The Acting Business Boot Camp Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

 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.

...

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...

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?

...

When are we doing too much?

When are we doing too little?

What is our responsibility and what isn’t?

My Part vs. Not My Part

The Serenity Prayer

Grant Me the Serenity to Accept the Things I cannot change

I cannot change other people, places, or things, or outcomes.

I did my part but I can not control how that director took my performance in my callback.

Courage to Change the Things I can,

I can only change myself, my attitudes, and my actions.

And Wisdom to know the difference.

Wisdom to know the difference between the things I cannot change, and what I can change.

Thank you for helping to change the things I can control, and to let go of the things I can’t.

Recovering your True Self—The awareness of who you will are

When in doubt, leave it out.

Don’t just do something, sit there.

When in doubt, slow down, pause, journal, and make a plan for how you are going to take care of yourself. 

Journal, talk it out, find a bookend.

Show me what I need to learn...

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“If we treated our friends like we treated ourselves, we’d all go to jail.”

There are no mistakes.

I use my mind to govern my brain.

The mistakes stem from my brain, or my heart, or both.

Why is it so bad to give yourself a break?

Ask yourself what was the lesson, what can be learned from this experience?

The next time I’m in this situations, this is what I intend to do.

There are no mistakes there are only choices.

If you let go of it being a mistake, and allow it to be just something that happened, then you prevent it from becoming an assumption.

The Thought, Action, Emotion Triangle.

Why do I feel that I always screw up __________?

What do I need to work on?

Reframing thoughts empowers us to be more positive about what’s happening.

When we are more positive about what’s happening, we get more positive results.

Change can’t to choose not to, change should to...