient I mean black-belt level—they were allowed to start experimenting. Knowing the ins and outs of martial arts was the prerequisite to creativity and unique performance.

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The same goes for public speaking. When you’ve achieved a deep knowledge of the craft, you're better able to make creative decisions that propel your career forward and set you apart in the industry.

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In order to create something unique, at some point we have to start making choices that are unique, and not just based on what other people are doing. That’s when you reach the highest level of mastery, when you’re able to make knowledge-based choices that are uniquely yours.

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Mastery and Uniqueness Take Time

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While many experienced speakers often offer the advice to “just be yourself,” discovering who you are as a performer isn’t something that happens overnight.

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What do you stand for? How do you show up in the world? What’s your value system? How do you express yourself? You probably know what you value and who you are as an individual, but figuring out who you are as a performer and a creative artist is different. It’s something you discover along your creative journey.

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This takes time. At HEROIC, our students learn that mastery is a process. During months of speech writing and months of stage performance, as they trust the process, they’re given the space to discover who they are and who they want to be as a performer. How? Through learning the craft, putting in the work, and mastering their material. During ideation, writing, rehearsing, and performing, they start to discover their uniqueness.

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It isn’t an intellectual exercise. You can’t discover it through answering a series of questions or solely by studying the craft of speaking. It comes onstage, while you’re stretching yourself, testing yourself, challenging yourself to take risks and try things that you may not have done before.

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The best, most fully self-expressed performers are those who make the most interesting, and often the most risky, performance choices onstage. Those choices set them apart, earn them their name, and make them someone worth remembering.

Don't

obsess over uniqueness at first; focus on mastering the craft of speaking and learning foundational skills that will lead to creativity and full self-expression.

give yourself time and space to master the creative process and uncover your uniqueness as a performer.

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Be Unique Enough to Be Copied

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When you do achieve full self-expression onstage, don’t be surprised if you notice other speakers who start to copy you. It’s a common cycle that happens in most creative pursuits. As Oscar Wilde said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

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You might be tempted to become frustrated when this happens. But when other speakers start to emulate you, it just means that what you’re doing is worth copying. In fact, one of the signs that your creative material is working is that other people don’t just consume it, but mimic it.

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As you keep challenging yourself, striving to be even better, and making big choices, you’ll stay fresh, current, and uniquely you.

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You might even become like Tony Robbins. Not in a facsimile type of way, but in the sense that you, too, will be a vibrantly unique speaker.

Don't

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Test Your Choices Early On

‍

You’ve successfully copied a speech opener. Or have you?

‍

There’s only one way to know: you’ve got to test it.

‍

Dont

assume that just because a speaker is “successful,” they’ve tested and refined all of their performance choices.

remember that there’s no one approach that works in a creative field; each decision you make will lead you to the next one.

The Prerequisite for Creativity

‍

Mastery and Uniqueness Take Time

‍

While many experienced speakers often offer the advice to “just be yourself,” discovering who you are as a performer isn’t something that happens overnight.

‍

Don't

obsess over uniqueness at first; focus on mastering the craft of speaking and learning foundational skills that will lead to creativity and full self-expression.

give yourself time and space to master the creative process and uncover your uniqueness as a performer.