At the edge
If you’re ever bored with your life I think the antidote is to put yourself at the edge of your ability in some way.
How far can you run?
Can you talk to a stranger for an hour?
How many press ups can you do?
If you find your limit and then actively work to extend beyond it, life gets way less boring.
Take your own advice
The advice you give someone else is often the advice you need to follow yourself.
I mean, I find this is true with everything I write on here…
Give yourself more time
You have a script to learn and you have two choices:
- Just start right now (but you only have 5 minutes)
- Start tomorrow (You might be able to give 30 minutes to it
Take the 5 minutes now. It’s worth it to let the time compound.
And you might still have the 30 tomorrow as well.
Start where they are
Being a teacher is one of my favourite things because I get taught all the time.
One thing kids teach me every time is to start where they are.
You can go in with the clearest intention of what you want to do, but if you jump straight there without properly clocking where you’re students are at, they won’t be with you.
To have someone follow you, you have to follow them a bit first.
Where is this group of kids at? What is required of me now?
When we start in the same place we can go to a shared place too.
Don’t force it
When I was a kid I remember doing a puzzle and being frustrated that a piece wouldn’t fit.
As I think we’ve all done, I tried my best to jimmy a piece in that looked like it should fit.
My mum said “Don’t force it”
When a piece isn’t fitting, forcing it will just break the puzzle…and you’ll get frustrated too.
To advance, sometimes we need to do less, not more.
Take more time, not be quicker.
Both are counter intuitive when we want to take action.
But don’t force it.
Do more vs listen harder
Acting is cool because it’s simultaneously about doing something and about listening.
But it’s a great balancing act.
When it doubt, though, the answer is to listen more.
With most things, really.
Go in with a question
It’s easy to want all the answers.
If you have all the answers you feel certain, maybe you look cool and you might even be able to relax.
In lieu of ‘all the answers’ though, we’d do better to just go in with a whole lot of questions.
You don’t need to know it all when you have questions. But you do need to give your all to explore.
What got you here…
…won’t get you there.
And by the same token, you can’t get where you’ve never been by doing what you’ve always done.
Acting is synonymous with peak human health
I love that acting is synonymous with loving and taking care of your body.
Before rehearsal, it’s important to warm up. Actors warm up their body, they warm up their voice, they warm up their internal, emotional landscape.
To be in a show means to be healthy. To be in a show means to be strong. To be in a show means to listen. To be in a show means to have empathy for others.
Acting is synonymous with peak human health, and peak human consciousness. What a gift.
Normalise the outstanding
I remember at drama school, our teacher encouraged us to stop clapping, or wooting, or whooping, when our classmates did amazing work.
He was encouraging us to normalize the outstanding. Because if we’re amazed every time someone does incredible work, that work becomes something out of reach, something separate from us. It’s only when the outstanding becomes normal that we can actually build on it and create something even more extraordinary.
It’s important to celebrate our wins. But we mustn’t colour that celebration with astonishment.