Move Mountains with your Mind

NEWSLETTER #2 February 2023

Making theatre in Margate.

A few years ago, when I was Joint Artistic Director of Paines Plough, we were exploring the idea of building a pop-up theatre and looking at where we might tour it to.

On a tip off, our Producer and I set off one wet and windy November morning to visit the once-thriving seaside destination of Margate.

After two hours of slogging soggily around the streets, we escaped the sleet and the seagulls and sheltered in a coffee shop.

“It’s pointless”, I said to her. “There’s no theatre here. No one goes to the theatre.”

To which she replied; “It’s fantastic. There’s no theatre here. Everyone is going to come to our theatre.”

Where I saw disinterest, absence and futility, she saw opportunity, potential and a need waiting to be fulfilled.

Same town different view.

The difference lay in our perspectives.

And perspective informs behaviour.

At work as in life, one of our greatest challenges is to continue to turn up when the going gets tough. And checking in on our perspective is one of the best ways I’ve found to nudge ourselves towards the behaviour we’d prefer to see.

As creatives we face the fear of unoriginality.

If our perspective is that our ideas need to be new, we deny ourselves the chance to stay on the bus long enough to pass through imitation and reach originality.

As leaders we climb a mountain every day.

If our perspective is that mountains are supposed to be easy to climb, we feel defeated when we lose our way, hit bad weather or climb down to try again tomorrow.

As people our work competes with the rest of our priorities.

If our perspective is that our work is the only source of meaning in our lives, we’ll be unmoored when it no longer fulfils us in the way it once did and we will regret what we reprioritised along the way.

I recently decorated my new office and dug out a framed poem I’d long since forgotten but whose first lines and subsequent meaning lay more claim to the shape of my perspective than I think I’d previously realised: “If you think you are beaten, you are.”

The poem is called State of Mind.

Our state of mind, our perspective, shapes our thoughts. Thoughts become words, words become deeds. Deeds become habits. Habits become behaviour. Behaviour becomes character.

In many ways, how we see is how we behave is how we become.

Or put another way, when you change the way you look at things the things you look at change.

Our lives are no more or less than the accumulation of that to which we pay attention.

And If we can shift how we pay attention, our perspective, we can move mountains with our minds.

And make theatre in Margate.

Inwards, onwards and upwards.

George

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