Yesterday, I had a one-to-one meeting with my manager, and he was asking me about Scrooge Macbeth and how it was all going. I gave the usual canned responses: “oh, it’s going well, it’s really coming along, we’re only 3 weeks from opening so that’s a little scary, ha ha ha,” and then he asked me the million dollar question:

“Has the stress been bad?”

And that, my friends, I did not have a good canned answer to. The true answer to that is “yes, oh god yes, it feels like my life is falling apart around me, I took up meditation and mindful breathing just last week to try to counteract the fact that sometimes I feel so stressed I just can’t seem to catch my breath.” To my manager I was just silent, but that spoke volumes in itself. I’m doing OK with recognizing the stress and taking steps to mitigate it, including, but not limited to:

• Changing the hours I work so that I can sleep longer
• Adjusting my sleep schedule so that I get up at the same time and go to bed at the same time every day
• Meditating and practicing mindful breathing
• Journaling
• Managing my schedule such that I have at least one weekend evening to decompress by myself (introvert FTW) and not scheduling more than 1 “thing” (meeting, social event, etc.) per evening

That’s all going pretty well and I can mostly keep the stress under wraps. The big question that has been on my mind, though, is why? Why is this production so much more stressful for me? I’ve done arguably more intense jobs (stage management) for shows in the past without needing to take these steps to stay sane. Upon some reflection, I believe that it comes down to the fact that directing is a role that is entirely people management.

Stage managing, for me, is easy. Time consuming, yes, with a bit of people management in that you need to get the actors to do things, but ultimately a role that matches very nicely with my skill set and insane organizational brain. Directing, on the other hand, is not just a list of tasks to do and emails to send and people to follow-up with. Directing is managing a set of distinct individuals into a cohesive cast. Directing is managing a set of tech people with unique skills and strengths to get them to make the things that, until now, have only existed in your brain. Directing is knowing and caring about a large group of people and productively bringing them together to make one giant machine that will operate 9 times before we tear it apart. Directing is hard.

The hardest part, though, is that I have been committing one of the top management sins: micromanaging. I promised myself I wouldn’t. I promised my team I wouldn’t. I recognized it as a risk beforehand and believed that I took the proper steps to mitigate it, but here I am; if I’m not telling people when or how to do a task, I’m doing that task myself if they have not conformed to my timelines. I can’t quite let go of this feeling that nothing would happen if I didn’t.

Other managers or directors: how you do get past that?