I was reading Truth in Action by Mark Westbrook, the founder of Acting Coach Scotland when I stumbled across this one page full of lessons. The section on this page is titled “Spontaneity”.

What is spontaneity? Well, according to Cambridge dictionary it is “the quality of being natural rather than planned in advance:” Interestingly enough, this single word describes pretty much what acting is!!

Westbrook encourages us to think of acting as a game of table tennis rather than chess. The reason being? With chess, we plan our moves in advance. But table tennis, it’s more of a reaction-action game and therefore, cannot be planned. This unplanned nature is exactly what ‘being in the moment’ is all about.

“Actors must learn to come alive in these moments, by allowing their instincts and their intuition to triumph over thought and self-criticism” said Westbrook. Self-criticism plays such an important part in our society. In a not so good way, that is.

Why do we criticise ourselves? Westbrook says that the fear of doing something wrong and look stupid has been instilled in us since childhood. We do it because our community teaches us to. Unfortunately, that is one of the actor’s biggest demons.

How to defeat the demon? Stop using your brain for a minute. Westbrook suggests blurting, stop thinking and stop analysing. Now, that comes with a head up “It won’t be nice, it will feel awkward, painful and wrong most of the time” he said.

 Acting is all about getting comfortable being uncomfortable. You need to learn it earlier on to strive in the art. But what soothing is, nobody is perfect, we all will make mistakes… A LOT of mistakes “so often that it will no longer be a problem, they will get to like it.” as Westbrook puts it.

And to close it off, Westbrook leave us with a quote by Joseph Campbell “Where you stumble, there you shall find your treasure”

The only way is to stumble, be uncomfortable, make mistakes and keep going. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.

            What are you currently stumbling with?