On not falling in love with your schtick
Transcript of this video:
I’ve always admired those performers who create alter egos like Barry Humphreys as Dame Edna or Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat.
One of the things I think is so impressive about them is how fully they commit to their alter egos. So they never seem to actually break character. You never see Barry Humphreys sneaking out from behind Dame Edna.
And there’s a couple of people slightly more in my line of work in sort of training consulting who have also done this. Neil Mullarkey has an alter ego motivational coach called L Vaughan Spencer. And Patrick Lambe used to have a a caricature version of a knowledge management gure called Dr. David Vaine. And those two I don’t think they teased the audience as much as the first two but they were fully invested in those characters.
I’ve never really had the time to commit to that kind of role. But if I did, my alter ego would be Jared Scarrod.
Jared Scarrod would for some reason be Australian. And do you know what Jared would have this way of only talking as in a series of questions?
Like, “do you think it might be more powerful, Derek, if you approach Charlene in a slightly more compassionate way?” So Jared’s irritating piece of shtick would be to be always apparently asking what he thinks to himself are very powerful questions but which are always really secretly statements that he’s making.
And he has fallen in love with his own shtick. And I, you know, maybe part of my reason for finding Jared the idea of being Jared, an interesting thing to do is I think we should all be a bit careful of falling in love with our shtick.
I was reminded of it a little bit this past Christmas when someone wished me an Unhurried Christmas which I’m sure was meant in the nicest possible way. And yet a little bit of me went, ah, inside as I, oh I, I want you to wish me, Johnnie a Christmas.
I don’t want to be seen through the filter of Unhurried through this little brand, I suppose you could call it a brand that I’ve been been playing with.
I think whenever we find ourselves saying something that we’ve said a few times before, we risk it being a a kind of stock script. And it risks becoming a kind of skin behind which we hide rather than a way of ourselves being available to the world.
And of course, we all have familiar things that we do and we’re not going to stop them. But, you know, if I yet again, talk about unhurried as being “an antidote to late stage capitalism” which I notice I have done a few times, I want at least to smile at myself for saying it and recognize the risk of that becoming a a stuck record and inadvertently allowing a persona to get between me and the people that I’m talking to.
Photo by Muhammad Daudy on Unsplash
