Women on the Verge

In recent years, there has been a movement afoot in Hollywood. Women actors, tired of playing the wimpy roles as girlfriend or wife and equally tired of being paid a pittance in comparison with the megamillions their male counterparts were making, have begun to demand -- and get -- juicier roles and more money.

This push for more power and stronger roles mirrors what is going on behind the scenes in Hollywood as well. There, women, traditionally relegated to supporting players, are pushing their way into the spotlight and carving a place in the Hollywood power structure. 

Whether it be by propelling their way into the studios' corporate offices or going out on their own, women are cracking the celluloid ceiling and changing the old-school rules along the way.

On the corporate end, women still have a long way to go. If power, Hollywood-style, is defined as the authority to green-light a movie, then there are few women in power. In spite of a growing list of women in high positions, as of early 1997 there is only one woman in the United States who can decide what feature films you'll see -- Sherry Lansing, chair and CEO of the Motion Picture Division of Paramount. No woman sits at the very top of the Hollywood corporate ladder.

CEOs, owners, studios and boards are comprised predominantly or totally of men. Behind the boards are multinational corporations -- all governed by men. As one male executive says, "Our company has a lot of women executives in Hollywood, but the board that governs us in New York is almost all men." As another puts it, "It's still an old boys' network."

Why do so few women make it to the very top of the corporate heap? As always, the reasons are legion. Lansing suggests that some women choose not to try for these corporate jobs. "Many women find when they get to a certain level of executive height in the movie business, the hours are extraordinarily difficult," Lansing says."

The pressures are difficult and it's not as satisfying as they would like. They're interested in having a balanced life. They choose to be producers or directors or to have more control of their destiny as compared to being corporate executives." Lansing believes the opportunities for women in the industry are unlimited but that women sometimes choose not to pursue the corporate ones. "They choose to pursue others, which is a very valid choice."

For those who are committed to Hollywood's corporate side, the climb upward is bound to be steep. But the Hollywood hikers think that it's worth it. "People are in the movie business because they can make a lot of money, theycan have an exciting life and they can make a difference to a lot of people," says Marcia Nasatir, who was a studio vice president hired by United Artists in 1974 and was one of the first women to crack the glass ceiling.

"Why would men want to give up those jobs?" she asks. Recognising the limits within the corporate structure, some women have left in order to use their talents more fully, to find their own style of doing business. They have become Hollywood's new cast of entrepreneurs.

"A lot of women look through that glass ceiling now, and say, `Please, I don't want to go through that,'" explains Barbara Corday, former president of Columbia Pictures Television. "They see men getting sick to their stomachs and having ulcers and worrying about heart attacks and quadruple bypasses and all that and say to themselves,`If that's equality, you can have it. I don't want to become that. I don't want to be one of them.'"

So instead of trying to blend in with the high-powered corporate players, women have entered the film industry as entrepreneurs in record numbers. In Los Angeles, 80 percent of all new businesses are created by women. Because the film industry is fed by independent contractors at every level, women can start at the top and have all of the power within their own sphere.

"Since the death of the studio system, many jobs in film are for-hire, "says Los Angeles-based career consultant JudithClaire, who has worked in the business since 1978. "I teach people that if they're writers, directors, editors, costume designers, cinematographers, script supervisors -- they're all entrepreneurs. Whatever the job, it eventually comes to an end, and they need to find another client. They have to operate as a business and do all the functions necessary for a business to survive -- including public relations, marketing, financial planning and having a good lawyer."

Many of these entrepreneurs use a team model to support each other, even with jobs that seem to be competitive. They share experiences and discuss strategies. "We are part of a social change,"says story consultant Natalie Lemberg. "We read about it everywhere -- toward home-based businesses, outsourcing, new technology. In the courseof a day I often feel as if all the decisions I make are very individual, but I also realize I'm part of a big trend."

Changing the Rules

In the 1970s and 1980s, as women moved into Hollywood's corporate structure, they felt they had to play by men's rules. Some were good players but endured criticism for being too much like men. Things began to change in1980, when Sherry Lansing became the first woman president of a major studio -- 20th Century Fox. 

Changes continued throughout the decade: In 1981 Paula Weinstein became president of production at United Artists. Barbara Corday became the first woman executive vice president in charge of primetime at a network in 1981.

Then, Margaret Loesch became president and CEO of Marble Productions; Ann Daniel became president of Winkler-Rich Productions and Dawn Steel became president of Columbia Pictures. The tide was turning. As more women entered the industry, they began to find ways to balance their own personal style with the demands of the business.

"I don't feel I ever had to change my style of doing business,"says Betty Cohen, president ofCartoon Network Worldwide, "but I've had to understand that dealing with men at the top is surprisingly more about style than about substance I've learned to walk more lightly, be less stridentand less demanding. I've learned to keep a sense of humor about things. Not to act as though your ego is deeply on the line over anything seems to be working better than to be constantly drawing lines in the sand and being overly aggressive."

Now a partner and producer at Atlas Entertainment, Dawn Steel, once known as one of the toughest women in the business inthe 1980s, toned down her fierce personal style for a more mellow persona, a change she attributes not to toadying to the male bosses but to having a daughter.

"There's nothing like having a child around to clean up your mouth. And I sure had to clean up mine. It was like, `Oh my God, she understood what I said? That's the end of that.' I was once called the most powerful woman in Hollywood and Ithought, `That's not what I aspire to be. I aspire to be the most creative woman, or the person who made the best movie.' All those things are now more important to me than power."

Power Real but Elusive

Power is a tricky business in Hollywood, where women -- entrepreneur and corporate executive alike -- walk a fine line: If they're perceived as not having enough power, they're invisible; too much and they're dangerous. For Sara Duvall, president and CEO of Thunder RiverPictures, "Real power is learning to negotiate from strength. If you negotiate with a man and can identify what he's really afraid of and what it is that he really wants, and still have what you want, then you're there. It's a workable, constructive, effective negotiation."

Television producer Marian Rees sees power as a "prickly word" and prefers the term authority. "Authority is far more definitive. You have the authority to say yes, being in a position to make a difference through your own position and leadership. There might be a producer who has the authority as the custodian of the project. But there's also the personal authority ofthe director, writer, actors and all the people working on the film. It's about shared power."

Women want the power that can help them accomplish their goals. "Yes, I want it," says Amy Pascal, president of Turner Pictures. "To be in a position of power is to be very clear about how you feel about things. It's not clouded by what everybody else is doing."

"There are many different kinds of power," says Corday. "There are peoplewho have power because of personality. There are people who have power because of their talent. There are people who have power because of their jobs. Certainly in this town, anyone who can say `yes' to a project has a certain amount of power."

For Corday, as for many women, the key to power is the ability to use it well. "I have always said to anyone who works for me, `You already have the power, so you have to be extra nice to people, because if they don't want to come to us, you have no job.'" Corday has seen the abuse of power and she doesn't like it. "With a wave of their hand, they dismiss people. `Oh, I've heard of her, she's not very good.' Or, `That guy, isn't he over 50?'"

"Power, for men or women, can be a very evil thing," says actor Jane Wyman."It takes away any humility anybody has. If you're powerful, you think you've got it all made. But when it's taken away from you, that fall down that ladder is so long and so hard, and nobody is going to catch you."

Compete or Collaborate

In Hollywood, the quest for power is intrinsically tied to the quest to takedown one's opponents, one's competition. "Ifthere's one thing that predominates in the way I hear men talk inthe business," says John Matoian, president of HBO, NYC, and HBO Pictures, and the man who used to green-light prime-time programs for Fox Television, "it'sthe use of sports metaphors. It's all about playing the game, keeping your eye on the ball, going to bat for the script and winning -- winning at anycost. It's what men learned in competitive athletics."

Some women thrive on competition, too. After all, doesn't everyone like to be the best, to be on top? Not necessarily, say many women, who see the destructive aspects of competition dominating many businesses. The competitive model has destroyed more people than it's built. 

Although the first wave of women had to play by the competitive rules of the game, the second wave, who are riding on the breakthroughs made by the Sherry Lansings and Dawn Steels of the film world, are questioning competition as a metaphor for business.

They see that competition between companies also can lead to competition within companies, which ultimately leads to wasted energy, inefficiency and an inferior product. Producer Janet Yang uses the collaborative model of management. "So much of this business is built on hype," says Yang, formerly a partner with Oliver Stone in Ixtlan Productions and now a producer at Manifest Film Company."It's like children: `My father is bigger than yours.'  It's about who got the most nominations, whose movie cost the most."

"I emphasize collaboration and delegation," says Lansing. For her, this model not only works well on the job, but makes it possible for her to have a more balanced life. "I've tried to find timefor my personal life. I've managed to do this by delegating and by starting early and not having any distractions during the day."

The collaborativemodel also emphasises efficiency. "I think of efficiency as balancing a career, a marriage and four kids," says Sheri Singer, vice president of original movies at Lifetime Television. "The juggling is easier if there is a team supporting the boss."

Many men find this teamwork approach refreshing. Richard Rashke, who has written television movies, sees competitionas getting in the way of art and productivity. "Women have had a lifetime of dealing with people in a more noncompetitive way. It's easy to explore story ideas with them. With men, it's difficult to get past the competition to a feeling level. Men get nervous as soon as you start talking about things on the feeling level.  

"If I'm developing a story with a woman and feel awkward and nervous about the inevitable sex scene, I feel confident that I can ask her to help me. I can say, `I'm really scared about this scene,' and know that will be accepted. But I couldn't do that with a man. First of all, there wouldn't be an opening, and if there were an opening, I'd be put into the position of`mine's bigger than yours.'  It's not always spoken, but it's there."

But being a woman does not necessarily make you a proponent of the collaborative system. Some women have foundthat while the collaborative model removes the need for politicking, it can be ineffective. It can also create discomfort when there's conflict, because conflict seems inconsistent with the warm, nurturing atmosphere that is supposed to be part of collaboration. Some women find that trying to emphasise teamwork and accessibility can interfere with their effectiveness.

Canadian producer Brenda Greenberg's desire for an open-door policy got out of hand. "The project can eventually suffer because I can get to the point that I'm so debilitated by trying to be accessible that I can't function anymore. I have to learn the ability to say, `I'm a little busy right now. I know I said I have an open door, but it's gotta close right now.'"

Greenberg sometimes finds a conflict between the desire to be effective and the desire to be well liked. But sometimes well liked has to win. As Canadian producer Andrea Shaw points out, "Being well liked, for many women, may be one way we keep our jobs."

Quiet on the Set

Women are also rethinking the rules in film production, particularly on the set. There are many metaphors of the badly run set. It's been described as a dictatorship run with an iron hand by the director or producer, a dysfunctional or nonfunctioning family, a war zone, a caste system with the emperor at the top and the coolies doing his (note gender) bidding.

Andrea Shaw says, "The worst sets are like a barnyard. Cocks crowing, bulls pawing the dirt, pigs snorting. It's all about marking territory and creating behind-the-scenes drama as a way of dominating. People get hurt for no good reason. On those sets I learned how not to produce."

This is not to deny that there are certain aspects of the set that are intrinsically hierarchical. "That hierarchy never goes away," says cinematographer Brianne Murphy, A.S.C. "There's the producer above everybody, andthen there's the director, and right under the director is the director of photography. The director of photography is in charge of the entire technical crew and nothing disturbs that hierarchy. It has to stay that way. There's a chain of command that has to be adhered to."

But the hierarchy can be benevolent, and collaboration is essential. "I tell my crew immediately that I can't do the job without them, that I need their cooperation," continues Murphy. "I tell them I expect them to be in earshot of me and that I won't scream. So they'd better be quiet so they can hear what I want, which works very, very well."

On a badly managed set, the atmosphere can pit one group against another. "It can become extremely stressful. Every single day they're after you." Murphy believes some of the stress and inefficiency is unnecessary. "People can't figure out why I'm so quiet on the set, but I'm fully aware how hectic things are. It doesn't help to get hectic along with it or someone will say, `She's acting just like a woman.'"

Collaboration on the set helps to spark creativity. Actor-director Jodie Foster sees this as essential. "You have to be sensitive and interested and fascinated and allow people to fly. Otherwise you break their spirit, and then they won't go for anything. So it's like good management. A good parent wants to protect her children and make sure they're on the right path but still kind of allow them to fly out."

For some, collaboration seems like a sign of weakness, that the director lacks vision. But some of the best films, whether directed by women or men, have used this collaborative model. Some women would say that the collaborative set is the only way to create a great film.

"To get your best work," says director Devorah Cutler-Rubenstein,"there has to be trust, and you have to let everyone know they're very important, that they are valued."

A Lone Voice

Perhaps one of the most significant ways that women collaborate in the industry is by networking with each other. "As one person, you're one lonevoice," producer Janet Yang argues. 

"As two, you're not yet a threat. When women first entered the business, they were very much on their own. Other women were threats to them. They did not work together. They had to be real ball-busters and get out there and be tough as nails. 

What I have found, almost uniformly at this point in time, is an abundance of support from other women. There's immediate networking. There's enough there that we don't feel one person is taking someone else's job away and enough so that we can really help each other. And there's still enough to go around."

While there may be enough jobs to go around, the market is still tight for women. Hiring in the film industry has often depended on whom you know and who has access to insider information. A lot of jobs are never advertised. And things may get worse now that California is planning to repeal its affirmative action laws. Even with affirmative action laws in place, women's careers still lag way behind men's.

"You all start out the same," says one executive who asked not be named. "Men and women usually start as secretaries or in the mail room. Or you've been to film school, produced your first short film. But a year goes by and you're still at the same level and you begin to see that the men's careers are moving. Or they're doing their second and third films, and even though your first film won awards, you can't get anywhere."

Even when one job leads to another, the moves for many women may be lateral or backward rather than up. Or, the next job may not be there--just because no one ever noticed her good work. Not noticing may be the main form of discrimination in the entertainment industry, as in many others. 

Many men do not realize that the most qualified person for the job may be a woman, or that there are only two women in their 20-person department, or that their film has only five women on the crew, or that they have no women producers, or that they've never hired a woman writer or director.

Of course, men do notice their fellow men. Producer Polly Platt describes the ways in which men look out for one another. "There is some kind of network that keeps the men who are biggies from falling down and losing their jobs. Not that they don't fail. They do. But there seems to be a safety net for men. It fascinates me the way they simply fail upward."

Statistics show that women are apt to hire other women, but bringing women into the corporate offices is not enough to change the entire industry. A quick look at the credits of most film and television shows indicates that women are still not well represented on the crews, many times serving only in what are known as the "female professions" of makeup, costumes and sometimes as a second assistant director.

And there aren't yet enough women in the business to counteract the effect of men not taking notice. So how can women break up one of the most stubborn of old-boy clubs? The Canadian government has set affirmative action standards that give that country one of the best records in the world for women in the film industry.

"The government is apt to be less sexist in its pronouncements," says Trina McQueen, president of Discovery Channel, Canada. "They do set policy. For example, our Canadian Television Commission requires every television station to have equity in hiring or they losetheir license. It also has policies on stereotyping."

Hollywood, however, is adamantly against any kind of censorship or government regulation. In the film industry, as in industries in general, women in the board rooms are essential if there is to be equality. 

Lucie Salhany, head of United Paramount Network, clarifies this necessity. "As women become represented in the real position of corporate ownership and control (and I don't just mean a token seat on a board), the decisions that are now made in board rooms and golf courses and locker rooms will also be made on shopping trips and in women's locker rooms. But that day is a long way off."

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/Page27.html

Striving for achievement

"Stacy could not have imagined the combination of exhilaration and fear she felt on beginning work on the documentary dance film. Suddenly people treated her as a serious artist..."

A psychologist and corporate consultant on maximizing personal and organizational potential, Kenneth Christian, Ph.D., identifies a wide range of challenges and changes people may face in striving for higher levels of achievement and personal meaning.

Stacy, one of the people Dr. Christian cites in his book as an example, found she was facing "demands she had not anticipated"and felt herself struggling when people referred to her as a filmmaker.

"She liked the sound of that identity but had not internalised it yet," Christian writes in his book Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement (HarperCollins).

He has worked with a wide range of successful men and women both privately and in corporate workshops, and recalls a very high-ranking woman executive, whose husband was working within the same company. 

"From my point of view, listening to her, she almost seemed to have married him to tie down that marriage thing, to have that external sign that she was feminine enough and desirable enough to be married and have children," Christian says.

"Yet she was clearly far more ambitious than her husband. In her case it led to business achievement. but I don't believe it helped her much at home, and in fact her husband was not as talented and over time considerably below her in the same organisation. Their relationship finally went on the rocks."

Her situation was "very complicated" Christian explains, "because she wanted to retain the certification that she was desirable, and yet in truth, I can't say she had enormous respect or esteem for this guy, because he was clearly less potent than she was. Probably less bright; clearly less powerful.

"She could hold her own with the men in this organisation far more than this guy could. And he wasn't a mouse; we're not talking about a relationship in which she dominated him. But she was just a force in her career.

"And you could see within her all the contradictions of the entire historical period. I think she probably came up in the late sixties, that entire period of transition from a much more traditional childhood in the fifties, to a period of coming of age in the late sixties and early seventies, where things were beginning to crack, and all sorts of possibilities were there. 

"But it's hard to shed so many skins and get used to this many different changes."

More gender issues

Christian finds that younger women he has worked with "seem to do much better, feel much more comfortable with being bright around men. 

But they can still face a certain kind of risk of intimidating insecure males, and it's very contradictory for these women. If they're very lovely, attractive and feminine, and very bright,  incredible persons, intensely motivated in their careers, it's a complicated mix, a Molotov cocktail, with different strains and trends within themselves."

One of the results of the ways boys and girls have been brought up may be a difference in how men and women deal with conflicts and competitions such as in sports. 

A co-producer of the film "Fried Green Tomatoes," Anne Marie Gillen once noted, "If you look at how little boys play on a team, there's a leader, they pick you or they don't pick you, they go out there and beat each other up, they win the game and it's over and they put their arms around each other and go on."

Some women (and men also, of course) may find it harder to move on from a conflict as adults.

"It may be that there has been more of a tendency for women to long-term nurse grudges," Dr. Christian says. "There certainly are males who do the same thing, but there are males who have a battle or contest, and then it's left, and feelings aren't nurtured and held and amplified as some sinister 'getcha - gotcha.' 

"That happens too with males, but it may be that there's this thread in cultural stereotypes that it's okay to have a good battle, a go-round, and then dust yourself off, if you're a male."

Thinking of the topic of battles in the context of corporate life, Christian brings up the example of Hewlett-Packard's CEO: "I'm fascinated by Carly Fiorina as a public figure, with all the guns aiming at her head, and her having taken a stand that included going against family (the Hewletts and Packards) and tradition and so on, and what she has produced, and what she has had to do to keep her skin almost.

"What must it be like to be her? It must be enormously gratifying. She is such a pioneer. Her space capsule is so far from planet Earth compared with the average woman. But the pressure is enormous too because she has to do it nearly perfectly for it to be good enough to critics."

These days more and more company presidents are women, Christian notes. "I think what is remarkable about Fiorina is that she is at the top of such a hugely visible company, and so the scrutiny is greater.

"There probably still is a glass ceiling, but there are certainly internal inhibitions about 'Do I want to put myself there?' It's like the first woman president; it's going to take a lot."

Another example he mentions is athlete Annika Sorenstam, who competed in the male-dominated PGA golf tournament in 2003 - the first time for a woman in 58 years; Babe Didrikson Zaharias competed in a PGA event in 1945. Sorenstam commented to CNN she took on the challenge "because I like to test myself. I'm looking for ways to take my game to a different level."

"And now there's Michelle Wie," Christian adds, "a Hawaiian girl who has played three or four golf tournaments against men, and at thirteen, she is hitting very long three hundred yard drives. She's a force of nature, a remarkable person.

"And the pressure on her is something completely different from Annika. Michelle thinks it's a hoot to be playing with men, but for Annika it looked like pins and needles, and she threatened certain men."

With women like Sorenstam, Christian says, he thinks the internal barriers now "have to do with being the first or one of the first persons doing something. And there are still women doing things for the first time, and I think that is such a strong issue. It is such an exciting time for women."

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Beliefs and attitudes

Christian brings up the force of beliefs and social attitudes about breaking the four minute mile running record as an example, and says, "I don't know if a woman can play golf as well when she's playing against men, with the force of so many eyes are on her. There are such expectations, and it so conflictual if she does well, or doesn't do well."

He recalls that at her famed Colonial PGA Tour, Sorenstam "rather quickly settled for having a good first round, and it was going to be wonderful if she was going to make the cut, but she'd already proved her point. 

"Well, those are major concessions because she's good enough to probably finish that tournament. But I thought you could see the crumbling, like 'Good for a woman' was the position she was starting to take rather early, or 'I've made my point' and then she quickly backed down and said she wasn't going to do it again.

"I want to get off the athletics analogy, but I see that women who are doing things for the first time may think they are like Icarus, that whole thing about how high can you fly. I talk about 'altitude sickness' in the book, for anybody who starts to exceed what they reasonably consider is where they could fly or achieve."

Breaking stereotypes

Christian emphasizes how remarkable it is "when somebody is going to do something new for the first time," and points out that many women are doing that now. "We're going to see a woman lead our country, I fervently hope. And I hope she's not a complete creep. 

"Men can be jerks, and women can't be, and that's the trouble. It's like Black people who used to start to crack the color line: they had to be model citizens. I still remember the phrase from my childhood: 'A credit to their race.' So I think women are still stuck right now in the 'credit to their gender' thing."

Thinking about examples of women who have reached heights of eminence and achievement, Christian speaks of Oprah Winfrey. 

"The thing that strikes me about her is that she's a wonderful combination of intelligence, femininity, strength, power and something within the shiny person she is, the personality, the character - what a wonderful thing it is to have someone like her have so much strength and so much power."

Her life story and record of accomplishment exemplify some of the preeminent issues in achievement, such as risk-taking and courage. 

"It plays out for both genders," Christian says, "but I think the way it plays out for women is related to the question 'How high is it alright for me to go?'

"That's something I think is so wonderful about Oprah: she transcends so many things that could be limits. How many excuses could she have used, but doesn't? All of us have opportunities to use excuses. We're provided with so many of them, 

and women have an enormous number available to them.

"Not everyone is going to be Oprah - we've got one, we don't need another - but we need another whoever you are, and for you to be fully yourself. To go for what intrigues you, and not stay safe, and not sit back, and not take 'No' for an answer."

Getting blocked by others, and by our reactions to others, can so often keep us from our own path. "Somebody can say something, and they can discourage you, and if you let it in, you're stopped," Christian says.

"Every day, how many ideas, how many brilliant possibilities, die before they even get to someone's lips? Often in seminars and workshops, people would say, 'I've never said this out loud before...' - as if, as long as they hadn't said it out loud, it wasn't a mental event, or a real event.

"How many things die before they are said out loud? Or how many things die on people's lips because somebody raises their eyebrows? Another thing is that our society is so market driven, that nothing good can come out if it can't be franchised next week."

These are, of course, issues that relate to both men and women. 

Christian points out there is a "very interesting story" that is akin to many issues for women, "which is what it's like in this culture to be a male, and not feel combative, and yet feel required to look like you are, in order to be 'one of the boys.' I've worked with plenty of people in that position. 

"Also, what do you do these days if you don't feel sexually precocious, and you want to wait for some reason, whatever it is. And now you're twenty one, and you're a virgin: what do you do?

Shaping influences

"All these things are shaping influences that have to do with how heavy a weight our adolescence is, which is the period in which we decide we're not going to be with our parents forever, and we've got to make it with this group, and then we have to get accepted to make it with them. And that starts something."

He adds that there are, of course, other factors from birth that "tell us what we can do if we're this gender, or this color or whatever," and that these forces "endure into our adulthood. Take the first day on a new job, you could be any age, you walk in, and read the raised eyebrows, the body language, tone of voice or whatever, and you know exactly what you're supposed to do and not do.

"This is a pure force that is operating all the time, that moves us toward accepting what is going on around us, and what others do, as the way it ought to be. The term 'over-achiever' means you are 'out of line.'"

Self-attackers

Dr. Christian has worked with  a number of exceptionally capable women executives, professors and other professionals, some of whom, he notes, are sometimes "self-attackers of the classic kind" that he describes in his book.

"These are utterly brilliant women," he says. "It would be hard to imagine that there would be many others out there that could match their brilliance, and yet they become a mess about achievement. They may be chronically late with projects. 

They might have a grant for a study and be two years behind on rolling it out.

"One such woman had enormous difficulties with doing things on time. She had developed a brilliant thesis. Things had been so easy for her, and she was the kind of person who feared that because it all came too easy, that she really and truly was a fraud. And that is such a toxic thing."

Her husband was a research cardiologist at a major university, and Christian says he got the impression "she did not want to compete with him. And I don't think it was because she thought she'd lose to him. She wanted to take risks, but feared risk enormously, because she'd talked herself into the idea that all her lateness proved she really couldn't produce.

"Well, I think the lateness was really that she wanted to perfect things before she let go of them, and she was afraid of criticism, and yet she was, paradoxically, also afraid she really was that brilliant, and then people would expect a repeat performance. Because when she put something together, it was completely new and fresh."

After some time and work on looking at these issues, she did "allow herself to put on a showing of some artwork," he notes, "and this was an amazing breakthrough, and a huge risk because she could be criticised.

"She is an example of how complicated the back and forth can get, depending on the rules you have about risk, and what's okay to show, and how bright you can be, and whether you can really be bright at all.

"She was so nervous about her capabilities, she would have made consolation come forth from a bus driver, or someone not on her intellectual plane at all. She would have disarmed any critic with the amount of self-attacking she was doing.

"So in a big picture way, I saw that a way she dealt with how potent she was, was to reduce her force. And yet she'd come to believe what she said. It's a complicated circle, how we turn strength into weakness, not just limit ourselves but attack ourselves, savagely."

One of his approaches in counseling her, Dr. Christian says, was to "nudge her with questions about why she just set it up that way, why did she make it that if she did something, the outcome would not be good enough. 

"We never talked, for example, about her exhibiting artwork, but I would ask her, What really would happen if you did do this or do that?

"She had a lot of really virulent doomsday fantasies, and I would cut through them and ask her to look at what could happen. What if, for example, she got a project in on time; what if it was 99 percent good, instead of 100 percent good, and she decided to let go of it?"

She made progress in counseling work with Dr. Christian, and in doing the fifteen steps outlined in his book, and reported later that after having held the art exhibition, she was "breathing a lot easier," that doing so had been a very helpful risk for her.

Risk-taking

"A realistic risk is one that changes some of the ways you limit yourself," Christian explains, "and certain things you've thought of as risky begin to shift, and they aren't as risky.

But, he cautions, there is also pathological risk-taking. 

"There are people who play very casually with their lives. They don't often wind up high in corporate structures, because they flame out, but you often find this in the arts, where there are people who could achieve much, much more but it's as if it's inimical to them, to let themselves really succeed.

"As an example, in the sixties there was a guy who used to sing with a group called The Charlatans in San Francisco, a band that was extremely edgy and creative. He went solo, to form Dan Hicks and The Hot Licks. 

"When he released a song that went to something like number four on the national charts, he disbanded the group. He re-formed a group and did an album maybe five or six years ago. 

"I do not know Dan Hicks personally or the reasons for his decision. He may have done what he did for reasons completely different from how they appeared from the outside. But here's a guy apparently running from success. He did not want whatever was going to come next.

"It's different from distancing yourself from getting caught up in stuff like, The record company wants me to do something; do I have to do it or not. 

"This is running before you even find out. It clearly seemed he didn't want to know."

Developing order

Developing order in your life is one of the key strategies that Dr. Christian has found to be helpful to people for reaching and maintaining higher levels of achievement.

"What I've noticed again and again with people who have a lot of talent and haven't necessarily harnessed it," he says, "is that the steps that have to do with being systematic were underdeveloped, almost from the beginning, in certain ways unless somebody mentored them and insisted that they really develop this approach, or unless they happen to be more predisposed to this.

"I think there are temperamental factors that predispose people to wanting more or less control. There are some people that it just seems to fall to them to be very orderly from early childhood, and they can be in the same family with somebody who's kind of loosey-goosey."

Obstacles, he notes, may be "biological, temperamental, or what somebody might consider to be a handicap of some degree, and the way to work with it is to recognise it and then to develop skills around that.

"So no matter what your temperament is, if you have been able to do math in your head, let's say, as one example, then that meticulous step of writing a little number at the top when you carry, is just one little point where you skip a step, and you're perfectly capable of doing that, but it can start to build in a desire to skip by steps later on that are more important."

An example he uses in the book is a man who "plunged into computers and learned how to repair them" but could never tell anyone else exactly what he was doing, and could not necessarily repeat the steps he took.

"And that makes for a certain amount of chaos," Christian says. "I used to think that I could tolerate chaos, but I really think I need more order than most people do. Some people have this kind of cast iron focus and concentration that enables them to multitask and do all kinds of things at the same time. 

"My particular nervous system is a little more sensitive to distractions, so I have to really have to notice more now, when the demands on me are greater, how much more I do need order.

"When you're doing things like consulting, and crossing time zones, and doing multiple tasks, having more than one activity, the need for order actually ratchets up."

Many people with a lot of talent don't want to be involved in something like government, "because of the rigidity of that structure," he notes.

"But if they have not developed a lot of rigor about keeping on top of everything, then the more interesting things that can distract them, the farther away they can get from their plan, and it can plunge them into chaos, so they're feeling that they are chronically running behind, barely keeping their nose above water."

He agrees it may be helpful, even a necessity, to sometimes break out of the patterns of your life, but if you really want to accomplish something "large and important" you may be defeating your ambitions by too readily, in a "knee-jerk" way, head for the beach instead of finishing something first.

NOT taking unnecessary breaks

"The people who do works of art, who write important books, edit films or take them from envisioning to completion on a shoestring budget -- at some point, it's not, "Let's break it out and go to the beach today" -- but the beach is finishing the thing, because the excitement is to be diligently completing something."

There is, he points out, a "very interesting tension" between being a spontaneous person and not: "People who grind away their lives never discover anything new. They go to the same restaurant for breakfast every morning -- it gives them complete safety and complete certainty. 

"And if your needs for certainty are really high, you're going to feel a deadness along with that order. There's a real importance to breaking out of that. Tony Robbins talks about the higher your need for certainty, the less likely you're really going to develop certain traits of greatness."

The target audience for his book, Christian notes, were people "who had so much talent, and so many curiosities and interests, and so many places they could direct their talent -- and it's always a matter of degree -- that they would become dilettantes, and not stay with anything long enough to really develop it.

"So the need for order there is to not just keep pulling up your roots and planting yourself somewhere new."

But he admits he has done just that in the past five years: "I've gone to Paris, and lived there. It takes a lot of order to do something like that, and I really had to pay attention to order, because I can be chaotic in a situation like that, and leave things not all tied down."

The patterns in the way we live are very significant, Christian asserts: "Habit is really how we govern ninety eight percent of our lives on a daily basis. We do so many things that we don't have to think about. That's what sets us free. Habits are a wonderful invention.

"This gets into the area of choice. We have a choice, to a degree, when we express our sexuality and when we don't. We don't just see 'another pigeon ruffling its feathers' in a certain way and it locks into our brain, and then a long sequence of behaviours goes on. 

"We're more like that than we want to think [he laughs], but there is a certain degree of choice. But choice emerges with attention. You can drive somewhere and barely notice that you're driving, if it's a familiar highway. You can be lost in your mind, because so many things are committed to mechanical habit.

"Well, that's how we run big chunks of our lives, unless we direct out attention to the moment, and say, wait a moment, I have a choice here; I don't have to keep doing it the way I've done it."

One of the main orientations of his work is to provide "methods to bring that choice up to the surface of conscious attention. If you're not consciously aware of your choice, you function as if you don't have choice."

There are 15 tasks described in the book to help do that, with the first one being to "Begin positive practices... Add at least one pleasurable thing to your daily life and make it permanent."

Christian cautions that people tend to skip over this aspect: "They don't put into their lives substantive pleasure. They put distractions or entertainment, but not really deepening their understanding of something, or spending quiet time, or contemplating their lives and looking at where they're going, or listening to good music, or going to view good art.

"And, of course, that's the thing that is tricky for anyone who travels, because it is so easy to be jet-lagged. Do you carry art books with you, or your iPod with good music on it? It's a hard task, oddly enough, to keep to for many people, to make sure they keep something in their life that makes each day worth having lived, besides just having gone through the motion."

Some of the tasks in the book may be of lesser priority, especially for people "who are achieving, like executives, or writers, and don't need to spend as much time on, Christian notes.

For example, the task of developing an overall vision or dream: "Many people have a pretty clear vision; there's no reason for them to spend seven days working on that written exercise.

"The idea of going on for a month is extreme. It happened in a group I led, but translating that to an individual -- it would probably be better for them to say, If I haven't gotten it in a week, let me just choose four or five things I know I want to do with my life before I'm done, and let's not worry about the term 'dream.'

"The guy I refer to as Earl in the book said, You know, that dream stuff is like psychobabble to me, but I do know there's some stuff I want to do before I die; do I have to call it a dream? Can I just choose some things I want to do?

"I said, Sure. That's the way to go. He came up with four or five of them, and just chose one that he really did want to make sure he completed first before he left the planet, and that is what he used as a dream."

Exercises and tasks to reduce self-limiting

Some of the exercises or tasks "look like they kind of go on and on," Christian admits. "Since the specific target for the book is an underachiever, I don't want them to slack, and I want them to be repetitious, but it's a real tricky dose of medicine to go from a group to someone doing this on their own."

One of the values of the groups engaged with this process is that people keep making supporting calls to each other. "To make sure you do the exercises," he explains. "When you're doing it alone, I think a lot of people skip over what I call in the book a prerequisite: to get somebody to check in with who is going to keep you honest -- what people might call an accountability partner.

"But when you get people who are achieving at a fairly high level, they don't need steps like the exhaustive self-appraisal, and they almost know the five things that get in their way because they've had so many 360 reviews or whatever.

Earlier in the interview, he talked about what happened with golfer Annika Sorenstam, and Christian exclaims, "Wow. My hat is off to her; am I ever impressed with what she's done, and it would be ludicrous of me to ever presume she should have done more or that she didn't have the right to say what she did about not continuing in the PGA golf competition. I don't want to judge her because she said it's doing a lot to qualify or to finish the first round, or have a good day. 

"On the other hand, if you are aiming for something, one of the places to look if you're feeling stuck, is the way you talk about and use your language when you discuss the goal you're aiming toward.

"In task nine in the book I talk about the way people use qualifiers, use adjectives, use present tense versus past tense. I talk about Clive, who is very clear, very succinct speech, and then when he talks about smoking, he talks in a passive voice: 'It will be interesting to see how it comes out.'

"That language is a tipoff to the way you're meta-communicating to yourself. You're keeping yourself in a hypnotic trance."

Referring to dealing with any sort of glass ceiling, Christian advises: "If you feel you're running into a barrier, a stuck place, and you're unaccustomed to that and want to move past it, start first with the way you're talking to yourself about it, because you may be using very equivocal language with yourself, instead of very unequivocal, definite, 'this is the situation' statements.

"If you're using language like 'just' and 'kind of' and 'sort of' and all those things that diminish the potency of what you're saying, you can examine doing that and then look to see what is the ambivalence under that. 

"The ambivalence may be, You know, I don't think I really want this; a lot of people think this is a good thing for me, but I truly like where I am right now, and I don't think I want to invite all the new challenges that are going to come with that. Who says you have to keep rising in any one particular system? This life is your life, and any new changes ought to stem from your own volition."

Dr. Christian is also developing a "field manual" for people who "aren't necessarily underachievers, but who want to maximize their potential. 

"And in there, I talk about people with something tugging at them, having a 'rock in their shoe' or a kind of itch, and it's similar to the pre-contemplation period, when you haven't really figured out what it is that's bugging you, but something is there.

"Sometimes when people don't want to go farther, or they have ambivalence, usually they've gone in a straight line. It's worth looking, because maybe something else is beginning to call them, a different kind of development. 

"Instead of further advancing their career in another step, they might advance their career in terms of increasing the level at which they're doing what they are already doing.

"Maybe it's that something else is already starting to bloom in them, that has to do with a different form of self-expression or self development, something they've left behind. Or maybe relationships are starting to become more important, at a certain age."

Asked about what may be most helpful to people in terms of making change, he says that support is crucial. 

"Having someone who doesn't want to tug at your lapel and say, Wait a minute; stay back here with me, don't abandon me. In other words, finding someone who is really excited about your continuing to move and grow, and is not intimidated that they're going to be left behind.

"We can all exert influences on each other out of our own needs, and sometimes we hold each other back, or we make unspoken agreements that we're both going to do this, and mock the other people who are doing that, or whatever. So support is really crucial. Especially for anyone who is the first one doing something."

But not everyone wants to be in that position of front-runner or pioneer, he agrees. "And nobody should be forced to.

"Anyway, support is huge. That's why I spent so much time in the book talking about Andre Agassi, because he's clearly someone who had enormous talent, and hadn't been nearly as systematic earlier in his career, just going on the raw talent, as he was later on when he hooked with Brad Gilbert and another kind of conditioning coach."

"Between the three of them, they brought his career back to number one. [Agassi won both the Canadian Open and the US Open.] And it was really because he developed a much more systematic approach."

http://talentdevelop.com/interviews/KChristian.html