Gary DePaul:
Gary DePaul with Unlabeled Leadership. Welcome to episode 89. Terry Knickerbocker helps people find their voice. Here’s a shout out to listeners in Virginia, specifically in Williamsburg, Woodbridge, Yorktown, and in Texas, Plano Red Oak, San Antonio, and Amarillo. With that let’s get started. I sat here for about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to articulate who Terry Knickerbocker is. He’s not a corporate professional, he’s not a leadership expert. And he’s, I don’t know what to say. He’s amazing.
Gary DePaul:
Terry founded the Terry Knickerbocker Studio, and this is a premier acting studio located in Brooklyn, New York in the heart of Industry City. Terry has taught and continues to teach actors from all over the world. Even if you don’t know anything about acting, I encourage you to go to his website, the Terry Knickerbocker Studio website, read about the philosophy, read about his FAQ’s, learn a little bit about this technique. He uses called the Meisner technique in the show notes. I list some of the actors who Terry coach over the years. And I also list some of the projects that he’s currently working on. I guess the point I’m trying to say is that this is someone who has been extremely successful in his field, in his craft. Yet he continues to thrive to push the boundaries of what he does. And in part one, you’re going to hear an amazing story about how he did that during the pandemic. Oh, and one more thing, Terry gets what leadership is about. And I can’t say the same thing for some other people. I know
Gary DePaul:
Part one committed to excellence. In Nine Practices of 21st Century Leadership. I talk about seven principles and one of those principles is connecting with others. If you want to be effective at leadership, you need to find ways to connect with other people. That connection
Gary DePaul:
Sets a whole foundation for how you lead and be able to help other people grow, develop mentally and morally in this first story, Terry shares how he connected with his students and other people. Here’s Terry with his story,
Terry Knickerbocker:
It’s recent, it’s two different people and they sort of helped me very much. Um, and this goes back to March of 2020 when the pandemic was coming upon us. And honestly, as an acting teacher who runs his own business, I was convinced that we were going to have to go out of business. I knew that NYU, where I used to teach was charging all their professors in all departments to move online for. It’s hard to believe this now, but for like three weeks, that was the idea. There would be three weeks and then we’d be back to normal. I got scared, terrified, and angry because I was there. Like, there’s no way you can teach acting movement, voice. These are embodied practices online. You could teach poetry, you could teach a history lecture, but how are you going to teach the things that happen between bodies in a story?
Terry Knickerbocker:
How are you going to do a kiss or an embrace or a shove? I honestly thought, I mean, I got into some very catastrophic thinking and started to think, well, I’m going to have to go out of business as a business. I bootstrapped. I’m going to have to sell my house and we’re going to have to, I don’t know what you know, I have a seven-year-old son and a wife. I don’t know what we’re going to do. It really, really rocked me on Thursday. The 11th of March, I had, for some reason, decided to walk down to NYU in Greenwich village, where I used to teach in this mood, wanting to see my old boss. Who’s a woman, a very wise acting teacher named Rosemary Quinn, just to see what, what are you doing about this? And nobody was there. Then normally it would be bustling, but everyone had cleared out.
Terry Knickerbocker:
Parents had said, kids come on home. None of the staff was there, but Rosemary was there in her office and she was jolly. And we did an elbow bump, which was like one of the first times I’d done that. You know, all these things that we’re sort of used to now. And she was so jolly. And I said, Rosemary, I’m really worried. What’s going to happen. She said, well, look, NYU said, either do this or you’re fired. So that’s it. And one of her teachers said, well, fire me, cause I’m not going to do it. And the rest said, we’ll figure it out. And she said, who better than us to figure this out? Because improvisation is that the heart and soul of what we teach, you know, which is another way of saying pivot that’s improvisation. Being able to sort of take a left or a right turn based on how things unfold, not having a script.
Terry Knickerbocker:
And so somehow that without knowing how it was going to happen, lifted my mood and gave me a little bit of hope that Saturday I’m a member of this, a wonderful sort of elite organization of acting teachers called the National Alliance of Acting Teachers. And we had our first zoom crisis meeting and there were like 70 acting teachers from across the country from Wisconsin and Wyoming and California and Connecticut and New York and et cetera, like the cream of the crop, we’re all just going. Like, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this? We didn’t have a map. And these two acting teachers were having a conversation on this zoom call with 70 people. And this one, his name’s Peter J. Fernandez. He’s a wonderful teacher at Columbia University. He was feeling like I was feeling, he was kind of angry and was saying, there’s no way you can teach the fullness of what we teach online.
Terry Knickerbocker:
You can have some what we call table work, where you have actors with scripts when they have to get up on their feet and start to put it into their bodies. There’s no way. Then there was this other woman, Cynthia, who is at Ithaca College. And she’s saying on the call, but Peter, my husband and I he’s from Cameroon. We dated for two years on Skype. So much got transmitted between us, even in this weird video format, it was meaningful and touching. And even the sense of touch, I would say, sweetheart, I want to reach out and caress your cheek. And somehow that came through the screen and they went back and forth and we’re watching them start to have a really heated argument. And it got a little scary to have some colleagues really in the thick of it. And then sort of all of a sudden, collectively the penny dropped or the like, oh, they’re doing what we want our students to do.
Terry Knickerbocker:
They’re having an embodied conflict, which is what acting is all about is about embracing conflict. That’s what a play’s about right in front of us, moment to moment it’s heated, it’s alive. It’s improvisational. In some ways it was delicious. I was like, oh, that’s really cool. Then the third piece of this story was I was supposed to go on vacation that week. That was our spring break. Well, I canceled that because I was going to go to Mexico and I was frightened that we wouldn’t be able to get back into the country. There were some words, some stories about maybe some of the borders getting across. So I stayed here and reached out to this very wise business advisor named Caren Rubino, who helped me a lot with the business aspects of my studio. I said, Caren, I want to do this, but I’m not sure what to do.
Terry Knickerbocker:
And I had about a hundred students at the time. She said, I think people are going to want to study online and they’re going to want to study for two reasons. One, they’re going to want to do something meaningful. This is a time when everything is going to get contracted and they’re going to want to do something that has meaning to them, which is why they’re training. Two. They’re going to want to be in community. Everyone is isolated. Everyone’s in their own pod, in their own apartment, watching Netflix. And it’s very lonely. And it’s scary with those two ideas. She said, call every one of your students because our normal form of communication is email. Don’t email them, call them, have a conversation with all 100 and tell them what you’re doing and listen to them and see if they’ll buy in. So that was obviously a massive effort to call a hundred people.
Terry Knickerbocker:
But we used that week to get ready. We called everybody and everybody came back except one. And the one who didn’t come back was a mom who had three school-aged kids. And she was going to acting class when they were in school. And without school cause New York city schools closed. There was no way, but everyone else bought in. And we kind of started to figure out how to teach this work. That was a massive transformation in my thinking and in my staff’s thinking. And in my students’ thinking, thanks to the influences of that meeting with those actors, my meeting with Rosemary and my conversation with Caren.
Gary DePaul:
When you met with the students individually, how did those conversations affect you? And as far as your plans and in your thinking, did that validate, explain a little bit about what that experience was like?
Terry Knickerbocker:
Sure. I mean, there are, you know, that the people that are taking class are between 20 and 30 plus years of age, it’s a bigger, wider demographic. They’re all kinds of people. What they share is this real passionate desire to be good actors, but they’re all different. And actors are very sensitive. So the conversations were very individual and all over the map, some people were like, yeah, I’m in, you’ll see me. Others were very angry, scared, doubtful. The common thing was we don’t know that this will work. And in fact, I got some group emails. I have another teacher who also teaches for me. And so I got a group email from his students saying, we beg you not to do this instead. Let’s pause. And let’s come back in a couple of weeks. You know, they had different ideas of how to organize it curricularly so that we could take some of the parts of the work that would normally be best in person.
Terry Knickerbocker:
And wait till we could be in person. Nobody knew that. I mean, I’m still teaching online. I’ll be going back in person, come September. But we couldn’t predict that. So I met with all those people on a zoom call. And then I got another group email for many of my students with a similar sentiment. Like just, we don’t think this is a good idea. We trust you, but we don’t think this is going to work. We ask you to think about it. We ask you to pause. And so I met with each of those on a group zoom call, and then we came to March 20th or 22nd after that week off and everyone was nervous. I made space, you know, it’s a three and a half hour class, three hours of the first class of each of my sections. I had four different sections was just for people to talk and to talk about among other things where they were, because we’d normally meet in person in Brooklyn, New York, and many of them had gone home.
Terry Knickerbocker:
So I had people who are now in Minneapolis, in California and Virginia and Florida. Where are you? Are you feeling safe? How does it feel to be here? And it was a very nervous, scared, worried group and what I proposed to them. And I meant it because the tagline of my studio is very aspirational. It’s training, the passionate actor committed to excellence. And that means that that value of excellence is in the DNA of everything I do. So it’s not just that I want them to be excellent, but it also calls on me to be excellent. My staff to be excellent, my space to be excellent. We’re always looking to see how we can do things as well as possible. And when we fall short to take inventory and see how we can improve. And so it felt hypocritical to say, well, I expect you to show up.
Terry Knickerbocker:
If this is going to be a less than excellent experience, I said, it’s going to be a different experience. Classes met twice a week. I’d like you to give it a week. Let’s see how it goes this week. If it doesn’t feel excellent, we’ll pull the plug and we’ll come back when we can in person. And that’s not what I had been thinking the week before I was thinking like, okay, we’ll be back, but given their doubts. And even some of my doubts, I thought we had to see. After three hours of conversation in each of these classes, I gently steered it towards doing a little basic work, which is something we call the repetition exercise. And it’s just two people on screen. Normally they’d be in person facing each other. It starts with listening and being just present in the moment. One person might say to the other, I like your hair today.
Terry Knickerbocker:
And the other person will repeat you like my hair today. And that kind of goes back and forth like ping pong. And it starts to develop a kind of improvisational listening and responding experience that sort of tunes you into yourself, into the other person. And it was profound what was happening on zoom. And in fact, there were some unexpected advantages, for instance, in a classroom I’m off to one side and there are 20 people there. So the people on the other side are going to see the back of my head when I’m facing the classroom where the work is, and they’ll be far away, but on zoom, everybody’s got a good seat and everybody could see me. And I could see some details in these exercises. I have a big screen computer. So I had the zoom screen as big as it could be. And I was seeing details in their faces and their expression that I wouldn’t be able to see when they were in the class 10 or 15 feet away from me.
Terry Knickerbocker:
And something sort of clicked that week. And we went on and then we graduated. We had a virtual, you know, everyone’s there like when will we be back, be back in person? And we’re like, we’ll be back when it’s safe to be back. So we finished the year for those first and second years in May, June, July of last year, we did a completely online summer session and at 80 students for that. And that was an extraordinary experience. Most of those people I’ve never met, but it also opened up, uh, some borders. Like I had people from Canada and Israel and Australia taking class at all kinds of crazy times of the day and night because they wanted to train and they’d rather train and do something meaningful as Caren suggested and sit at home and watch Netflix.
Gary DePaul:
One of the things in a previous episode that Patrick Ward said is that when the pandemic started for him, he had a daily meeting for, I don’t know, maybe about 30 minutes or something like that. They talked about the situation, how they were feeling, what they were experiencing. Afterwards, when it came time for performance reviews, the feedback was that saved me, that made all the difference in the world. So I’m wondering when you had those individual meetings, when you had the three hour session and talked about this and allowed people were able to share and express themselves, how much of an impact did that have compared to, if you just started and say, okay, we’re going to begin teaching and we’re going to do the repetition exercise?
Terry Knickerbocker:
I would have lost them. They wouldn’t have been there. Um, my intuition said that I needed to make space for everyone to be there. And in fact it changed the way I teach for this time, because normally, you know, I always do attendance in the beginning,.Attendance, now takes about half an hour because it’s really a check-in and it’s really a warmup for me to get the temperature of the room and see where everyone’s at. And you would notice strange things. You’d notice, oh, they’re in a different environment or, oh, there’s their dog, or you say, oh, Sally, did you, uh, it doesn’t look like your room? Oh, no, I met my, my dad’s house in Florida. Oh, it really became very important for me to hold them and invite them into the space of work because acting is about brave free play. You know, we like to call it a safe space or even a brave space. And there’s no way if you’re worried about something or don’t feel, or are in a kind of a trauma state, you’re not gonna be able to act. So it really called for a little bit more cajoling and inviting and connecting on my part too, to settle them.
Gary DePaul:
Part Two: Foundation of Your Genius. Another principle I talk about is believe in others. It’s a simple principle, but it’s a major theme in these podcasts. It happens over and over again. When you believe in someone, I mean really believe in them. You enable them in ways
Gary DePaul:
That you probably cannot imagine, or even fully understand. Terry shares a story that touches on this principle. Again, here’s Terry,
Terry Knickerbocker:
I’m a proponent of psychotherapy working on yourself, working on your body, working on your heart and working to keep growing and expanding. And I really, really am a proponent of that for my students, especially because they are the material of their work. And so if things are tight or hidden and they haven’t really explored it, then they won’t be able to make use of it. It would be like a piano with a key that doesn’t make any sound. This is just all about my own personal development. I’m a very introverted person, which is weird for a teacher and the leader of a studio. That’s sort of a persona that I can inhabit. And I also used to direct plays. I’m the person at the party who’s going to be off in the corner. I tend to be introverted, but I also had this sense that that needed to be expanded.
Terry Knickerbocker:
And so I found and sought out a brilliant group therapist named Dr. Lewis Ormont. And I was with him for 15 or 16 years. And he changed everything for me. Sometimes those sessions we’d be in group could get very emotional, very upsetting, you know, you sort of regress and it sort of feels like your original family and all the different issues come up. Two things come to me about that because I’d get, you know, I like to roll up my sleeves and get in there. So I’d be like falling apart or upset or humiliated or devastated or whatever. And then I would go on the subway and teach a class. It was a half hour ride from Lou’s office to my class. And I had to obviously be together something about apart and pulling myself together. Again, started to create some extraordinary resilience in me, which of course was the point.
Terry Knickerbocker:
The point was not to shatter me, but the point was to move beyond what was stuck. And I was always amazed that the classes I was able to teach after these really upsetting sessions and sort of connect it to that was Lou said to me once, and maybe this is about alchemy. You know, that ancient principle that turns lead into gold for artists. You know, you look at someone like Tennessee Williams who had an awful, awful life growing up, closeted, homosexual, overbearing mother, a sister who was severely mentally ill and ultimately institutionalized and lobotomized, and an absent father. He turned that into a Pulitzer prize, winning play called The Glass Menagerie. Lou said that the thing that plagues you, that undoes you will become the foundation of your genius. And I just found that so fascinating that this thing, whatever that thing is that thematic chord that each of us has that like, ah, there it is again.
Terry Knickerbocker:
And, um, no matter how much work you do on yourself, it still can kinda get in, ultimately become something you offer to the world and transform into something really, really positive. And there was one other moment with Lou. I used to sit next to him. I was so fond of him and we’d sit in a circle and some people would sit very far away from him, but I love to sit next to him. One time something was unfolding and I knew something needed to be done. And I sort of turned to Lou and said, Lou, you need to do something here. And he just looked at me with this smile and said, you got it. You take it. That was such a, I mean, I’m just getting chills thinking about it because a lot of therapists would get off. Their egos would get off on. Yes, that’s right. I’m here. And I will clean up all the messes, but he trusted me in that moment. And it was a moment of growth that said, oh, I don’t know what I’m going to do, but Lou trusts me. So let me offer what’s coming from me. So that’s what comes to mind in terms of leadership and growth.
Gary DePaul:
So much of leadership involves helping other people to develop and grow. But there’s also a part which I think you just captured beautifully. And that’s the part of just giving encouragement and recognition that you have the skills you have the abilities you’re at the right emotional place where you can take something on. And sometimes all we need is a little nudge from someone to validate that it may not be a confident experience, but you can do it.
Terry Knickerbocker:
Yes. There’s a play a lovely play. It’s not a play that’s very well known called Orphans by a playwright from, I think, Chicago named Lyle Kessler. It’s about these two orphan boys, um, who were sort of Grifters. And then this sort of master grifter comes in an older man and becomes a father to them a little bit. And it became a movie also with Albert Finney at one point, Harold who’s, the Albert Finney character turns to one of them. It says, Phillip, I want to give you an encouraging squeeze. And it’s really him putting his arm around him. But it’s him saying, you can do this. Phillip had been led to believe that he was agoraphobic. And so we never left the house. And he was very dependent on his older brother. And so his older brother had to have him tie his shoes and house said, let’s get you some loafers and let’s take a walk. And then he went outside and met all these people and more loafers. And it was really Harold saying, I’m going to give you your independence. That’s beautiful.
Gary DePaul:
Part three: making space for people to find their voice. There’s a great deal that goes into leadership for you to be able to do it effectively, tearing share some advice that can help us continue to develop our leadership. And his advice is practical applications of some of the principles that I talk about, especially the one
Gary DePaul:
Connecting with others. Again, here’s Terry.
Terry Knickerbocker:
I think the best way to lead is to be a really good listener. I had a colleague at NYU who was chair. He was a very dynamic fellow. Kevin Kuhlke was his name. He was a brilliant leader and an actor and a teacher. And what I noticed about Kevin is he didn’t say very much what he was doing was connecting people and making space for them to find their voice. So I think speaking less and listening more is advice I keep trying to give myself and I notice it when I talk too much and take up too much space. I was on a call yesterday with my director of operations and an attorney getting some advice about how to reopen in the pandemic. I was like, I got to let her speak some more. So that’s the first thing. And then the other thing I’d say is really self care. You have to be a model. If you’re not living what you’re preaching, people are going to pick up on it. Yeah. I think you have to take care of your body, your soul. You have to eat well, you have to exercise and you have to be kind. I think kindness is empathy. And the golden rule really treat others the way you’d like to be treated. Even if something’s not working out. Even if you have to fire someone, fire them quickly and compassionately and leave the world a little but better.
Gary DePaul:
There’s a difference between being nice and being kind. And those are two words that on another episode with Ed Gesh, he said, you could be nice to someone, but you may not be acting kindly towards them. I see this in organizations where people avoid conflict, avoid criticizing other people. So they’re nice to them, but they tell everyone else about how terrible this ideas or whatever being kind is, is so much more compassionate when you’re talking with someone and you explain why you disagree and to help that person.
Terry Knickerbocker:
Yeah, sometimes, yeah, you have to have difficult conversations. You have to be up for that, but you can still do that kindly. There’s a wonderful book called Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott, which encourages you to really have the courage to say, listen. And I also like Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication Principles. You know, you can tell someone, listen, I notice you’ve been late to work the last three days. That makes me worried because I have a need for my employees to keep their word part of our contract. Is you being on time? Can I count on you to be on time from now on? That’s very clear. And to the point it doesn’t attack them, but it invites them to step up.
Gary DePaul:
I like that. One of the things that you were saying was one of the best ways to lead is to listen. It seems that when you are trying to connect with other people, when you’re trying to learn from me, the other people, you need to give them room to express themselves. And listening seems to be a huge part of enabling
Terry Knickerbocker:
That. Yeah, absolutely. And you need people to keep their dignity. They are probably doing at least to their mind the best they can. Even if you see more potential, somehow you have to invite them to the next place rather than shame them or demanded or make them feel bad about it. But you also have to have an employee or whoever you’re leading, who welcomes the gift of failure, you know, and it’s like curious. I mean, you have to have the right person. Not everyone is always open for these conversations.
Gary DePaul:
My thanks to Terry Knickerbocker. If you’d like to learn more about Terry, go to the show notes. And if you have a question or comment, go to unlabeledleadership.com, click the message icon, and you can leave a voicemail for up to one minute to thank those who contributed the show, your contributions make a big difference because this is an all volunteer service. Mostly I’d like to thank you for listening until next time lead on.
