Surfing the Stress Curve with Tom Wright
Welcome to the Coaching Your podcast Reloaded. We've moved to a new hosting site and improved the audio quality and the editing. Since we originally launched in February 2023, we've attracted new members and followers. So as well as bringing you new material from our wider Coaching York membership, we'd like to take this opportunity to reshare some of our earlier content that you may have missed. In this episode, we originally recorded in June 2023, my co host Fiona Smith and I explore an issue we all face in some form, on most days, stress.
Geoff:Our guest is Tom Wright, whose range of experience encompasses coaching, training and communication skills, and theatre direction. And if you take a moment to think about it, there is a lot of stress in theatre. As a performer, you don't know if your audience will want to cheer you or throw tomatoes at you. By the same measure, as a director, you're a leader responsible for a high pressure, high stakes creative project. We reckoned Tom would have some great insights to share from his combined experience of coaching practice and theatre, and we weren't disappointed.
Geoff:As well as some great practical applications, Tom also shares some insights, secrets of working in the theatre industry. You won't need your tomatoes for this podcast. Listen and enjoy as we begin with introductions from Tom.
Tom:For twenty five years, I've been a leader. I've led 70 plus high pressure, high stakes creative projects, which is my kind of fancy way of saying I'm a theatre director. And alongside that, I've been training people in communication skills, leadership, presentation skills, and for the last five years have been a coach. I live in York. I'm doing these totally the wrong order.
Tom:And yeah, I'm a Buddhist. I enjoy playing role playing games and going for a walk on those rare days that are actually sunny.
Fiona:Thanks, Tom. Theatre director and coach. Can you tell us a bit more about how that works for you?
Tom:When I started out directing, I very much thought that directing was about telling people what to do. I went through a phase of doing workshops on directing with school children. And every single time I went in, went, What do you think a theatre director does? They went, Oh, they're the person who tells everybody else what to do. And interestingly, think that's lots of people's definition of a leader in general.
Tom:And there was a moment three years in where I went, what if I took the pressure off myself to know the answer to everything? And what if I started asking everybody in the team what they thought? And suddenly the shows went from being okay, but never better than the sum of their parts, to really demonstrably more creative, more exciting. The reviews got better in terms of that external metric, but also there was less interpersonal conflict. People were reporting that they were really enjoying the process.
Tom:And there were so many ideas in the room, such high quality input from everybody. And then years later, I discovered coaching as a discipline and received some coaching and started to look at how coaching work and went, oh, this is how I direct. But people have actually figured out how to teach this as a skill and kind of broken down what are the components of it. And I became really passionate and really excited about being like, it's one thing giving an audience an amazing experience in an evening, like having 100 people sit there and gasp at a moment you wanted them to gasp. But there's also something profoundly satisfying and moving about sitting with somebody and enabling them to have these amazing personal breakthroughs that are going to potentially change the rest of the course of their life.
Tom:So yeah, I find them both deeply satisfying but in very different ways, but interestingly an almost identical set of skills.
Fiona:Well, that's what a powerful insight into the difference in that change of approach made for you. And when you were working with those people in those three years in and you changed that style, what did that do for you as the theatre director in in how you felt about your work?
Tom:I think it was hugely liberating. Hitchcock is an example of a really not psychologically healthy director, either in terms of his behavior and definitely on the set. But he has this quote about every day making a film was agony for him because every day the film became less and less like the film that lived in his head. So he saw actors, he saw the creative team around him as threats to the purity of his vision. And I realized that I'd been holding something very similar, that I was seeing everybody else in this room could either do what I want or will provide me with resistance or won't do what I want them to do as well as I want them to do.
Tom:And the moment I took the pressure off myself of having to have all the answers, and when I'm going to leverage the collective imagination, skill, experience and opinions of the entire group, I became much more comfortable and much lighter. My role became recognizing the moment in the room and go, there, that. That's what's going to really land for the audience without feeling that I had to create it. So there's immense liberation in setting aside ego and also an immense satisfaction in in kind of watching how everybody else responded and flourished in that kind of environment.
Fiona:Wow. I think what a powerful insight and how in about sixty seconds you managed to sort of sum up the content of so many leadership books.
Tom:Yeah. That's the problem. If I over summarize it too well, then people won't hire me to train them in how coaching is a leadership style. Okay, that was if you enjoyed that also commission me to run a day long workshop for you.
Fiona:Well, greater insights will be available. Okay, so if we sort of move forward to now, the work that you do as a coach, how does all of that inform the work that you do and how you work with your clients now?
Tom:As a director, I learned before I knew what coaching was, questioning, listening, not interrupting. Especially when I first saw Written Down the idea of unconditional positive regard, I was going, Oh, yeah, that's what I'm striving to do in the rehearsal room. I didn't know it had a name. But one of the things that theater really taught me that is very present in my coaching was seeing the way that stress blocks creativity. Being an actor is an incredibly stressful job.
Tom:Like in surveys, ninety five percent of people fear public speaking more than they fear death. So there is a group of very special people on the planet who volunteer for kicks to do what is ninety five percent of the population's worst nightmare, and get in front of other people and do stuff. And not only will they be watched by potentially hundreds of people a night, if you're on a really successful show, but they will then be reviewed in minute detail in the press. People will comment very publicly on how well they did or didn't do. So it's a hugely exposing thing.
Tom:What that leads to in the Alexander Technique, which is a kind of way of thinking about posture, they call it end gaining. Everybody who arrives on the first day incredibly anxious about what the show is going to be like in four weeks. And that anxiety about what's it gonna be like in four weeks is a major interference with engaging with the day's task. So very rapidly, I began to see my role as a manager of stress. So how can I support people to gently kind of take the stress off them so that they could be liberated to think clearly?
Tom:And I was kind of really excited when I discovered that, like it's variously called the stress curve or the pressure performance curve, that ever since 1908 when it first appeared, but has been replicated a lot since, there is this study of how as you increase pressure, if you have very low pressure, people will start off kind of bored and disengaged. You increase the pressure, they move up into kind of comfort and engagement. Then they move into stretch where they're really at the edge of their abilities and growing. But if the pressure continues, they will move into stress and then they will move into burnout. And what the social science has been showing us is that's true of complex tasks, but it's especially true of creative tasks.
Tom:No pressure, creativity doesn't really engage. A little bit of pressure and it starts to come online. Too much pressure and it shuts down completely. So for me to really harness the input and creativity of the actors, I had to find ways to keep them moving between their comfort zone and the stretch zone and spend as little time as possible in the stress zone of high pressure, even though actors by instinct will come in on stress and will ideally stay there. And we were also fighting against and I don't think theatre is unique in this.
Tom:I think this is a problem we have as a society. The idea that the harder you work, the better the product. So, there's almost this masochistic desire to be in stress zone, to go so far beyond your comfort zone all of the time without ever returning to comfort for recovery that we risk burnout. And I saw that in so many actors with the level of pressure they were putting on themselves in the first week of rehearsal. When you want people to be the most creative, you want all your best ideas in the first week, because then you can build on them and hone on them.
Tom:And I've really seen with coaching clients, when they come in and they're so worried about the long term goal that the first step seems impossibly difficult to even generate ideas. So a lot of my work about as a coach, similar to the director in the room, is what can I do that's going to enable somebody to enter the comfort stretch zone for a moment, to liberate their creativity so that they can make a plan to move forward and back away from that kind of burnout space?
Geoff:Question that came to my mind when you were talking about Helping either clients or actors manage their stress levels was how how you see that relationship working. So to what extent do you see it as your job to identify the level of stress that the other person is under and to help them manage that? And how much do you see your role as helping them understand where they are on that stress curve or how they understand it and to come up with their own ways of managing that themselves.
Tom:Yeah, I think it's both like it's like the meta thing that is happening in how I coach, and it is also the subject thing that we will sometimes talk about. So I think the stress curve, not least because it does challenge this kind of societal idea of the harder you work for better, the output, monsterably untrue. But I will absolutely like I pretty much every time I'm coaching online, have the stress slide ready on a PowerPoint, should I need to share it at some point. Because I think it's a fantastically useful visualization of what goes on for people. So I will absolutely have a coaching conversation when I'll introduce that concept and go to where are you at the moment?
Tom:What might you do to spend more time in comfort and stretch? Or what for you would be the ideal rhythm of alternating between comfort and stretch? And very often, business challenges and things have been resolved by people reflecting that they need to go to bed earlier or restart their yoga practice or make sure that the weekend they turn off the emails and go for a walk. Like dealing with the stress so often then gives them the capacity to solve the actual thing that they came to coaching with in the first place. But then I think there's the second level, which is what am I as a coach doing even if stress isn't the topic?
Tom:What am I doing that enables the coachee to enter a relaxed, reflective space without that stress blocking their thinking?
Fiona:I think one of the things for me that that that's interesting about that is this is this point around whether the coach can help the client to build their awareness and their self awareness. Because it's that point you make about whether whether whether they come in the room and start talking about the fact that they're stressed or whether it's something that you as a coach can just observe by the way they're talking, by whether what they're saying or not saying by their body language, etcetera. And and I guess there's something there about the coaching session where you're you're helping them to gain that insight into actually what's going on at that deeper level where they're they're operating at this surface level of, well, I've got this to do and I've got that to do and and and I need to be on my game when I walk into that presentation, etcetera. Can you tell us a bit more about how you take them on that journey?
Tom:I think it is about I mean, first of all, just in general I try and stay a relatively neutral coach and be kind of led by the thinking that the coachee is at. But one of the few kind of more direct challenges that I will offer is to kind of share the model with them, but specifically with the idea of challenging that. All right, so how true is it for you that the harder you work and the more pressure you put on yourself, the output is better? And I think people genuinely find it quite liberating when they go when you go scientifically, it's been proven that's not true. Then let's have a conversation about optimal level of work to output look for you, what might that be like.
Tom:I think that's the main way that I introduce it. And then, yeah, we can definitely start then digging into that. Like, what are the things that help you relax? What are your triggers that make you kind of more stressed? And very rarely, I might share the personal anecdote that because my personal journey with this was as a theatre director, that idea you have to be obsessed with the show and your work is so prevalent.
Tom:And there was a moment where I went, what if I spent several weeks preparing, which DirectShare should, but then what would happen if I got into a rehearsal room and I left my script in the rehearsal room at the end of every day, and I didn't allow myself to take the script home and reread it overnight. And, oh gosh, the work got so much better because I was arriving relaxed and clear headed by going away and thinking about something else. And it allowed shower thoughts to happen. Like I would relax enough that suddenly my creativity would kick in. So I don't do a huge amount of anecdotal coaching, but that is something I will share from time to time.
Tom:Like, how might you open up space for your creativity to offer you new ideas and suggestions by deliberately not thinking about work and thinking about something else?
Fiona:And like we said, the parallels into gosh. I can think about so many conversations I've had with leaders where they're saying the subject is different, but the content of what they're saying is just so exactly the same. And it's almost that they need to pause and have that conversation and reflect on it to gain that insight and and almost to stop the treadmill and and to stop, you know, the the hamster wheel type thing. And it's that how what helps you to take that pause. And Yeah.
Fiona:Know, oh, yeah. Actually, it's there's a different way of doing this. And I think also, you certainly as you were talking about that process of when you started to involve your cast and and your your crew more in the how are things going to be and and and be more inclusive in that the conversation and not take that all to yourself. I think it it really sort of almost like a flashback for me of memories of things I've done in the past where, you know, it's exactly the same. The the the the really, really successful things have been when it's it's around not saying I need as a leader to take this all on myself, but actually I need to think creatively about how I engage the people around me.
Tom:And we know as coaches that people are much more likely to implement a positive change well if they feel that they came up with it. Like self identified change is always more productive. Seeing that in a rehearsal room, once we'd agreed what the story was for a scene, what we wanted the audience to understand, liberating the actors to find the way that they wanted to play it, they would always play it well. Like when I'm training emerging directors, which I'm doing a bit of at the moment, going, it's much better for the actor to find the note that works for them than for you to give them the amazing note from the back. Your note of how to say that line might be perfect, but they're never going to play it as well as something that they discovered organically for themselves.
Tom:And we kind of absolutely know that as coaches. Very often the ideas that we might want to suggest will not be as good as the one that if we sit on our idea for a moment and ask the open question, the coachee will get to themselves.
Geoff:I'm always fascinated with the way that different disciplines interrelate to enrich each other and theatre direction and coaching is one. I'll remind you of a conversation I was in recently where a very successful senior manager was talking about the thing you mentioned earlier. They are terrified of public speaking, hate doing it. And one of their techniques to addressing that was to take on a persona. So this particular leader was saying, I imagine myself as Lara Croft going out to do this public presentation.
Geoff:So I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about that kind of idea, Thomas. We've talked about how you might help a client in the moment in a conversation. Think about stress and manage it. If you're thinking about helping a client prepare for a stressful situation. What kind of things might you do around that?
Geoff:And I was particularly interested in what you just said there about if you're working with an actor, so an actor's thinking, I know what the scene is and my part in it and the lines I need to take and whether there's any kind of overlap between those ideas that relate to a stage that could then overlap or transfer to someone who's going into another stage situation, like a meeting or a presentation or a conversation that they're not looking forward to?
Tom:Yeah, I think so many things bubbling up to mind. One is around so there is an exercise around that I sometimes do, especially so some of the work I've done is either training groups for presentation skills or one on one presentation skills training. And I seem to have found a bit of a niche with people who are fully phobic of presenting. The things that have really landed for them are there's some work around positively imagining it going well, because our minds are so evolutionarily preprogrammed to identify threatened risk that they will fixate on risk and therefore dial up anxiety in a context where anxiety is not useful. So we know that.
Tom:So doing some positive visualization of it going well can be incredibly challenging for some people, but can also yield really great results. And I think for us as coaches, that's why sitting with the goal stage of grow for a while is so useful. So those seemingly irrelevant questions around what will it feel like when you achieve your goal? Imagine the moment that you know for sure you've achieved your goal, what do you see? What do you hear?
Tom:Those sensory things about making achieving the goal, using the imagination to make achieving the goal seem real, and the effect that can have on the anxiety about achieving the goal and how achievable it feels. I guess the next thing that cuts across all my work is the very mechanical thing about breathing. Actors, like in drama schools, if you're on a three year vocational acting course, a lot of your time will be learning how to breathe properly. Because the skill of being able to fill a 500 seat theatre with your voice without microphone, it requires huge muscular control, but also very, very particular technique. I've got some actor friends who, if you go drinking with them, are kind of deafening because they've then forgotten how to turn that off.
Tom:It's unfortunate. But in general, it's a really useful skill. But what's fascinating is then having learnt that and learnt how to teach actors that, I then got really into different kinds of meditation and martial arts and discovered the same breathing patterns in everyone. And there is now extremely robust research on the psychological effect of taking deep diaphragmatic breathing. So, really removing breath from the chest and the shoulders, and really breathing down into the belly button as slowly and deeply as possible.
Tom:And so, actors, when they're doing their vocal warm up, which involves practicing breathing deeply, and they've been trained they have to do that, so they're not going to strain their voice, and they do it before every show. But what they are also doing without knowing it is they are using a powerful meditation technique to calm themselves down in that crucial moment before performance. It's kind of the most important thing that I teach people when I'm training them on skills, and the effect of it has been amazing. So I'll teach a little five minute slow diaphragmatic breathing exercise, kind of calming meditation, and I'll go maybe if you find yourself feeling stressful about a presentation, just give yourself the gift of doing this for a couple of minutes. And definitely do this lock yourself in the toilet before you give a presentation and just do this for a few minutes.
Tom:But then what happens is I've seen people who, like with proper phobias, get up in front of a group of 12, start to share their presentation, and begin to have a panic attack. So the breath starts to move into the chest, starts to move into the shoulders, starts to get very shallow, starts to catch, starts to get faster and faster and faster. And you can see they are about to have a panic attack. And then they remember what I taught them, and they stop, and they take one single deep breath and completely reset emotionally in one breath, And then carry on calmly with the rest of their presentation. And I've used that exercise in coaching sessions.
Tom:So if somebody is so distressed in a coaching session, they've turned up with something so burning and so hot that they can't think constrictively. You can't get to options because the level of panic is too high. I will sometimes go, I have a little exercise. Would you like to do this for three minutes? And I will just work with them with breathing.
Tom:And then I'll go, so returning to the challenge that you're facing, what might you do to take a step forward towards your goal? And suddenly there are ideas, and there's positive forward thinking, because they're coming from a calmer place. So that's definitely something that kind of runs through every strand of my practice is the importance of one deep breath.
Geoff:So I just had one more question on this bit, Tom. You were talking there about things that you get clients to practise so that practise is then something they can refer back to. To what extent do you sort of deliberately build this into your coaching conversations where you say, I think it would be helpful for you to learn the following. And then in between, say, this conversation and the next time we have our coaching conversation, can you find an opportunity in a kind of a safe environment to practise this, to see what it's like so that it becomes easier to access and you've got to learn the techniques, you can access it more easily when you get into a more difficult situation. How much of that is part of your practice?
Tom:I mean, if I've been contracted to coach somebody specifically on their presentation skills, then I will absolutely work with them to put kind of a programme of practice into place. Practicing is one of the best things we can do to give ourselves a sense of confidence about things that we feel stressful. And the breathing especially we want to try and habituate. But if I've been contracted as a kind of more neutral coach and my focus is on supporting my coachee to do their own thinking. I may offer them meditation technique and then I will tend to sit back and in the kind of close of a session where I'm going, what are you going to take forward from this session?
Tom:What are you committing to? Just allow them to kind of set a plan for how they might want to to implement that. So I'd let that sit with them much more.
Fiona:So, yeah, as I reflect back on the conversation, there were, I suppose, two things in terms of a sort of takeaway and thoughts around it are, two b's actually. So around beliefs and that that really immersing yourself in the what could this look like, what do I want it to look like, and and doing that through the senses. I think so helpful in embedding that belief that being part of you going forward. And the other one was of course breathing. So I think the two takeaways for me for conversation that those insights and thoughts around beliefs and breathing.
Fiona:Fascinating to just think about those parallels between the the theater director role and the and the and the the the leader's role in general. I just think the the analogies that you shared are very, very unlocking for for a leader to think about in parallel and to really be able to access and understand and apply to themselves. So, yeah, fascinating conversation, Tom. Really, really enjoyed it.
Geoff:Just to say to our to our listeners, one point, Tom mentioned grow model. So for those of you who aren't coaches not familiar with this, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's a way of structuring a conversation and it starts by, as Tom was talking, thinking about your goals and what you want to achieve. And we might come back to this in a later episode. But you would if you if you have a look at that model and think about what Tom's been talking about today, you'll probably see the different elements of it through his conversation.
Geoff:One of the things we sometimes do in previous podcasts is think what I think about. I wish I'd done this twenty years ago when I was in a different a different place. Certainly the stuff about practising and controlling breathing, which is something I've learned. I learned that from my previous supervisors. So Steve Page, if you're listening, I was listening to you when you told me about this and I did practise it and it does help.
Geoff:So it is extremely powerful. And if you want to practise some of this or discover more about how it works, we will put Tom's details in the notes. And by all means, you can get in touch with him. Tom, if in addition to the really helpful tips, techniques and experiences you've mentioned, if you were going to leave people with a thought to take away, to play with, that might help them in the future as they're handling stress. What thought would you like to leave people with?
Tom:As both a director and a coach, the number one thing I can do to make the people with whom I'm working relaxed and move them away from stress is be relaxed. So actually, the person who most needs to take a breath is me. So human beings unconsciously mirror each other's behavior all the time, but one of the things that is most infectious is breathing. So if somebody has an agitated breath pattern, other people in the room can start to pick up on that. It's one of the reasons why watching somebody who is stressed give a presentation is a hugely stressful experience for an audience, because you start to mirror what's going on for them.
Tom:So I think there's something really interesting that as a coach and as a leader, we can enable the people around us to feel calmer by taking responsibility for giving off a calm energy. So the power of us taking a deep breath, even if we never explain the concept of a deep breath to anybody else, makes a huge difference.
Fiona:That's great, Tom. Thank you. And yes, so maybe for people who are listening with us today, then hold it. Hold it in your mind to think you know over the next few days just. Yeah, drop it in and think about if you're feeling a bit anxious about something either in the moment or something that's coming up.
Fiona:Stop and think about what's happening with your breathing and think about what happens if you just change and take those few deep breaths. Thank you hugely for joining us today Tom. It's been a great conversation.
Tom:Thank you so much for having me. It's been a delight.
Geoff:Thanks for coming in, Tom. Well, thanks for tuning in, everyone, and we'll speak again soon. Bye bye now. Thank you for listening to this edition of the Coaching York podcast. I'm Geoff Ashton, and I curate and edit the show.
Geoff:Coaching York is a special enterprise, a community of coaches serving the communities of York, North Yorkshire, and beyond. We offer commercial and time gifted coaching, mentoring and coach supervision services to businesses and to other sectors. And if you're a coach looking to join a supportive, generous and expert community of coaching practice, find out more about us at coachingyork.co.uk. That's coachingyork.co.uk.
