Performance Coaching Techniques for Actors

How often do you leave a class, workshop, casting, an audition or an acting job feeling dissatisfied?

You know you could have done better, you know you have the potential, but somehow you didn’t reach it today - even when you were perfect for the job – ESPECIALLY when you were perfect for the job?

Or perhaps you felt you were performing at your peak, but you still didn’t achieve your goal?

The answer isn’t far away. In fact, it’s sitting between your ears. Our conscious mind is often the biggest obstacle to our achievements. With its help, we can sabotage our own performances without a clue as to how to get out of our own way.

Thankfully much of the hard-work for helping actors overcome this problem has already been done by coaches, researchers, performers and psychologists in other fields. Whether in sport, the military, music, business, or law – performers are required to deliver high quality performance under highly stressful conditions, sometimes with life, liberty or living at stake.

In most fields, the role of mental skills training has been accepted. Law, sports and the military are just three diverse areas where outside consultants are employed to assist with the ‘performance’. It has been accepted by these areas that success or failure in a particular field can come down to whatever is going on inside the performer’s mind.

In sport, ‘mental coaches’, experts in peak performance, have become a part of any successful team, the Seattle Seahawks have their own resident performance psychologist. The Royal Academy of Music has its own MSc in Performance Science, an attempt to engage with peak performance in musicians scientifically.

For centuries, actors have put up with performance anxiety and stress, calling it ‘stage fright’. Slowly, now the acting profession has begun to understand the benefits and potential

At Acting Coach Scotland, in our Glasgow acting studio, we regularly use the tools of performance psychology and engage a type of performance coaching that we call the ‘Inner Game’ of acting, helping individuals to learn more efficiently and enhance their performance. This approach focuses on the individual rather than their acting – although we do teach acting too!

There are few limits on the potential for coaching an individual’s inner game, it is as likely to help the amateur actor, as it is the professional. It is as likely to help the first time professional, as it is the seasoned veteran of forty years. It can equally help those auditioning for drama school, and those auditioning for Hollywood films. And while most Performance Coaching is aimed at helping elite performers perform at their peak, it is just as likely beneficial to complete beginners.

Performance Coaching techniques can be applied at FOUR different stages in the performance process:

PERSONAL PERFORMANCE: Techniques aimed at helping the actor with their day to day, long term development. Includes: Goal Setting, Raising Awareness and Building Self Trust, Self-Image, Motivation, Beliefs, Managing Interferences.

PRE-PERFORMANCE: Techniques aimed at preparing for the performance. Includes: Preparation Strategies for Performance, Managing Self Talk Interference and Imagery (visualisation).

PEAK PERFORMANCE: Techniques aimed at managing the performers arousal state, their emotions, stress and concentration levels – as well as managing the ubiquitous interference/self talk.

POST-PERFORMANCE: Techniques aimed at managing the post-performance experience, includes imagery (visualisation) interference reduction, post-performance stress management including helping the performer to manage stress-related behavioural changes including: substance abuse, changes in eating habits, sleep disturbance.

At each stage, it is possible for these ‘inner’ techniques to be employed to help the actor to perform at a higher and healthier level.