There is a moment in my performing journey that I return to often because it taught me something I did not expect to learn.
I was at a corporate event in Vienna, performing a short set as part of a keynote presentation. The venue had provided a stage, basic lighting, a sound system, and a podium. Standard corporate setup. Nothing special. The performer before me — a motivational speaker — had used slides, background music, and a wireless handheld mic with practiced stage movement. She was good. The audience was engaged.
Then it was my turn. I had no slides. No background music. No elaborate setup. Just me, a small table, and the items I needed for the performance. Walking up to that stage, I felt acutely aware of how stripped-down my production was compared to what the audience had just experienced.
What happened next surprised me. The response was strong. Not because of what I said or what effects I performed — those were solid but not extraordinary. The response was strong because of how I stood there. How I sounded. How I occupied the space.
I did not understand this at the time. It took months of reflection and re-watching the recording to identify what had actually happened. And what had happened was embarrassingly simple: I had stood still, stood straight, and projected my voice. That was it. Those two choices — posture and vocal projection — had created enough presence to fill the gap left by the absence of everything else.
The Position of Power
Dan Harlan describes something he calls the “position of power” for standing on stage. The technique is specific: feet shoulder-width apart, one foot turned slightly out, one foot slightly back, with all your weight on the rear foot. From this position, you can shift naturally by moving one foot back or forward without your upper body swaying.
I adopted this technique about two years ago, and the difference in how I appear on video is remarkable. Before learning it, I had a habit I was not even aware of: I swayed. Gently, almost imperceptibly, I shifted my weight from foot to foot while performing. It was a nervous habit, the kind of self-soothing movement that the body defaults to when the mind is under stress. I never noticed it. The audience probably did not consciously notice it either. But it was there, and it communicated something.
What it communicated was uncertainty. Movement without purpose reads as nervousness. Swaying reads as someone who is not quite settled, not quite confident, not quite in command of their space. Harlan puts it directly: “If you can stand in one place and deliver, you will be thought of as the most intelligent, confident, likable, entertaining, most interesting person in the room.”
That is a bold claim. But I have tested it, and the principle holds. When I stand still — truly still, rooted in that position of power with my weight on my back foot — the audience leans in. They feel secure. They feel like the person in front of them knows exactly what they are doing and is not going anywhere. The stillness creates a gravity that draws attention rather than dispersing it.
This does not mean you never move. It means that when you move, the movement is deliberate and purposeful. You move to get a prop. You move to engage a different section of the audience. You move to create a physical transition between segments of your performance. And when you arrive at your new position, you settle again. Weight on the back foot. Still. Grounded.
The contrast between purposeful stillness and purposeful movement is itself a form of production value. It creates rhythm without requiring a single piece of equipment.
The Voice as Production Value
If posture is the visual component of free production value, voice is the auditory component. And voice, in my experience, is even more impactful.
I am not talking about having a naturally great voice. My voice is ordinary. I am Austrian, which means my English carries an accent that I cannot fully eliminate and have stopped trying to. I am not a trained actor or singer. My vocal instrument is average.
What I am talking about is projection. Volume. The deliberate choice to send your voice to the back of the room rather than letting it fall at your feet.
Fitzkee wrote about voice with characteristic precision. Pitch low — a lower voice carries better and has a more pleasing quality. Articulate carefully, sounding every syllable. Pause between phrases. Know where your accents go. Do not strain, do not shout, do not mumble, do not whisper.
I remember reading that passage and thinking it sounded obvious. Of course you should project your voice. Of course you should articulate. Everyone knows this.
Then I watched my recordings.
My voice was not projected. It was present — audible, clear enough — but it was not filling the room. It was reaching the first few rows and fading. I was speaking at a conversational volume, the volume I use when talking to three or four people across a dinner table. But I was performing for fifty or a hundred people in a conference room. The math did not work.
The difference between speaking so people can hear you and projecting so people feel addressed is enormous. It is the difference between overhearing someone and being spoken to. When a performer projects — really projects, with diaphragm support and intention and the deliberate choice to fill the space — every person in the room feels like the performance is aimed at them. Not just the front row. Not just the people closest to the stage. Everyone.
The Grandmother Technique
Harlan shares a technique for non-amplified venues that I have adopted even for amplified ones. He describes visualizing that his grandmother is sitting in the back row center seat, and performing the entire show for her. The idea is that by directing your energy and your voice to the most distant point in the room, everyone between you and that point gets more than enough.
I adapted this for my context. I do not visualize my grandmother — she would have been confused by most of my material. Instead, I pick a specific person in the back row before I begin and make a mental note: everything I say, I am saying to reach that person. Not just audibly. Energetically. I am performing for the person who is furthest away, and everyone closer gets the benefit.
This technique changed my vocal delivery more than any formal voice training I had attempted. It gave me a physical target for my projection. Instead of the abstract instruction “be louder,” I had a concrete objective: reach that person. The body knows how to calibrate for a target. Give it one, and it adjusts naturally.
Why These Two Things Create Disproportionate Impact
Posture and voice tap into signals about status and authority that humans have been reading for hundreds of thousands of years. A person who stands tall, still, and grounded signals competence. A person who fidgets signals uncertainty. A voice that fills a room signals authority. A voice that does not signals timidity. These readings are automatic and largely unconscious.
When you combine upright, still posture with a voice that fills the room, you activate both channels simultaneously. The visual signal says “this person is in command.” The auditory signal says “this person is speaking to all of us.” Together, they create an impression of production value that has nothing to do with equipment, staging, or budget.
I have seen performers with expensive sound systems and professional lighting who seemed small on stage because their posture was poor and their voice was thin. And I have seen performers with nothing — no lights, no sound system, no staging — who held the room through sheer physical presence and vocal command. The room did not need production value because the performer was the production value.
Practical Exercises That Actually Helped Me
I want to be specific about what I actually did to improve, because abstract advice about “stand up straight” and “project your voice” is not very useful without practical methods.
For posture, I practiced the position of power at home. I stood in my hotel room with my feet in the correct position, weight on my back foot, and I ran through my entire set while maintaining the stance. The first few times, I kept catching myself shifting my weight forward. The position felt slightly unnatural, slightly off-balance. But after a week of daily practice, it became my default. My body learned the position and stopped fighting it.
I also started recording myself from the side, not just from the front. The side view revealed posture problems that the front view hid — a slight forward lean, a tendency to lead with my chin when making a point, a habit of dropping my shoulders during transitions. These were invisible from the front but obvious from the side.
For voice, the most effective exercise was the simplest. I stood at one end of a long hallway in a conference hotel and spoke my opening lines to the far wall. Not shouting. Speaking at what I thought was a normal volume. Then I walked to the far end and spoke again, imagining someone standing where I had been. The volume and energy required to fill that distance was dramatically more than what I had been using on stage.
I also practiced pausing. Fitzkee’s instruction to pause between phrases and pause longer before establishing a point turned out to be one of the most powerful vocal techniques I adopted. Pauses do two things: they give the audience time to absorb what you just said, and they create silence that makes your next words feel more significant. Silence is free. It costs nothing. And it is one of the most underused tools in a performer’s arsenal.
The Hotel Room as Laboratory
Most of this work happened in hotel rooms. That is the recurring motif of my practice life — alone, late at night, in a room that is not mine, working on craft that feels simultaneously important and absurd.
I would stand in front of the hotel bathroom mirror in the position of power and deliver my opening lines. I would project my voice to the far wall of the room and listen to how it bounced back. I would record myself on my phone and watch the playback with a critical eye, looking for the sway, the slouch, the dropped volume.
It is not glamorous work. It is repetitive and sometimes tedious. But it is the work that, accumulated over hundreds of sessions, transformed how I appear on stage. Not through equipment or production budgets. Through two things I brought with me: my spine and my voice.
The Pareto Principle of Performance
In strategy consulting, we call it the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the results come from twenty percent of the inputs. In performance production, posture and voice are that twenty percent.
You can spend thousands of euros on lighting, sound, staging, and props — and you should, eventually, invest in those things. But if you stand poorly and speak quietly, all that investment is undermined by the two cheapest elements of your production: how you hold your body and how you use your voice.
Get those right first. Everything else you add will amplify what is already working. Get them wrong, and everything else you add is compensation for a foundation that is not there.
The posture and voice work cost nothing. Some investments have a better return than others.