Ten Acting Techniques and Exercises for Medical Practice Employees

Every employee who has ever worked successfully in a medical practice has had to fake it at times. For example, your employees probably have had to act as though they were interested in what a patient or coworker told them, even when they were not. Or they made it seem as though everything was well-in-hand when it wasn’t. Or they remained calm and unruffled when they were feeling frustrated, angry, frazzled, or fed up. Or they acted as though they were fully engaged in and enthusiastic about their work when they were tired, sick, or bored and would rather have gone home.

To succeed, we must all at times squelch our impulses and rely on our acting skills, in any workplace. As Ciotti(1) suggests, employees rely on basic acting skills to maintain their usual “cheery persona,” even when they must deal with grumpy, angry, boring, and otherwise challenging people and situations. However, while acting a part can be so useful to us, it has a potentially ugly underbelly. We want employees to act professionally; we don’t want to encourage them to lie.

Therefore, it’s important for us to regard acting in the medical practice as a set of skills that can help employees align their outward behavior with their inner truth. For example, we can encourage employees to act calm, centered, interested, and cheerful, and then, to find those characteristics within themselves and bring them to the surface. In fact, acting can be a great way to help employees to find those parts of themselves that are buried deep inside them. Simply acting a part can help employees to become it. The key is to encourage acting that draws upon a greater truth than the employee may feel in a moment of anger, frustration, boredom, hurt, or despair.

Acting to Help Employees to Find Their Inner Truth

There is an inner actor inside of every medical practice employee. As Stevenson(2) explains, “He or she shows up multiple times every day. You play roles. You assume different personas. You will yourself into different states of being in order to accomplish your goals.” Acting is a tool your employees can use to call upon different aspects of their personality, Stevenson explains, using different levels of energy, and different emotional states at specific times and places for specific purposes. In all of those situations, Stevenson says, “You didn’t turn into a phony, you merely dug deep inside and found an inner reserve of talent and skill.”

For example, when your employees act as though they are confident when they are not, they can find that kernel of confidence within themselves, nurture it, and help it to flourish. Focusing on the physical manifestations of confidence can help a lot. Specifically, if your employees assume a confident posture, they will start to believe that they are confident. There is a physiological basis for this transformation. Robbins(3) explains:

Studies from the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives show that your physical behavior influences your brain chemistry just as your brain can influence your physical behavior. In other words, the more you stand as if you are self-confident, the more your brain will be convinced that you are.

An employee who stands straight with shoulders back and down and with his or chin up will look confident. Coaching your employees to sit, stand, and walk with confidence, and to speak with confident voices will encourage their brains to tell them that they are confident. But for this to work, the confidence must have been buried somewhere deep inside them. Acting will help them to find that truth and to bring it out of them.

Ten Acting Techniques and Exercises for Medical Practice Employees

As a medical practice manager, there are several ways that you can help your employees to develop their acting skills so they can use them in your practice. Here are 10 techniques and exercises for you to try with them.

Method Acting

Actors like Robert DeNiro, Hilary Swank, Christian Bale, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio are famous proponents of method acting. Method actors prepare for roles by involving themselves fully in the characters they play. They use techniques such as sense and memory to achieve realism in acting. Method actors rely on using their own emotions from their past to bring new depth to a part. Your employees are customer service representatives of your practice. In that role, they can learn about common patient concerns and problems, empathize with patients, and prepare to help them. But by applying method acting, Open Mind(4) suggests, they also can draw upon their own experiences with other customer service representatives. They can consider those representatives’ most likely concerns, apprehensions, and frustrations, as well as their joyfulness and elation when they are able to help their customers.

Exercise: Ask your staff to talk about specific customer service representatives with whom they’ve interacted on the phone, in writing, and in person. Encourage them to explore the range of emotions likely to be at play within those representatives. Help your employees to imagine those representatives’ concerns about their customers, how they must have felt in their bodies when things went well and when they didn’t, and how both good and bad customer service representatives may feel about their jobs. Also help them to connect those emotions and physical responses with times when they may have felt and responded in the same or similar ways, whether in the workplace or elsewhere. That work can inform what your employees do when they are face-front with your patients.

Improvisation

Many seasoned actors use improvisation as a tool to help them prepare for roles. The premise of improvisation is simple. Improv performers don’t know what will happen onstage until they’re up there. Each scene begins with a suggestion from the audience. The performers start with that prompt, making up the story, dialogue, and movements as they go along. As Shilling(5) suggests, improvisation can help actors to prepare for their roles and also, to develop “a connected flow” with their fellow performers. Furthermore, some actors have the freedom to improvise even within their performances, and rely on improvisation to deliver the best performance possible. For example, Richard Gere improvised the famous scene in the film Pretty Woman in which he closes the jewelry box he is offering to Julia Roberts, and she laughs exuberantly. In your medical practice, nearly everything your employees say will be improvised, not scripted for them. You can help them become better at improvisation by leading them through improvisation exercises.

Exercise: Create or ask your staff to create prompts for an improvised scene likely to take place in your medical practice. Ask employees to assume the various roles. End the improvisation when you feel that the scene has been sufficiently played. Then, have a “debriefing” session by asking employees what they observed—what went well, what didn’t, how they felt at each point in the improvisation, and what are their takeaways. Added bonus: participating in regular improvisation exercises will help your employees develop trust for one another. The shared experience also can help them to bond as a team.

Stay in Character

Many actors use tricks to help them stay in character. For example, some stay in character as long as they are wearing their stage makeup. Once the makeup is removed, they become their usual selves. The actor Jack Waterston famously parted his hair differently whenever he assumed the role of attorney Jack McCoy on the television show Law and Order. According to the website These Are Their Stories,(6) Waterston explains, “I part my hair in real life the way I do in my commercials—on the right . . . When I took the role, I decided to part it on the left side as one step in the process of creating the McCoy character.”

Exercise: Encourage your employees to develop and rely on a trick, preferably of their own choosing, to help them stay in character as a customer service representative of your medical practice. For example, they can teach themselves to stay in character whenever they are wearing their name tags. That way, the act of putting on and taking off the name tag cues them that they are going into or getting out of “character.”

Stay in the Moment

It’s so easy when we interact with others to focus on what we want to say and to let our minds wander. Actors do many things to help them stay completely in the moment. As Scinto(7) explains, actors need to pay attention to everything that is going on around them. Says Scinto, “Everything’s moving so fast, you may have missed the most interesting thing. The audience may have heard it, and if you missed it you haven’t really driven the scene forward, you don’t know what to react to.” It can be challenging for your employees to stay in the moment in your medical practice. They may be juggling many balls and have a lot on their minds. Exercises that can help them to practice staying in the moment may help them especially during crunch time in your practice, and when they are distracted with personal problems.

Exercise: Put your employees in pairs and have them face one another. Ask one member of each pair to be the leader, the other the follower. Instruct the leaders to move their bodies slowly and deliberately, continuing to face their partners, while the partners mirror their movements. After sufficient time, ask the pairs to switch roles. Debrief your employees to give them a chance to explore what it felt like to be fully in the moment, and how they can be more in the moment when they perform their roles in your medical practice.

Active Listening

Active listening is a direct upshot of staying in the moment, though it focuses more so on words rather than actions. It is a vital tool actors use to rehearse, to perform, and in their auditions. Wallace(8) explains:

I’ve been in casting rooms over the years where the decision as to who will get the job is in a seemingly unbreakable stalemate based on the reading. Half the room is convinced Actor A is the best choice and the other half feels as strongly about Actor B. One way I’ve seen the tie broken, is to watch the tape of the two people again and turn the sound down to see who had the more connected listening and brighter reactions. It never failed to be a unanimous decision after that.

More than half an actor’s job, if they get it, will be listening and reacting, Wallace says. The same is true of your employees. More than half of their jobs is listening to your patients, their managers, and doctors, and reacting appropriately.

Exercise: A good first exercise in active listening can be one in which you model active and distracted listening. This exercise, from Price,(9) is one she uses to get her acting students to work with each other within a drama class context. To begin, ask one employee to come up to the front of your meeting space and instruct him or her to start a conversation with you on a topic. It might be helpful to give the employee a topic, such as, “What is your favorite type of music and why?” As the employee talks, model the difference between a distracted listener and an active listener, using nonverbal and verbal cues. Afterward, ask the observers on your staff to describe specifically the behaviors they saw for both the distracted and active listening, as well as any observations they have about how the listening seemed to affect the speaker. Then ask the employee who took part in the conversation with you to compare what it was like to try to talk to someone who was distracted versus someone who was listening actively. Ask your staff when and how they can use active listening techniques in their jobs.

Personal Experience

Actors who are preparing for a role sometimes design experiences for themselves in which they come as close to the character as possible. For instance, WhatCulture(10 )reports that Marlon Brando prepared to play a wounded World War II veteran in the film The Men by spending almost a month confined to a ward in an army hospital. During that time, Brando used a wheelchair as his only means of getting around. Likewise, WhatCulture reports that Daniel Day Lewis prepared for his role in The Last of the Mohicans by spending months living alone in the wilderness. Day Lewis survived by hunting for every one of his meals and he even taught himself to build a canoe, WhatCulture says. Of course, these are extreme examples that required unusual physical fortitude, stick-to-itiveness, and a significant investment of time. Nonetheless, medical practice employees can craft smaller-scale experiences for themselves that will prepare them for the roles they play in your medical practice.

Exercise: Ask your employees to design experiences for themselves that will put them as close as possible to the experiences of your patients. For example, they might call a business or medical practice, ask questions, and see how they are treated. They might spend time sitting in your reception area imagining that they are waiting for an appointment with nothing to do but to read your magazines and watch the clock. Or they might interact with a customer service representative in person at a store to resolve a problem, and imagine how a patient in your practice would feel when trying, similarly, to resolve a problem in your medical practice. Ask your employees to share their experiences at your staff meetings. Guide each employee to describe not only the experience, but also, his or her feelings about what happened. Help your employees to connect their experiences with those of your patients. Explore what they can do to create the best experiences possible for them.

Character Research

Actors often undertake extensive research to prepare for their roles, especially if the characters they are going to play are based on real people or if they are set in another time in history. For instance, Forest Whitaker underwent an extremely thorough research process to prepare to play the role of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, WhatCulture reports. Whitaker moved to Uganda to breathe in the atmosphere and politics of the nation in which the film is set. There, Whitaker met with many of Amin’s relatives, former generals, friends, and victims, in an attempt to build up a broad and unbiased portrait of Amin. Whitaker also was reported to have read dozens of books about Amin, WhatCulture says. Your employees are not going to move to another country to prepare for their role in your medical practice. However, you can guide them to conduct their own research.

Exercise: Task your employees to undertake at least one research project to help them prepare for and better understand their roles in your medical practice. For example, they might identify a colleague in your practice or in another practice who they feel does an excellent job, and interview that person to learn more about what he or she does and why. Or, they might read a book or books, listen to audio programs, or watch videos to help them learn more about what it takes to do their jobs well. Or you might even select a book for your entire staff to read, or videos for them to watch, choosing titles that support their work as customer service representatives of your practice. Help your staff to connect their research to their jobs. Ask them to identify how they felt about what they learned, and how that will influence them as they go through their day-to-day tasks.

Shadowing

Actors sometimes prepare for their roles by spending time shadowing people who resemble the characters they will play. For example, The Chive(14) reports, Jack Nicholson prepared for his role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by being paired with mental patients in a hospital so he could shadow their day-to-day lives. Likewise, Zemler(15) reports, Day Lewis prepared to play Christy Brown in My Left Foot by shadowing disabled patients at Sanymount School Clinic. Of course, actors don’t hold the monopoly on shadowing. Job shadowing is a technique used in many workplaces. However, shadowing typically is done with new employees or when employees are training for new roles. This is unfortunate, because employees can benefit from a shadowing exercise at any point in their careers.

Exercise: Encourage each employee in your medical practice to design a unique job shadowing experience. Ideally, ask the employee to spend one full day shadowing another person, but at the least, a half-day. It’s important that your employees have sufficient time to shadow the individual while her or she faces and handles a variety of challenges. The individual to be shadowed could be within your practice, but could also be in another medical practice. Or have your employees shadow customer service professionals in other industries. Prepare your employees for the shadowing exercise by instructing them to brainstorm questions to ask. Have them to bring a notebook and pen with them so they can take notes about what they observe throughout the exercise. After the shadowing, bring your staff together to share their shadowing experiences with one another. Ask each employee to give an oral report of his or her observations, and to discuss best and worst practices observed. Help employees to link their shadowing exercise to what they do in your medical practice every day. Encourage them to focus on takeaways and lessons learned from the shadowing experience.

Voice Work

Most actors take vocal training to help them use their voices well for the parts they will play. They learn to speak clearly, expressively, and pleasingly, and in ways that engage their audiences. For example, Backstage(11) reports that Emily Blunt worked with a voice coach to improve what Blunt describes as a “very squeaky, nervous voice.” As well, Backstage says, Kunal Nayyar, well known for his role in The Big Bang Theory, studied the Fitzmaurice Voicework Technique,(12) which combines adaptations of classical voice training with modifications of yoga, shiatsu, bioenergetics, energy work, and many other disciplines. And according to Wingman,(13) Lauren Bacall, who was known for her deep and resonant voice, wasn’t born that way. Says Wingman, “She was born with a shrill and unpleasant voice, but took up the challenge and undertook extra effort to transform it.” Your employees use their voices every day in your medical practice, which makes them professional voice users. It would be beneficial for them to develop their voices for the work they do, just as actors do.

Exercise: Many vocal exercises that you can use with your staff are available. Here’s one that Kingman recommends to help them to deepen their voices: lead your staff in singing a song. After they’ve sung it once, ask them to sing it a second time, this time a little louder. However, don’t allow them to lift their faces up to sing louder. That’s a common mistake people make, Kingman says. Rather, ask them to sing at a higher volume, but to keep their faces intentionally tilted down. Also ask them to bring their voices to the lowest part of their natural registers. That will eventually train them to speak at a lower pitch, Kingman says. This exercise requires regular practice. Therefore, continue to sing together with your staff often, perhaps at the start or end of each of your staff meetings. A bonus is that communal singing is an excellent way to build goodwill and to increase morale.

Body Work

Actors pay a great deal of attention to the way they use their bodies. To help them hone their craft, many actors study movement techniques, Wright(15) says. As Wright explains, “Great actor training focuses on the whole instrument: voice, mind, heart, and body.” Specifically, Wright recommends a number of movement-based methods that all actors should study. For example, Wright recommends the Suzuki method, which teaches that acting “begins and ends with the feet” and includes controlled forms of stomping and squatting. Wright also recommends the Williamson technique, which draws on the five senses, and the Jacques LeCoq method, by the renowned actor and teacher, which uses a mix of mime, mask work, and other movement techniques to develop creativity and freedom of expression. Of course, you are working with medical practice employees, not actors, and you are probably not in a position to teach these and other movement techniques. Nonetheless, you may be able to use body work exercises with your employees to help them to be more effective in their roles with patients.

Exercise: Your employees already know that body language is a powerful communication tool. Draw upon this foundation of knowledge. At a staff meeting, ask two employees to participate in a role play, one playing the part of a patient, the other as an employee in your medical practice. After a first attempt at the scene, ask them to sit or stand closer to one another. Then ask them to repeat the scene, this time focusing on ways to express physically what they are saying. Debrief the two employees by asking them to explore how the change in distance and body language affected them. Then ask participants to share their observations about both scenes. Discuss how lessons learned through this exercise can be applied every day in your medical practice.

References

1. Ciotti G. 16 customer service skills that every employee needs. HelpScout; March 7, 2018. www.helpscout.net/blog/customer-service-skills/ . Accessed November 26, 2018.

2. Stevenson D. Acting for non-actors. Doug Stevenson. www.storytelling-in-business.com/keynotes-training/story-theater-method/acting-for-non-actors/ Accessed November 26, 2018.

3. Robbins JM. Acting Techniques for Everyday Life: Look and Feel Confident in Difficult Real-Life Situations. New York: Marlowe & Company; 2002.

4. Acting skills for your customer service. Open Mind. www.openmind.in/acting-skills-for-your-customer-service.php . Accessed November 26, 2018.

5. Shilling S. Why do actors use improvisation? Quora; March 22, 2018. www.quora.com/Why-do-actors-use-improvisation . Accessed November 26, 2018.

6. The Sam Waterston hair part mystery solved! These Are Their Stories; May 23, 2008. https://thesearetheirstories.blogspot.com/2008/05/sam-waterston-hair-part-mystery-solved.html . Accessed November 26, 2018.

7. Scinto J. Why improv training is great business training. Forbes; June 27, 2014. www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2014/06/27/why-improv-training-is-great-business-training/#75b97a4b6bcb . Accessed November 26, 2018.

8. Wallace C. 3 reasons why listening is the most important part of acting. Backstage; July 18, 2014. www.backstage.com/magazine/article/reasons-listening-important-part-acting-12768/ . Accessed November 26, 2018.

9. Price L. “What did you say?” Active listening in the drama classroom. Theaterfolk; July 23, 2016. www.theatrefolk.com/blog/say-active-listening-drama-classroom/ . Accessed November 26, 2018.

10. 10 actors who conducted insane research for iconic movie roles. WhatCulture. http://whatculture.com/film/10-actors-who-conducted-insane-research-for-iconic-movie-roles . Accessed November 28, 2018.

11. Successful actors talk about their training. Backstage; November 9, 2011. https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/successful-actors-talk-training-55312/ . Accessed November 27, 2018.

12. About Fitzmaurice Voicework. The Fitzmaurice Institute. www.fitzmauriceinstitute.org/fitzmaurice-voicework/ . Accessed November 27, 2018.

13. Wingman. How to make your voice deeper: a definite approach. Wingman. https://get-a-wingman.com/how-to-make-your-voice-deeper-a-definite-approach/ . Accessed November 28, 2018.

14. Actors who went to the extreme to prepare for a role. The Chive; June 30, 2018. http://thechive.com/2018/06/30/actors-who-went-to-the-extreme-to-prepare-for-a-role-15-photos/ . Accessed December 1, 2018.

15. Zemler E. 15 actors who went to seriously extreme measures for a role. Elle; February 5, 2016. www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a33861/extreme-role-prep/ . Accessed December 2, 2018.

16. Williamson KC. 7 movement techniques all actors should study. Backstage; July 14, 2017. www.backstage.com/magazine/article/movement-techniques-actors-study-8763/ . Accessed December 1, 2018.

What Roles Do Your Employees Play?

Each of us chooses to play different roles in different situations. According to Sherwin,1 “Some [roles] are conscious choices at the time, and some are simply an unconscious but learned reaction to the moment.” Actors work hard in the initial steps of role preparation to figure out how to become the character in the moment, Sherwin says. Likewise, your employees need to identify their various roles, and when they need to play each one, so they will be prepared to play them when needed.

Sherwin suggests as an exercise that employees brainstorm all of the roles that they play throughout a day, week, and month in your medical practice. Says Sherwin, “To identify as many as possible, you need to take the time as you go about your day to mark down the roles you are playing.” For example, an employee in your medical practice may answer the phone, process insurance paperwork, check inventory, or prepare an examination room. But he or she also may focus on the personal and not task-oriented roles that he or she plays throughout the day, such as supporter, listener, team player, leader, problem solver, role model, friend, advocate, authority, teacher, coach, or consultant. This list-making takes a little time, Sherwin warns, but is beneficial. As Sherwin explains, “Often, people are surprised when they realize the various roles that they play.” They may be surprised, too, at how vital each of these roles is to their success.

As the practice manager, help your employees identify roles they play in one situation that would be transferable to and useful in another, Sherwin says. An employee who is a good listener with your patients, for instance, may see that he or she can be a good listener at your staff meetings, too.

Reference

1. Sherwin L. All the Workplace is a Stage: Acting Techniques to Create Award-Winning Business Performance. Northwest Territories: Inukshuk Publications: 2015.

Acting Skills for Medical Practice Managers

Medical practice managers, like their employees, can benefit from having fairly well developed acting skills. As Stephson(1) suggests, “Managers need to always be aware of how they present themselves and the impact of their behaviors on their subordinates.” To illustrate this point, Stephson suggests three common and challenging managerial scenarios. She suggests that practice managers identify the roles they might play in each scenario, and then carefully select the one that will yield the best results with their employees.

Reference

1. Stephson A. Acting 101 for managers. Workplace Insiders; November 28, 2012. https://workplaceinsiders.com/tag/acting-skills-for-managers/ . Accessed December 2, 2018.