As many of us start to figure out how to venture back into the world, we have to have conversations about safety and risk.  These can feel awkward, whether you’re setting up a socially distanced lunch with friends or trying to plan a vacation with your family. There are terrific resources out there for what to cover in these conversations. I recommend this article: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_form_a_pandemic_pod

And I also recommend practicing how you want to approach having the dialogue itself. Regular readers of this blog know that I am a proponent of practice over winging it, and that’s most crucial when the conversation has high stakes—the outcome really matters.

It can feel easier to assume that everyone has the same standard of care about COVID, that we all make the same decisions about mask wearing and  social distancing and what it means to minimize risk exposure. But of course that isn’t true. And avoiding the conversation isn’t practical.

In most conversations, there are two tracks running at the same time: the task and the relationship. If you are having a conversation with your best friend about how to merge your two families’ bubbles, you want to take care of your relationship with your friend and sort out the intricacies of the merging to keep everyone safe and prevent misunderstanding.

 
But you can approach these conversations with deliberate intention. A very helpful intention might be “to make her feel that we are on the same team,” or “to get his ideas about the plan.”  Choosing a deliberate intention means we are subverting our default intentions, which in a case like this one might be “to defend my position,” to tell her she’s wrong,” or “to get what I need.”

Think specifically about your intention. Imagine how you want the person you care about to feel, and let that outcome determine how you approach the conversation. Remember that you are managing the relationship and trying to complete a task—leaning too far one way or the other can hurt feelings or leave important topics undiscussed.

One meaning of to incorporate is to make physical, to embody.

When we learn something in our brain, we have to figure out a way to bring it into our understanding, our embodied knowledge.

For example, you can watch YouTube videos for days about the perfect golf swing, but until you start to incorporate the information, you aren’t any closer to playing better golf.

Being a clearer communicator means:
1) developing self-awareness of your communication patterns and how they affect your ability to communicate,

2) embodying or incorporating that knowledge in your body and voice, and

3) practicing this awareness and alignment on an ongoing basis.

In other words, it’s one thing to know something in your brain. It’s something else altogether to be able to incorporate it into your body.

I want to make sure you know this important tip:

You can turn off self-view on Zoom and most other video platforms. And you should.

When you’re logging into the call, there is usually a chance to check yourself out before you join the other participants.  Use this opportunity—make sure there’s nothing in your teeth, and that your hair and background are the way you want. Then join the call, and turn the view of yourself off. 

There’s no other circumstance in our lives when we talk to other people while looking at our own faces, and it’s distracting. Having to look at and assess yourself while you’re engaging with others adds to Zoom fatigue, too.

So do yourself a favor, and get acquainted with the “hide self view” function!

I got to be part of an online workshop this week with hundreds of educators, kindergarten through university. These dedicated teachers were looking for ways to engage their students online in this new, unsettling world we’re all living in. One of my favorite aspects of the workshop was the incredibly generous way that the teachers contributed in the ongoing chat thread—asking questions, offering solutions, resources, and ideas that they had tried. 

One topic that came up was how to replicate the casual conversations, the container of relationship, that we take for granted when we spend time with other people every day in the same space. “I used to greet my students at the door every day and have a little time to check in with them; what do I do on Zoom?”  

The answers here are going to vary from teacher to teacher. The personalities, circumstances, students, and subjects of each teacher will determine what these rituals and routines look like, just like they do in physical classrooms. But it’s important to think this through, give it a dry run, before the first day of school.

Here are the questions I would start with:

What will it feel like to enter my learning space? Will they come all at once (be let in at the same time from a waiting room), or can they enter as they arrive?  What will they see and hear as they come in?

Where am I? Am I in my classroom, a dedicated space in my home, or somewhere else?

When I think about the important routines and rituals of the day, what can I keep? What will need to be changed? How can I keep the essence of the ritual if we aren’t in the same room?

As a student, what should I expect from this class? How do I know what’s coming next, what behavior is expected? Will it be obvious when I’m supposed to speak or listen?

How will I end the class? There probably won’t be a bell or announcements, they won’t need to pack up their stuff, so what will we do to close out our time together?

Please let me know what you’re planning and learning as you think through these and all the other questions that are coming up as we approach the school year. Ignite CSP is excited to be a resource for the educators who are on the front lines.      

“But we already know how to do this! It’s like starting over.”

Actors, directors, teachers, trainers, salespeople, coaches, ministers, tour guides, team leaders, managers, boards of directors…people in so many industries are having the feeling that just a few months ago they were on top of their game. Now, in order to do the most basic part of their jobs, they (we) have to master some form of technology to connect them to other people.

And it is more work.

There’s the choosing of the new technology, and then you have to learn it, and then you have to make sure all the people you work with can use it…and ugh it is such a hassle. 

But doing this work on the front end will pay off.

Confession time: I am not a “let’s think it all through ahead of time” person, but my husband is. Charlie is meticulous, while I’m always looking for the shortcut. I remember one summer before we were married, we were planning to go for a hike. I was impatient to leave, and Charlie was (to my mind) taking FOREVER to get all the stuff together for this little day hike. At one point I said, “What are you doing now?,” and when he answered that he was getting big trash bags to carry with us in case it rained, I scoffed.

Well, you can see where this story is going. The hike was lovely until giant clouds rolled in and started to absolutely dump rain on us. It was a big summer afternoon thunderstorm, and without the trash bags he had brought, we would both have been soaked. 

Another, more pertinent Charlie story: the theatre he runs, North Carolina Stage Company, is closed right now, like almost every other theatre in the US. But he was thinking for several months about how he could be in touch with the subscribers and patrons. He could have held a Zoom call from our living room. It would have been easy. He could have recorded a video and sent it in the newsletter. That would have checked the box.

But he wanted to bring the audience into the theatre, and give them a taste of what we have all been missing. The staff sent out invitations to our patrons, and on the designated night, they dialed into the Zoom link. They were welcomed into the “lobby” with a greeting and a notice of when the “doors” would open. At 7:30, the white “lobby” screen vanished, and we could feel the event beginning as the image on the screen changed. There was music playing in the theatre, and we could see the stage, still set with the furniture from the last play, that closed before it ever opened. 

Faces of audience members began to pop in, smiling and looking for people they knew.  Staff and board members said hello, and patrons unmuted to greet each other. It felt like we were mingling before a play. It was exciting. It didn’t feel like “just another Zoom call,” and here’s why.

Charlie had worked for three days with two designers, masked and socially distanced, to set up lights, sound, two cameras, and an enormous, 17-foot wide screen. He recruited a test audience of family and friends to try out the technology before the event. One staff member served as the stage manager, working behind the scenes to mute mics, monitor the waiting room, and troubleshoot. Another staff member handled questions and tech issues from audience members. The executive director and associate artistic director planned portions of the program.

The program Charlie designed was simple: he wanted to connect with the people who care about NC Stage and tell them how things were going. But he also wanted to remind them of what they love about live theatre—and the only way he could do that was to bring them back into the space, to see the stage. And in order for them to really be reminded, he had to make sure the technology would enhance his message. 

The cameras gave the audience different perspectives. The microphone ensured they could hear. The lights were designed for the cameras, not for stage lighting. And the giant screen? That was crucial because this was where the audience showed up. Laptops were connected to two projectors that sent all those smiling faces onto the screen, situated in the front seats of the center section. Charlie could stand on stage, look out, and see those faces, of supporters and donors and subscribers, of people who have sat in those seats season after season. Those faces are the reason for the event, for the work, for the theatre itself.

The point here is this: As you’re pivoting your work to the online world, be like Charlie. Think through what you’re going to need. Test it out ahead of time. Don’t settle for “good enough.” If you discover something isn’t working well, be ready to change it.

We may be doing this for a good long while, and you deserve to show up at your best. 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

Many of us probably heard some version of this playground chant as children. Meant to encourage us to let name-calling roll off our backs, the rhyme reinforces the idea that only physical violence hurts us.

This is not only patently false, it also gives a free pass to those who revel in using words to hurt others. They get a double-bonus: they can bully people verbally, then tell them they shouldn’t be hurt since it was “only words.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (also known as AOC)  stepped up to the microphone in Congress last week to call out this behavior. Representative Ted Yoho accosted Rep. Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of the Capitol, seemingly deciding this was the appropriate time and place to let her know how he felt about her recent remarks about the connection between poverty and crime. He called her “disgusting,” and “out of her mind,” then when she said his remarks were rude, he walked away, adding the coda, “Fucking bitch.”

Those last two words are getting most of the attention, but I’m interested in the whole exchange. The terms “disgusting” and “out of your mind” serve to dehumanize AOC, to place her, her opinions, and her work lower than that of Yoho’s. Once he has done that, it’s a short step to calling her a fucking bitch, not a term one reserves for esteemed colleagues across the aisle. According to AOC, this was the first time the two Congresspeople ever spoke to each other. 

To state the obvious, words hurt. They demean, they belittle, and in this case, they send the signal that women (perhaps especially a young woman of color), should stay out of the men’s world of politics. These words are wielded as a weapon.

Make no mistake. Verbal abuse is violence, and words shape how we see and understand other people.