Monday, March 2, 2009

The Roles of a Lifetime

"Vanessa was usually the President of the United States and Corin was usually the Prime Minister. I was usually the dog."
Lynn Redgrave, on role-playing with her siblings


We play roles. Like it or not. You can make your own list: parent, child, sibling, boss, employee, co-worker, instigator, consoler, motivator, prime minister, terrier ….
 
We play roles. Like it or not. So why not like it?
 
Well… there are reasons. One reason role-playing is not always seen as a ton of fun is that it comes with all the negative connotations of fakery, deceit, manipulation—or insincerity, inauthenticity, and partial truth at best. (Of course, those qualities are exactly what make role-playing fun for some people, but let’s not be those people.)
 
Where did all those negative connotations come from? Our Puritan roots? (They hated actors of all kinds, including "Papists," who they saw as putting on a show rather than having true faith.) Our fear that we’ll be manipulated by the people around us, who may be playing all sorts of roles without our knowledge? (Con artists certainly do exist, and that’s a form of role-playing that may have given the whole practice a bad name.) Or is it our own insecurity about who we really are and who we wish we could be?
 
Ultimately, the origins of the negative connotations don’t matter all that much. When we play a role like "good spouse," "tough-love dispenser," "patient tutor," "truth teller" or "cheerer-upper," we tend to be pretty okay with the role-playing thing. It’s a question of the particular role—is it one we can be proud of, and one we (therefore) assume comes naturally? We might get around the whole issue by not acknowledging praiseworthy behaviors as roles at all, but of course they are.
 
Notice that it doesn’t make much sense to talk about playing a role all by yourself, with no one else there to praise you or blame you or be immediately and directly affected by your actions. When you’re by yourself, you’re just…yourself. But that doesn’t mean we "put on a mask" or somehow cease to be ourselves when other people are around; it just means we behave differently when we have different people to interact with. We play roles in relation to others. To some extent, our relationships with other people define the role or roles we play with them.
 
When you’re with your boss, one obvious role you might play is that of employee. No-brainer. Directly determined by your relationship.
 
When you’re with your mother, one obvious role might be that of offspring. But what does that really mean? That role is not necessarily well defined. That’s because every mother/offspring relationship is different from every other one. And, come to think of it, every boss/employee relationship is unique, as well.
 
But sometimes we allow ourselves to think that our roles are completely defined – written in stone, even—and that’s one way the role idea can seriously backfire. "When I’m with my mother, I play the role of enabler." "When I’m with my brother, I play the role of conciliator." "When I’m with my minister, I play the role of hypocrite."
 
Isn’t it true that sometimes when you’re with your mother, you play the role of … mother? You can mother anyone you please, including her.
 
We have more choice in this matter than we sometimes allow ourselves to believe. The idea that a role can be played at will is another thing that makes people uncomfortable—if it doesn’t "come naturally," then it partakes of the evil of play-acting—but the simple truth is that we consciously choose various roles for perfectly benign reasons and with perfectly benign results all the time. In fact, the world would be a better place if we all did a lot more of that.
 
Good actors never let themselves get stuck in a narrow interpretation of a role, but in real life we do it all the time, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Many of the roles we choose to play are appropriate and useful, but others are unhelpful or downright counterproductive. It would really help if we could all be better actors in our lives.
 
Since the terms for these roles are all so poorly defined—boss, mother, servant—maybe we’d be better off talking about specific behaviors—what we choose to do rather than who we think we are. That approach might allow us to find more helpful variations of the roles we think we’re doomed to. A mother might be a caretaker, a motivator, a teacher, a challenger, a needler, a clarifier, or a shoulder to cry on. Like an actor making a role her own—a good actor, who knows how to access herself in a thousand authentic modes—she gets to choose.
 
So the next time you’re facing a situation that puts you in a narrow box—I hate evaluating my employees because they treat me like I’m the enemy—try doing a better job of casting yourself. If the version of "evaluator" that you're playing is being received by your employees as "enemy," maybe "evaluator" is not doing the trick. Choose a more specific and active role—try teacher, or ally, or mentor, coach, cheerleader, doctor…something as far from "enemy" as you can imagine. Even if you use the exact same words in your employee evaluations, changing your sense of your role may completely change the way your "performance" is received. Give it a whirl—and please report back on your results.

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