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Harriet Beveridge – How to Focus on The Performance that Drives The Result You Want to Achieve

Written by Harriet Beveridge, Associate Director at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?

Harriet is set to return to the Edinburgh Fringe festival for a fourth time come August. The below article is an insight in to how Harriet utilises key Will it Make The Boat Go Faster? performance ingredients to deal with the uncertainty of stand up comedy, where she draws parallels to business leadership.

I’M ABOUT TO DIE ON MY BACKSIDE. I ADMIT IT’S NOT GUARANTEED, BUT IT IS HIGHLY LIKELY.

I’m taking my comedy show ‘Stand Up and Thrive’ to the Edinburgh Fringe in August and the statistics are savage:

Q: Average size of audience?

A: 4

Q: Number of competing shows for punters to choose from?

A: About 4000

Q: Chances of a reviewer even coming to your show, let alone reviewing it?

A: Tiny!

For every Award-winning breakthrough act you’ll see on TV come Autumn, there will be thousands of others nursing post-Edinburgh debts, squashed dreams (and haggis-kebab-induced expanded waistbands).

I think the Fringe is therefore a strangely close parallel to running a business. The chances of achieving your goals, be they delivering a project on time and budget, or hitting a sales target, or building customer loyalty – they are all similarly uncertain.

This is where I find the idea of ‘Performance vs Results’ from Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? immensely helpful.

Ben and the crew made a significant distinction between results and performance:

RESULTS: The End Product

PERFORMANCE: The Approach We Follow To Get That End Result

Get Curious About Your Performance Recipe:

In The Book, we use the everyday example of baking a cake (result) by using a recipe and ingredients (performance). We can’t control the result, but we can control our performance.

 

I have absolutely no control over my audiences’ or reviewers’ reaction (result). It’s tempting to think I do when I nail a gig, just as it’s tempting to think we are the world’s best exec when we nail a meeting. But we don’t…

I have seen excellent comics deliver a world class set to rapturous applause one night, then die on their backsides in front of stony faces the next. I have walked out of gigs having laughed so hard I’ve split my trousers – and read reviews the following day slating the comic’s performance.

In the same way, your sales folks can deliver an excellent pitch, but still lose the deal. Your project might have a world class scrum master, but still overrun. You may have an incredible product that your customer overlooks as they’re delirious from soaring temperatures in a heatwave. (**she says, while writing this in a 35-degree study whilst immersing her feet in a bucket of cold water**).

 

I have seen excellent comics deliver a world class set to rapturous applause one night, then die on their backsides in front of stony faces the next. I have walked out of gigs having laughed so hard I’ve split my trousers – and read reviews the following day slating the comic’s performance.

Hang on a minute! you might be thinking… ‘Isn’t this rather defeatist? After all, didn’t Ben and the crew achieve their Crazy Goal of winning an Olympic Gold medal? ’

Yes, they did – because they let go of trying to control winning gold.  Instead, they poured their focus and effort into optimising their performance. ‘Control the controllables’ is a laughably simple idea that is laughably uncommon in practice.

It feels incredibly liberating to let the pressure of ‘the result’ go. People often ask me ‘isn’t it terrifying to do stand up?’ I’ve found that accepting the inevitability that there are forces outside my control, that I will therefore definitely, absolutely go down horrendously sometimes, means the fear lessens. Failure will happen. It is part of the deal. Name me any comic and I guarantee they have died on their backside.

Trying to control the uncontrollable will only make matters worse. If I obsess about the audience laughing (result), I’ll turn out a rigid gig. If I focus on my performance on the other handon writing excellent jokes, delivering with a smile and eye contact, putting people at ease, at spotting curveballs and hecklers… then I’ll actually maximise the chances of the audience laughing.

What are the ingredients and recipe that will maximise the chances of you achieving the results you want? Perhaps you already know, perhaps you don’t. Either way, getting genuinely curious will reap dividends. If I get curious about my performance at each gig (curious, not judgmental) then I can spot what’s working and what isn’t and figure out how to improve my performance the following night. I will be taking my trusty little pink notebook, veteran of 3 Edinburgh Fringes, up North. I’ll video each show and watch it back and jot down answers to the crew’s three simple questions: where did I perform well? Where could I have performed better? What will I do (differently) tomorrow night? (And yes it is painful to watch yourself on video, but this is where it’s particularly important to get curious about the recipe, not judgemental.)

What Are The Results You Really Want?

I’ve jumped straight to the ‘performance’ bit of ‘performance vs results’ but ‘results’ benefit from attention too. It is super tempting to pick the results we feel we ‘should’ want and what everyone else is celebrating. My unthinking goals for Edinburgh would be: sell out shows, rave reviews, maximum laughs-per-minute.

What are the ‘unthinking’ goals in your industry? Double your revenue? Be the customer’s ‘number one choice’?

But have a proper mull. What results do you really want?

Watch Harriet speak here on how you can focus on the performance that’s driving the result you want to see:

Ben and the crew got really good at NOT following the herd. They ignored ‘normal’ measures of success – like being good at circuit training, or achieving certain statistics in the GB rowing camp just prior to the Olympics – because they were very clear on the result that mattered to them, an Olympic Gold medal.

My personal goal is to help folks learn science-backed wellbeing strategies, using humour as a way of getting the message across. I am frustrated that wellbeing and corporate success are often presented as an ‘either/or’ (‘either you make it in the boardroom OR you have mental health, the choice is yours!’). Within that goal I want to hone my corporate keynote about achieving sustainable results.

If I measure ‘success’ in laughs alone I’ll be missing my genuine goal. If I get bent out of shape by a poor review made by a reviewer who’s looking for something politically edgy, I’ll be missing my genuine goal. If I get upset by the yawning audience member who only came in because it’s raining, or a heckler who has a bingo card for making comedians cry, I’ll be missing my genuine goal.

What tempting measures of illusory success might be distracting you from what’s truly important?

Conversely, if my audience walks away having laughed and learned, that would be utterly brilliant, but I need to hold that desired result gently and concentrate instead on my little pink book of performance curiosity.

And haggis kebabs obviously.

They let go of trying to control winning gold. Instead, they poured their focus and effort into optimising their performance. ‘Control the controllables’ is a laughably simple idea that is laughably uncommon in practice.

If you’d like to learn science-backed wellbeing strategies whilst laughing your socks off, you can see Harriet perform ‘Stand Up and Thrive’ from 5th – 12th August at Greenside Infirmary St. The show is in aid of The Samaritans, get your tickets HERE!

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