In front of 200 colleagues, without a script
Main character syndrome… not
Our company, Propeller, kicked off its offsite in Vietnam recently with the MC declaring he had “main character syndrome”.
I do not like being the main character. At least not in public. I would much prefer to stand in the background and avoid the focus of attention.
As much as I enjoy it, perhaps there is more to life than staring intently at small fonts on a computer screen all day?
However… like most people, I also want to be noticed and to impress people. To push myself to try uncomfortable things, and to develop skills that my job as a software engineer generally doesn’t. As much as I enjoy it, perhaps there is more to life than staring intently at small fonts on a computer screen all day?
Improv anyone?
The idea of doing improv — that is, improvised theater — lodged in my brain after reading Amy Poehler’s autobiography “Yes Please!” on an airplane a few years ago. I’ve often wondered if actors know something about being human that the rest of us are missing. I think I also always wondered about that “sliding doors” thing — what if I’d grown up completely differently, say in a family of acrobats? What other versions of me could I access?
So a year and a half ago, when I heard there was a school near me in Sydney (somehow I thought you had to live in America to do improv), I took up classes. Very quickly they became the highlight of my week. How often in adult life do we get the chance to make stuff up and not worry about how silly we look? To drop all the filters that we layer onto ourselves about what is appropriate behavior? To act like kids again?
Performing it on stage came a bit later, and was of course terrifying. It took several shows before I even considered inviting anyone I knew to come and watch. But as a parent, I am mindful of “doing not saying”… if I want my kids to take risks and not be scared of what other people think, I need to model that myself… so I tried to drop my ego and just do it, and accept that the first few times I would probably suck.
The Talent Show
When the idea of a Talent Show was touted for our company offsite, I knew immediately I wanted to do improv there. But it’s one thing to be in a show with people you’ve been practicing with for months, in front of a small crowd of (mostly) strangers. It’s quite another to volunteer to get on stage with people who’ve never done improv before, in front of 200 people you work with every day, and risk bombing out.
I posted to the whole company to see if anyone would be game to perform, and got a single tentative “I’d be interested to learn”, from Kat… who then suggested Le, who then suggested Rusty, and then I was talking to Rich in the team room and he mentioned an interest in acting… and so our team was born. With only enough time for a few practice sessions. Thrust a lot earlier than I expected into the role of improv teacher, I copied the format of my classes, with a “stretch and share” and some warm up exercises, and chose a fun improv “game” called “gibberish interpreter” for us to work on. With that and a few simple pointers I have learned (like not blocking other people’s ideas, thinking “yes and”, and trying not to break out of the reality of the scene), we were away.
Fast forward to our last night at the retreat, and the show was a huge success! The energy was high, the gibberish was outstanding and there were lots of laughs. I am deeply impressed by the willingness of the others in the team who were absolutely keen to give it a go, and we all reinforced our commitment and drive to do it. What a high!
I think the moral is we’re all capable of much more than we think.
I think the moral is we’re all capable of much more than we think. And there are such benefits to taking chances like this: even if the performance had tanked, our little team had so much fun training together in the weeks leading up to it that the embarrassment would have been worthwhile regardless — and we are planning to continue meeting afterwards too, with others keen to join!
Talented Propeller
Propeller has done a great job fostering a culture where I, and others, feel comfortable taking a personal and utterly unnecessary risk like this. (And this is just one Talent Show performance’s story — there were a dozen others, each performer showing incredible vulnerability, on display as well — and many who had not intended to get up at all!)
I hope to see you up on stage some time!
