1. Who Are You Surrounding Yourself With?
If you are feeling low on confidence and self-esteem, you need to be brutally honest with yourself about who you are surrounding yourself with and what effect they are having on you.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who are the main 5 people who surround me?
- How do I feel when I’m around them? (Do this for each person individually)
- What do they say/do that impacts me in a positive way?
- What do they say/do that impacts me in a negative way?
Anyone that is negative or overly critical towards you is going to knock your confidence IF YOU ALLOW THEM TO. My advice would be to create as much distance as you can from them and to surround yourself only with the people who support you, encourage you and make you feel good. I understand that this may not always easy, if it’s family, for example, but you can still set boundaries, and avoid discussing certain subjects such as your acting career with people who just don’t get it.
This will make a huge difference!
2. Keep Learning and Developing You Skills.
To be confident in your abilities as an actor, there’s no doubt that you need to be consistently working on improving and developing your skills. The more experience you get and the more you put yourself in situations that are slightly uncomfortable, the more you will see your confidence grow.
Improvisation is especially good for helping you to build confidence as it will push you out of your comfort zone, and get you used to listening to your instinct and trusting in your choices.
Go to acting classes, do all the training online that you can, get as much experience as possible and practice, practice, practice!
3. There Is No Such Thing As Too Much Preparation.
If you have a role or an audition coming up, prepare the hell out of it. Nothing will knock your confidence before a performance more than being under prepared.
4. Look after your body.
Exercise, eat clean and pay attention to what your body needs. This will drastically improve your confidence!
5. Dedicate Time To The Things That Make You Feel Alive!
If you are a creative person, which you clearly are or you wouldn’t be here, you need to be creating. If you suppress that creativity, it will slowly eat away at you and you’ll become stressed, frustrated and it will have a negative effect on your confidence levels. Make enough time to create and express yourself as an actor!
I would like you today to look at the points mentioned above and to come up with a list of things that you can start putting into action TODAY!
You weren’t born to be ordinary… You were born to shine!
Eirian Cohen | Founder of Northern Star Acting and co-producer of ESG Media, LTD.
Good article. Self-confidence is key in this business. It’s not always the actor with the greatest talent that gets the job. Sometimes it’s the actor with self-confidence and perseverance that gets the work. Ofcourse there are many other factors that come into play. There are ways of having self-confidence on demand. Which comes in handy when you need to plug it in just before you enter the audition space. Anchoring positive emotions with a certain movement or touch is powerful stuff. You can then do your movement or touch, and put yourself in the state you anchored to that body movement. Motion effects emotion.