The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 167 - Emotional Muscle Memory

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Pete.

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Well, I have been back in my in-person classes...

Pete: Oh my gosh.

Jen: ...for nine days now.

Pete: Mm-hmm. And?

Jen: And while it's been utterly amazing and magical and healing (and everything you want it to be), it has also been very surprising and eye-opening, and I'd like to share with you just one of the many surprising things, which has to do with emotional muscle memory.

Pete: Okay. Alright. Emotional muscle memory. Okay, I guess this is the muscle memory of me saying, "This is The Long and the Short Of It."

Jen: Okay, so I'm going to have to provide some context so people can follow along at home. My classes at my studio involve actors getting up in front of their peers with a live accompanist (who is playing the piano beautifully, I might add), and singing in front of other actors. They then get some adjustments and feedback from me, and then they do another pass. So, we have basically like an in-the-moment work session.

Pete: Can I just like pause and just emphasize how unbelievably terrifying that sounds to a mere mortal, like a muggle like myself, or the people listening to this podcast? The thought of getting up in front of a group of people to sing...oh my god, that is like the scariest thing you could ever describe. I just feel like I have to emphasize: these people are superheroes, they have superpowers that they can do this. Anyway, sorry, continue.

Jen: It actually wasn't a tangent. You set me up beautifully. Because, yes, I imagine to muggles, that sounds scary. But now imagine that the people sitting in your audience are some of the most exquisitely talented singers in New York City, and you're singing for them.

Pete: I have sweaty palms. I've actually...I've been lucky enough, listeners, to sit in some of these classes in years gone by, and I just sit there with my jaw on the floor and sweaty palms at the thought of having to stand up in front of these people. Like, ah...oh my god.

Jen: Yeah, I do have the best job in the whole wide world.

Pete: It's incredible.

Jen: So pre-pandemic, my clients, not only would they get up and sing in my classes, but they would be singing regularly in auditions for people who maybe were or were not actually paying attention. But there was a status game at play. It was just always something to create a level of discomfort, intention, and most importantly, self-consciousness, a severely high level of self-consciousness at all times. And so much of my work as the coach was to help people move through the self-consciousness so that they could be free in their work. Well, twenty months passed, during which these singers were not going back into familiar scenarios. They were singing in their apartments. They were singing on Zoom. They were trying out different material. They were doing all sorts of new things. And when they got up to sing for me and their peers for the first time last week, my big surprise was that the self-consciousness was not there.

Pete: Whoa.

Jen: I had expected the muscle memory, the emotional muscle memory of, "I'm getting up in front of these people and I'm singing, which means I'm supposed to judge myself. I'm supposed to tell myself, 'I don't like what I hear.' I'm supposed to tell myself, 'Everyone in this room is better than I am.'" And it was almost like the polar opposite experience happened. They were free. They were fully themselves, like the unique, special, amazing, singular self. They were open, vulnerable. It was astonishing to me. And the reason I wanted to bring it up is I think my expectations are probably similar to other people's expectations about what it means to return to some of the activities we were doing pre-pandemic, and having a certain expectation of how it might feel to do those things, and what it might look like, and all of the sensory experiences. And thanks to my clients, I realize I have to completely abolish that story from my mind, that anything is going to feel the way it felt before, and open to the possibility that it could be amazing.

Pete: Wow. Have you thought about, or even asked those that took part, like, how and why that might be the case? Like, what's your hypothesis as to why they are no longer so self-conscious?

Jen: Okay, this is me hypothesizing.

Pete: Totally. Yeah.

Jen: They're different. They're not the same people. They have been through a twenty-month collective trauma, an individual trauma, an awakening, a healing, a repairing. Some of them are in the best vocal shape of their lives. Because, you know, twenty months of not abusing your voice every single day, they sound like a million bucks. Their physical instrument is not the same, but their internal instrument is not the same. They are different people than they were. And I feel so grateful that they were willing to meet themselves where they are right now, rather than trying to require themselves to be who they were. And so as a very positive outcome of that, they were free from some of the very debilitating, in some cases, obstacles...externally or internally imposed obstacles that would create that sense of like, "I have to constantly be watching myself, and judging, and telling myself, 'I'm not enough.'" It just wasn't there.

Pete: Wild. I wonder if...now, I'm hypothesizing. I wonder, too, if there's some level of new-found appreciation and gratitude for the things that we took for granted. Like going to a class at Jen's studio and singing, if you did that a few times a week in the past, you don't walk into that studio with this like sense of intention and joy and gratitude for the fact that you can do that, which I imagine you would have done or that your clients are doing now. And I think this applies to more than just your classroom. I think that I've observed this in myself. Catching up with my family last weekend for the first time in months, six+ months, I was so much more intentional and present and aware of the conversation. And we had this like quite deep conversation about the last twenty months that prior to this, I probably would have like checked my phone while I was talking to my mom, or like, you know, not really been listening as hard, or not necessarily even made the time to go down and visit. Like, I just wonder if there's some level of collective and individual, I don't know, I guess gratitude for the things that we can now do.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: Which I really, really, really hope we can hang on to.

Jen: Yeah. I mean, it's making me think that we could intentionally create this positive emotional muscle memory, rather than trying to reach back to the stuff that wasn't serving us before. I have a question for you: Have you done an in-person keynote in the last twenty months?

Pete: I'm just like checking my...checking my memory bank. I mentioned this in one of the early episodes of this year, must have been around April...I'll double-check and pop it in the Box O' Goodies. In April 2021, I ran an in-person workshop, and I actually believe you and I talked about it on this podcast. It wasn't a keynote, it was like a full-day workshop with a friend of mine, Mary, for a brilliant, brilliant group of founders and leaders. And it was like an out-of-body experience, I remember. Yeah. And especially now that I think about it, because it was like...we had this small window here in Australia for like a couple of months where there was basically no cases, and so people were moving around freely and things were happening again. And then, we since like went through another lockdown and yada yada. But it was this, yeah, it was like this weird parallel universe for a small period of time where (yes, to answer your question) I ran a workshop in-person.

Jen: The reason I'm asking is, I have my first in-person keynote coming up.

Pete: Mmm.

Jen: And I've been wondering how I might apply this learning to my own upcoming experience with the keynote. Because I had a bit of a habit, I think, pre-pandemic, of really getting in my head right before I would go on...for maybe like the twenty to thirty minutes before I would go on, where I would try to convince myself that I would forget everything that I came there to say, that, you know, they booked the wrong speaker, that nobody's going to like me. You know, all of the self-sabotaging thoughts.

Pete: Sounds familiar, yeah.

Jen: Yeah. I mean, thankfully, I've got a bunch of mindset tools in my back pocket that I can pull out and work through, and so I never didn't go on stage and do the keynote. But with this new one coming up, I'm like, "Maybe I should expect to have a similar experience to the one I saw my clients having." Which is, I might be completely free, completely open, completely vulnerable. And what if I offer that same expectation to the people in the audience? That they are not the same people that they were twenty months ago, and that they might be open and willing and engaged and vulnerable, the way I am.

Pete: I mean, I feel like, yes, that is worth trying. And not only trying the first time you do a keynote, but the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth time, the next time we do a workshop, the next time we coach a client, the next time we, I don't know, catch up for dinner with friends. What I'm hearing is almost like the sunk cost fallacy with the stories we tell ourselves, which is, "Can I ignore the stories I used to tell myself about these things?"

Jen: Yes.

Pete: "And show up free, present, excited, aware, and open to what might be?"

Jen: Yeah. Yeah, and then build that as a habit, as a habitual way of thinking.

Pete: Yes.

Jen: Thinking with freedom in mind, as opposed to, "I have to hide." Or thinking with openness in mind, as opposed to, "I'm so scared, I have to close myself off."

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. So it dawns on me, I've been working with a number of organizations around the world on what it looks like to show up and be a leader in a hybrid world of working. And part of the keynotes, these workshops I've been running, and these coachings I've been doing...it's all been remote. But part of the conversation that I'm trying to help folks see, or part of the door that I'm trying to open for them is: going back to the office or returning to the office, it shouldn't even be framed as "returning to the office." What we frame it as is "the future of work." So, it's not going to be what it was pre-pandemic. It's not going to be what it was for the last twenty months. This is all new. This is the future of work. And so, as much as possible...it is so hard. But as much as possible, can we intentionally and consistently, to your point, remind ourselves to show up in a different way, to show up with more possibility or more curiosity and openness to a new way of working, or a new way of teaching, or a new way of delivering a keynote? And have the humility to recognize that because it's new, it'll probably be messy. And they'll be like, "Oh. We didn't used to do it this way, and now I feel clunky." And that's good, because it's not that we're trying to do things the way we used to, we're actually entering a new way of working and showing up in the world, I think.

Jen: I think that's just so very important. I'm thinking about some conversations I've had recently about whether or not we're ever going to go back to some of our old practices here in the Broadway theatre industry. And there seems to be almost a longing, when I'm hearing people talking about this, for the way things were, as they complain about the way things were. And I think it's because at least we knew what that was.

Pete: Totally. It's like fatigue of change, or change fatigue. I even hear it in myself. When I say to an organization, or a bunch of their senior executives...which I've been doing for the last six months. When I say to them, "This is not going to be what was. This is not going to be what has been. This is something new," you can feel them be like, "Goddamnit. More change, really? Like, I have fatigue of change. I'm so fatigued. I just want something familiar."

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: So, I get it. Like, it's hard.

Jen: Yeah. It's making me want to kind of pull on the change thread a little bit.

Pete: Hmm.

Jen: Because if we're not changing, does that mean we're staying the same? I mean, if the opposite of changing is staying exactly the same, is that really what we want, ultimately? No. I think we want to grow, and evolve, and develop. But you're right, it can feel very exhausting after a while. Huh.

Pete: Yeah, totally. And overwhelming because of the unknown, I think.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: So like, Fear Of The Unknown is an episode we did recently-

Jen: FOTU.

Pete: FOTU.

Jen: FOTU comes back.

Pete: FOTU is back. And so again, if I'm like thinking about the way I've been talking to organizations and leaders and executives about this, it's like, "Okay, cool. So, let's acknowledge this new reality. This is new. This is the future of work. It's going to be messy. It's uncomfortable, because it's change. I've acknowledged that you've all just taken a big deep breath, hilarious. And let's focus on what we can control. We can't control that it's going to be uncertain. We can't control that it's going to be different, and new, and change. That is just like a reality that we can't control. What we can control is how we choose to show up within that,-"

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: "-how we choose to lead, how we choose to practice certain skills." And so, in my mind...the leaders, for example, I've been talking to them about practicing the skills of empathy. Everyone has just gone, to your point, through a collective and individual trauma. So what does it look like to think about what they might be going through when we come back to an office? Or, intentionality...can I get really, really clear in, "What does success look like for me, for coaching this class or delivering this workshop or running this meeting in-person again, if I'm in an organization?" So getting really intentional, and then getting super curious, and, like I mentioned, having humility to be like, "What's working? What's not? What did we learn from the last twenty months that's worth hanging on to? And what's worth letting go of," and just like constantly coming back to the skills that are within our control, rather than the overwhelming reality that we're going through more change.

Jen: Forever.

Pete: Forever, exactly.

Jen: Forever and always.

Pete: Right.

Jen: Forever and always, yes. Okay, Pete, so what's our big takeaway here?

Pete: I think as we enter this future of work, or future of teaching, or future of learning (whatever the context is you're going into), can we remind ourselves and let go of the stories we used to tell ourselves, because it's not going to be the same as what was? And in doing so, can we then anchor ourselves to certain skills or behaviors that we want to embody, or values that we want to practice and show up as? Like I mentioned, is that intentionality? Is that curiosity? Is that empathy? Is it just an openness to possibility? Like, think about, "What are the values that you can control how you show up in any given setting?"

Jen: Yeah. It might be as simple as, "You're not who you were. You are now who you are. Maybe it's time to re-meet yourself as the you you are now."

Pete: And with that mic drop, that is The Long and The Short Of It.