48. Stage Fright
A Close Cousin of Writer’s Block
In Chapter 12, “Writer’s Block,” you read about how the hero of the Hollywood film Limitless cured his writer’s block with a drug that stimulated his creative capabilities. Concurrent with the film’s opening, a related article about creative paralysis appeared in the New Yorker magazine. Staff writer Dana Goodyear profiled Barry Michels, a real life therapist who treats blocked Hollywood screenwriters with his own unique methodology derived from the concepts of Jungian psychology.
Mr. Michels, whose starting rate is $365 an hour, also treats the stage fright that movie colony writers and other creative people face when they have to pitch their ideas—a subject near and dear to the solar plexus of every presenter. The presentation equivalent of stage fright is the pervasive fear of public speaking. Although Hollywood pitch meetings are anything but public, and Los Angeles is 3,000 miles and a galaxy away from Wall Street, the angst is just as real and just as pervasive.
Mr. Michels works in tandem with his mentor, psychiatrist Phil Stutz. They treat their clients with three techniques that they call:
• Visualization
• The Shadow
• Dust
Ms. Goodyear described how Mr. Michels uses Visualization:
Patients are told to visualize things going horribly wrong, a strategy of “pre-disappointment”...[that] involves imagining yourself falling backward into the sun, saying “I am willing to lose everything” as you are consumed in a giant fireball, after which, transformed into a sunbeam, you profess, “I am infinite.”1
Mr. Michels’ version of visualization is a 180 degree reverse of “guided imagery,” a technique used by mental health professionals to get their patients to think positive thoughts and direct their minds toward a relaxed or desired state.2
Positive visualization is also used in sports where athletes envision successful outcomes: The racer crossing the finish line, the basketball going through the hoop, or the tennis ball landing in the perfect spot across the net.3 This technique took wing in the 40-year old bestseller The Inner Game of Tennis, in which author W. Timothy Gallwey wrote, “Concentration is the act of focusing one’s attention. As the mind is allowed to focus on a single object, it stills.”4
Here is how Ms. Goodyear described Mr. Michels’ second method, the Shadow:
...the occult aspect of the personality that Jung defined as “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.”5
The Shadow, like Visualization, is another negative point of view, as is Mr. Michels’ third concept, Dust, which Ms. Goodyear said:
...involves pretending that your audience is covered from head to toe in dust—“a nice, thick, two-inch coat of dust, like you’re going up into an attic and everything is covered, it’s been up there for eight months.”6
If Dust sounds familiar, it is. Mr. Michels and Mr. Stutz have coined a variation of the equally-senseless—and tasteless—pervasive recommendation that presenters imagine their audience, and job applicants imagine their prospective employer, naked.
If you’re beginning to see an unorthodox trend here, you’re not alone. In what has to be the understatement of the year, Ms. Goodyear observed, “Needless to say, neither therapist relates much to the wider analytic community, and both suspect that the techniques would be met with consternation.”
The techniques also drew consternation from Time Magazine humor columnist Joel Stein who had a session with Mr. Stutz to discuss his panic over public speaking and concluded, “Phil has invented the only therapy technique I’ve ever heard of in which you leave with bigger problems than you walked in with.”7
Mr. Michels’ and Mr. Stutz’s techniques would undoubtedly draw consternation from the business community for one simple reason: They ask their end users to apply imaginary solutions to real challenges. Businesspeople require specificity, the “Show me” principle.
To overcome the fear of public speaking, presenters should focus on the tangible results of their efforts: how the audience is reacting to their presentation in real time. When you present, if you see nodding heads, you can move forward with your story, but if you see furrowed brows or perplexed looks, you must stop and adjust your content to clarify or explain what you have just said. This simple act will produce head nods, and this immediate visible reaction will diminish the fear of failure that caused the stage fright in the first place.
In presentations, the endgame is a sea of nodding heads, not an image of the sun or a shadow or of a coat of dust. The only imaginary images are those of a bank of bright light bulbs going off over those bobbing heads, accompanied by a chorus of resounding “AHAs!”
See the cause and effect a change. “Show me the money!”