We could define a state of wellbeing as feeling more calm, confident and happy. For a performer it must also include feeling creative, motivated and connected, perhaps even inspired. In this chapter, we’ll take our first look at how you can feel better more of the time. It is a key concept – and we will expand upon and reference back to it as we move through each chapter.
Essential to the process of becoming healthier and happier is building your emotional resilience. But what do we mean by resilience? It’s not the old-school definition of ‘pulling yourself together’ or ‘manning-up’, but something that’s bound up in flexible and adaptive thinking, emotional intelligence, and the capacity to accept and even to embrace change.
We have noted already that actors, performers and those working in creative industries need to possess high levels of resilience. Let’s do a quick exercise to get an idea of what this strong sense of resilience might look like, and why it’s so essential for performers.
Exercise: Resilience for Performers 1
• Make a list of five aspects of your professional life as a performer that require resilience – for instance, periods being out of work, bad reviews, last-minute auditions, and so on.
• Next to each of the five items on your list make a note of a specific example of when you had to cope with that challenge, and give yourself a score from 1 to 10 on how resilient you were at that time. Then make a note of what emotions you felt, and for how long the challenge lasted.
• We will revisit these situations a few times as we work through the book, but before we move on to look at what an emotion is and how to harness them to help us towards good emotional health, just look at your own answers for a couple of minutes. Are the resilience levels those that you would have expected? Do they vary widely? Do you know why? More on this later.
Emotions
You may be feeling a concern that to achieve a calmer and happier life it might mean suppressing your emotions.This is not the case. Not only do emotions give our world colour, texture and even purpose, but we fully recognise that they are the quintessential tools of your trade if you work in the creative industries. By the end of the book, we hope that you will see and value your emotions as a richer and deeper resource to be drawn upon and employed in performance, as well as in everyday life, both with a skilful control that boosts creativity and better mental health.
Negative emotions will no longer be controlling your life. When one comes along, you will know how to give it its proper weight and respect, but not get drawn to a place where it takes over and destroys that which is good.
Emotions impact our health, performance, wellbeing, motivation, sense of fulfilment, and ability to make effective decisions. They also determine the strength and quality of every relationship we make.
What is an emotion? Scientists disagree about how many emotions there are and, to some extent, on the description of what an emotion is. Here we are defining an emotion as a conscious or semi-conscious experience characterised by mental activity and a certain degree of pleasure or displeasure.
