Leo Gene Peters has built a reputation as an award-winning director of A Slightly Isolated Dog. Peters' latest production, Our Own Little Mess is part of Q Theatre's MATCHBOX from 24 July to 3 August (co-directed by Jane Yonge) - after making its debut at this year's Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts.

Peters has also directed for Long Cloud Youth Theatre, Capital E, and Taki Rua Productions - and opened up to The Big Idea with some raw, unfiltered advice he'd want to offer his younger self after accruing some many life lessons along the way.

Practice cultivating curiosity.

You think you know everything. You don’t.

Practice cultivating joy and community. Those are the values that actually matter to you. But it’s easy for you to get sidetracked and neglect these values for some misguided notion of success. Keep coming back to joy and community.

You have an overinflated sense of competition and you are constantly comparing yourself to others. You’ve held on to this habit since childhood and it adds to making you miserable.

Stop making yourself miserable.

Learn that being arrogant and overly critical is driven by your anxiety, uncertainty and jealousy. Even though you won’t understand or admit that to anyone, especially yourself, for many years.

Take the things you do more seriously. Do more preparation, research and planning. Then take the time to revise and redraft your plans

Take yourself much less seriously.

Understand that you don’t have a fully developed frontal lobe, so understanding many things is not physiologically possible until you’re about 25. And even after that, it’s all mostly a mystery.  

Talk to more people you don’t know at parties and opening nights, even though you hate going to parties and opening nights.

Practice nurturing your relationships.

Practice getting curious about everyone you meet - and everyone you talk to. Breathe through your social awkwardness and ask more questions.

Practice listening.

Listen in such a way that you allow yourself to be genuinely surprised by what others are saying - and how you respond.

Practice cultivating curiosity. You are most happy and alive when you are genuinely curious about the world.

Sometimes you lose sight of that and get caught up in the busyness of life - trying to keep up with everything - then you realise that a decade has gone by and you feel like you’ve barely blinked and haven’t had any time to relax or sleep or catch up with that friend that you haven’t really seen in 3-4 years - and can you still be that close of friends if you haven’t seen each other in 3-4 years? You thought you were really close, or at least you were at one point in time and now you’re pondering the nature of your friendships and all your relationships and what it all means and you’re kind of spiralling now that you’ve convinced yourself that that friend obviously is angry at you for something or quite possibly actively dislikes you and has spoken with everyone else you care about and they all kind of agreed that they actively dislike you and that you’re actually not a very good artist or much fun at parties and your parents are probably a bit disappointed in you and you’re definitely going to get a much larger tax bill than anticipated and that weird pain in your shoulder is back and you think it’s probably a pinched nerve or something but you can’t help but wonder if it’s something more serious and the world has flown by and you haven’t even noticed and now you’re in your mid-40’s (on the downward side) and time is really getting away from you and you thought you would have done more by now.

So, definitely practice cultivating curiosity.

And practice letting things go. 
 

Leo Gene Peters'  Our Own Little Mess runs at Auckland's Q Theatre from 24 July to 3 August.