Based on my experience as a teacher and before that as a talent agent, as well as the feedback I have gotten from both students and clients, I can safely say that nearly as many jobs are lost in the waiting room as in the audition room.
You’ve prepared your piece with a compelling intent, meaningful relationships, and dynamic choices. You’re confident and ready to book. Then you enter the danger zone. The voices, the posturing, the anxiety, and desperation all seem to be conspiring to diminish your strength and confidence and steal your focus.
Some waiting rooms are thankfully better than others, but even the good ones have the potential to distract and drain your energy.
When this begins to happen, it’s time to become mindful of your circumstances and ask yourself: “What do I need in this moment?”
When you’ve identified the problem, you can then work with the breath to help solve it.
When you are in an environment that’s puling you away from your center, it’s easy to lose your sense of self and become overwhelmed. You may be nervous, tired, angry, defensive, or any number of other things. It’s time to get specific. Each emotion or physical state has a different cause and a different solution, and there is a breath that can act as an antidote for each.
First take a deep breath and fill your upper chest with air to bring yourself back into your body. Now, ask yourself, “What do I need in this moment?” Let’s say the answer is that you need to get back to feeling relaxed and safe, because you’re feeling nervous and exposed.
First, know that even if you’ve prepared really well and feel great about what is going to happen in the audition, you can still feel nervous. We are big containers and can hold more than one emotion at once: Feeling nervous and confident at the same time is the hallmark of great actors, singers, and athletes. These types of nerves are present simply because you’re a human being and as a human being you come installed with fight, flight, or freeze mechanisms hardwired into your brain. A tense, stressful waiting room can kick the flight mechanism into overdrive.
So try this:
Straighten your posture and whether you’re sitting or standing, feel your feet firmly on the ground. Now take a minute’s worth of deep breaths from your stomach. When you expand your stomach with air, it sends a signal of safety to the brain. The breath softens the stomach and releases all of the holding that anxiety can create. When the holding in your gut eases, your brain will start to understand that it doesn’t have to protect you and will stop trying to get you to flee.
This undefended, soft belly openness will make you feel more powerful and courageous. You can now stand tall and think back to all of the times that you’ve auditioned or performed well, how successful you’ve been in getting to this point in your life; and as the thoughts change, so do the chemical signals that are sent to the brain. You’re now back inside your skin, realigned and safe, knowing that nothing that can happen in this situation will hurt you.
All this from a series of focused breaths! The signals the brain get from the breath are some of the strongest and clearest it receives from anywhere in the body. Changing the breath can change the mind.
Let’s take one more example. You’re sitting in the waiting room of a multi-studio casting facility, listening to people bragging about how wonderful they are and how often they book, babies screaming, mothers panicking, assistants freaking out and you are quickly losing the focus you had when you arrived—the focus you’re going to need in the audition room.
Back to the breath. Again, sitting with your feet firmly on the ground, put all of your focus on your nose. Breathing naturally, feel the air as it goes into the nostril, and then experience what it feels like going out of the nostril. The coolness and the warmth. The fact that this is such a small, specific part of the body requires you to focus and the concentrated effort it takes to really feel the subtle differences of the inhale and the exhale is the perfect antidote to the mental fragmentation caused by external chaos. The “nostril breath” is very popular among elite athletes.
It's important to do these breathing exercises with your eyes open. When you close your eyes, it sends your brain the signal that that you can only relax, focus, feel safe, etc., if you remove yourself from the environment. You want to include the entire experience of the environment and relax into it, not shut it out. Also, with your eyes open you can be doing this anytime you want and no one will know!
There are many more examples and techniques, but no matter what the different scenarios may be, it all comes down to mindfulness and awareness: the mindfulness to ask yourself what you need and the awareness to know how, through your breath and body, to send the brain the signals to relax, focus, and feel safe so that you can be the strong, confident actor that gets the job.
So, give these two simple techniques a try. They’ve helped hundreds of actors turn the waiting room into a place where they gain power—not lose it.
Craig Wallace will be giving a free seminar, Q&A in Hollywood on Feb. 28. See www.wallaceauditiontechnique.com for details and sign up.
Like this advice? Check out more from our Backstage Experts!
