Leading from the clown

Transcript of this video:

Last week I went to a workshop called Leading from the Clown, run by my friend Ralf Wetzel.

Ralf has a really interesting combination of experiences, partly as a teacher at business schools in Europe, but also as someone who has done a lot of training and performing in clown work.

Do you remember that scene from the first Lord of the Rings film? Where Gandalf gets cross with Bilbo and looms very large on screen and says, “Do not mistake me for a conjurer of cheap tricks.”

I feel like I want to add this kind of caveat to talking about clown training, because you might think clown training is about putting on a silly nose and being funny and silly. That’s not really what it is. It is actually, paradoxically, in my experience, some of the deepest and most challenging training you can ever do, because it’s really about the subtleties of being really present and often being really receptive to the audience, that the great clowns are hugely tuned into the audience and sensitive to the audience.

And a lot of clown work is about really not trying to be clever. Clown training really pulls you up straight. As soon as you try to be funny or clever, you fail. It’s when you really relax into connection with the audience that you create drama and often humour.

And clown training is really challenging. It was lovely to do this workshop. First, because Ralf is a terrific facilitator. I’ve known him a long time. This is the first major event I’ve seen him facilitate. And it is lovely to watch someone who’s really good at it, who’s just got that perfect balance of a lightness of touch but an ability to set really kind of clear parameters and boundaries and hold the space really well. So just in the first five minutes, that was a plus.

It was lovely to be in a room full of people who were clearly all up for this kind of work as well. That creates a super permissive energy. And I realised, oh, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a room with that level of commitment that was great and then the clown work itself was a really interesting mix of exercises that I found really quite challenging and difficult and uncomfortable and others that I was just completely into.

The bit that I was completely into was an activity called “Don’t do anything,” in which one person – and the second run of it it was me – leaves the room comes into the room you’re invited to take your time to really ground yourself to be looking at the floor while you’re doing that so not making contact with the audience and then very deliberately, one person at a time, to create direct eye contact with each member of the audience with the injunction not to try and make anything happen but to be genuinely receptive to the person you’re looking at and to do it for as long as you need, really. Until you feel in some way or other that that’s enough and then to move on to the next person.

Desperately simple sounding exercise thats so deep and so satisfying. I remember just each time I moved from one person to another I felt a kind of visceral surprise to be confronted with another human being. Each person created a different kind of eye contact. There were one or two where it felt like there was sort of wit and warmth and humour and we kind of bounced off each other. There was an element of mirroring going on.

And then there were others where I didn’t have that feeling. You know, with one or two, I just had that sense of them staring at me. I mean, not experiencing a warm and deep connection. And I didn’t quite know what to do. I thought, well, do I stare back? And that didn’t feel right. And then I remembered the injunction, which is to be receptive. And so with those people, I realised what I wanted to do was to let them stare at me. To relax into their staring. So not to stare back, not to match their intensity, but to be, I’m okay with you just staring at me.

I don’t know what their experience was. I don’t know if they thought they were staring, but it was a really fabulous training in relaxing, letting go. What if we don’t try and drive things? What if we don’t allow ourselves just to sort of react, but to be genuinely receptive?

So it was a really fascinating afternoon. And then the debrief in the pub was also really great. It was nice to spend time with these people. One conversation in particular stuck in my mind is with someone who’s clearly done quite a lot of this clown work, who also worked in a tech company in management. And it was really nice to hear from him how his management style had been impacted by the clown training he had done.

So you might think, well, clown training, what’s that got to do with management? But he was able to say how much it had helped him to be more patient with the people he was working with, to not do too much. I think most facilitators, most managers are too busy, they’re trying to do too much, trying to make stuff happen and the real talent is often to slow down enough to pay more attention and to be, as I said earlier, more receptive and it was really interesting how he’d signed up for clown training out of genuine interest, he wasn’t regarding it as leadership training and yet it had a really quite subtle but profound effect on his leadership.

And it made me think, gosh, I’ve seen a fair bit of leadership training in my time. The stuff that Ralf was sharing, I suspect, would be much more powerful and influential than quite a lot of quite highfalutin, highly structured, slightly self-important, high-status leadership training.

And then I think it’s also fair to report that when I’ve done clown training before, and I haven’t done a huge amount, I have to remember that there’s a kind of after effect. That simple practice of making yourself available does, I think, how can I put this, it kind of opens you up. And there’s a bit of a recovery time afterwards, I think, for a day or two afterwards, I did feel, I kind of, not sure this is quite the right word, but I’m gonna say more vulnerable. It’s not exactly the right word, but it kind of opened my channels of communication. And I had a sense of some of my energy suddenly having a place, having sort of access to the outside world. And it wasn’t, I wouldn’t say it was energizing, but it definitely left me feeling in a more alive contact with the world, as if some of my habitual defenses had been loosened a little. And that isn’t always an entirely pleasant experience. It takes a little bit of time to settle down.

And as I tell you this story, I kind of realise this is, I think, the best kind of training. It does need to be, in a sense, a little bit disturbing. I think training where you go, you tick the boxes for what you learned and you say, what a great teacher it was. There’s something slightly unconvincing about that. If you haven’t been a bit disturbed by it. I wonder if you’re really being invited into a space where you’re going to grow. You’re going to make that step from where you are now to the next step on whatever journey in life you are on.

So as I reflect on six or seven or eight minutes of me talking about it, it felt like a really, a really super three hours. And I think if you listen to me talking about it, I think you’re getting an idea of the sort of work that I’m most excited by doing.

Photo by Alina Kompa on Unsplash