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You’re sitting in a packed auditorium, watching a dynamic professional speaker deliver a performance full of movement, humor, and insight. Her confidence and charisma seem to fill the room as she masterfully delivers her message.
You leap to your feet to join in a rousing standing ovation, then hurry off to the side of the stage to congratulate her for such an inspiring keynote. But as you politely chat with the speaker, you’re surprised to find that offstage, she’s quiet, reserved, and seemingly uncomfortable with all the attention.
Given her onstage persona, you probably never would have guessed that she’s an introvert. In fact, many people even assume that to be a successful professional speaker, you must be naturally extroverted.
That’s simply not the case. Introverted, extroverted, or anything in between, you can thrive in the spotlight, deliver a transformational performance, and share your message with connection, craft, and confidence.
(And don’t let the word “performance” scare you. You don’t have to leap from introversion to “bigness” onstage. Performing, simply put, is making your audience feel through actions onstage. Actions that are aligned with a performance style that feels authentically “you.”)
First, a Disclaimer About Labels
As a society, we often put ourselves into different boxes. However, the way you decide to show up onstage is entirely up to you. Your natural inclination doesn’t determine your ability to succeed in the spotlight.
You might consider yourself extroverted, introverted, or ambiverted, but onstage, those labels disappear. All the perceived inner or exterior boundaries we put on ourselves—about how we should interact, what is “right,” what is taboo, how much is too much—fade away.
Sure, there are some traits that come with being traditionally introverted or extroverted. But it’s an incorrect generalization to assume that all extroverts enjoy being in the spotlight and all introverts do not.
Often, simply labeling someone as an extrovert or introvert can be an oversimplification; it can color your idea of what types of people belong on the stage. In my experience in life and in performance, humans show up in different ways at different times and in different settings in our lives.
An introvert can have a huge, expressive style under the stage lights. An extrovert might be stoic and quietly intense onstage. Labels don’t matter here. There’s no one “category” that you—or anyone onstage—belongs in. And a vast range of types of speakers can deliver a transformational message and leave their unique mark onstage.
There’s No One “Right” Performance Style
If a speaker’s performance style is more reserved, stoic, and quietly intense, I love that. And, as Performance Faculty, I want to nurture that; I want to see what happens when they stand on their own two feet and really own their unique style.
If somebody’s performance style is more athletic and they use their whole body, act out the physicality of their speech, and end the performance dripping in sweat because they’re working so hard, I love that too.
I don’t love either of these performance styles (or any other performance style, for that matter) more than the other. Because there’s no one performance style that’s most effective or most impactful. Any performance style can be effective if it’s rooted in honesty, full commitment, and is centered on the audience.
The idea that onstage you need to be really big, performative, and theatrical—it just isn’t true. (Go ahead, breathe a sigh of relief.)
Masterful performance is about committing to the craft and thinking deeply about how you plan to make your audience feel, think, and act. Most importantly of all, it’s about focusing on serving the people in front of you.
The most effective performers are the most honest performers. They believe wholeheartedly in their speech, their delivery, and their performance. They uncover the performance style that’s true to them, their message, and the audience they serve. Then, through investigation and rehearsal, they root themselves deeper and unapologetically embody their performance.
Our work as Performance Faculty is to help people discover their specific style, root it in craft, anchor it in structure, and enhance their commitment to it in whatever way feels true to them.
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