10/24/2021
Have the Courage and Desire
to Know Yourself Better: Part 2
Another banality of the coaching/teaching industry that needs to be addressed is the mind-numbing cliché that in order to act, you have to “use yourself.” My question is, “Which of your many selves are you using?” We are multiples who have multiple relationships with other multiples. Although few of us can lay claim to (or would even want to lay claim to) being like Sybil, we all have many sides to our “personalities” – it’s our multiplicity that makes us interesting and unique. Using 19th-century concepts rooted in Freudian psychology as our main source of relationship analysis is as ridiculous as making stick drawings and calling them Rembrandts.
This idea of “use yourself” is really a primitive notion. Each one of us has many facets to our being. Each one of them will color, impede, refract, or perhaps occasionally aid in the analysis of our current life situation or of a script. The way you think changes the way you feel and what you perceive. The idea that you can experience life objectively or read a set of sides neutrally, is nonsense. You must develop and become more highly in tune with all aspects of yourself and understand how and when your perception of events and other people is refracted and impacted by that perception. One must learn how to recognize these “refractions''. If necessary we must recalibrate our “perceptual sense” when we approach a script so it is in line with the character’s thought process.
Consider: You can be having a really bad day or be going through a rough patch in your relationships and you get an audition for a Hallmark movie. There may be (without realizing it) a tendency to look at it cynically. You're not going to be open to that particular “fantasy” of life. Conversely, you may be in a place where amazing things are happening, and things are going well after coming through a dark tunnel. The thought of going to a dark place in a script may pose some difficulty. A scene or even one particular line, might be too hot to handle and therefore blind you to what’s really going on in your life and therefore the scene. This may deprive you of bringing the true nature of the scene or character to life.
1/ We must learn how to see our world as it is, not through the filter of our needs.
2/ We must learn how to see our world with courage, not fear.
3/ We must learn how to see the world through the prism of the character’s needs, not our own.
4/ We must learn how to see the world through the prism of the character’s relationship to courage and their fears, hopes and dreams.
Striking an even deeper chord we must also consider the software implanted in our brains from childhood, some good and some bad.....
Read more here: https://lbactingstudio.com/blogs/the-lb-blog/have-the-courage-and-desire-to-know-yourself-better-part-2
