Stop Performing: How Marc Chase Helps Leaders Communicate with Presence

What would you say if someone told you they get paid to just talk? For Marc Chase, that has been his job for almost 30 years. He started in talk radio in South Africa, hosting an overnight talk and call-in show on the largest talk radio station in the country.

That job led to almost a decade as a national morning show news anchor, soccer commentary for Ajax Amsterdam, and a career in commercial voice work. Today, Marc facilitates leadership presence programs for Ariel, where his message to participants is a refreshing one: bring your real self to work – don’t flip on that ‘professional’ switch and pretend to be someone you aren’t.

The Practical Skills Behind Authentic Communication

“Authenticity” gets thrown around so often in training that it has lost a lot of its meaning. Marc teaches specific, physical techniques to modulate presence instead. The first we’ll cover is voice placement:

• Middle of the mouth: conversational, everyday tone.
• Back of the throat: intimate, soft register. Take a breath, let the voice settle, and you can feel it move backward.
• Front of the mouth: assertive, “action” tone. Your teeth or tongue touch the back of your front teeth, and the voice moves forward.

Three placements, three ways the same words land differently on a listener; learning them is presentation skills 101.

For those who struggle with filler words (this author included…), Marc uses a gas tank metaphor. Think of your mind as the tank, and your mouth as the accelerator. Talk too fast and you empty the tank. As your tank fills back up, the gap between mind & mouth gets pronounced as an “um.” The fix is enunciation: deliberately pronounce the beginning and end of every word. It slows speech naturally and gives the mind time to refill.

Then there is the pause. Marc uses American Idol’s Ryan Seacrest as his example. Seacrest does not say “and the winner is, um, Kelly Clarkson.” He says “and the winner of this year’s American Idol is…” and stops. The silence does the work. “The power of silence is more powerful than talking, especially if you can control silence,” Marc says. And the bonus for slower talking is “you come across more intelligent, more thoughtful, and more mindful with what you’re going to say.” For more on the power of the pause, see here.

All of these learnable presence skills combine with your personality to form your authentic communication style. You, but eloquent, impactful, concise: halfway to voice acting already.

Virtual Presence: A Quick How-To

The most impactful presenters “are the ones who can carry their personality while at the same time using presentation best practices.” And for virtual sessions, Marc believes it’s “not necessarily worse than in-person. It’s different. It requires a different set of behavioral skills,” he says.

Technicalities first: get light on your face so you don’t look like you’re in a “hostage situation.” Background matters too. Marc speaks of the time when a colleague’s labrador once appeared in frame during a prospect call, and the prospect spent 15 minutes talking about their dog, also a labrador. “A complete opportunity missed if you just use a blurred background,” Marc says. Use a laptop stand to bring the camera to eye level, and vertical lines in the background to mimic physical rooms.

Eye contact is the hardest habit to fix. Looking at the screen reads as disconnected. Looking at the camera the whole time reads as intense. Marc compares looking at only the screen to staring at someone’s beltline for an entire conversation.

The reaction: “That looks so weird.” His reply: “That’s what it looks like whenyou’re doing it virtually.”

About Marc Chase

After studying Economics at the University of South Africa, Marc Chase moved into broadcasting and spent nearly 30 years across talk radio, national television news, and commercial voice acting. Now based in the Czech Republic, he is regularly called on as the “Voice of God” for major events and as the announcer for leading brands, and he trained in short- and long-form improv with a comedy group in Amsterdam. Speak with presence. Lead with it too.

As an Ariel facilitator, he leads programs in Leadership Presence, Virtual Presence, Storytelling, High Stakes Conversations, and creating and delivering powerful presentations. He teaches the same skills he built on air through Ariel’s presence and storytelling programs, where executive presence is treated as a set of learnable behaviors rather than an innate trait.