Tag: Performance

Performances

Posted on by jabittan
Much of our life, especially if we spend a good amount of time engaging with social media, can feel like a performance of some kind. We have performance evaluations at work, we want to get that photo just right before we post it, and there are mirrors and people everywhere at the gym so it often feels like everyone is watching you for every squat that you do. In addition, we watch movies about great historical figures, read their diaries years after their death, and celebrate those who started small but ended up big. All of this creates a feeling that we are living for others and that they care what we do and what we are up to, so we better put forward something to entertain, impress, and display our complex skills and thoughts to everyone else.

 

In reality, however, almost no one is really aware of what we are doing from one moment to the next, and almost no one really is interested in what we think about all day long, and no one is going to dig back through our lives to write a book or direct a movie about our us. Spending time in this performance takes a lot of our energy that we could direct toward things that help our community and family members, but instead channels it into vain and self indulging activities to try to impress people we don’t really spend a lot of time with. As Ryan Holiday writes in his book Ego is the Enemy, “There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.”

 

When we are in performance mode, we can certainly get a lot of work done and certainly do a lot of learning. The difference however, between actively engaging with the world out of curiosity and a desire to have a meaningful life and engaging with the world to boost ones status, is that one approach clouds your judgement with fears and thoughts about other people. It may not be possible to completely ignore what others think, and it may not be healthy to do so, but we should recognize that there are social impulses and drivers of our behavior and place those in the back seat, not the driver’s seat of our life. When we want to impress others, we never truly live and we risk pursuing things that appear to give life meaning rather than the things that we like and are interested in. As a result, we put more effort into the appearance of learning, working hard, and being interesting than we actually put into the things themselves. This leaves us in a place where we feel like a fraud and are fearful that people will find out that we are not who we look like in our performance of life. The advice from Holiday is to put the ego in the back seat (or maybe the trunk or even strapped down in a trailer behind us) and to focus on the things that interest us and are the most valuable to us. From this point we can meaningfully engage with the things we are motivated by and do great work, connect with our loved ones in an honest and open manner, and see the world and people around us in an objective and non threatening way.

Performances on Social Media

Posted on by jabittan
Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy helped me to better understand and recognize moments when I was allowing my ego to drive my behaviors and decision making. So much of our desires and motivations we hide from ourselves in an attempt to make ourselves feel better about who we are and what we do. We pursue things that give us rewards and social recognition, but we tell ourselves that is not why we are doing such things. One area where this is obvious is in our social media habits.

 

Regarding social media and ego, Holiday writes,
    “Blank spaces, begging to be filled in with thoughts, with photos, with stories. With what we’re going to do, with what things should or could be like, what we hope will happen. Technology, asking you, prodding you, soliciting talk.
    Almost Universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” Its rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.”

 

We tell ourselves that we use social media to keep up with friends and family. To know what loved ones and close acquaintances are up to. And we post to let them know what is going on in our lives and to share fun and interesting details about what we are up to.

 

But what Holiday has recognized and addresses in the passage above (something we all have seen and know in our hearts), is that we are really just posting on social media to look good and to get rewards from people liking our posts and telling us that we are doing something impressive or good. People often refer to Facebook as Bragbook and are good at catching other people behaving in an attention seeking way on social media, but are not always good at recognizing this in themselves. It is helpful to recognize exactly how we are using social media and to try to adjust our behavior in a more honest way. Rather than asking ourselves what will get the most positive social recognition we can at least ask if what we are posting is truly for us and to keep our friends in the loop with something we want people to know about, or if we are simply trying to seek sympathy, congratulations, or to incite envy in other people. Everything we post is a signal of one sort or another, and everything we do on social media is to some degree a performance. We have the choice of making that performance an ego boosting yet hollow ostentatious display, or a more honest and real snapshot of our lives.

Coaching Tactically and Coaching Strategically

Posted on by jabittan
I work for a tech start-up in the heath care space and within our company (at least in our office which is lead by a couple of former Microsoft ninjas) two key buzz words are tactical and strategic. I was not sure exactly what these words meant and how they were used in business until I had a very specific meeting with our site director who was at one point my manager for roughly 6 months. I was in a one-on-one meeting explaining some challenges that I was facing in my role. Every day I was reacting to problems that bubbled up and needed my immediate attention, and I was not quite doing anything that would get ahead of those individual problems and solve the long term issues that created these acute problems. My boss at that point described the difference of thinking tactically versus strategically.

 

The daily grind and the individual problems that scream for our attention create the tactical work. The long term planning and insightful problem solving that stops those problems is the strategic work. The tactical is important and takes a certain set of skills, but the strategic is the differentiator — what separates the average companies from the excellent companies, what makes the top employees stand out from those who show up each day and punch a clock. What I was learning in that one-on-one was the difference between the two types of thinking. Now, when I look back at that coaching session, I also  see two different coaching styles at work.

 

In his book The Coaching Habit author Michael Bungay Stanier makes a distinction between two types of coaching: coaching for performance and coaching for development. He describes the two styles and approaches in the following way, “Coaching for performance is about addressing and fixing a specific problem or challenge. It’s putting out the fire, or building up the fire, or banking the fire. It’s everyday stuff, and it’s important and necessary.” In this quick quote he is describing tactical coaching. How can you help an employee, colleague, or friend navigate the individual challenges that are popping up in front of them and how can they get through those obstacles? Bungay Stanier continues, “Coaching for development is about turning the focus from the issue to the person dealing with the issue, the person who’s managing the fire. This conversation is more rare and significantly more powerful.”

 

The second quote is about coaching strategically, helping the individual see not just how to overcome one challenge, but how to adapt and change what they are doing, the process they work with, and how they are approaching obstacles to make them better in the long run. It is a focus on the individual and their growth as opposed to a focus on a problem and how to address that problem. Thinking strategically requires awareness and understanding of common threads between problems and issues, and that is what you are trying to build in the other person. You are working with them to find the areas of growth for them that will connect the dots in their own life and story, and you are working with them to shift their perspective to solve long term problems and not immediate issues. This is what my boss was doing with me when he explained the difference between thinking tactically in my daily work and angling myself and my operations to be more strategic.