The Acting Business Boot Camp Podcast

SAG AFTRA Panel on Performance Anxiety

When things are going well, feelings of unease can come up.

“You are not responsible for your first thought but you are responsible for your next thought.”

The fear of success is really more about the fear of responsibility that comes with being more successful.

Remember you will never be given than you can handle but you will be given more than you can control.

Whatever level you are at in your career now, it is essential for you to take responsibility and show up and do the things that make you scared.

Go just a bit beyond your comfort zone every day.

Go back to feeling good.

It’s ok to feel good.

“I want to feel good.”

“Give me the strength to feel good.”

I am willing to show up and take the responsibilities that are required for me to feel that success.

Do you scare yourself out of good feelings?

Do you find stuff to worry about?

Do you sabotage yourself out of feeling good?

We do this because the other feelings (anger, sadne...

The problem is perfectionism is a good thing up to a point.

When it crosses that line of paralysis, the excitement burns off, or it becomes too late.

A story about learning imperfectly.

If I was trying to do it perfectly, this podcast wouldn’t exist.

When it's imperfect, it’s exactly the way it is meant to be.

Perfectionism is what stops me from getting the really important things done.

Full Focus Planner

Every day you do three things that are towards your goal.

Allow yourself to be an imperfect person, and allowing yourself to show your imperfections to the world.

Allow yourself to be brave.

The process of being comfortable with yourself while you’re not doing it perfectly.

Learning to soothe yourself, when you get scared or uncomfortable.

• Having the presence to feel those feelings, and feel safe and good to feel those feelings inside that.
• Feelings aren’t facts.
• “What other people think of me is none of my business.”
• Seeking balance.

98.6 is our body temperatur...

Melody Beattie: The Language of Letting Go

"Many of us have someone in our life who challenges our ability to trust and care for ourselves.

When we hear that person’s voice or are in his or her presence, we may forget all we know about what is real, about how to own our power, about how to be direct, about what we know and believe to be true, about how important we are.

We give up our power to that person. The child in us gets hooked with a mixture of powerful feelings—love, fear, or anger. We may feel trapped, helpless, or so attracted that we can’t think straight. There may be a powerful tug-of-war going between feelings of anger and our need to be loved and accepted, or between our head and our heart.

We may be so enamored or intimidated that we revert to our belief that we can’t react or respond to this person any differently.

We get hooked.

We don’t have to stay under a spell.

We start by becoming aware of the people who hook us, and then accepting that.

We can force ou...

Business Insider Article by Drake Baer

In Outliers, Gladwell wrote, “10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.”

Gladwell also said, “The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest.”

So Good They So Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

“What makes ridiculously successful people so successful is that they are experts at practicing.”

Deliberate Practice:

• Goal/ Want
• Thought
• Action

Your goal needs to be supported by your wants and actions.

What are the things you are doing for your Acting Training, your Business Steps, and your Core Work?

Rigorously honest with yourself whether you can do more, or you need to stop?

Are you deliberately practicing your acting in your rehearsals?

Kevin Durant, “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.”

“It’s hard to play well, but it’s easy to work hard.”

Consistence, persistence, and determination.

Do what you feel is going to overwhelm you.

You baby step them.

R...

COVID took energy out of us.

A lot of feelings are coming up.

How do we dig deep? How do we find the things to help us through this?

So you can continue to pursue your dream…

I go back to baby stepping.

How can I break this down?

When you feel exhausted, instead of getting dramatic, get really quiet, reach out to the energy that knows best, and say, “Please guide me in this day, I invite you into this day, and please help me to just take care of things one thing at a time.”

I go as slowly as I need to to take care of myself.

Things like:

• Drink enough water
• Eat
• Permission to reach out to invite the energy that knows best and invite it in

Stop and create space for something else to come in so that it’s not only your will, it's inviting another energy.

When we are exhausted and depleted, our past coping mechanisms come up from the past.

You may start to put yourself down, which is so unhelpful.

You want to have as much of yourself working for us instead of against us...

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome, or the impostor experience) is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.

Letting Go of Shame by Patricia S Potter-Efron and Ronald Potter-Efron

“Shame is more than a feeling, it is a set of physical responses such as looking down or blushing combined with predictable actions such as hiding or withdrawing from others or having uncomfortable thoughts such as, “I am such a failure in life” or spiritual despair.

The definition of shame is a painful belief in one's basic defectiveness as a human being.”

We make choices based on our belief systems, our past, our values, and our collective consciousness.

We always choose what is the best possible choice at that moment. We are always doing our very best.

You are not responsible for your first thought, but you are responsible for you...

From the book: Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman

“Tennis taught me so many lessons in life. One of the things it taught me is that every ball that comes to me, I have to make a decision. I have to accept responsibility for the consequences every time I hit a ball. 

It also taught me about delayed gratification. No matter how you look or how much money you have, you still have to learn your craft. You have to hit a lot of balls. You have to train.

There are disciplines of life that you learn from tennis or other sports. Another thing is that you learn to adapt. I have two sayings, champions adjust and pressure is a privilege.

When you’re playing a tennis match you can’t say stop I want to do another take or can I play that over. That’s the way sports are. They’re very real that way. They teach you lessons in life but the most important one is accepting responsibility. You have to make a decision, and live with the consequence, that’s what tennis does with every ball that comes to me. And...

 Burnout means you are at a point where an extended period of time has gone by without you taking care of yourself.

Whatever you put before taking care of yourself, you’re going to lose.

When you’re burnt out take a step back and observe.

Take time out to think about where you are in your life and where you wanna go.

What my ego thinks I can get done and what I can actually get done are very two different things.

Overwhelm happens when I am trying to catch up with what my ego thinks I can get done.

Slow down and look at a week, a month, a quarter, a year.

Start to plan, and take some of the pressure off.

Emotions that come up:

• Burnout
• tired
• defeated
• disappointed in myself
• am I ever going to achieve this?

Cure:

• Baby step it.
• Take time off and just take care of me.
• Journal.

You don’t to quit, what you want is a break.

When I’m overwhelmed the number one thing I don’t want to do is stop but the number one thing I need to do is stop.

Expectations are premed...

So many feelings come up around the opening

• I’m not ready...
• How do I do this?
• Will I sound like a fool talking to real people?

There is a special anxiety around it.

There was anxiety around the pandemic because it had never happened before…but that same anxiety is around opening up because it’s never happened before either.

What are the things we can do to take care of ourselves emotionally while this is going on?

Fear and anxiety are never going away, but how we handle those can change.

When we stay in anxiety, we are in victim energy, catabolic energy— energy that eats itself, it's self-destructive.

We want to be in anabolic energy.

How can you break it down? Baby step it.

• Turn our attitude into if I’m anxious about xyz…then what you want to ask yourself is “how can I take responsibility for that?
• ie: If I’m afraid of redoing my resume, then what is one small action I can do to work towards that?
• Go as slowly as you need to in order to take care of yourself.
• Ju
...

Think of something that happened to you that you’ve held with you throughout your career and created some sort of thought attached to it.

Think about how that instance is holding you back.

“Forgiving is not forgetting, it’s letting go of the hurt.”

Resentment- the only person it’s hurting is you.

Think of resentment as a replay on a football field.

When you have a resentment, and replay what happened in your head, you are reseeing it.

Ex: Two guys collide, and you hear the break of the bone, and the commentators go ooh that was a bad break, and they watch it again. The next time you swear the sound got clarified, louder, and you swear the grimace of the guy who got hurt got bigger, the color got brighter.

And each time they play it again, the sound gets louder, the color gets brighter.

Resentment does just that.

“Don’t allow someone to live rent free in your head.”

How many resentments do I have that are taking up energy and space?

This is the question: Can I love myself e...