Coaching A Champion

Article by Dave McIlhenny

Darren LaCroix recounts his journey to the 2001 World Championship of Public speaking in Anaheim. Since I was his principal coach, Darren and I thought it would be instructive to document the process from the coach's standpoint.

In April 2001 Darren called to ask if I would coach him. He had won his area contest and wanted to win the division. Why did he call me? Because I was a friend whose opinion he respected, because he knew I coached corporate executives professionally. But mostly he called because I had won the District 31 speech contest twice. To Darren, I was someone who had been there and done it.

He also recognized that our strengths reinforced each other. Darren's strengths are delivery, movement, comedy, and a stage presence gained from hours of stage time at comedy clubs. Mine are message, wordsmithing, transitions, and coaching. It made for a great marriage.

In all three contest speeches, the main ideas were Darren's, all the main speech elements and stories were Darren's, and the delivery was Darren's. No ethical speaker or coach would have it any other way. So what does a coach contribute? Tuning, focus, structure, filtering, discipline of a sort, and most important - consistent high-quality feedback. I believe a good coach can improve a speech anywhere from 5% to 25%, sometimes more.

In preparing his District speech, Darren came to my house once with his friend, Tanya, who has excellent instincts. We made six run-throughs and did major tuning, focusing on transitions, pauses, phrasing, and streamlining stories. The next time I saw Darren was at the contest itself. He won with a marvelous job of delivery of a fairly good speech built on his comedy routines. But the close (always the most difficult part of a speech) was contrived. When he asked I said I didn't think he would win Regional with that level speech. That's when we both got serious about the coaching relationship.

Darren built his Regional speech, "RMT" around another story he used in his comedy routine and added a heartwarming vignette about his mother's scare with a heart attack. Darren and Tanya came to my house twice for major run-throughs, and I attended two practice speeches he gave at local clubs. We talked on the phone almost daily.

I recall some of my contributions to the Regional speech. I insisted that Darren (kicking and squirming) write his script out. To win at world-class levels this is must. I suggested adding energetic movement to a vignette where he described the fear of your first speech. I identified two imbedded lines ("His happiness was connected to my heart," and "You see, when you humorize you humanize.") as gems that could become 'Darrenisms,' and suggested he put major pauses before and after them to make them stand out. We reluctantly concluded that time would not allow a story about a mentor who had died of cancer. Finally I suggested that the audience needed to see the relationship between him and his mother and that he turn sideways to the audience and tenderly look down at his mother in her hospital bed — almost a pantomime. In my opinion that's where he won the speech. Note that the operative work here is suggested.

Now Darren was headed for the big shootout in Anaheim. You need all the help you can get for world-class speaking, so at Regional I introduced Darren to Mark Brown, 1995 World Champion, and asked Mark if he would help coach Darren. It was to prove a great second marriage.

About this time Darren experienced his first serious panic. He had used up all but one short story (the Subway sandwich shop) from his comedy-routine material. His well was dry. What in the world was he going to talk about in his Anaheim speech?

A week later he called on his car phone and said "Coach! I have a great idea. What if I come out and fall flat on my face?" That's where his magnificent speech started — with Darren's simple idea for a gesture. If you've heard or read his final speech you'll recognize how thoroughly the falling-down metaphor expanded into the whole speech. But it didn't happen overnight.

Pieces of the speech started cobbling themselves together in Darren's head and we talked by phone every day. At this point the 'speech' was a collection of segments that had little to do with each other: (a) the initial fall, (b) a lumpy, long-winded story about rocket scientist Robert Goddard, (c) another long-winded story about Darren's first professional speech bomb, and (d) a hilarious but unfinished skit on "funsuckers." No script, little structure, and no close.

Darren came to my house and we went to work. At this point we were concerned with structure and it came hard - if you don't know what segments you're going to use, it's difficult to build a speech. So we sifted. Painfully. Like any parent, Darren was most reluctant to give up his babies, his precious material. When we drove to New York for a three-hour session with Mark Brown the next week, there was still a lot of work to do. We sorted through the segments and homed in on the stronger ones. Also we leaned on Darren to quit explaining in his stories and get to the point. The speech bomb story, which at this point was taking three minutes, took only forty seconds in Darren’s world championship speech.

Were two coaches a problem? On the contrary. When either Mark or I suggested something, the other almost always saw its value right away and agreed. There are times when one and one makes ten.

Back in Massachusetts, Darren started giving the speech at clubs even though it was still in pieces and each club got a different speech. I didn’t think this was a good idea, but Darren likes audiences and insisted he works best this way. Sometimes a coach needs to know when to get out of the way.

Back to my house for more tuning. The speech was stuck at well over ten minutes, partly due to Darren's habit of throwing in ad-libs. We made a second trip to New York ten days before the final contest, hoping to focus on delivery, but the speech was still too long. Darren was in a near panic. In three intense hours Mark, Darren and I managed to tighten and tighten again. How? By cutting half the Goddard story, reluctantly tossing out the whole "funsucker" segment, and pouncing on Darren when he ad-libbed. One problem was that what the script said and what Darren was saying onstage were very different. And each run-through was different. However, as Darren would say, each time we fell forward. Finally he did one run-through at 7:22. We were videotaping and from that videotape came a script we could work on.

We made another breakthrough on that trip. I had been quietly unhappy with the close because I felt it was out of step with the message. Darren didn’t see anything wrong with the close he had. When we huddled with Mark I mentioned the close and he agreed it was weak. Because there was a second opinion we got Darren’s attention. In five minutes of three-way conversation the answer suddenly popped out — take the second fall, which was halfway into the speech, and move it to the end as the close. Eureka! Whose idea was it? I don't think any of the three of us know. Nor do we care.

Over the next few days Darren gave the speech once or twice a day to local clubs. He would tape each one, transcribe it, and e-mail the script to me. In the afternoon I might get a 960-word script and be halfway through marking it up when another e-mail would arrive with a 900-word script.

We got to Anaheim with five days to work. We ran through the speech at least thirty times. To deal with the avalanche of suggestions from practice audiences, many of them good and all of them well meaning, Darren finally asked people to give their suggestions directly to me; I would relay to him the ones I thought would improve the speech. On the next to last day we had a half-hour session with Mark. He suggested adding energy to the opening and we fixed a weakness in the close by simply adding the two words, "Go ahead."

Darren never lets up. On the day of the contest, which started at 9:00 AM, he came looking for me at 8:30 and we did one last run through. My role was to tune his mental attitude, "That's MY stage you’re on." When we went back to the auditorium, Darren didn’t have his badge and I had to intercede with the door monitor to get Darren in to his own contest.

The rest is history - an epic winning speech, a deserving world champion. My thoughts about coaching and the coach/speaker relationship follow.

What's in it for the coach? One answer is, "Who cares; it's a fun ride." A second is, "It's your duty" - I believe that when anyone is given a talent they also inherit a responsibility to share it for the overall good. A practical answer is that no matter how experienced the coach, I guarantee he or she will learn as much about speaking as the speaker.

What's the basis of the relationship? Reinforcing capabilities, reinforcing experience, commitment, and above all, mutual respect and trust. This is not idealistic; a coach-coachee relationship can't last long without respect and trust. Nowhere does this say the coach must be a world-class performer. When I was in college and captain of the swim team, after our first winning meet we heaved the coach into the deep end of the pool. Only when he surfaced, gasping and thrashing, did we find out he couldn't swim.

What does the coach do? He or she is, variously, a mirror, a filter, a reinforcer, a confidant, and a nudger. And the coach provides much needed continuity.

A mirror: Most of us have a hard time telling if something we do is good or not. We need someone else to hold up a mirror and show us what it looks like. A trusted coach is the first line of feedback. But ...if something keeps gnawing insistently at the speaker, he or she must listen to it, coach or no.

A filter: Any speaker who presents to a large number of people will get conflicting opinions, some negative. Most of us tend to dwell on negative feedback even when we know better. A good coach helps the coachee deal with suggestions and sort out what's useful. Many suggestions would work for the suggestor but not for the suggestee.

A reinforcer: One of the main contributions of a mentor/coach is to say, "You did good." Everyone, particularly a speaker gearing up for a major contest, needs to hear that and hear it frequently. It sounds best coming from someone you trust.

A confidante: There are days a speaker just doesn't think it's going to work. And has to vent. If the speaker can get frustration off his or her chest, he or she can get back to the task at hand. A good coach doesn't comment negatively on these confidences but just listens. Being there for the venting is part of coaching.

A nudger: All of us have things we avoid and all of us procrastinate. Darren didn't like to write scripts out or stick to them. He discovered as we went along that using a written-out script is essential for a world-class speech. All I did was nudge him. Sometimes firmly.

So, whose speech is it, anyway? The speech is always the speaker's. If the coach attempts to take ownership of the speech, the relationship is doomed to fail. And a coach should be leery about taking credit for anything that winds up in the final winning speech, even if he or she suggested it. The speaker might have reached the same conclusion later, or someone else might have eventually made the same suggestion. In the give and take of working on a speech it's often hard to figure out who made a specific suggestion that worked.

The worm can turn: Speaking is unlike an Olympic sport where the coach is usually past his or her performing prime. A speaking coach one year can be a coachee the next. Next year I will be competing and Darren has agreed to coach me.

Do you know about the World Champion's EDGE?

Want to be coached by a World Champion or two?

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