Iris Professional Practice Blog

WHAT MAKES YOU A FOLLOWER

I had a meeting today with a friend of a friend who is a property investor.
What's that got to do with dance you may ask?...
Well, throughout our conversation we discussed many things. I learnt something new about how property works and re-affirmed to myself that although I understand about business it's not what makes my wheels move, per say.
At some point we got talking about how having a vision is simply not enough to making your dreams work. My friend was talking about his frustration on how how difficult it is to explain his vision to people around him and how frustrated he is because people don't understand it.
While listening to him it reminded me of some of my own steep learning curves. It's all great to have an idea, but, if you are not able to explain it to anyone, how on earth you expect people to believe in it?...And if they believe it, how will they continue to support it?...

Training an instructor's team for the last ten years has brought me plenty of "on the job" learning experiences. One of them was to understand how to present ideas to people. Presenting your ideas to someone requires you to have researched your idea well and have some good points of reference to back up your idea. Also, de - constructing your idea is a useful exercise to yourself which allows you to reflect further on every step of your idea in order to see your idea in a clearer light, as well as knowing how to present it to others in simple, easy terms. My friend was impressed. He mentioned he was naturally shy and had difficulty relating to people. He would consider it his next challenge to improve his public speaking and presentation skills based on our conversation (!)

Creating an engaging audience is also a key aspect to any successful project outcome. My friend was wondering as to how to get people to believe and support his ideas.
I've often concluded that, trust has been at the base of creating any sort of audience for my work. An audience that relates to you, that trusts your process and what you are developing and/or sharing is more likely to follow you in the long term. My dance experience has taught me that having integrity in my work will create a space where students and audience will come to view you as a "true representative" of your work and facilitates a space for trusting the artist.
Once this trust is established you will easily create your own "tribe" which will support you and even advise you, providing you with essential resources for "constructing" your dream.
Trust, I learnt, is a base component for creating your own targeted audience.
Our meeting went on longer than I expected and I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation exchange, which felt like a learning exchange in itself.