part0006

Imagine if the ‘you’ in your workplace and the ‘you’ in your life outside those doors got together and became soulmates. Imagine that ‘lifework’ was a real word and it meant ‘the connection between your work life and your outside life’. Imagine what a favour you’d be doing your organisation if the ‘outside’ you made more than an occasional guest appearance and showed up a lot more. How vivid and inspiring the world of work would be if you dared to be a bit more you !

Performing as you harnesses your life force: your experience and wisdom, your talents and gifts – the ones you acknowledge and use and the ones that are waiting to reawaken; it harnesses those moments when you feel in your element, and when you’ve exercised resilience and courage; it harnesses your creative energy and the sources of your inspiration.

It takes awareness and some practice, but you already have everything you need to perform as you and enjoy the liberating and lucrative results. All you need is to give yourself permission to bring more of you to the table. This book shows you how to do just that.

Think of me as the ‘coach in your pocket’: I’ll prep you and get you focused. I’ll free you up to be more authentic, more confident and more credible. I’ll help calm and centre you when you’re feeling under stress. I’ll challenge the stories that no longer serve you and help you craft new ones that are much more accurate and potent. I’ll remind you to reflect and restore in order to perform at your best. I’ll help keep you receptive, responsive and alert to your wonderful aliveness. I’ll help you get unstuck when you forget that you have choices for impact beyond those in your default zone. I’ll liberate your voice for more effective expression. I’ll support you in manifesting your vision, and I’ll be a mirror to reflect your strengths and unique gifts. I hope you feel a big heart coming at you to fortify, support, nudge, challenge and applaud you as you step into your fullest self and shine in every role you play.

Here’s the deal – this is what you’ll get:

Growing up in New York, I was nourished on a diet of great performances. From Bernstein to Baryshnikov to Broadway, these performances ignited and inspired me so much that I entered the world of dance and theatre and spent years directing artists to perform brilliantly. Now I’m a performance coach on the business stage. Performance is not just in the domain of the arts. We are all performers, and everyone wants to perform their best in life. All the world is a stage, and the greatest role you ever get to play is that of you . When you perform as you, you connect first to yourself, deeply and truthfully, and then to the world.

Over the last decade I’ve coached thousands of wonderful, smart, talented women just like you. From that intimate, privileged vantage point I’ve witnessed your humanity, your gifts and your transformative ‘aha’ moments. Maybe I’ve worked with you in person, but chances are I haven’t had the pleasure of working with you, and that’s the reason I wrote this book. I’d like to reach you. I’m on your side. I want you to move yourself forward to enjoy greater performance, fulfilment and service – for you, your organisation and your life.

Being and bringing more of ourselves through the door is a challenge, a quest and a joy for both men and women, and everything in this book will most certainly resonate with men too. (Men, you are hereby invited to read this book!) But I have put women centre stage in writing this because their ‘me time’ is at such a premium, because they can sometimes be hard of hearing when it comes to messages of self-permission – so this book dials it up good and loud – and because, let’s face it, there’s a bigger history of male templates around leading and influencing, and women could do with a bit of template-crafting of their own.

Contradictions, politics and ever-changing perspectives on gender equality and the advancing of female talent abound, from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to Michelle Obama’s ‘It’s a lie, you can’t have it all’. Nevertheless, there are some consistent realities for women: the aspiration for fulfilment in work, the ambition for personal and professional growth, and the economic necessity of single-working-woman and single-working-mother households as well as two-earner households.

Wherever you are on this spectrum, I hope we can agree that organisations and their cultures can be healthier, happier and more sustainable if the people in them feel supported, valued and purposeful. It would help to have a lot more women as players in this enlightened leadership field. We need their voices and visibility to manifest this story. But that on its own is not enough. Women could also use some space to build a bit more muscle. Here’s what I mean.

When I was thirteen, I decided I wanted to be a ballerina. At that age, I was already late to the party for becoming a professional dancer, as there was a lot of technique to acquire. I remember seeing boys who were considerably older but got promoted in performances much sooner. They caught up faster. Why? Because they had a muscular head start. They didn’t have to build muscle strength so much as refine that strength into expressive technique.

My thirteen-year-old fury went something like this: ‘They waltz in here and get all the attention just because they can lift us up!’ In the ballet world, boys had more muscle so they did the lifting, and in those days they also did most of the choreographing.

I love coaching men as well as women, and of course men will benefit from this book too ! But, like dancers, women need to build some muscle so they can focus on how they want to express themselves authentically in the roles they play. This book offers women especially a ‘rehearsal space’ where that can happen.