I’m walking to the staff room. There’s a 6 year old with wild hair who stops in front of me.
Kid: Who are you?
Me: I’m Justin
Kid:….. COOL!
Me: Who are you?
Kid: Hugo!
Me: COOL!!!
Now every time I pass Hugo he never fails to greet me excitedly.
Aren’t kids awesome?
What is a sparkle noticer?
It’s what I call the people out in the world that notice real presence. I’ve been to 5 different states in the US across the past few months and everywhere I go I’m trying to make connections with strangers.
Buying a coffee, passing a stranger, getting in a lift; these are all opportunities to connect with another human.
And the rule is you can’t just say hi and look away.
You have to actually be present. You have to SPARKLE.
Sadly, most people are quite closed off to strangers. I turn on my sparkliest most present eyes and give them a sweet little hello… and there’s often not a response.
And that’s okay! I get it, it’s a bit weird.
But now and then… you get a sparkle noticer.
Someone who catches the sparkle and notices the real life presence you’re bringing to a moment.
They see you seeing them and thus you see each other!
The goal for me isn’t to be the person always saying hi with a warm smile.
The goal is to become the person who notices the sparkles when they fly my way.
We all get caught up and walled off day to day. But if we let ourselves, we can be a sparkle noticer and the world is a deliciously good place when you let that in.
The golden goose of any initiative is implementation.
Starting out, it’s up to us to get ourselves to follow through on the work we know needs to get done. We have to work out what it takes for us to do the hard thing.
We find that ‘pushing through’ isn’t sustainable. Eventually we find a reason that drives us.
Whether it’s a diet, a new skill to learn or a formidable project- we each find our own way in to get it done.
When we lead others, we come up against the same challenge- how do we get people to follow through?
How do we get others to own outcomes and claim autonomy in their work? There’s a lot of things that help, sure; clarity of objective, clear milstone tracking, step by step systems, authority to make choices… all of these things contribute to the work getting done.
But those are all the tools- just like when we were doing it on our own we all needed tools. But if all it required were tools it would be easy.
Like you discovered on your own, you need heart. What do I mean? Well it needs to hook onto the thing that we value most. That’s how we bring heart to our work.
Why do I teach? I teach because I love bringing possibility to life for young people. I love learning and I love growing and I love contributing to something bigger than myself. Those are called values, by the way. Values are a steam train zooming off into the sunset and our outcomes are the things we hook on the back of that train.
Values are our own power source. The same is true for those we lead. It’s not enough to give excellent tools, protocols and outcomes- we have to hook it to their steam train.
What does this person value most? Don’t guess, get in conversation and ask them. It’s in the language; “My work is about X” or “The most important thing for this is Y”.
Find their values and align the job to that.
This is the never ending power source that gets the job done and has them fulfilled in the process. And that’s WAY better than merely implementing something.
We all want to work for a meaningful cause. Implementation… sure.
But doing meaningful work in the world with people that care?
That’s where it’s really at.
There’s a belief I’ve battled with in the past that if we make learning fun, it undercuts the seriousness of the subject.
Whenever I have an internal conflict like this I always come back to outcome. What is this really about? What are we trying to do?
Well with the learning I deliver, my big bold outcome is to bring it to life for the kids. Words can also betray us a bit here, because you hear a word like ‘fun’ and that might conjure images of a hectic classroom, a ball bouncing off a window and no one listening to each other.
So maybe the word ‘fun’ isn’t the right word.
What I’m really looking for is life.
There is life in a kid’s eye when they are transfixed by a giant digger doing construction next door. There is life in their eye when they notice an adult is in a bad mood. And there is indeed life when they are learning something they love.
The only thing that can trivialise learning is a trivial intention.
If you’re looking to make ‘fun’ of something, yeah you’re probably going to be a bit disrespectful.
If you’re looking to bring something to life, though? Well now you’re playing a game I like. And there are a million and one ways to bring something to life. There are quiet ways, big ways, busy ways and gentle ways.
Let’s take seriously our job to create vibrant, living connections to the learning we share.
That sounds fun to me
The fact that you’re a human being means you have a way in.
Early on as a teacher I’d easily feel out of my depth when teaching things I didn’t have all the answers to. We get hypnotised in the culture to believing that we have to be experts.
More often than not, we don’t need to wear that responsibility. We just need a way in.
In acting, we’re encouraged to find truth in the imagined circumstances of a character. One of my teachers Miranda Harcourt calls this ‘make it true for you’. The text talks about a cousin? Build an internal reality of that person.
Make it true for you is the secret to finding confidence when we feel out of our depth in other arenas too.
I don’t know about drums and I can’t play the drums. So I have not connection to them right? No way to make it true for me?
Well I’d say the fact that I can’t play the drums is a relationship to the drums. I know what drums are. I had a friend at high school who played the drums. I’ve always liked that drum solo by Phil Collins.
I suddenly have found my way in.
No matter what we bring ourselves to, in any arena, we always have the ability to make it true for ourselves.
Education is about connection. So finding that connection to any material we teach is vital.
Make it true for you and you’ll have a never ending source of connection.
A director I worked with gave me a key question that I use to guide all of my work.
It was after a show and he’d given us all a few pages of notes for things to focus on and improve in the show. A collection of ultra specific tweaks.
He turned to us, knowing that hitting all these in one show was a long shot. He acknowledged this and said simply “All I’m looking for is the life. All these notes are there just to support that. So all your job is is to search for the life.”
“{Is it alive?”
That’s it. We have tonnes of technical moments to hit, emotional beats to play, connection to each other, the material, the audience- one million things that culminate in a single outcome; life.
When I act I come back to the question.
When I rehearse. When I create. When I teach. When I converse. When I collaborate. When I build. When I help. It’s all in service of the same question:
Is it alive?
I like talking about silly things. Specific moments from a reality tv show. Why the painters of a wall I walk past chose that shade of blue. Discussing whether flying or invisibility is a better super power.
An over-optimised life is always on the precipice of making you feel obsolete.
When I’ve done all the things; automated, delegated and streamlined the work to make valuable things in the world… I’m suddenly in danger of having nothing to care about.
Worse still- I might be so addicted to the doing that I seek more tasks.
When I talk about things that ‘don’t matter’ it sends a signal to my brain that re-affirms the absurdity of it all, while maintaining my conviction that when my work finishes, I go on.
I make room for the meaningless to find the meaning.
So I ask you-
What would your super power be, flying or invisibility?
(I do think flying would exhaust you the same as running, so there’s that consideration too)
They say that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
I think the same is true for things we know.
Something that is a piece of cake for you might be the missing piece for someone else.
One person’s breakfast is another person’s breakthrough (Trying to coin a phrase, is it any good?)
We’re often too close to our own abilities, skills, stories, distinctions and remarkable results to see the potential value they can provide to someone.
So don’t be stingy with the magic you make, it’s your responsibility to share it.
Here’s a frame to set abstract outcomes succesfully.
An abstract outcome is what I call something that doesn’t necessarily have a finite beginning or ending. Want to enjoy a day with the family? Have a restful day? Feel like a cool uncle?
These are all abstract and so they require a frame that pulls them from the abstract into something you can action while not necessarily being able to measure or quantify them
Stealing from the actors’ methodology of objective and action, have a think about what it is you want to do.
-I want to make my mum feel special.
-I want to make my niece feel heard.
-I want my friend to feel inspired.
These could qualify as objectives for an actor to play in a scene. And if they’re good enough for an actor they are good enough for you! They say a good objective for an actor should have it’s test in the other person. Said another way, is your objective set up in such a way that allows you to, at any moment, use your senses to ascertain how successful you are in your pursuit? This is what keeps actors active and it can do the same for you too.
This one is less useful for actors, but super useful to you. The strongest force in human psychology is to remain consistent with our identity. So choose the identity you will live into. I will be a loving son. I will be a strong partner. I will be a playful prince. What ever is is for you! When we are intentional about who we are being when we show up, we are far more likely to act in congruence with it when we pursue our outcome.
So using the frame we put the two together.
“I will make my mum feel heard and be a loving son.”
Or
“I will light my students up and be a master of ceremonies”
-What you want to do?
-Who you want to be?
When the outcome isn’t clear cut, see if this fit instead.
This is one of my favourite acting ideas. I heard it first in an early interview with Jeff Goldblum and he had learned it from his teacher Sanford Meisner.
It’s the idea that as actors one of our key jobs is to put our focus outwardly, on the world, the task and, most beautifully, on our scene partner.
They say there’s nothing more captivating than watching someone tying their shoes. They are unselfconscious and completely wrapped up in their simple objective- tying their shoe.
This is the gold standard we are going for as actors. We want to honestly have our focus, energy and intention on doing something.
I say ‘honestly’ because we must fight the natural human urge to be liked and thought of as good. And there’s the extra thing for actors of auditioning, where we have to somehow forget we are seeking to be cast.
Part of acting is learning to ‘honestly’ place our focus.
That’s it.
It’s riveting when someone does that. Don’t worry about being interesting, get interested.
