Lessons from the rehearsal room
A one-day workshop
This Speech & Communications workshop is built on a range of tools taken from the world of the professional theatrical rehearsal room. Joshua Roche, professional Communications Coach and Theatre Director, will use these tools to coach confidence, clarity and personal impact when speaking publicly or communicating to teams.
The workshop is participative but does not involve any ‘acting’ or physical performance exercises (you will not need to take your shoes off and roll around on the floor…). The workshop begins with a brief explanation of the tenets underpinning theatrical performance, and how they are directly applicable to communications in the professional world outside of theatre.
Learning Objectives
- Deliver messages with passion, clarity and confidence
- Understand what is useful and what is prohibitive when communicating
- Learn some new tools and techniques soothe personal anxieties or fears
- Speak confidently on your given topic
- Understand that all public speaking is about personal voice. You can only speak well by unlocking the voice you have, rather than mimicking others
Workshop information
Programme outline
1. Welcome, aims and introductions
- Thinking about the challenges of public speaking
- Outlining the workshop to come
2. What can we learn from Romeo & Juliet
- Character through action: why people are listening to the way you speak, and not what you’re saying
- How does acting practice and the fundamental principles that underpin it, inform our approach to public speaking? A discussion
3. Tools and approaches
- ‘Say what you f***ing want to say’ – a slightly fruity but essential exercise about realising what you care most about in your message
- ‘Focus on the audience’ – an exercise that coaches the essential relationship with the audience you’re speaking to
- ‘Stakes’ – an exercise that using an imaginative tool to help develop a purpose for the speaker
- ‘The speaking script’ – an exercise unpacking what constitutes a useful script
4. Let’s get practical
- Preparing to communicate – a discussion with tips from Josh on the basic questions of How do I stand? How do I prepare? What do I do with my hands? and the rest…
- The slide deck – a discussion about what makes slides a useful prop, and what makes them a dead weight that’s dragging you down
5. Questions
- Public speaking is a very personal experience, so here is time for questions about anything raised during the day, and anything not yet discussed that is weighing on participants’ minds
Give us a call
If you’ve got any requirements at all around presentation skills – whether that’s for an in-house training programme for a group of people, a bite-sized session, one-to-one coaching or a keynote conference presentation – then please just give us a call on 01582 463460 to talk it through.
