Pitch

Words fail

November 15, 2025

My dad just graduated from a year full immersion te reo Māori course.

The ceremony was full of emotion and as I watched family after family get up in support of their person, they performed beautiful haka, waiata and karanga.

As actors, words are our weapon to carry emotion. In musicals the character must sing because the emotion is too big for mere words. There’s no other option.

But of course the emotion is always too big for words. Shakespeare knew that words fail. The prettiest, fanciest or coolest words strung together pale in comparison to the ocean and galaxy of energy they represent, pumping out of our heart.

These families had the gift of song and of haka to carry their pride. To stand and make all the beautiful noise they could to show a tiny preview of what’s going on inside.

How lucky that we have our culture and our art to begin to express what’s inside us.

Yes, words fail. Songs fail. But the humble pursuit to use both to express ourselves is a beautiful one.

SING! MAKE NOISE! SHARE!

Some people are magnets

November 14, 2025

They make you smile, they make you feel heard and they make you want to shout “Heck yes!” when they share their vision for the world.

They aren’t magnetic because of any communication tricks or hacks- sure, they may have honed their craft, but theirs is an elementally magnetic core.

Where does it come from? Like most delicious meals, it’s a balance of all the good stuff.

Here are some of the raw materials:

A listener.

This person has the ability to deeply listen to people with both brain and heart.

A purpose.

This person has a burning purpose that will cut through anything. This might be a grand vision for change or something that leads them to hold down their corner of the world and enact the purpose daily.

Values

This person has a strong set of values. Values that make decisions for them.

We not me.

This person is not out for themselves. They understand that a win for you is a win for me. They know that there is no feeling greater than lifting up others.

Leverage.

This person makes big things happen with short conversations.

Abundance.

This person knows there is more than enough.

We need magnets in the world.

We need you to be one and we need you to create them.

Failure into feedback

November 8, 2025

Sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t.

That is so great.

The trick is to be able to stay curious and cheerful for both. And this can be trained.

What is the feedback we give ourselves and others when things don’t work? When you misplace and finger and don’t get that new jazz chord right on the guitar do you grunt in frustration? Or do you smile to yourself and try again?

I’m willing to bet it’s the grunt. It seems natural to have a frustrated response when something doesn’t work the way we planned. But each time we do that, we condition ourselves like Pavlov’s dog to associate negative feelings with trying and failing.

The key to growth is the exact opposite. How can we associate feelings of excitement, fun, curiosity and a hunger for more to those moments of “failure”.

One step is to stop calling it failure. Call it feedback. We always get ‘an’ outcome, it may not be ‘the’ outcome but you will always get some feedback.

This isn’t just positive thinking, this is practical to your growth and crucially to the growth of those you lead.

I love Benjamin Zander’s exclamation when things don’t go as planned (he teaches all his music students to say this when things go wrong):

“How fascinating!”

Let’s train ourselves to celebrate the micro failures and lean in more, it’s win win really

Rehearsals build certainty

November 2, 2025

An actor in rehearsal is building the future.

You’ve heard of vision boards, right? Don’t lie I know you have one!

They seem kind of embarrassing when others see yours, but they are powerful visualisation tools. When I first heard of them I thought it was all a bit mystical, but the older I get the more I understand how important it is to see something before it exists.

To build a house you draw up the plans for it.

To take a road trip, you use a map to see and plan the journey.

I knew all this in theory, but I recently realised that the actor’s rehearsal process is also a visualisation exercise.

To get a desired outcome, we have to have a sense of certainty of what it will be like when you do it.

The first day of school is daunting because we can’t picture in our heads what it will actually be like- who will I sit next to? What do the classes look like? What will happen? (Sometimes we imagine it worse than it will be). We don’t have a store of images and experiences ahead of the first day of school, we can’t visualise it, therefore it’s a difficult experience before and possibly during.

The 513th day of school on the other hand, is a lot less daunting- or at the very least we know exactly what to expect.

An actor in rehearsal is laying the foundations and ruts of certainty.

“I will go here, I will do this and then this and then this. The audience will be there, the lights will be there and then I go backstage and have 7 minutes to get changed, have a drink and get the rubber chicken.”

Without this methodical and gradual process, actors don’t have the certainty they can perform at their peak come curtain.

When I think forward to 3 months from now when we’re remounting a show I tour in the US, I get zero nerves because I have laid hundreds of ruts of certainty. I can visualise exactly what it will be like.

So a fun game I’m playing is to create that level of internal certainty for things I don’t yet have in my life.

I think this is what the vision boards are all about. If we can make our desired realities as clear, as vivid and as real as our actual realities, we’re a heck of a lot more likely to get them.

The Gene Wilder one

October 31, 2025

Abundance is magnetic.

My favourite people ooze a sense that there is more than enough of everything:

More than enough time, more than enough resources, more than enough opportunities, more than enough love- everything!

Abundance is the best.

And if the sentiment of “if you believe something is true, then so it is”- abundance is at our finger tips at any moment.

We always have a choice to orient ourselves to abundance. To communicate effectively with those we lead and love that there is more than enough. That the world is bountiful and it’s opportunities are awaiting you.

We don’t have to go out and change things to make this so. To quote Gene Wilder as the chocolate maker, “if you want to view paradise simply look around and view it.”

Go on, be one of my favourite people.

View the paradise around you.

Playing for keeps

October 30, 2025

It’s not what you achieve, it’s who you become in the process.

This is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned. It seems like a cute concept, but in practice it’s powerful.

For me it’s the idea of playing for keeps.

That means when you go after a big audacious goal, face your fears or push yourself beyond what you thought was possible, the real treasure at the end is who you are.

The person who tries and fails 1000 times is a cool person.

So is the person who has hundreds of difficult conversations.

Who you are on the other side of the big scary impossible is the thing you want, not the big scary impossible itself.

Playing for keeps makes you undeniable to yourself.

Playing for keeps is stepping up to a new challenge, looking back to all you’ve gone through to get here and thinking to yourself “this challenge ain’t seen nothing yet- it hasn’t met me”

This is all just for you, by the way.

Playing for keeps isn’t for others, so don’t bother trying to tell them. It’s about what you think about you.

And you get to keep it forever.

I’m a model

October 29, 2025

I’m a model.

Although people don’t take my picture for money and I’ve never been on a runway- I’m modeling everyday.

You’re a model too and it’s the greatest honour for us all.

Teachers especially are models. And anyone in a leadership position; guiding or teaching souls who are seeking growth.

Whether we like it or not, our behaviour is teaching people the way to be. I’ve always hated the phrase, “Do as I say not as I do”. I really hope people only ever use that as a joke.

We can tell people what to do all we want but our biggest tool for passing on knowledge is the behaviour we model.

It’s not for me to tell you what to model- I think it’s enough to know that we are always modeling to those we lead. We can pretty much guarantee that your attitude and behaviour around certain things will be passed onto them.

Do you model optimism or pessimism?

How do you greet your students and what does that tell them about the world?

How do you react when something goes wrong?

What do you model when you’re tired?

Do you model gratitude or complaining?

Abundance or scarcity?

The classroom is our runway and we have choices to make at every turn.

What will you model today?

Words are gifts.

October 21, 2025

Yes they’re free to give but that have oceans of value.

At high school I wanted more than anything to be an actor. At that point it felt unknown and unreachable. One day my drama teacher gave me a gift in a few words.

She said, “It’s not a matter of IF you’ll be an actor- but are you ready to be an actor?”.

With her language she created possibility. Using the words “are you ready” assumed that me being an actor was a given. The unknown was my readiness at this point- something I have within my power.

What a gift.

Another memory I have was feeling like my work was going nowhere and I felt like giving up. To me it felt like the end.

My mum said to me “You’re on the cusp”.

Being on the “cusp” is a world away from being at the “end”.

What a gift.

I have a friend who has the habit of using the word “and” where most would say “but”.

It seems insignificant, right? Well playwrights and actors will tell you that “and” and “but” are different planets.

“You’re doing great but you could work on this.”

Vs.

“You’re doing great and you could work on this.”

Words are gifts we can give people anytime we choose.

Don’t try and be good.

October 19, 2025

Looking back on my experience of drama school, it seems a lot of the initial training was about getting us to focus on the right things.

There’s this thing people say about actor training where they “break you down and build you back up”.

I’ve never really liked this saying- it seems kind of negative or unnecessarily fear inducing. From my years of training it’s more about discovering patterns and building new ones.

And that’s just the learning process. But I guess people like making things sound dramatic and scary when it comes to acting.

It’s confronting, sure, but so is meeting your edge in any arena.

One of the main focuses I needed to undo in my training was this thing of trying to be liked. Of monitoring in an audience or in a director- am I doing the right thing? Do you like this?!

It makes sense, of course; my only frame of reference for learning was the school system that was all about being ‘right’. But of course acting isn’t about being ‘right’ it’s about being true.

Even that is a tricky metric- true according to who? Looking elsewhere for how truthful your work is is just another way of outsourcing your certainty.

Instead, as actors we must become experts of placing our focus. One way of doing this is to give your character an objective:

To make this person stay

To make them leave

To make them understand me

You get the idea. This is how we pursue truth; to what extent did you fight for your objective?

I love this way of thinking because if I’m feeling nervous I can ask myself, what is my objective?

And more often then not in those nerve wracking situations my objective has accidentally become “to make these people think I’m clever or funny.”

You lose when this becomes the objective, you really do. And this is what can happen if you’re not clear on your objective as an actor.

Trying to be clever or funny or attractive will always set you up for failure. Those things MIGHT come as a result of what you do in pursuit of an objective (emphasis on might, haha).

So in life, I think we should practice the same thing; give ourselves objectives that get us out of our own way. Objectives we can fight for, use our full selves to pursue them.

That’s playing big and that’s where the real magic is.

Residue

October 10, 2025

I had a teacher at my school who had this amazing ability.

Whether he’d been shouted at by a student, had to have an uncomfortable meeting with a parent or just had a hard morning-

The very next person he spoke to was always treated with kindness, levity and warmth.

In acting I’ve heard the term ‘residue’ often used. It’s the idea that people carry over experiences that have immediately happened to them into the next moment.

A director might say to me “Justin, your character has just had an argument with his wife in the next room- I want to see the residue of that in this next scene.”

We never see the argument but we feel the residue. It’s a great story telling tactic, but it can be unhelpful in our day to day life.

This teacher of mine had the remarkable ability to get rid of residue.

He understood that any unpleasantness that happened before had nothing to do with who walked through his door next. He took responsibility of the way he might make some one else feel.

How generous.

The opposite of course is to be short tempered with someone who has had nothing to do with your difficult morning.

Here’s two questions I’m asking myself today:

How can we meet people anew in each moment?

What can being searingly present, warm and open in new interactions give us- and most importantly- those around us?

JUSTIN ROGERS

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