How to Feel In Control, But Not Controlled By Your Acting Career?

Ever feel like one day you’re on top of our game in the acting biz and the next you’re not? That can feel so disempowering and chaotic. What you thought isn’t so… or is it? 

Control. This word can mean a lot. Actors either want to control their careers or they feel completely out of control.

Some actors feel they aren’t in control at all, especially when casting directors are looked at as gate-keepers and agents as the answer. You tend to give their own power away as you look at everyone else as an authority and forget to look at yourself.  

For other actors, control means always trying to fit a mold and giving people what they think they want. You can lose yourself in the process and work REALLY hard. But you’re forcing things to happen and shutting people out in the process. 

In sports, (yes, please tell my husband I’m referencing sports, he’d be so proud) they say great players let the game come to them. Mistakes happen when athletes try to force a shot or a throw. The same holds true for actors. I see actors constantly self-sabotaging themselves as they try to make their career happen or listen to everyone else’s ideas about their career. 

So how can you feel in control of your career, but not be controlled by it?

This question plagued me, especially while I was transitioning between coasts. Before I moved to Los Angeles in 2013, I had hit a wall in my career in NYC. I’d been in NYC for a while and I realized musical theater was no longer the path for me, but that was how the industry saw me, so I kept doing it. I knew my look wasn’t getting me in the door for the types of roles I wanted to play, but I was too scared to change it. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel of complacency and I had to get off but wasn’t sure how. 

I felt out of control but somehow controlled by the biz.

Through that time, I did a LOT of soul-searching of what I really wanted. And I reignited in myself one thing I always teach – 

How can you play the game but by your own rules?  

This has come up a lot lately for my clients. I wanted to share with you the steps I took back in 2013 to feel more in control AND free:

1. Owning who you are and what is uniquely you and presenting that unapologetically to the world.
   
2. Believing and knowing that you are enough.
   
3. Accepting it’s never going to be ‘perfect’. You just have to jump.
   
4. Knowing your core values.
   
5. Letting go of the result.

Here’s the thing, ultimately, there is no control. All you can do is put yourself in a position to be ready when the opportunities present themselves. 

You get to do the market research and all the goal work to get where you want to go and know what is special about you in this business, then let it go. And trust.

I promise you, the result will be better than what you ever envisioned or was trying to control in the first place.

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