Sarah Archer argues that speaker archetypes like storyteller or motivator force inauthentic persona-switching onstage. Instead, treat yourself as an actor playing one consistent character whose personality stays fixed while your talk's content shapes tone, pace, and authority. Know your default stage persona and how you actually come across.
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Have you heard of speaking archetypes? You might have heard of the storyteller, the provocateur, the authority, the guide, the teacher, the motivator. There's a whole bunch of these things, and on paper they can make sense, but in practice I believe that speaker archetypes can trip you up, impact your results as a speaker, and break your connection with the audience. And that's why today I'm going to be sharing about the big problem with speaker archetypes and what you need to do instead. Welcome to episode 329 of The Speaking Club Podcast. I'm Sarah Archer, your host, and I'm here to help you master the art and science of public speaking. So let's get into it. Speaker archetypes. You've likely seen a whole bunch of these around. Maybe you've even taken a quiz to help you find your archetype, and that's one of the 2 jobs that these speaking archetypes do. So first of all, they help you find your kind of default speaking style, and secondly, they help you to see other speaker archetype styles that may work at different parts of your talk depending on the context. And it is true that people can get stuck in one kind of default mode, hitting one note as a speaker. For example, I have worked a lot over the years helping coaches and therapists craft their keynotes and deliver their keynotes, and when they come to me, often their speaking style, the mode that they choose to use as a speaker, is based on their job as a coach or a therapist. So they will have this very calm, encouraging voice, and they'll use it at all parts of their talk. They'll get stuck in this one note, and that can make their delivery proper boring. And also what it does is completely masks their personality, but they've got it in their head that this is the presenter mode that they need to take on stage. Getting awareness of your default style is good. For sure, because you cannot stay in one note and deliver a great keynote. You have to shift absolutely. Your times you're going to be wanting to be provocative. You're absolutely going to be wanting to tell stories if you want to be a great speaker. At times you're going to need to motivate your audience to increase the energy, take it down, and so on. But now we come to the big problem with speaker archetypes. If you're presented with a list of different archetypes— this storyteller, the teacher, blah blah, whatever— you might think that you have to become a different version of yourself for different parts of your talk. And what that can look like on stage is someone artificially switching from one character to another, okay? And here's an example. So now I'm telling a story, I have to be warmer, I have to make my voice more melodic, I have to hold eye contact longer, perhaps I even sit on a chair. Or now I'm the teacher, I have to be more authoritarian, or I've got to get them into action, I've got to be high energy, I might have to wave my hand about to get the audience to respond If you've seen those Alien films where the alien takes over people's bodies, it can look a bit like that. When the alien jumps bodies, the person looks the same, but they start behaving super weird and out of character. And that's kind of what happens on stage. Your personality gets masked and the audience can sense something Strange is happening. It looks like you're wearing clothes of a wrong size or whatever.
You're moving stiffly.
It's just it's not you, and it can come and it can come across clearly to the audience, and that will undermine your authenticity, your authority, and as I said before, it'll break your connection with them. Not to mention completely distracting them from your message. Okay, and that's because. If you're doing this switching archetypes thing, you're focusing more on managing yourself in and out of these characters than you are on being yourself and being with the audience. So I want to give you a better new metaphor for understanding this situation and what's required of you as a speaker, okay, and that metaphor is acting. Now I'm an actor and when I'm doing a play or whatever it is, I am playing a character and the script will likely have my character shift emotion Maybe wildly, relate differently to different characters at different times. There will be these big shifts, but my character will always stay the same person throughout those different emotional episodes and relationship changes and so on. What changes is how that character responds truthfully in the moment to what that script requires of them. And speaking works the same way. You are the character. Your personality, your values, your worldview make up the character, and the script is your talk content. And the journey that you take the audience on, and your performance choices, how you deliver those parts of your content, are about shifting tone, emotion, pace, warmth, and authority. Okay, this is not about staying in one emotional place, Your character, your personality stays the same. It's about staying recognisably you whilst the script asks different things of you. The content is what dictates the performance choice, not a speaker archetype. You know, it's, it is important that you understand what your personality energy and style is, so that one of the things is so that you can stay true to it. And it's likely that you do have a default stage persona personality, just like me, and that will determine how much authority you project, how much warmth you lead with, and also whether you naturally put yourself ahead of the audience, beside the audience, or slightly behind the audience in terms of status. Now some speakers walk on stage and the audience immediately reads them as someone who knows, and another person can walk on stage and the audience will read, read them as, this person gets me, they're with me, and neither is better. And both have power, but we need to recognize what that is. So you might already have a good idea of what your default energy personality is, but if you don't, I wanted to give you a few questions to help you get some insight into this. Okay, so first question: what do you think people tend to read first when you step on stage, or enter a room? Do they see you as an authority? Do they see you as a companion? How do you come across? Secondly, when you are feeling most yourself when you're communicating, what qualities are present? What would I see when you're feeling mostly yourself? Okay, most comfortable. And lastly, Think about your off-stage life. How do you convey different emotions when you're feeling them? How do they come across in your voice and your face and your body? Now it's true we have to have bigger energy on stage, more, you know, but it doesn't mean the energy has to be out there, but we want to have that emotional truth still come through. As I said, your personality It's always the same. You just make different performance choices. And this becomes really interesting when we start to talk about humour, because humour often works by shifting status up and down. So in the next episode, I want to look at comedy personas and status and why humour either works or doesn't work or feels wrong even when the joke itself is fine. And so we're going to have a look at that, but between now and then I want you just to have a think about those questions and notice how you naturally position yourself with an audience in a room and also think about those differing emotions. Well, I hope that's been useful. So don't get hung up on being these different speaker styles. We want to focus on being you. Thanks so much for watching or listening to the show, and if you like it and you haven't subscribed, do hit the subscribe button. Also, if you want to leave a comment below, love to hear what you thought, if you've got any questions. And if you are listening to the podcast, then please leave a rating or review. Uh, wherever you're listening, uh, whichever app or Amazon, Spotify, Apple, wherever, or you can go to ratethispodcast.com/tsc and leave a review there. Thanks so much again. So much you can watch and listen to. Appreciate you taking the time to be with me here. And until next time, you know what's coming. Don't forget to go out, grab your life by the nuts and get cracking. Bye-bye.
It's a nightmare. You're an expert with so much to say, but now that you've been booked to speak, you're struggling to know exactly what to talk about. You want a talk that engages the audience and wins you new clients without you losing your personality or anyone feeling pitched to, but What happens when you sit down to create that talk is that you end up staring at a blank page for ages, or worse, surrounded by hundreds of sticky notes with content that you could include. With so much material, you just don't know where to start or finish. Don't worry, because many experts like you face exactly the same challenge, and that's why I created the Blank Page to Stage Guide. In just 15 minutes, this breakthrough resource is going to help you identify the big idea of your message, make it relatable for the audience that you're speaking to, and convey it all in a way that gets the audience inspired and on board with your idea. And it works even if you have tons of material or your subject feels less than exciting. If you want to cut through swathes of content, and get a talk that you're excited to share, your audience loves, and wins you new clients, then grab your Blank Page to Stage guide from saraharcher.co.uk/newguide-tsc.
