To Become a Better Leader, I Studied Clowns
What Clown School taught me about emotional intelligence, human connection, and the difficult art of not taking yourself so seriously.
While I expected to have fun at Clown School, I didn’t expect to walk away thinking so much about life and leadership. Clowns practice the competencies of leadership by deliberately abandoning the very behaviors we tend to associate with competence. They don’t cover up mistakes, try to look smart, or pretend to have everything under control. They don’t hide their emotions or cling to their plans. In fact, the harder they try to do any of those things, the less entertaining, funny, interesting, and effective they become.
Here are the top life and leadership lessons I learned from a group of clowns.
1. Optimism is a Willingness to Begin
One of the first things we learned about clowns is that they’re fundamentally optimistic. Their general mindset towards everything is: “This is going to be GREAT!” They enter every situation with an almost absurd level of enthusiasm and curiosity, even if they have absolutely no reason to believe things will work out.
And, inevitably, things don’t work out. An obstacle appears, you get tangled up in the curtain on the way out, a simple task becomes inexplicably difficult, or another clown interferes. The entire situation falls apart, by design. But the clown doesn’t approach the next moment with the accumulated cynicism of everything that went wrong before. They begin again, fully convinced that this time, “This is going to be GREAT!”
It’s so different from how most of us operate. We accumulate experiences, disappointments, embarrassments, and failures. We are skilled at anticipating what could go wrong. We call it being prepared or managing expectations, but what we’re really doing is protecting ourselves from disappointment – often to the point of talking ourselves out of participating in the first place.
Optimism, in this sense, isn’t believing everything will work out. It’s the willingness to continue engaging even when it might not. Sometimes the most productive thing a leader can bring into a room is a willingness to believe something good might happen.
2. Resilience Doesn’t Have to Be So Serious
Clowns experience emotions at full volume. When they’re scared, they’re 100% scared. When they’re sad, they’re devastated. There’s no subtle version of an emotion in clowning. Whatever they’re feeling, they’re feeling all of it.
Here’s the cool part: They also don’t stay in an emotion long. A clown can experience complete devastation one moment and overwhelming excitement the next. Every emotion is real, and no emotion is permanent.
Compare that with how we tend to handle emotion. We make a mistake and replay it for three weeks. Someone challenges our thinking and we spend the afternoon questioning our competence. A conversation goes poorly and we carry the frustration into our next five interactions. We don’t just experience the emotional toll. We build a narrative and an identify around it. Clowns don’t have time for that. There’s another, new ridiculous thing happening right in front of them.
This isn’t an argument for ignoring emotions or pretending difficult experiences didn’t happen. There’s a difference between feeling an emotion and becoming it. Experience it without allowing it to dictate everything that follows. A leader can be disappointed without becoming defeated. Frustrated without becoming hostile. Embarrassed without becoming defensive. Feel it, don’t become it.
Emotional regulation requires us to recognize that emotions are fleeting experiences, not identities.
Resilience is the ability to experience something difficult and remain available for whatever comes next.
3. You Can Stop Making Everything So Complicated
Clowns aren’t interested in nuance. Something is wonderful or terrible. Exciting or terrifying. A tremendous success or a complete disaster.
As someone who spends a considerable amount of time thinking about human behavior, communication, and all the complicated reasons people do what they do, I found solace in this.
Because adults can make almost anything complicated. We rehearse conversations before having them, construct elaborate explanations for our behavior, and anticipate reactions to things that won’t ever happen.
While nuance is essential for understanding inherently complicated and high-stakes situations, it’s rarely necessary for taking the next step. Sometimes we’re using nuance to avoid the discomfort of doing something that’s much simpler than we make it.
The clown doesn’t need to understand every possible interpretation of the situation before responding to it. It’s a lesson on discernment. Not every situation deserves the same level of analysis. Good leadership requires knowing when complexity matters and when we’re introducing it to talk ourselves out of action.
The most intelligent response is often the simplest.
4. Connection Happens When You Get Out of Your Own Head
This was my favorite lesson. One of the biggest differences between improv and clowning is the connection with the audience. In improv, you’re focused on building a scene with other performers. In clowning, the audience is part of the experience. You’re not just performing something for them, you’re experiencing something with them.
You make eye contact with them, notice their reactions, and allow their response to influence what you do next. You’re not trying to manufacture a particular emotion or execute a predetermined performance. You’re responding to what’s actually happening. There are times where that means doing nothing but making eye contact. Looking around the room, noticing, seeing each other. It sounds ridiculously easy. And yet it’s something my classmates and I struggled with the most. There’s something wildly vulnerable about standing in front of other people without immediately trying to entertain them, impress them, explain yourself, or fill the silence.
We spend so much of our time trying to avoid that kind of unstructured presence. Reach for the phone, mentally rehearse what to say next, wonder how we’re coming across, search for something to do. Even when we’re physically with other people, our attention is often somewhere else.
Think about how often we enter conversations with our attention focused on ourselves. How am I going to handle this? What should I say? How can I make a good impression? What if they ask something I can’t answer?
In clowning, we’re taught to change the question “How am I going to do?” with “Who am I going to meet?”
Who is this person, right now, in front of me? What are they communicating? What might I be missing? What is happening between us? That shift from self-monitoring to genuine curiosity about someone else changes the entire interaction. Connection comes from being present enough to notice what another person is offering you.
5. The Moment Is More Important Than Your Plan
Imagine you’re performing, carefully working through your plan, when a toddler wanders into the stage. My clown teacher explained that in this situation, you have two options. You can try to ignore the toddler and continue with your plan. Or you can recognize that the toddler is now the most interesting thing happening.
A clown will always choose the toddler. Maybe the clown is terrified of this tiny, unpredictable human. Maybe the toddler becomes the most powerful person in the room. Whatever happens, the clown flows with it. A clown should never expect to execute their original plan perfectly. They must create an experience with what’s actually happening.
I love this as a leadership analogy because we spend so much time preparing for interactions that don’t unfold exactly as expected. We’re so committed to what we intend to accomplish that we miss what the situation actually requires. Maybe a team member raises an unexpected concern, or someone lashes out emotionally. Rather than responding to that information, we try to steer everything back to the script.
Good clowns (and good leaders) prepare, but they don’t confuse their preparation with predictability or control.
6. Stop Acting Like You Don’t Have Feelings
Clowns hold a mirror up to the rest of us. They express things we’ve spent our entire adult lives trying to conceal.
They don’t shrink away from any feeling, be it joy, fear, or jealousy. They expand into them. Watching someone openly experience an emotion we usually try to hide makes us feel more comfortable with our own experience.
We recognize ourselves in the absurdity. That’s part of what makes clowning so human.
How much energy do we spend trying to appear unaffected?
We want to seem unshakably confident and knowledgeable, even when we’re terrified or don’t have a clue what’s going on. Some restraint is important. Leadership involves responsibility for how our emotions affect other people. But there’s a difference between emotional regulation, which allows us to respond thoughtfully, and chronic emotional concealment, which prevents people from connecting with us at all.
A leader who can acknowledge an emotion without collapsing into it, admit disappointment without assigning blame, or express joy without worrying about looking foolish creates room for other people to be fully dimensional humans, too.
The world doesn’t need leaders who are emotionally perfect. It needs leaders whose behavior is trustworthy, whose responses are proportionate, and whose humanity is visible.
7. Your Mistakes Might Be the Most Interesting Part
One phrase I really liked during clown school was “your clown.” The idea is that you aren’t inventing a character from scratch. You’re discovering parts of yourself that emerge when you’re surprised, embarrassed, frustrated, or caught off guard.
The things you do when you’re not trying so hard to manage how you’re perceived: that’s your clown.
We usually think of costumes as a way to hide behind something. But for a clown, the red nose means the armor comes off. Now you’re allowed to be your silly, wrong, uncertain, imperfect clown self. You don’t have to protect your image because the entire premise is that you have no image worth protecting. You’re a clown. That freedom makes room for play.
When a clown makes a mistake, instead of pretending it didn’t happen, they acknowledge it and let the audience in on it. The mistake becomes an opportunity for humor and connection.
Imagine how different our workplaces would feel if we were a little less invested in appearing infallible. How much faster could we solve problems if people didn’t feel compelled to conceal or sugarcoat them?
Of course, some mistakes have serious consequences, and leaders have a responsibility to address them. But accountability and self-protection aren’t the same thing. There’s something reassuring about a person who can say, “Well, that didn’t go how I expected.”
8. Slow Down Enough to Notice What’s Happening
Clowns take their time noticing something, reacting to it, allowing the audience to recognize what’s happening, and responding to the response. A small shift in expression can completely change the energy in the room.
None of that works if the clown is moving too quickly to notice the people around them.
This made me think about how often we equate speed with effectiveness. We’re thinking about the next thing before the current thing is over. Then we wonder why we missed an important signal, misunderstood someone’s reaction, or failed to recognize that the conversation wasn’t going where we thought it was.
Slowing down creates space for information, like the subtle hesitation before someone agrees, or the one person in the room who hasn’t spoken. You become more present and adaptive when you move at a pace that allows you to see what’s happening around you.
9. Whoever Has the Most Fun Wins
“Whoever has the most fun wins” is an excellent philosophy for clown school. But the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated what it implies. The goal is to immerse fully enough that the experience becomes rewarding in itself. That’s also what makes the performance so enjoyable for everyone watching.
Fun is contagious, and so is the exhausting, self-inflicted pressure to get everything right.
Leaders have an enormous influence on the emotional atmosphere around them. When a leader approaches every interaction as a test of their competence, other people feel tested, too. When a leader is curious and able to laugh at themselves, other people participate without so much self-protection, too.
There are difficult conversations, consequential decisions, and moments that deserve seriousness. But seriousness and effectiveness aren’t synonymous. And sometimes our determination to be taken seriously makes us less approachable, less creative, and less capable of connecting with other humans.
The Part You Can’t Learn From a Book
The hypocrisy of writing an essay about clowning is that none of these lessons would have landed quite the same way if I’d read about them.
I already “knew” that presence is important. I talk all the time about the importance of adaptability, emotional awareness, resilience, and connection. But knowing something and experiencing it are two different things.
It’s one thing to understand intellectually that you shouldn’t worry so much about what other people think. It’s another to stand in front of a room full of strangers, make eye contact, and deliberately look ridiculous.
None of this could happen alone. Clowning requires other people. You need someone to react to, connect with, misunderstand, surprise, and respond to. The learning happens in the interaction. That’s true of leadership, too.
We can read every book, take every assessment, and learn every framework, but eventually we have to practice being an imperfect human with other imperfect humans.
The clown is concerned with being fully in the experience of the present moment, and entirely unconcerned about looking foolish. Maybe that’s a pretty good place for the rest of us to start.
