Mentorship

Most artists are waiting

It doesn’t look like waiting. It looks like getting ready. Another class, another coach, another round of materials, another year of preparing for the thing that starts when some force finally says go.

The craft improves but the inner life stays exactly where it was, and after long enough, you’re a good artist who hasn’t made anything in a year, or maybe you’ve made but without what you’re deeply seeking to connect to.

The ones who last aren’t the most talented people I’ve worked with. They’re the ones who produce. They write on Tuesday because they made it happen, and they’ll make the thing badly rather than not make it, and what they think of their own work is the value they feel in getting done.

Nobody is born like that. It gets built, mostly out of things nobody teaches you.

And I know where you’re reading this

You’re on a coach’s website, thinking about working with a coach, and I just told you that’s what waiting looks like. Let me say the rest of it.

I’m not against classes. I teach. The question isn’t whether you’re training, it’s what the training is standing in for. If you’re making something and the work is feeding it, good, keep going. If the training is the thing you do instead of the work, you can run that for ten years and nobody in your life will ever call it. They’ll tell you you’re dedicated.

And yes, you could hide in this too. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you can’t. What I’ll tell you is that I’ll see it, and fairly quickly I’ll make it hard for you not to see it either.

It won’t stay in one part of the house

Here is what I didn’t expect. The people who got the most from this didn’t only get better at the work.

The ones whose lives truly accelerated didn’t change one thing. They changed several at once. A business went into development the same season a show got made and the materials were built to take it out. A relationship changed shape. A lease ended and they moved to the neighborhood they’d been driving past for years. Not one after another. All at once.

Nobody set out to change everything. They stopped holding it back.

Here is the belief I want to take apart. I’m an actor, and I have to prove it.

Every egg in one basket, and the basket gets checked after every audition. It looks like commitment. It’s a chokehold. Energy with only one place to go stops moving, and becoming needs movement.

The energy that starts change doesn’t stay where you point it. It has to travel through all of you… the writing, the business, the relationship, the home, the body. Hold it in one part of the house and it stalls. Open the house and it feeds itself. The more of you that’s open to it, the more it builds on its own momentum.

“I don’t know if I can” was never only about acting. It lives at the kitchen table, in the lease you keep renewing, in the idea you keep in a drawer. The nerve that makes the ugly choice on camera makes the honest one at home. The discipline that gets you writing on Tuesday gets you making the call you’ve been avoiding.

So we don’t fence it in. The art is the front door. Everything behind it is open.

Where there was scarcity, I’ve watched abundance show up. Not luck. They stopped rationing themselves.

Why this moves the craft when a class doesn’t

When you’re genuinely deepening as a person you get better without practicing, because more of you is available and more of you shows up in the work. When you’ve stopped growing you can take every class in the city and stay where you are.

That’s the part I care most about and it’s the part most skip. Craft sits downstream of the person carrying it. Get the person moving and technique stops being something you apply and turns into something you have.

There’s no project attached to this

On purpose.

If a project were the point you’d finish it and go straight back to waiting. You don’t walk in with a project. You walk in with something that hasn’t been made yet, and the year is engineered toward bringing it out of you and into the world. A film. A business. An installation. A career pivot and the move that comes with it. Sometimes you know what it is on day one. More often it shows up in the work, wearing a disguise.

That is what maturity means here. The thing that lived inside you now exists outside you, and you are somebody who doesn’t wait. That person keeps making things long after we’re done, without me or a class or anybody’s blessing.

If you arrive with one specific thing already in hand and want it developed and taken out to the people who can make it, that’s the Private Development Partnership. Different work. We can talk.

Where we begin. The reckoning.

The reckoning is how we make sure next year isn’t a rerun of this one. An honest account of where you are, then we restructure the way forward.

You’re doing this.
That was never the question.

Then we work the transition

There is an infinite number of ways to define life. But one, I feel, captures the expanse of it. An experience of perpetual becoming.

Over twenty years I’ve recognized that my work is less about being any version of yourself at any specific time. It is about the process of transitioning. It’s not the being in a changed place that is difficult. It’s the in-between. Not quite out of one version and not yet in the next. The version of you living from your art is different than the one in a day job.

1. IThe Invitation, or the SurpriseI am still working out what this even is.
2. IIThe InitiationI know what I have to do and I have not done it.
3. IIIThe ExplorationI am in it and I have no idea what I am doing.
4. IVThe CultivationSomething is forming, slowly, and it’s different.
5. VThe AcceptanceI keep grieving a life I said I wanted to leave.
6. VIThe ImplementationI’m the new version on paper and I have not behaved like them yet.

You don’t arrive at stage one. Nobody does. You arrive mid-air, telling yourself a story about why you’re behind. The reckoning finds where you honestly stand, feet in reality, hard truth. Then the work is tailored to whichever stage you are trying to invite, navigate or implement.

So, what do we work on

What you believe you’re allowed to do.

Does the true thing in your heart get made? What you quietly expect to happen if you try something and it isn’t good. I’ve watched this decide more about what an artist produces than talent ever has.

How you avoid.

Not discipline. I’m not interested in beating you up about discipline. I want the actual mechanics of what happens to a day that was supposed to have connected work in it, which are specific to you and usually pretty clever, because avoiding is protecting something.

How you get in, and what you do on the days it won’t come.

The patterns, the rituals, the practices, the small stupid things that work. This has to become ordinary. Nobody does an enormous thing daily, and daily is the only thing that adds up.

The version of you being left behind.

Summoned, given a chair and a voice. You are not done with them and they are not done with you. The fear, named in one word and handed a clear task. The grief, given its hour.

You.

Because you’re the instrument, and the instrument keeps changing.

Avoiding is protecting something.

Who this is for

Actors and artists in the in-between. A new gig, a new position, a new rep or no rep. A rebrand. A day job you swore was temporary. A relationship beginning or ending, a birth, a death, a move, a creative partnership forming or one you’ve outgrown. The business idea sitting in a drawer. The launch date you keep moving. We exist in a continual push and pull on the balance beam of transitioning.

And if you make things and put your face on them, you’re an artist. The camera includes your phone.

This is for the version of you who sees the next version but not how to cross the gap.

What this is not

Not therapy, and I’m not a therapist. If you are in crisis, or in the first raw weeks of a loss, you need a clinician and I will tell you so. Not career strategy either. Your representatives handle the career. This is the work underneath it. The engine.

How it runs

One on one. Built in confidence. Launched in public.

Weekly to begin, while the ground is laid. Then every two weeks. Then as the work asks, once you’re carrying more of it yourself. We move it when your life moves. You book a job, you go on location, something opens up that needs more than the calendar allows.

I don’t count hours. I follow the work. Mentorship concludes when the work reaches maturity or at twelve months, whichever comes first, and the fee is the same either way because the work is the same either way. We’ll both know. It’s the day you stop needing me to start.

Homework between every session. Answer fast. First thought, ugly handwriting, no editing. You must be willing to make real, tangible changes to your habits and patterns.