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 methods:

Our solutions are firmly grounded in business outcomes. Every phase — from discovery to design, coach preparation to delivery, and post-workshop reinforcement — is tied to your stated objectives and specific business indicators. To move conceptual learning into the visceral, relational, and practical level of human interaction, we immerse participants in exercises and activities that draw on the tools actors and improvisers use to transform themselves.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
We employ frameworks and exercises that draw on our deep expertise in behavioral change through purposeful performance and play. These experiences stimulate new behavioral choices and strengthen social-emotional skills such as listening, agility, empathy, curiosity, divergent thinking, vulnerability, and self-awareness — all key to growing participants’ capacity to lead.

A RIGOROUS PRACTICE FIELD
Our work is designed to provide a “practice field” where participants learn to apply the skills built in the exercises we run, aligned with the business impact and developmental outcomes you wish to achieve. By performing and being coached and directed in improvised scenes that resonate with their real world challenges, participants discover and develop new and more effective ways of interacting in the varied situations they face.

PERFORMANCE COACHING
Our carefully designed and facilitated small-group coaching sessions provide an environment for practice, collaboration, and accountability. In addition to continuing the skill-building and reflection from in-person workshops, participants bring their opportunities and challenges to work on in a smaller, focused setting.