Presenting or performing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The November 2022 issue of Toastmaster magazine has a useful article by Joel Schwartzberg on page 26 titled Are you presenting or performing?

 

Its opening two paragraphs say:

 

“Do you want to be a great public speaker? Probably – who doesn’t? But that aspiration becomes problematic if you make it your primary goal.

 

Here’s the issue: When you focus on how people perceive you (for example, as a fantastic speaker), you steer your mindset toward performing (‘here’s how I want to be seen’), when it should be focused on presenting (‘here’s what I want people to know’).”

 

That’s a useful distinction. But it is not new. Michael T. Motley discussed that concept over three decades ago in an article in the Journal of Social Behavior and Personality (1990 Volume 5, number 2) titled Public Speaking Anxiety Qua Performance Anxiety: A Revised Model and an Alternative Therapy. Its abstract says:

 

“Based upon counseling sessions with subjects experiencing high public-speaking anxiety (PSA), informal data are presented as evidence for the viability of a new PSA therapy technique, and for revision of existing models of PSA. Subjects’ cognitive orientation to public speaking as either a ‘performance’ event (with priority on audience assessment of the speaker’s oratorical skills) or as a ‘communication’ event (with a priority on the audience’s understanding of the message), seems to be a key determinant of PSA levels – lower levels being associated with, or resulting from the ‘communication’ orientation. A therapy technique for replacing a ‘performance’ orientation with a ‘communication’ orientation is described, and implications for the role of cognitive orientation in models of PSA are discussed.”

 

I blogged about that back on August 10, 2011 in a post titled Reframe your way around fear of public speaking.

 

Images of Theodore Roosevelt presenting and performing were adapted from Puck magazine cartoons, found at the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.