returning to career stomping grounds 🌱
(4 minute read)
Hi! Welcome to Our Best Work Weekly, a newsletter from Healthy Pour where you'll get weekly tips on creating a healthy workplace, becoming a more compassionate leader, and cultivating a regenerative relationship with work.
In early April, I’m headed to my undergraduate alma mater with a few of my former classmates to discuss careers and what students can do with a Fine Arts degree in theatre performance. I’m so stoked. SO stoked.
This will be the second time I’m doing this, and I’m excited to share with the group 1) the expansive ways they can use their performing arts degree, but especially 2) how they can use other experiences and fields to enrich their work as artists, actors and performers. Frankly, the world of theatre performance is very insular—particularly in training programs—and while students are amassing incredible and valuable skillsets usually unafforded to college students, there often isn’t guidance on how to wield those skillsets off the stage...and how profoundly valuable those skillsets are. Many businesses are spending a ton of money to teach their teams skills that come very easily to theatre professionals.
Returning to my school in this capacity has inevitably prompted me to reflect on the winding and weird path of my career and how I’ve been able to employ those theatre skills. My favorite example happened in the first few weeks of my counseling degree a million years ago when my professor asked us about primary emotions. My hand shot up.
“Sad, mad, glad, and scared.”
I learned this from my Meisner instructor, Ted Hoerl, who also taught us that we are capable of feeling and behaving in a multitude of ways if we’re under the right circumstances—essentially speaking to the impact of environmental and social influence on beliefs, decisions, and needs. Sounds a lot like organizational behavior, right? He’d prompt us to imagine: “Under what circumstances would I (someone) behave this way?” I employ variations of this question regularly, even all these years later, even off stage, and even in a scientific capacity. Especially in a scientific capacity since my current primary research methodology is interpretative phenomenological analysis, which is mega reminiscent of character analysis and beat work.
But there were so many other ways my theatre degree has served me, like reading physicality, power dynamics, and status when sitting therapeutically with a client (thank you, physical theatre and clowning!). I could stretch my imagination and empathy while tuning into the client’s energy—skills I had learned in scene study. Then, of course, there is public speaking and storytelling, which are skills I use regularly.
We (the royal “we”) somehow continue to maintain this idea about career development that there are clear, linear pathways that we must take to arrive at a certain status of career or role, and that’s just not true. This, of course, goes back to critiques of experience requirements in jobs, but it also highlights the insular nature of career paths and the tragic rejection and loss of multi- and interdisciplinary influence. This ultimately has my mind returning to the ways my undergraduate program and experience were intentionally designed to, in many ways, isolate and eventually indoctrinate us into tolerating and even worshiping abusive behavior and environments. My experience in theatre school very much mirrored the patterns of indoctrination into abusive workplaces I found in my dissertation.
It was a highly focused program with very few courses outside the rigid degree requirements, leaving very little opportunity for academic or social exploration and curiosity, which is essential at that age. Had I not been in the honors program (which I only did because I needed the scholarship money—I was going to be on Broadway! I didn’t need biology!), I would have never taken what is likely the most influential class I’ve ever had: Race, Gender, and Public Policy.
However, I cannot emphasize enough that what I’ve learned about human behavior since studying psychology and psychotherapy would have been invaluable as an actor. Imagine employing a genogram when working on family dramas! The potential!
All this is to say that I’m increasingly convinced that rigid career approaches will never be as successful as expansive and even chaotic pathways. As leaders and managers, it’s up to us to creatively hire and develop individuals and teams to employ amassed skillsets, curiously investigating how skills and experience perpetually interweave and strengthen if we let them, like the benefits of companion planting! Yes, we can plant rows and rows of tomatoes, but they benefit more from sharing soil with marigolds and basil. This means there is also a responsibility for teachers, mentors, and their training programs to diversify their teaching and encourage multidisciplinary study—even when the student is hyper-focused on a single career path. ESPECIALLY when they're hyper-focused on a single career path! Diversity, in all facets, will always be the healthier way. Always.
But to prompt this kind of expansive creativity, we also need to explore it within ourselves. Even when we’re happy with our careers, it can be helpful to reflect, process and probe. What skills have you amassed in your career? Where did they come from? What skills have you abandoned that might be beneficial to recall?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to learning from these young people and sharing a bit about my experience. I’m also secretly hoping to find some theatre nerds to help me analyze some upcoming data I’m collecting. If you can analyze a scene, you’re well on your way to coding an interview. Science and art are often more interconnected than we think.
See you next Monday!
