On being self conscious

A couple of years ago, I had to give a 3 minute speech at a leadership workshop on "something I was passionate about/ had taught me a lesson / gave me insight". Here is what I said..

Imagine this -a nine year old girl in pink flannelette pyjamas. She wraps her bath towel around her head and fashions it into beautiful hair. She sashays down the hallway. "Hey I’m Ginger", she says "from Gilligan’s Island".
 

That was me at the age of nine. We hadn’t had TV very long but I had decided that I wanted to be an actress, a star of TV, stage and screen. 

 

At the end of my schooling, I told my career counsellor, I either wanted to be an actress or a social worker. Well, you can guess where she pointed me. My career highlight of playing Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night somehow hadn’t convinced her of my undeniable acting talent. 

Throughout Uni, I chose all the drama electives and produced and played in the Uni Revues but still those voices in my head kept saying – "it’s not a proper job, you aren’t really good enough, you’ll be waiting tables more than acting so…"
 

I said good bye to my favourite character parts like Petunia Dell Arte in the Uni Revue and my clown persona called Certain. I wrapped my secret ambition in tissue paper and packed it away in my closet of Secret Dreams.
 

I then embarked on my cerebral journey though Social Work, Management and Business.
 

Many years later during the Hoffman Process, when the participants were invited to give me feedback, one man said “You should do acting. You are so interesting to watch. You have to do this now”.
 

My jaw dropped. I hadn’t mentioned acting once. How had he seen into my Closet of Secret Dreams. Buoyed by this information, my heart lifted and a little voice in my head said "It is time to take out my secret ambition and dust it off thirty years after it had been carefully put away".
 

I searched the Internet and found a class – perfect location, perfect time and unbelievably called “The Truth Masterclass” How "Hoffy" I thought. I may have forgotten my acting skills but I had sure been working on my truth.
 

We started working with techniques developed by Sanford Meisner. He says that Acting is behaving truthfully within imagined circumstance”. "This will be a cinch", I thought as I took to the stage for the first time. My Dark Side reared its ugly head and suddenly self consciousness, competitiveness and fear of failure gripped and paralysed me. My heart pounded in my chest, my mouth became dry and sticky. I froze and I failed. I went home and sobbed.
 

Meisner says that self consciousness is the single most destructive force against actors. He says the way to overcome this is to focus on the other actor. When you stop focusing on yourself, you get in touch with your inner truth.
 

The next week I picked myself up and went back again. Realising that this is just another step in my ongoing process of self awareness.- peeling off another layer of patterns to reveal the diamond within….

Now as I take my first tentative steps into the blogging world, I notice I am again self conscious, afraid of failure and letting my fear get in my way. Taking Meisner's view and turning it on its head, maybe in blogging overcoming self consciousness is about tuning into yourself, finding your inner truth and concentrating on that place and forgetting about other bloggers and the audience's reaction, or is it?

Protea petal fuzz September 2012