becoming and belonging.

We Build Belonging Every Day.

At Performance of a Lifetime (POAL), a globally diverse, healthy, thriving culture is essential to our team’s well-being and our partnerships with clients in growing leaders. Central to our culture and our work is building belonging every day — a continuous, collective activity that supports us in taking risks, growing, and becoming.

And as it turns out, seeing and working to support others’ capacity to grow and change — and become — strengthens belonging. Belonging and becoming are interdependent and reinforcing.

Our belonging practices

As the builders and shapers of our environments, we invite our team to prioritize how we work together each day. Differences in our histories and experiences matter and are valuable for business growth, and we aim to be alert in our interactions, to attend to, appreciate, and pursue these differences.

We have developed a set of Belonging Practices that guide us to be active and creative in our conversations, our relationships, and ways of working with our clients and with our ensemble:

Build belonging every day. Belonging is built in every conversation and in the relationships and community we cultivate. So let’s listen, be curious, and be kind. Let’s see the ensemble, the particular humans, and their context. Let’s attend to the unique histories of our relationships. Let’s build environments where we can explore, challenge, and build beyond our assumptions. 

 

Appreciate language and be makers of meaning. Let’s approach every conversation as a chance to co-create meaning (and recognize that’s the activity we are always doing), and engage with the impact of bias in our daily work. Definitions are a starting point, but they become meaningless (and can be harmful) without ongoing conversation aimed at building new ways forward together. 

 

Choose to grow, not know. Let’s be continuously curious, impacted by, and appreciative of the differences among us. Let’s both acknowledge pain and find joy in our unique experiences and histories. Let’s learn what matters to each of us when it comes to transforming the world and how POAL can contribute. Let’s build with who each of us is — and is becoming — and create something new together.

 

Embrace our differences and our unique humanity. While our similarities and differences (and the labels that society attaches to them) significantly impact our lives, let’s choose not to assume we know how identity matters to anyone. Instead, let’s build brave environments that invite us to give more, ask more, and make our assumptions seeable.

And as a company led by people living in the U.S., let’s embrace the intentionality, awareness, and learning required to work and play in a globally connected world.

 

Let’s play! …as a means for connection and activating new ways of engaging. While it may sound counterintuitive, we see play and performance as essential to taking social change seriously. When we play together, we experience immediate and visceral connections with one another. In play — freed from “getting it right” — we can be more brave, try on new ways of talking to one another, and see that change is possible.

 

Value history and continue to learn. Let’s learn from the rich history of social activism, and continue to take action, learn, and build new tools. Let’s appreciate that while systemic oppression and efforts to divide us continue to catalyze hatred and violence, change and transformation are possible — and are happening. Let’s celebrate and build on emerging progress.

“Whoever told you that changing the world can be done without changing yourself?”  

— POAL founder Fred Newman, in a song lyric from “The Task,” adapted from the play by East German playwright Heiner Müller.