Tuning the Instrument: Vocal and Body Preparation for Public Speaking

This set of workshop exercises is designed to help set the speaker’s psychological baseline of confidence and well-being by working first from their physical selves.

Author: Kevin DiPirro

Activity description: While much advice for public speaking is based on formulae and strategies for “how to speak persuasively,” the foundation of the public speaking experience—the speaker’s groundedness and well-being in the social space they occupy as speakers—is much less addressed. This series of classroom exercises, activities, demos and immersions is meant to offer students a collective, playful, ground-up building of self-management skills for the stressfulness of speaking situations. It starts by reconsidering the physiology of how we breathe and how we speak, practices putting the mind and body in a state shift from performative stress-response to inclusion and belonging in the speaking event, and concludes by considering how to bring these inward regulatory embodied tools to bear before a classroom setting with audience, dais, note-cards, and projected visuals.

Course: PWR 2

Activity length & schedule: These exercises are intended primarily for PWR 2 students at about week 7 or 8 as they are preparing their 10-minute final research presentations.  The activities should take approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour of class time.

Activity goals:

• To familiarize students with their bodies through breathing and speaking and gesturing exercises so that they feel confident and grounded and embodied as part of a larger social body
• To get students out of their heads and nerves and high-stress performative approaches and into the practice of sharing their researched work with their community through invitation, their own interested affect, and their own natural storytelling techniques

Activity details: See handout (Stanford access only)

Image from Nicolas Lochon (ytse_jam18)