Training gets Personal

Personal Presentation uses acting techniques as a way of improving the communication skills of business people. Phil Mellows took the course

Well, I'm still me. I was hoping for Cary Grant with perhaps a dash of Pink for assertiveness, but no, I'm still me. A gruelling day of personality training has left me with the personality I started out with.

You would have thought that being coached through a series of exercises by a professional actor who makes a living being somebody else would have produced a different result.

But Noah Maxwell, who used to play the villainous cad Lord Alex Oakham in Emmerdale, had other ideas.

"This is about how you can come across with your full personality, the you that comes across when you are passionate about something," he explained. "What we aim to do is to give you the tools to enable you to perform that personality consistently and in a professional way."

Noah's organisation, Personal Presentation, was formed 13 years ago by Julia Goodman - she used to star in the 1970s television drama The Brothers - when she realised that the techniques actors use to perform a role to the same standard night after night could be used to improve the communication skills of business people.

She started training top executives in the financial sector, moved on to employees in the frontline of the National Health Service and has now turned to the hospitality industry - and its pubs.

People who work in pubs have a lot in common with actors. When you are behind the bar you have to perform for your customers.

Not simply serving drinks but making them feel comfortable and welcome, putting them in a good mood and - increasingly - actively selling to them.

This involves smiling and talking and, above all, in those few moments you have, establishing a relationship with them - every one of them.

People don't, however, make relationships with a smile or the words you speak. It's the personality behind them that brings your gestures and speech to life and truly engages the customer.

The most difficult thing, which pub people share with actors, is that you have to repeat the process over and over again without being put off by the inevitable irritations and distractions - the unfounded complaints, the grouchy customers, the temperamental tills, not to mention your sore toe and the fact that it's 11pm on a Friday night and you're exhausted.

Through all this you cannot allow your smile to turn to gritted teeth or your conversation to congeal into mechanical McDonald's-speak.

To overcome this, Personal Presentation has identified a concept called performance energy.

Actors learn to sustain their performance by continually dipping a metaphorical toe into a hidden reservoir of energy, and Julia Goodman's insight was that everyone should be able to do the same.

This underlies one half of the company's work, branded You Training, a two-day programme which is carried out one-to-one or in groups of three or four and can be followed up by months of coaching.

The other half, ShowBusiness, involves actors performing humorous sketches that raise awareness of problems within organisations, especially ones related to poor communication. Delegates at this year's Publican Conference, on November 7, will get an idea of what this is like when ShowBusiness actors support learnpurple's Jane Sunley's talk on staff retention.

In a new initiative, the two halves are being merged in something called Forum Theatre which is specially designed to meet the needs of the hospitality industry by giving You Training to a whole team.

Marketing and sales director Michael Anselm is currently working with six or seven companies on the idea. "It's only in the last six months that pub companies have realised that their brands can only be expressed through the individuals who work in them," he said.

"The hospitality industry has got training courses coming out of its ears.

"What these companies want is for their frontline staff to be confident and that means the focus has to be on personal development, on life skills that give people the ability to communicate well.

"We give them a toolkit to be able to do that. We don't have course notes or box-ticking. We aim to build their self-awareness so they can keep working on behavioural changes when they are back in the pub."

While its ultimate goal is to get people to be natural, the You Training programme begins by making you feel very unnatural indeed.

You are asked to stand up and talk to a video camera on a familiar subject for three minutes. Then, excruciatingly, your performance is played back and analysed. Weaknesses are identified and worked on through a series of exercises.

Noah liked my hands but somehow the energy in my voice wasn't matching up to energy in my body.

He also said he found me intimidating, which I was quite pleased about, but apparently this is a block on people forming a relationship and interacting with you. The cowards.

Noah got back at me by devising some intimidating exercises. "I want you to talk about butterflies," he said. Butterflies! "And I want you to get angry about it."

Exactly what I shouted into the camera is too embarrassing to reveal. "How did you feel?" asked Noah afterwards. "Stupid," I said.

He assured me that it was "almost impossible for anyone to go over the top" - then proved it by playing back the tape.

Another exercise was a strange variation on grandmother's footsteps. Noah walked towards me slowly as I spoke and I had to stop him reaching me by introducing exaggerated pauses which made him walk backwards.

It felt like I was on one end of a boring telephone conversation but, once again, the pauses hardly noticed on playback. The trick, you see, is to throw in a bucket of energy when you come out of a pause and this makes it much more likely that people will listen to what you are saying.

Research, Noah told me, has revealed that the actual content of a performance accounts for only 10 per cent of its impact. What you look like is 60 per cent and what you sound like is 30 per cent.

As long as you hit the basic message you need to get across, the rest of the time can be spent in making sure your performance keeps getting fresh injections of energy by putting lots of yourself into it - this also helps you smile and be less intimidating.

So while, for instance, you might tell barstaff to encourage customers to buy a larger glass of wine, they have to do that in their own way. It can't be scripted or it loses energy and the engagement of the customer.

By the end of my day with Noah I had literally thrown the script away. Now all I have to do is overcome my fear of cows and a role in Emmerdale awaits!