Pitch

Just ask

September 10, 2025

It’s amazing what you can get by just asking.

I start every session I teach by asking the kids to say hello to me in Te Reo:

“Can I get a “Kia ora Justin?!”

They’ll repeat it- and what’s more they’ll even match my tone exactly.

To make it fun, I’ll add a “Can I get a “You’re such a great singer, Justin!”

Two things are happening here:

Ask with levity: I’m playful in my request. There’s no real stakes but the opportunity is still there. When there’s a bit of a joke with it, it’s in their best interest to answer because it’s fun to be ‘in on a joke’.
Ask with direction: In my sessions, we’re signing and speaking in Te Reo. My two asks of them are related: one is in Te Reo and one is about singing. It steers us in the direction of the learning without overtly saying “Here’s what we’re learning today.

If I want to start a session that’s fun and engaging, I just ask.

Small talk isn’t small

September 7, 2025

It can feel like a waste of precious class time to chat with students about their day. We have limited class time so surely it makes sense to just get on with the learning, right?!

One of my favourite ways to start a waiata lesson is to get a sense of what the kids have been up to since I last saw them.

“What have you been learning today?”

“What’s something surprising you could teach me about?!”

“What are your plans for the holidays?”

These seem simple, but hidden beneath these questions is a core Māori value:

Whānaungatanga.

You might notice whanaungatanga has the Māori word for family in it; whānau. It’s all about a building a sense of family. It’s just like how Japanese business people highly value starting with ‘small talk’ before of ‘getting down to business’. I’ve heard a business deal can be completetly ruined if someone doesn’t engage in small talk first; it’s considered rude!

Well, this is similar in the Māori world. It’s not as formal as having a set of questions or steps you need to do to ‘do whānaungatanga’ (can you imagine!?)

It’s really about being human first. You’re meeting a human being who has had a whole day before this moment, they have family, friends, insecurities, hopes- the whole shabang. How wonderful then that whānaungatanga gives us space to honour that.

It doesn’t have to be a therapy session! Just get interested in their reality and let them into yours.

So when I’m with kids I’ll start by treating them like family members I’m curious about. By the way people tend to act like how you treat them. And I want my students to engage with our work together like trusted family members.

It may seem insignificant, but small talk is anything but.

The Rubik’s cube doesn’t matter.

August 17, 2025

There’s the content of what you’re delivering and then there’s the way you deliver it.

I’d go as far as to say the content comes second to the delivery. You could teach a kid how to solve a Rubik’s cube and arguably that’s a pretty useless skill. It may or may not come in handy (as with much learning) or it might just become obsolete.

I think learning things is a bit like setting and achieving goals; it’s not getting the goal that’s the real prize, it’s who you become in the process.

The same is true for teaching and learning. It’s not really about the Rubik’s cube.

It’s about showing the kid they have the ability to learn. They have within them the power to learn something or create something or solve a problem.

If, through our teaching of anything, we can teach them that- then we have won the game.

Teach like you believe in them. Teach like anything is possible for them. Teach like they have infinite potential. Teach like they are at the doorstep to what ever life they want.

The rubiks cube doesn’t matter, but everything else is monumentally important.

Simplicity in the classroom

August 13, 2025

I’m back teaching for a few days this week and it’s so cool to be around year 5 and 6 kids here in Gisbourne.

I realised today one of my only responsibilities in the classroom is to show the kids that the world is safe and that they can do anything they want.

It’s that simple, I reckon.

If we can build these two beliefs in our kids then we’ve done our jobe at the most fundamental level.

If you believe it about them, then it’ll come through in every single thing you do and say to them.

Production is a net positive

August 9, 2025

I believe there is no downside to making things and sharing them with the world. I think its the most generous thing you can do to say here I made this, I hope it makes your life better, or gives you a moment of joy or helps you achieve your dreams.

It’s our responsibility to get out of our own way enough; to make ourselves the best we can be and share that with the world.

Its generous to be unselfconcius.

It’s generous to give without needing anything back.

It’s generous to try your best.

It’s generous to put the work in.

It’s generous to overcome resistance.

Plus-

And there’s a big plus

Think of the person who you become after that much generosity. Think of the skills you’ve honed. Think of the ground you’ve covered and the artifacts you have to show for the journey.

It’s win frickin win.

Production is a net positive.

Value first as a life strategy

August 6, 2025

There is a concept in business called ‘value first’. It’s exactly what it sounds like, before any business transaction between and buyer and a business, it’s the businesses job to provide value in advance.

If you’ve ever taken a free trial, you’ve experienced value first.

I really like it in business because it’s a no strings chance for all parties to do the thing they all want to do; provide the value and consume it- it’s win win.

It also forces the business to show up as their best; there’s no use giving a free sample that kind of sucks.

This reminds me as well of Steve Martin’s advice to aspiring performers: “Be so good they can’t ignore you”.

He’s talking about value first here. Too often we want to ‘save the goodies’ for paying customers and we lament that ‘if they just gave us a chance, they’d know what I can do!’

Trust me, I’ve had these thoughts as an actor.

I increasingly believe that it’s everyone’s job to do their best, relentlessly and share it for free. And be so damn good they can’t ignore you.

Want to be paid for the thing that you do? Show everyone how great you are at it now. Not so good yet? That’s okay, just keep practicing,

Give value first.

The physiology of confidence

June 8, 2025

It’s amazing being back doing Mrs Krishnan’s Party and feeling the way the show almost happens automatically.

After 6 weeks off the show and living a domestic and regular life, I got used to not needing to be big and open to strangers.

Now in the last 24 hours I’ll have individually welcomed 300 strangers into the show. I couldn’t imagine talking to new people with such ease and gusto in my regular life, but through the body of the character it is effortless.

I wonder how we can use this in normal life?

Entertain, Engage and Educate PT 5

May 31, 2025

In the last post I talked about freeing the expectations we put on the people we are working with.

Today, we move on to ‘engage’. Are the people I’m talking to listening? Are they comprehending and making meaning of what I’m sharing?

I offer a simple exercise we use in acting to keep our performances ‘alive’.

In acting, we have objectives. I might want my scene partner to leave the room. Or I may want to make them understand something. These kinds of objectives are great because they activate actors and take us outside of our own heads. The test is in the other person. At any given point I can look to the other actor/ character and ‘test’ (using our senses) am I closer or further from my objective?

This same test can be used to test engagement. You can ask yourself, what would these people look like if they were engaged? This may seem contradictory to our last idea of loosening the grip, but what we’re really after is simply being alive and aware to what you’re receiving from them.

Are they really looking at you and seeing you or are their eyes glazed over? What ever you notice, you can make the assessment as to whether you’re closer to or further from engaging.

This puts us in a very powerful position because we are no longer wed to the action (how we get them engaged) but only to the outcome (whether they are they engaged). This unleashes us to a world of possibilities of how to bring about high levels of engagement.

So as we work through these steps of entertain, engage and educate I invite you continue to test externally whether you are closer or further and change your approach endlessly until you get to the desired outcome.

Entertain, Engage and Educate PT 4

May 29, 2025

Loosen the grip.

In the last post on this subject, I talked about how a key step to entertaining is to loosen our expectations about what the group of people we are working with need to be like.

They say great parents have few rules. This doesn’t mean that they let the kids run rampant, but it means that they give more space. A parent with more rules might see a rowdy group of kids, get stressed and yell at the kids. Not fun for anyone.

A parent with fewer rules might see the same group and decide that this is a highly energised group of kids. They might then make some new decisions about how to work with that rather than fight it. There’s less yelling and (most excitingly) less stress for the parent.

Instead of feeling stressed that the kids aren’t acting the way they ‘should’, they become interested in how they might work with the way they are.

As an actor, I also find this an effective way to entertain. To go on stage with a preconceived notion of how an audience should react, how they should listen and (worst of all) where they should laugh, is a death sentence. Not only will you go out there and not be ‘in the moment’ but you’re also in danger of beating yourself up after the performance.

The same is true for teaching or delivering any information to a group of learners- there’s no right or wrong in the way they should be. Here’s a belief I invite you to adopt as you experiment with entertaining to engage:

New Belief: Any behavior my learners display is perfect. Everything is an opportunity for me to explore new ways to engage.

The alternative of course is that there is a ‘right’ way to be and there is a ‘wrong’ way to be. This is the kind of rigidity that makes entertaining difficult and certainly is the antithesis of empowering anyone.

Really, every day?!

May 28, 2025

There is a fantastic life planning system that I learned from Tony Robbins called RPM.

It’s designed to change the focus from ‘to do’s’ to outcomes. What’s the difference? Well I find that to dos can become a never ending list you work through for the rest of your life (or indeed that you never get through). I also find that if I’m a bit underenergised and I look at a list of things I ‘have to’ do, then I’m very prone to procrastination.

Tony’s system helps you re-align with the purpose- or the “why the heck am I even doing this?”

I know I can easily forget the WHY behind anything when I’m in the flow of my work day. I had a mini breakthrough today while using the RPM system that I think is worth sharing.

It may seem tedious at first, but a crucial step in the RPM system is to look not only at outcomes but the reason you want it. I sat down to plan my day today and thought twice about whether I would use RPM for my film a day habit. This is something I decided to do this year to make a little movie each day to share online.

The reason I didn’t want to do it went something like this “Well look, I know I need to make a movie anyway, so I can just put in on the calendar or carve an hour or so out of my day to do it, what’s the big deal? I don’t need some fancy system for that”

WRONG.

I decided to do it anyway and I’m glad I did.

As unnecessarily time consuming as it seemed, I followed the process:

What’s my outcome? To have a film that I’m proud of that I want to share with the world and shows me at my best. Hmm pretty good start, certainly glad I wrote that down, it hadn’t been that clear in my head…

Why do I want that? Well… I want to act! I love acting and creating, I want to use my hard earned skill and entertain some stranger. I want to cast a vote for the type of creator I am- one that works every day. I want to make something I’m proud of that will exist forever- this one time investment will keep working for me and entertain people for years to come! Woah, where did all that come from! I couldn’t believe how much I had to say about why I wanted this outcome. The best part was, the more I wrote the more associated I became with these reasons. I felt them more in some symbiotic loop.

It was only later that some old thoughts came back: Well I want to make a film every day… what am I supposed to do write that out every day? Come on what a waste of time, I can just get on a make the thing rather than spend time doing all that…

And there was my breakthrough. I do have to do it every day. That’s the difference that makes the difference I think. If I take the time remain connected to my purpose each day, I will have more access to the resources of someone who is inspired.

Yes it’s work, but that’s the point. I don’t think it comes naturally to do hard things. And if we just schedule it and expect the ‘why’ to be searingly clear for us, we may run out of steam. This is especially true when it comes to the important non urgent stuff, it’s easy to cast it aside in your day to make way for the inevitable day to day things that need our attention now. We have to make them urgent otherwise we’ll never get around to the things that make the real difference.

Take the extra couple of minutes before you engage with these tasks that really matter. Engage with your why each time; make it a habit. Go on, do the hard thing. Every day.

JUSTIN ROGERS

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