How To Steer A Ship

“Hello passengers, this is your captain speaking…” said the female voice on the ferry.

There was a woman steering the ship, which was fitting, as I was thinking about women in power. About confidence and authenticity.

I’d just come from working on a tv series - one set in a superhero universe. When I was a kid, all the superhero shows starred men. Now, this is a superhero show, but let’s just say it’s not Superman.

People are often curious about how actors “learn all those lines”, and let me tell you, these ones were really challenging for me. A lot of technical language, quite complex stuff. And when I arrived on set, I discovered I would also be handling a lot of complicated props. There was a bunch of intricate business to execute - accurately - while speaking this complex dialogue. Talk, walk, use the equipment as if you’re an expert, use this eyeline, hit your marks.

(Sorry, I’ll stop with the hand-wringing. This is an actor’s job, nobody tricked me into it.)  

Film sets are a bit like ships. You need strong leadership - a responsible captain, so that all the passengers feel they’re in capable hands. There’s a strong sense of hierarchy. And at the top of the chain of command is the director. Through the years I’ve seen a lot of directors use their power in different ways. Different approaches to working with the actors and the crew. And we’re all watching them, to see how they’ll set the tone. It can be subtle, but that dynamic moves through the cast and crew, so if the director is domineering, the crew may become fearful and insecure. If the director is disorganized, the tone becomes chaotic, people can get sloppy, and mistakes happen.

The director on this show was grounded. She knew what she wanted, she didn’t have any time to waste getting it, but she wasn’t aggressive or bossy. She didn’t get angry, she wasn’t manipulating people into giving her what she wanted. She didn’t plead - she just was honest and direct. She was straightforward. She was clear.

And I found myself becoming more grounded and calm as I interacted with her. So, as she was herself, she allowed me to be myself. And I also saw the crew and other people around her taking on that energy too. 

It’s easy to make observations and assumptions as a short-term guest in a workplace. No doubt that film set has its share of issues and challenges. But what I saw and felt on that day helped me to relax and get my part of the job done. And it was impressive to see how much was accomplished in a short period of time. Others, as far as I could tell, felt good about their work too. 

This is not a given on film sets. I’m partly writing this because it stands in contrast with another recent experience. So I wanted to report my findings as a student of women in leadership. My notes from the field. 

How was she successful? What did she do? 

• She didn’t try to do other people’s jobs for them. 

• She didn’t waste time. 

• She didn’t become erratic.

Instead:

• She spoke calmly, joking occasionally, when it served to help others relax.

• She clearly described what she needed, so others knew what to do. And gave praise when things worked.

• She collaborated. Instead of micro-managing, She showed respect for the expertise of her co-workers, and she recruited them and their skills. 

This is how to help make a ship run smoothly.

She Worked Hard All Her Life

Last night I learned of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a woman many described as having worked hard all her life for gender equality and social justice. I heard the news of her passing while watching a movie called ‘Knives Out’, and in that movie there’s a character, a young immigrant nurse, who is described as a hard worker too. I thought that was a nice coincidence.

Working hard is good, and good qualities are for others to observe in us. Some people just can’t wait, though, they have to bring it up to make sure everyone knows: “I’ve worked hard.” It’s actually a pronouncement I hear a lot, “I’ve worked hard!” It’s not always said defensively, though it sometimes sounds that way. And it’s not always spoken by people of a particular sex, or age, or skin colour, though it sometimes seems like there’s a pattern. One might be tempted if one were prone to generalizing.

It’s rare to meet someone who does NOT feel that they worked hard… to get that promotion, that tenure, that holiday, that car, and so on. I don’t often hear, “I have an average-level work ethic, but I was born in the right place, at the right time.” That’s not a thing. We are a nation of hard workers, just so you know.

If the hard work is so irrefutable, then why the need to assert it? Why mention it at all? Talk about stating the obvious. It’s like going around saying, “I breathed in. And then I breathed out.”

And it’s in the past tense, so we know the accomplishments are complete. All the work is over, time to put your feet up and enjoy a well-earned holiday. A “richly deserved” holiday, as the saying goes. The work is all done!

I guess RBG never got the memo. She never acted like the world owed her a comfortable retirement. Surely if there were a person who had earned it, it was her. Nevertheless, to borrow a descriptor of another strong, hard-working woman, she persisted….well into her golden years. And how much we have gained from that wisdom. That experience. That unstoppable drive to “do her work to the very best of her ability.”

Play Dead

Waking up this morning, it drifted through my mind how Shakespeare liked to have actors play dead. Of course, the actual death toll in the Complete Works is substantial, and people have compiled lists, created pie charts, and performed new plays to illustrate the many ways characters are sliced, diced, pummeled and poisoned.

But there are also characters who only pretend to die, and that event is usually the turning point in the story. There’s Hero in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’: she ‘dies’ because of being shamed at the altar, and so that Claudio can feel the grief and loss and regret for his mistaken punishment of her. In ‘A Winter’s Tale’, Hermione is another virtuous woman accused of being false. She too must appear to be dead until her husband truly recognizes her innocence and mourns his loss.

This summer at Bard on the Beach, you will see Juliet pretend to die to avoid marrying Paris. In ‘Pericles’, Marina will be thought to be killed by the evil Dionyza’s henchman, and Thaisa, believed to have died in childbirth, is thrown overboard a ship by Pericles.

Sometimes the audience is in on the secret although the characters are not. The deaths, real or pretended, are always important. Men really die and their ghosts often return to haunt the killer (or an indecisive child). When the women die they don’t haunt anyone. And sometimes they have to pretend to die just so the men can grow up. 

Burned Out On The Fry

Who isn’t talking about vocal fry these days? Google will give you 509,000 responses in .28 seconds and they come from journalists, speech therapists, actors, job coaches, physicians, singers, politicians…

In a Guardian newspaper article, Naomi Wolf called on young women to “give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice”: 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/24/vocal-fry-strong-female-voice

A response to that article accused Wolf of “missing the point”. Complaining about vocal fry, says Erin Riley, is just another excuse not to listen to women:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/28/naomi-wolf-misses-the-point-about-vocal-fry-its-just-an-excuse-not-to-listen-to-women

In some ways I agree with both points of view. It seems (anecdotally, at least) that we are often more critical of women’s voices than men’s. Traditional authority figures still, in 2016, try to discount the voices of young women in particular. However, standing up for the right to be heard also means resisting pressure to conform to a popular sound which could damage your voice. I hope that women, especially young women, can be true to themselves -- expressing themselves with authenticity, and saving and cherishing their precious voices. Our voices are the means with which we tell the world who we are.

This debate came up for me again in a recent visit to a Women’s Studies class at Vancouver Island University.

The students expressed differing points of view, and some admitted they had not previously been aware of vocal fry, or had never carefully considered their own voices. By the end of the discussion, they were excited to continue reflecting on these questions, and inspired by the possibility of harnessing the power of their authentic voices in their careers and their personal lives.