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Martin Best

Inspiration isn’t something that just happens.

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HBR this month reminds us that ‘…we believe that leadership starts with ourselves and, more specifically, it starts with our mind. By understanding and leading ourselves more effectively, we can understand and be able to lead them more effectively, and then we can better understand and lead our organisations’. Bill George, professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, tells us that ‘ …self- awareness is the starting point of leadership’, and that ‘self-awareness is the skill of being aware of our thoughts, emotions and values from moment to moment. Through self-awareness, we can lead ourselves with authenticity and integrity – and in turn better lead others and our organisations.’ All true. But let’s notice how the difference between the two paragraphs above. HBR holds that leadership starts with the mind. Bill George teaches that it begins with being aware of our thoughts, emotions and values. The recommendations they make are...
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Martin Best

Illusionary beliefs

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I believe that the great danger of the market society is that it instils illusionary beliefs in us. We were better to be taught to look out of the window as well as for gold, for if we only look for gold we are not becoming who we really are. If we learn to look out of the window, we begin to look for what the economist Yannis Varoufakis suggests is as stake: ‘our creativity, our relationships, our humanity and, of course, our planet.’
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Martin Best

The body is the channel through which our experience reaches us.

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We are seeing a shift in attitude. Women are standing up for their physical integrity, are exposing the sexual powerplay of film producers and others. This shift  is driven by the very power of Presence which activates inspiration into being a force for change: it is concerned with the body. When the male guests at a charity dinner grope the (scantily clad) waitressing staff, they are trespassing upon the body, on the Presence of a person that contains both the receptors and transmitters of inspiration. If this thought seems a bit rarified, let’s remind ourselves that William Blake, more than 200 years ago, announced with passion that the body is not distinct from the soul; that the body is the channel through which our experience reaches us, and through which we reach others. # metoo  highlights that when a person’s physical body is groped, the person within is touched unwillingly,...
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Martin Best

Presence does not have to be loud.

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Presence does not have to be loud. What it comprises is a body that is integrated, energised and grounded in action: it means a daily routine of practice: filling the lungs with breath, using the diaphragm muscle to enable breath to work the larynx that makes our voice, strengthening the lips and tongue so that diction is clear, and getting our body aligned with the pull of gravity so that our legs, head and torso are in harmony. This daily practice is more of a workout to raise self-awareness than a preparation for a performance, although when it comes to public speaking, Presence will aid us as well as our audience. But Presence is first the basis of how we are experienced as people. And, most crucially, when we concentrate on, and train, these components of physical Presence, we lose our fear, because by focusing on crafting the integration of...
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Martin Best

Learn to master Presence...

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Actors, singers, orators, all performers, have to learn to master Presence so that its integration of voice, posture and diction can carry the creative, empathetic and authentic elements of the performance to all parts of a performing space. But the principle applies to leaders too. A client recently told me that one of his mentors had told  him  that the most important thing in becoming a leader was abdominal breathing. It was the source of his composure.  Leaders are looked at; they are listened to (though not always heard); they are  sensed . Even in the quietness of a meeting or a personal development session or a team strategy meeting, the leader’s Presence is the power that will carry her or his inner inspiration across to others.
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Martin Best

When it comes to inspiring others...

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When it comes to inspiring others, it is often said that actions speak louder than words. And if we reflect for a moment on the people who have inspired us in our own lives, we will find any number of friends, relations, bosses and colleagues who have in some way exemplified for us virtues like selflessness, courage, compassion, cheerfulness, hard work and wisdom. They have been an example to us of the kind of people we would wish to become, and have infused us with feelings, thoughts and principles, as if by breathing, into our mind or soul, so that in many cases we have come close to the ideal they set us. As we reflect, however, we will realise that their actions were not silent, but communicated through words as well. And our conclusion may well be, as mine is, that words are part of those actions, and are...
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Martin Best

Wealth must fulfil two functions.

Growth and inspiration
I believe that all of us will be richer if we live each day with the certainty that we will be inspired, that we do not need to forget to look with our eyes and listen with our ears; to understand with our heads and feel with our hearts; to end the day with the surety that we have grown. This growth is not only the domain of artists, philosophers, prophets and gurus. It is fundamental to real leadership. Corporations have a practical as well as a human interest in making things better, because ‘better’ means growth in people within the enterprise, which is a basis of growth in performance and, consequently, in wealth for society. Such growth is a sign that the connection between the producer and the buyer is healthy, and with that comes the joy of achievement. I see no intrinsic conflict between inspiration and wealth creation,...
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Martin Best

Jasmine infusion.

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  In my window I can see through the jasmine to the blue sky of the Andaluz winter. Yesterday at tea time the sun was hot on the skin. The wind of the previous days has left me with a headache, but today the air is as still as silence itself. The morning light is making patterns on the broad leaves of a creeper whose name I can never remember. That’s what I see. How do I feel about it? Glad, and more than glad. Why do I care? Because it’s just for me, so it’s like a present. Deep breath and blow the air out through the lips, like blowing out a candle. Do this for about 3 minutes. Get the body centred in the chair, the weight of gravity on the feet, backside and hands. Feel my pulse – the beat of the heart. There is no pulse...
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Martin Best

The Scent of a Woman.

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When we want to inspire others, the habits of looking, feeling and caring at what we experience will provide the best foundation, because our capacity to inspire depends on our being inspired. The mechanics of inspiring require physical energy, whether our audience be big or small. I call this energy the power of Presence. It means finding and using the combined force of breath, voice, diction and posture to shift our receptors of inspiration to a level where they become its transmitters. By using the power of Presence, looking can become the transmitter Creativity, feeling can become the transmitter Empathy and caring can become the power of Authenticity.  This lesson is often the trickiest one to learn, because the conscious application of Presence means navigating a new awareness of something that has always come naturally, and it feels uncomfortable until it becomes a habit. Nonetheless, it is the key to...
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Martin Best

The harder we work, the luckier we get.

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Our senses and our imagination are just two of the ways through which our three receptors of inspiration, Mind, Heart and Soul, work. If we practise using them willingly and regularly, other ways will open up for us. All of them will get stronger over time, and we’ll become adept at exercising them simultaneously and in balance with one another.  The fact that it results from distinct habits makes inspiration more, not less, something to wonder at. It’s said that the harder we work, the luckier we get, and in that equation there is both fact and mystery.  Paul McCartney may have written ‘Yesterday’ in half an hour, but that half hour was fed by his talent, nurtured by years of daily rehearsal and nightly performance in a Hamburg cellar. Picasso at the height of his powers could turn out a great painting in half an hour, but he would...
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Martin Best

Immersion into the knowledge and skills of inspiration can help a corporate person to lead themselves.

It is the purpose of a business to survive
It is the purpose of a business to survive, and the received wisdom is that it can only do so by growing. Once a company reaches a certain size, though, its further growth will demand conformity. Its leaders become more a part of the corporate system than of the natural and human systems they were born into. If this is symptomatic of capitalism, as Marx pointed out it was, the living standards we expect in return for its command to grow wealth require most of us to be complicit in this conformity. Yet, and to quote Fromm again, this mode of existence ‘is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness.’  Within the separateness that conformity seems to breed, I have seen how an immersion into the knowledge and skills of inspiration can help a corporate person to lead themselves, and the people they lead, with an effect that they variously...
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Martin Best

The ‘corporate and collective cold’ that makes our world one of transaction.

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In his laboratory, the theatre, Shakespeare unthrones the age-old security of Platonic ideas that had held things together for so many centuries.  But he gave some challenges to his audience, and therefore to us, and the first one was this: we are responsible for using our imagination to create the world we experience, and to create it for others to experience in turn. To be responsible is to be  responsive.  His second challenge is to our human tendency to conform, which keeps us in the ‘corporate and collective cold’ that makes our world one of transaction. Shakespeare anticipated it, and Fromm describes it nicely:  Union by conformity is … calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness. The incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide in contemporary Western society are  symptoms  of this relative failure of herd conformity.   Herd conformity has only...
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Martin Best

Conversation with a leader about The Corporate Theatre and its Inspirational Leadership Program – Part 3 Creativity

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This conversation took place over an hour on 18th January 2017. The individual is the COO of a division in a global company, and leads a team of about 100 people. He participated in several Corporate Theatre learning events in his previous company, and the purpose of this conversation was to find out how he used his learning about creativity to create an inspired culture in his new organization, and how that has contributed to its outstanding performance.   How has our work on creativity and presence helped you and your current team to inspire performance?  The Corporate Theatre gave me a model and a method (Pathos, Logos, Ethos) that I use every time I talk publicly.  Before every occasion, I always practice my breathing and diction. I watch Shakespeare videos – it’s opened up a world that was previously completely closed  to me .  Where do I get my inspiration? It appears –...
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Martin Best

Conversation with a leader about The Corporate Theatre and its Inspirational Leadership Program – Part 2 Empathy

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This conversation took place over an hour on 18th January 2017. The individual is the COO of a division in a global company, and leads a team of about 100 people. He participated in several Corporate Theatre learning events in his previous company, and the purpose of this conversation was to find out how he used his learning about empathy to create an inspired culture in his new organization, and how that has contributed to its outstanding performance.  How has our work on empathy helped you and your current team to inspire performance? Well, I’m very anti-hierarchical. I don’t have the best ideas. I let people go in their own direction. I give decision making to the younger people. I always look at them as though they can do wonderful things.  We find out very quickly who will not get lost, and I feel it with great depth.  That’s really...
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Martin Best

Conversation with a leader about The Corporate Theatre and its Inspirational Leadership Program – Part 1 Authenticity

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This conversation took place over an hour on 18th January 2017. The individual is the COO of a division in a global company, and leads a team of about 100 people. He participated in several Corporate Theatre learning events in his previous company, and the purpose of this conversation was to find out how he used his learning about authenticity from those to create an inspired culture in his new organization, and how that has contributed to its outstanding performance.

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Markus Graw

Looking out of the window.

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Through exercises, rehearsals and seminars The Corporate theatre draws on the combined power of Performing Arts, Philosophy, Psychology and business acumen to develop new ways to reconnect leaders with their inspirational powers, something we consider vital in the relationship economy. In this post, we present you with one of many exercises which can help you to be inspired by what you see around you and can help you to reconnect with your natural inspirational powers. Once you rediscover your powers and know how to use them you will lead in a new way fostering growth and enabling your company to thrive in the new relationship economy. Think of a group of high potentials who have come together for a leadership training program. After several days of visiting plants, labs and company outlets, of meeting senior leaders and hearing about the company strategy, vision and values, they are suddenly asked to...
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Martin Best

Being Inspired.

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We actually can’t avoid being inspired, nor can we avoid inspiring others. Chance and our humanity will have their way: we dream our dreams; we reach out to, and love, each other; we are, when we are brave, true to our real selves, and we are inspired when we witness these things. We are moved by great music, by drama on stage and off it, and by the unselfishness of ordinary people. And ordinary people do the same for us: we have each given and received Inspiration, for it is part of being human. However, by developing our capacity to receive and give Inspiration consciously, and with courage, will and awareness, we can grow habits that can help more of us live more fully, and help each other to do the same.  We can ‘lead’ ourselves and each other to become less ordinary and more fully human. We have a...
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Martin Best

We live our lives as though we had another one in the bank...

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In our workshops we do an exercise that shows our participants how to allow a sensory, granular, event-based narrative to open up to the picture, waiting in the wings as it were, that wants to come on stage. Imagine 20 people in a large rehearsal space, empty except for easily moveable chairs. We ask them to divide into 10 pairs. Each pair takes two chairs, and they sit opposite each other so they are face to face and quite close. We then ask one person in each pair, let’s call them ‘A’, to imagine a moment in their life that animated their true self and awakened it. As soon as they are ready, we ask all the ‘A’s to describe their chosen moment to their ‘B’s. The room comes alive with murmuring as the ‘A’s begin. The ‘B’s’ role is no less vital than the ‘A’s. We have already taken...
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Martin Best

The Power of Imagination.

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Seeing with our eyes is but the first step towards bringing the power of imagination to bear on the whole picture we might be experiencing. The next step is that, by letting go of the dominance of thinking, our imagination can ‘make’ our version of what the whole picture comprises; then we are ready to ‘breathe in’ the picture through the receptors of Mind, Heart, and Soul. The picture then becomes experience ; the experience infuses us, ‘as if by breathing’; and infusion leads to animation which leads, as night follows day, to Inspiration.
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Martin Best

The Unpredictability of Chance

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  As humans with Receptors of Mind, Heart and Soul, we are bound up in the unpredictability of chance. This means that we actually can’t avoid being inspired, nor can we avoid inspiring others. We all dream our dreams; we all reach out to, and love, each other; we can, if we are brave, be true to our real selves. We are all moved by great music, by drama on stage and off it, and by the unselfishness of ordinary people. And ordinary people do the same for us: we have each given and received Inspiration, for it is part of being human. However, by developing our capacity to receive and give it consciously, and with courage, will and awareness, we can live more fully and help each other to do the same.  This, hopefully, will ‘lead’ us to become less ordinary and more human. We have a pathway to...
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