Whuddup Greenblasters!

I had the best day of my recent career this week:

I didn’t win any awards. I didn’t get a huge sum of money. I gained no massive surge of followers, subscribers, or new clients.

BUT:

I took my community members through Act 2, Scene 2 of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, and holy fuck was it awesome!

I wanna share with you:

• 3 lessons we learned,

• and how you can do this kind of acting exercise yourself to become a more confident and dynamic speaker.

Lesson #1: Context is everything

The first time an actor reads a scene out loud that they’ve never seen before, it’s called a “cold read.”

Every actor struggles to make a scene come to life on the first cold read, because they have no context for what’s happening yet:

• Who are these characters?

• What’s their relationship to each other?

• Do they like, love, or hate each other?

• How old are they?

• Where are they?

• WHEN are they (time period)?

All of these questions, plus many more, need to have some kind of answer before an actor can feel confident performing a scene.

Likewise, if you’re talking about your business, you need to answer some CONTEXTUAL questions before you start talking with confidence:

• What problems are you solving?

• For whom?

• How do these people suffer with these problems?

• What are the COSTS (money, time, etc)?

• What are the PAINS (fear, despair, anger, physical pain, etc)?

• Why do you CARE about this in the first place?

• How does your business HELP SOLVE these problems?

• Why is it so effective?

• Why is it better than other alternatives?

• And how does all this make you and your customers FEEL? Truly?

*This can also apply to any talk or presentation, just slightly change the language of these questions.

Asking & answering these - plus many more - will make you much more confident when you speak by providing context for what you’re saying.

Lesson #2: Language matters

I can’t tell you how much fun it is to read Oscar Wilde out loud.

Here’s how the scene we did begins:

JACK: "Charming day it has been, Miss Fairfax."

GWENDOLEN: "Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous."

JACK: "I do mean something else."

GWENDOLEN: "I thought so. In fact, I am never wrong."

Immediately, both of the “actors” started smiling while reading these words, because the musicality, wit, and playfulness of the language jumped off the page at them:

• The repetition of “talk to me about the weather” and “mean something else”

• The refreshing honesty of both characters

• The varying lengths of the sentences, making it sound like good music

• The strong language of Gwendolen: “I am never wrong”, “I always feel quite certain”

Oscar Wilde is widely considered a genius, in large part for his command of the English language.

For your purposes as an entrepreneur, look to use repetition, honesty, varying sentence length, and strong words to make your language SING.

Lesson #3: Fun is enough

I was nervous before asking my community to do this acting work:

They’re paying me to help make them better speakers and improve their business. What if they think this is stupid, or a waste of time?

I shouldn’t have worried. They LOVED it.

And one of the biggest things they’ve said about it since, was how FUN it was.

It made me remember something I often need reminding of, especially as an adult:

FUN IS ENOUGH.

Not everything has to have a deeper lesson, or meaning.

Not every activity that you do has to be “beneficial.”

And not everything that you pay for has to have an instant and obvious ROI.

People spend thousands on a Taylor Swift concert, for fuck’s sakes. Not because it’ll make them richer (quite the opposite).

It’s just.

Fucking.

Fun!

And that’s enough.

How YOU can do this work at home

Even though I just said fun is enough, there are lots of practical benefits to doing this kind of acting work as an entrepreneur, like confidence and clarity as a speaker.

Here’s how you can start:

1. Find a monologue from your favourite movie or play on Google

2. Copy and paste the text into Word

3. Read it out loud, “cold”, once (film yourself for bonus points)

4. Then ask some of the questions above in Lesson #1 (“Who is this person” etc.)

5. Do it again, at least 3 more times, and whenever you don’t feel confident saying something, ask yourself what it means, and try again

6. Optional: Film your last attempt, to see how much better you are!

That’s it for this week!

Please reply, share, all that good stuff and until next week…

Greenblast, out 🚀