Whilst browsing the library last weekend I came across Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. Her TED talk on vulnerability is one of my favourite TED talks so I grabbed it immediately and had a sit down to read it there.
It is a really useful book about leadership, based around her experience in running her own business but also useful for any kind of leadership. I liked it because it has specific tools that she uses in her company, and she’s honest about the mistakes she made and how the tools she uses helped her build trust and competence in her team.
I have read a lot of books about leadership, self-organisation and how teams work, and sometimes they have great ideas but not many actionable tools. This book had loads, and ones I will definitely use myself.
Here is one that can be useful for debriefs after a show, or for feedback in general: Turn & Learn. Everybody writes down their thoughts on a post-it and we reveal them at the same time. This helps avoid the first person’s response domination the conversation, and gives everybody a chance to form their ideas themselves before presenting.
There were loads of others that I will use, too many to write down here, but I came up with another idea to build team spirit.
It’s a way to capture positive feedback in a fun and lighthearted way. After you have worked on a show or project for a while, take some time to sit everybody down and think about one thing that each cast-member did that helped the success of the project.
Once you have written down a recognition of success for everyone else, go around presenting your complements and sticking them on the receiver. Everyone turns into a little complement tree capturing the things they did in the project.
I went to a weekend foundation training in coaching with the Coaching Academy and my favourite session was the one on limiting beliefs. We all learn beliefs about how the world works, and about how we work. Sometimes our situation changes so much that old beliefs are no longer helpful, and we can take time to reflect on them and update them.
I have been thinking recently that my skill set has outgrown my image of myself. I have been improvising and writing for about 10 years now, but I still feel like a beginner sometimes. The session on limiting beliefs gave me some tools to use to update my image of myself. For me these beliefs are things that we tell ourselves all the time or in response to triggers. The great idea I took from the weekend is that you can update an old belief to work for you.
I’ve never found affirmations to work for me, and I thought this might be a similar thing, but it was very different. It’s a useful exercise to look at beliefs you have and then translate them into more useful ones if they find that they aren’t currently serving you.
Buttressing beliefs
Another pleasing find was a phrase from Neil Gaiman’s lessons on Masterclass.com. He said that a second draft is for buttressing what the story is about. You add in more supports for the story’s themes and ideas and take out what doesn’t support them.
I like that metaphor, and I am going to use it for updating my beliefs. I have goals I want to reach, and useful beliefs are ones that support those goals. I’m gonna buttress my goals with some updated ideas about myself. It’s spring cleaning for the brain.
My Example
I have been organising my writing time and I have been saying to myself :
“If I don’t write at least 2 hours a day then I won’t write enough.”
The intention is to value my writing time, but I just get stressed when I tell myself that. When I sit down in business mind writing is harder for me. It’s more productive if I approach it in the same mood as an improv rehearsal, with curiosity and a lightness of anticipation.
I realised the problem is a collision between two different desires. I want a free process, but I still have to get it done. How can I do that? What beliefs are better suited to buttress my goal?
“I want to write more like I improvise.”
“I am keeping 2 hours a day just for writing, so I can write like I improvise.”
I felt a great relief and excitement when I wrote that down. Before, I was trying to use logistics to motivate play which doesn’t work. If you book a rehearsal room you make sure it’s suitable and make sure everybody can turn up, because you want to be free and concentrate on the work. My original belief was like saying if I don’t book rooms and sync diaries then I can’t rehearse, which is true, but it’s not an idea that you want to carry into the rehearsal. You do the scheduling work then you forget about it.
This was a nice untangling of ideas for me. It’s worth doing this reflection to see how you can smooth things out.
For You
Here is a short exercise you might find useful, it takes about 15 to 30 minutes:
Write down a goal you want to achieve in the next year or so.
On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being certain, how likely are you to reach that goal?
Write out all the beliefs you have about achieving this goal, empowering and limiting. Don’t think- just brainstorm whatever comes up, no censoring.
Pick one of the limiting beliefs to work on. Ask yourself what helpful intention might be behind the belief. e.g. “Everybody will laugh at me if I sing on stage”, maybe you want to be confident in your singing, maybe you want professional assessment or teaching on your singing?
Play around writing a new empowering or buttressing belief that will support you taking action towards your goal. e.g. “I want to find a respected singing teacher”, “I want to sing with confidence”, “I want to sing without anybody laughing at me”.
Write down what you have done so far to reach that goal
Revisit your 1 to 10 rating, has it changed? Hopefully it’s gone up, if it’s gone down why might that be?
I went to a great meeting hosted by the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain, called Writing: what do you need, and what can you share?
It used the Open Spaces format, which allows any attendee to suggest a discussion topic, and then everybody chooses which sessions they want to attend. You can move in and out of sessions and they tend to break up and form organically.
A few things stuck with me and I think they apply to any creative endeavour, so here are my highlights.
Protecting your creative time
As creatives we need a space to create, if you work at home then you can use a ritual to start your working day. Here are some that other people use or suggested that I liked.
Walk to work: go outside your house for a 15 minute walk and then return, ready to go.
Put your shoes on: one creative’s relative works in the basement, and he puts his shoes on to go down and work.
Set an end time: not just a start time. When that time is up you have to stop, so if you didn’t use your time well you can’t cheat and drag it on forever.
Thomas (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Bonus Story Time: Stone Soup
This story came up and I found another interpretation of it very entertaining.
Stone Soup is a very old story. A traveller comes to a market place and announces he wants to make stone soup. He pulls out a stone and puts it in a pot of boiling water. Everybody crowds round to see what stone soup is like.
“This could do with a carrot, does anybody have a carrot?” he asks. Somebody gives him one and he drops that in. He goes on like this, adding stock and other vegetables provided by different villagers.. Until finally he has a huge soup that he shares out between everybody.
The usual interpretation of this is that you can do anything with co-operation, but I like to think that maybe all the villagers are just part of you. Sometimes you sit down to create and all you have is a stone. So you just have to boil that water and start making stone soup. Later on you’ll find the carrots and other tasty ingredients.
It’s OK to start with just a stone.
I am running £5 Storytelling workshops near Waterloo on Tuesday evenings. Open yourself up to your impulses, and learn how to weave them into stories.
I visited Oslo last weekend and one of my favourite parts was the Viking Ship Museum.
They have wonderfully preserved ships recovered from burial mounds, along with many of the grave goods that were put there for the deceased. There were goods from all over the Viking trade routes, like buckets made in Ireland, and even a peacock from the Middle East.
The favourite fact I learned is that a sail would cost as much as the rest of a ship. They were incredibly valuable because they took just as much work to make as the wooden hull, and for a long sea journey you needed to harness the power of the wind reliably. A good sail is the difference between being able to visit faraway lands or being limited to your local area.
This made me think about the analogy of motivation. Sometimes creative work is easy, like the wind is carrying you along. Other times its exhausting work and it seems that you are the only person on board rowing. Even worse is when your solo rowing is making the ship go round in circles.
If you want to catch that wind you need to keep your sail in good condition. I wondered what my sail is? What are the habits I can cultivate that will keep me riding that wind of motivation?
The Oseberg ship.
What moves me?
Here are moments that recently lifted my spirits and kept me moving forward.
Rehearsing a sketch for a show, and being surrounded by other performers rehearsing their bits.
Sharing work in progress with others, and seeing their work in progress.
Going to a friend’s music gig in a cosy out-of-the-way cafe I would otherwise never have visited.
Talking about our processes with a creative friend.
Seeing the art of the Oslo Town Hall, huge friezes depicting the history and hopes for the future of the city.
There are common themes in those moments, ones that often turn up if I think back to other inspiring moments. For me they are:
Being around people making things.
Enjoying art from different fields than mine.
Talking about the process of making things.
So to keep my sail in good condition I need to make opportunities to be around people who are making things, go to random galleries and performances that I know nothing about and stay in contact with people that I respect and can talk to about my work.
What moves you?
If you are feeling dead in the water right now, write out a short list of moments that inspired you recently. See if there are any common themes in these moments and older ones that spoke to you.
Then write a short list of specific actions you can take to capture more of those moments. Now you have a checklist of things to do to tune up your sails and get back to riding the winds.
Current Workshops
I will be using my passion for sharing your creative process in a series of workshops in London. Tuesdays from 12th March to 21st May. Check out this link for more details. Come down and let’s quest together.
“Finding Your Voice” -people talk about it in writing classes and improvising classes, in standup as well. In pretty much every kind of creative lecture or class I have seen.
How do you find your voice though? Here are my thoughts, with some exercises you might find useful.
My Voice – Preparations
When I started improvising the excitement of making live comedy shows and learning how to improvise was enough to keep me occupied. The rush of getting up in front of an audience and making a show was an overwhelming buzz and most of my early shows were me just enjoying the ride.
But after about 3 or 4 years of improvising I started thinking about my skills and what I needed to do to get better at improvising. I went to more physical theatre workshops and musical ones to see what it was like using those skills. I had never used those skills and it was a big challenge to go to one of those classes for the first time (my first more physical class was with Kate Hilder, who I strongly recommend for anybody wanting to experiment with that. It was a supportive and excellently led workshop).
After doing ‘things I am not good at’ I started to realise more about the ‘things I am good at’. Things I didn’t need to work on, that I had been doing since childhood and took for granted. If new skills are like parties across town with new and exciting people I have never met before then old skills are the parks and woods near my house where I know the shortcuts and hidden glades.
In Chicago after I suggested a school debate scene was between the characters of Life and Death a classmate said they loved my epic and mythical impulses. To me that kind of offer seems like an obvious way to spice up proceedings, but I realised that not everybody is into mythology as much as me. I’ve been reading myths and comics and novels that are retellings of myths since I was a kid. All of that stuff is within arms reach of my impulses.
My fellow classmates all had their own offers that I could never have come up with. We’ve all been training since we were born, without knowing it. Learning secrets about ourselves and the world. I thought I had no skills, I didn’t do drama or learn an instrument. But I have ancient stories living in my veins. My heart beats with the sound of the deep dark woods. I wrote hundreds of stories and ideas, and read thousands of books as a kid. I was preparing to be a storyteller without even knowing it.
Learning these things helped me realise what I had that I was taking for granted, but it didn’t completely answer my question about what my voice is. I still wondered what kind of shows I wanted to do, where my performance career would lead me.
The other part of your voice is your motivation as a human performer. If your unique skills are your voice quality, then your motivation must be the topics you choose to write songs about.
Here are some things you can do to reflect on your work and see what areas work for you:
Ask a fellow performer what surprises them about your performance, or what they enjoy that only you do.
Make a list of 10 things you enjoyed doing in shows/performances. Are any of them connected? Have you done some of those things since childhood?
Make a list of 10 things from projects that were unsatisfying to you. Translate each negative into a positive. Something was missing, what was the ingredient you wanted to add to make it satisfying? Then go one step further, why is that ingredient important to you. Then go another step, what actions could you take to sprinkle in that ingredient?
Here is my example of number 3.
I did a run of experimental shows which were based on myth, but we didn’t get a lot of audience for them.
Missing ingredient – audience (seems obvious I know).
Why is that important? Because I wanted people to see what we were working on, and also get feedback.
Actions: We could advertise the next shows even more, network with storytelling nights and try to perform there, hire a director to give us feedback on the show.
We did advertise the shows more, and got gigs from doing that. Apart from that practical benefit I found a deeper message underneath this questioning. I realised I had avoided advertising the shows I was doing, or just done the minimum.
When I was younger I made funny sketches and plays, and couldn’t wait to show it off to my adults in the family. “Come and look at this!” was easy for me to say. But coming into making shows as an adult I was shy about it, and never realised how much I had lost that spirit of wanting to share things from the joy of sharing.
The message I heard was that people sharing their voice is important to me. When I see that in a show it sticks with me, the teachers I respect have a way of encouraging that sharing from their students.
It frustrates me when I see beginning performers telling themselves they will be bad before they even try something, because I think the most important thing is for them to know that they have something amazing to offer, and they are in the enviable position of not knowing what it is yet. They are at the start of their adventure. They don’t know how much they are going to grow.
Conclusion – Your Quest
You have a voice, even if you don’t know what it is yet. You can get hints about that by reflecting on your specific skills and also what inspires/annoys you. If you turn a missing ingredient into an action then you may find a deeper insight underneath.
You made preparations when you were younger for the quest you are on now. You have a compass to show you which way to go. Maybe you don’t know how to read it just yet, maybe it’s recently been spinning wildly and you need to re-calibrate, but it’s trying to show you someplace.
Current Workshops
I will be using my passion for sharing your creative process in a series of workshops in London. Tuesdays from 12th March to 21st May. Check out this link for more details. Come down and let’s quest together.
Pebbles in the pool 