The Suit Over The Lederhosen

I watched a studio recital yesterday and found I could pick out the dancers who were all the way in. Not by skill exactly. By their faces. By the way they dragged their toes with style when they walked offstage, because they knew that even the walking was part of the picture. From three rows back I kept saying it out loud. Remarkable. Remarkable. I could not stop remarking.

Then came the strange flip. If I had been the one up there doing the thing I was admiring, I think I would have felt embarrassed. Too much. Trying too hard. The very gesture that moved me from the seats would have felt, from inside the body, like something to apologize for. Kind of crazy, isn’t it?

That gap is the whole story.

I’m reminded of how we are moved by exactly the thing the maker wants to take back.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The line cook who plates the staff meal like a critic is coming. The teacher who laminates a worksheet nobody assigned her. The one slide in the deck that is clearly three hours past what the deadline required, and that one slide is the only thing anyone remembers in the meeting. Nobody told these people to do the extra thing. Catch them at it and most will shrug and call it stupid.

The shrug is the tell. The embarrassment is the gauge. It is the needle telling you that you are still in deep enough for the work to cost you something.

Mine was a kickoff. Four of us, a virtual call, a corporate campaign that on paper did not need a costume. I put on lederhosen. Then I buttoned a business suit on over the lederhosen and got on the call looking, from the neck up, like a man about to walk you through Q3. The team was confused. I was uncomfortable. I rehearsed a talk track anyway, and I painted the customer for them: a buyer who shows up all business, jacket and handshake, quietly spending real money to pull the humanity and the fun back out of their own workplace. The suit was the part the world sees. The lederhosen was the part the software was for.

I tried to talk myself out of it twice. Maybe three times. I did it anyway. That is the kickoff the team still brings up, the one that sent the reps out the door lit from the inside.

Here is what businesses tend to do with the toe-drag… They sand it off.

They take the one specific, slightly-too-much detail that signals a human cared, run it past a room, and file it down until it is smooth and safe and forgettable.

They call this polish.

It is closer to anesthesia.

Committed work and committed brands both look a little amateurish from the inside, a little earnest, a little too much. From the outside they look like the only ones who meant it.

And the part that still surprises me about the lederhosen: it was never really for the customer. It was for the four people on that call.

You hand your team something they can feel, something a little ridiculous and a little brave, and they carry it to the customer with their own pulse already in it. That order matters more than anyone admits. Energy does not trickle down from a polished mission statement. It walks out the door inside the people you trusted enough to be weird in front of.

I would like to tell you the feeling goes away. Shit. I wish I could tell myself that feeling would go away.

It does not.

I still get the flush of this-is-stupid every single time I lean all the way into something. What changed is the lag. There used to be a long argument between the flush and the doing. Now they land almost at once, and I have learned to read the flush less like a stop sign and more like a porch light.

Still on. Still home. Still in deep enough to be scared of it.

Stay Positive & Drag Your Toes