Performance, Frame by Frame

Andrew, Joey, and I stared quietly at the drain pipe in my side yard. None of us moved from our hard seats on the river rocks. I looked past the camera toward the afternoon November sun. “We’ll lose the light soon,” I said. “We need to get this shot to match the next one, which we’ve already shot.”

“I’m not going to go get her,” said the Andrew, the director and co-writer of this film.

“Well, I don’t want to go either,” said Joey, the other writer.

The “her” in question was Queen Victoria, the villainess in Andrew and Joey’s award winning film The Portal Adventures of Dr. Stoopid and the Prince. They were making a sequel. Andrew and Joey, my nephews, were 11 and 13 at the time. Queen Victoria was a Lego figure. We had left her in the house.

The boys had already put in a long day by anyone’s standards. They had started the morning building sets, tested various effects for alien footprints, discussed plot points over lunch at a local Italian joint, canned a few shots, and broken into a heated creative debate over whether the Prince now lived in a tree house. Performance was deteriorating.

As their producer, my job was to fund, drive, facilitate, and mediate. I had not hired a prop master. I thought it would be best if they sorted out the fetching between them. But we had already been through two pep talks in the last 24 hours. I knew that I was out of juice. Our energy tanks were empty.

According to the Human Performance Institute, performance is enabled by the effective management of four types of energy:

• Physical: Bodily health, strength and endurance.
• Emotional: Connection to the activity or people.
• Mental: Focus, clarity, and creativity.
• Spiritual: A sense of alignment with the activity’s mission.

It’s not uncommon for me to whip out a chart or a microscope to share high concepts with my clever nieces and nephews. But as I’ve grown wiser in my practice I’ve learned to reach only for the next obvious response and go from there. We needed a break.

“Guys, let’s try this,” I started. They shifted on the rocks but didn’t look up. “Let’s take a break for 45 minutes.” They both looked at me with wide eyes.

“You can each do whatever you want. Play video games, watch TV, read, play with Legos, whatever. You can snack but it has to be fruit, nuts, or the cheese sticks. Drink some water.”

“All right!” said Andrew.

“Nice!” said Joey.

“I’ll set a timer. In 45 minutes we’ll meet back here and shoot the shot. Okay?”

“Okay!”

“One of you needs to bring the camera and one of you needs to bring Queen Victoria. Who will do what?”

“I’ll bring the queen,” said Andrew.

“I’ll bring the camera,” said Joey.

Performance falters when we are stressed from either over- or under-expending energy. It made perfect sense that the team’s blood sugar levels were low, that they harbored negative feelings over the creative debate, that they were out of ideas, and that they had lost sight of the mission—the final film. They had disengaged. Maybe they also needed freedom to express themselves without compromise. They could have been suffering from under-expense as well. A bit of free play energizes anyone.

HPI’s research says the enemy of high performance is the absence of strategic recovery. The recovery period worked. We got the shot and one more before the sun set.