JUSTIN ROGERS

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Generous Teaching

Best worst

February 16, 2026

My acting mentor has a great phrase he often uses when directing.

He’ll say: “Show me your best worst version of…”

And then he’ll add whatever he wants me to try out.

Your ‘best worst’ means to do the best you can at the worst version of the thing.

It lowers the bar, it asks you to be bad and gives you permission.

In acting, like many endeavors, you have to start somewhere… and that somewhere is probably not going to be Oscar winning.

So don’t try and be awesome. Just give me the best version of the worst version you possibly can.

It might, be good. But it better not be, I asked for best worst!

We all have a way in

February 6, 2026

The fact that you’re a human being means you have a way in.

Early on as a teacher I’d easily feel out of my depth when teaching things I didn’t have all the answers to. We get hypnotised in the culture to believing that we have to be experts.

More often than not, we don’t need to wear that responsibility. We just need a way in.

In acting, we’re encouraged to find truth in the imagined circumstances of a character. One of my teachers Miranda Harcourt calls this ‘make it true for you’. The text talks about a cousin? Build an internal reality of that person.

Make it true for you is the secret to finding confidence when we feel out of our depth in other arenas too.

I don’t know about drums and I can’t play the drums. So I have not connection to them right? No way to make it true for me?

Well I’d say the fact that I can’t play the drums is a relationship to the drums. I know what drums are. I had a friend at high school who played the drums. I’ve always liked that drum solo by Phil Collins.

I suddenly have found my way in.

No matter what we bring ourselves to, in any arena, we always have the ability to make it true for ourselves.

Education is about connection. So finding that connection to any material we teach is vital.

Make it true for you and you’ll have a never ending source of connection.

Is it alive?

February 5, 2026

A director I worked with gave me a key question that I use to guide all of my work.

It was after a show and he’d given us all a few pages of notes for things to focus on and improve in the show. A collection of ultra specific tweaks.

He turned to us, knowing that hitting all these in one show was a long shot. He acknowledged this and said simply “All I’m looking for is the life. All these notes are there just to support that. So all your job is is to search for the life.”

“{Is it alive?”

That’s it. We have tonnes of technical moments to hit, emotional beats to play, connection to each other, the material, the audience- one million things that culminate in a single outcome; life.

When I act I come back to the question.

When I rehearse. When I create. When I teach. When I converse. When I collaborate. When I build. When I help. It’s all in service of the same question:

Is it alive?

Outcomes by accident

January 28, 2026

Whether consciously or not, we all have outcomes as teachers.

And depending on the day, they will be of varying qualities. If I’m a bit hungry and tired, in the middle of a school day my outcome might be “To get through this in one piece”

On a better day, my outcome might be “To light these kids up and get them excited about this lesson”

Taking a second state my outcome is always a good idea. We’re all here to do a job and it’s too important to let outcomes be left to chance and to be decided by the whim of your biochemistry or mood.

What is your outcome for your work today?

Little geniuses

January 27, 2026

People tend to be who you believe them to be.

If you want to be married to a god treat your significant other like a god.

I love thinking about this for teaching too.

I want my students to be clever, funny, interested, inspired, unique and have amazing magic to share with the world.

I want to teach little geniuses- How lucky would that be!

So you can guess what I choose to believe about my students. And so how I treat them.

Decide who you want the people in your life to be and treat them like that.

Building and dismantling

January 6, 2026

There’s two types of communications:

Building and dismantling.

“Yeah but…” dismantles

“Yes, and…” builds

Our job is not only to find the ones that build, but to eliminate that ones that dismantle.

The ones that dismantle are good at hiding from us.

They hide behind our need to protect ourselves, our ideas and our egos.

If we can release the need to protect whatever it is we feel we need to protect, we can focus instead on the ‘yes, ands”

Great acting is unselfconscious.

December 11, 2025

It’s one of the first things I learned from my teachers at drama school. It’s being able to be watched and, like many of the most sought after skills, the path to getting there is indirect.

We cannot push to be unselfconscious and we can’t even pull to do it. When you try to be comfortable being watched, that very tension manifests in the opposite which is self consciousness.

So how do we do it? Well I don’t have all the answers, but there seem to be patterns that help actors get there.

  1. Listen. Miranda Harcourt taught me about ‘reversing the flow’. She said it’s like the selfie function on the phone is switched off and you’re staring directly at the world and people around you. Listen with all of you; your physical senses and your psychic senses. Someone who is listening, truly listening, has a great chance of being unselfconscious. It’s pretty awesome to watching someone who is listening and for them not to be monitoring or adjusting themselves.
  2. Place your focus. All acting is is doin things- it’s in the name. So great actors have the ability to place their attention on an activity and wholeheartedly do it. They don’t feign doing it or display that they’re doing it; they really do it- in the imaginative reality of the piece. Believe it or not those are two different things; You can feign an action in imagined reality (bad acting) or you can really do it in imagined reality (good acting).

We can’t create unselfconsciousness, but we can place our focus outwards and invite it in.

“You are interesting to the extent that you’re interested”

December 10, 2025

This is one of my favourite acting ideas. I heard it first in an early interview with Jeff Goldblum and he had learned it from his teacher Sanford Meisner.

It’s the idea that as actors one of our key jobs is to put our focus outwardly, on the world, the task and, most beautifully, on our scene partner.

They say there’s nothing more captivating than watching someone tying their shoes. They are unselfconscious and completely wrapped up in their simple objective- tying their shoe.

This is the gold standard we are going for as actors. We want to honestly have our focus, energy and intention on doing something.

I say ‘honestly’ because we must fight the natural human urge to be liked and thought of as good. And there’s the extra thing for actors of auditioning, where we have to somehow forget we are seeking to be cast.

Part of acting is learning to ‘honestly’ place our focus.

That’s it.

It’s riveting when someone does that. Don’t worry about being interesting, get interested.

Whakaiti

November 24, 2025

In te reo the word for small is iti.

It’s such a cute word. There’s also a word for making something small:

‘Whakaiti’

‘Whaka’ means to ‘do’ or ‘make’.

‘Iti’ means ‘small’.

To ‘whakaiti’ a person is to make them small. I love the simplicity of that translation. I don’t, however, love what it represents.

Making people small is, unfortunately, really common these days. Couples make jokes at the expense of their significant other, we laugh at peoples attempts or push them down when they try something new.

What we should aim to do is make people big: to whakanui them. That is, to shine a light on them. Uphold their mana. Listen when they want to be seen anew. Celebrate them and support them.

Remember, it’s not always obvious if what you’re doing is a whakaiti or a whakanui. And it might seem like a little joke here and there doesn’t matter…

But one cut still draws blood.

Here’s a simple question if you’re unsure: is what I’m saying or doing honouring the fullness of this human being, or shrinking them down for a quick laugh or aside?

It’s easy to whakaiti someone. But it takes real guts to make others big, celerbrate them and honour them no matter what.

Congruence

November 19, 2025

Things are better when they line up.

My least favourite phrase people say is “Do as I say, not as I do”. Why should I do what you say if you hold yourself to a different standard?

To lead, we have to be trusted and to be trusted we have to be congruent. And to be congruent we have to be clear. Clear on our values, standards and boundaries.

The leaders I admire most walk the talk.

Their actions match their words, their words match their beliefs and their beliefs match their values.

It all lines up.

Not only do we trust these people more, but they have more leverage to make things happen in the world.

Why?

Alignment is strong. Congruence is king.

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