Character Switching

How to stop playing the game of not it

One of the most common questions I get when people find out what I do for a living is do I get to meet famous people? The answer is yes, but it’s not as glamorous as it might seem. I’m not hanging out with movie stars, I’m mostly interacting with them in a professional capacity.

But in the summer of 2003 I had a job unlike any job I’d had before or since. Reality competition shows were all the rage and NBC decided to do a summer series based on the Fame franchise. It was a reality competition where the contestants had to sing and dance. It was hosted by Debbie Allen and Joey Fatone.

Joey would come on shoot days along with the celebrity judges, but Debbie was very heavily involved. She was not only an executive producer, she was in the trenches every day choreographing the dances and rehearsing the contestants. The brilliant accompanist and vocal coach the late Terrence Lee Jones was in charge of helping the contestants prepare their songs every week. I was hired to work with them both and directly with the contestants.

Because I was involved in the music selection for both the dancing and all of the singing, I worked closely with Debbie on each of the songs making sure that they were edited so the show played out the way she imagined it every week.

That summer with Debbie Allen was the most hands-on and intimate relationship that I formed with a celebrity on any show that I ever worked on. She was a powerful force. High standards, pulling 110% out of everyone. She was definitely a first class Hollywood diva but she used her diva powers for good. We worked every day at the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, a dance school for inner city children. She didn’t have to run that school. She didn’t have to do anything, but she’s the kind of person that got things done. That loving but hard and driven character that she played in the Fame franchise is not an act. She is the kind of celebrity that is very easy to respect.

Every week there were these big group numbers Debbie choreographed, where all the contestants danced together. One week she’d choreographed the opening number to a James Brown song and asked me to check with the music supervisor Evan Greenspan about getting the rights to use the song.

He said it might be tough to do that quickly. In his experience, James Brown’s label was very deliberative about who used his music, and that process took time. Unlikely we’d get clearance in time for that week’s show, but he’d try.

The days passed. The dancers rehearsed the dance. Permission still hadn’t shown up. Now it was crunch time. We were shooting the next day and we still didn’t have clearance to use the song.

While Debbie was perfecting the dance with the contestants in the other room, my phone rang. It was Evan. He was brief and to the point. I hung up and told everyone in the room that Evan said we can’t use the James Brown song.

One of the producers said something like, “Well, I certainly don’t want to tell Debbie that she can’t use the opening number the day before we shoot.” Which started the “not it” game that almost always follows when someone has to deliver bad news to the boss.

I also felt fear in that moment. I didn’t want her to get mad at me.

But I had never seen her get mad. I don’t think anyone had ever seen her get mad. Certainly not a crew member. Certainly not for something that was beyond their control.

So it occurred to me, what was I actually afraid of? Why did I assume she was going to react badly? That wasn’t very nice of me! So I said, no worries. I’m just gonna tell her.

When I informed her that we couldn’t use the song and she was going to have to change it, she didn’t get mad at all. She simply informed me that I was wrong. I believe her exact words were: “Oh no, baby. Don’t worry. We can use the song. It’s not gonna be a problem.”

Now I suddenly don’t know how I’m supposed to react. We can’t use the song without a license. We don’t have a license. The guy whose job it is to get us the license has informed me we’re not going to get one in time. And Debbie Allen is the executive producer. She knows very well we can’t use the song without a license.

So while I stared at her blankly, clearly at a loss for words, she says, “Just get the celebrity wrangler to get James Brown on the phone and I’ll take care of it.”

That was the moment I found out we had someone on the crew called the celebrity wrangler. I had never seen him. He kind of magically appeared at my door when summoned. When we asked him to get James Brown on the phone, he didn’t blink. He just said “got it,” turned around, and disappeared.

Fifteen minutes later he comes back and tells us, “James Brown doesn’t like to fly, and is currently in his limousine driving cross country, somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. He also doesn’t like cell phones, so he doesn’t have one. But he does have a fax machine in his limo. We can fax him, and he’ll pull over and call us back if he wants to.”

He handed me a slip of paper with a fax number on it and was gone. I never saw him again.

Debbie Allen handwrites a fax to James Brown. And I fax it to James Brown’s limo.

A little bit later my phone rings.

“Hello.”

“Yes, is Debbie Allen there?”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is James Brown.”

Not a lot of people sound like James Brown. It was obviously James Brown, who in my mind is now standing on the side of the road at a payphone. Do I put the hardest working man in show business on hold? I cup my hand over the receiver and whisper scream at whoever is nearby: “It’s James Brown! Go get Debbie right now!”

“Hold on, Mr. Brown. We’re getting her as fast as we can.”

So, I’m sitting silently holding the phone, listening to James Brown calmly breathe while my heart is going a thousand miles an hour until Debbie finally shows up. I could only hear one side of the conversation, which went a little something like this:

“Hey James, we have just got to use this song. It is just perfect and we have just got to use it, so we need you to say yes. So you’re gonna say yes, right? Perfect. Love you, baby. Thank you so much. It’s gonna be so great. Thank you so much. Love you, bye.”

And then she turned to me and said, “See, I told you. It’s all taken care of.”

And it was. The number went off without a hitch. All the paperwork got taken care of. And I had a small epiphany in that room that was the beginning of noticing a pattern. The producer’s desire not to be the bearer of bad news was a perfectly reasonable and normal response. If the game of “not it” had played itself out to the normal conclusion, the loser would be timidly approaching her, defensively delivering the news with body language and a tone in his voice that was expecting backlash. But in that moment, when I imagined her reacting in any of the myriad bad ways we were all imagining, none of them seemed realistic with the image I had of her in my head. And it felt almost disrespectful to not give her the benefit of the doubt that she had earned that she would react in a positive and productive way.

We are often driven by a fear that others are going to judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves, which is almost never true.

This mistake can surface in almost any part of your life, but it’s almost always shaped the same way. It’s always a thought you have where you think, if I do or don’t do X, then people will get angry or judge me harshly.

It might look something like, if I wear these shoes people will think less of me. Or, if I don’t get my mom a good birthday present she’s gonna be really mad at me. Or, if I explain to my boss all of the things that went wrong that were beyond my control, he’s gonna blame me anyway and then I’m gonna get in trouble. Or, if I tell the customer I made a mistake and sincerely apologize and try to make it right, the customer is gonna think I’m incompetent and it’s gonna snowball and ruin my career.

These are very dangerous thoughts because they actually affect your behavior. You make choices based on bad assumptions about others. Your decision about what to do next always hinges greatly on your prediction about how others will react. Instead of just coming clean to that customer and solving the problem, you might make excuses or even try to cover it up.

The danger is compounded because these thoughts are basically unavoidable. We all have them. But there is an easy way to take their power away from your decision making.

In this particular kind of story that we tell ourselves, we are the ones who have to suffer the bad outcomes. So it feels like we are judging ourselves harshly, something we’re all very comfortable with, but it is actually judging the other person harshly. You’re being mean when you entertain those thoughts.

The technique is something I call character switching. Instead of imagining how others will judge you or treat you if you do something you think they’re not gonna like just switch roles. Imagine that that person brought that bad news to you or wore socks you thought didn’t match their outfit. What would the best version of yourself do? You would most likely imagine yourself showing some compassion and understanding. Well now just extend them the same grace.

Ask yourself if you were a mother and your child gave you a gift you didn’t love, would you be mad? Most people would say no. So why are you judging your mother so harshly? Why are you assuming your boss or friend or customer won’t be understanding?

Most of us strive to be kind. It’s fair to assume that the people in your life will be kind to you. And if you stop and think about it, very few people have given you reason to assume otherwise.

If you assume that the other person will be understanding you will make very different choices, and you will find that when you make it your practice, the mean people quickly out themselves. And it makes it very easy to surround yourself with people who are actually at least trying to be kind and understanding. It’s actually most people, celebrity or not.