When You Put Yourself Out There | The RuleBook

When you put yourself out there you open up a world of possibilities both positive and negative. You hope that by putting your video online or applying to that job something good will happen and move you toward your goals. Many times though you don't get what you're searching for. Sometimes you get the opposite of what you wanted. You become discouraged. You get anxiety because you have whiplash from the last thing you did that was so heavily criticized. It's an endless cycle of trying things and facing the music.

When auditioning in person was still a thing, I would sometimes, okay, a lot of the times miss my auditions because I was so, so nervous. I'd tell myself I didn't prepare enough, or that I'm not what they're looking for anyway. And usually these projects were non-union, non-paying and had a crappy script attached so in the grand scheme of things what did any of it matter?

But guess what? An actress who doesn't go to her auditions is not an actress. And that was something that I had to acknowledge because if I say that this is something I want to do, but I'm incapable of showing up, I have a bigger problem.

In the beginning when I was auditioning, I had very little training. Every casting call ended up being a public humiliation ritual for me. I would leave feeling defeated and stupid. And as a perfectionist, I despised It. It was in those moments that I realized, I need to find a good class with a great teacher because if every time I have to put myself out there, it hurts this bad It's only a matter of time before I quit.

Not putting yourself out there is certainly not limited to acting or auditioning. For me, there's been plenty of videos I didn't post on social media, let alone create because I'm afraid of people's reaction to them or how they might judge me through that content. It is hard to show up, and that's why so many people just don't.

Back in my blogging days, I would sometimes write personal things about my life, and family members would find it and they would forward it to my mother who'd get very, very upset at me. I'd end up having tons of fights with her about deleting things. Eventually, I just stopped writing completely. I didn't want my blogs to become arguments because that wasn't the point of them. I just wanted to express myself.

Unfortunately, the message I got was that when I show up, people get upset. They don't like it, and I think that's a big part of why some of us stop ourselves. We're afraid of how other people are going to react. It wasn't until this podcast that I actually sat down and wrote again.

Even though other people are going to get in the way of you showing up, you have to try to push past it if you don't want to disappear. If you don't go to the audition, you're not getting the part. If you do go, you might embarrass yourself but there's a 1% chance something else could happen too. Those are objectively better odds.

I remember taking an acting workshop with a pretty renowned teacher, and I was very new in my training. I had studied the play, Fool for Love for six months, and would be doing a couple scenes from It In his workshop. Most of the audience, well, the whole audience was other actors who were also either participating or auditing for learning purposes. I got up on that stage, obviously not ready, and the critique I received was, "Alex, acting is not playing dress up in your mommy's clothes." The audience audibly gasped. That comment was like a knife through the heart, and I'm not being dramatic. It felt like the teacher was telling me, that not only do I not take the craft of acting seriously, but that I don't take myself seriously either. It was brutal and painful, but I had put myself out there, gotten honest feedback and fallen flat on my face.

The best part was the workshop is set up so that you get to perform twice. That Initial comment was from day one. I had to come back and try to improve on the performance with that note In mind. Looking back, I didn't have the technique to be able to act in this play at that point. And I had to stand there and take similar criticism about the craft of acting and growing up. Even though that was one of the harshest critiques I ever got, it helped. It reminds me of when you're in a swimming pool and you're hanging onto the wall because you're too afraid to let go in case you can't reach the bottom. I felt like this teacher ripped me from the wall and pushed me out into the deep end. This is one way people learn to swim. I was sitting in the water doing absolutely nothing before that workshop, too afraid to go under.

Sometimes you will swallow some water before you get it together, at least that's what happened to me. I was truly baptized through fire in his class, and it did eventually lead me to getting it more together because no 26-year-old woman wants to hear that she's playing dress up in her mommy's clothes. They just don't. And that's the thing I want to say about showing up, It's great, you should do it, but it hurts. Showing up has consequences, sometimes positive, and sometimes negative. And mostly negative in the beginning, especially when you're trying something new. You're going to look stupid. You're going to get hurt by what people say about you. Every time I showed up, I got punched in the face, but I also learned how to get back up.

I ended up performing in that workshop two more times over the course of three years, and the last time I did it was right before the pandemic, and I did a different scene from a different play with a different scene partner. And the comment that I got was one that I will hang on to, "Alex, you got earned laughs." Maybe that doesn't sound like the most stunning note to you, but for me it was as good as it gets. My commitment to showing up in my acting was acknowledged, and I really did earn every laugh.

That's the thing about showing up. You're going to get better at it each time you do it. When you grow, it will hurt. And the more you show up and the more you grow, the less it'll hurt. I'm glad that someone called me out, told me to stop playing dress up, and start taking It seriously. I hope that you do yourself that same favor.