The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 306 - The Pirouette Process

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jennifer.

Jen: Well, I'm in the very middle of my summer coaching program, and I recently landed on a metaphor that's been very helpful for the actors I'm working with, as I'm teaching them all of these new skills and frameworks and ideas. And I'd love to run it by you and see if it has any leg to stand on, outside of the acting context.

Pete: I'm yet to find a metaphor or a framework of yours that we haven't figured out a way to give a leg to stand on. So I'm all ears, Jen. I'm all ears. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: So, I'm giggling because I know that "leg to stand on" is a pun.

Pete: Oh, I see.

Jen: But I haven't said what the thing is yet, so...

Pete: You were looking at me like, "This is really funny." And I was like, "I don't know why this is funny. I know that expression."

Jen: So, I've been using the metaphor of learning how to pirouette as a way for people to understand how to be more gentle with themselves, practice more patience, and set realistic expectations for implementing new skills.

Pete: Alright, alright. So, let my layman brain try and break this down for a second. Learning how to pirouette is...I'm totally going to not do this justice.

Jen: No, I can't wait to hear.

Pete: It's like learning how to do a spin, in a choreographic sense.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: Some sort of spin, is that right?

Jen: It's really learning the technique of turning on a single leg.

Pete: Turning on a single leg...like a full 360, or there's no defined amount of rotation?

Jen: Well, that would be a single pirouette. But if you did that twice, it would be a double pirouette, and a triple, and on and on.

Pete: Okay. And so, on one leg, meaning it sounds like it's obviously a hard skill where one needs to give themselves some grace when learning. Is that right?

Jen: Yeah. It's not the easiest skill to pick up, especially if you're trying to pick it up as an adult.

Pete: Right, right. And if you were six-foot-seven, I imagine it would be a little difficult.

Jen: Okay, so I've started to refer to this as the "Pirouette Process", because I like the alliteration of it.

Pete: Oh, love that alliteration. So good.

Jen: So when you're learning to pirouette, the first thing you do is not learn how to spin, it's to learn how to spot, which is to look at a single spot and then you slowly rotate your body and then snap your head back to look at that same spot. And you do this very methodically until you learn how to spot, and then you're able to start turning faster. But in order to execute the turn faster, you also have to learn how to prepare for the turn in your lower body and in your upper body, then you need to learn what to do with your arms in order to get the rotation while remembering how to spot, lifting your leg into passé, putting your standing leg on relevé, beginning and ending in a plié. There are so many different technical components.

Pete: I'm so overwhelmed.

Jen: Okay, now I know for those of you who don't dance, I've kind of lost you. But let me get you back and say that the pirouette is considered, to dancers, one of the simplest moves.

Pete: Mmm. I had a feeling you were goin to say that.

Jen: And it is a foundational technique. So as I'm sharing with my clients this summer all of these new skills, reaching out, effectively negotiating better contracts, communicating more clearly with their agents, sharpening the narrative of their marketing materials, there's like so many things that we're doing and they want to do it really fast. But like pirouetting, if you just start randomly spinning, first of all, you're never going to execute a pirouette. And second, you're going to throw up, because you're going to be dizzy.

Pete: Literally, you'll throw up. Oh, wow. This is rich. This is juicy. This is taking my brain in so many different directions. So, let me try and summarize for my own tiny little brain. What I heard is that the pirouette being such a foundational technique to dancing is one thing, but what I also hear is that behind what is seemingly a very simple (for certain people) foundational technique, there are almost like step-by-step components that one needs to practice in order to be sufficient at the skill for it to become almost unconscious. I'm imagining, if you're a really good dancer, you're not even thinking about it. You're just doing it.

Jen: That's right. And if you're learning to pirouette, you don't learn to pirouette by pirouetting. You learn to pirouette by practicing a plié. You learn to pirouette by learning how to hold your upper body. You learn to pirouette by learning how to spot. And then, you start putting those things together. So if you tried to learn to pirouette by skipping all of those steps and just randomly spinning, you'd never actually execute the move correctly.

Pete: Woof, I feel challenged. I feel challenged because I can hear myself saying (I've said this so many times about certain skills), "The best way to get better at that skill is to do that thing. Like, the best way to get better at asking questions is to practice asking questions. Or the best way to get better at coaching people is to practice coaching people. The best way to get better at writing is to write." Like, so I've heard myself say that so many times. And now, I'm having an existential crisis of, "Have I been saying the wrong thing? Is there a step before the thing that is actually more important?"

Jen: My gut is saying there's a, "Yes, and," here.

Pete: Uh-huh.

Jen: That there's not necessarily a right or wrong. Because what I think I'm trying to express with the Pirouette Process...and I'll bring it back to, "The best way to get better at asking questions is to ask questions." The thing that I'm trying to communicate with identifying the Pirouette Process is that there are levels you can go through to execute something at a high level. So, "The best way to get better at asking questions is to ask questions," does that mean the first time you ask a question, it should be to the person who is most senior in your organization?

Pete: No. No, no, no.

Jen: When you've never asked a question of someone who's working on your own team?

Pete: Great point, great point. Yeah, you know, find a low stakes environment for you to practice asking a question.

Jen: Right. Like, what are the components you can get better and better at? And then, you move from a single pirouette to a double, to a triple, to a quadruple, etc.

Pete: Now you ask three questions, yeah, to a senior executive. Alright, you talked me off the ledge. I could catch that. The other thing I wondered is, as I was having that existential crisis, maybe before that is these skills that perhaps I think about a lot around leadership and do a lot of coaching around, what are the foundational techniques of like...what's the equivalent of the pirouette when it comes to being a leader? I'm just like so fascinated by that. And then, once you've identified that, to your point, can you break that down even more to help people get better at it from scratch? That's fascinating. You're so smart. Pirouette Process.

Jen: I had a conversation earlier today with a client that made me chuckle, knowing that I was potentially going to bring this topic up with you today. And she was like, "I need to burn my entire video library," so she's referencing her videos of her singing material, "and build the entire thing from scratch. And I just need to figure out how to build an entirely new library." And I was like, "I have a suggestion. Let's just start with one piece. Let's just pick the one piece that you think will represent you the best right now. Nail that down. Figure out the process that you're going to use for getting these pieces ready, selecting the pieces, coaching the pieces, taping the pieces, publishing the pieces. And once you feel like you've got the hang of that, then you can add a second one. But let's not worry about the entire video library. Let's worry about the first piece."

Pete: That's so good. I mean, how many people listening can relate to that moment of, "I'm just going to burn it all down and start from scratch."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And then sometimes you actually do that, and you get a quarter of the way through and you're like, "Goddamn it, what have I done? Why did I do that? Why did I burn it down? What was I thinking?"

Jen: Right? Right? "And I don't know how to build it, because I've never taken myself through the steps to actually build it in a way that feels like it has structural integrity."

Pete: That is wild. I mean, it's so fun for things that come into our brain when we have these conversations. This is so random, but one of the things that came into my brain was this story I heard about Josh Waitzkin, who was one of the best chess players in the world for many, many, many years. And I've read his book and I've heard him interviewed, and I heard an anecdote which I'll butcher, for sure, and I'll try and find the original source and put in the Box O' Goodies. But essentially, it was when people ask him about how to be a better chess player, and he might even do some coaching with them, the counterintuitive thing that he does for a lot of people is he takes all the pieces off the board except for like the King and the Pawn, and says, "We're going to start here with just these two pieces. Remove everything else. Don't worry about the Queen. Don't worry about the Bishop and the Knight, all that. And we're going to start with these two most simple fundamental pieces and work our way up from the endgame backwards, almost." I've always loved that, but not really known what to do with it. But I just, I love the simplicity of looking at it as a completely broken down individual thing, rather than the whole game itself. Like, that would be where I would challenge my own thought of, "The best way to get better at chess is to just play chess." It's like, "Well, maybe not. Maybe understanding how each interaction at the endgame is more important, like you mentioned with the pirouette." So yeah, that's just a random aside that I think is relevant.

Jen: I love that idea. And that feels exactly like what I'm talking about now. I'm fascinated in how we might use this in the context of communication, building empathy, leadership. How do you see the individual components, for example, of building empathy, Pete? Like, instead of like, "Just be empathetic."

Pete: Right. Good question. Okay, so let me try and work through this. So one of the things I think that is perhaps fundamental to empathy, if we were to break it down, is this idea that we've talked about a number of times called "sonder", which is a concept that was written by John Koenig, who invented The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is this hilarious and amazing online resource. Anyway, he invents words for things that he thinks should have words. And we've spoken about this before, so apologies to longtime listeners who have heard me say this before. But basically, sonder is this realization or this reminder that everyone around you is living a life as rich and as complex as your own. That everyone has a noise in their head. Everyone has context. Everyone has stories and hopes and dreams and fears and goals and desires that you just can't see. And so, I think one of the fundamental techniques in order to be able to empathize with someone is just to remember that the people around you are having a totally different experience than what you're having. They're thinking different things. They don't know the context that you know. That everyone has a different worldview. Only then can you start to, I think, move on to the next skill, which might be to get curious about what that might be, to try and understand, "Okay, so if Jen's having a totally different experience to me, how would that look? What would that be like? How could I find out what that is?" And then, you might move into question asking and actually trying to put myself in your shoes, by asking you what it's like to be in your shoes. So there's an unscripted response, straight off the bat, from your question. What do you think? What have I missed?

Jen: I love it. It sounds like a progression that ultimately results in the empathetic equivalent of a pirouette.

Pete: Nice. The empathetic pirouette. And then, I don't know if this is relevant too, but like the result of that, from an empathy perspective, is hopefully you build more connection with the people that you're interacting with. The result of the pirouette, I imagine, is...I mean, I don't even want to assume, but you can tell me. What the result of the pirouette is the dance can continue. Or like, what is it?

Jen: Yeah. The result of the pirouette is that, because it's a fundamental move, you can learn all of the more advanced versions of a pirouette.

Pete: Nice.

Jen: So, you know when you watch ballet and the ballet dancer starts turning and turning and turning and turning, and it goes on and on and on and on and on?

Pete: I get dizzy watching.

Jen: Right. Those are fouetté turns, which you cannot execute unless you know how to pirouette.

Pete: So good.

Jen: So you can start giving yourself more responsibility. You can start challenging yourself with more advanced skills. You can break apart those component pieces and ask how they fit together in other ways, and learn other steps.

Pete: Yeah. Which makes it feel so much more accessible, when you break it right down too. The thing I'm also thinking of is that the Olympics is coming up at the time of us recording this. And I mean, I guess pirouettes are relevant in the Olympics sense. But I was also thinking of the gymnasts who do the, you know, like the rings routines, where they're hanging off the rings.

Jen: Oh my gosh.

Pete: And in my twenties, I remember I was so excited training at this gym where I finally learned and nailed a muscle up. And I was able to do strict muscle ups and kicking muscle ups, and I was like, "This is like the coolest thing ever. And it's so crazy that my body can do this." And you watch these gymnastics Olympians, and it's like probably a joke to even say this is a fundamental skill, because it's like breathing air for them. They just hoist themselves up with a strict muscle up before they start, and they're like, "Okay, now I can begin my routine." And it's like, "Oh my god. Do you know how much effort I put into just doing that one thing that you just did like straight away?" It is so funny.

Jen: Oh my gosh, I'm having horrifying flashbacks to sixth grade PE class and not being able to do a pull up. Wow.

Pete: Oh dear, yeah.

Jen: If someone had broken it down for me, maybe I would have learned how to do it.

Pete: And this feels like an important takeaway for me. Especially as someone like you and like me and like plenty of our listeners, who is spending a lot of time trying to help other people build skill and capability in certain things, whether that's in leadership or in acting or performing or whatever it ends up being, how do you break down the skill to the absolute essence of what it is? I feel like you do this so unbelievably well. And I feel like I have not and do not. And so, I'm excited to start to think about this. Because it also feels like those things that we think are common sense or those things that we think that everyone can do, like, "Of course, you just ask questions. Just practice asking questions," it's not that simple for people. There are people out there who are, you know, I guess maybe not quite, but the equivalent of me doing the muscle up. Someone might be looking at you, going, "But I can't just come up with techniques like that, Jen, on the fly, ex. the Pirouette Process. So like, how did you actually do that? Break it down for me." And that feels for me, from a teaching perspective, really important.

Jen: Yeah. I mean, just being able to break anything down into its component parts makes it easier for the other person to digest. Like the other day, Cate told me she wanted to cook with me. Which made me so happy, because I do love to cook. And I was like, "Before I can teach you how to cook, I have to teach you how to use a knife." So we spent that whole session just learning how to handle a knife for various different cutting skills.

Pete: Mmm. Yeah.

Jen: "This is how you slice. This is how you chop. This is how you dice." Like, you can't cook unless you know how to chop.

Pete: Right. Right, right, right. Or even like, reading the recipe. "What does TSP mean? What does TBS mean? Like, what do these acronyms mean? What's a cup? Who's a cup? Where do I find a cup? Like, which cup?"

Jen: Yeah, so breaking it down. And it also makes the person learning the skill feel more confident, like they have a handle on it, like they're safe in adding on to the skill.

Pete: I totally agree with that. That's exactly what I was thinking, is how it makes the person being taught feel seen and feel excited about the fact that they can do it. And my brain randomly went to when I was in, I guess, Year 10, the language that I studied at school was Indonesian Bahasa. And I absolutely loved it, and I won an award for it. I was like, really quite good at it. And I went on a holiday for two weeks with my family, and I came back and the teacher said something along the lines of, "You missed a really fundamental part of learning Bahasa in the last couple weeks." And I mean, this is very much, on reflection, probably on me, but I couldn't grasp or get myself back into the fundamental thing that she had taught in the two weeks while I was gone, that I became completely disengaged and stopped studying the language in Year 11 and 12, which was all my intention, was to do it in Year 11 and 12. And I stopped completely because I felt so disengaged, because I felt like I didn't understand some sort of foundational technique, some sort of like dicing versus chopping, and so I kind of just threw my hands up in the air and gave up.

Jen: That feels like a cautionary tale for all the teachers out there.

Pete: Yeah. I mean, I also probably threw a tantrum and could have just caught up. But like, I still remember that moment of like I was good at this thing, and in two weeks, I felt not that I wasn't good at it, but I felt so out of my depth all of a sudden that I gave up.

Jen: Wow. Well, I know I've said this on previous episodes, but you know, a professional baseball player takes batting practice every day. A professional dancer does a plié series every day. A professional singer warms up their voice every day. So anything you want to get good at, you've just got to keep practicing those fundamentals. Otherwise you get dizzy, you fall off your leg, and you vomit.

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.