Nicholas Janni

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

I think the deepest thing I learned and practiced through twenty years of working with actors was that you don't do creativity, it does you.

And I spent twenty years helping actors, just exploring with actors, my own company teaching in theater schools. What were the practices that would open that possibility? Because every creative, every artist knows that. Mostly it's frustratingly unpredictable.

Actually, it's just like most people have experiences of flow but there's not a great knowledge or science of well, how would it be to live more of my life like that?' So in the arts world, in the theater world, we spent literally twenty years. I had my own group, very dedicated practitioners, exploring the practices that would open that. And it's not just the understanding that creativity tells you, it's that you have to be fully available.

And that would often involve a very precise kind of bodywork, particularly with the pelvis and spine that opened the frequency, let's call it, in the body. Then to either speak a text or just to start working in different ways and particularly with my own actors who were so dedicated, the most extraordinary things would start to happen. I mean, you'd be you'd feel you're in the presence of the gods sometimes and the actors were like pure channels But it was coming through in a way that was completely coherent and transparent for the spectator. So it wasn't just I'm in having a personal experience. That's the art of the actor, is to be transparent. It's a very particular craft. So there's a mixture of the craft but also this total surrender.

And generally, I heard at the end there about art, I'm still passionate about art and particularly music now because I think music is one of the highest combinations of left brain, right brain, yin, yang. And I often think about someone like John Coltrane because in his most wild solos where you're like, oh my goodness, the energy coming through here, you also remember that he knows where the one is even though he's totally off the rhythm and he knows exactly the harmonic structure from which he's departed and from which he will come to where he will come back. I think that's a very high level of integration.

And it's extraordinary to have such deep respect for and love of musicians because they're embodying that total flow and complete structure at the same time.

So thank you. You've reminded me of how important my arts background is. I think Einstein's question is very important when he said, is your mind your master or your servant?

And certainly in the corporate world, 95 plus percent of the time the mind is the master, meaning it's the predominant function and it has to become the servant, which means we have to, what I call, relocate ourselves inside through very deliberate practice. So I am here embodied. I'm available because all of my sensing faculties are open and my mind is a very very sophisticated function within me. But I'm located in something that's beyond my mind. And my mind then can articulate, receive, formulate very coherent, sophisticated maps. But I am located in something beyond. I feel that's very, very important.

Of course, there can't just be chaotic energy and emotion. Precision. It's a very interesting craft, precision of gesture. How that happens, but you're not you're not controlling it and yet your part of you is is knowing you have to be precise in your gesture. Can't just be chaotic.

I mean, there's also a lot of vocal work that's needed to free your to free your voice so your voice becomes fully available. That's a huge part of an actor's toolbox, let's say. And the body must be as free as possible so that all the emotions that arise see this question of transparency is critical. And that only happens when an actor's body is so available that whatever emotion arises fills them. It's like it the water goes into every corner of their system. And then if you look at the really great actors, I'm thinking of someone like Mark Rylance, he doesn't appear to be doing anything but you look at his face and his whole inner world is available. That's the highest level of acting. He's not even trying he's definitely not trying to show anything. He's 100% being.

And there's this total transparency, that's really great acting.

You can speak one word to an actor and half the audience will be in tears because in that one word, everything was open.

And and there's one other thing I really want to talk about because it's so important. It's one of the most important principles in my work that I teach when I because I teach coaches. But I'm also always talking to leaders about it and I'm talking about precision of language because a lot of the way we talk in our so called normal culture, for me is totally imprecise. Meaning it's like we language is out here and it very rarely actually reflects what's happening here. So it's empty in a way. And it's also often imprecise because people use words and I'll say to someone I'm working with, sorry, that word, what do you really mean by that word? And they'll start to explain and it was not the right word at all. We're very, very lazy with language. So I what I you see I'm doing this. I what I what I try to teach is what I call the marriage of word and energy.

So that our words are spoken from state and they're spoken in full coherence with the body and my interior. That's coherent communication and people respond to that because it has transmission.

So much of our language, the way we speak is like this and then we're lost in this kind of dreamland, fog actually, it's in fact energetically, it's a kind of fog because the moment word and energy align and it requires great precision of language, that's the beauty of poetry. Like you read a good poem and you can be moved to tears by one line because the words and the energy are so aligned.

And I think we all need to practice speaking like that much much more because it heals fragmentation and we're in a very big fragmentation a lot of the time. That's part of the essence of leader as healer. To have teams that speak with coherence to each other.

And the voice, you see a lot. A lot of people speak like that because their body is tense so they're not in their natural sound. Sometimes I work with executives and we just do very simple work and they're because this is just this resonator but we have another resonator here.

And then the voice changes and people are like, oh my goodness!' Because when someone speaks from here, first of all, they have a whole different presence and authority, natural authority.

So I took that from the theater as well. And that's not a tech, it's not like a skill, it's more like a taking away what's obscuring your natural sound.

And to understand that when you do that, that opens the field then for what I would call downloads, where suddenly new ideas start to come in and then the mind is in a very high function of capturing those and articulating them and then coherence. So if I ask someone, if I ask you, how are you feeling? You know how to answer coherently. Not well, I feel that blah blah blah blah. No. No. No. That's not an answer.

It's precise and the words are precise. Emotional vocabulary is very rich, as is intellectual vocabulary. And I think here we're in my work and here we're looking for this very high marriage of the rational and the somatic, the rational and the trans rational.

Located in this fundamental sense of I'm here and I'm available.