Awesome Actor Dude writes: “Hi Melody! I NEED YOUR HELP. I’ve been a struggling actor for about TEN YEARS now. I don’t understand how I’ve manifested the opposite of my dreams!!! Starting out, I was a bright, shiny new penny, full of confidence and a GENUINE belief that success as a Movie Star was my life’s DESTINY. My feelings of conviction were that strong! But it didn’t happen.

Now, after years of rejection leading to nowhere (I’ve never even booked a ONE-LINER on a frickin’ TV show OR commercial), I’ve become so beaten, jaded and bitter. It’s gonna take a lot of work to shift my vibration because even when I do so consciously (I’ve tried meditation, affirmations, visualization), the next rejection brings me back down again. And it’s 99.9% rejection, even though I visualize myself getting the part after each audition. WTF is going on???!!! It’s impossible to maintain positive vibration in the present when I keep getting hit with disappointment!

I had an audition for a play this past week. For about two weeks up until the play, I meditated and visualized getting the part. I vibrated during meditation that I already got it, and it felt good.

I DIDN’T EVEN GET A CALLBACK. You’d think that with all that work, it’d at the very least get me to the second round, no?

And it’s so hard to keep a positive vibration (“I’m already a successful actor”) when in reality people keep asking me about my career and if I got this job, or that job, and I have to tell them NO and then remind myself that I’m NOT WHERE I WANT TO BE. That completely cancels out any self-work that I tried to do.

If I couldn’t manifest & attract success ten years ago (again, I got ONE small gig and then that was it!), when I honestly vibrated at a higher frequency because the “reality” of Hollywood hadn’t hit me yet, how the hell do I get myself out of this bitter hole now?? And WHY didn’t anything manifest before? I seriously believed to my bones that I was meant to be a film star. But I got 0 roles in film, couldn’t even land anything in TV, not even a national commercial!! Just some student films and two local/small commercials. In 10 years. Thanks Universe. Thanks for the bones. Not even steak bones. Or chicken bones. More like fish bones. I’ve never tasted meat.

Please help…I’m so frustrated!!!
Disillusioned & Dejected”

Dear Disillusioned & Dejected, or as I like to call you, Awesome Actor Dude,

Actors and artists have it tough – there’s no shortage of people who will tell you it’s impossible to become successful, that you’ll have to sell your soul at the very least and not even then, that you have a better chance of getting abducted by aliens than becoming famous. It’s hard to imagine anyone being alive today who hasn’t picked up some version of that belief, knowingly or otherwise. We assume that it’s hard to become a successful actor (which, by the way, isn’t necessarily the same thing as being famous, especially today). There’s almost no way that you didn’t have a bit of that expectation when you started out, even if you weren’t aware of it. Then, being in an environment filled with other actors and industry types, all happy to keep reinforcing that belief by telling you about how much they’ve struggled, wouldn’t have helped. The very first audition you went to that didn’t result in a job offer would’ve made it even worse. The fears rose up and over the years, took over more and more, leaving you frustrated and jobless.

But don’t despair! None of this is irreversible. We’re just going to have to dissect and call bullshit on a few assumptions, and then get you focused on what you really want. Ready? Here we go:

It’s not hard to become famous

Face it, today, just about anyone shameless enough to publicly engage in behavior that the rest of us wouldn’t even do in private can make it on TV. You can become famous for being an idiot, an asshole, being pretty, being ugly, for being really smart or really dumb, for being really fat or really thin (or fat and then thin), for being talented or embarrassingly untalented. The field is wide open. Got a camcorder and an idea, no matter how ridiculous? You could be a star! It’s not hard to garner some attention these days. Now, I know that this isn’t necessarily the kind of attention you are seeking, you want to be respected for your craft, but I’m attacking the entire premise that it’s hard to be famous. It’s not. Not anymore.

Musicians, artists, comedians, actors and writers have more ability to get their work out there today than at any other time. Thanks to the internet, there are more avenues to get noticed than ever before. These are amazing times to be a creative being!

It’s not about talent or luck

The second myth I’d like to dispel is that becoming a well-known actor is based on massive talent and luck, or being in the right place at the right time and impressing the hell out of someone. Now, I’m not going to spend any time on luck, because if you’ve read anything on this blog at all, you’ll know that I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a random force doling out favors willy nilly.

But I will say a few words about talent. If talent were a deciding factor in success, then wouldn’t all the famous actors be super talented? Yes. Yes they would. And are they? Well, I get that this is a subjective question, but I’m going to go ahead and bite the bullet on this one and express that I do not believe all the actors in movies and on TV today to be a fair representation of the best of the best (how’s that for diplomacy, eh?). The same can be said for writers. While there are excellent productions with top notch talent behind them, there are also many, many examples of, well, the opposite of that. All you have to do is flip through a few channels on the old boob tube and it becomes glaringly apparent that talent doesn’t have much to do with it. There are actors with no talent getting jobs and there are brilliantly skilled actors working as waiters, unable to even get auditions. Clearly, talent, while being a wonderful thing, isn’t that much of a determining factor and certainly not the only one in how successful on can become in the thespian arts.

It’s about vibration

But don’t let that get you down. This is good news! And yes, I’ll explain just how that is. You can’t control talent. You can control your skill level, you can learn and practice and study and work at becoming better. But you can’t control natural talent. You also can’t control luck (mostly because it doesn’t exist, but even if it did, you wouldn’t be able to control it, short of catching a leprechaun or finding an old bottle with a genie in it. Good luck with that. See what I did there? Ha.)

What you can control, though, is your vibration, which is all that matters. Some people just seem to get all the auditions. They get parts they’re not even right for. They just always seem to be in the right place at the right time. Hell, they can be in the wrong place, like bartending at some dive bar, and some big shot producer’s car will  just happen to break down right in front of said bar, causing him to wander on in and discover the unknown thespian on the spot. Cherlize Theron was discovered while throwing a tantrum in line at the bank.

How do you know where your vibration is at? Look at your manifestations. Look at how you feel. Your vibration, my dear awesome actor dude is, well, disillusioned and dejected, which isn’t anywhere near where you want it to be. Let’s change that, shall we?

Do you know why you’re here?

The first thing you want to do is to get back to your roots. Why do you even want to be an actor? You may not have pondered this for a while, but it’s time to bring it out and dust it off. If your main reason is to be famous, to make a lot of money or to bang a lot of chics (or dudes, you know, whatever), there are easier ways to go about doing that. But, if you’ve been at this for ten years, chances are your reasons run a lot deeper than that. I’m going to take a guess here and say that you’ve always had a burning desire to act, that you LOVE it with a passion you can’t easily put into words, that you feel you have something to share with the world and are just waiting for the right stage to come along so you can take your shot. Am I somewhere in the vicinity?

Acting is a spiritual endeavor. When you stand on a stage and entertain others, they are manifesting through you. You are making yourself available to flow energy through your body to them. When you make them laugh, you have successfully ripped them out of their daily lives and given them a moment of joy. You can evoke all kinds of emotions. You can shift massive amounts of energy. An actor (or musician) has a powerful job – you put yourself in a position to make people feel better, not one at a time, but by the hundreds, thousands or even millions. Running that much energy through your system is no small thing (and is one of the reasons so many artists turn to drugs. If you’re not vibrationally ready for that much power, it will beat the crap out of you). You have the power to uplift, to pull those in powerlessness into anger, those in anger into bitter laughter, and those in boredom to joy. You are a lightworker, a healer, a transmitter of energy. This is what you came here to do. No wonder it makes you so miserable not to be doing it.

Get back to the basics

So, when you focus on acting, it’s helpful (especially when your vibrational panties are in a twist), to go back to the basics, the very core of what you want and focus on the feeling of that. Oh yeah, the feeling is the most important thing. You may have been visualizing getting the part, but I’ll bet money on the fact that you were inadvertently vibrating the exact opposite, something your emotions would’ve told you if you’re sensitive enough to pick up on it. Taking it back to the basics will untangle all that panty twisting and bring you back into alignment with what you’re here to do (and we’re all waiting for you to do it, you know).

Focus on how it feels to act. Disregard how that acting will come about, what parts you have to get, or what producer you have to sleep with (ha!). That’s not your job right now. Focus on how you feel when you’re standing on stage, letting that energy flow through you to the audience. Focus on how it feels when you are aware of that connection, when everything just clicks and they all laugh at just the right times, they get what you’re doing up there, they’re with you every step of the way and you can feel them coming with you. Focus on how their attention on you feels, on how the energy flow fills you up (providing you’re not resistant to it), fueling your performance, driving you to heights you didn’t even know you had in you. Focus on how it feels when you KNOW you’ve affected them emotionally, when you’ve left them in a better place than when they came in the door. Focus on how it feels to know that seeing your performance has forever changed someone in even some small way.

Focus on how the connections feel, the connection between you and the audience, the connection between you and the other actors on the stage, the backstage crew doing their parts, all of you working together to create this magnificent opportunity (and by all of you, I mean the audience, too) to experience something new, something tangible, something amazing, something uplifting. Why do you people even go to movies or the theater? They actively seek out the experiences you help to provide! They want to escape from their every day lives, which they assume have to be hard (mistakenly. Ahem), and feel better for a couple of hours. Focus on the benefit you give them, on the healing that takes place, on the change in perspective you can provide, on the manifestations that flow through you to them. How they experience your performance is their manifestation. How you experience the interaction is yours. You have a desire to participate in such interactions. THIS is what you really want. Do you feel the power in this visualization? Do you feel the lack of resistance in it?

Take the details out of the equation

Just for now, take the details out of the equation. Focus on the feeling I described above, on the joy you, personally, get from acting, NOT on what needs to happen to bring you that joy. Look for that joy. When you see an actor really going for it, rejoice in it. See the flow of energy passing through him and to the audience. Remember how it feels when you do that. And it doesn’t matter if you’re on stage or in front of a camera. Energy transmission is energy transmission. When you focus on the core of what you want, and only on the core, something magical happens. Energy opens up and flows. What was stuck becomes unstuck. Manifestations start to come in, in the most miraculous of ways. Get into the details, and things tend to slow way down (unless you have no resistance. But then you wouldn’t be writing to me). When you try to control HOW your dreams will come about, you tend to get in the way. When you focus on what needs to happen in order for you to feel better, you block the energy of what you want. But, if you simply focus on the core feeling and allow the Law of attraction to take care of the details (it’s better at it than you, anyway. Way better), things start to line up. That’s when you seem to be in the right place at the right time. That’s when you get called back and you get parts that weren’t even advertised yet. That’s when parts seem to be written just for you.

When you don’t get the part

That’s all fine and good, you might say, but how can you keep this wonderful feeling when you go to an audition and then you don’t get the part? How can you help but not feel rejected and jealous of the actor who was chosen? Understand that the Universe has more parts for you than you could ever have time to play. There is no shortage. So, if you didn’t get a part, it was perfect for you but you weren’t a match to it (in which case you’d have been feeling mostly negative emotions lately), or you were a match to what you want but the part wasn’t right for you (in which case you would’ve been feeling mostly good lately).

If you’re predominantly focused in a way that feels really good (spend lots of time connecting with the energy of your core desire), and you don’t get a part, there was something about that part that wouldn’t have been good for you. Maybe the director was a total asshole and wouldn’t have allowed you to do a good job. Or the co-star was awful. You won’t know and you may never know what the real deal was, but assume that there was a valid reason why this part wasn’t good for you.

You can, however, look for what was right with it. Why did it appeal to you? What was it about the part you liked? You don’t have all the information, but you can appreciate the information that you do have, which resonates with you.

Bottom line

You can’t get parts that feel great while putting out a vibration that doesn’t feel great. Trying to feel good about the industry or your chances at fame, however, might be just a touch too far to jump right now. If you focus on how it feels to act, why you want to be an actor, and the spiritual experience of connecting with others through your chosen medium, you’ll open up the energy flow. You’re fall in love with acting again. And from that point of attraction – being totally, unequivocally and madly in love with acting, you can’t help but attract opportunities to do so. And then, you know, maybe invite me to the Oscars. I’ll get my dress ready now. 🙂