I recently got a barrage of email and social media posts from a big casting-director-slash-coach asking something like 'what if you didn't have to dread auditioning?'
Are you weighing each audition by success or failure? - Image via Flickr by http://www.houstondwiattorney.net
My first thought was, 'Are there really actors who dread auditioning?' My second thought was, 'You know there are, Rebecca. You just hate to think about it because you know it doesn't have to be that way.' I clicked the link in the email, hoping it would lead to a post about why actors dread auditioning and how to love it instead... but it didn't. So I decided to write one.
The dread comes from a few places, often in combination. First, the little kid who lives in all of our brains sees an audition as a test, just like school; Do well and you pass, do badly and you fail. (Except in auditions, if passing means booking the role, only one person passes and everybody else fails. That's one tough test.) Second, auditions force us to confront the harsh reality that there are a lot of other actors out there doing what we're doing, and some of them seem a lot better at it than we are, which makes us feel small. Third, we think of our career as an old-timey pharmecutical scale - with Success on one side and Failure on the other - and every audition we don't book adds weight to the Failure side. Good lord, just typing that makes me never want to go to another audition again. (Seriously. My subconscious just made me take a HUGE deep breath to calm the anxiety that bubbled up from even thinking about those feelings.)
The good news is that all of that stuff comes from inside our own heads, which means we can change it.
First, instead of approaching an audition as a pass/fail test, what if we approach it like Show and Tell? There's no grade, it's not a pass/fail thing, you're just showing people something that you think is cool. "Today, I brought in what I would do if I got this job." Other people are bringing their cool stuff too, but it doesn't take away from what you brought, because no one else has what you have. The only way to fail at Show and Tell is not to bring anything at all.
The second strategy is all about focus. If you're comparing yourself to the other people in the waiting room, it doesn't matter if they're 'better' than you, because you're already distracted. Practice bringing your attention back to what you can control - your preparation. You're there for a reason - a decision-maker thinks you're potentially right for the role. That means you have as good a shot as anyone else, and for the few minutes that you're in the audition room, the role is all yours. Enjoy it. (The comparing thing is one of several 'waiting room traps' to practice protecting yourself against.)
Third, the success/failure scale. Equating audition success with booking the job is the equivalent of believing a first date is a failure if you don't walk away with a marriage proposal. It's bonkers. The real measure of audition success is simply this... did you do what you wanted to do in the room? That can mean many things; Did you go in feeling good thanks to maintaining your prep in the waiting room? Did you play strong choices in the scene? Did you maintain a professional attitude? Did you ask any questions you needed to ask? Did you feel comfortable working with the camera? Did you conduct yourself in a way that established or furthered your relationships with the decision makers? Whatever it is that you wanted to accomplish, how did you do? If you can answer that question - even if the answer is that you didn't do as well as you would have liked - it's a successful audition. And I don't mean that in a 'pre-school graduation/everyone gets a trophy' kind of way. If you walk out with a clear understanding of what to work on for next time, you've made the audition process work for you, and that's a success.
We're actors. An audition is an opportunity to act. Even better, an audition is an opportunity to act for someone who picked you out of thousands of actors they could have picked instead. That is something to be happy and proud and excited about. So if auditions don't make you feel happy and proud and excited, spend a little time figuring out why, and what you can do to change it.
Image via Flickr by houstondwi_photos