When I am not in front of the camera acting, I coach some of the most phenomenal people of New York City and around the globe. My clients include CEOs, company presidents, judges, UN delegates, students, teachers, medical professionals, footballers and basketball players, ballerinas, PhD graduates, economists, media representatives, administrators, actors and artists, accountants, parents, children, business executives, plus many more beautiful kind successful humans.
The reason these people from all walks of life and varied professions come to me is for Speech Coaching, Accent Reduction and Public Speaking training.
When I moved into doing this work at a company, my boss had opened up a concept to us speech coaches called 'the rate of no clutter', which we applied as instructors. The rate of no clutter is a technique using a series of drills and exercises that helps the client master their public speaking from a really practical perspective. Through this work I started to notice certain clients had massive blocks (as the healing world would call it) towards achieving success, which ordinarily could be mastered with the practical application of tools like the rate of no clutter drills.
I started to wonder why these blocks occurred, which turned my interest towards investigating what was behind the rate of no clutter and also the doing side of the human body which achieves public speaking 'success'. Which, for many of my clients, is often executive presence. My interest lead me to spending months, if not a couple of years (and more to come) researching, learning, attending trainings, workshops, symposiums, and testing techniques and after a while clear answers started to emerge.
When we look towards Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Buddhism (to mention just two), simple but true human reality is apparent. It comes back to 'what we feel, affects how we think, affects how we behave', or from a speech coaching perspective 'behave' can be termed 'do/how-we-appear/how-we-present'.
Indian lawyer, politician, social activist, and writer Mahatma Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, is claimed to have said a very similar statement about why Gandhi was such an effective orator; Gandhi was not confused by what he wanted to say, he was not trying to keep tabs on his thoughts, he was not trying to manipulate his audience, he was speaking from his 'truth'.
This paradigm started to become very helpful with my clients, especially for clients who found that the 'doing' of the drills was creating more anxiety than less. If my clients could get more real with how they feel (I want this on a T-shirt – 'Get Real with How You Feel' hashtag 'Speakeasy with Clara Francesca'), then their (often toxic) limiting beliefs, also known as their thoughts, began to stop bullying their feelings which allowed them to speak with more ease, thus giving them the executive presence they were seeking.
I have seen other healers call the 'feel-think-do' paradigm the 'heart-hand-head' paradigm, which I also love. They all get at the same thing.
Further on into my research I wanted to know more about this human phenomenon, so I began working with David Grand PhD, a psychotherapist known for discovering and developing the Brainspotting Method and Howard Teich Phd psychologist and founder of the PACE Profiles and pioneer of the Solar-Lunar Method.
Dr Grand's The Brainspotting Method proposes on a simplistic explanation, that where we look affects how we feel, and his work looks at the analysis of optical-brain mapping to determine what traumas are locked in our bodies through our subconscious memory, identified with certain brain scans, where no amount of talk therapy can help heal.
Why? Simply because usually when the person has undergone a deep trauma, their mind will compartmentalize the memory from the emotion. Humans need the memory to connect with the emotion in order to have an empathic experience and begin to heal the self. Brainspotting work has become fundamentally useful for me when clients need to be more aware of their feelings.
If we allowed children to daydream more (where we look affects how we feel), children would probably have less trauma by adulthood because their subconscious brain has spent years daydreaming and processing the gunk they are accumulating in hostile situations. This daydreaming and processing enables them to be more self-aware, more open to processing their inner discomfort and thereby becoming better at reflecting and responding as adults opposed to reacting.
Centres like non-profit research and educational organization Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), whilst honouring the wise practices of pre-colonized First Nations, are uncovering other medicine-aided therapies to discover similar personal-growth and healing modalities for healing mental health conditions.
The Solar-Lunar Method extends Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s theory of conscious and subconscious whilst dismissing the sexist feminine-masculine underpinnings of this outdated paradigm, using archetype and mythology to create a framework around why the West thinks the way it does. When the individual can balance their inner solar-lunar, yin-yang, conscious-subconscious, doer-thinker, actioner-intuitioner, introvert - extrovert; then the individual can begin to enjoy themselves more completely, even the sides of themselves which might be more dominant or more intuitive without letting their pre-programmed-conditioned thoughts (generally inherited from third parties as a survival mechanism for a myriad of reasons) bully or deny their true feelings. Individuals are able to exist inside of themselves with ease.
My clients that navigate their inner solar-lunar with more awareness find their inner judgmental voice more balanced, which enables them to commit to the task (often a presentation or meeting where they have to speak) with more panache, gusto and joy. And then they get bigger pay checks. It’s a win-win.
Meditation is also a great way to get at this. I think the world has forgotten that there are a number of ways to mediate and that meditation can include dedicating a period of time to scribble on a piece of paper and then let it go.
There are many other spiritual, technical, technological and therapeutic practices, which aim to address the feel-think-do paradigm, many of which work very well. But when they are being used to 'fix' the individual, as if the person is broken, if they are used to address the human as a robot then the instructor or therapist does a massive disservice to the healing individual. Humans are not robots. We don’t just do. There is a whole lattice of complicated intertwined reasons to why we do what we do. When the feel-think-do is out of whack, when the individual is not able to feel truthfully, think calmly and 'do' intentionally, then often their speech is dramatically affected.
How this presents is very varied, and again, usually determined by the myriad of reasons inherited from third parties as a survival mechanism. For example someone who is very scared of public speaking might appear as really angry, or someone who is not balanced in their inner yin might let their unhealthy-ego bully someone at work.
However, when the feel-think-do paradigm is aligned, there is a wonderful joie de vivre! That is when the individual begins to realize their mind is not that detached from their body. As those with positive psilocybin healing experiences will attest to, the mind and body are one, equalling the mind-body connection.
Written by Clara Francesca. This article also appears on Clara’s website here.
Learn more about how Clara Francesca can help you with Speech Coaching at ‘Speakeasy!’
https://www.clarafrancesca.com/speech-coach/
We can set-up an in person session at a location of your choice, the company’s studio or online via platforms such as Skype-Facetime-Zoom. Discounts available for at-location services. Become your own favorite Orator!