“It’s difficult to be curious and unhappy at the same time.” – Mark Williams
 

Much of the change process is about awareness of yourself and others. Consciousness will allow you to take ownership of what is yours so you can change it. I liken personal awareness to a theatrical production. Often, I will ask my clients to imagine themselves in a play. The show will be the play of their own life, where they are the writer, director, producer, set director, stagehands, and actor. They play every single role of the play! And, in life, we do. We write our own lives, set the scene, direct the show, and act out based on the lines we’ve given ourselves. However, we rarely play one part of the play – the audience. Rarely do we step away from all parts of the play and examine the play of our own making.

 

You Are the Director

(and every part in between)

If you’ve ever been to a play while not knowing much about theater production, it’s easy to watch the actors on stage without giving much thought to the many other people who help create and deliver the show. In fact, you may not notice that sometimes actors will play multiple roles.

Your life, and my life, is nothing but a theatrical production! It is an assembly that you (and I) wrote, down to every witty or horribly-delivered line.

Imagine your life as a performer on the big stage: Every day, you take the stage, belt out the lines you create, produce the play of your own imagining, and direct every piece of your life just the way you’d like it to be delivered. Every prop is yours to use how you wish – you are the set designer. And when you don’t like a line, you have the power to change it on the spot, or have a do-over. The play is YOURS!

Besides the theatrical production with its many parts, big and small, behind the scenes and otherwise, another significant part of your play, is the audience. After all, if you don’t have an audience, you hardly have a play. The actors perform to entertain, and the entertainment comes from the perfectly choreographed lines while the audience applauds or walks away, disinterested. The play could be a hit to many or a failure to all.

 

“Action!”…and I Stood There Terrified!

In 5th grade, I was in a school play – I played an elf in a Christmas play. I had the part of the narrator who came out on stage before the curtain opened to read my lines – a monologue of sorts (even typing it out and visualizing that anxiety-ridden evening is making my stomach churn!).

At the time, I was SCARED-TO-DEATH of passing out, forgetting my lines, being booed off stage, and tripping over my own feet. I was scared for that small yet monumental part of delivering those lines in front of all of those people who watched, ready to form opinions of my performance. I was so self-absorbed in myself and how I appeared to the audience that I ended up getting through the production without much feeling at all – I had to eventually just “numb out” and spew the lines as quickly as I could to get OFF the stage before I died. Yes, I thought I would die.

As an adult reflecting on that play, and my life AS a play, I now realize that the only way to change is to put myself in the audience’s position. To, in essence, BE the audience.

 

The Lines That Have Created Our Day-to-Day

Life is a series of actions, much like a theatrical production. Life is also a series of emotions in which we can choose to numb out or be fully present in them. I imagine that actors and all the other people who make the production possible know their individual parts of the play so well that their behavior becomes automatic. The play begins, and they just GO. Without much thought at all, they act, direct, improvise, change attire, direct the orchestra, and changesets. Their actions are habitual.

Once we learn our lines, we say those lines over and over and over again. Our actions become habitual. So habitual, in fact, that we don’t realize we’re even doing them. We don’t realize that the seat we sit in to watch television is the same chair we always grab, or that the handful of chocolate we pop in our mouth when no one is looking, is the same handful we grab each evening. We don’t notice that we follow the same morning routine, from stepping out of bed, into the shower, and into our clothes. We don’t notice, because to NOTICE, is taxing on our brain! If we had to notice every action we ever performed, we’d be exhausted by lunchtime. Therefore, our brain learns “the program” very quickly. It learns what it needs to know and follows in perfect order until you tell it to do differently. We deliver the learned lines of our lives every day, all day, and without much conscious thought at all.

The actions and emotions of our lives become so habitual that we forget our impact on our own lives, and when it comes time to change, we don’t even know where to begin. We don’t even know what’s become habitual; so automatic. Our lives have become rote, subconscious. Change, however, requires conscious thought. It requires that we observe the lines of our own play – our own life – and decide if they need to be changed or altered in some way.

 

Taking a Step Back and Changing the Script

By being the audience of our own lives, we slow ourselves down just enough to thoroughly examine every part of our being from a different perspective. As an actor, we have the acting perspective. We wrote our life script, but we don’t know how it looks until we’ve taken a step back to decide if the lines we’ve prepared are really as good as we thought or aren’t serving us in a way that is positive and forward-moving.

 

Photo credit here.