Shea hosts with the Sweeney brothers while I’m at Christmas: the thirty minutes they spent rapping before the show, the question every coach asks before pushing a student somewhere new, the day Shea refused to scream in the old back room, and why they were all at the studio at 7 a.m. two days before Christmas.
December is when everyone quits and January is when everyone hoards. We decided to do the opposite, on air, with one commitment each and a report due Friday. Cold showers, Sunday scaries, the tiny thing that wrecks a morning, and why a dip never has to go all the way down.
The week before Thanksgiving 2019. Brian lost his voice to six hours of Ninja Star, Shea asked for my mom’s deviled egg recipe, and we got into Black Friday, Santa, white elephant rules and the roofer who did his job like a craftsman. Then the real point: why people stop investing in themselves in December, and why the studio is the gym for your soul.
Why we show actors the inside of a casting room, the hour our improv troupe spent telling each other things nobody knew, a college football player who came in to learn listening, and what a CEO’s visualization has to do with a scene.
Kyle Maynard, born a quadruple amputee, climbed Kilimanjaro and wrote a New York Times bestseller. I met him backstage at NextCon while coaching a CEO’s keynote. He came on to talk about mastery with no summit, why he stopped talking in absolutes, and the night he danced alone in the Phoenix airport until two police officers asked if he was okay.
Shea sent me a thank-you text after a hard week and it made everything melt away. I read it, showed my wife, and forgot to reply. Twelve minutes on why a thank-you matters more than you think, and why the people who loved your audition will never tell you.
A team argues, on air, about the etiquette of asking someone to bring you coffee, what replying K actually means, and whether a favor comes with a debt. It sounds like nothing. It’s the whole reason this team still works: the small fights get had out loud, kindly, before they grow.
Hanna Spence-Schehr of The Phoenix Theatre Company on a company that opened in January 1920 and never shut its doors, the camps where four-year-olds with autism share the main stage with their peers, and what a ballet dancer learned about mastery.
A student emailed to say she couldn’t get emotional in the scene and put the credit on the coach. Shea told her the truth: you’re afraid of something, and you are the only person who can remove it. Why we refuse the credit, why we don’t want students dependent on us, and the light switch.
The night after what Joey called the best class ever: why you can’t grow until you get to failure, how perceived pressure in a room with no stakes teaches you to handle the real thing, and the ex-ASU football player with the notebook.
The sound on a Monday livestream was botched, three tired people started blaming each other at 10:45 at night, and the next morning we did it differently. Forty-five minutes on watching your own game tape, the wrong Sally, accountability, and how to handle a teammate who screwed up.
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