Episode 301: Abandonment and the Actor
Try out The Weekly Accountability Group Book a Free Consultation with Peter Today I'm going to talk about the abandoned actor and this is something that I have been really delving into on a deeper level in my private work, the private work I do with clients, but also in my weekly classes. And it's the idea of when we audition, or when we go to a set, or anything, maybe it could even be in your personal life when some kind of pressurized situation happens. We abandon ourselves. And I'm gonna start talking about I, just to make this easier to explain. I would abandon myself. Meaning, I would abdicate my feelings, my point of view, my talent to everybody else but myself, and that's what I mean by abandonment. One of my weekly classes is in my sister coaching company called Chiropractor for the Mind. And what I teach is emotional self sufficiency. And it's emotional self sufficiency, by teaching you emotional intelligence and teaching you to raise your intelligence emotionally. And this idea of emotional self sufficiency, let me just talk about that for one moment, is that when I'm just talking about me, when I am emotionally self sufficient, that means whatever comes my way in life, I am able to coach myself, I am able to help myself out of that emotional confusion. And emotional confusion is a problem for an actor because when you go in to do a scene, you want to be in the moment, emotionally on point. You want to be emotionally understood. You want to be able to access every single emotion in you in the moment. But if you are emotionally confused as a human being, oh boy, do we have a problem. So here's the thing, through core work, which is all that I talk about, that's how we become emotionally unconfused. And it is also where this ability to coach yourself is so important, and that is especially important when it comes to this idea of how do you abandon yourself. Now, a lot about abandonment has to do with feeling that you are a victim, thinking that you can't handle it, that you can't manage the situation you are in. But as all of my teachings have taught me and others, it is that we will never be given more than we can handle, but we will be given more than we can control. I'm just going to use the audition situation to keep this easy. Why when we walk into a meeting or an audition, why do we feel the need to abandon us? Why all of a sudden does it matter what the writer, director, producer, casting director thinks, but not what we think? And one of the things I talk about with my private clients and in the weekly classes are, this idea that if I go in and pretend I am the character of Sally. If I believe I'm Sally, if the only person that I am focusing on that needs to believe that she is Sally is Peter Pamela Rose, guess what automatically will happen? Automatically, everybody else in the room will. And I've only had to put the focus on making myself believe. And when I do that, I am not abandoning myself. I am not abandoning myself. Now let's just talk about anxiety and abandoning ourselves. I want to talk about a few points of When I start to feel that I am, like, abdicating my responsibility for myself to someone else, the number one thing I need to do when that happens is, I need to become aware. And I need to acknowledge my feelings. I talk about awareness, acceptance and action. the first step in core work is becoming aware because you don't know what you don't know, right? So becoming aware. And as I am aware and I accept that, “oh, look, I am doing this,” then I can, then that awareness happens, the acceptance that I am doing it happens, and then I want to move very quickly into action. The subject of awareness and acknowledging is really about recognizing and validating my emotions and also allowing myself to say, “okay, it's okay to feel it,” but this is the thing, if I try to say it's not happening, or just go away please, which is w
