I spent most of my professional life learning to project a particular version of myself.
Controlled. Measured. Never the most animated person in the room. Confident enough that people didn’t need to worry about me, calm enough that they could think about the problem instead of about me. This is useful in consulting. In a room full of stressed executives making expensive decisions, a consultant who radiates composure is someone they want on their side. The composure is professional currency.
It turns out composure is terrible on stage. Or more precisely: composure that is also distance is terrible on stage. And for the first several years of performing, I couldn’t tell where composure ended and distance began.
The Persona That Serves You in One Context
Professional identities are real. They’re not performances in the pejorative sense — they’re functional adaptations to environment. In twenty years of consulting work, I developed genuine habits of self-presentation that served me extremely well.
Not showing uncertainty before I’d gathered enough information. Not reacting visibly before I’d processed. Not being the first to speak after something surprising is said in a room. Maintaining facial neutrality as a default. These aren’t pretenses — they’re useful ways of moving through professional space.
But every performance context I’ve worked in — close-up, stage, keynote — runs on almost the opposite currency. Openness is better than control. Visible reaction is better than processing. Speaking before you’ve fully worked out what you’re going to say is sometimes exactly right. Being the most animated person in the room is often the job.
The habits I’d built over two decades were running interference.
What It Looked Like on Stage
My early performances were technically competent in a way that probably looked strange from the outside.
I presented effects clearly. I spoke crisply. I managed the pacing adequately. But there was something inert about how I moved through the material. I was, in retrospect, consulting at the audience. Delivering information about the experience rather than being in the experience. A presentational style built for boardrooms applied to a performance context that needed something warmer and less composed.
I watched a video of one of those early shows — someone had filmed a keynote appearance from the back of the room — and I could see it. A man standing at the front of a room, doing things correctly, radiating competence and distance in roughly equal measure. The kind of performer you’d give a professional review to. The kind of performer you would not necessarily tell your friends about.
Keith Johnstone writes about status as a continuous negotiation in performance — not just between performers and audience, but within the self. The person who maintains high status through emotional control and measured reactions is doing something fundamentally different from the person who allows themselves to be affected by what’s happening in the room. Both have value in different contexts. On stage, the second one tends to be more interesting.
The Specific Problem of Analytical Thinking
For performers who come from analytical professions — consulting, law, finance, engineering — there’s a particular failure mode worth naming.
We evaluate in real time. It’s a trained habit. Something happens, we’re already assessing it, comparing it to the plan, identifying the delta. This is valuable in strategy work and genuinely counterproductive in performance. The moment you’re assessing how an effect landed, you’ve stepped outside the experience. You’re no longer in the room with the audience — you’re above the room, running diagnostics.
Audiences can see this. Not as a thought process, but as a quality of presence. The performer who is assessing while performing looks, to the audience, like they’re somewhere else. And they are. They’re in the mental space of professional analysis, which is a different room entirely from the one the audience is in.
The challenge for analytically trained performers isn’t eliminating the analytical habit. It’s learning to quarantine it. The debrief happens after the show, not during it. During the show, you are not the analyst. You are the performer.
This is easier to say than to do.
The Vulnerability Problem
The consulting mask also protected me from vulnerability, and vulnerability is load-bearing in performance.
When you allow yourself to be genuinely affected by what’s happening — when the audience’s reaction lands and you let it show, when something goes unexpectedly right and you let yourself be pleased by it — you create an emotional transaction with the audience. They see someone being real, and they respond to realness.
For someone with my professional background, this felt like losing control. Showing genuine delight or genuine surprise or genuine concern in a professional context signals that you hadn’t anticipated the situation, that you’re responding rather than managing. That’s a bad signal in consulting. It’s a very good signal on stage.
I had to learn — and “learn” is the right word, because it required deliberate practice over a fairly long time — to let things land. To let the reaction on my face happen before I managed it. To resist the impulse toward professional neutrality and allow the show to affect me the way it affected the audience.
This is not the same as being artificially effusive or manufacturing enthusiasm. That’s a different problem. It’s about allowing the genuine response to actually surface before the composed professional instinct suppresses it.
What Changed
The shift didn’t come from a single insight. It came from accumulation — enough repetitions in performance contexts where I could observe what was working and what wasn’t, combined with enough reading and watching of performers I admired.
What I noticed about the performers I found most compelling was that they seemed unconditionally present. They were not evaluating the show while they were in it. They were not maintaining distance as a safety protocol. They were simply there — fully available to whatever the room was doing.
Derren Brown writes about conviction: the performer’s complete inhabitation of the experience they’re offering. This is not technique. It’s a relationship you develop with your material and with the people you’re performing for. You decide, beforehand, that what’s happening is genuinely worth your full presence, and then you actually give it.
The consulting mask was useful. In consulting rooms, it still is. But I had to learn to leave it in the bag.
The first time I allowed a genuine reaction to happen on stage without managing it — real surprise, real pleasure, real visible delight at something the audience did — felt like falling. It turned out to be the opposite: finally landing.