Our approach and methods.

What’s required of leaders is always changing.

Leaders who rely on existing knowledge and a need for certainty are at a disadvantage in today’s world.

Leaders are asked to take risks, embrace the unknown, increase engagement, and co-create value with clients and colleagues. They need to have vision, and the ability to build belonging, community, and environments in which others can do new things — before they know how.

To grow the crucial leadership capabilities that meet the needs of a challenging, exciting, and relentlessly emergent world, new methods for learning and development are needed.

The Becoming Principle.

The Becoming Principle® is the innovative human development approach that teaches business professionals to do what they cannot do, so that they may learn to do it.

• Human beings are not only who we are. We’re also who we are not yet — that is, who we are becoming.  
• The human capacity to become is fully appreciated in children. We all played, improvised, and performed when we were young, and human development science shows how essential these activities are for developing cognitively, creatively and emotionally. 
• But adults are not encouraged to engage in this process of experimentation and discovery. Instead, we’re told to play it safe, get it right, “be who you are.”
• Performance of Lifetime supports leaders in overcoming this limitation by helping them awaken and engage their innate ability to perform — to simultaneously experience both who they are and who they are not yet; that is, who they are becoming.
• Belonging and becoming are interdependent. Seeing and working to support others’ becoming increases belonging. And when we feel belonging we can take risks, grow, and become.
• We create environments where our team and our clients feel belonging and can see each other’s becoming.
• And performance is a catalyst for becoming. Learning to perform in life — bringing intention and creativity to how we interact — helps leaders activate and strengthen their:
  • Courage to disrupt habits and engage in new ways
  • Self and relational awareness
  • Commitment to building belonging
  • Social and emotional agility
  • Ability to embrace and learn from failure
• Leaders in our programs engage in real-time transformation and leave with a mindset and posture that propels life-long development.

Our programs employ the following methods:

• Improvisation and theater exercises designed to grow participants’ abilities to experiment; to build their courage, creativity, and focus; enhance their skills in making new choices, thinking on their feet, taking risks, listening and building with diverse input; and seeing, building, and being part of an ensemble.
• Teaching modules focused on specific leadership capabilities — storytelling, influencing, presentation and presence, communication and collaboration, client sales and relationship building, coaching and feedback, challenging conversations, etc. — that are relevant to the organization’s objectives.
• Scene work (role-plays) that embody the challenges leaders and teams are facing in their business. These can be allegorical (i.e. taking place outside the specific business but capturing the dynamics and challenges), or set within the business. Participants perform in these scenes and are directed by our expert coaches. 
• Theatrical vignettes, performed by professional actors, that “hold a mirror” up to your company, and portray the way things are now and the way they could be.
• Ongoing reflection and debriefing in small and large groups to consolidate these new experiences, ideas, and practices.
• Performance coaching groups — subsets of the full participant body that meet with a coach for practice, rehearsal, reflection, peer and expert coaching, and shared accountability.