7 Acting Tips To Risk Being More Vulnerable

Don’t be afraid to take risks, in art, the moments that resonate are the ones where you put yourself out there, where you’re vulnerable, where you make mistakes. That’s where real beauty and truth come from.

– Jessica Chastain

Being vulnerable, now that can be hard. Brenee Brown defines vulnerability as:

“uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” It’s that unstable feeling we get when we step out of our comfort zone or do something that forces us to loosen control”.

How do we step out of our comfort zone into the uncertainty of the unknown when acting?

Here are 7 acting tips I share with you as a coach and therapist for actors, to support you to be more vulnerable in your acting.

1. Identify Your False Beliefs

You can become aware of any erroneous beliefs you’ve picked up about vulnerability from your upbringing. Awareness is the first step towards change. If you know how you learned something, you can decide to un-learn it. 

We might have grown up in a family where the implicit message being broadcast by members was “we don’t do vulnerability’ or, “vulnerability is for the weak”. We never had vulnerability modelled to us. 

Our caregivers would shout, withdraw or pursue an addiction to bury their vulnerable feelings. They never (or incredibly rarely) told us they were feeling sad, helpless, shame, envy or other feelings which made them feel emotionally exposed.

Once you’ve identified the false beliefs you can kick their ass. Figuratively speaking of course. You get to decide which beliefs you want to hang onto and which beliefs you want to change. 

Maybe you want to believe that showing vulnerability makes you powerful, or beautiful or strong whatever else it is you think of that is going to serve you better.

The next acting tip to help you risk vulnerability is to…

2. Understand How You Came To Believe Vulnerability Is Unsafe

If we have problems getting vulnerable we usually believe we’ll be unsafe. This is mostly because we’ve been harmed or taken advantage of when in a vulnerable state. 

Perhaps  a six-year old us told our mother we felt scared in the dark and she ridiculed us and told us to grow up. Or we confided in our grandfather that we’d stolen some sweets and and he went ahead and disregarded his vow to confidentiality and dobbed us in. 

Or we expressed feeling self-conscious about our looks to our father and in an argument he took a low blow and criticised our looks, knowing it would hurt us. Or our brother knew we were scared of being alone and threatened to leave us if we didn’t do what he wanted.

Mostly we’ve had this experience within our family. We might also have experienced it at school with a teacher or bullies. 

Once you’re aware of how you learned to associate vulnerability with danger you can remind yourself that you now know how to keep yourself safe now. 

Remind yourself that to stay safe you can

• Choose safe people to open up to. 
• Get to know people and open up more and more as you start to trust them. 
• Keep strong boundaries around people you do not feel are safe to be vulnerable with. 
• Keep strong professional boundaries when acting.

3. Acknowledge your shame and fear of rejection

What do all the above examples have in common? They all lead to feelings of shame. Shame is a spectrum of feelings from self-consciousness and shyness at one end of the spectrum. In the middle of the spectrum is embarrassment. At the far end of the spectrum are shame and humiliation.

Shame is the experience of wanting to connect and being rejected. We feel like we want the ground to swallow us up. We feel shunned and like the world’s most unattractive person.

As social animals, the experience of being shunned hits deep. It feels scary to our nervous system which equates being shunned from the group with danger and threat.

We’ll do anything not to feel this sensation of being bad and alone again. Anything. And so we learn how to cover up our vulnerability. 

If intimacy means “in-to-me-see”, there’s no way we can allow that if we believe that the real us is shameful and unworthy.

How shame shows up in acting

Underlying shame shows up in acting when we’re afraid to make a mistake. Or when we struggle to be fully present with our scene partner in an emotionally intimate scene.

Or we find it difficult to take a risk with our acting. Or we find it difficult to allow them to really see us, to stay connected, to be emotionally intimate. We find ourselves drifting away, zoning out, closing down.

We can also experience shame as clouded thinking. All of a sudden our mind clouds over and we lose track of our thoughts and forget our lines.

Shame can also show up as perfectionism. 

Here’s an acting tip for how we can heal our shame. 

4. Develop Compassion For Your Shame 

In therapy for actors we can talk to our ashamed part.

• What does it look like? Animal, human, something else?
• What does it smell like?
• How old is it?

My client Carmen’s shameful part looked like dog shit and smelled like it too. I invited her to talk to it. She told it how she repulsed she was by it, how critical she felt of it. I then got her to reply as the shameful part. 

It said:

“I’m tense and wooden. I feel frozen. I’m just here but making myself as small as possible to not get any more negative attention”.

Carmen and her ashamed part had a dialogue. She gained awareness on how it had developed as a result of being criticised by her mother.

She started to feel compassion for the ashamed part. As she did that the ashamed part faded into the background. It didn’t get in the way so much in her acting. She was more able to stay present and in relationship with her scene partners.

Another acting tip to heal shame is to…

5. Do or Say  The Thing Anyway.

Shame makes us want to hide away. We want the ground to swallow us up. If we do the opposite then we shine a light on the shame and it recedes.

Think about times when you’ve confessed something that makes you feel bad about yourself to someone. Often once we’ve done this we feel so much better. If they respond to us in an understanding and compassionate way of course.

We can practice saying the vulnerable thing to people we think we can trust.

The more we do it.

The easier it gets.

Then the easier gets to stay vulnerable with our scene partner too.

Another acting tip to heal shame is to….

6. Figure out How You Hide So You Can Un-Hide

In order to be vulnerable when acting we need to figure out how we hide our vulnerability in our everyday lives. Is it by:

• Staying in our heads rather than being present with others
• Controlling the conversation
• Allowing others to control the conversation
• Zoning out when things get too intimate
• Creating a drama to avoid intimacy
• Busying yourself with work or activities
• Moving and speaking quickly

These are just some ways we devise to avoid being (figuratively speaking) naked with someone. 

What do you do ? 

Is it listed above or is there another way you avoid intimacy?

7. Get To Know What Fear Of Vulnerability Feels Like In Your Body

It might feel like you are:

• Tightening your jaws
• Grinding your teeth
• Breathing shallowly
• Hunching your shoulders
• Tensing your stomach or buttocks
• Shielding/hardening your heart

We often learned to develop a body armour to keep others out to protect us from the pain of rejection. Once we know what it feels like we are one step closer to shifting it by trying the below.

As an actor we can experiment with exercises to un-do this. Alexander Lowen wrote a book called Bioenergetics on this topic. In the Alexander Technique there is the constructive rest exercise. In the seminal book “Gestalt Therapy”, the first part of the book gives lots of exercises to connect with body armour.

Exaggerating the tension

Something I invite my clients to do is to notice where they are tensing and tense even more there for a few seconds. Then release.

Notice what that is like and what thoughts and feelings come up. Do this several times. The more you consciously connect with how you are tensing, the more control you have over when you do it and when you don’t.

Talking as the tension

Another experiment is to talk as the tensing muscles. When I asked my client Carmen to do this she spoke as the muscles in her jaw and the back of her neck. They said they were tensing to protect her. To stop people getting to her.

She realised she had learned to do this in childhood to keep out her bullying older brother. The more awareness and compassion she had for her tensing jaws, the more she relaxed.

Breathing into the tension

Lastly, we can try breathing into the area with awareness. For example if we notice we are shielding our hearts we can breathe deeply into the heart area and as we exhale relax. Noticing it opening up as we do so.

So there you go, there are my 7 acting tips for taking risks and being more vulnerable. I hope you find them useful.

If you’d like to find out more about my programme for actors then click here.