How To Deal with Audition Rejection

I’d put my heart and soul into the 12-week showcase preparation. I’d prioritised it. I’d made time to squeeze rehearsals with my scene partner into my working day and spare evenings.

Acting lights up my soul and I wanted to honour its importance in my life. And of course there was the hope, much as I kept it very much in the back of my mind, that something might come of the showcase. It was the yearly opportunity to ‘showcase’ our work by performing a 4-minute scene as part of a 1-hour production with a partner on a live Zoom stream for a paying public.

The school director reminded us each year that agents watched and that students could and did get picked to be represented as a result of their showcase performances. Indeed every term we received a newsletter about current student and alumni who had gotten roles in well-known films and TV series.

Showcase night came and went. I felt disappointed at the end of it. I’d not been able to connect with my emotions and let go of control as I’d done in other performances. I knew, based on my feeling, that it wasn’t my best performance by far.

I clung on to a bit of hope whilst awaiting the marks to see if i’d progressed to the next level. Nope I hadn’t. The group WhatsApp chat buzzed as  class members checked in with their results. A few had been moved up to the next level.

I hated the fact that despite not wanting to compare myself unfavourably, I was. Even though I wanted to stay true to how I evaluated my performance, I found my mood slipping into disappointment and a general sense of lowness and anti-climax over the next few days.

I was annoyed that I’d hoped the showcase would lead to being ‘picked’ by an agent or chosen to be moved up to the next level. I felt ashamed that I felt envious and resentful of some of my peers that had been promoted.

As I write I feel embarrassed acknowledging these reactions publicly and at the same time I know that others in my group and many of you readers have had similar feelings and reactions. That’s why I’m writing about them. I hope to help you with your response to audition rejection through writing about my own. I know my experience is common because it’s part of being human and many of us share the same or similar wounds. 

 I hope to help you with your response to audition rejection through writing about my own.

First I want to normalise strong feelings of disappointment at being rejected. It makes sense that we feel that way if we’ve put our all into an acting project. Especially if acting feels like our vocation or at least something that we hold very dearly. We’re sentient human beings so of course we’re going to have an emotional response. Even more so if we naturally have sensitive and/or intense feelings.

I don’t want to make these feelings a ‘problem’ per se. Only you can decide if they are problematic for yourself. For example, if they cripple you temporarily or lead you to act in  ways that don’t serve you, or if you recognise they’re connected to childhood woundings. 

Here are the 3 ways I was able to ‘get over’ my feelings of audition rejection and quickly feel balanced, grounded and optimistic again:

1) Do a group-evaluation of your performance

Firstly, I reminded myself of what one of my tutors said. An experienced actress and vocal coach, she  told us not to give our power away to others. As soon as a production is public, the audience, friends, family and people we don’t know feel free to critique and criticise. She encouraged us to first evaluate our individual and group  performance within the group.

We did this by sharing a feedback session where we said what we liked about each others’ work. My heart lifted when I received feedback from a peer that confirmed my own experience of the best parts of my acting process over the past 12 weeks. 

2) Do a personal evaluation of your work

Secondly, I did my own personal evaluation of my work. This meant taking into consideration the feedback and marks I received since the last showcase. It also meant taking into consideration the feedback I’d received over the year from my teachers.

I then evaluated to what extent I’d shifted. I took into consideration the amount of energy I’d put into rehearsing, my experience of my performances over the entire 12-week process, as well as the night itself. This included how much of my energy and presence I gave to my scene partners and to the group. I evaluated myself on professionalism, attendance, presence, commitment as well as the five factors that I was marked on by the assessors which are: embodiment of character, ownership of space, presence, connection and vocal clarity. 

Having done this I recognised that I’d shifted a considerable amount over the year. I’m not someone who easily claps themselves on the back. In fact celebrating or complimenting myself is rare. At the same time I know how important it is to give and receive praise along the journey of life, not just with acting.

My experience as a therapist tells me I’m not alone in this. Many people I come across have a much more developed self-critical part and/or part that pushes them to achieve and they don’t like to stop and smell the roses. The compassionate part is often much weaker.

I guess you might be similar to me?

If so, I invite you to evaluate your performance process fairly and celebrate the progress, however small you feel it is, that you have made. What that celebration looks like is up to you. A glass of wine, a nice meal, a day out with friends?

And now onto the last tip for dealing with audition rejection…

3) Turn inwards towards the ‘part’ of you that gets triggered by the rejection process

I use part language to differentiate that we all have different parts within us. This does not make us ‘crazy’. We develop different parts to manage various aspects of our lives and to keep us safe.

For example, my ‘mother’ part is different to my ‘friend’ part who is different from my ‘therapist’ part.  Parts exist to help us manage our lives and stay safe. My angry part stops me being a ‘push-over’. No part is ‘better’ or ‘worse’, nor does it matter how many different parts we have. The  only problem is when parts work at cross-purposes to each other. For example, if my stroppy teenage part pop ups when I’m negotiating an important financial transaction and throws a hissy fit that jeopardises the deal. 

I have a rational part that recognises that my acting doesn’t define me as a person and others’ marks do not define my value. I also have a resilient part that carries on and will bounce back from this ‘rejection’.  However I have a part that feels dejected and unworthy by audition and showcase rejection. This is the part that needs my attention.

I now invite you to consider this part within you ….

How do we work with a part that is overly sensitive to rejection ?

We do this in four steps which are:

• 1) Understand how it evolved and how it is trying to ‘help’ us
• 2) Have compassion for it and spend time with it
• 3) Connect with the underlying part it conceals which holds unbearable pain
• 4) Befriend that underlying part too.

So let’s take step 1 and get to know it. You can imagine it sitting beside or opposite you. What does it look like? Is it human, animal, cartoon or something else?

Flesh it out, give it whatever shape it takes. What colour is it, what ethnicity/age/gender? I imagine mine to be a 4-year old boy who is desperate to be the centre of attention. He wants to be the winner, the best and clamours for constant praise. 

As a therapist, I know that he’s a part that yearns to be truly seen and known by others. He’s a part that developed in childhood who got lots of praise for being ‘special’. My parent needed to see me as ‘special’ so that their ‘unseen’ parts could feel ‘special’ by proxy.

My 4-year old boy part learned that doing things that made him ‘special’  equalled worth and also got  attention. He’s trying to help me get attention and love which are vital for any young child to thrive and indeed survive! From a nervous system point of view, we are wired to connect to our primary caregiver to stay safe. If we don’t feel connected our nervous system literally feels like we are about to die. So this part that I feel embarrassed about is actually trying to help me survive by seeking attention. 

Reframing like this helps me to start feeling compassion instead of embarrassment which is step 2 of the process. I connect with empathy. It occurs to me that the intergenerational family system within which myself and my parent grew up, was starved of love and  attention. So no wonder this part developed.

How could my parent possibly give me what I needed when they’d never got it themselves? As I acknowledge this I let out a big sigh and connect with the grief which is step 3 of the process.

Grief is one of the unbearable feelings that belongs to the underlying exiled part. It also holds loneliness, helplessness, resentfulness and hopelessness for not being accepted as I was. For needing to be a certain way for someone else. It makes sense that my 4-year old boy part wants to cover up these painful feelings by striving for ‘specialness’.

As a professional, I’m aware that to get over my disproportionate reaction to audition rejection I need to befriend the exiled part that holds the painful childhood feelings. This is part 4 of the process.

I imagine that part as a very young girl. She is sitting beside me on a wooden swing. She feels hollow, hurt, resentful and sad about not getting the true acceptance she needed. I imagine my adult self sitting on a swing alongside her. I can’t go back in time and change her childhood. That time has been and gone but she and the 4-year old boy are still living in the past.

As I swing gently next to her I want to convey that I can feel her pain. I can’t change the past but I can share her pain with her in the present. I imagine how she might feel with me next to her. I sense she feels less alone and less helpless. Having an empathic adult swinging along beside her gives her permission to cry and feel her grief. 

I put my arm around her and she leans into me, feeling less alone and  more connected. It’s new for her to be with someone who has the emotional capacity to allow her to have her own experience. She relaxes as she feel accepted as her own person.

As we connect, she has the sensation of becoming more grounded and more solid inside. The 4-year old boy part has gone off to play somewhere. He’s no longer thinking about how he ranks amongst his peers and how far he is on his acting journey.  Those negative thoughts feel irrelevant now and no longer hold any emotional charge. 

I the adult who is not a ‘part’ know that by connecting with my young girl part,  I’m exactly where I’m meant to be on my acting journey. Connecting with her is what’s going to help my acting journey evolve. You doing the heroic work of connecting with your parts is what’s going to help your acting journey evolve.

By connecting with her I contact the feelings of  grief, loneliness and  resentment that were out of my awareness.  I need to access these in order to process them. Having access to them also lets me have more depth and range when acting. By plucking up the courage to take this detour and spend time with your pain, you too give yourself the opportunity to not only heal but to make your acting more ‘real’ and ‘true’.

It’s easier said than done. It’s more usual to avoid doing this work and suppress our pain. We might do this through compulsive drinking, eating, binge watching Netflix or whatever our particular ‘poison’ is. 

The problem is we’ll be confronted with the painful experience again and again. As Jung contended, “what we resist persists and grows in size”. Far better then to embrace the pain so that it starts to gradually dissolve. There is gold to be mined from the shadow. In fact according to Jung, “the shadow is 90% pure gold’.

So next time you have a disproportionate reaction to an audition rejection or any other kind of acting rejection, see if you can spend a few minutes getting to know that part. In this way you are processing the pain. Ideally you start to check-in with this part on a daily basis and let it know that you’re there for it. This helps it to relax and stop getting so triggered. Let me know how you go with this. And if you need any additional guidance get in touch.