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How to Keep Your Authenticity While Adopting a Stage Persona
Many singers, actors, and other performers build a stage persona around themselves. It makes them feel comfortable. That persona is better than them, more capable, confident, and fearless. It allows them to distance themselves from their personal identity and connect more effectively with their audience.
This seems to work perfectly for artistic performances, but how about public speaking? Would you be authentic and trustworthy to your audience if you use a stage persona? Would the connection be real?
Why do people create a Stage Persona?
Before we discuss whether it is cheating or not, it is essential to understand why people create these personas instead of just going up the stage and being themselves.
The idea is as old as Ancient Greece, when storytellers used masks to represent the characters in their stories, and it has many benefits. It increases your confidence, helps you maintain consistency throughout the presentations, and distances you from your own misconceptions about your abilities of delivering the message.
Despite all the benefits, creating a stage persona is sometimes considered deceptive to your audience.
How Authenticity looks like
“Be yourself.”, “Be authentic.” is the kind of advice you’ll see when you look for tips on how to be a good speaker. Naturally, this raises some questions about the validity of creating a stage persona to help you overcome your insecurities. Are you being authentic?
Now, let me ask you a different question: are you connecting properly with your audience? Instead of worrying about how close the persona is to you, focus on how your audience connects with your persona. The connection between the audience and the speaker is what really matters, after all. A stage persona grants you the emotional distance to show your confident self.
When you decide to create a persona, anchor it in elements of your true self. Balance is everything. Blend authenticity with performance. You don’t need to show your whole self on the stage, but revealing aspects of your personality that align with your message is important.
When preparing your presentation, think of it as a narrative. It needs to be coherent—that’s where authenticity lies.
If you are a motivational speaker, you must show positivity, resilience, and confidence. If you’re a comedian, you can adopt a more extravagant persona for comedic purposes. None of these personas are compromising authenticity. They have a specific goal.
Authenticity doesn’t mean revealing everything; it means staying true to your core message.
The Art of Balancing
You create your persona and can do it in many different ways, making it as close (or not) to yourself as you’d like. This way, using a persona while maintaining authenticity is indeed possible.
However, before you enter heated debates about it, think for a minute about your personal case. Why would you like to adopt a stage persona? Is it to enhance your message, engage the audience, or overcome personal barriers? Do you want a mask to hide yourself or a strategically built way to improve your speech and relationship with the audience?
If you are seeking to hide something, maybe you need to rethink the situation and find ways to overcome your fears and worries about public speaking before investing your time in creating a stage persona. If your goal is to improve your presentation, what could be more authentic than your preoccupation with your audience? Be honest with yourself, find out your actual reasons, and work on them.
Where does your authenticity stand?
Creating a stage persona for public speaking is not free of controversy. Many people question the speaker’s authenticity when they make this choice, yet it is an excellent exercise to develop confidence.
Resorting to a stage persona is not faking—it is projecting. It is not about lying or being untruthful to your audience; it is about looking at yourself differently.
A well-crafted persona will enhance your impact without sacrificing authenticity.
Cátia is a psychologist who is passionate about helping children develop and train social skills.
