Dan Erwin

Bravo Bridgerton and Rege Jean Page

I have been an unabashed, naive lover of romantic comedy for years. Still, I was surprised by how much I learned from numerous interviews of the male lead of the Bridgerton romantic comedy, Rege Jean Page. He has a lot to say about culture, literature, drama, movies—and Bridgerton. So much that I decided a blog was in order. But an analysis, not a review. With the added interview input from Rege, a new video paradigm is both confirmed and enhanced. So, here goes.

First, let’s dispose of the notion from several critics that the Bridgerton series is escapism. Saying a movie is an escape is different than saying it’s escapist. Chris Van Dusen, the writer-producer said the series was a “great escape for the holidays,” not that the series itself is escapist. Calling the series escapist is a sign the critic is either attention seeking or a certified ignoramus. At its core, escapism is the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.  Escapist behavior typically involves things like substance abuse, compulsive gambling, reckless driving, or dangerous sports. Generally, they are behaviors that put your health or wellbeing at risk, things you wouldn't normally do, and might regret later. Rather than escapist, in some ways, Bridgerton is, among other things, a social statement. And Rege emphasizes that point.

Romantic comedy, like Bridgerton, is fiction—and all good fiction is rhetorical. Good fiction, like Bridgerton, influences—it persuades and creates. It does things to its audience. The Bridgerton series is a fascinating, and—yes—superb romantic comedy. It’s romantic in the sense that the plot circles around feelings of excitement and mystery in love. It’s comedy in the technical sense: the plot moves along by the wit and wisdom of the characters in the story. In Bridgerton, uniquely, a terrific number of characters move the plot. And it is also fantasy in that it creates images that are on occasion unrealistic or improbable. Images that we might desire in our dreams—what some writers label “magic.” This is the background for Shondaland’s new video paradigm.

By starting out with the notion of fiction, I’m emphasizing my belief that stories have the power to pull people together—or push them apart. Stories can also make relationships possible and even better. The genre of comedy, which Bridgerton is filled with, inevitably forces us to redo our values. Revaluing those underlying assumptions that guide our lives and behaviors, sometimes obviously and other times unconsciously. At least a third of the population is completely unaware of the impact of comedy, unaware of what it’s doing to them. Consequently, when people trust a power person, they can easily put themselves at the mercies of stories, stories that are going to unconsciously impact them. Very clearly, Trump’s stories, even though nutty, crazy and dead wrong, did it to several hundred non-thinking people—largely by mutual osmosis. Fiction can pull readers out of their heads. And we suffered on January 6 as a result.

So, in the following, I’ll analyze Bridgerton and call your attention to a number of important issues in the series, indicating that Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton is actually a new video paradigm.

Rege Jean Page
One of the things that caught my eye in the first episode was the fierce intelligence of the male lead, Rege Jean Page. As an exec coach, I’m always assessing the intelligence and abilities of a client. After more than fifty-years of assessing intelligence, these antennae are always up. Of course, a player can just be using the script he was given. But in this instance the actor’s verbal ability, accenting language, inserting verbal commas, subtle nonverbals, pauses, the ability to reflect feelings on the end of his consonants, the slight pause before punching the most important word in a sentence, the language not only with a glance, but evoking communication with his positioning, dance, hands, a simple ice-cream spoon (that hit Twitter and the internet like a bomb) and even a wine glass, all scream a rare dramatic intelligence. He’s Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings and very much the societal heartthrob. “Darcy as a 21st century fuck-boy” is Page’s immortal description. Such dramatic intelligence focuses attention perfectly on his characterizations, suggesting there must be more to life, reshaping sensibilities and offering triumph over the challenges we inevitably face. His Bridgerton persona is so well developed, not just with his love partner, that what is offered through his dramatic intelligence drives the immense viewership of this Netflix blockbuster...

David Brooks' Unusual Smarts

Just one sentence:

"Democrats, God put you on this earth to spend government money on the disadvantaged.

Now, please go do it."

Should We Regulate Business Coaching?

Can psychological therapy provide the competencies executive coaching actually requires?

It’s not the first time that a psychiatrist has written about credentialing business coaching. Over the past twenty years there have been at least two articles in the Harvard Business Review by other psychiatrists pointing to the need for credentialing in psychology or psychiatry for the business coach. My hackles inevitably go up reading these articles. The current article, which appeared in Psyche Ideas, is a critique of business coaching by a Stanford psychiatrist, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. His conclusion is that coaching must be “defined and regulated so that mental health interventions can be offered by the experts trained to deliver them.” What adds fuel to the issue is the loosey-goosey goal of the Coaching Federation “to inspire the client to maximize potential.”

The conclusion that managers need a mental health intervention is a serious error—and an obvious power grab. Having worked extensively--one-on-one--with senior managers and executives for nearly 35 years, I’ve found that mental health has almost never been the issue. The psychiatrist and Coaching Federation not only misunderstand the needs of most executives, but they lack any awareness of the personal drives and psychological health of all but a very few managers.

My experience and education
Though neither a psychiatrist nor a registered psychologist, I hold a PhD in communications and modern rhetoric and an MDiv, along with the equivalent in post-doc course hours of a master’s in psychological foundations, including highly relevant subjects such as tests and measures, practice theory, abnormal, clinical, adult learning and informal supervision by a psychological mentor. In addition, my background includes extensive counseling as senior pastor for an eleven-year period in two university related churches, and eleven more years teaching and coaching preaching and communications for both Protestant and Catholic seminary students. Uniquely, I also coached maximum-security prisoners at Oak Park Heights, Minnesota.  An additional 35 years were spent as executive coach of more than 500 senior managers and executives from more than a dozen industries in Fortune 100 and 500 corporations across the country, as well as in Latin America and Europe. Among my clients (with typically a year or more of personal coaching) were MBA grads of Harvard, Chicago, Northwestern, Tuck-Dartmouth, Wharton, and yes, Stanford—as well as others from major public universities.  That also included major experiences coaching clients from the fields of law, medicine and architecture as well as Continental and Brit Europeans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Israelis—and members of the LGBT community. Most importantly, my background in rhetorical criticism, an extensive competency providing exceptional tools for both diagnosis and development of various forms and contexts of personality and relationships, brings profound insight to executive coaching. For example, with rhet crit you become a better “noticer” and can observe and then coach in ways simply not available to psychology—feeling the end of a person’s consonants and getting at meanings and subtexts reverberating in emotions. That competency lies outside the awareness of psychologists and those from other disciplines. The fact that major firms recruited me on a recurring basis over the years, points to their belief in the validity of my various approaches and insights. My point? The proliferation of differing tools in the social sciences and varied approaches for business coaching, the size--and what one executive called the “weird diversity” of my client base--meant that client need determined the necessary tools, a need that was never purely or even largely psychological.

What’s my beef?
Begin here: We now know that in any kind of problem solving the way you define a problem determines the way you resolve the problem. But still more important—and rarely mentioned—is that the tools you bring to the problem determine the way you define the problem. Until physician’s insurance rates skyrocketed as the cost for malpractice, it used to be said that if you take a medical problem to a surgeon, he’s going to recommend “cutting.” That’s why today’s surgeons need a clear rationale for Insurance to be willing to pay. Similarly, if you take an executive’s needs to a psychologist or psychiatrist, you can be damned certain they’re going to recommend a psychological resolution for the issue. And though psychologists regularly reject the notion of “medical model,” they are controlled unconsciously by its power. That’s true whether or not there are better and more efficient non-psychological ways to resolve the issue.

Dr. Aboujaoude is an example of this problem, writing that the common topics for leadership coaches are the “bread and butter of many a therapy session.” That’s simply not true. Obviously, the writer has little experience in business. If, for example, you take DSM-5, the standard set of diagnostic criteria for the American Psychiatric Association, nothing, absolutely nothing in all those psychiatric categories fits typical business requests for help, nor are executive needs satisfied by “bread and butter” therapy. In the psychiatrist’s attempt to create a semantic world bounded on all sides by psychology, he got caught up in his psychological shorts.

Common development issues
The common developmental topics for executive coaches are determined not only by the basic performance needs requested by a client—even when off-base and wrong, but also by the organizational strategy and the cultural emphases of a given time period. For example, the 1980s were strongly oriented to basic management vs. leadership competencies, team skills and, I realized early on, the often, profound needs of significantly introverted IT people with a deficit of interpersonal competencies. The 1990s were oriented to working with flattening hierarchies, more interactional conversation, ordinary exec needs (like time-management or small-talk) and internal client-based, cross-cultural teamwork. The early 2000s, to more cross-disciplinary communication, complex teamwork, more technology management, decision process, business empathy, and—as the research and my experience reveal--ever more profound interpersonal deficits.