One of the most widely known quotations from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” Perhaps you’ve not given it much thought; I know I hadn’t until I came across a couple of other things.
The first was a book by Derren Brown called Tricks of The Mind. In one chapter, Brown discusses the subject of developing and displaying confidence. Now if you’ve ever seen Brown perform, I think you’ll agree that he comes across as being supremely confident. And yet it wasn’t always like that, and indeed isn’t necessarily like that today.
You see, in his early life, Brown suffered from the same doubts and insecurities as most of us. So what made the difference? Well he discovered something very simple, and yet extraordinarily powerful – in order to become confident, you firstly have to act confident. Once you start to act in a confident manner, others begin to treat you as confident, and guess what? You become confident because of the way other people are now treating you. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second thing that happened concerned one of the actors who features in a film I’d been working on. Part of ‘the deal’ when you star in a film is that you’re expected to help promote it. Now acting and promotion are two completely different things, which is why the cast of this film were booked in for a training session on how to present themselves in interviews. Some of the cast were ‘naturals’, but one guy (I won’t say who to save his blushes) just wasn’t comfortable with this sort of attention. Whilst he comes to life on screen, in private he’s pretty quiet and unassuming. Perfectly fine qualities in a human being, but not so great when you’re trying to excite and enthuse people about the film you’ve just made.
The lady running the course had seen all this before and knew exactly what to do. Instead of giving him a list of specific instructions, which she knew he’d probably forget anyway, she gave him just one instruction… “Just imagine it’s a part, and you’re playing a successful movie star!”
As soon as he twigged this… that he wasn’t being himself in these interviews he was simply playing a part, just as he did every day of his working life, the transition was near-instantaneous. He acted like a movie star, so people started to treat and react to him as though he was a movie star. You know what happens next… he’ll start to feel like a movie star, and that will affect how he behaves naturally. But like Derren Brown, he had to consciously choose the role before it became part of him.
Is there an ‘Aha!’ moment there for you? I know there was one for me. The world is indeed a stage and we’re all playing parts. The great news is that we get to choose the parts we play. Nobody else chooses those parts for us. If we play the part well, the world demands and dictates that we play it for life. But it works both ways. Choose a lousy part for yourself – and if you don’t apply conscious effort and thought to this, you probably will – and that’s the part the world will allocate to you too.
Once you realise that, you become what you present yourself as being, it’s a tremendously enlightening and empowering moment, because you know that your fate and fortunes lay entirely in your own hands. But it can be a frightening moment too, because every excuse you ever had for not being where and what you want to be, is stripped away in an instant. And there’s comfort to be had in excuses.
Kind Regards
John Harrison
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Kind Regards,
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