Hi,
Yesterday, I was coaching a client, - Boogie- who arrived at the session upset because she realized for a long time now that she had felt acting was a frivolous career choice.
Since she had started, Boogie had given her career a lot of time and energy but something deep inside of her was judging her career choice as “not serious”.
…Quite a split energy…
Have you ever felt like you are giving everything you’ve got, and in the back office there is a voice shouting: THIS IS NOT WORTH IT, STOP WASTING YOUR TIME!!
Relationships that never seem to work though you invest all your energy in them… Anyone???
When that happens, no matter how much you give it, - and you really can give it more than you even have-… It can’t work. No fruits to pick when no one is watering the tree.
Boogie and I started working and I told her this story:
One of my friends saves baby lives for a living. She is one of the partners of the neonatal intensive care unit at one of the most prestigious hospitals around. “Exactly!” said Boogie “ that’s profound, that definitely has value!”.
I couldn’t agree more.
The baby savior and I became friends at the NICU when she saved our newborn baby Tyger. And by the end of her career she will have saved hundreds of little precious lives.
I told Boogie, “you know what the weirdest part is? She knows she will never make anything remotely close to what a well known actor makes in term of money”.
Her job is to save baby lives and in her own words she makes thousands of times less than famous actors…How absurd is that?
For some reason, the society we live in, has organized itself, and apparently agreed to value the work of an actor more than that of a baby savior.
Are we demented?
Probably, yes. It seems that as a society, and therefore as individuals we desperately crave for guidance. For life meaning. For a manual on how to live.
And mythology and therefore stories have always been around for that reason. To offer the members of our societies a way to approach life, guidance and a possible “enlightenment”.
And though we can all agree that the life of a baby must be more important than a story, we also have to agree that what our society seems to need right now is meaning and guidance.
Being alive on this planet without exploring how to deal with it, doesn’t make much sense to anyone.
And so there we have it.
Boogie pondered a little and started crying.
“It’s so fucked up” she said.
And I responded ” Yes it is. But we are living in this time space reality”. And right now people are “dying to make sense” of it.
So, if some of us have it in them to shed some light and inspire, they must do it. It has a tremendous value right now in our world. So it is a very serious career.
Judging it won’t help anyone.
Embrace it.
Embrace the fact that you can offer a piece of you to those who are thirsty for meaning.
And you acting colleagues can offer another unique piece of humanity.
You have to show up for that. Truly. Fully. Freely.
Not for you. For the rest of us. Lost in the dark.
Jo.