Post written by Dharini Woollcombe.
How to Handle Humiliation:
- Allow yourself one day to sulk, lick your wounds, hide and eat your favorite treat.
- Go exercise and begin to break down the facts of the event – what happened, what did you do or not do to make this happen.
- Build yourself up and get perspective by focusing on technique, taking a class, talking to a mentor or teacher and remember that because of this time, you will do better next time.
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Oh man. Do you know that feeling? The one where you actually wish you could drop into the floor, where you feel your body physically trying to leave the room as you attempt to keep your cool, and you hold on to some semblance of a calm expression as you feel steam coming out of your every pore. It’s an awful, sick, sick feeling. Humiliation. Perhaps the worst feeling there is.
I remember feeling the hot and sticky, ickyness of humiliation one particular day. I had just blown an audition. I tried to mumble thank yous as I walked out of the room, but my voice was thick and husky. I was humiliated and there was no one and nothing to blame, but myself.
I didn’t know what had happened. I completely lost my lines, I felt disoriented, confused, and I couldn’t hear the director, just the echo of my own voice in my head. For some reason I couldn’t find myself, I couldn’t find my feet and get grounded. I had experienced stage fright.
Stage fright? Me? After all this time, in the middle of nowhere? I called up my very first acting teacher and proceeded to bawl and blubber in to the phone. With the voice of a saint and the wisdom of years she suggested I spend some time in voice class and get back to basics. Now this was something I had not done in a while….
It was the best advice I could have gotten. By getting back to basics, I realized how much I’d grown. I also realized that I had been taking short cuts in a way that did not support my acting work when I was under duress. Most importantly, it reminded me about process. I had begun to put so much pressure on myself to get the job that it all became about the end product, and worse, it was about trying to give the auditioners what they wanted.
This is an impossible and destructive feat.
If you don’t know what they want, and you’re trying to give them what they want….then what on earth are you doing? You’re not focused, you’re not in the moment, you’re not making strong, simple choices. You are failing. You are failing yourself and you are failing them, so get the hell off that stage and out of that audition room until you sort yourself out.
Clearly it’s time to get back to basics and revisit the foundations of your acting training.
And THAT, my friends, is what humiliation can do for you.