Igor Stranvinski once said that the only thing that inspires an artist is an accident. For example when a glass tumbles unexpectedly on stage, the great actor will make a moment of the unexpected. Accidents require improvisation. They keep the artist from becoming too comfortable. They offer the element of the unexpected - an opportunity for the creator to be surprised by their own response.

Finding a Language of One's Own
I was meeting with John, a vice president of sales and marketing for an international pharmaceutical company. We were talking about what it means to be present and open to the moment. I shared a story with him about a time when I was a music major at college. One summer I earned extra income as a pianist at the Quinte Hotel.

"The first night I played at the Quinte the room filled quickly. Soon the air was thick with the smell of beer and stale smoke. Noisy voices drowned out my quiet thoughtful improvisations. "What am I doing here?' I asked myself as waiters rushed by, their trays heavy with glasses of cold draft beer. Looking around at the hard faces, I put aide any ideas of playing my own ompositions. I also put aside thoughts of playing Chopin or Debussy as well.

About half way through the third night I absorbed myself in an arrangement of 'Summertime" moving languidly through a progression of dark minor chords. The noise in the room seemed faint now, as it if it were miles away. I was lost in my own musings when suddenly a glass of cold beer smashed against the wall near the piano. It was followed shortly by another. Within moments the entire room was a brawling mass.

I jumped up, closed the piano lid, stepped off the small stage, and walked quickly to the offices at the back of the hotel. There I met the owner who, taking me firmly by the arm, said " I am paying you a dollar an hour to make this room happy. It is not happy so go out there and cheer everyone up" Within moments I was back on the piano. But I no longer got lost in the music. Instead I learned to 'feel the room'

And as I allowed myself to connect with the room, it connected with me as well. Soon the anonymous surroundings of the Quinte Hotel had taken on a distinctly human and intimate face.

John and I talked further about what it meant to bring the whole person to our encounters with others and how it is in our vulnerabilities that we find our deeper strengths.

John thought about this, wondering aloud what it would mean to be more vulnerable and open in the context of an upcoming sales meeting that he need to leave for shortly. He was taking his sales and marketing team-a group of approximately 80 people- for a three-day offsite national sales meeting.

As we later reflected on what he had learned from this meeting, John described how our brief conversation about vulnerability had set in motion his own moment of truth when he also needed to "feel" the room:

"I had originally planned to take the group through a series of PowerPoint presentations highlighting the financial priorities, strategies, and goals for the business over the next year or so. But it was clear immediately following our conversation that to proceed with my original plan simply wouldn't work. I could no longer hide behind the sales numbers, graphs, or technical expertise.

 

People were too excited and engaged. I knew I needed to drop my plan, but I did not have any idea what to put in its place. I was new to this group and so I needed to prove myself and establish whom I was. But I also realized that what I already knew how to do simply wouldn't work."

John knew that he needed both to be ready to step out in front of people and to be with them-to find his own inner strength by being willing to also be open and vulnerable with others.

"I knew that if I could trust in the power of the moment, I would find a more engaging, creative way of conducting business and that this would guide me in the future. This would be more challenging, but it would also yield much more than what I already knew of myself as a leader.

 

What scared me was that I knew that by engaging others in this way, I would no longer control the outcome of the meeting; I could not foresee where it would lead or what it would ask of the company's leadership. And what was most frightening was that because I would not be reporting from any established body of knowledge or expertise, I would be in a sense relinquishing my authority to speak."

As John shared what he had learned about himself and others from the meeting, I reflected on my own experiences as a performing pianist as well as a keynote speaker and creative facilitator. I remembered how I often have felt challenged to free myself from the understandings I have held in memory in order to ease into the inner teachings of the moment. Speaking from memory, which I think of as "thought speech," assumes its authority from a body of content and expertise. "Living speech," or speaking from presence on the other hand, reflects our thinking and experience as it is made in the moment-including our doubts, perplexities, questions, aspirations and fears.

Poet William Stafford suggests that this manner of speaking offers unique challenges:

"You start without any authority. If you were a scientist . . . if you were an explorer who had gone to the moon, if you were a knowing witness about the content being presented . . . whatever you said would have the force of that accumulated background and information; and any mumbles, mistakes, dithering could be forgiven as not directly related to any authority you were offering (Stafford, 1978: 62)."

But for a poet, he adds, "Whatever you are saying, and however you are saying it, builds its authority from the performance in front of us, or it does not build" (Stafford, 1978: 63). This is the unique challenge of a living speech. "Artists are alive in the presence of experience," Stafford says. "This is their job" (Stafford, 1986: 68).
John agreed that this was the new challenge for leaders as well.
" In a world of accelerating, unexpected change" he said " none of us can any longer depend on simply downloading information from memory, because whatever we might offer on that basis is already out of date. Increasingly, the intuitive insights that will matter most will be those that are living in us now"
It may be that, in the future, all that speakers will have is the now. The courage to capture the feeling of what is alive now and bring it into words - to make visible the hidden wholeness that lies behind all things - this will make a crucial difference.

This is not to imply that the past is not relevant. Nor does it mean that what we say needs to be original. It does suggest that when we follow along the nerve of our own intimate inquiry our past experience benefits from a fresh reading in the context of what is emerging in the moment. And this is what we need now. And this can be very disorienting because this 'feeling of the moment' is often vague and ephemeral, a flash of intuitive insight that plays at the edge of our conscious awareness. It rarely comes to us complete. While we may notice its existence at the periphery of our conscious attention, it is difficult to determine whether what we are sensing is real or imagined, and so we often consider it an untrustworthy guide; we disregard its subtle urgings.

"Yet it is precisely in these moments of disorientation, that the potential for innovation is most accessible," John said. That is what happened to me. I had to let go and let the words find me. -It was the first time in a work setting that I allowed myself to be that vulnerable. And I didn't actually allow it - it just came."

We need to create conferences and meetings that are authentic encounters with insight and learning. That is, places and spaces that feel alive and authentic and where what we take away is not what is announced in the program but the surprises that greet us when we are willing to engage with the unknown and the unexpected. In this new speaking world, speakers are not performers or readers but learners and catalysts. Here their authority comes not only from a body of established expertise but also from listening into the moment, asking the right questions and bringing forth fresh viewpoints that come from a curiosity and inquiry that originates deep within themselves. What is most personal is also most universal. When we speak from the deeply personal we are also speaking from the whole.
In this manner of speaking we act as true artists in that often won't know what those words will be until they are spoken. That is how my playing changed at the Quinte. In life's true fashion it was behind that green and red door, with its grimy, peeling paint, that I first learned to forget myself and discovered how to feel the room. By means of finding a language of one's own, my music - and my way of speaking - has not been the same since that night.

Speaking from Presence is adapted from the chapter, Awakening Presence; Discovering the Organic Nature of Learning and Change in Artful Leadership: Awakening the Commons of the Imagination Michael Jones, Pianoscapes 2006.

References
Jones, Michael Creating An Imaginative Life (Berkeley, CA, Conari Press, 1995
Stafford, William Writing the Australian Crawl; Views on a Writer's Vocation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1978).
Stafford, William You Must Revise Your Life (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press) 1986