I was teaching at our New York studio a few days ago and had what I thought was a thunderous aha moment.
In this amazing, beautiful, miraculous universe in this incredibly energetic, dynamic, wonderful city filled with so many creative people doing their things…why don’t we believe that what we want is possible?
I mean, really believe.
If the universe can generate the correct nitrogen-hydrogen-oxygen combination to sustain us…
If a mosquito can find you and pluck you out of the darkness and do it’s vampiric work on you…
If you can think of someone you haven’t thought of in years and then all of a sudden, out of the blue, that same person calls you…
If you can take a flight from L.A. to NYC to Nairobi-or pretty much anywhere in the world…
If human beings can feel and emote and dance and sing and paint and act…
Then don’t you think the universe can deliver to you your dream?
The universe constantly wants to yield to us what it is we desire. The problem is, we get in the way of that happening. We doubt, we self-sabotage, we become impatient, we demand our dreams must look a certain way, we give up, we control, we don’t allow.
You don’t get what you wish for in life, you get what you believe.
This can get tricky because our belief systems are often manipulated and shaped by what we continuously experience in our worlds. As actors, this can get magnified because of the nature of the business. We put ourselves out there, we get rejected, we struggle to find representation, we compare ourselves to others and we start to see evidence that what we’re wanting isn’t coming.
The insight here is this: Adapt your circumstances to the belief, not the other way around.
This is hard. We think we have to have all the other stuff before we can actually believe in the belief. In other words, we think we have to have an agent or be booking jobs, or get a callback or book a role or have lots of credits to support the belief.
We have it backwards. The belief comes first. It doesn’t matter if you have never worked a job in your entire life. If your belief is strong enough, your circumstances will change to fit that belief.
Don’t worry about the details. Just work on your beliefs. Sometimes we get scared of what we want. We begin to worry and think, Can I really do that? I don’t think I can pull this off. When that happens, just work with smaller beliefs to get you to the big ones. In other words, work with beliefs that don’t seem to require a quantum leap and eventually you’ll work your way up to bigger ones. So if doing a movie with Steven Spielberg, let’s say, really triggers doubts, first work with getting a role on a TV show that you feel is in your wheelhouse. After you’ve accomplished that, your belief system will rise to meet its new goal.
Science calls it fake it ’til you make it.
Spiritual texts would say, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
I’d just say it’s both. If you can dream it and believe it. You can have it.
*First published via Backstage