Do you work out? Personally, I’m a fair-weathered friend to the workout. I’ll do it like crazy for many, many months, then go back to slovenly, sloth-like sofa-dwelling for the most part. Well, I’m happily deep into one of my “I cannot get enough of my workout” stages of life. I get full-on angry when I’m not hitting the pole for at least three 90-minute classes per week. Here I am in New York for ten days and I’ve booked three private sessions with one of the pole fitness industry’s top competitors, because I learned on the Pacific Northwest SMFA Tour last month that I simply cannot be without my fitness routine right now. It’s a part of who I am.
Cool. So, what does that have to do with you?
Well, I was just in a private coaching session with one of my NY-based clients and we were talking about auditions. He had had what could be considered a “bad” one (I put the word BAD in quotation marks because what made him classify his audition as bad was the fact that he got feedback he didn’t quite understand, after having made it to third and final callbacks, the latter part of which would be my recommended focus — FINAL callbacks! Yay!) and we worked to put it into perspective.
“You work out, right?” I asked.
“Sure,” he replied, but he didn’t need to. You can generally tell who works out and who doesn’t, just from the way they carry themselves.
Then I began to explain that auditions are another form of the workout we go through, as creatives. And just like no one who works out would ever leave the gym saying, “Okay! That was my best workout. I’m done,” and stop working out, no actor should leave an audition saying, “Victory! My best audition. I’m done!”
More importantly, an actor should never leave ANY audition, no matter how good or bad, and attach any more meaning to what happened in that room than he or she may attach to anything that happens in the course of a workout. When the feedback on an audition leaves you scratching your head, you have to stack it up against other feedback you’ve gotten. Unless you’re consistently getting feedback that indicates you need to get stronger somewhere, take more classes in something, work out a kink in your performance, generally feedback — especially if it doesn’t track with what you know is true — is just that thing that stops the conversation about whether or not the role is yours.
Like, if you had a bad workout and your trainer said, “You aren’t strong,” when you know you are, you’d never doubt your strength (you may, however, pick a new trainer, though). 😉
I want to see actors treating their auditions like their workouts. Yes, your audition is also your job interview, it’s your chance to show a near-performance-ready version of what your take on a role might be, it’s always a fantastic opportunity to showcase your bullseye. All that. Yes. But once an audition is over, I want you to think about it no more or less than you think about your most recent workout. You’ll have good ones. You’ll have bad ones. You’ll have amazing ones that don’t end up having burned as many calories as you hoped they would. You’ll have crappy ones that yield a tremendous breakthrough you didn’t expect.
The bottom line is that we have to keep showing up to ever get the results we actually WANT, big-picture. And it’s the big picture that matters. Not each little workout, nor how well it may or may not go.
Sometimes we have a good workout. Sometimes we don’t. And as everyone knows, the best cure for a crappy workout is the next workout. And the next. And the next.
Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!
Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001569.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.