Milking Feedback

Actors practice a slew of skills that can be usefully applied to our everyday "performances". Of course, those skills include how to use their voices and bodies effectively. They also include listening and responding, understanding objectives and how to vary one's tactics to achieve them. . Actors learn to take risks, be vulnerable, adapt their behavior to the context and to walk in others' shoes with understanding and empathy.

Yes, we in the theatre believe all of the above are skills. And we believe that to one extent or another they can be taught. More on much of that in later posts. Now, I want to discuss another skill that actors acquire, one that often goes unnoticed even by actors themselves.

During my starving actor days in New York City, because I was, in fact, very bad at the starving part, I got a job teaching English as a Second Language to Russian immigrants. After a couple of years there, I acquired some management and training responsibilities and participated, along with a number of my fellow actor-turned-trainer colleagues, in a day of supervisory training. The training consisted of the standard interpersonal stuff - giving feedback, managing conflict, communicating policy and procedures - but it was all new to us. Just like our engineer counterparts in other organizations, we had excelled at our jobs and therefore been promoted, but had virtually no management experience.

At any rate, we happily participated in the training, learned things, and then sought to apply them back on the job. Six months later or so, the program facilitator returned to see how it was going and offer some additional coaching. He followed us around, took some notes, and then, when we convened the next day, expressed amazement.

"You...uh...you are doing everything we discussed," he said.

Well, yeah, we answered. Isn't that the point? What's the big deal. Eventually, he articulated his surprise. In his experience, the learning from a one-day workshop faded pretty quickly. Skills are not learned in one day. Individual behaviors, let alone whole group cultures are not changed. Honestly, he said, he had expected very little difference in our way of doing things.

But...we were Actors. To us, the process went like this:
1. You perform, i.e. try something.
2. You get notes, i.e. the director gives you feedback.
3. You peform different, i.e. try again, integrating that feedback.

In other words, we had learned the skill of receiving and applying feedback. What did we do to succeed in grow as effectively as we did? We employed the following approaches, I think:

• Accept all feedback. Try it on, use it, don't argue with it. You can always go back to your original way of doing things later, if the new performance doesn't work for you.
• Embrace discomfort. New ways of doing things are by definition New. Therefore they will often feel more awkward than an habitual way of interacting. Just because you try something once and it doesn't feel comfortable, doesn't mean it is wrong, or that it won't soon feel comfortable as familiarity grows.
• Practice. Our coach was right. Nothing changes in one day. We took for granted that we needed to rehearse. So we set up role-play sessions, we went to each other for guidance, we exercised our management and communication muscles every day as part of our routine.
  
• Separate the person from the performance. Your performance in a given instance is not you. When a director asks you to play a scene differently, she is not asking you to become a different actor, simply to flex your talents in different ways. Defensiveness and ego undermine one's ability to grow and serve the scene.
• Enjoy. What? Yes. Getting feedback can be delightful. Think of it: someone is focused on you, your development, your performance. We thought of our coach as a wonderful source of support and tips. Of course we applied his teaching. Why wouldn't you want to accept such useful gifts.

So, here's the tip. Get good at receiving feedback. Even if others don't give it well. Even if, especially if, you think you know exactly what you're doing. Everyone will benefit. No one as much as you.