Performance

Transcript of this video:

If I suggested that you think of your work or your job as a performance, would you think that was a good thing or a bad thing? I can imagine why you might think it was a bad thing.

That might be a performance as in a performance review. You know, those processes where we get marks out of 10 where even when we get a 10, the pleasure is short-lived, and generally we expect to be told about our deficiencies. Performance as something very externally moderated.

Or you might think of it in the way someone talks about something, feeling like a “bit of a performance,” where they feel like they’ve been invited to put on a bit of a false front. Social media often feels like it’s a bit of a performance, by me giving a performance, and wondering whether the people saying things in response are performing something for the benefit of others.

So those are ways in which, thinking of work as a performance might not sound very attractive.

But I’d like to suggest a more positive way of thinking about it because as human beings, it could be said that we actually learn by performing into things.

So a toddler learning to walk, performs into walking, it starts to sort of imitate a person who can walk. And when the toddler falls over the good parents don’t admonish it or give it a performance review, they try to be very encouraging and gradually the toddler performs from incompetence to competence, in walking.

So performing in this sense can be how we learn and grow. I remember during the COVID lockdown, the Danish Conductor Peter Hanke ran a fascinating Zoom workshop for business leaders, in which he showed a small choral group rehearsing its performance in various stages.

And I remember one of those businessmen saying to me that he found it absolutely fascinating, he loved watching how they interacted during rehearsal and gave each other notes so that their collective performance would improve.

And he said, “We are often invited to be high performing teams, but we don’t seem to give ourselves any rehearsal space.” So if we take that idea of rehearsal to the idea of performance, then we might be able to see it as something where we can learn and grow.

Some actors actually say they actually enjoy rehearsals more than performance, because it’s in rehearsal that they’re growing and exploring, and trying out different possibilities.

So when I’m working, for instance with people on having difficult conversations, I try to encourage a rehearsal and performance space where we give ourselves permission to try out lots of different things and see what we can learn from, so that we gradually build our performance.

And then in this sense, we can think of performance as something deeply satisfying as very profoundly connected to learning and growing, and also connected to our inner sense because when we perform well in this sense, is as if we are drawing something new from within ourselves to give to the outside world which is a very different set of expectations from, oh, a thing for which I’m expecting to get criticized from outside.

It’s an inner directed kind of performance. And that kind of performance, as you can tell, I can get quite excited about.

Photo by Joshua Hanson on Unsplash