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Last week on the blog, I introduced an idea I call “actor voice.” Actor voice is when a performer or speaker doesn’t sound authentic because they are stuck in a vocal pattern. I named a handful of different vocal patterns that are possible to get stuck in, and today I want to elaborate further on a specific one I mentioned called “emotional pressure.” Here’s what it is:

Emotional pressure is when you let the idea of the emotion you’re...

Okay, so there’s this thing that sometimes happens with actors that like to call “actor voice.” Let me explain.

Actor voice is when something about the performer’s voice sounds or feels inauthentic. As the listener, your bullshit meter starts to siren: “Bull-shit bull-shit! Something about what that person is doing is FAKE. I don’t believe them. They’re not thinking of this in the moment! They planned this!”

Well of course they planned it,...

You woke up this morning and you feel crappy. You’re sad, you’re out of sorts, and you don’t feel like going to work (/school/rehearsal/wherever you need to go). What should you do?

Option A: Stay in bed.

Option B: Get up and mope around feeling sad. Stare blankly at the mirror while you brush your teeth. Drag yourself out the door.

Option C: Turn on Kanye and jam it out. Chug some coffee. Bounce out the door.

Answer?

Any of them. All of them. None of them. It...

Recently I’ve been teaching something called the “Unconscious Competence Model” in my classes and sessions a lot. I like to alternately call it the “how-we-learn-anything/OMG-this-explains-everything” model, because it describes how we learn anything new or acquire a new skill. I believe that when we dive in and hack this process it gives us a much better understanding of the work we need to do to change, and the LETTING GO we need to do to let...

I’m part of an amazing community of female entrepreneurs on Facebook (it’s called Dreamers//Doersand truly, it’s amazing), and we often converse about things beyond the scope of our businesses. This past weekend, our founder shared a beautiful post about how challenging it can be to cope with the news of tragic or unsettling world events. She posed a question, which I’ll rephrase like this:

How do we cope with the intense emotions that come up when we watch the...

I’ve been going through a very big time lately. I told myself that 2016 was going to be my Year of Transformation, and boy oh boy stuff is transforming. A lot of things are falling away, new things are emerging, and in general BIG CHANGE is happening in every aspect of my life.

One of the reasons I’ve been interested in transformation is that I feel like I’ve spent most of my adult life racing to catch up. Always rushing to meet a deadline, hurrying to not be late,...

Recently I floated in a sensory deprivation tank for the first time. I’ve been curious about trying it for awhile, and oh my goodness I’m so glad I did because it was magical. It was absolutely fascinating to be in an environment with no immediate boundaries (I mean yes the tank has walls, but the point is you don’t have to be in contact with them). At times it felt like being in the womb, at times it felt like floating among the stars, and at times it felt like being...

I work with and teach a lot of actors, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what a complex task it is to perform. On one hand it’s the most natural thing in the world. On the other hand though, to appear natural in front of an audience is perhaps the hardest task ever known to man. (Corroborated by the fact that people fear public speaking more than death!)

I’ve come to believe that when we’re performing, we’re always balancing three things. Those three...

Okay, let’s talk about your diaphragm. I know we voice coaches says things like “breathe with your diaphragm” or “use diaphragmatic breathing,” but to be honest that language is misleading. Why? Because it’s kinda like saying “walk with your feet”…. what else are you supposed to do it with anyway?

Unless your diaphragm is paralyzed (and you’d know if it was!), it’s moving when you breathe. So the question is not whether...

So there’s this thing that sometimes happen to us creative, driven people… It goes something like this:

Step one: We dream up a big project.

Step two: We put our plan into action. We pour our time, energy, money, love, sweat, blood, and tears into it. We work on it for months, if not years. We work insanely hard and make something that we are crazy proud of. Something that is so quintessentially ours.

Step three: When the time comes to share this huge thing, we do the big...