Being performative
This week, I heard in an interview with Nilofer Merchant that 61% of us hide who we are at work. We hide our background, our likes and dislikes, and we unconsciously try to conform to fit the norm. She gave this quick example: if you see the majority of the people in the room wearing glasses, you might feel like you want to wear your glasses too just to fit in.
This reminded me of something I heard a while back when Pippa Grange talked about how society and education has conditioned us to become performative, instead of simply performing our thing. She said, “We don’t know how to not perform.” We have become performative so we can be recognized, get validation, and feel belonging. We believe that if we’ve performed correctly and up to par, we would finally be accepted.
Yet, we don’t consider whether being performative allows us to truly perform as ourselves, to say what we have to say, and to be innovative. We don't consider how it restricts our creativity and our happiness and autonomy in doing our work.
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I wonder how much of what we perform is to be performative as musicians. And what's the difference between performing and being performative anyway?
For musicians, we perform and it’s quite literal—performing music, performing on our instruments. We have our own artistic ideas and instincts. But it's a vulnerable and raw act to show that to the world and particularly to other musicians. We are naturally afraid of what people would say about it. And this fear makes us reconsider our actions, words, and ideas so they would be more safely accepted by others. This is being performative.
So if performing is simply communicating what we have to say, being performative is communicating something that we think the audience wants to hear. It's making an effort to fit in. I wonder how much we are hiding behind being performative even if it contradicts what we fundamentally believe as artists and people.
When we are being performative as musicians, we stop having our own ideas and stop feeling ownership and pride in our work. We start catering to what we think a leader, teacher, or audience wants. And we feel more and more hollow within the performative shell. We lose our sense of identity too.
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When we are more mindful of this as leaders, we can start breaking down the defensive mechanism of being performative.
We can find ways to ask our musicians:
What is it that you truly care about?
What do you want to say about it?
How can we help you say it?
Sometimes, becoming performative can come from our believing that other people simply don't care about what we have to say. And when we show interest in what they have to say, maybe the wall may start coming down.
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