Most of the time when we talk about a stage management toolkit, we’re talking about a literal Mary Poppins-eqsue box of stuff you use to solve problems in rehearsals and performances.

I’ve talked about this before in terms of personal finance. In my personal finance toolkit, I have things like budget worksheets and net worth updates, side hustle information, inspirational books, useful podcasts, etc.

My personal finance toolkit is full of less tangible “tools” I use to improve my relationship with money. It’s trainings I’ve done. It’s experiences I’ve learned from.

Today I would like to leave that literal SM kit behind and ask you, what’s in your other stage management toolkit?

And what can we do to improve the toolbox.

#1: Time

There’s a very popular book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers that states you become an expert after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is different from just showing up. It’s more engaged than that. It’s practicing with a constant, critical eye toward improving.

On the plus side, I think stage managers naturally gravitate towards this. We’re aware that the better we get at each skill, the easier our lives will be – whether it’s mastering Excel or learning from the bad conflict management moment.

At a 40 hour work week (hilarious thought in the arts), assuming two weeks of vacation, if you were deliberately practicing every second of work (unlikely), you’d be an expert in about 5 years.

So perhaps there’s something to be said for our ridiculously long work weeks, we may become experts a little sooner. Though the other side of that coin is that exhaustion does not help deliberate practice at all.

Irrelevant of the exacting math of becoming an “expert,” the fact is it takes time. Personally, I’m at three times that long into stage management and I don’t consider myself an expert by a mile. I constantly see things I could be improving and learning more about.

What teaching Stage Management I at a university this semester has taught me though is that I am literally miles away from a stage manager on day one of their journey.

If you stick with something over time, you will get better at it. The amount of interesting and unusual and downright insane situations we sometimes find ourselves in as stage managers are all learning experiences.

I jokingly call it my mental rolodex of experiences. Every time something new happens or I learn a new way to deal with something, it goes into that section of the rolodex.

In the beginning, I had what I learned in my stage management class textbook and through those lectures. Now I have 100+ shows of info in there, and who even knows how many hours of deliberate practice.

#2: Trainings

We live in a pretty good time for finding additional trainings.

A few years ago, I started the goal of building two skills that would help me as a stage manager a year and it was really difficult to find places to do that. The few places I could find with training for technical skills that I knew it wouldn’t hurt to get better at all seemed very expensive.

Well it’s the dawning of a new age and there seems to be shortage of trainings and certifications anywhere. I’m sure years of training myself to look for them has helped, but there are definitely a lot more options these days.

I think for any early career stage manager, you can’t go wrong getting your basic Red Cross First Aid & CPR certificate. Many companies require you have one. Additionally, my OSHA card has improved my odds of getting hired with the larger corporate companies.

A lot of the other trainings I do just to learn new things that might help me out a stage manager. Some have had really valuable info, some were not so great. Almost all of them provided me with at least one new idea to use or think about. Some of the trainings are also in technical fields that aren’t stage management, because I feel like the more I learn about the other technical fields, the better I’ll be able to communicate with those designers and technicians.

Some trainings I’ve done include:

• Basic First Aid & CPR Training
• OSHA 30
• Pyrotechnico Training and Safety Seminar
• FEMA Animals in Disaster
• ETC Troubleshooting Techniques
• Defensive Driving Class (which can save you some money on your personal car insurance too)
• Notary Public
• NYC Fire Guard (you’ll usually need to be sponsored by your theater or company)

I also keep a to-do list of trainings I want to look into. I have no idea if these trainings are useful, but when I see other stage managers mention them, I add them to my list. Some of those trainings currently include:

• National Safety Passport
• Event Safety Access Training
• Wilderness First Aid
• PHTLS Courses
• SCUBA
• AVIXA Project Management
• Project Management Professional

I also try to take advantage of what’s available to me when I’m working for a bigger corporate company. There are a lot of places with tons of little trainers on topics I use as a stage manager all the time. I just took one on Conflict Management through the university I’m working at.

All of these add up to more “tools” in my stage management toolbox.

#3: Learning From Others

This is another topic where it feels like we’re in a renaissance of sorts. What a time to be alive! There are so many lectures, classes and webinars from folks who are experts in some form of stage management or some type of skill and they’re just sharing that info for free.

I remember when the only place to go to learn from others was the SMNetwork.

Now there are piles of Facebook groups like:

• Year of the Stage Manager 2020
• Stage Managers
• Stage Management Jobs in Opera
• Stage Management Jobs in Dance
• Women+ In Theatre
• BOBNET
• Stage Management NYC
• Young Stage Managers
• UK Stage Management Resource

And organizations like the Stage Managers’ Association, Broadway Stage Management Symposium, TheatreArtLife, USITT, and Year of the Stage Manager 2020 are hosting webinar after webinar right now.

There’s so much going on lately, at times I find it a little overwhelming. There’s so much to be learned from everyone’s stories though. It’s a fun and easy way to pick up some real pearls of wisdom.

When the world isn’t on lockdown, making friends with other stage managers, grabbing a coffee sometimes, volunteering with some of them – these are all good ways to get to know one another and learn from them. It also gives you a little network of friends with similar skills that you can turn to when you have a question you want to ask without getting lambasted in a Facebook group.

What’s in your toolkit?