This Blog May Not Be For You

The type of mindset you bring to any task or activity dictates how you perform in it.

Psychologist Carol Dweck describes two types of mindsets. A growth mindset and a fixed mindset. The future of your acting career can have more to do with your mindset than your ability.  Today, I want to talk about the type of mindset that can damage your acting career:

THE FIXED MINDSET OF THE ACTOR: 

Actors with a fixed mindset need a positive self and public image, they want to do well and need others to see them doing well to reinforce how they feel about themselves and their abilities.

But to achieve success, they must face challenges.

Challenges have an element of risk in them, failure is possible.  An actor with a fixed mindset will struggle if these challenges might potentially impact negatively on how they see themselves and others might perceive them.  And so, they will attempt to avoid, evade, distract, deflect or escape from that challenge.

Another way in which the actor with the fixed mindset might struggle is with an obstacle.  Challenges are somewhat option. Obstacles demand attention. If you get dropped by your agent, getting a new agent is not optional, it’s necessary. Obstacles end careers.  Because the actor with the fixed mindset cannot bear the pain of potential failure in order to overcome the obstacle.

If you have this mindset, you may struggle with the effort needed to overcome obstacles and meet challenges. Your worldview has been shaped by experience to believe that it is not worth the risk of failure to put in the effort to overcome them. They may go to acting classes, they may audition, they may work professionally, but they cannot engage in any situation that might endanger their self-image. You’ve seen it, I see it most days.

This actor struggles to receive feedback. Even the most useful feedback interferes with the self-view the actor has, and is often received as an insult. That’s not a conscious decision they are making, they aren’t even aware they are doing it. Because of their mindset cannot differentiate criticism of their performance with criticism of them. They attempt to avoid feedback situations, ignoring it where possible.

Their defensive response to feedback quickly conditions others to avoid offering any kind of constructive feedback at all. This mindset isolates that actor from the opportunity to develop.

As a result of their mindset, these actors rarely achieve their full potential,  this further reinforces their belief, which reinforces the belief that they can’t change. Thus, they become fixed.

The problem can start when a young actor who receives a great deal of praise for their acting or performing activities finds themselves in drama school, the expectation created by that praise and acceptance into the institution often leads the young actor to unconsciously protect the status. For them, drama school is mainly engaged in a series of unrewarding tasks, which are better avoided than partaken. When this training delivers little of value, they move into their career with a belief that their ability and not the training got them through their education. Avoiding any opportunity for their self-image to be threatened or damaged has helped them avoid pain, and the benefits of drama school training.

The wrong type of praise and thinking often reinforces this thinking further. People praised for how good they are, will often seek to defend that status. Anything that threatens that status must be avoided or attacked.

The fact is that even this blog would be a challenge to the self-image of an actor with a fixed mindset – hence why I suggested that this blog might not be for you.

How do you break this cycle of fixed thinking? You need to interrupt it. Acknowledging that you may currently have a fixed mindset is the first step to changing it. Of course, I’m sure from the blog you’ve just read, that may be very difficult.

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