Be more you: Finding your authentic voice for writing and presenting
We all have certain people we love to talk to and topics we love to talk about–for me it’s times like this where I feel most in-line, most connected, and most truly myself.
Contrast this with the thoughts many of us hold about presenting or writing. Phrases like “stage fright” and “writers’ block” come to mind, which are a far distance from those connected conversations we love to have.
This had me thinking–how can we bring some of those connected and pleasurable experiences to something like writing or presenting? Through some observation of my own process, as well as through some nuggets of Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist, here are a few ideas I’ve been employing lately.
Record yourself talking about the topic you’re going to write about or present to a friend. Isn’t it a little bit weird that we write down our content or ideas for presenting and then read what we’ve written, versus speaking about the subject matter more naturally? I noticed how my ideas would flow on certain topics when I was talking about them, but then my mind would become grid-locked once I sat down to write. So, I got around this by recording my natural flow of speaking.
Once you’ve recorded yourself, you can transcribe the valuable bits, and keep your way of speaking in the language that you use. If you don’t yet feel like you know enough about the topic to spitball it to a friend, you may want to consider getting more familiar with it.
Find others who you enjoy reading or listening to, and articulate for yourself what you love about their style. As Austin Kleon says in this TEDx talk and his book, Steal Like an Artist–nothing is original, all creative work builds on what came before. Kleon notes that there’s “good theft” and “bad theft” which is an important distinction. Rather than performing “bad theft” by degrading some else’s content or voice through plagiarizing or imitating, you can commit acts of “good theft” through studying, honoring, crediting and then transforming into something that becomes your own.
For myself, I love how Jonathan Van Ness brings nuggets of fabulous wisdom to every episode of Queer Eye. One of my favorite lines, which I felt compelled to replay in order to write down, is “Nobody grows in a box, honey, so we need to get out of that box, stand on that box and use it as a vantage point to see who we really are”. It’s refreshing, it’s him, and it’s something that, while said 1,000 different ways before, became new again when he added his sparkle to it. I want to find more of that in myself and bring it out.
Carmen Simon, PhD. is another source of inspiration for me based on the topics she covers. Simon is all about focusing on how to create memorable messages and has the science to back it up. She’s a cognitive neuroscientist who’s applied this to communication and business, which is a pretty badass combination.
Write the book (blog post, talk) that you want to read. I love this third point from Steal Like an Artist. The thing I would like to read is un-stuffy articles about presentation design, that are backed by nuggets of science and psychology. I’ve got lots of ideas and years of experience on this topic, and plenty of research I’d like to do to bring some external validation to the party.
Rather than prematurely editing my thoughts and ideas for some fictional external audience, I’m consistently working towards creating content for my own enjoyment, and allowing more curiosity and honesty to come through.
Have you employed any of these techniques or have favorites of your own? I’d love to hear!
Adrienne is Presentation Designer at InVision with over fifteen years of design experience in the Science and Tech space. She is an enthusiastic explorer of the intersections between neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and presentation design. She spends her free time painting miniature watercolors, singing to her kiddo, and learning to play the ukulele.
