Actionable Steps

Up a Winding Path by Steve-h

So, it's Week 8 in The Artist's Way. Week 8's subtitle is "Recovering a Sense of Strength." I think part of this is also recovering a sense of clarity of purpose, or that's what I'm getting out of the two days that I've been in Week 8.

I've been thinking a lot lately about my pseudo-pending move to Los Angeles. As of right now, I'm planning on moving to LA after grad school ends, which isn't until May 2013. It's so far away and fuzzy that it seems like a HUGE deal, and if I think about it too much I get pretty anxious.

This often leads me to ignore it completely.

Working on one of this week's tasks, a Goal Search, is making it seem less fuzzy and more accomplishable.

The Goal Search steps include:
Name your dream.
Name the event that signals the accomplishment of your dream.
In five years, where do you want to be in relation to your dream?
What action can you take this year to move closer to your dream?
This month?
This week?
This day?
Right now?

My dream, as of right now, is to act in movies. There was lots of other soul searching that went into this task, but the point of this post is what I realized at the end of the list of questions. As the goal search forced me to break down the huge task of moving to LA and becoming a movie actor in actionable steps, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. Follow the path that you've created for yourself.

I found multiple things that I could work on today that would help me in my eventual career move. And, because the anxiety was gone, I no longer ignored my big fuzzy dream by watching TV on the Internet (and imagining myself as one of these people following my dream), but I did something about it! It's only research at this point, but research now means less research time, being informed and having more fun later.

I often run into a similar problem at the beginning of each quarter of grad school - when I am handed a syllabus that tells me all of the things I will have to accomplish in the next ten weeks, I'm struck by this overwhelming need to finish every single assignment immediately and it's all just too much. When I realize that no teacher expects me to do all of the work at once or to turn everything in the first day, I am able to step back and just work on the next assignment. One step at a time...

So often as creative people our dreams are washed in big strokes of color, hope, and chance. Taking the time to concretize the steps towards a dream may make the dream less glamorous, but so much more achievable.

Los Angeles in a good light by kla4067

Inspiration: On Being Creative

Evil, thy name is Perfectionism

The Russian Royal Family, Library of Congress

My friend Sonya and I are currently rehearsing a scene from Chekhov's Three Sisters for school, and at the end of rehearsal yesterday we were discussing the evils of perfectionism. We were talking about how being perfect isn't possible and yet we so frequently strive for it in every aspect of our lives.

We try to be perfect actors. When you are trained in the American schools, you are taught or somehow misled to believe that the ideal to be reached is to inhabit your character 100% - to move, breathe, act, talk, think, feel like your character - to believe that you are your character the entire time you are playing them. Sonya and I, both being Type A personalities, have aimed for this in the past when working on characters.

And it drives you crazy.

Why? Because you can never 100% be another person. You would have to have been born another person, to have lived their life in their time period and in all their exact circumstances in order to be them completely. But you will always have been born you. What is an actor to do?!

For a long time, my answer was "do nothing." If you didn't do any work (or claim that you didn't have time to do the work) then you can't be blamed for not making it to 100%. I didn't try, so of course I didn't make it anywhere. I would tell myself that it would be worse if I really tried, and still didn't make it anywhere.

But trying and failing is how you learn.

So, after getting a kick in the pants by reading David Mamet's Theatre (more on that another time), I've let go of the guilt by remembering that 100% is not possible.

Do your work, be prepared, and then get in the room and have fun with it. Don't let the guilt of not being a perfect actor (or person) keep you from being an actor at all.

*

My chat with Sonya also reminded me of a conversation I had with a very good friend when I was first starting to study acting. I think I was more of a perfectionist then than I am now.

 He told me:

1. You're not perfect.

2. You're never going to be perfect.

3. No one thinks you're perfect.

These three things blew my mind and surprise me to this day because, at the time, I thought the opposite of each was attainable.

"Perfect" is just an idea. An idea that we define for ourselves, and usually the bar is set beyond what is really achievable. As we begin to renegotiate our own expectations of ourselves, we can live our lives in the direction of achievable goals.

Move towards great acting, not perfect acting.

If you want to take it in another direction and out-think your inner perfectionist:

1. The only thing you can perfect is always being imperfect.

So there, inner perfectionist beast! I'm already imperfect. Try perfecting that, bitch.