How To Combat Your Need for Approval

We’re out there in the spotlight, we must all be extroverts, right? Wrong. Most actors are not extroverts at all. Many are painfully shy. But either way, what most actors seem to experience is a strong need for approval.

Approval from whom? Family, friends, the audience, their agent, critics, other actors – to name but a few.

In such a high pressure environment, with very low employment rates and often downward spiralling self esteem, getting someone’s approval seems like a very important part of being an actor.

But it’s not and actually, the need for approval drives very damaging behaviour for actors. I want to spend just a few minutes explaining that, and how to combat the need for approval.

Being focused on other peoples’ approval means you are focused on the outcome of your performance, you are driven by a need for the type of results that would win someone else’s approval. It can motivate some individuals, but mostly, it damages us.

And we begin to associate how we feel about ourselves as a performer, how we see ourselves as a person, with how we think other people see us. But the main issue is not how others see us, but our own self-image, how we see ourselves, but additionally – how we feel about ourselves.

We don’t want to fail in front of those we want approval from - and this leads to a drastic reduction in our ability to take risks. This can cripple you in the rehearsal room when you should be exploring freely, or on set from take to take, when your need to get the director’s approval is squashing your ability to take creative risks and deliver phenomenal results. All the focus becomes about getting a successful outcome.

We get tight. We try to avoid mistakes at all costs. Our energies are taken up by telling ourselves to do more, try harder, to do your best. And in that place, we are not at our best, in that place, we are conservative at best.

In order to be exceptional, we have to be able to take risks. To be exceptional, we have to be completely absorbed in what we are doing. Not self consciously self critical, but completely immersed in your performance. If we are looking for approval, we stand outside ourselves and watch ourselves AS-IF we are the approval-givers, and we deliver a constant negative narrative of our failures.

If you want to become completely absorbed, you need to have something thoroughly absorbing to take up your attention. Tim Gallwey says ‘focus is whatever distracts us from whatever distracts us.’  The obvious place to put your attention, the least self conscious place are your scene partners and trying to do real things to them.

Needing approval from other is about needing to feel good about yourselves through others. But to overcome our need for approval, you must discover who you are as a person, not as an actor. You are a person first, and an actor second. Do you like who you are as a person, do you like your characteristics? Most people can find many positive characteristics. Liking who you are as a person outside acting, accepting who you are as a person – that’s how you overcome the need for approval elsewhere.

You have to find harmony with who you are, when you are happy with that, the approval of others becomes less and less relevant.