The Value of Reframing

In my introduction to this series of videos, I talked to you about the fact that, at one point in my varied career of careers, I spent a number of years singing opera, and in one case musical theater as well. I was in England — I'd sung in England a number of times, operas at the Royal Albert Hall, concerts — and at this point I was up in the great city of Leeds, in the north of England, and I was preparing the role that would then take us to great success there in the city of Leeds, at the Grand Opera House, and then we moved to Italy, to a great festival in the summer, and eventually to a successful run in London's West End. So that was a thrilling part of my career.

What happens in rehearsal periods is you have days on and days off. You're not in Act Two, Scene Three — that means you have that morning off, you're in your apartment, or at the gym, or doing your shopping, whatever it is that you're doing when you're off. And what I decided to do with that time that I had off every week was to pursue an interest. There was a major university there, and I contacted the university and I asked if they had a sports psychology department. Now, what I may have made clear already is I'm not a great athlete — I like my games, I can play well enough, but certainly not at that level. And I was put in touch with the head of the department, a professor of sports psychology who worked with many famous athletes, professional athletes. And I said to him, "I'm a singer and a performer, and I'm not an athlete, so you may wonder why I'm even contacting you. But I'm sure there's a correlation, a connection, between what an athlete experiences on the court, on the field, and what a singer or performer experiences on stage."

And we had some great meetings. We met every week and had great conversations. Now, one of the conversations was about distraction. I said, "What does the guy do at the free-throw line, when he's concentrating like crazy, or so it seems, and he's about to throw that shot perfectly, and people all around him are screaming, shouting, swearing, insulting him, cursing the team, whatever they do — dropping bottles, flashing cameras? How does he work with all that distraction? Does he learn how to block it all out?" — which is what I would have thought we do, we blank or block it all out. He said, "No, it's the opposite of that. What he learns to do in training, specialized training with sports psychologists, is to need it — to need all that noise, to need the flashes, to need all that distraction." He practices with people making those noises, doing those distracting things, so that then, when it happens in the game, he listens to it and says, "Bring it on. This is what I need to be successful."

And my question to you — and of course to me as well — is: do we know how to do that in our own lives? Or do we get annoyed and upset by the things that are distracting us, invading our workday, invading the space of our project and our relationships and all the minutiae of being us? Maybe this little lesson teaches you that you have a certain amount of control, which is not to change the reality, but to reframe it. And by reframing it, you put a new frame over the same picture; you get to see it differently. In this case, instead of trying to blank or block out what's bothering you or distracting you, instead to say to yourself, "Thank you. I need just this, just now, to do my very best."