One of the biggest things I work on with students is helping them stop speaking purely from their heads.
Many intelligent children and adults become very good at saying words correctly. They project. They articulate clearly. They make “good acting choices.”
But often, something is missing underneath it.
The student sounds careful rather than truly connected.
Recently, I came across a fascinating piece of writing by Writer/Director Andrew Higgins exploring the relationship between the body, emotion, thought, and action in performance. It deeply resonated with work I’ve already been exploring in lessons with students.
One idea particularly stayed with me:
The body often knows before the mind does.
And I see this constantly in the students I teach.
A student receives a line or an instruction and immediately starts thinking:
“How should I say this?”
“What expression should I use?”
“How do I make this sound emotional?”
But truthful communication rarely begins there.
In real life, something happens to us first.
Our stomach tightens.
Our chest lifts.
We lean forward.
We pull away.
We freeze.
Then emotion arrives.
Then thought.
Then words.
In lessons recently, I’ve been exploring a simple sequence with students:
Gut receives.
Heart reacts.
Body commits.
Words arrive afterwards.
The shift can be extraordinary.
The moment a student stops trying to “perform the line” and instead allows something to genuinely happen inside them before speaking, the whole performance changes.
Their face becomes more expressive without forcing it. The voice gains contrast naturally. The words suddenly carry weight. And you can feel the audience leaning in.
Not because the student is working harder, but because they are communicating from their whole selves rather than just their intellect.
This work has also made me think differently about confidence.
True confidence in communication is not sounding polished every second. It is trusting that something real is happening underneath the words.
And this applies far beyond acting.
I see the exact same pattern when students are speaking in interviews, giving presentations, answering questions under pressure, or simply trying to express something important authentically.
Because ultimately, this is not just performance work.
It is human communication.
As tutors and educators, I think we sometimes accidentally reward people for sounding “correct” rather than being present.
But presence is what people actually respond to.
People do not need to become less intelligent communicators.
They simply need to stop letting the intellect do all the work.
The head is not the enemy.
Its job is to organise and articulate experience — not replace it.
And often, the most powerful moment in performance happens in the milliseconds before the line is spoken.
That is where truth lives.
With thanks to Andrew Higgins, whose recent piece on body, emotion, thought, and action in performance inspired this latest exploration into embodied communication and performance.
You can read his original article here.
