The conference organizer in Linz was apologetic. “I know the lighting is not ideal,” she said as she walked me into the venue, a modern event space in a converted industrial building. “We tried to get them to add a spot for you, but the ceiling is too high and the fixtures are built in. I hope it is okay.”
She was clearly expecting me to be disappointed. Or frustrated. Or accommodating in that resigned way where you say it is fine while clearly communicating through body language that it is not fine at all.
Instead, I asked if I could have twenty minutes alone in the space before the setup crew arrived.
She looked surprised. “Of course. But there is not much you can do about the lighting.”
She was wrong about that. There was quite a lot I could do. Not about the ceiling fixtures — those were indeed permanent and immovable. But about everything else. The placement of my performance position relative to those fixtures. The angle of the portable floor lamps the venue had in storage. The arrangement of the seating relative to where the available light was strongest. The position of my prop table. The direction I would face.
In twenty minutes, I had reconfigured my performance environment from “not ideal” to functional. Not perfect. But functional enough that the lighting worked with me rather than against me. When the organizer came back, she looked at the room and said, “That looks completely different.”
It did. And the reason it looked different was not that I had done anything technically impressive. It was that I had treated the space as mine.
The Default Mindset
The default mindset for most performers who work corporate events, conferences, and private functions is guest. You are a guest in someone else’s venue. You are grateful to be there. You accommodate whatever they have set up. You perform within whatever constraints exist. You do not want to be difficult. You do not want to be the demanding performer who makes the event coordinator’s life harder.
I understand this mindset because I lived in it for a long time. As someone who came to performance from the business world, I was acutely aware of the client-service-provider dynamic. The company was paying for the event. The venue was their choice. The setup was their decision. I was there to perform within whatever framework they provided, and asking for changes felt like overstepping.
This mindset is polite. It is professional in a customer-service sense. And it is absolutely wrong.
It is wrong because the performance environment directly determines the quality of the performance, and the quality of the performance is exactly what the client is paying for. When I accept a suboptimal lighting arrangement because I do not want to seem demanding, I am not being accommodating. I am delivering a worse product. The client is getting less than what they paid for because I was too polite to adjust the conditions that would have allowed me to deliver at my best.
The Office Analogy
The reframe that changed everything for me was simple: this stage is my office. My workplace. The place where I do my job.
If someone showed you to an office where the desk was facing the wall, the chair was broken, the monitor was at the wrong height, and the window blinds were open and creating screen glare, you would not sit down and start working without changing anything. You would adjust the desk. Fix the chair. Raise the monitor. Close the blinds. Not because you are demanding or difficult, but because you need your workspace to function correctly in order to do your job well.
The performance space is the same thing. It is a workspace. It has requirements. When those requirements are not met, the work suffers. Adjusting the workspace is not being a diva. It is being professional.
Dan Harlan’s entire approach to the physical environment in Tarbell Lesson 83 reflects this ownership mentality. He does not talk about hoping the venue has good lighting or wishing the stage were configured differently. He talks about controllable aspects. About decisions you make. About how to look at your set from the audience perspective before performing. The language is active, not passive. You adjust the lighting. You position yourself against a wall or corner. You redirect available lamps. You work wide, not deep. You find the best configuration within whatever constraints exist.
This is the language of someone who owns the space. Not in a legal sense. Not in an arrogant sense. In a professional sense. This is where I work. I need it to function.
What Ownership Looks Like in Practice
For me, the ownership mentality manifests as a pre-show ritual that I perform at every venue. It takes between fifteen and thirty minutes, and I build it into my arrival time for every event.
First, I stand in the audience position and look at the performance area. Not from backstage. Not from the wings. From where the audience will be sitting. I look at what they will see. Is there a window behind my performance position that will silhouette me? Is there a bright emergency exit sign that will compete for attention? Is there visual clutter — stacked chairs, audio equipment cases, unused lecterns — in the audience’s sightline?
These are things that the event coordinator may not notice because they are thinking about logistics, not about visual composition. But the audience will see them, and every piece of visual clutter in the performance area is a micro-distraction that pulls attention away from me.
Second, I check the lighting from the audience position. Is the performance area brighter than the seating area? If not, what can I adjust? Can I turn off some overhead fixtures? Can I redirect a portable lamp? Can I reposition my performance spot to stand under the brightest available fixture?
Third, I walk to the performance position and do the hand test I described in the previous post. I find the hot spot. I mark it. I know where center is.
Fourth, I set up my prop table and walk the route between my table, my performance position, and any location where I will interact with audience members. I check for cables on the floor. Uneven surfaces. Steps I might not see under stage lighting. Anything that could trip me up, literally or figuratively, during the performance.
Fifth, I test the microphone while standing in my performance position, speaking at the volume and tempo I will use during the actual show. I listen for echo, feedback zones, and dead spots.
This entire process is the equivalent of adjusting your office chair, positioning your monitor, and making sure your tools are where you need them. It is mundane. It is not creative. And it is one of the highest-impact things I do.
The Permission Problem
Many performers, especially those who are relatively new or who work in corporate contexts, feel that they need permission to adjust the venue. They wait for someone to ask, “Is there anything you need?” And if nobody asks, they assume the answer is supposed to be no.
I learned to stop waiting for permission and start communicating expectations. Before the event, during the planning conversations, I include a short paragraph about my technical requirements. Lighting, sound, staging arrangement. Nothing outrageous. Just the basics.
Most event coordinators are relieved when I do this. It turns out that they are accustomed to performers who say nothing about technical requirements and then perform poorly because the environment was wrong. An event coordinator who knows in advance that I need a front-facing light, a prop table at a specific position, and the house lights adjustable has a concrete task list. They prefer concrete task lists to vague anxiety about whether the performer will be happy.
And when I arrive at the venue and start my pre-show walkthrough, the coordinators almost always respond positively. Not because I am making demands. Because I am clearly someone who takes the job seriously. Someone who cares about delivering a good experience. Someone who is professional.
The ownership mentality communicates professionalism. The guest mentality communicates passivity.
The Psychological Effect on Performance
There is a deeper reason why the ownership mentality matters, beyond the practical improvements to lighting and staging. It changes your psychological state.
When you walk onto a stage that you have inspected, adjusted, and claimed, you feel different than when you walk onto a stage that belongs to someone else and you are merely borrowing it. The difference is subtle but real. You stand differently. You move differently. You project differently.
It is the difference between walking into your own kitchen and walking into a stranger’s kitchen. In your own kitchen, you know where everything is. You move confidently. You reach for things without looking. In a stranger’s kitchen, you are tentative. You open the wrong cabinet. You move carefully to avoid bumping into things you are not sure about.
The pre-show walkthrough transforms the stranger’s kitchen into your kitchen. By the time the audience arrives, you have already spent time in the space. You have already looked at it from every angle. You have already walked the routes you will walk during the show. You know where the hot spot is. You know where the cables are. You know which light switch controls which fixture.
This familiarity changes your body language in ways the audience perceives even if they cannot articulate them. A performer who owns the space looks confident, grounded, authoritative. A performer who is uncertain about the space looks tentative, distracted, slightly off-balance. The audience reads these cues instantly and unconsciously, and they form an impression of your competence before you perform a single effect.
The Hotel Room Connection
My practice in hotel rooms connects directly to this ownership mentality. Every hotel room is a stranger’s space. Every night, a different room, a different layout, a different light, a different mirror position. And every night, I spend a few minutes making it mine. I move the desk lamp. I clear the surface I will use for practice. I position my materials. I create a workspace within the generic hotel room.
This habit, developed over hundreds of nights on the road as a consultant, turned out to be perfect preparation for the ownership mentality I now apply to performance venues. The skill is the same: walk into an unfamiliar space, assess it quickly, adjust what you can, mark what you need, and then work within it with confidence.
The hotel rooms taught me that you do not need much time to claim a space. Five minutes of deliberate attention is worth more than an hour of passively accepting whatever the space offers. The same principle applies to a conference room in Klagenfurt, a ballroom in Vienna, or a restaurant back room in Innsbruck. Fifteen minutes of active ownership transforms your relationship with the space.
The Client Perspective
I want to address something that my consulting background makes me acutely aware of. Some performers worry that arriving early, inspecting the venue, and making adjustments will annoy the client. That it will seem fussy or high-maintenance.
In my experience, the opposite is true. Clients notice when you arrive early and take the space seriously. They notice when you test the microphone and adjust the lighting. They notice when you walk the performance area and mark positions. And what they notice communicates something valuable: this person is a professional who cares about the quality of what they deliver.
I have never had a client complain about my pre-show preparation. I have had multiple clients comment positively on it. One event organizer in Vienna told me that she could tell the performance was going to be good because of how thoroughly I prepared the space. She was right. The performance was good, in part because the space was set up to support it.
The ownership mentality is not about ego. It is not about control. It is about the straightforward professional principle that the quality of your work depends on the quality of your working conditions, and ensuring the quality of your working conditions is your responsibility, not someone else’s.
This stage is my office. My workplace. The place where I do my job. And I am going to make sure it is set up correctly before I start working.