Posts in month: April, 2009

Susan Boyle, who recently performed on the U.K. television show “Britain’s Got Talent,” has captured the world’s attention.

In case you’ve missed it, she’s a 47-year-old unemployed charity worker who lives with her cat in a small village in Scotland.

As soon as she walked on stage, the audience began to snicker and roll their eyes. Simon Cowell, the show’s host, asked her some pre-performance questions in his famously condescending style, and to the audience’s enjoyment, she answered awkwardly.

She was painfully ordinary, and everyone was prepared, looking forward even, to see her fail.

By now, if you don’t know the story, you could guess it, right? She more than wowed them. She opened her mouth to sing, and, as judge Piers Morgan later said, she had “the voice of an angel.”

She wasn’t painfully ordinary; she was amazingly extraordinary. The audience immediately jumped to a standing ovation and stayed there until the end of the song. The YouTube video of Susan’s performance has, as of Tuesday, received more than 35 million views.

We are riveted, and a recent article in USA Today does a good job of cataloguing all the reasons. We prejudged her by her looks and were fooled. We experienced the gamut of emotions in a few short moments: guilt, shame, vindication, hope. She’s a modern-day Cinderella, and these days, it’s a wonderful distraction and inspiration to witness the triumph of the human spirit.

But there’s something else Susan Boyle awakens in us as we watch her come out of her shell: our own selves. Who among us does not move through life with the hidden sense, maybe even quiet desperation, that we are destined for more? That underneath our ordinary exterior lies an extraordinary soul? That given the right opportunity, the right stage, the right audience, we would shine as the stars we truly are?

That promise underlies most successful advertising campaigns: the desire to transform from caterpillar to butterfly. Maybe if you buy that (fill in the blank), people will see you for the sophisticated, cool, gorgeous, talented, lovable person you know you really are.

But in our less desperate moments, we know we can’t purchase that transformation. Although Susan Boyle became an overnight sensation, hers was not an overnight transformation. She’s been practicing singing since she was 12. In her case, overnight was 35 years.

It’s easy to admire Susan. But it’s far more interesting to be transformed by her. “There is grace,” a friend recently wrote to me, “in being molded by your own gifts.”

To allow yourself to be molded by your own gifts takes courage. You have to be willing to stand there, exposed and authentic, while the audience rolls their eyes at you and sneers, expecting failure. And then, of course, you have to fail, laugh or cry, and keep going until, one day, they stop laughing and start clapping.

But you can’t do it alone. Susan Boyle didn’t; she had a voice coach, Fred O’Neil, who worked with her for years and encouraged her to audition. And she had her mother.

“She was the one who said I should enter ‘Britain’s Got Talent.’ We used to watch it together,” Boyle told the British paper The Times of her mother, who died in 2007, “She thought I would win. … I am doing it as a tribute to my mum, and I think she would be very proud.”

If we’re lucky, we have parents who encourage us. Nothing really replaces a mother or father who believes in you. But even if you don’t have parents who believe in you, it’s important to have someone. Someone you trust, enough that when they offer criticism, you know it’s to draw you out more fully, not shut you down even partially. iReport.com: Have you been judged on looks?

And a good supporting friend even sees through the talent, right through to you. With her mother gone, Boyle still has O’Neil. And recently he said to The Telegraph that he was worried all this attention was obscuring “the real person” he knew.

“I am concerned about her being surrounded by all these PR people,” he said, “that she will not be given the time to sing.”

Susan Boyle is a phenomenal role model for all of us, not just because of her talent or her courage or her perseverance or her supportive friends. She is a phenomenal role model for us because she is us, in all our awkward ordinariness and amazing extraordinariness.

Peter Bregman is chief executive of Bregman Partners Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of “Point B: A Short Guide to Leading a Big Change”. He writes a weekly column, “How We Work,” for HarvardBusiness.org.

Do you ever feel like you’re just faking it?

You know, walking around in a grown-up body acting like you know what you’re doing, when really you have no idea who you are inside.

We all play-act. We don a suit, go to work and act like the other people at the office.

We get married, have kids, buy a house and join the PTA, yet secretly wonder if the other grown-ups feel just as clueless as we do.

We frequently put so much energy into being who we think we should be that we forget who we actually are.

It’s amazing how much of our identity is tied up in the roles that we play. We often assume that because our job title reads VP of Development, church secretary or head widget maker, that’s the net sum of identify.

But talk to anyone who has lost their job, or their savings (or worse) and they’ll tell you, you are not your job description. Nor are you your home, your bank account, or even your body.

Like it or not, the angst of our times is forcing us to do some serious soul searching, yet the person we often the most afraid of discovering is our real authentic self.

In his newest book, “Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Taken,” author Mike Robbins writes, “We live in a culture that is starving for authenticity. We want our leaders, our co-workers, our family members, our friends, and everyone else we interact with to tell the truth and to be themselves.”

But beyond wanting others to be authentic, we also want permission to drop our own masks as well. Robbins (www.mike-robbins.com) says, “We want to have the personal freedom and confidence to say, do and be who we really are, without worrying so much about how we appear to others and what they will think or say about us.”

“Sadly, however,” he writes, “even though we may say we want to live in a way that is true to our deepest passions, beliefs and desire, most of us don’t.”

Busted. (And you thought it was just you!)

How many of us can honestly say that we’re living a life that is 100 percent true to our values? Much less the inner yearnings of our souls?

The sentiment, “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken” was originally penned by famous nineteenth century author and poet Oscar Wilde. But the words resonate in today’s environment.

I would never minimize anyone’s money woes, or other suffering, but perhaps with some of our outer trappings stripped away, we’ve been given the opportunity to discover who we are inside. The prospect is both scary and exciting. Robbins says that, “the paradox of authenticity is that we both seek it and fear it at the same time.”

What if I reveal who I really am and nobody likes it?

But then again, what if Mike Robbins and Oscar Wilde are right? What if all the other roles are taken? What if there’s nobody left to be but yourself?

It’s a tough call, you can keep on faking it, which is even harder to if you’re anxious and broke. Or you can decide that there really is only one you, and that you’re already good enough, smart enough, and tough enough to handle whatever the Universe sends your way.

So just be you, it’s cheaper, it’s easier, and you don’t even need a costume.

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, keynote speaker, nationally syndicated columnist, business consultant, and media personality.  Read more at <www.forgetperfect.com>.