She is my favorite actress. I am sure I’m not alone. It is not just that she is a gifted actor. Meryl Streep steps into the soul of every character she plays. This week she won yet another accolade for best actress. This time it was the Golden Globe for portraying Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.
Actors like Streep prepare extensively to take us into the world of that character. Likewise, introverts often emphasize how much they prepare for meetings, calls, presentations, etc. so that they perform at their best ( a side note: Meryl Streep is an introvert like many actors). Yet, despite careful preparation, you can’t always anticipate what is thrown at you. Handling the moment sometimes trumps preparation.
In this clip of her recent Golden Globes Acceptance Speech a great actress is a normal human being. In the blush of winning and kissing her way up to the stage, Ms. Streep forgot her glasses. So how did she handle it? She was refreshingly real (they bleeped out the “Oh ____” ), cracked some jokes and complimented the other nominees (some even more than once:)
I loved her rambling, laughing performance where she played the character she knows best: herself. Perhaps an extra glass of wine helped. Any scripted thank you she might have had was gone and there she was, like the rest of us, dealing with an “Oh ___” moment. I will take that real performance over a carefully rehearsed acceptance speech any day.
The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people’s bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city’s crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury—you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society. Continue reading the rest of this article...
Introverts are so often mischaracterized and even blamed for the woes of the world. Now government workers seem to be taking the hit. Continue reading the rest of this article...
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