The Art of Communication
This fun podcast series is for anyone who has to deliver a message, tell a story or speak to another human being. Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen cover all aspects of how you connect with everyone you meet - whether you're giving a speech, running a meeting or simply talking with friends. Our Communication Experts series includes experts in many different fields: TV and radio presenters, politicians, auctioneers, writers, professors, lawyers, film directors, actors, art dealers, photographers and designers etc. Everyone will be an expert in communicating with their audience in their particular medium. Robin Kermode, is an actor, best-selling author, leading Communication Coach, popular keynote speaker, body language expert and media commentator. For more information visit: www.robinkermode.com
The Art of Communication
The Importance of Energy
The Importance of Energy.
How important is energy when engaging an audience? What is the right level of energy? And how can we change our energy levels?
Discover how physical and mental preparation can help you channel that "sweet spot" of energy for different situations — from meeting rooms to large gatherings.
Join Robin Kermode and Sian Hansen as they discuss how different types of energy can change our communication style in another fun episode of this podcast series.
Hello and welcome to the Art of Communication podcast, where we talk about everything to do with communication, both in our personal and our business lives. You're welcome to contact us at robincermodecom.
Speaker 2:Hello, it's Sian Hansen here with Robin Kermode. Hello, Today we're going to talk about the importance of energy in a presentation In life actually, oh, in life Okay. We're going to talk about life, are we? Well, the importance of energy in life, energy in life Okay, I think to just kick off a good place actually is why does that even matter? I mean, when we're communicating, when we're talking one-to-one or in a speech, why does energy matter?
Speaker 1:Well, energy matters because it affects the other person. So if you walk into a building with lots of energy, people will notice you. Now, you can have too much energy, of course, and that can be irritating, but if you walk onto a platform with no energy, then it won't even grab anyone's attention at all. So energy is important, but I think there's a balance between too much and too little. That's what I think we should talk about today.
Speaker 2:Okay, but just real basics here, I imagine having energy means really simply that you can engage with your audience and hold their attention and be persuaded by what you're saying. I'm only saying that because you watch politicians. You know use high energy, usually yes.
Speaker 1:Or they use rhetoric, which is a device to increase the energy. So maybe they do things in threes and so there's a kind of wave motion. So there's momentum. So there are lots of different ways of doing it. It doesn't have to be constantly high. You can build up and pull it down again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay. Why don't we talk about that? How do you know when you've got the right balance? I mean, what can you tell us?
Speaker 1:about how you know when to use a lot of energy and when to pull back. Does it depend on the words that you're saying? It depends on the message, it depends on the time of day, it depends on the audience and all those factors. But if you think about how you start, so you walk out onto a platform, it doesn't matter whether you're in a meeting room and you've got 10 people around a table or you're standing on a platform or you're just meeting somebody at a networking event. It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1:But whatever your audience is, however big the audience is, we don't, at the beginning, know what's going on in their lives. No, so we have a mixture of people. Some people's lives will be great and they'll be happy and they'll fall in love and have babies, and life is wonderful. Other times people are sadder and they've had more challenging times. Now we can't come in with a very high energy and go hi, hello, how are you doing? Because that's not going to resonate with somebody who's feeling a bit vulnerable. But similarly, we can't come in with too low an energy and going okay, so good morning, hello. Are we all right? Because everyone else is saying well, that's a bit passive-aggressive and don't talk to me like that, because I have more, and also I've showed up for this talk, and so so.
Speaker 1:And I want to be entertained?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to be entertained. Or why are you on the back foot?
Speaker 1:So there's a kind of sweet spot in the middle that we've got to aim for at the beginning, and then you can warm an audience around, but at the beginning I think we've got to be in that sweet spot in the middle.
Speaker 2:Oh, isn't that interesting. So you're actually weaning them round at the beginning. Making them feel and ramp it up if you need to Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And the analogy I use is when I was learning to drive, my driving instructor said look, if you're driving and you have a passenger, you want the passenger to feel safe with you. So if you come out of your driveway or you start the car up and you pull away, if you pull away at 100 miles an hour, everyone's going to think, oh my goodness, this is going too fast. But if you pull out gently, slowly and within a mile, you're doing 100 miles an hour. Well, legal, maybe 70 miles an hour, I don't know what the legal limit is, but I mean you pull out and you build up to that speed, then everyone feels safe. But if you ram it at that speed it doesn't work, unless you're a comedian or there's some build up. In the event, there's an expectation, there's an expectation and it's kind of you know, drum rolling on, you come. But in most situations I think we want to get the audience on our side and that means we've got to hit the sweet spot in the middle.
Speaker 2:Right. Is there something that you can give to us about prepping for what you think will be an energetic speech? What I'm really thinking about here is do you have to do some physical exercises? Well, it's physical and mental isn't it.
Speaker 1:So it's about getting ourselves in that calm space, and we've talked about this, I think, in another podcast. When I was at drama college, the movement teacher said you do your jumping jacks or whatever, and then you come to a still stand and I always thought, well, that's the same as standing still? And she said no, it's not, because a still stand has lots of energy and lots of potential energy in it. And if we think of energy, I mean energy comes from the Greek word meaning activity.
Speaker 1:So, there's lots of types of energy, as we all know from our chemistry and physics at school. There's kinetic, elastic, chemical, electromagnetic, thermodynamic. But potential energy, I think, is one of the most interesting ones about communication.
Speaker 2:It's that stillness where there's a potential energy to come on, so I think that's really interesting. Yeah, actually you once told me a story that was just brilliant, where you went to a reunion of your acting college and somebody came out on the stage and didn't say anything.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:He had, that's still.
Speaker 1:He did. It was actually your favourite actor. Yes, that's true. It was him, yeah, who happens to be very good looking.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this was at the Old Vic Theatre, and he came out and he did stand there and didn't say anything for a very long time.
Speaker 2:But everybody felt his presence. Mesmeric, it was absolutely mesmeric.
Speaker 1:It was very funny.
Speaker 2:Absolutely love that, that's potential energy.
Speaker 1:That is potential energy. That's very interesting In terms of exercises to get there, to be centred. I think it's back to the old breathing. It's back to being nice and calm and centred and breathing slowly. To being nice and calm and centered and breathing slowly. There's a very simple one where you breathe in for two and out for five. You breathe in longer on the out breath because that's the calming one. So anything that's going to calm us down is going to center our energies. There's one I like doing, which I often get my clients do, which is to prepare maybe the first sentence, and you do it. You have to go to the bathroom or somewhere the corridor where there's no one there. You do your first sentence standing on one leg and then you do the same thing standing on the other leg, and what it does is it balances the body out. But because your mind is concentrating on not falling over, you tend to feel more natural about it anyway.
Speaker 2:It loosens up the first sentence. Okay, so it loosens up the first sentence. So there we are. We do some jumping jacks, we try some jumping jacks, we try out our first sentence on one leg a couple times over warming up our voice and then we do our breathing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, then we do the breathing and then, intentionally, we think about what is the energy level we want to bring on for this particular event, this meeting, what? Is it we want. Maybe we want a high energy, maybe we want a calmer energy, maybe we're trying to motivate, persuade reassure, whatever it might be calm, whatever it might be calm, whatever it might be, and that will change our energy level from the moment we come in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, I can see that if we follow those steps, you're going to feel confident anyway.
Speaker 1:Yes and intentional.
Speaker 2:And intentional when you get out in front of that one person or that huge audience, absolutely in front of that one person or that huge audience. So can we now move on to giving us again keeping it really basic, because this can get quite high level this conversation, just keeping it really basic Can you give us a demonstration, using a single phrase, of how you would say something low energy and how you would say something high energy, so we can hear the difference?
Speaker 1:Okay, let's come up with, say, a corporate sentence, so it could be something like this Now, I'm going to do this very flat. This is flat, with no energy, but obviously the words will be. You realize that actually they should have more energy. But often I work a lot in corporate life and people because they're nervous and because they feel they're just trying to impart information, it comes across as under energized actually. So this is what this would sound like, with no energy. So this is the sentence. I initiated this project a year ago. It's going to really benefit the company and that's good news for us all okay, that sounds like something I've heard a million times it's just giving information, but the energy behind it hasn't been thought about.
Speaker 1:So, for example, I could give too much energy. Yeah, give us too much, too much energy, and then this is going to sound inauthentic. It's probably going to sound a bit like a game show host. Okay, right, so too much energy. I initiated this project a year ago. It's going to really benefit the company and that's going to be good news for us all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's too much. That's too much. That sounds like a game show host. It does. Yeah, yeah, and it's authentic, isn't it as well? Yeah?
Speaker 1:And you sit there in the audience going well, it's just a company. Come on, get a balance of life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but somewhere in the middle.
Speaker 1:Can I be somewhere in the middle energy? So that's where we have quite a lot of energy but we can take the volume down, but there's quite a lot of energy in what I'm about to do. Let's hear this I initiated this project a year ago. It's going to really benefit this company and that's good news for us all. How does that feel?
Speaker 2:It feels intriguing. Actually, it feels like intriguing. Oh, I want to hear more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it also sounds like I've bought into it. So if the person speaking has bought into it, then they're probably speaking at the right energy levels. But, Sian, I know you've been seeing a lot of speakers recently and obviously you do see a lot of speakers. What have you noticed in terms of energy and style recently.
Speaker 2:I have the joy of going to see quite a lot of academics at the moment, particularly in and around London and Oxford, because of the work that I do. I would say the energy in the room and from the speaker is one of urgency. So I'm not hearing a lot of people just give information which I think I would have heard a decade or so ago.
Speaker 1:So these are passionate people.
Speaker 2:There's a huge passion that's suddenly come into academia and people giving their time and effort. They really want their voices to be heard Because at the moment there's quite a few topics Some people say you can't speak about or it's not appropriate to speak about them, or something like that, and then on the other side of the equation are people who are interested in free speech.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:If they get a chance to speak, they're bringing a lot of energy to it and passion, and passion. And what they're doing is they're standing in order to emphasize a point. They're actually even standing at the front of the stage, right.
Speaker 1:So they're coming closer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they come out from behind the podium and they say they're almost saying in highfalutin words, but they're saying listen to me, this is important. There is a moment in time in history where there is a change of foot and this is it.
Speaker 1:So what's interesting as you're talking about that is you're using your hands, probably almost in demonstration to what they were doing.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, they were using gestures, but they weren't changing their volume. No, sometimes it was incredibly soft spoken. Yes, but that's potential that pulls you in and actually that particular lady who was speaking, who was originally Somalian but was an immigrant, was a refugee. Actually, she spoke quite softly, but she had such determination in her voice about making sure she was heard.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You could see the whole audience leaning in to try and hear what she said, and that all has energy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all has energy. Yeah, there's something very interesting and we both came across this many years ago. If you think of a timeline of energy for a speech or a movie or a play or a piece of music, all of them, everything gradually builds and builds and builds, and builds to the end of the film, you would think. But it doesn't. Actually it goes to about 95% and then it pulls back a little bit. So the energy builds and builds and builds and then it drops down slightly. So if you think of most films, the dramatic scenes get right to the end and you get to the denouement and then there's a little scene at the end that kind of calms it down a little bit and that means it's just, it just humanizes it. So I think when we do want to build energy, it's also quite good.
Speaker 2:Just remember, at the end, just pull it down a fraction yeah, if you have gone for that, have you ever noticed a conversation, you know, around a dinner table with friends or something like that, and it's getting quite animated and energetic and you're sharing memories and stories and things like that and everybody's laughing. And then there's always, just after that, there's a kind of oh, you know, there's a sort of isn't there?
Speaker 1:there's a pause?
Speaker 2:yes, where everybody collects themselves again and perhaps has a drink of water or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Well, that's what comedians do, of course, isn't it to ride. The laughter is they'll get through to the end of the line. They go here's the punch line, and they'll. And anyway, and they take a sip of water and that rides until it end.
Speaker 2:So just a technical question here If you had a microphone on and you wanted to give it energy, if you're using your natural voice, do you have to lift your voice to sound like you have more energy, more volume? I'm saying. Or if you have a microphone, do you not change that?
Speaker 1:What do you do? Well, the thing about microphones is that they do all the work for you. So we're talking here, we have a microphone, but we're only across the dining room table here, so you can hear me anyway, but I do have a microphone in front of me as you do.
Speaker 2:We're not across the dining room table where are we no?
Speaker 1:no, we're in a very smart studio yes, we are, we're in a very smart studio in soho in london I afraid we're not, but we are in our dining room, but we do have a microphone in front of us.
Speaker 1:Now, what many people do if they come to an event and maybe they're speaking to I don't know 25 people or maybe 250 people, but there's an audience in front of them the natural instinct when you stand up is to feel that you have to fill that space with your energy.
Speaker 1:You have to fill that space, space, and therefore also vocally. But if you have a microphone, in fact you don't have to talk any louder than I'm talking now and I'm not using a lot of volume. The microphone is quite close to me, so I'm not using a lot of volume. I mean, you can hear me the other side of the table but it means that if you want to have this sense of expectancy, of a motivation, of wonder, of excitement, actually you can take your voice down whilst having a microphone and there's this kind of bubble of energy that's quite infectious but also quite centered. As soon as I take it up, then we go into the realms of demonstrating and that's the kind of transmit stuff that we're trying to avoid. So the one thing about a microphone that's really good with energy is that you can take it down, because you can use a different register in your voice.
Speaker 2:Okay, and you can only do that with a microphone. Like I said, this was going to get complicated.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I mean, there's lots of possibilities.
Speaker 2:There's lots of possibilities. So maybe for Joe Bloggs like me, the best thing to do is to test it before the speech. If you're using a microphone, try, because you might have practiced like in your office, in your bedroom, and then, when you get the microphone on, you do sound like a cartoon character.
Speaker 1:So you've got to practice and also most people tend to go too loud because you still, even though you have a microphone, you see the 250 chairs when you're practicing and you feel you have to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you remember when I used to do the tennis at the O2, we had the World Tour Fin finals for 12 years in London, which I loved comparing. I was the MC, or what they used to call the voice of God, that's the stadium voice.
Speaker 2:Did you catch that, guys? He?
Speaker 1:was called the voice of God. Well, I wasn't. I mean, whoever does that job is the voice of God.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's a great gig and I was in the fantastic the microphone. Because I was very close to the microphone, I was able to take the volume down right down into my stomach and say something like ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the world's number one. Now I'm not using a lot of volume, but because the microphone can amplify it through 800 speakers in the stadium it kind of went like that.
Speaker 2:Did you have Eye of the Tiger behind you or something?
Speaker 1:Did you have big?
Speaker 2:music behind you.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, we didn't have Eye of the Tiger. In fact, we started off with London Calling actually it was Viva. La Vida. We had Coldplay and various things, but it was rock music, dry ice.
Speaker 2:It was the most exciting thing. It was kind of boyish fantasy.
Speaker 1:frankly, to be honest, yeah, yeah, fantastic.
Speaker 2:So listen, there was one nuance. I wanted to get behind this. I said this is a complicated subject. We're coming from 50,000 feet and we're going to come down to 5,000 feet, and what I really want to know is where is energy from? Is it from your heart? Where is it coming from? Is it coming from the very cells of your body? Is it coming from your brain? Where is it coming from? Is it coming from the very cells of your body? Is it coming from your brain? Where is it coming from?
Speaker 1:Well, if we go to the ancient chakras of the body and I'm sure if you've done any study of these kind of things, you'll understand the chakras. And the fifth chakra is the throat chakra. And the throat chakra, obviously, is how we speak and how we communicate.
Speaker 2:Doesn't the word chakra actually mean energy?
Speaker 1:It is from the Sanskrit. It means energy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so we have the root chakra, the sacral, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the third eye and the crown, so you're going up all the way through the body. But the throat chakra is very important in terms of how we communicate, so it does require energy and the throat, of course, is a muscle just like any other part of the body. So if we want to be fit, we go to the gym, we go running, we do sit-ups, we do whatever we want to do, do yoga, pilates or whatever, and then we feel fit, and the muscle for the throat is also something that we should exercise. Opera singers we would expect an opera singer probably to rehearse or practice three or four hours a day, which they do to be able to sing in the volume that they do. But most of us, unless we're professional speakers, we don't really think about our throat at all, but actually you bring up an interesting point.
Speaker 2:I mean, of course you've always said you know you have to practice your presentation, you know you should speak out loud and hear it back to yourself and everything. But should you sing, does that help in terms of warming up your voice and everything I mean you just mentioned opera singers.
Speaker 1:I was just curious I mean, I I don't sing, so I'm a terrible singer, so I don't sing.
Speaker 1:What I do is I hum, and certainly when we were learning to be actors, one of the exercises was humming oh right and there's something that we can do just to wake our voice up, and it's also actually getting our radiant energy right, which is and you can do this you can put your hands across your face, across your nose and mouth and just hum, just go, and you can move it higher. You can go higher and lower and you'll feel it moving within your head you'll feel it in your forehead, you'll feel it in your sinus area and then around the jaw do that in some yoga practices.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, it's a vibration, then now, of course, as we all know, s everything in life is vibration, do we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do.
Speaker 1:So if you watch a sound wave going up and down we're used to seeing speech, sound waves of various things and if you see somebody standing at the front of an audience with a piece of paper and they're nervously shaking with the piece of paper like that, you can see the vibration.
Speaker 1:There is literally a vibration, and that vibration which is actually literal, from the paper, but it's also the nervous vibration that's projected onto the audience. The audience will pick that up, yeah, and they will feel relaxed as a result of that. But somebody who manages to have a calmer energy will send out different sound waves that are less cliff-like, going up and down, they're softer in their vibration field and that will make the audience feel better. But once you start getting this resonance, this everything humming, you can feel that your body is actually radiating some sort of energy and that's very exciting to watch when you see it.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's sometimes sought after in some speakers. I'm only thinking of, you know, the high-level religious speakers or things like that. I suspect that's what they're aiming at.
Speaker 1:To whip up a crowd?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well no to have resonance. You know that actual vibration resonance yes. You know you did a podcast with Peter Elliott, yes, and Peter said something about they were breathing in time with you.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a great phrase. Yeah, do listen to the podcast if you haven't heard this one with peter elliott. He's a very eminent clergyman in canada and he says that occasionally you can just sense you have the whole audience when everyone is breathing in and out at the same time it's like one organism and he said doesn't happen all the time, but occasionally you think, wow, everyone's just really on the same page and it's a lovely feeling. Yeah, so energetically, everyone's on the same page.
Speaker 2:Well, that's really interesting, because I imagine that we're now on to how you pace your presentation, or when you're speaking to somebody, because energy isn't just about volume, is it? It's about pacing it is. It's about moving around across the stage. It's about volumes high and low, is it? What is that? Yeah?
Speaker 1:Well, if you think of the way animals move, you know if you have a bear or a tiger, the way they move across a stage. If you did a sort of a human version of that, it's mesmeric because you think this kind of movement walking around Now of course you know we don't want to go on there and act like tigers or anything like that but if you think of some of those great movie stars, the old movie stars, they moved beautifully, they walked beautifully, they were almost balletic in the way they walked oh, Cary Grant was a dancer.
Speaker 1:Cary Grant, really, really smooth and almost beautiful to watch and, again, physically calm. They knew where they were going. But there's a technique that I often encourage my clients to do is this, particularly in your first sentence, when you're trying to create the mood we call this sweet spot mood. Most sentences have an A and a B, two halves of the sentence, and because we're most nervous at the beginning, if we can slow ourselves down in the first sentence, we're probably going to help ourselves a little bit. Okay, get the energy right. So here's an example. If I'm giving a talk, I could start with this sentence right. So here's an example If I'm giving a talk, I could start with this sentence why do we listen to some speakers and we don't listen to others? That's the sentence, the first sentence. It's quite a good sentence. Everyone knows why I'm there. It's very clear Now, if I split the sentence into two halves, why do we listen to some speakers and we don't listen to others? A and a B. If I do the first half to the left side of the room.
Speaker 2:Are you physically moving across? Well, I can just look.
Speaker 1:The first half of the sentence to the left, the second half to the right. Okay, so it's going to feel like this why do we listen to some speakers and we don't listen to others? Because I've taken the time to go from the left to the right with a pause in between. Yeah, it gives the audience time to process the information and it has a kind of energy there, but it's not manic. It's quite a calming Isn't that interesting?
Speaker 2:Because I never would have thought a pause was energetic.
Speaker 1:Well, this is the point. So there's a dead pause or there's an energetic pause. So I'll do the same sentence again.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll do one with a dead pause first of all, and then I'll do one with an energetic pause, potential pause, potential energy. So the first one is a dead one.
Speaker 1:Go for it. Why do we listen to some speakers and we don't listen to others? It's a dead pause in the middle. Here's another one. The balloon is still in the air in the gap. Why do we listen to some speakers and we don't listen to others?
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Can you feel the difference there? Yeah, there's a huge difference, but it's almost we can see your mind working in the pause. Yes, you can see, as you say, the mind and the energy of the speaker in that and the passion for their subject in that pause, and therefore that's electric and that's what you want to follow.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. When it goes dead. I think some people think I'm going to put pauses in and then I'm going to speak like this, and then what happens is actually you fall asleep, or people think you've lost your way, or people think you've lost your way, exactly so. But I think it's about potential energy. Potential energy is very exciting.
Speaker 2:You know what it's about potential and everybody. That's what you want. You just want to see potential in everybody and potential in the idea.
Speaker 2:Potential in the speaker In the speaker, and you know you want to see potential, don't you? Okay? So this has been really interesting because, essentially, there's a really basic level and there's a really high level on this topic, because energy is all around us. Everything is energy. That's what scientists tell us all the time. Energy is everything and it is a fundamental essence of life. But when it comes to actually communicating with someone else whether that's a lot of someone else's or just one other person what you're basically saying to us is that there's one level Do your physical exercises, do some breathing, do some voice exercises so that you just get your body into a mode where you're able to give out energy. Yeah, you're loose, you're up, you're loose, and you've given us actually some really good top tips about making sure you know there's an active pause in between and how you can actually feel vibrations from your audience and things like that. But there is this much higher level, isn't there? It's a much higher level about actually just engaging with life and understanding that energy is life.
Speaker 1:You make a really good point about reading the energy of the room and there are people who are very good at that and thinking is this an energy I can work with? Do I need to change the energy? But being aware of the energy is really important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, important for a successful engagement, whatever it is Meeting. Important for a successful engagement, whatever it is meeting, speech, whatever yeah, yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much, really really interesting topic and I hope I've ended with lots of energy I do have lots of energy.
Speaker 1:I hope you were energized exactly. There are lots of other fun episodes in this series. We'd love you to follow us, and you can contact us directly with any ideas you might have at robincomodecom.