Media Coverage in Success!

Story by Paul Luke, Business Reporter   pluke@png.canwest.com

Peter Gardiner-Harding awoke one morning at age 30 and found he had been transformed into a chartered accountant.

"But this really isn't who I am," he moaned as he headed off to work at a Toronto accounting firm.

But Gardiner-Harding didn't know who he really was. He only knew who he wasn't.

He left accounting a few years later and enrolled in a master's of divinity program at Trinity College in Toronto. He planned to become an Anglican priest but soon realized he wasn't cut out for that either.

Then it hit him: What he really wanted was to be an actor. After all, he'd done acting as a kid in Montreal despite passive discouragement from his parents.

After all, he'd acted the part of accountant for five years – even rising to the role of manager of business planning at a national brokerage – when his true self was somewhere else.

Gardiner-Harding plunged into acting. He took lessons, rehearsed, auditioned. He set a goal of getting his first professional acting job in five years. Within six months, he landed a paying

part in summer stock theatre in Bolton, Ont.

This was it. This was what he always wanted to be.

Still, he knew it meant he would likely be fated to eke out a bare living scurrying after parts in film, theatre or TV.

Then it hit him again: He could apply his acting skills to dramatize issues in the business world.

He could apply the empathy and inward probing he'd developed at divinity school to study deep-rooted workplace problems. He could identify solutions and deliver them to a job site

through the medium of theatre.

As a trained accountant, he knew how to convince bean-counters among prospective clients that his theatrical services were cost-effective.

Since 1989, Gardiner-Harding had owned and run Focus Management Group, a company that offered financial counselling, handled personal taxes and provided outplacement guidance.

In 1999, he sold off the financial side of the business to concentrate on delivering workplace solutions through drama.

For the last five years, Gardiner-Harding and a group of on-call actors he has trained for Focus Management have been presenting in-house theatre to a wide spectrum of organizations.

After interviewing employees and researching issues such as boss-worker skirmishes or difficult customers, he creates play, character studies or business simulations to crystallize a particular issue.

Gardiner-Harding and his troupe then enlist their workplace audience's help in resolving the inter-personal dilemmas they've just watched.

He and Irene Gardiner-Harding, his business partner and wife, have lived in Victoria for the past two years.

Peter, 49, commutes to his business base in downtown Toronto once or twice monthly.

He makes more money than he ever did as an accountant.

His clients – listed on his website –

include organizations as diverse as Scotiabank, Alcan Inc. and the Vancouver Island Health Authority.

He says his mission as a director-actor and business person is to create plays that reflect employees' challenges and help them find greater harmony, productivity and integrity.

"I really believe that corporate North America is starved for a mechanism around which people can tell the story of their work lives," he says.

"My aim is to try to get my audience to emotionally connect with their stories so we can start the process of exploring choices so they come to realize they have more than just one way of dealing with situations."

While accounting didn't gratify him personally, Gardiner-Harding respects the profession and the need for the work.

The kinds of people he worked with in business now make up his clients – and it's no wonder he understands their problems first-hand and speaks the language of business.

Christine Graham, a Victoria resident and long-time friend, calls Gardiner-Harding the most enthusiastic adult she knows. His focus and flexibility has kept him aloft as he makes career leaps, she says.

Graham, a retired executive with Sears Canada, says that during her own career she learned how essential it is to encourage employees to align their personal goals with the corporation's goals.

"One of the things Peter is doing with his company is exactly that," Graham says. "He has helped his clients bring those two things together."

Gardiner-Harding says one of his current challenges as Focus Management's president is to learn to handle a growing business. If he's too busy to take part in an in-house performance his usual reaction is disappointment that he can't be there in person.

When he wakes up these days Gardiner-Harding is buoyed by the knowledge he will spend the day being what he wants to be.

"I'm blessed. I love what I do," he says.

"If I'm able to keep telling people's stories until the day I expire, I'll be a happy clam."

Four Tips from Peter to help you succeed

Career fulfilment begins with self-awareness, actor-director Peter Gardiner-Harding says.

"I perceive a huge lack of self-awareness among people," he says.

"Whether you're a tax accountant or a criminal lawyer or a storyteller, you have to have the awareness and the courage to stand in the truth of your vocation and look for ways to contribute to your community."

Here are three suggestions from Gardiner-Harding for finding

self-awareness and a fourth for following through on it:

• Heed yourself.
  "You need to slow yourself down enough to hear your inner voice," he says. "This can be done through mediation, prayer or whatever you want to call it."
• Heed others.
  "Get feedback from as many people as possible and be able to maturely integrate it into your self-perception," he says. "People are generally good at telling you what you're gifted at."

• Analyze events in your life.
  "It's important to be self-reflective about things that happen to you," he says. "Ask, "How did I show up as a leader or a member of this community and how could I have contributed more or differently?" That's self-awareness."
• Work with integrity.
  Long-term productivity at work depends on making ethical choices, Gardiner-Harding says.
  "We sometimes make choices that aren't morally justifiable," he says. "No activity that's unethical or immoral is going to be sustainable over time."