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The LearningMethods Library
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Good For Whom?
A Chronicle of Stage Fright, People Pleasing
and Other Anxious Moments
by Elizabeth Garren
Copyright (c) 2007 Elizabeth Garren, all rights reserved worldwide
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traduction complète en Français
My heart was in my throat as my turn to take the stage approached. I’d been
relatively calm during the first five speakers' presentations, staying in control of my usual debilitating
fear of public speaking. I was last of seven dancers invited to talk about their dance careers
at the prestigious Walker Art Center, a contemporary art museum. Speaker number six was half way
through her presentation. I was next. What I planned to say was condensed to a pile of notes clutched
in my hand. But what was now unfolding on stage threw me into chaos. The poised and articulate
dancer, the one I had to follow, chose to punctuate her talk with a bang up slow motion silhouetted
movement sequence, accompanied by a hypnotic tribal beat … the audience was mesmerized. When the
music ended, she held her pose for a moment of electric silence, during which I felt the life drain
out of me. The audience erupted into whoops and shouts. It should have been the end of the show,
but little ol' me was next, with a low-key talk on my cerebral, avant-garde no-music dance experience.
I was doomed and I knew it. These people wanted drama, action, passion! I had to get out
of there, but couldn’t move. I was trapped. I knew in my bones my talk was a disaster ready to
happen, in full view of my colleagues, family and friends, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could
do about it … or was there? In a gesture of survival, I reached down deep, not for courage,
but for clarity…
My first instinct, when invited to speak at the Walker was NO WAY! Although
honored to be asked, I’d always feared speaking in public. In spite of years performing with a
well-known dance troupe on stages around the world, speaking my mind alone on stage was another
story. Did I really have anything to say? Would the audience like me? Would I be good? I knew from
experience what these concerns could mean: weeks of anxiety preparing a talk, accompanied by the
inevitable fear, dread, and possible near panic during the event itself. I’d be exhausted, even
sick, afterwards. Why would anyone say yes to this?
But I did say yes. I wanted to see if I could finally speak in public without
experiencing stage fright. Over the previous year, I’d radically changed the way I viewed
what I had always feared about being onstage: the possibility of being judged negatively by
an audience. During all the years of my stage fright, I’d operated under the assumption that
other people’s evaluations of me (or of what I say or do) held the key to how good or
right or of value I was. Instead of registering my own responses to the world
around me, my sensitive antennae were often tuned to what other people were experiencing as good
or right, so I would know what to aim for. The slightest signs of approval/disapproval, agreement/disagreement,
or interest/boredom in others would shape my words and actions to better ensure I’d be regarded
positively. To be clear, I was not aware of thinking or doing any of this. I was only aware of
the anxiety or fear I felt whenever everyone’s eyes were on me as I spoke, and there was the possibility
of a negative response.
I often had felt this anxiety or fear in my personal life as well. Concern for
how I might be perceived has influenced my interactions with other people (often called people
pleasing), including my ability to make decisions, to form opinions, to choose what to say
or write, and even to know what color to paint my kitchen walls. I can trace nearly every problem
in my life, big or small, back to my concern about how my words or actions might be valued or not
valued by others. Would I be good? Would I be right?
I see so many people who suffer from the same dis-ease I had, I can
almost smell it when I am with them. I see it in my granddaughter already, and she is only seven.
What I didn’t see, in the years of my stage fright, was that I was leaving my
sense of identity and worth to be decided by the opinions and whims of other people. I didn’t see
what shaky ground I was on, or that fear might be a logical result. I needed help to uncover the
specific misconceptions that were driving my fear, and found it in a remarkable work called
LearningMethods, founded by gifted teacher David Gorman. During workshop settings with other
performers, I learned simple but radical information that shifted the way I view audiences or anyone
else who may be evaluating me, positively or negatively. I learned that if and when other people
evaluate me, they are defining themselves, not me. Their assessments of me reveal
useful information about who they are, what they value, and how they see
the world. In other words, they are learning information about themselves, which they can
use to actively navigate their lives toward what has value to them. I realized we can all learn
about ourselves this way.
What a truly liberating thought this was! And how obvious it appears to me now.
How could I not have known this? Alas, I had to inch my way incrementally toward the obvious.
For me, the path to freedom was in the details.
I am using my story to share what I have learned in a non-abstract way. Not
all individuals who experience stage fright or people pleasing will find their paths to
freedom in the exact way I did. Nevertheless, the simple information that has transformed my life
should be available to all. Half of my story describes the information itself and how it was laid
out for me. The other half describes how I turned that information into the practical clarity I
reached for the night I spoke at the Walker.
It all began one day when I brought my stage fright to a LearningMethods
workshop, and encountered a simple, clarifying question…
Good for Whom?
In a LearningMethods workshop, people learn tools of inquiry to bring
to bear on whatever problems they want to solve in their lives. On day two of the workshop I attended,
I brought up a recent stage fright experience, so we could search it for possible clues as to why
it was happening. I began by recalling the moment-to-moment sequence of thoughts and perceptions
that led up to my first anxious moments. Could we find anything in the way I was seeing
the situation, rather than the situation itself, that was fear-making? At one point, when
I mentioned my concern about how good a speaker I’d be, the teacher asked me a pointed question:
“Good for whom?”
I remember it sounding like a strange question. I’d never thought to pin the
word good onto anyone in particular. It felt more like a free floating kind of good
that I aspired to, as evidenced by the audience enjoying my performance. I responded:
“Good for the audience.”
At this point, so early in the discussion, I had no idea how penetrating and
pivotal this simple question, and my response to it, would turn out to be. From where I stood then,
trying to be a good performer was something I valued, and it had a lot to do with pleasing and
satisfying the audience.
We looked closer at my idea of being good for the audience, since it
occurred at the same time I was feeling fear. Several interesting observations emerged from this
reality check. First, although I was trying to be good for the audience, I had no actual
information about what precisely would elicit a good response from their point of view.
At any given moment, only they had access to that information. Hmm…
Also, I thought of the audience as if it were a single entity with a single
response to my performance. In fact, an audience is composed of a number of separate real
individuals, each of whom might have quite different and conflicting ideas about what is good.
Not only that, even if I knew in advance what would be good for each
person, how would I go about fulfilling all these different expectations of good at once?
What if someone’s notion of good changed halfway through my talk? Let's say a member of
the audience was feeling sleepy after eating lunch, in which case good for that person
might mean leaving the room to take a nap. Of course I would have taken this as a negative statement
about me.
With all of this out on the table, my desire to be good for the audience
suddenly seemed a lot like trying to hit a moving target with blinders on, all to ensure a certain
response. Impossible. Yet that’s what I was assuming I should be doing, scoring a bull's eye on
each and every person’s good target with every word I spoke, so I could avoid a negative
response from even one person.
But how could the thought of being criticized by even one person hold such power
over me? One look of disinterest, one scowling face could suck the life out of me. Real or imagined,
the way I saw it in that moment I was not good at all. I would feel defined and written
off as boring, wrong, off the mark, and left with no way to recover. Not a good feeling to someone
whose goal was to be a good speaker. Given the way I was seeing it, no wonder I feared
getting up in front of an audience! There was always the possibility of someone not liking what
I was doing, and a certainty that I would take this personally.
But was I seeing the situation accurately? Here was a question I’d never thought
to ask myself — about anything!
So at that point in the workshop, we looked more closely at what I feared most:
being assessed by someone else as a bad speaker. We sorted out four basic elements
that appeared to make up such assessments of value. These elements were to become a grid of clarity
to sort out my confusions, as well as a key to making sense of my fears.
Four Elements of any Value Assessment
 1) The valuer
(the person doing the assessing or evaluation)
2) The valued (the
someone or something being valued)
3) The evaluation
itself (good/bad, etc.)
4) The criteria
being used for making the evaluation
Let’s say I am onstage. Someone in the audience (“Jane”) is checking her watch,
thinking my presentation is too long (low value), and we’d sort it out like this:
Who is doing the
evaluation? Jane
What is being valued?
My presentation
What is the evaluation?
Too long, bad
According to what
criteria? ????
Hmm… Good question. We don’t know what criteria Jane is using for what constitutes
bad. Only Jane knows that! She may prefer facts to personal stories and thus dismisses
my story-filled presentation. She may be at my presentation through no desire of her own. Meanwhile
I presume her clock-watching to mean I am boring her, that my presentation is bad, that
I am a bad speaker. One thing is sure, I am not factoring in that Jane is judging
my presentation according to the particular criteria she brought with her that day.
Here is another example:
Picture two friends (Jack and Jill) walking out of a movie. They each have strong
opinions about the movie.
To Jack, it was a bad movie, boring, at two hours lasting way too long.
To Jill, it was a good movie, much better than the one she saw the
night before, and even at two hours, not long enough.
Was the movie good or bad? If you answer BOTH, think it through.
In a factual sense, can the same movie be good AND bad? If it’s good,
how can it be bad? The only way to make sense of a movie being both good and
bad is to realize that the goodness and badness does not exist IN the movie, but IN Jack
and IN Jill as a reflection of how the movie matches their individual criteria.
Since Jack loves action and speed, he was bored… Thus it was a bad
movie.
Since Jill is comparing it to the lousy one she saw last night, the movie was
good.
But you can bet Jack and Jill don’t realize this. They argue about whether it
was a good movie or a bad movie, not factoring in they are each judging the movie
using different criteria! Meanwhile the movie just sits there being itself in all its
movie-ness, not taking the conversation personally.
That day of the workshop I didn’t fully understand that every value judgment
was inextricably linked to the criteria the valuer was using; it was not a factual statement
about the person or thing being valued. True understanding would come later. What I did sense was
a shift of focus away from me and how good or bad I was and onto something
called criteria — something that was way over in the other person’s court.
Or was it? If ensuring a good time for the audience was an impossible endeavor,
and their judgments of me did not define my worth, the ball was actually back in MY court. What
did I value? What would be good from my viewpoint? Where would I find
the answer to such unfamiliar questions?
I had never heard the term personal value register. But it seems we
all have one built into us so we can answer such questions. The term value register refers
to an aspect of our being that seems so normal that we take it for granted, or never think to name
it. It explains the personal nature of our likes and dislikes. It would be the compass that would
guide me out of stage fright.
A Personal Value Register
If someone tries a new flavor of ice cream, they usually don’t have to think
before they know whether they like it or not.
Each of us has the ability to register our own personal responses
to what we encounter in life, be it ice cream, a performer, a movie, an idea, our current
physical state, the weather … you name it. These responses can be experienced as positive, negative
or just plain neutral, reflecting the amount of worth or value something has for us. If we like
something, find it attractive, pleasant, or interesting, we register a thumbs up kind of response,
i.e., high value. If we dislike something, find it unappealing, unpleasant, or boring, we register
a thumbs down response, i.e., low value. This inner registering of value or worth can be used to
navigate each of us through the many choices we are presented with every day. What to eat for breakfast?
What section to read first in the paper … what to wear, what to do, how to do it, for how long,
with whom … and, contrarily, what to avoid. Imagine a sliding scale of value responses,
from high value to low value, with neutral (no particular value being registered) as the steady
center.
What most captured my attention about these value registers was the
notion that they are absolutely personal to each of us. That is, only I can feel mine,
only you can feel yours. Given how my sensitive antennae were usually
tuned to what other people were valuing, this was intriguing information. I had been tuning
into something I had no direct access to, and as a result I was missing out on what I did have
access to … the information from my own inbuilt value register! This would explain
why I wasn’t at all sure what was good for me (except trying to be good for others,
which my fear was letting me know was not so good for me after all) … oh, the convolution
of it all!
All sorts of what ifs came to mind. What if I have my own
value register that lets me know when something nourishes, delights, or enlightens
me? What if I used this information to steer my life as I would use a compass in the wilderness?
What if I did all this in the presence of other people? Finally, what if I stopped trying
to get other people’s compasses to register yes when they encountered me, onstage or off?
Where would that leave me? Would I be better off? Would I still have stage fright?
All this was almost too much to imagine. I walked out of this workshop session
dizzy from the rigor of sorting through and examining my own ideas, like breathing pure oxygen.
I knew I had some very basic homework to do. Nothing could be taken for granted. First, I needed
to find out on the most elementary level if value assessments could really be sorted into
four elements. Second, I needed to find out if I really had my own value register. My
everyday life was going to be my laboratory. But I knew deep down that something profound had already
been set in motion.
HOMEWORK SESSIONS…
Stacked Dishes
That night I caught my first value assessment in the act. My husband
was washing the dinner dishes and stacking them to dry in the WRONG WAY. Heavy things on top of
light things, silverware akimbo. I’d have to sort them out like pick-up sticks to put them away
without breaking something. Normally my judgment would have registered as a fact about
his way of stacking. But I was primed to run a background check on the assessment I’d just made
… WRONG WAY … for whom, according to what criteria? I sorted the four elements,
counting on my fingers:
Who’s doing the
assessing? Me
What’s being assessed?
The way the dishes were stacked
The assessment?
Wrong, bad
According to what
criteria? Hard to put away, they might break
So there! Once I’d clarified the four elements of my value assessment, the tables
turned instantly. My focus changed from my husband and the badly stacked dishes to me and my criteria!
My judgment had just clarified something about myself (I like unbroken dishes and less work). What
an entirely new way to experience passing judgment. It made me wonder what my husband’s criteria
were for the right way to stack dishes. I sensed all this may apply to more than stage fright.
Miserable Weather
Next I observed other people making value assessments … about food, books, weather,
etc. I heard someone say, after three days of rain, “What miserable weather!” Again I sorted out
the basic elements: miserable for whom, according to what criteria? When I asked, this person
told me he preferred sunny weather so he could play golf without an umbrella.
Was miserable a property of the weather? Or was it a property of this
person’s criteria? Put another way, where was the misery being experienced, in the weather or in
the person? It was clear to me that miserable was not a fact about the weather, but a
description of the low value experience this person was having, because rain did not match his
criteria for good weather.
I sorted through many more such value assessments. The way they were phrased
made them sound like statements of fact when they were actually descriptions of personal
preference. Being clear about this helped me in the moment I felt I was being judged
by someone. I could see the judgment contained information about them. When I became more
clear about that, I felt curiosity about them instead of fear.
But still something was missing. I was letting go of my concern about being
judged and my hyper-sensitivity to what other people thought was good or right.
There was still the question, how would I know what was good or right for
me without peeking over someone else's shoulder? Did I actually have a value register
of my own? Could I discern my responses to the world around me from those of others?
Prairie Grass
I started quietly, walking by myself through a neighborhood, past homes and
gardens, along sidewalks and streets. I wanted to see if anything caught my eye, if there was any
little bump of interest, curiosity, attraction, repulsion, maybe a house that I particularly liked,
or didn’t like. What surprised me was how neutral most everything seemed. But just as
I was thinking that, my eyes focused on a clump of wild prairie grass on a manicured lawn. And
there, it had already happened … I had indeed registered (that word seemed exactly right)
a subtle but palpable stirring within me. It wasn’t neutral, it got my attention … a definite
thumbs up response. The prairie grass was beautiful, to me.
Chimayo Red
I didn’t know what color to paint the kitchen wall. As I picked out and tested
each new possibility, I was never sure what worked, or if a certain color was right or
not. I had never trusted my sense of color before. Now I realized why. As I looked at each new
color, any registering of my own response was overshadowed by what I imagined my sister would think,
or my daughter, or my niece … all people I thought knew color. They weren’t even in the
room, but their voices threw me into doubt. I just couldn’t tell what I liked on my own.
No wonder. My criteria for right were based on what Joanne, Sara, or Gen might think.
I was seeing through everyone’s eyes except my own.
Then I tried Chimayo Red. Surely too dark (for my sister), surely would
make the kitchen appear small (to my daughter), surely not exciting enough (for my niece). I’d
be thrown into doubt about the color, was it right, not right, etc., etc.
Chimayo Red would be the fourth layer of paint on my test wall. When I woke up the next morning
to get a first-thing-in-the-morning spontaneous impression … I LIKED IT! I felt it clearly; it
was rich, soothing, dramatic, and it brought the whole room together … for ME! There was no mistaking
the palpable high value bump in my register. This was good. This was fun.
I knew I liked Chimayo Red even if no one else did! I finally understood what creativity
was based on, and what I’d been missing out on. I was making it complicated when it’s so simple
… letting my own responses, rather than everyone else’s, guide me! I went out and bought two more
gallons of Chimayo Red.
Jazz
I worked with several jazz musicians early in my dance career and became
someone who liked jazz. Thus it was disconcerting to realize, from the privacy of my own register,
that in fact I DON’T like jazz. I’d always WANTED to like jazz, felt I SHOULD like jazz, even made
myself turn to 88.5 FM in the car. But one day, listening to the car radio, it became clear that
I always secretly wanted to change the channel. I felt a moment of shame, like I was now a simpleton
or an easy-listener. But it was so freeing to lift that dishonesty off of me that I accepted it.
I was a non-jazz lover, plain and simple. Ironically, once I stopped trying to like jazz, I found
myself being truly curious about jazz; what were those sounds, and why are some people so in love
with it? I was free now to really experience jazz for itself, and like it or not.
By now I was pretty clear what it felt like to experience my own value register
right in the moment, within myself, by myself. And to recognize when other people’s voices
were hogging the spotlight from my real responses. I wondered what would happen in the presence
of an actual other person who had views of their own?
Amy
One day, on a supposedly relaxing walk with my friend Amy, I recognized a feeling
of tension in me that felt something like stage fright on a smaller scale.
Amy, who comes across to me as deeply committed to her political views, was
talking about xyz. Suddenly I noticed a knot of tension in the center of me. My face was
jutting out toward Amy, nodding yes, yes, in agreement with what she was saying. I felt like I
was straining to find and agree with what the right opinion was, since I didn’t seem to
have one of my own. I remember thinking, Oh, I’m all caught up in
Amy’s value register … and then thinking, if hers is over there in her,
where’s mine? The clarity of my question (and my previous experiences
with prairie grass, chimayo red, and jazz) was all it took. The knot of tension in the center of
me changed to ease and to a sense of heft and intactness, as if a paperweight was keeping me from
fluttering back over to Amy. There had been no effort involved in the shift back to my own register
… just the clarity that my register was in me, and Amy’s was
in her.
I was still walking with Amy, listening to her, but from what felt like an unfamiliar
distance. It struck me that even though Amy and I were side by side together, she was looking out
from her eyes, and I from mine. We each brought our own backlog of life experiences,
mood of the day, and personal value register to how we viewed xyz, or anything
else. There was no need to reach out and grab Amy’s point of view of things, because I had my own
point of view, which was a good four-feet of airspace away from hers!
I now felt much more connected and comfortable with Amy as we walked side by
side, partly because I didn’t have all that tension and strain, partly because I didn’t have to
agree or disagree with her. I still didn’t know my exact opinion on xyz, but now I sensed
where those opinions would come from, and it was not from abandoning my own register to match someone
else’s. The thought of living my life with other people in this separate but together way felt
like an adventure waiting to happen.
This walk with Amy reminded me that ideas are tested by how they perform in
actual lived moments, because that’s where reality speaks. My experience had shown me the strain
and tension of being caught up in someone else’s value system; the relative ease and freedom of
operating out of my own. To me, the message was clear: I have no business trying to read someone
else’s register! If I really want to know what’s going on for them, I can ask.
Step by step, I was recognizing long held confusions and replacing them with
new clarities. I was feeling more pleasure and fun, less anxiety, as I learned what worked for
me. Still, I had a ways to go. All of my research had occurred in the relative safety of my personal
life. It was time for a new test. Sure enough, one came knocking when I was invited to speak at
the Walker Art Center. Feeling confident that I could bring what I had learned into a more public
situation, I accepted the invitation. Alas, after an initial few hours of calm excitement, I awoke
in the night with a gripping sense of dread inside me. Why had I said yes? What did I possibly
have to say, especially compared to all the other speakers, who of course would be more in touch
with what was right and good. Fortunately, I was determined to find out how my
new insights would work during my pre-performance stage fright. The next day I began to prepare
my talk.
Preparing the Talk / What to Say?
Talk about a flip-flop. One moment, with my notes spread all around me on the
floor, I recalled a funny story to tell about my dance experience and a glimmer of enjoyment passed
through me. The next moment, seemingly out of nowhere, I was flooded with dread and scrambling
for reasons to back out of my commitment. What had been a funny story now seemed embarrassing and
silly, not funny at all. What was I thinking? How could it change so quickly?
I knew from my experiences so far that such a jolt of feeling most likely did
not come out of nowhere, but was a reaction to something. But what?
I searched the moments right before the change happened, as I’d learned to do
in the LearningMethods workshop: I’d been cruising along just fine, sitting on my living
room floor, enjoying writing out my funny story idea. Suddenly, out of nowhere it seemed, the fun
had changed to dread. I sat quietly now, waiting to remember … did anything happen in
those out of nowhere moments between having fun and dread?
“Having fun” … … … … … “dread” …
(The dotted line represents those few moments I was trying to recall.)
“Having fun” … … … … … “dread” …
And then it clearly came to me … a split-second image had flashed across my
mind … of people in the audience judging my story! I hadn’t even registered it. The sense of dread
had hit me at that exact moment. Wow!
I sat back in wonder at the power of a fleeting image to set off such a huge
reaction in me. Not even a real audience! I looked around at all my papers on the floor. The dread
had vanished. Suddenly my situation felt sadly poignant. Inadvertently flipping from my own
value register, where my story was funny, to the value registers of the audience
where it might not be, had literally stopped me in my tracks. A great barrier had come down. From
this place I would never create a story to tell, never share what gifts I might have to give, never
have fun being who I really am, except in the privacy of my own living room. And now, not even
there! It wasn’t just my Walker Center talk that was at stake. It was my whole life.
I calmly took stock of what I knew. When I was enjoying my funny story, it told
me everything about the kind of things I found funny (corny, off beat, simple, personal),
not whether my story would be considered funny or not to anyone else. More importantly, when I
was using my own criteria for funny I actually had fun planning my talk. The more I went toward
what was fun for me, the more I could imagine having fun being in front of an audience, even if
no one liked my funny story! It was that simple.
It occurred to me later that if I could bring the clarity I’d just applied to
preparing my talk into an actual performance situation, the audience would be experiencing a wholly
different person speaking to them. Instead of listening to someone who was scared, tense, and rushing
to get offstage, they’d be hearing someone speaking freely from her own passion and interests,
curious about but not defined by how good she was for the audience.
I realized also that a person sitting in the audience would have a wholly different
experience if that person understood that the value they usually ascribe to the speaker
was actually information about themselves. Audience members could then discern what was
good for them and move toward what delights them, inspires them, or piques their
curiosity as they move through their lives.
I continued shaping my dance experiences into stories and movement for the upcoming
performance. My trusty stage fright alerted me whenever I became so concerned about whether the
audience would like my stories or not that I’d lose touch with how I felt about them.
Lynchpin
In spite of steady progress leading up to the Walker talk, my daily interactions
with people made it clear that something still had its hooks in me. I wasn’t free yet. Right at
the moment when I’d be about to express myself in a way that might get a negative reaction from
someone, I’d pull back, not prepared to accept the possible consequence of someone not valuing
me. What if they walked away from me in favor of someone more interesting, more supportive, more
compatible, better for them? The reality of someone being better without ME in their life
seemed too stark to deal with, illustrating just how self-centered a people pleaser can
be!
Who would I be in their absence, as they walked away?
I had to accept that, like everybody else, I’d be an ordinary person, to whom
some people were drawn and others were not. But this was no longer such a bad thought. I had found
a replacement buddy in my own personal value register. Waking up to Chimayo Red
that morning and really liking it, then covering my whole wall with it, was such a simple act of
happiness. I knew I had something I’d never lose, no matter who walked away. I undid the final
lynchpin.
I finally had my speaking notes in order and practiced the phrase of choreography
I planned to perform. Now I just had to show up.
Back To The Walker
Every inch of me yearned to flee the auditorium as the audience broke into whoops
and shouts for the mesmerizing speaker who preceded me. But I didn’t flee; I reached for the clarity
I knew was in me somewhere. Suddenly all the awfulness of my situation sparked a flash of recognition.
I didn’t want to live another minute like this. If I were going to have any fun at all in the rest
of my life, I had to sort out what I was in the middle of NOW. It was clear to me I’d gotten lost
in the dark void of the audience and its applause, and how I wouldn’t meet the audience's high
expectations of drama and passion. I knew I needed to get back to the only thing that would save
me. What did I value about my talk?
That’s all it took. I felt the life flow back into me, the ease and heft in
the center of me. I was home. From here my connection to my stories came alive. From here
I could feel the pleasure I’d had dancing the most fascinating delicious choreography
… yes, in silence, unaccompanied by any musical score … in the midst of a provocative
avant garde dance scene for small and passionate audiences around the world. I truly had something
to say!
My mouth was dry as sand, but I was ready. The applause died down, and I with
my notes in hand walked toward the podium. Amazingly, a silly joke occurred to me as I crossed
the stage, something about being the last of seven presenters. I sensed no one might get this joke,
but I told it anyway. No one got it. IT DIDN’T MATTER. My connection to the joke catapulted
me to the next moment. I recognized some people in the first few rows. I said hi to someone. My
stories flowed out, I improvised, I danced. My mouth was still dry, but it didn't matter. Something
quite unusual was happening. I was being myself in front of an audience, knowing that all those
in the audience were having whatever experiences they were having, and I was having mine, together
with them. Then it was over. Afterward, as people came up to me saying this or saying that, clearly
I was hearing about their experiences, not about mine. I’d shared who I am; now I was learning
about them. Boy, was I exhausted. Time to go home.
Summing Up
Looking at my situation from the outside, even though I knew I was liked and
respected, I nevertheless walked on shaky ground. No amount of praise from others could fill in
what I needed first and foremost, the navigational system within myself, the capability to know
and value my own responses as a foundation for being with other people. Understanding when I assess
others for value, I am learning about myself. When others judge me for value,
I’m learning about them. This is simply how it works. I have all the proof I need, at least for
now. In this sense my stage fright was my true ally. It kept knocking at my door until I finally
invited it in, sat it down, and listened to what it had to tell me. LearningMethods helped
to translate. Now that I use what I learned that day in the workshop along with what I learned
from all my investigations afterwards, I live my life from a different perch. I’m not afraid anymore.
I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned with my granddaughter.
~~~~~~
There is small biography of personal details about
the author below.
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About the Author
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 Elizabeth Garren is a
former member of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. She is one of four Certified LearningMethods Teachers
in the United States as well as being a Certified Teacher of the Alexander Technique. She lives in Minneapolis,
Minnesota.
Elizabeth Garren
912 30th Ave S, Minneapolis, 55406 MN, USA
Tel: +1 612-375-9142
e-mail:
If you are interested in working on similar issues in your life, contact Elizabeth
(or another LearningMethods Teacher) to discuss how you can get help to change.
You can arrange in-person sessions, you can attend a workshop, or if you do not live near a teacher, you
can also work very effectively in phone sessions.
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