Critical Thinking: A lost art for career development in the arts.
A Disorienting Dilemma.
In 2012 I was performing a play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. As an Irish actor, working at the Abbey is a little like playing for the national team. For me it's as good as it gets in many ways and very much a professional peak. I was particularly lucky on this occasion to have been offered a small part in the next show in the season too. I was looking at almost six months work, doing what I loved most in my dream venue. This was literally the situation I had pictured as a teenager when I imagined what my career would ideally be like, so why was I not as happy as my teenage self had hoped?
I never really found an answer to that particular question during that season, and soon I was back in London auditioning again. While I was going through the motions of being an actor, as I'd always done, I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd discovered a fatal flaw at the core of my acting dream. I sensed it was such a fundamental flaw that I didn't really want to look at it either; for fear my dream would crumble to dust in front of me. I'd invested quite a lot of time and energy in this particular idea of career success. My eggs were very much in one thespy basket.
What followed was a period of stagnation. I did my job as best I could whenever I was called on to do it in auditions but I wasn't reaching out for work myself or creating it. This stagnation had a bit of a domino effect. I noticed I was more annoyed than ever by the seeming relentless success of others on Twitter. I was beginning to discount my chances of getting roles before they even started auditioning. My view of my opportunities was getting smaller, and with them, my hopes. I was complaining more about the business than connecting with it. The unspoken question in my mind was 'where had things gone wrong?'. However, it was still easier to keep on keeping on than to really examine any of this stuff for fear I might discover something even more unpleasant. I was 35 and I needed to make some changes. I was mid-career.
What I had trouble making sense of most was how this had all snuck up on me. Why, suddenly, was the way in which I'd always thought about my career not working? This was very much a dilemma and the period of stagnation which followed allowed me time to brew on it. It’s said that if you could speak to a fish about water it would have no concept of what you were talking about. It knows nothing beyond the water it swims in and so has nothing to compare it to or distinguish it from. This downtime in my career allowed me to see more fully that the water that I was swimming in was becoming both murky and a little poisonous. So it was time to step out of it and get honest about what was working and what wasn't. Here's what I saw:
I was working under the assumption that all of life's good things would come as a result of being successful as an actor and not before (or without).
I was ultimately only as good as people recognised me to be.
A belief holding me back was if I can't be outstanding at something why bother at all.
My idea of what 'being a successful actor' was neither A. my own nor B. making me happy.
I wonder how many of the assumptions and ideas I had on how to be an actor in the world were uniquely my own and how many are prevalent throughout our industry?
Hindsight is 20/20 you might be thinking. Of course on reflection things become clearer in ways we often can't see at the time. But do we have to wait for such moments of turmoil and crisis to see the wood from the trees? I don’t believe we do, at least not entirely.
Critical Reflection.
Hindsight allows us to reflect on our experience from a different position, that of the future. We can review our thinking, see the actions it led to and the consequences that followed. We can often instantly see where we were misinformed, mis-led or simply mistaken in our thinking. From there we have the option of making more informed decisions about how we act in the future. Critical reflection doesn't just look at what we did and didn't do in the past or present, but examines the patterns of thinking that led to those actions. It requires us to step out of the water long enough to understand that we are swimming in one pool of thinking amongst many others. Critical reflection asks us to identify our assumptions about what we think success is in our industry and where those ideas have come from. Is it our’s or societies, Instagram’s or our parents? It asks us to be explicit about our beliefs about our careers: what do we believe will happen after moments of success or failure and what evidence do we have for these beliefs? It asks us to review how we hoped we'd feel as creatives and artists moving through the world and to what degree or extent we currently feel that way? It allows us the time to examine our assumptions, beliefs and guiding theories. Much of which dictate our actions and connect them to the outcomes that we often assign purely to fate, bad luck or 'just the ways things seem to turn out for me'. Hindsight requires time for clarity. Critical reflection requires time too. Time where we step out of the normal flow of work and career long enough to see from the pool side the nature of the water we've been swimming in.
Transformative thinking.
So, once you've had time to observe your thinking and beliefs and their origins and consequences, what next? The sociologist Jack Mezirow originated a theory of transformative learning that involved critical reflection as one of its starting points in the 70's and there is still much we can take from it. Looking beyond what we do to why we do it allows us to examine the ways in which we think about ourselves and our careers and adapt them where we need to, pre-emptively. I very much had a belief that focusing all of my energy and thinking solely on the job of getting more acting work, would ultimately result in success and therefore a happy life. Reviewing that belief critically has allowed me to shift it to one where I recognise the need for a wider, more integrated, idea of success. One that incorporates much more than just ‘getting good gigs’. This in turn has fed into the way I think about myself and my work, the decisions I've made, how I've spent my time and energy and so on. Mezirow’s research on how we typically navigate this kind of change outlines this sequence in the following way:
We experience a disorienting dilemma.
There’s a period of self-examination.
A critical assessment of our assumptions.
Exploration of options, new roles, relationships and actions.
Planning a course of action.
Acquiring knowledge and skills for implementing one's plans.
Provisional trying out of new roles.
Building competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships.
A reintegration into one's life on the basis of conditions dictated by one's new perspective.
As you can see, it's comprehensive but by no means quick. Real sustainable change rarely is. But it does make the steps involved clearer. We are offered quicker routes in the form of professional development, many of which exist only on a surface level. While headshots, books, workshops and one-to-ones all have their place, unless we learn to dig a little deeper and get critical about our beliefs and assumptions such offers are seeds dropped on hard, arid soil. Mezirow, in his research, spotted that for most people it took a 'disorienting dilemma' to begin thinking critically, but it doesn't mean we have to wait for this to occur. We have the option of examining our careers and our thinking from the perspective of belief and assumption at any time. It's not always easy to do by ourselves but writing and journalling can help to separate thoughts from thinking. Talking with peers who will naturally bring other perspectives can help too. Just ask them to listen specifically for the assumptions and beliefs they hear as you speak about where you are in your career in order to highlight them. As a coach, of course this critical and transformative approach to professional development is what coaching is all about and what sets it apart from other forms of professional development like mentoring or training.
Critical reflection is a lost art in career development in the arts but it doesn’t have to be. Mezirow offers a clear pathway in his transformative theory, but we have many more at our disposal. The invitation is to find one that works best for you and to do the work to identify the waters you are swimming in. Every artist wants something different from their career, getting to know what that is for you is the difference between being satisfied or suddenly finding yourself far from it.
Photo by Faris Mohammed on Unsplash.