“Tomorrow hundreds of people will be watching you on the most important day of your life. Try to remember this: It’s not a performance; it’s an experience.”
In other words, we think life is a performance because, well, it kind of is. We feel judged by others because, often, we are. And let’s be honest, it’s not just they who judge us; most of us spend a considerable amount of energy judging others as well. Which, of course, only reinforces our own experience of being judged. And fuels our desire to perform.
But here’s the paradox: living life as a performance is not only a recipe for stress and unhappiness; it also leads to mediocre performance.
If you want to get better at anything, you need to experiment with an open mind, to try and fail, to willingly accept and learn from any outcome.
And once you get an outcome you like, you need to be willing to shake it up again and try something different. The best performers are life-long learners, and the definition of a life-long learner is someone who is constantly trying new things. That requires performing poorly much of the time and, often unpredictably, brilliantly some of the time.
When you’re performing, your success is disturbingly short-lived. As soon as you’ve achieved one milestone or received a particular standing ovation, it’s no longer relevant. Your unending question is: what’s next?
When you’re experiencing though, it’s not about the end result, it’s about the moment. You’re notpursuing a feeling after, you’re having a feeling during. You can’t be manipulated by a fickle, outside measure because you’re motivated by a stable internal one.
So how can we let go of performance in favor of experience? Here’s something that’s helped me: Several times a day I’ll complete this sentence: “This is what it feels like to…”
This is what it feels like to receive praise. This is what it feels like to be in love. This is what it feels like to be stuck writing a proposal. This is what it feels like to present to the CEO. This is what it feels like to be embarrassed. This is what it feels like to be appreciated.
On the day of our wedding, I took Sue Anne’s advice. And when I think back now — it’s been 13 years — the moments I remember most clearly and with most fondness are the things we did not rehearse, the things that went wrong but somehow gave the wedding its life. Even our rehearsal, which clearly did not go as planned with its missing rabbi, was perfect since it led us to integrate a minister — especially meaningful for Eleanor and her family — in a more substantial way than we had anticipated.
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