115. Procrastination

"You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." ~Martin Luther King Jr.

What is happening today? This is what's happening... You've had TONS of time to do everything you needed to do...And yet, you are finding a million low-priority things to busy yourself with...none of which are the important task that's weighing on your mind and making your tummy a bit queasy...You know, the one that you MUST accomplish by the end of the day orrrrrr else consequences will be had.

Procrastination....Not my friend...But we do spend a lot of time together. True story.

How to motivate oneself to motivate oneself?

Need a solid tip to get off your a$$ and do that thing that's gotta get done...TODAY?

CLICK HERE FOR WORDS OF WISDOM

Sending you all the peace-of-mind that comes with the completion of a task that you've been actively avoiding.

Juuuuuust DO IT!

Loves,
V

"...[He] who waits until circumstances completely favor his undertaking, will never accomplish anything." ~ Martin Luther

 P.S. Did two monologues in my living room for my friend E. Don't know exactly how I felt about them. Fine, I suppose. I did realize that I have a hard time focusing on "the moment before." I tend to take-on the energy of the room, rather than creating my own energy based on the given circumstances of the monologue...especially with the first piece. By the second piece, I've kind-of "warmed-up," I think, and it's easier for me to focus. Also, I am having some resistance to really getting super passionately lovey-dovey with my Shakespeare piece...which it sort-of requires. But, personally for me right now, that whole "romance" thing is not an emotion that I've felt recently, so accessing it is taking some...um...imagination to muster.

89. Learn From The Best

"I have a lot left to learn. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I know almost nothing, and that I’m often wrong about what I think I know. Life has many lessons left to teach me, and I’m looking forward to them all." - Leo Babauta, ZenHabits.net

I want to be a life-long-learner. Part of this whole journey of wanting to get back to school and get my MFA in acting has been motivated by my desire to continue to LEARN and, specifically, learn how to create a sustainable and fulfilling career as an artist.

Hence...applying to NYU, Yale & Juilliard...arguably three of the BEST acting programs in the US. What better place to submit to the process of learning about the craft?

Observing New Yorkers since I moved here in 2007 has expanded my perception of what is possible for ordinary people to be able to do in the world. Being here has made me more aware of the impact that everyone is making on our society every day...and the question is.. What kind of contribution are you making today? And what more would you like to do if you showed a little initiative and guts?

These are the kinds of questions that NY has caused me to ask myself.

I am surrounded by successful people EVERYWHERE. People making their living doing EXACTLY what they are passionate about, taking risks, not compromising and making a great living from their work. This is incredibly inspiring to me.

So now that I KNOW that this kind of life is possible and that even regular people are doing it. I have to ask..how do I make this a REALITY for me?

A little background on my experience as an actor in NY...

In 2009, I went to over 200 theatre auditions here. I got three callbacks and booked one show.

That. Was. An. Exhausting. Year.

Just awful.

Let's not even talk about how devastating that year was for me financially or psychologically... Needless to say, to continue with that approach to my career was not a sustainable business model or healthy for my soul.

However, I acknowledge that I am an experiential learner...and I feel like I had to experience that awfulness for myself in order to know that it wasn't going to work for me.

Picture this...

200 mornings...waking up at the crack-of-dawn to stand in line with hundreds of other "me" types...all of us wanting jobs...needing to pay our rent...hoping to get an audition appointment and be "seen" for 2 minutes...sing our 16-bar-cut or speak a short monologue...and maaaaaybe be remembered by the casting assistant's intern behind the audition table...in hopes that you'd be that one "perfect" person for the job and your headshot would end up in front of someone with "actual casting authority." Such is the life of an agent-less actor. I realized that even with my Equity Card it was a looooong shot, but I kept "showing up" because I thought it was a numbers game...and EVENTUALLY I'd book something...and then I'd be "happy." Well...eventually, I did book a job...but...HAPPY?...Not so much. That job was not creatively fulfilling and it was over, start-to-finish, in less than 5 months...and back to the audition circuit I'd go.

This is not what I thought life as an actor would be...this life is not fun. Why do I feel like I'm desperately begging for a job every day? Bleh.

"Wrong approach, Wilcox. Sorry, Sweet Heart. The juice ain't worth the squeeze."

"There's gotta be a better way!"

I had to do SOMETHING differently. Because giving up acting for good was NOT AN OPTION.

I thought to myself, "You're not in Northern California anymore, Virginia. This is N.Y.C. There are new rules to this game. And you've got to learn them and figure out how YOU are going to be able to play YOUR way and not feel like you're being played. How are you going to be able to create an acting career in New York City that's... A. economically sustainable (gotta pay the rent and not get into debt) and B. creatively fulfilling (this is what you LOVE to do, right?) Being actor in NY is NOT an easy task or for the faint-of-heart or the "dabbler." You've got to be COMMITTED to failing and taking risks and thinking outside-the-box in order to LEARN how to make this career happen for you."

And I discovered that...I don't like feeling like the "long-shot" at an audition. I hate walking into the room and feeling like the casting director is thinking, "Virginia Wilcox, who? And why should I care?...NEXT." Actually...that's what I was thinking when I walked into the room...And THAT was the REAL problem.

I realized that I had get to a place in my own head where I could feel like the "sure-thing"... Eventually, I would like to be the person that walks into the audition room and the casting director's reaction is "Oh, thank goodness Virginia Wilcox is here. I love her work." So how do I get THERE?

I am still in the process of discovering the answer to this question. I'm hoping that part of the answer will be the confidence and exposure I will gain from my grad school experience.

But the most urgent question that pertains to NOW... is... What do I need to do TODAY to get myself on that path?

"It's often from a sense of discontent, feelings of incompleteness, or even a twinge of true unhappiness that the seeds of great accomplishment are sown." - Mike Dooley, Tut's Universe

I didn't want to buy into the "starving actor" mentality anymore. I'm not interested in "surviving" as an actor. I want to THRIVE as an actor.

So, what did I do after my marathon 200 audition year? I did what every self-respecting actor/actress in their right mind would do...I stopped auditioning and got a "day-job."

F*%k auditioning...I have to eat, make rent and these credit card bills are NOT going to pay themselves.

:-p

But what about acting? Was Virginia Wilcox giving up?! Maybe... maybe not...

"A young woman with an extra ten or twenty thousand in her pocket has a lot more room to maneuver than a girl who's broke at the end of every month...There's no disgrace in waiting tables if it's part of a long-term strategy." - Hugh MacLeod (taken from Tim Ferris' blog)

I knew I needed to figure out a strategy before I could move forward again... I knew that what I'd been doing wasn't working and wasn't making me happy and that if I continued on that path that it'd ultimately lead me to damage my love for acting (NO!!!). I couldn't let the challenges and competitive nature of the "business" destroy my desire to participate in this art form.


But what exactly was getting in my way? How could I approach all this in a smarter more fulfilling way?

And more specifically, was I really ready and willing to let go of everything in my life that's keeping me from my goal...thoughts, habits, relationships...anything that doesn't support me or has become unhealthy and no longer serves me...Would I really be brave enough to let it all go in service to my dream?

Scary.

Needs support.

Needs inspiration.

Needs to know that the juice will be worth the squeeze.

I became drawn to stories of successful people and how they became who they are today. Though many famous people I admire have amazing stories...I felt a certain distance from many of their tales because a lot of them started out with more resources in life than I felt I had. So, in my mind, I thought...well...NATURALLY they'd be successful...if they came from money... or if they were BORN into a family of industry leaders...or they found an influential MENTOR early in their life that enabled them entry into their field of choice. But those were not my circumstances.

So I kept searching until I found a story of an ORDINARY person, with similar resources to my own, no significant advantages to speak of, that found a smart and self-loving way to make their dreams happen in spite of the odds...

And that person was not an actor (surprise!) and came from the most unlikely of places...Guam...His name is Leo Babauta and it's his success story that has inspired me the MOST!


From Leo I have learned HOW to get over resistance to doing something you've never thought yourself capable of before and HOW changing your life in small ways can lead to changing your life in BIG ways...

READ LEO'S STORY HERE.

If Leo found a way to achieve his goals, then I can too! And my way may be slightly different than his way...but I will use his tools and adapt them to my own needs.

Some improve-your-habits-to-change-your-life guidance from Leo:

• Do one habit at a time.
• Make it easy to do.
• Do it consciously, very consciously at first.
• Don't allow any exceptions.
• Post your progress publicly.
• Keep doing it every single day.
• Enjoy the habit.

Sounds like a description of AcceptanceProjectNYC, huh?

Yes. I am totally unoriginal. All my good ideas are stolen and regurgitated from others.

Maybe that's my true calling...selective regurgitation.  ;-)

Anyway...

Leo inspires me because his is a story of an ORDINARY man, with ORDINARY resources, and with EXTRAORDINARY aspirations. He has completely changed his life... all because he was unhappy with the way things were going and he wanted a change. And he figured out a way to make the changes in his life soooooo easy and soooooo simple, that he couldn't make excuses for not doing it. For him, he made TINY changes...one thing at a time, one day at a time, step by step, inch by inch...nothing sweeping or grand. But NOW...all of those little moment-to-moment decisions have added up and he's living the life of his DREAMS and loving the life he's created.

I've been following his blog for a couple of years now. He's had such a HUGE impact on my life. But it's funny... I've never contacted him once, or commented on his blog or anything. He's changed my life by telling his story and he'll probably never know my name!

That's the beauty of the internet, I suppose. You put yourself out there...and somebody's happy to read what you've written. (You'll never really know the impact you've had on people. And that's probably best anyway, 'cause it's really too overwhelming to process psychologically.)

Thank you, Leo...for sharing your story. It has motivated me to stop sitting around and waiting for the life I wanted to find me...Now I'm taking action to create it, one tiny moment and one blog post at a time.

So hopefully, in the future I'll be able to make a whole huge awesome list of things I've accomplished with these baby steps...things that will have great meaning to me...because I took the reigns of my own life and did what I could to get the ball rolling.

I'm my own knight in shining armor...saving my own inner damsel in distress. And I know that no matter what happens with the "outcome" of this grad school goal, we're gonna live happily ever after.

Thank you to all of YOU, my readers, who CARE about pursuing your dreams! Please know that I am personally invested in your success! It's always such a thrill for me to press "send" and know that you're reading! And I'll keep showing up on this blog...6 days a week. Because I TRULY BELIEVE that you can create EXACTLY the kind of life you've always secretly imagined, by doing a little bit every day to move yourself in the direction of your dreams.

We're gonna get there, people. Where ever "there" is exactly...will become clear later. But, right now, at least we're on the way.

You may say that I'm a dreamer...but I'm not the only one,
Virginia

"Think only as you can think, which will lead to feelings that only you can feel, from which connections will be made, lives will be changed, and worlds will come tumbling into existence." - Mike Dooley, Tut's Universe

79. Do Nothing

"Should you want to contain something, you must deliberately let it expand.

Should you want to weaken something, you must deliberately let it grow strong.

Should you want to eliminate something, you must deliberately allow it to flourish.

Should you want to take something away, you must deliberately grant it access.

The lesson here is called the wisdom of obscurity.

The gentle outlasts the strong.

The obscure outlasts the obvious."

-Tao Te Ching, Verse 36

Here's my personal addition to the above verse...

"Should you want to get stuff done, you must deliberately do nothing." - Virginia Wilcox

That's my current theory of accomplishment.

So far... I've given myself no goals for the evening... and I feel like I'm not really doing anything... no deadlines ... no pressure... no stress... no nothing... and YET... somehow I have managed to organically accomplish a ton of stuff I've been intending to do for a while... mostly having to do with cleaning and organizing my room and work-space (which have been a total disaster since the dawn of November a.k.a. the busiest month in living memory).

I loooove giving myself plenty of time to do things in an organic/not pre-planned way.

It's soooo much more fun to do something in the very moment that you actually FEEL like you are excited to accomplish that task... rather than FORCING yourself to do it because it HAS to get done or because you SHOULD do it.

It's like a brain trick!... By telling myself I don't have to do ANYTHING... I actually motivate myself to WANT to do things... but only the things I really wanted to do to begin with.

And... Since 2011 has been alllll about doing more of what I really WANT to do and skipping the stuff I don't really like, I can feel good about doing what I want to do because I know that's exactly what I SHOULD be doing. Doing more of what I love has made me a much happier human being... and I'm still gettin' stuff DONE.

So, anyway, I recommend being lazy and doing nothing... Try it! And see what fun stuff you can accomplish.

;-p

Loves,
Virginia

“Practice not-doing and everything will fall into place.” - Lao Tzu

 

68. What Is Your MIT?

"It’s very simple: your MIT (Most Important Task) is the task you most want or need to get done today. In my case, I’ve tweaked it a bit so that I have three MITs — the three things I must accomplish today. Do I get a lot more done than three things? Of course. But the idea is that no matter what else I do today, these are the things I want to be sure of doing.... And here’s the key to the MITs for me: at least one of the MITs should be related to one of my goals. While the other two can be work stuff (and usually are), one must be a goal next-action. This ensures that I am doing something to move my goals forward that day. 

And that makes all the difference in the world. Each day, I’ve done something to make my dreams come true. It’s built into my morning routine: set a next-action to accomplish for one of my goals. And so it happens each day, automatically. 

Another key: do your MITs first thing in the morning, either at home or when you first get to work. If you put them off to later, you will get busy and run out of time to do them. Get them out of the way, and the rest of the day is gravy! 

It’s such a small thing to implement, and yet I’m raving about it like it’s a huge revelation. But it is. Sometimes small things can make big differences. I highly recommend you give it a go." - Leo Babauta, ZenHabits.net

This idea has been key, key, KEY for me in helping to keep my sanity this past month... (Though the jury's still out on that one.)

There's way too much going on for me to be able to accomplish EVERYTHING I want to do in a day. Just forgetaboutdit!

But if I do that one important thing, I feel MUUUUUCH better about life... especially if that one thing is something related to building my DREAMS.

Because, in the long run... a year from now... even 3 months from now... 5 minutes from now... which will I regret more: not keeping my room tidy or not getting my grad school applications submitted on-time?

Um, that's a no-brainer. Clearly my priority is the application!!! Having a clean room is okay, but that's not my tippy, top, top priority right now. So... laundry... you will stay on the floor for now.

"Put all your energy on what you love to do in your career and very little on what you don't." - Peter Pamela Rose

And if I have to let some things slide for a while in order to make sure I am accomplishing my MOST IMPORTANT TASK... then so be it.

(On that note... if I'm not returning your phone call or replying to your email... this is probably why.)

I gotta prioritize and can't keep all the balls in the air all at the same time. And that's OKAY. As long as I am keeping my focus on taking action on the things that are REALLY important to me, that I will be proud that I took the time to do YEARS from now... 

And, for now... all the busy-work and day-to-day whatchamacalits that come up... I'll get to you when I get to you...or... NOT.

Use your precious energy wisely, folks. Today... do the thing that matters FIRST.

Love,

V

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker, management consultant, professor and writer (1909 - 2005)

 

52. Annnnnnd... ACTION!

"Wishing doesn't make it so; making it so makes it so." - Lena Stevens, The Power Path

Gooood morning, people!

Had a monologue coaching appointment with Kathryn Bild yesterday. She and I hadn't met in a while. After we chatted it up a bit about what I had been up to recently and about the blog... then she asked me... point blank... "So what have you actually been DOING for your ACTING lately?"

Called OUT! Yikes!

Thankfully, I had been DOING some acting lately (my on-camera class and some voiceover training), so I had a couple things to talk about... Whew!

But it got me to thinking... What good is all this talking and blogging about the creative process of an actor if I am not actually DOING any acting?

Don't get me wrong! I am not going to stop with the AcceptanceProject. I am committed to finishing my 180 blog posts. Trust and believe.

But it was an important reminder for me to note that THINKING about acting is not acting. TALKING about acting is not acting. And WRITING about acting is not acting. Though I have found value in all of those things.

ACTING is acting.

And I think it's important to find a balance. I want to make sure that my thoughts and motives are in alignment with my values as an artist/human... which become clearer to me by thinking, talking and writing... but when it comes to getting into the thick of really learning about how to be a better actor... well, the only way to learn it is to take action and ACT.

Sooooooo, I thought I'd share with you all one of my favorite blog posts written on the subject of ACTION. (Anyone sensing the irony here?)

;-)

Anyway, why reinvent the wheel and try to write something brilliant about action... when it's already been done?

Below is a guest post by Leo Babauta of ZenHabits (naturally).

Enjoy!... But don't just READaboudit... take ACTION!

Love,
V

The Little Rules of Action

“The shortest answer is doing.” - Lord Herbert

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

Too often we get stuck in inaction — the quagmire of doubt and perfectionism and distractions and planning that stops us from moving forward.

And while I’m no proponent of a whirling buzz of activity, I also believe people get lost in the distractions of the world and lose sight of what’s important, and how to actually accomplish their Something Amazing.

And so today I’d like to humbly present a few little rules of action — just some small reminders, things I’ve found useful but by no means invented, common-sense stuff that is often not common enough.

1. Don’t overthink. Too much thinking often results in getting stuck, in going in circles. Some thinking is good — it’s good to have a clear picture of where you’re going or why you’re doing this — but don’t get stuck thinking. Just do.
2. Just start. All the planning in the world will get you nowhere. You need to take that first step, no matter how small or how shaky. My rule for motivating myself to run is: Just lace up your shoes and get out the door. The rest takes care of itself.
3. Forget perfection. Perfectionism is the enemy of action. Kill it, immediately. You can’t let perfect stop you from doing. You can turn a bad draft into a good one, but you can’t turn no draft into a good draft. So get going.
4. Don’t mistake motion for action. A common mistake. A fury of activity doesn’t mean you’re doing anything. When you find yourself moving too quickly, doing too many things at once, this is a good reminder to stop. Slow down. Focus.
5. Focus on the important actions. Clear the distractions. Pick the one most important thing you must do today, and focus on that. Exclusively. When you’re done with that, repeat the process.
6. Move slowly, consciously. Be deliberate. Action doesn’t need to be done fast. In fact, that often leads to mistakes, and while perfection isn’t at all necessary, neither is making a ridiculous amount of mistakes that could be avoided with a bit of consciousness.
7. Take small steps. Biting off more than you can chew will kill the action. Maybe because of choking, I dunno. But small steps always works. Little tiny blows that will eventually break down that mountain. And each step is a victory, that will compel you to further victories.
8. Negative thinking gets you nowhere. Seriously, stop doing that. Self doubt? The urge to quit? Telling yourself that it’s OK to be distracted and that you can always get to it later? Squash those thoughts. Well, OK, you can be distracted for a little bit, but you get the idea. Positive thinking, as corny as it sounds, really works. It’s self-talk, and what we tell ourselves has a funny habit of turning into reality.
9. Meetings aren’t action. This is a common mistake in management. They hold meetings to get things done. Meetings, unfortunately, almost always get in the way of actual doing. Stop holding those meetings!
10. Talking (usually) isn’t action. Well, unless the action you need to take is a presentation or speech or something. Or you’re a television broadcaster. But usually, talking is just talking. Communication is necessary, but don’t mistake it for actual action.
11. Planning isn’t action. Sure, you need to plan. Do it, so you’re clear about what you’re doing. Just do it quickly, and get to the actual action as quickly as you can.
12. Reading about it isn’t action. You’re reading an article about action. Ironic, I know. But let this be the last one. Now get to work!
13. Sometimes, inaction is better. This might be the most ironic thing on the list, but really, if you find yourself spinning your wheels, or you find you’re doing more harm than good, rethink whether the action is even necessary. Or better yet, do this from the beginning — is it necessary? Only do the action if it is.

“Talk doesn’t cook rice.” - Chinese Proverb

(Thanks, Leo! ... Don't you just LOVE him!?)