As a trainer and professional actor, I have delivered many a workshop on the themes of public speaking, presentation skills and personal impact. I was recently asked to adapt these into a one-hour session for the Panel Chairs of a Professional Conduct Committee. The workshop was to be called Speaking in Public for Chairs.  I understood that many of the Chairs felt anxious about several aspects of their role, especially reading out determinations and dealing with the unexpected, and that some handy hints would be useful.

When recruited as a Lay Member to a Fitness to Practice Panel myself, back in 2004, I spent three years as a panelist before I took on the potentially nerve-racking ‘Mantle of Chairdom’.   Having worked as a professional actor for 18 years, my own anxieties did not revolve around being looked at in public, using my voice clearly or looking comfortable in my role. I had the techniques to do all of that, anywhere, anytime, even if I hadn’t a clue what was actually going on. This is generally a useful skill, that of pretending to be a swan when frantically pedaling under the surface. My own worries lay more around processes and preparation and for good reason – I didn’t want to look like a total numpty by making silly mistakes, missing things out and letting everyone down.

In my workshops with panel Chairs since, I have realised that I am not the only one to have had that anxiety. I have always been impressed by the calm, collected behaviour of my colleagues but they have almost all admitted to a dread of making a mistake. We all dislike situations for which we cannot be prepared but where we feel perhaps we should have been. Given that relatively few of the Chairs on conduct panels are professionals in that role – in that most have day jobs where they do not need to exercise many obvious ‘chairing skills’ – it’s not surprising that there is a worry about getting it right.  And even the most experienced Chairs admit to sharing the common anxiety of not wanting to look foolish.

In my years as an actor I had exercised what you could call my presentation skills in many different contexts, from performing in Shakespeare to acting in intense modern dramas, from singing in pantomime to improvising in museums. I had also used my skills in business training with my company Xperient.

On stage I usually have a script to work with, in which case my anxiety revolves around the fear that I might not remember my lines. In some types of acting work there is no script, just a series of objectives around which I will improvise. In both cases, I have to be highly alert to what is going on around me, taking in the responses of my fellow performers and those of the audience. In my performing work in museums, the audience became my co-protagonists and I developed ways to ‘feed’ them their part in the dialogue in a way which made them feel clever, creative and most of all, safe. This type of work involved a huge amount of preparation. My ‘script’ would have to be plucked from a world of information in my head plus a wealth of ideas and techniques, all brought out in whatever order seemed most effective in the moment.

Over the years as an actor I have had some very colourful anxiety dreams about not being able to find the stage, forgetting my lines and wearing the wrong costume and all whilst needing the toilet (and not being able to find it, of course). And I know I’m not the only one.  Since chairing hearings I have had a completely new set of dreams involving Chairing the Hearing from Hell.  Entertaining though it would be to describe one of these dreams, I will resist the temptation and will keep my nightmares to myself.

When I first started out as an actor I worked on more than one pantomime where I had to perform two or three shows a day, six days a week.  I knew that no matter how many times I may have performed that show, for each audience, it was the first and perhaps only time they had experienced it or anything like it.  I had to make sure that I was consistently on the ball, no matter how exhausted, demoralized, bored, flu-ridden, snotty-nosed or distracted I may have been feeling.

As a panel Chair, we all have days when we are not on top form, especially on a long case. We may have slept very badly in the hotel the night before, have had bad news from home, phone calls from ailing parents or anxious teenagers, problems at the workplace that we have no time to solve, we may have upset stomachs, period pain or headaches. If I felt like that when I was an actor in a show, I would have no choice but to gird my loins and get on stage.  Letting down the audience and all my colleagues for anything less than a life-threatening illness was unthinkable. I’ve noticed that my committee colleagues have a similar philosophy, conscientiously doing their utmost to give their best to a hearing no matter what the circumstances.

When designing my one-hour workshop on ‘Speaking in Public’ I first of all looked for the similarities between the types of public speaking I had done and the work of a Chair. In the workshop we started with an interactive exercise that gave everyone a chance to experience and discuss their own version of ‘stage fright’ in a very safe way. We then explored the various occasions when a Chair has to speak and we looked at the particular stressors of each. Then I shared some useful tips from my work as a performer. I will give a couple of examples here.

At the very beginning of a hearing when making introductions, apart from remembering everyone’s names and pronouncing them correctly, the Chair has an opportunity to set the tone and assert a level of comfortable yet formal control over the proceedings. One thing I wish I had learned and practiced more when I was young is a technique a more experienced actor shared with me, which helped her get through auditions. There can be few things more stressful than having to stand up in front of a roomful of critical strangers and to be expected to impress them.  I had to do this up to 10 times a week until I eventually impressed one of them enough to get the job and could have a few blissful months without any auditions.

My friend shared with me a technique she used in order to ground herself and build confidence at the very beginning of any kind of presentation. She called it ‘owning the room’. She would calmly take in everything in the room around her before she began. She would scan the walls, windows, doors, floor and would simply ‘notice’ them. She’d then look at everyone in the room and notice them, too, making eye contact and smiling or nodding at each person who met her eye. All of this noticing would only take a minute and although the silence would at first seem brave and potentially uncomfortable, it had a very powerful effect on her and on the others in the room. It gave her authority or gravitas and created a useful punctuation mark or headline moment before the action started. It also showed that she was in charge and that they were in safe hands.

As a Chair I found this a useful technique to use at the beginning of a session. It would calm me and everyone else down and create a feeling of shared enterprise. I would sometimes use it again at difficult junctures in the day where a change of gear was useful.

An awareness of the impact of tone, volume and pace has also been very useful to me when chairing.  A change of energy in either direction can help to focus the teams around you, wakes everyone up and gets everyone listening that bit harder. This can include simply slowing down, speeding up and/or speaking more loudly for a moment. Being aware of the power of different inflections in the voice and deliberately stressing certain words can be a useful technique if, as a Chair, you feel a need to be a little more assertive at given moments and to show that you still ‘own the room’.

Adopting a different posture is also very useful. It may help to take a moment to become more comfortable in your chair.  Don’t feel rushed and don’t feel you need to say anything while you do so.  I have also seen some Chairs lean forward and put their head on one side or nod a lot to demonstrate that they are listening urgently. Some sit back, put their hands by their sides, stop taking notes and become very relaxed. What does this signify to the room? As an actor, I know that everything that happens on stage has significance to the audience. Those watching will try to make sense of everything and anything they see, no matter how bizarre or, in fact, accidental it may be. It has been framed within the context of the performance and therefore achieves significance and meaning by default. (If this concept interests you, you may enjoy reading more about Semiotics.)

Similarly, in a hearing, everything that the Chair or panelists do can be significant to the observers, whether done deliberately or accidentally.  That is why ‘perception’ is such a big issue for panels. Even if the Chair is internally rapt at the information they are hearing, the fact that they appear not to be may have more impact. This might mean that a witness or one of the parties trails off in giving important information to the panel. We all want to feel that we are being listened to. Another example is that the panelist may have sniffed because they have a tickly nose, but to a witness it could seem to mean disdain or disbelief. Therefore it is extremely helpful to develop an increased awareness of the perception there might be of how you are behaving and responding, from eye contact to posture via tone and expression.

It is funny how in ‘real’ life we don’t usually have to worry about breathing. It just happens and we generally have enough breath in us for what we are saying and doing without being consciously aware of it. Yet remembering to breathe becomes a problem for most of us when in certain stressful situations. It is particularly a challenge when a Chair is faced with reading out a very long and complex determination. One easy win is to be aware of the extent that posture has an effect on breathing.  I have found that sitting up a bit straighter can make a big difference to the depth of my breathing and the freedom of my voice. It should be obvious but we all get tired and forget to sit up straight.

When I was an actor, I would arrive at an audition to be handed a page of dense text, a speech that I was expected to prepare to perform within five minutes and I had to do this preparation whilst sitting in a busy corridor with a bunch of other actors all trying to do the same.  I would start by skimming through it to grasp the general structure then would go back to the beginning and quickly mark up the text to help me when sight-reading it the audition. I would mark with a big ‘V’ or ‘tick’ the places where I could take a breath, just as musicians do on sheet music. To help me make sense of the text, I would underline any words I could stress. I would use arrows, up or down, above sections of text to help me know when to increase or decrease tone or volume or when to use an upward inflection. I would use a ‘slur’ (again, a musical symbol) to show where to join ideas together using inflexion or intention. I would note places where it would be most effective (or simply possible) to look up from the text to make eye contact with my audience.

Unfortunately documents like determinations on findings of fact are not written to be dramatically interesting, no matter how talented you and your committee secretary may be at drafting. But it is still important that it makes sense to those listening and that when reading it out, everyone can follow what you are saying. Because it is such a formal document and not a Shakespearian monologue, reading a determination can be punctuated with pauses and sips of water whenever you need to.

I leave you with a quote by the great actor Sir Ralph Richardson, “The most precious things in speech are the pauses.”