Do you feel like yourself when hosting?

Or are you doing an impression?

how i occasionally feel while hosting

The best hosts I know often credit a lineage of other great hosts who aided in their greatness: mentors, moms, pastors, legendary organizers, high school teachers.

At my best I hope to be like them, gathering others for a meal or leading a workshop while the translucent smiling blobs of every good host I’ve ever known cluster behind me and, even though I’m the only one who knows they’re there, make a “she’s pretty good, right?” type eyebrow raise.

But sometimes I am not weaving these influences together at all; I am 100% just doing an impression of someone else entirely.

I know because I can feel the difference; I’m ‘snapping into’ a mode, my voice doesn’t exactly sound like mine, I might say words or phrases I never use otherwise in my life, I do TED Talk hands, my heart races or I’m not even conscious of my body at all because I am so far outside of it. When it’s all over – the meeting or party or workshop – I feel myself come back into my body like a soul after possession.

Recently I realized that this was all so utterly normal to me, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Hosting, facilitation, or any sort of presentation requires so much energy, so much confidence and grit, that it sort of necessitates becoming a different person. An image of my aunt on a holiday comes to mind after hustling in the kitchen all day, snarfing through dinner, and finally flopping down on the couch, dishes done, spectacle over, returning to herself: And I’m back. What’d I miss?

But there’s a difference between buckling down for a burst of energy and teleporting out of your consciousness to get through something. At least the first one still includes you in the picture.

So many community building experiences require us to step into some type of host self. As is true for any of the skillsets that help us show up with/for others, hosting is both so essential and a role we might not have ever played before.

So when we grasp for the playbook – assuming we can find the influences at all – we reach for these Patron Saints of Really Good Hosting. Or the darker flip side: we revert to any mascot of power or influence from our lives. Even the bad ones, like narcissistic bosses. Or the well-worn ones (again, see: TED talk hands). Or the tragic ones, like family members who threw a great party but disintegrated, over so many birthdays and holidays and dinners, through self-sacrifice.

But our communities don’t need a carbon copy of any one of these influences; they need us, special ‘ol us, showing up as only we would. Feeling like ourselves while hosting is essential for our nervous systems, for developing our own sense of power and pleasure, and for building a more authentic world where we don’t have to put ourselves on hold when we show up as conveners.

a very incredible spectrum on “ideal gestures” from this piece

It makes me wonder about the line here, when stepping into another hosting self can be invigorating, and when it might be so disembodied from who we really are that it feels like a trick. If we need to become someone else to show up with people we are asking to show up as themselves, how does this distort the exchange between host and the group?

Or put yet another way: How do you know when you’re using a role for its promise of escape or its offer of power?

Theatre, unsurprisingly, is a deeply comfortable dimension for embracing the role of it all. It’s why so many facilitative practices root in performance, like the coaching offering from legendary improv theatre Second City. Or why the best warmup games often originate in theatre. The practice of Applied Theatre leverages performance and roleplaying to get at very real world outcomes in real world settings. Augusto Boal, founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, utilized The Joker as a neutral “facilitator” in dialogic scenes, carving out an entire role that played a crucial intermediary function among participants. I know I have found beautiful permission in embracing the humiliation of facilitation for this reason; I get to float outside of myself and the group, be a bit of a clown, bounce back.

Maybe that’s the trick; it’s a role, or a combination of roles, but it isn’t all of you.

Just yesterday, a friend summoned up the image of her electric, kooky, magnet of a father when I shared my nerves around an upcoming gathering. “Just channel Scott.” I was wildly comforted by this. And I want to be! I want the experience of hosting to be something that energizes me, connects me more deeply to my influences, myself, and the people around me. I want to draw from mentors and be totally myself, shaped by all of them but still wrapping it all together in a form only possible because of that unique mix, every bit like DNA.

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Would love to hear when you feel most/least like yourself when hosting, and who you channel when you’re not fully “you”! Or how you stay grounded in yourself so every hosting opportunity is not also an out of body experience.

p.s. If you’re new here, might i show you the way to GROUP HUG HQ?