Port, Michael - Steal The Show Flashcards
Chapter 1: Find Your Voice
This is the first step to mastering the inner game of standing out. You’ll finally embrace and choose to own your specific and unique strengths as a performer. This is where you dispel the doubts about the roles you want to play and the dreams you want to live. You’ll examine your self-image and prejudices about performing, inventory your mental filters, and scrape away your false personae.
THE MOST COMMON MISSING ELEMENT in the thousands of presentations and performances I’ve witnessed is the speaker’s true voice. But finding your voice can be difficult for many people in business and life, even for those building careers as top executives, thought leaders, or performers.
So what is finding your true voice?
For starters, it’s about letting go of your inner critic, the voices in your head telling you you’re not good enough, don’t know enough, and don’t have enough.
Letting go of thinking you don’t have enough to offer allows you to embrace your gifts so you have the confidence and natural conviction that you can get results from your performances and speeches.
By learning how to be yourself when you perform, while also embracing the fact that you can be a chameleon who plays lots of different roles with different styles of behavior, you will become a powerful performer and speaker.
Authenticity really comes down to this question: do you have the courage to talk about who you really are, not just who you want others to think you are?
It’s important to listen actively, to be curious about others, and to have a sense of proportion about how much you talk about yourself.
At the same time, many extraordinarily successful people learn how to “own” the key elements of their backstory and make them part of their public personality and statements. In the right circumstances, when you’re open about your weaknesses, differences, or difficulties, people find you more approachable and they will connect at a deeper level with your message.
Chapter 1: Find Your Voice
THE FEAR OF BEING FOUND OUT
You want to improve as a performer and speaker. You’re committing to being authentic to your personal biography and style.
Steal the Show is about delivering big results for you and your career. It’s not about getting approval or keeping your head down or doing just enough to stay in your job. You can’t perform your way into universal job protection. Perform to win. Perform to achieve business goals by trusting your preparation and your true persona.
Chapter 1: Find Your Voice
FREEING YOUR NATURAL VOICE
The important behaviors that open the way to freeing your voice and finding a sense of self-esteem and self-possession as a performer include:
Finding out what it takes to discover your backstory, and keeping your promises to your audience (whomever and wherever they may be).
Letting go of the pernicious small thoughts that maintain the illusion that your voice shouldn’t be heard.
Escaping the perfection trap in embracing your role as a performer.
Never again being trapped by your history or anyone else’s.
Embracing your audience with love.
Chapter 1: Find Your Voice
KNOWING WHEN YOUR VOICE IS ALREADY THERE
You will strengthen two types of confidence, self-efficacy and self-respect, and starve the inner nags of the oxygen they need. Finding your voice isn’t necessarily a matter of adding things.
It’s about returning to who you were before you started believing other people’s stories about you. It’s you. It’s your core.
Chapter 1: Find Your Voice
DON’T TALK YOURSELF OUT OF SUCCESS
Don’t let your voice be trapped by history. The past doesn’t have to predict whether or not you will have success.
When it comes time to create, I trust my voice. And you should too.
The problem with fixating on other people’s histories of failed expectations is that it makes you think small and play small. The notion that being “realistic” or practical means settling for less is a small idea that robs you of your voice. It is realistic and practical for you to do big things.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams and have the willingness to find their voice and confidently and proudly share it with others.
Chapter 1: Find Your Voice
PUNCTURING THE PERFECTION MYTH
Trusting your voice means that you rehearse and perform to achieve your goals, communicate a big idea, and get results.
You just need to be able to deliver on your promise.
You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to present.
Chapter 1: Find Your Voice
WHEN YOUR VOICE IS THE STRONGEST
To be exposed when you are performing is where your true strength resides. When you think you have to protect yourself from getting hurt, from the power of others to adversely affect your life, all you have really done is repress your dreams. You have wasted your voice on self-protection, rather than amplifying it through self-understanding followed by self-expression. All that negativity makes you weak. Your voice is strong when it is founded on generosity and, dare I say it, love.
Finding and sharing your voice is about creating something new, not simply complaining or rebelling against something in the past.
The exciting performer breaks the rules—not just to be rebellious but to create something new, something that works better than what currently exists, and to delight, surprise, enthrall, move, and inspire.
Part I: The Performer’s Mindset
In Part I, you’ll learn the keys to the performer’s mindset.
You’ll begin by finding your voice and the strength to use it.
You’ll discover how to play the right role in any situation and learn that you can authentically play many different roles in many different scenarios.
Then you will once and for all crush your fears and silence the critics . . .
This way, you’ll be prepared, psychologically and emotionally, to perform in ways that stir the heart and inspire action.
In order to do this, your desire to perform needs to be stronger than your fear of criticism or failure, your voice must be powerful and in tune with your values and beliefs, and you’ll need to know how to play the right role in every situation.
