Where The Confetti Lands

As the curtain call nears, signaling the finale of Sesame Street Live!, the story arc reaches its resolve, the music hits its climactic point, the audience is on its feet, and a blast of confetti drops from the grid, raining down flecks of multi-colored tissue paper. I produced that moment more times than I can count, and almost never watched the stage when it happened. The better view was the seats, where a toddler who had spent an hour losing their mind over Elmo would look up and start grabbing at the air with both hands, while a parent beside them beamed and went fishing for their phone to capture the rapture.

I've had a lot of jobs and not many titles. Much of what I took on over the years, I took on because it needed to be done. That habit gave me a wide view of how organizations work, from creative development and communications to marketing, logistics, and managing everyone from artists to executives. What it never gave me was a clear sense of what tied it all together. This fall, with a new season starting, I did an energy read on myself, the same exercise I do with the leaders I advise, tracking where my energy came from and where it dipped. The process took me further back than I expected, all the way to college.

The trail started at NYU, as a student at Tisch School of the Arts. On "crit" day, with our photographs pinned around the classroom, the assignment was to make pictures tell a story. The skill I became known for wasn't my photography. It was my critical eye, the ability to say something about a classmate's work, re-order their images, and draw out their narrative. My energy came from watching them see their own body of work differently. That was when the eye for storytelling showed itself, and the pull toward picture editing took hold.

That eye got me a job at People Magazine. Out of thousands of frames, one has to make a reader stop, because a story is told with pictures as much as with words. The proof arrived on the subway, spotting someone skimming through the issue we had just published and lingering on a page, and a very young me quietly proud to have been a small part of bringing it to life.

Then the eye moved to a different venue altogether, the two decades I spent producing live shows, including the one with the confetti. Live entertainment turned out to be picture editing in three dimensions and in real time. It became talent scouting, traveling the world watching performers of every kind and knowing which ones could be polished and perhaps slightly repackaged to amaze audiences of all ages. Producing for global audiences meant years of watching crowds the way a photo editor combs through a contact sheet with one eye pressed to the loupe, the little magnifier that reveals which frame is worth keeping (I'm really showing my age now): an arena catching its breath as an oversize truck attempted something that looked impossible for any vehicle that size, a little girl meeting her favorite character and checking with her whole body whether this could be real. Every night offered a read on what landed and a chance to adjust what didn't.

Now the eye works one person at a time. Leaders arrive at an inflection point, often with the title and the paycheck and a question they've only recently let themselves ask: "Is there something else I could be doing?" Listen to how someone tells their story. Notice what shows up when they talk about themselves, which is usually a title and a résumé rather than the thing that actually lights them up. Then say the thing that lets them see it differently. The shift lands in their posture before it lands in their words. It's photo editing, it's talent development, it's producing. Find the story, re-order it, edit it, reframe it. I'll take my loupe to the contact sheet of your career.

None of this looked like a pattern while it was happening. Art school, a magazine, show production, and private clients don't share a job description. Under the loupe, though, it's one skill moving from room to room, with the energy traveling alongside it. The dips showed up anywhere a finished idea got stuck on its way to the people it was made for.

Talent and energy tend to live at the same address. The thing you're known for is often the thing that fills you up, and it's rarely tied to the industry where you first found it. It hides inside titles, and titles don't travel. The skill underneath them does.

If you want to find yours, lay out your own contact sheet. Pick four or five frames from different chapters of your working life when you felt most like yourself, including the ones that never made the résumé. Under each one, write what you were actually doing, in the plainest verb you can find, then look for the verb that repeats. That repeat says more about your values than any goal you've set, and it's probably more portable than you realize. The next step doesn't have to be a leap. It can be one more hour a week spent doing that verb somewhere else.

For most of my career I went where the work was needed, and tracking my energy is how I finally saw which of those needs were mine to answer. I still watch the seats.

If you lay out your contact sheet, hit reply and tell me which frames are jumping out at you.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole