How to Bounce Back After Career Disaster

Last month I gave a workshop at the Screen Actor's Guild Conservatory here in San Francisco and afterwards spoke with several of the professional actors there. It was interesting to note that they all had this in common:

They have all had a devastating blow to their career at one point or another that they're still recovering from.

This might have been in the form of rejection, a horrible audition, or even worse, a traumatic event like being raked over by the press. And yet, they have persisted. Because they understand that playing the game means getting injured sometimes.

This reminds me once again that: Staying in the game matters more than anything.

When a professional athlete endures an injury - which they often do during their careers - it takes a tremendous amount of rehabilitation, training, and focus to be able to get back to their top condition and go back out there to the game as though nothing bad has happened. If they go back into the game flinching or holding back for fear of re-injury then they will never play their best game and they know that. This is an incredibly hard thing to do and we hold our athletes up as heroes when they do that. But think about it - artists have to do the same thing. When something goes horribly wrong, onstage or off, we have to find a way to recover and get back to it. Just like the athlete, we have to go to heroic heights to rehabilitate. Even if what we are healing from is invisible, it is no less real than the athlete's injury. This is one of the topics we'll be covering in my upcoming webinar. Because it isn't always easy getting your mojo back after career disaster and so, I'm going to be sharing some helpful advice for finding your way back to total alignment so you can once again kill it onstage, onscreen and in your auditions.