The Great Acting Blog: “Be Your Own Perfect Director”

The Great Acting Blog: “Be Your Own Perfect Director”

To follow on from yesterday’s post, about how fear of making mistakes kills creativity – one of the things that hasn’t been mentioned is our own response to ourselves whenever we make a mistake.

How you treat yourself when you make a mistake affects how much you fear mistakes in the first place. If you berate yourself and see each of your errors as yet more evidence of your own worthlessness, then you’re not going to get very far at all. However, there is nothing more productive than being strong with yourself, firm, ensuring that you develop good habits of work – without this kind of discipline we never learn from the mistakes we make, repeating them over and over again instead, and this is as useless and inhibiting as the self-lacerating response.

We all of us make mistakes, even very very silly ones, and we do so despite our planning and best intentions. Making work is not the easiest task in the world, it is full of anxiety because we are required to step into the unknown, and personally there is a great deal at stake. But we have to at least give ourselves a chance. Be like the ideal director you’d like to work with: don’t suffocate your potential with pre-concieved notions, but give yourself space to create. If it all goes horribly wrong, then reflect on it, try to extrapolate some useful, practical lessons from it, and then move on.

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