What All the Best Actors Have in Common

All the best actors have something in common. They have a growth mindset. They simply could not succeed in our industry without one.  But what is a Growth Mindset?

Whenever you face a challenge or obstacle in your acting career or training, there’s a chance to learn and grow. It’s how you respond to those challenges and obstacles that shape your chances of success, and that response is often defined by your mindset.

Leading psychologist Carol Dweck writes about what she called The Fixed Mindset and how it can negatively affect an actor’s ability to develop in training or respond to feedback. Today, I’d like to explore the Growth Mindset, the mindset that allows you to learn and grow in response to the challenges that you experience in your acting career and training.

An actor with a Growth Mindset believes that intelligence, ability and skills can all be developed. This leads the actor to a desire for improvement. An actor with this mindset looks at challenges as an opportunity to grow. If you have this mindset, you have not tied your career success to your self-image. You do not define yourself by your success or failure. You aren’t concerned with how this will look to others. You have a ‘succeed or learn’ attitude to the challenges they face and the obstacles that they encounter.

This actor seeks criticism and feedback as opportunities to learn how to get better. It doesn’t mean that criticism isn’t painful, but if you have a Growth Mindset, you know that it isn’t personal, you don’t connect that feedback to how you see yourself or how others see you. That doesn’t mean that all feedback is equally helpful – you have to look for feedback from experts. 

When other actors get auditions, or do particularly well in a performance, those with a growth mindset see it as proof that they can achieve their goals too. So actors with the Growth Mindset continue to improve, taking in positive feedback and creating the type of thinking that reinforces their Growth Mindset.

How you respond to challenges and obstacles should tell you the type of mindset you have:

If when the director gives feedback, your mind is actively trying to ferret out how to use that to improve – that’s a Growth Mindset right there. This actor actively seeks an opportunity to develop, and feedback is just that. Their mindset creates a positive feedback loop that encourages them to learn from feedback.

If when the director gives feedback, you want it to be over as quickly as possible, the chances are that it’s a Fixed Mindset. This actor doesn’t believe that feedback really improves anything, their experience tells them that’s the case. They have developed a negative feedback loop.

In tomorrow’s blog, I’ll explain how to change your Mindset. It is possible for you to develop a growth mindset.