I recently taught a workshop for those in leadership positions within a human services agency. The workshop was titled “Emerging as a Leader in Your Field” and the main message I wanted to get across was that the participants could not only serve as leaders within the organization where they work, but they could emerge as leaders within their respective fields.
One of the overarching themes that we kept coming back to during the workshop was the shift in perspective that I was inviting them to make. Instead of seeing their job as identical to their life’s work, I invited them to see their life’s work as a larger, more significant, truly transcendent mission or purpose. And their job, then, would be one laboratory that serves that life’s work.
Our life’s work (or if you prefer another term, you can think of it as a larger purpose, a personal mission, or one’s reason for being) is our primary commitment and our principal means of leaving a legacy on the planet. That may sound grand but I believe that each one of us has life’s work that we have chosen, even if it feels like it was chosen for us, or, perhaps, if you’re really lucky, you feel that it has chosen you.
We are so used to thinking of our job as our life’s work that we often don’t realize the limitations that that view can place on us. Also, if we view our job as the be-all, end-all of our personal mission, then we place an undue amount of pressure on that particular space, which actually limits our creativity and our opportunities to explore our talents and potential impact.
I think that we should view our job not as the primary space in which we perform our life’s work (although it can be), but as a laboratory–a space where we can work, conduct research, and gain skills, all of which we can then carry into other contexts and share with others.
Our job can be the laboratory or workshop where can:
Experience
Explore
Experiment
And, then, whatever we gain from our activities in that particular space can translate into important bits of knowledge, nuggets of best practices, or even questions to further guide our research as we generate knowledge that we, and others who do similar work, can put to use.
I think that we should view our job not as the primary space in which we perform our life’s work (although it can be), but as a laboratory–a space where we can work, conduct research, and gain skills, all of which we can then carry into other contexts and share with others.
I’ll use my own life and work as an example to highlight what I mean. And as I write that, I notice that I am, in fact, doing something very “meta” here: by drawing an example gleaned from my own work, I am also, in fact, offering an example that I was also able to discover within my work. In other words, the process whereby I draw my example is yet another example of what I mean! I hope that makes sense!
Lessons from the dance studio
I have the privilege of owning a dance studio where I have worked with students of all ages (4-adult) for twenty years! (Not that I am old enough to have done that for twenty years.) I can view myself as merely one small dance teacher, in one small studio, in one small town, where my impact is limited just to those who walk through my door. Or I can view my studio as one space in order to fulfill my larger life’s work which is to advance how we teach individuals to perform in the world. And that broad vision is so inspiring to me!
Every student that I work with, I, of course, view as an individual. But I also view them as a tiny microcosm of the larger world. Every student of mine represents a kind of “every student” and therefore, any insights that I draw from my experience with them can translate into larger concepts that I can then apply to and inform my interactions with other students. I can even offer those insights to other dance teachers who can then incorporate any knowledge that I gain into their own teaching.
Furthermore, any insights I gain from the teaching of dance can inform the other kinds of teaching that I do (at the college, in corporate trainings, in workshops). And, if given the opportunity to share those insights with others who also do those kinds of work, I can happily notice that whatever I gained in one tiny, limited situation with one student, can actually have a tremendous ripple effect across multiple contexts and circumstances.
What one little dancer teaches me, can have a broad and positive impact on the larger world.
Shifts in perspective
To make this magic happen, where the little and limited becomes big and broad, I just need to make the following shifts in perspective:
- I need to view my life and work as having a much broader potential impact.
- I need to think of my job as one laboratory or workshop where I can experience, explore, and experiment in ways that provide me with knowledge that is:
- Translatable
- Transmittable
- Transcendent
- I need to view every interaction, no matter how small, as a chance to glean insights that apply in much broader ways.
- I need to see myself not as one person, doing one job, but as a potential leader gaining knowledge that I can ten share with others and the world at large.
Now, it’s your turn:
- What is your life’s work that is much larger than your job?
- In what ways does your job provide you with space to experience, explore, and experiment in order to gain new knowledge?
- What knowledge have you already gained that is translatable, transmittable, and transcendent? (In other words, its power goes way beyond the situation in which it became apparent to you.)
- Where can you share what you’ve gained? (Workshops, articles, publications, professional development training, etc?) Yes! You can do this!
The Power of Performance 