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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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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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