Many effective leaders and communicators project an intimacy with their audience that at least imitates their more private backstage selves. As a result, we the audience take away the impression that we really know the speaker even if the speaker doesn’t have a clue who we are. The effective speaker bridges the gap with the listener while maintaining a safe distance, thanks to the platform.
That platform protection is lost once the speaker descends. To maintain a necessary defense barrier, the public person learns to project a careful balance of warmth and arm’s-length positioning when working the crowd. People want to know that this person is touchable, that he or she is truly flesh and blood.
Some great platform communicators can exude the same platform warmth up close. Others struggle with it. I remember when I met Bob Hope in person when I was a college student. The dean had handpicked a few of us for a small group shot where Hope would field questions for a campus program he was filming to be aired on national TV.
On camera, he was vintage Bob Hope. We felt warm and connected. Afterward we got to shake his hand, get his autograph, and chat for a minute. As I did, I felt a strange and foreign presence – a plastic Bob Hope I’d not sensed a few minutes earlier or when I’d seen him on TV. Hope and I were trading commodities – or maybe we were the commodities to each other.
There is no way you can give yourself away to thousands and expect to have anything left, unless the self you are giving away is sourced elsewhere. Those who learn to pull off this sharing of self with the masses know how to refuel. They aren’t giving themselves away as much as they are allowing themselves to be a channel through which energy from elsewhere flows through them.
But no one can truly do this channeling unless they have a backstage life where they can fully be themselves and get their own needs met. Not just expressing what they choose to share in public, but where they share with the guard down.
A funny thing about muscles and muscle groups. If you use them 24/7, if you never relax them, they eventually lose their ability to function. A muscle is not a bone, which is set. A muscle is designed to tighten (contract) and loosen. And every person needs to exercise these public/private muscles or they will freeze in place.
The reason for the need for the public guard or defense, the reason Bob Hope couldn’t risk being intimate with my friends and me, is because the more intimate we are, the more vulnerable we become. We risk losing ourselves to the other person(s) entirely.
Contrary to the mindset of this modern hookup society, you can only do so – become intimate – in a very safe, secure setting. Anyone who has sex with a stranger is not being emotionally intimate, for you can only give what is intimate to you in a context where that intimacy is mutually shared and protected. Otherwise there is no intimate self to share.
When a public person no longer has those safe havens, those backstage hideaways, he or she is in mortal danger. The risk is high for failure of some sort no matter how strong a person is. Strength is not the issue. Human beings are designed for being open, and as I’ve said, openness requires protection, something you don’t get with strangers.
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