You have to love yourself. End. Of. Story. What else is there really on this individual journey we’re all taking? If you don’t love yourself, how can you possibly love another and radiate that love to your work, creativity, the birthing of new ideas and bringing something tangible and worthwhile into the world? WhenRead more
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Remember just how much you’ve already accomplished in your life. We forget that. Especially when we face constant rejection and hear endless “no’s” and begin personalizing and believing the negation means there’s something wrong with us or we’re untalented or flawed in some way. We start believing the illusion that this business is harder thanRead more
Fake it ’til you make it. That’s what everyone’s doing every day of their lives, but we don’t realize it because we’re so caught up in the myth that “making it” looks a certain way and is a final finish line at which we must arrive. In that illusion, we compare ourselves (and our struggles)Read more
Whenever I’m in NY teaching at our school there, I’m reminded of how much humanity is about . . . well . . . just being human. Maybe because LA is shaped by a car culture, it’s so easy to remove ourselves from life (from connection, from vulnerability, from having to confront life head-onRead more
Playing. That’s the thing. What happened to that? Since the beginning of time, that’s the real reason to be an actor. The ancient Greeks may have called their little skits “tragedies” but the word is a compound of two Greek words: “goat” and “to sing.” So, ummmm . . . they were definitely having funRead more
Stop auditioning! What? “Well, Tony, I can’t very well get a job if I don’t audition!” Yes, you can. In fact, you book jobs when you take the whole paradigm of what an audition is and turn it on its head. The term “auditioning” stacks you against yourself and becomes an implicit order ofRead more
Go all in. That’s what filmmaker Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years A Slave, says actors should be doing all the time. Always. But we don’t. Why? Mostly, because we have a number of defaults to keep us from really committing fully, 100%. In our lives. In our work. In our auditioning. This isRead more
I had a sort-of meltdown at the Vancouver Airport’s Air Canada check-in counter this week. I missed my flight. No big deal. I’ve missed flights before. But for some reason – no not some reason – a specific reason – I was triggered. The trigger: We can’t control anything in life. We may deludeRead more
Okay all you football fans. When one of America’s most popular football players talks about “being in the present” and observing how children play; which is all about playing in the moment, we know we’ve turned a corner on the Art & Science of Presence. Science calls it being in the flow. Sociologist AbrahamRead more
Because it seems to be all the rage these days (thank you Miley Cyrus!) we’re going to do our own version of “Twerking” it. But we’re going to learn how to “twerk” something emotionally and physiologically to increase our chances of getting what we want in life. It’s called Amplifying your frequency. If you thinkRead more