Choose (Your Options) Wisely

Hi There,

It’s been a challenge to make space right now to sit and write. I find myself turning on the news, watching helplessly as peoples lives are torn apart. Donations feel like they’re not enough. What could possibly be enough?

So I made the choice to sit, and write.p Because I said I would. Keeping my word keeps me trusting myself. Keeps me showing up for you.

Thank you.

JC

Given the choice between working on a challenging monologue or chilling out and mindlessly scrolling the internet, I will choose mindless scrolling every time. Because I naturally almost never see those as competing options, or realize that I’m making a choice between them. The scrolling just sort of… happens. Over time, these unconscious choices add up, robbing us of the time, resources, and emotional stamina to pursue and tackle the stuff we really care about.

Do you ever find yourself realizing a time-waste, or other negative pursuit… after the fact?

By developing some behavioral awareness, it’s possible to reframe time commitments into the choices that they actually represent. In the monologue example, I’m choosing between developing my craft to work towards the type of artist I want to be vs. wasting time on an activity that tends to make me feel a little aimless. Once I’ve recognized I’m making a choice and framed the options, it’s easier to choose the better option the next time it pops up.

And of course, sometimes you need to be aimless. But that’s usually after and not instead of periods of deeply intentional pursuits.

Struggle Sooner

There’s one trait I consistently see in actors who make progress: they intentionally seek out their weak spots and choose to address them—despite discomfort, and despite other difficulties they might be facing. It’s not fun. When facing areas that could use improvement, you’re going to come up short of your own taste and expectations. There will be limits you know intellectually how to push through, but that you’ll find you can’t physically do just yet. It’s frustrating.

You will have a heightened sense of self- awareness. It’s like how your hands may have felt like foreign objects the first time you put up a scene. It’s an artistic puberty complete with the imaginary audience we have in our teen years judging us for every little thing we do.

It’s easy to understand why actors would try to avoid going through that. The alternative isn’t to bypass the awkwardness altogether but to avoid it now… by putting it off. Unless you make the conscious choice not to put it off.

Successful actors make the choice to engage in the struggle. And they earn the relief of feeling good about disengaging after giving a best effort.

Change Your Mindset

Why we choose avoidance is just as important as how. If you identify with the outcome of being a “good actor,” it will be hard to face what you’re not so good at. But, if instead you identify as someone courageous enough to see their own shortcomings, you’ll not only feel comfortable being bad: you will seek out areas that need improvement. A shift in mindset can change everything.

If you’re going to do the difficult thing, go easy on self-judging your failures (but firm in your choice to face your struggle). You are the first and last person you hear from every day. Having a rough go at a scene in class that’s outside of your current range is struggle enough. If you compound that with berating yourself for not “being good enough” you’re not only making the experience less pleasant, you’re setting yourself up to stop challenging your current abilities.

Many actors avoid the hard stuff because of this negative self-judgement: of performance, of outcomes, of meeting expectations in taste. But when you stop judging the outcome and start judging the showing up and engaging, progress reveals itself. By making yourself aware of the avoidance, and choosing to engage with the struggle, you’re well on your way to the next level of your career.

The late psychologist K. Anders Ericsson devoted his life to the study of expertise, becoming… well… an expert in how to acquire it. In Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise he shares his life’s work on what it takes to walk towards your own excellence. Some favorite takeaways:

• There is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don’t train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people’s faces. You don’t train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player. You don’t train to become a doctor; you train to become a diagnostician or a pathologist or a neurosurgeon.
• Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline.
• As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration. Maintaining the motivation that enables such a regimen has two parts: reasons to keep going and reasons to stop. When you quit something that you had initially wanted to do, it’s because the reasons to stop eventually came to outweigh the reasons to continue. Thus, to maintain your motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.
• Limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour. You can’t maintain intense concentration for much longer than that—and when you’re first starting out, it’s likely to be less. If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.

If you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.

Via the Momentum Acting Studio in Ireland:

Mark Rylance on Acting