Telling yourself you’re messing up or that you suck at acting?
This clip is for you if you ever feel crappy in acting class when you get feedback, when you get a note from a director that leaves you feeling like you suck or even when that negative voice in your head is the only thing you can hear clearly.
CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION
Sarah: Do you ever feel worried about not getting it right? Do you feel like you’re messing up? Do you feel…
Student: Yeah, sometimes.
Sarah: Yeah. I can so relate to that feeling. I remember feeling like that all the time, and that’s your own protection, that’s your own perfectionism and your own protection mechanism, it’s that stuff that comes up to kind of, to keep you safe, to guard you, to keep you protected, right. You spend your whole life trying to protect yourself from being all kinds of things, right, in the world. We put up this shield of armor to get through it, to get through life, to get through school, to get through all the stuff, we have to put all this armor on. And so, when you act, you’re asked to take that armor off, and it’s hard. And so sometimes as you’re starting to work, you can hear…I’m so used to working with actors in this way, so I see it all the time, and I want you to know that, and this is something that I remember for myself, is that when that stuff comes up, to not feel like you’re bad. To not feel like you’re failing. To just know that that’s your own defenses that are doing their job, that are doing their job to kind of keep you safe and to protect you.
But when that does come up, if you can acknowledge it…there’s like that voice that I used to call the rascal, the voice that would come up, that voice in the back of your head that’s like, what do you think you’re doing? You can’t do this, who do you think you are? You suck…you’re not tall enough, you’re not pretty enough, you’re not blah blah blah. And that—the job of that voice is to protect you. It has a place, and it’s done a good job. And you can also say, thank you, heard you, don’t need it right now, I’m good. So I just want you to know that. Sometimes I know emotion comes up when there’s, it can feel like you’re failing when you’re getting notes of, let’s try it like this, let’s try it like that, but it’s always the work. It’s always what it is. So I don’t want you to hear that there’s something wrong with where you’re at, because it’s 100% not true.
