Your Excuses Pinpoint Your Fears

Excuses Expose Fear

You may see a pattern of excuses that appear in the big seven areas of your life.  It is not easy to look at yourself this objectively.  By employing the process of observation you will be able to avoid letting you use patterns of behavior that have been accepted by you for so long that they have become habits.  You may have created habits for avoiding, facing or acknowledging specific fears.  Yet, you can see by the excuses you use what causes fear of in you.  Acknowledge the common denominators that appear in your efforts to avoid an action, to avoid a situation, or to avoid a confrontation.  Acknowledge the physical manifestations that indicate fear in you. 

You may get restless.  Your palms may sweat.  You may get a headache.  You may get depressed.  You may become self deprecating.  You may become hostile.  You may lash out at those closest to you.  You may even try to justify the feelings of being anxious and agitated on other people or situations.  You may find non-important situations become the focus of your frustration.

You need to recognize these patterns as alarms to activate awareness.

You know what your body feels like when you are on the verge of behaving badly.  Most of the things you do to justify your right to behave badly come from fear manifesting itself in you.  You can acknowledge the feeling as an indicator, an alarm, if you will.  You can use the alarm to let you know that there is an area of your life that is being controlled by fear. The fear could be manipulating your behavioral patterns and defocusing you from going after the real reason for your behavior.  This is why you want to make your fears specific so they cannot manipulate your desire to be a successful professional actor as well as a successful human being.  Use these feeling to discover what causes fear to take control of your body. 

With that knowledge you have the ability to seek out the true reason for your fear.  Right now you may be using your short temper, your irritation with a relationship, your feeling of being betrayed, or your past pains as the reason your body takes on its discomfort.  Accept the fact that these feelings, and resulting thoughts, are activated to avoid discovering what you really fear. You can use this alarm, as I call it, to discover a way to face what really frightens you.

Real or Imagined

Discover the specifics of your life fears.  The fear could be meeting new people.  It could be self worth.  It could be thinking others know things you don’t.  It could be thinking you are being judged by a set of rules you don’t understand.  Once you find a specific fear origin you can find the knowledge necessary to disempower that fear circumstance.  You can create the actions needed to put the new knowledge into physical repetition allowing that knowledge to move into that place called Talent.  If you can recognize how fear controls you then you can work to change that control. 

Fear is a genuine emotional response activated to initiate the hormones and impulses necessary for your fight or flight mechanism to work. 

It will protect you from real harm if you know how to recognize it.   You want to use the instincts that it awakens to separate real danger from imagined danger.   You want to avoid using this human physical protection device to activate emotional or belief concepts that are used to protect the vessel from real danger by the imagined danger of fear.  Once activated the fight and flight defense system releases all sorts of endorphins and chemical secretions needed to give the body additional power and response time.  If these chemicals are not burned off by the body’s actual need for fight or run actions, they will turn on the body itself in their effort to be used.  Sudden outbursts of anger or inappropriate physical behavior may result. Behaving badly will be the result.   You can regain control, both physically and mentally, once you recognize there is no real danger.  You can refuse to mislabel the feeling, or attach it to a belief that can only result in behavior you do not wish. 

Once you recognize the source of a fear you can begin to seek the knowledge needed to disempower it.  Take success for instance.  You know that success means the ability to achieve recognizable achievements in a given area.  Therefore, you want to limit yourself from using general terms for specific areas.  You can not have a fear of success.  That would mean you have never achieved any recognizable talents in any area of your life.  And, you know that is not true.  Understand the areas of your life where you are successful, such as being a friend, a mate, a son or daughter, a swimmer, a cook etc.  Clarify what made these areas successful for you. 

You can then use the same techniques to achieve success in other areas that you will need in your quest to be a successful professional actor.  Using the success you have achieved in any other of the big seven areas of your life will guide you to the other successes you desire.  It will help you isolate specific areas of fear that may be related to success. 

The Pitfalls

You should also be prepared for possible pitfalls when success comes your way.  Pitfalls are hidden or not easily recognized dangers or difficulties.  Any unrecognized fear that causes you worry is a possible pitfall.  The pitfalls can be attitudes such as arrogance, lack of respect, poor work ethics, lack of physical endurance, disloyalty and other possible behavioral problems that may appear because you have not prepared yourself for their possibility.  Pitfalls may cause you to break the three major rules of responsibility for the actor: showing up on time, knowing your lines, and not causing trouble.

If you have not gotten a handle on your talents that are reaping financial rewards for you, then you could run the risk of letting your ego or self destructive mechanism reverse your financial situation. (For clarity, the opposite of ego is confidence.)  You might want to address this now. 

One of the reasons you may not have achieved your desires in this acting career may be a subconscious concern or fear that these behavioral patterns could happen to you.  The number of stories of actors who have achieved a certain, perhaps even monumental, level of success and then self-destruct is legendary.  You have heard the stories all your life.  The stories have been used by people you love and respect to discourage you from pursuing an acting career.  Fears of gloom and doom may have been instilled in you about the dangers of success in the entertainment business. You may have suppressed them in order to pursue this career. 

Because these fears may have been suppressed the core reality of them could be ignored.  The knowledge necessary to keep this scenario from happening to you may not come to your conscious mind.  For many aspiring actors these hidden fears can be used to keep them from being able to break through the non-action phase in order to achieve success in the acting field.  Those who do break through with the actions necessary to achieve success could be vulnerable to becoming victims of the success pitfalls because they never gained the knowledge necessary to protect them from those pitfalls. 

Understand fear as a concept and look for the specific sources of fear rather than the generalized blanket thought as fear of failure, fear of success and/or fear of rejection etc.  You know that for every action there is an equal reaction.  Therefore, if the action is executed without clarity of purpose then the reaction may not be understood.

Rejection Experience

I have talked about rejection and how important it is to change your perception of it from the negative to the positive.  You know that rejection experiences during the formidable years of your life may have left deep scars.  These scares may have created dedicated efforts to avoid the rejection scenario at all costs.  The power of understanding rejection lies in your belief in your abilities.  It also lies in your expectation of the circumstances that could lead to an interpretation of rejection.  Be sure that your avenues for interpreting rejection are clear.  The avenue may be the interview.  It may be the audition.   It may be sending out a picture and resume. 

Know what kind of rejections you fear.  Be specific about the reason why you fear you might be rejected. 

You may fear the buyer will reject your ability to go to make believe.  You may fear the buyer will reject your look, your style, your personality, your choice of clothing, your voice or your body.  Don’t give the person holding the interview or audition the power to undermine your right to be an actor.  Your fear of rejection may be your fear of ability.  If your talent is in question to you then you must get honest and open evaluations from those qualified to give their opinions on your abilities. 

There must be no doubts in your mind that you are an actor.  Waiting for someone who is hiring to validate your ability as an actor makes a rejection interpretation all the more real to you.  The blanket fear of rejection may only be a smokescreen for not having complete confidence in yourself and your abilities.  Without that confidence you will always run the risk of interpreting not getting the job as rejection.  As I discussed in an earlier lesson, all auditions and interviews are part of the “no” responses required to get to the “yes” responses.  You can’t have one without the other.  But this is based on the assumption that you believe in your acting ability and work on your skills daily. 

Type

Type is the way the actor is classified for casting purposes. One of the problems you may have in your effort to change your circumstance in relation to becoming a working actor may be not having a clear picture of what you are marketing as to type.  Many people may wish to be a different type from what they are.  This wishful thinking is not going to make it so.  Not being clear about your type may be one of the reasons for this fear state.  The types include lead, character lead, character supporting, supporting falling within the age categories of juvenal, adult and mature.

It is important that you clarify your type to your satisfaction and your acceptance in order to remove a primary area of fear activation.  Make sure that you review the lesson on type and joyfully clarify your type based on look and personality.  Remember, the formula for creating a character (A + B = C) has to be completely understood by you.  You need to know everything about the “A”, the actor.  That’s you.  That includes your look, style, presentation, personality, point of reference and adaptability.  You need to know everything about how to interpret “B”, the book.  That’s the script.  Know how to analyze it in relation to the written word, the medium, the director’s vision and the other collaborators. You need to be able to blend both to create the “C”, a character that is free to live in make believe.  The only way the character will be free to do that is if the actor has done all his work. 

Your character cannot exist if the words are not learned, blocking and director’s concepts are not integrated into the character’s reality, and your repetitions have placed that knowledge into muscle memory so the talent for the character has become a reality.  And, as you know, your pursuit of a successful acting career cannot be based on the belief that if you achieve this you would find happiness.  This approach should be reversed.  Don’t ever forget to allow yourself to be happy and joyful that you have the ability and talent to pursue this business.  Because, you cannot be happy if you are constantly finding yourself in a fear state without a clear understanding of what is causing it.

 
Tantrums as Defense

Your tantrums may be used to help you defend yourself against bad behavior.  This may seem a bit strange but it is a technique to help empower you.  As you know my desire is to clarify fear as a state.  A tantrum  is a state that is activated by a sense of unknowing.  With focus and perception that state can be attach to an unrelated, yet more manageable circumstance. 

You could select that manageable circumstance from any of the big seven areas of your life.  Recognize when you find yourself “behaving badly” so you can stop that behavioral pattern and explore what you are avoiding in the professional area of your life and why.  You do not want to allow yourself to accept upsets and tantrums as part of your defense mechanism.  The upsets are not meant to hurt you, even if that appears to be the result.  The upsets are tantrums designed by your unconscious brain to defend you.   You want tantrums to be eradicated before they become a physical manifestation.  The need for defense may only be an illusion created by the misuse of your body’s defense system for an emotional defense.  When you recognize this misuse of your defenses you will be able to catch yourself doing it. Allow that knowledge to look at the real issues of your life’s goals. 

Explore the issues that are standing in the way of your goals.  In doing so you may find out interesting possibilities.

It may be the idea of success that is standing in your way in relation to your conscious and subconscious belief systems.  It may be the idea of failure in relation to your conscious and subconscious belief systems.  It may be the idea of rejection in relation to your conscious and subconscious belief systems.  An idea should not be misread as a reality.  An idea is a possibility that can only become reality by action and effort.  You do not want fear to become the action and the effort. 

Imagine the excitement of not being controlled by your misused defense system. You can make sure of this by acknowledging your behavioral patterns that are not supportive of your efforts. Once you do this you can begin to observe yourself and your fears. 

Take control of all the situations that happen in your life. It is possible to override any belief based ideas that are lead by a fear.  You can do this by working on mastering your fate by disempowering your internal sabotage mechanisms.  Acknowledge those bursts of physical pain known as passion.  Do not attach that physical passion to a belief that can result in a position of defense.  Take that moment and use the feeling to activate a mental periscope.  Search around your mind for that momentary thought wherein lays the specific cause of your state of fear.  That specific fear, once recognized, will result in personal growth and empowerment.

Defining Success If Fear were not an Issue

You need to know if your expectations of success are realistic, because, you don’t want to make success too hard to achieve. Success is different for different people.  Some people make their rules for success so demanding that they never truly experience it no matter how successful they may appear to others.  Enjoy your path to a successful acting career. Allow yourself levels of success as you move toward your acceptable idea of success.  Allow yourself to enjoy the lower-level jobs as you work your way up to the bigger acting jobs.  Allow yourself to separate the business into the two different categories; the story telling business and the story moving business. 

Remember, you want to recognize the difference in the two businesses as to their approach and expectation.  You want to understand the value of the smaller jobs so you can appreciate the value of the larger ones.  Do not let them be overvalued or undervalued but valued for what they are.  They are the path to your desired level of success.  They can be used as a guide and a level of comparison to the paths of other successful performers. If you can answer the following questions you know what you would need to be called successful as a professional actor. 

 

How much money do you feel you must make?  

What kind of home would you have to have?

What could be considered enough for you to feel successful as an actor? 

What kind of jobs would you have to get? 

What kind of people would you have to know? 

What would the other major areas of your life include?

What about the other major areas of your life?

What would constitute success in each of these? 

What things do you think must happen in your professional life for you to classify yourself as a failure? 

What would you be basing that failure on? 

What about the other major areas of your life?   

What would constitute failure in your financial life, your personal life, your physical life, your spiritual life, your intellectual life and emotional life?

These are questions you may want to answer.  By not addressing these questions you may be allowing personal fears to lurk in the shadows of your subconscious.  Individual fears will always find ways to pull you into the shadows of their power.  Do not let this happen.  Fears that could lead to perceived failure have to be taken on one by one.  However, the repetition of your efforts to do this will give you a Talent to recognize and disempower a fear.  You can never remove all fear from your life.   There will always be something that comes into your life that you do not understand.  And, this lack of understanding can attach itself to your fear emotions and make every effort to pull you from the light.  Don’t let it happen. 

It is not the impact that fear has on you that must be addressed.  It is the speed with which you can recognize the feeling of fear in you and reverse the process.  Each specific fear , in truth, is a path way to your success.  Nurture them as clues to the answers you seek in your journey through life. The fear can bring to you a negative flow of vibration by the law of attraction for as long as you allow it to hold you.  That is why you want to release the fear as quickly as possible.  You want that energy flow to be positive, the vibrations to be on a frequency of success and the law of attraction working in your favor.

Failure as a Concept

I hope you have no areas of your life where you believe you are a failure.  I hope you recognize that failure is only a word used to discourage action.  Don’t forget, as long as you have breath in your body you are in the game of life.  So don’t let the experiences you have had to date be called failures.  They are experiences.  They are just how the process of turning experiences into good judgment and success takes place.  Make sure the concepts you understand for success, failure, and rejection are concepts that work for you.  Don’t live someone else’s ideas.  Allow yourself the benefit of the doubt.  Remember, concepts are ideas that have manifested as beliefs or rules you follow. They are personal recipes for any given circumstance in your life. Therefore, set rules that work for you, not rules that defeat you before you start. 

Know that the only way you can fail at anything is to give up.  The only way to really fail is to quit.  And, don’t mistake change as quitting.  Change is part of the process of your personal success.  Anytime you learn from an experience has been a success.  Don’t allow yourself to be so disappointed by the desired outcome that you lose sight of the knowledge of the experience.  You are responsible for working for what you want in your life. 

An Idea

How would you approach an acting career if you could not fail?  Would you be doing anything differently than you are doing?  Of course you would.  You wouldn’t let the feelings and thoughts of failure stop you because you would know that these thoughts are not real.  You would know they are not real because you can’t fail.   That is what perseverance and desire are all about.  Swimmers swim, every day.  Dancers dance, every day.  Performance related careers require that they are practiced every day.  Talents must be maintained at peak energy performance level.  Actors must act, every day. If you do not set a certain amount of time each day to act there is something missing in your process.  Something inside of you may be saying you are never really going to need these abilities.  They could be fears that are not acknowledged.  Without defining these fears you cannot begin to change them.  Without change you may not realize your desire to be a successful professional actor.

Playing Your Hand

Life must be enjoyed.  Fulfilling your destiny is about the cards you were dealt and the ability to play your hand.  No matter how many people you may believe were dealt better cards than you, the truth remains that there are always enough cards in every hand to create a combination for the win.  Fear is either going to keep you out of the game or you are going to realize it is one of the major clues to winning the game.  Fear, clarified to its specific cause, can guide you to a successful journey through life.  It is your subconscious that may ultimately determine your success.  But, your subconscious will support you only if you instruct it.  And, those instructions come from action not thoughts. 

Your actions of learning, your actions of taking that knowledge and putting it into physical repetition resulting in muscle memory, are how the subconscious is put under your control.  If you could free yourself from the bondage of fear your life would be different.   If you could free yourself from the manipulation of fear over your actions your life would be different.  Recognize that fear being activated in your body can be used to guide you to the areas of your life that must be explored and empowered.  Discover a way to use fear activation as an alarm to alert you of your hidden knowledge voids and your life will be different.  Learn that fear activation not associated with real physical danger can be stopped.  Use the power of your spiritual Mind to overcome the body’s primitive effort to survive.  Divert your life energy from the fight and run position and employ that life energy to move you to your life’s destiny and your life will be different.  Your life would be different because you have control over it.  You have control over your feelings and your thoughts. 

Experiences Make Success

It will take a dedicated effort on your part to do what is necessary to achieve the talents needed to get to where you want to be.  People who have become major successes in their professions have had to follow the same process.  There will always be a series of apparent failures before success manifests itself.  So, the failures are not failures, they are steps.  Each step leads you closer to the level you wish to reach. 

To classify an effort as a failure only causes you to take a step back with each two steps forward.  If you didn’t call the steps failures you would not lose a step with each experience to your destination.  You do yourself harm by attaching too much disappointment or self criticism to a circumstance that need take place for success to happen.  Certain steps need to occur so that desired knowledge is put into place for the expected success to happen. Allow yourself the appreciation of the experience when the steps, you call failure, happen.  Remember, if you allow the steps to be viewed as failures you increase the odds that you will give up. You may not take any more steps toward your goal.  The talents that you were striving for may not be.  The physical part of your being will rejoice in this decision. It will feel it has defeated the spirit’s effort to redirect your life energy from survival to enlightenment. 

Breaking the Wild Horse

The effort to create any talent is analogous to breaking a wild horse.  The wild horse will buck and fight you all the way until suddenly the horse realizes that you are not going to get off his back.  The horse at a certain moment realizes you are going to stay on him no matter how hard he fights for control.  At that very moment the wild horse will stop his fight and become one with the rider.  That is what will happen with your body as it fights to keep your life energy for survival.  Once the body realizes that you are not going to stop, once your body realizes that no distraction or defeat, no step you take is going to stop your efforts, your body will submit to you.  You have achieved a talent.  You will now be in a position to use that new talent to pursue your goals.

Obstacles Are Life

You can not let the idea of rejection, failure or fear itself be used against you by you.  All things worth achieving are going to have a path filled with obstacles.  Those obstacles are called life’s journey. They all come to pass if you acknowledge their right to exist.  Once that right has been acknowledged you will find that many of them will just go away on their own.  Life is not meant to defeat you.  Life is meant to excite you, to challenge you and to inspire you.  If the obstacles defeat you then you miss out on the joy of being alive.  It is not the number of obstacles, or the seemingly insurmountable challenge of the obstacles, that are the issue.  The issue lies in your perception of the obstacle’s power over you. 

It is in your willingness to disempower its effects by recognizing the obstacles for what they are.  It is human to feel fear. It is human to think about rejection.  It is human to experience disappointment and perceived failure.  But, it is also human to overcome these obstacles and garner out of life the thrill of living it. 

Know what being thin-skinned means.  Evaluate the various areas of your life.  See how thin-skinned you may be.  Understand what being thin skinned means to your life goals.  Discover what causes you to become thin-skinned in those areas. Acknowledge it and disempower the feelings. The acting profession may appear to require you to be extremely sensitive in order to be affective in creating characters.  This should not be misinterpreted.  Being sensitive should not allow you to be thin-skinned.  Being sensitive to others and compassionate to the needs of those around you is not dependent on being so sensitive to your own ego that you use the slightest criticism as an excuse to get off the horse.  You have the power to refuse hurtful comments or efforts by others to divert you from your goals. 

To be thin-skinned means you have allowed others to instill in you a control device that demands you help them hurt you.  Remove that device.  This is not a gentle business.  It is not a sweet business. Very few, if any, businesses are.  If you desire to become a contender you must eliminate those distracted thoughts and fears that keep you on the bench rather than on the playing field.  When you are in the game you can expect a few scratches and bruises.  They hopefully will not kill you.  And, those scratches and bruises can be worn with great pride.  Fear is nothing but the control device of your vessel in life.  And, when fear is real your five senses will let you know. 

 

Have a wonderful week and know that the power of your success can be found in your willingness to address the fears (lack of knowledge) that reside in your mind.

 

I wish you well,

Russ