The Successful Talent: Tips for the Actor & Model

KNOW YOUR TALENTS & LIMITS

Have you ever asked yourself:

How would I know if I’m deluded? What if I’m swimming in a giant pool of denial?

Simple: YOU ASK, says Peter Spevak, a psychologist at the Center for Applied Motivation, outside Washington, DC, and co-author of Empowering Underachievers: New Strategies to Guide Kids (8 - 18) to Personal Excellence. “We all have several data points—from friends, family, and coworkers—with which to gauge our competence, but we may have to ask what they really think.” Others often can more accurately assess traits or skills in which our egos are invested, such as our appearance or intelligence or ability to hold a high C. They can give real feedback about our aptitude.

The hard part is learning to listen once the trusted source starts to answer the question.  Someone may not be saying the things that we hope to hear, but hearing the feedback genuinely is key to knowing your talents and your limits.

Facing an unfavorable assessment can be painful, but it also may break you out of [a debilitating] trap. From the time she was eight, Melissa Levis knew what she’d do with her life: Be a playwriting superstar of musical theater. Her aunt was the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, and, “I saw that living that life was not just a pipe dream,” says Levis.

After earning a master’s degree in musical theater writing from New York University, Levis had her first show, The Joys of Sex, performed off-Broadway, when she was 33.  She expected Joys to run forever.  Instead, the play closed after two months.

For many people, an off-Broadway production would be the accomplishment of a lifetime. But Levis had such high hopes for herself that she felt heartbroken and a little ashamed. She spent the summer at her parents’ home in Vermont, sulking. After a few weeks, she began volunteering as a music teacher at a day-care center near their house. Within a month she’d become wildly popular and even gotten her own kids’ show on local cable access. “By accident, I discovered how much fun I had singing with kids,” she says [looking back on her trials and triumphs].

Levis decided to combine her disappointment about the play’s middling success with her newfound love of performing for kids. She formed a company, Lemonade Productions, and now writes and performs her own kids’ music, plays in Central Park, and is in negotiations for a national TV show.   “I’ve found the application for both of my dreams, music and performing” she says.  “It’s worked out better than I could have anticipated.” Levis was honest with herself and clear-eyed enough to both see her limitations and reapply her strengths.

In Melissa’s case, hind sight may be 20/20 as she tells of her Broadway woes, but her current happiness could not have been achieved without moving past her frustrations and into something new.  Like Melissa, many talented individuals find themselves sulking in defeat.  Unlike Melissa, a large percentage of those sulkers never find a new creative outlet that could lead on to a bright and fulfilling future.  In these cases, we become our own worst enemies.  What is holding you back from reaching your dreams?

THE REAL YOU VS. THE IDEAL YOU (PART 1)

This same article digs deeper by contrasting “the real you” with “the ideal you”. 

The contender syndrome is subtly different from envy. It’s more a sense of not living up to the best you, rather than not living up to the best Albert Einstein. A multi-billionaire reality TV producer once told me that he felt like he hadn’t arrived because he’d never made a movie. He had gobs of money, but he hadn’t “proven” himself because he was not a feature film producer.

We all know someone who we think is super-successful.  The truth, however, is that the same person we judge as super-successful feels like they have short-changed themselves due to that same syndrome.   And to take that thought even farther, someone also is looking at us (as we are comparing ourselves to that same super-successful person) and wishing that they were as successful as we seem to be.  Our circle of envy and/or competition keeps us in one frame of living:  unfulfilled and unmotivated.

Some psychologists say the feeling of not reaching your potential comes from a discrepancy between the “actual self” (who you are), the “ideal self” (who you’d like to be), and the “ought self” (who you think others want you to be).

The actual self is the person we see in the mirror each morning.  The ideal self is who we have become by the time we walk out the door for the day.  The ought self is who you manipulate gently throughout your day depending on whose company you are in.

The art of encouragement is modeled by our parents, teachers, mentors, and high profile personalities.  We are told from childhood to “try harder” and that “we can do it.”  But that’s not enough to be successful.

. . . as a culture, Markus says, we don’t pair that praise of innate talent with practical strategies for developing it. . . some of us never learned how to build a bridge from where we are now to where we’d like to be.

It’s not enough to be encouraged if there is no plan of action to implement.  A talent knows that they can perform the task and may hear admiration from friends, but add in a solid game plan on how to get from point A to point B and we are looking at the next superstar!

Real, focused work, as mundane as that sounds, is often what separates the contenders from the victors. “Dreams are good, but unscaffolded, I think they’re dangerous,” says Markus.

You know your dream, but what is your plan for achieving it?