The Great Acting Blog: “Concentrate On Now”

The Great Acting Blog: “Concentrate On Now”

The life of an actor can be full of stress and pressure. So much of it seems to be out of our control. Things don’t move fast enough, we’re not where we want to be in our career, we haven’t accomplished the things within the timeframe we thought we would. It’s frustrating. Unexpected obstacles emerge, we are lead down blind alleys and up garden paths. The response to a performance is not as potent as we would have liked. Actors who we don’t rate get lots of great work. That director who we worked with when they had no budget has just got a big budget, but the phone isn’t ringing. We worry about the future, we worry about the past, we want to produce even more, that new project we want to undertake is going to take two years to come to fruition, and when oh when will I ever get to do a Harold Pinter play?!

Regret and stressful anticipation are a complete waste of time. If something hasn’t turned out how you wanted it to, then learn from it, carry the lesson forward. Worrying about something which has yet to happen is even more of a waste of time. If you want something, then concentrate your effort on those things which you can do to get it. If you’re not doing anything to get it, is it rational to complain about not having it (like actors who complain about not working but do nothing to actually obtain work)?

Commit fully to the moment at hand. Give it your full attention and only do what is in front of you. It’s like being on stage: we don’t anticipate the next line or the next scene, we just wait for it to come and deal with it as best we can when it does. Similarly, if we spend our time worrying about what happened in the last scene, then we will miss out on what is happening now.

Focussing on the moment at hand is not only more productive than worrying about past or future, it’s also more pleasurable.

Subscribe to The Great Acting Blog