The Performance Ladder™
The Performance Ladder™ is a practical framework to help communicators understand and contextualize the elements of a successful interaction.
I began conceiving of The Performance Ladder™ in the summer of 2020, after nearly twenty years of performing onstage and collaborating as an executive, lawyer, and professor with a wide range of brilliant professionals and students.
I was noticing that most of the smart, driven, and articulate people I worked with excelled at logic and precise wording (i.e., semantic communication), but were less comfortable with non-verbal, "affective" aspects of communication (despite knowing intellectually that verbal information makes up a relatively small piece of human interaction and persuasion). Modern conveniences like smartphones, AI, social media, cars, TV, and more weren't helping, since they weren't developed to support us standing in front of people, looking them in the eye, breathing, and sharing our full, embodied voice to build lasting bonds.
I also observed that school and workplace training systems - if they taught oral communication skills at all - didn't really know how to teach the physical craft of speech, presence, empathy, and delivery. Add to this an AI revolution making well-crafted content increasingly attainable, and the need for a modern, practical performance skills framework embracing affective communication as well as semantic communication became clear.
To address this compelling need, I developed The Performance Ladder™ to contextualize the four elements that - in my view - go into a successful performance: Self-Knowledge, Content, Connection, and Flow. The Performance Ladder is designed to help you zoom out before giving a presentation or entering into a high-stakes conversation. It gets you "out of your head and into the space" (as teacher, social worker, and mother of improvisation Viola Spolin implored), and puts cognitive verbal and structural content in its proper analytical place. It asks you to shift your view of speaking from a one-way information flow into a dynamic, balanced interaction that demands your full humanity, seeing and engaging others as equals, deeply noticing and vibrantly inhabiting the world around you, and learning how to more consistently achieve flow in your interactions.
My students and clients find this framework useful because it honors verbal precision, logical structure, and clarity, while putting these essential qualities in their broader context and still allowing for individual expression and poetic license. It's helped people since 2020, and Vox Vera is the only coaching company exclusively licensed to use The Performance Ladder™ to assess and address specific areas for improvement.
We hope you'll find the Ladder useful, inspiring, and thought-provoking, and encourage you to reach out if you'd like to discuss further, or schedule a Performance Ladder workshop or assessment for you or your team.
Paul Marchegiani
Los Angeles, 2024
Self-Knowledge: The journey up the Ladder begins with self-knowledge - a deep and ever-evolving understanding of your own values, experiences, curiosities, points of view, strengths, and weaknesses. Great communicators bring their full humanity to their interactions. They know what they have to offer, are open and courageous, and are willing to share and test their ideas in the public sphere.
Content: The second step up the Ladder is content. Every great performer has something meaningful to say, and spends time crafting a clear message that meets the moment and the needs of the audience. Whether it’s an idea, a call to action, an opening statement, a story, a briefing, poetry, an artistic gesture, or a piece of music, the content should be relevant to your audience and reflect deeper truths that bind you with them. Though you might use AI as a tool, rely on your own judgment and perspective to ensure your language, content structure, and framing match the setting and desired outcome. The goal is to create a connection with your audience through the substance of your presentation, so that the words you choose and how you arrange them resonate both emotionally and intellectually.
Connection: Once you know who you are and what you want to convey on a given day, you’re ready to scale the Ladder to connection. Great performers spend decades mastering the art and craft of empathic connection. This involves not just being present with your audience and yourself, but also with the physical space around you, the ground beneath your feet, the medium, and the moment itself. Vox Vera's trainings, workshops, and 1:1s are designed to give you and your team practical, time-tested, and actionable tools to learn how to connect in each of these ways.
Flow: At the pinnacle of The Performance Ladder™ is flow - the state of being fully immersed in an activity, where everything seems to fall into place effortlessly. It’s peak performance, where your ego falls away during the act of communication, and your skills, muscle memory, knowledge, and preparation come together seamlessly, sustainably, and without resistance. You become the vessel for the content - a magnanimous and nimble conduit for the flow of information.
