Inspiration For The Day!

By Dawn Tolson

As January 1st comes and goes with a big bang each year, it is a certain fact that you will never know what the coming 365 days will hold for you. Who would have known that this year would have been my year to have the fortunate opportunity to participate in so many inspirational seminars? After so many years of stay-at-home-boredom, oops, sorry, meant to say MUMMYDOM, my diary has been full of school schedules, band concerts, dance rehearsals, and other time-demanding tasks that have left really no time for anything else than a zombie at night in front of the TV.

Once again, this week I find myself on another one of those tasks as I am currently sitting on the 26th floor of a luxurious Boca Raton hotel accompanying my daughter whilst she attends an International Talent Show. We arrived last Tuesday and are here for a week. A whole week of mummy be-here-for-me time! This extracurricular activity trumps most when it comes to time and money! Nevertheless, it was her dream, so I could not deny her. At the young age of 12, she is already a natural beauty. She turns heads everywhere she goes. I have had to adjust to the attention she receives. I am getting used to it as much as any caring and protective parent can.

However, as I write this my eyes are heavy and my head is spinning. Today has been filled with a wealth of information that has been imparted upon the eager young delegation and to us, the parents.

The whole convention has been filled with workshops and seminars led by leading industry professionals. We have seen runway coaches that have appeared on America’s Next Top Model, agents recruiting for the markets in Asia, New York, and Los Angles, authors, photographers, singing and acting coaches, everyone but the Queen so to speak (well maybe one or two but that is another story!). However, today, one person stood out like no other. He is an older gentleman, a seasoned Shakespearean actor and tutor at an esteemed acting school in New York.

His message was simple but oh so effective. The seminar was called “The Three P’s Of Becoming an Actor”. Those “P’s” were not pertaining to Playing, Performing, or Pretending but had to do with three other simple rules that quite honestly every child, no let me change that, EVERYONE should apply to their lives. With these three simple rules stardom in your own life is a certain outcome.

P 1          Preparation

To be well prepared is key. Learning is an ongoing experience but it takes energy; you need to up your energy levels. He advocated exercising whether that is in the form of physical, or such things as singing. Every actor has to learn how to put his or her own statement on an audition. Transport this notion to normal life and what do you get? You get the message to make yourself an Individual. Something that is lost currently in our multimedia, digitally enhanced world. Preparation is also about epiphanies. The time to discover you, embrace it, prepare for it and apply it.

P 2          Passion
Yes, we all can imagine some hunky movie star in a passionate embrace of a beautiful maiden, but, no, this is not the idea here. It is about doing what you are passionate about. How many of us adults ended up in a career we don’t even care about? How did that happen? Were we afraid of falling back, worried that we could not do what we truly wanted to do? Go back to P1 and did we prepare ourselves, did we have the epiphany? I will leave you to answer that question. This simple statement he made says it all, “Follow your heart and you will be a happy person.”

P3           Persistence

NEVER GIVE UP!!!! He related the story of Anthony Hopkins, once an ever-perpetual understudy and a drunk who would have killed himself before giving up his passion. He persisted relentlessly, took control of his addiction, and forged forward to achieve his goal. How many of our children dart from one activity to another because they feel they are not good enough? Take my son for instance. He wanted to play the flute and after a growth spurt, his hands were so large that he had difficulty on the keys, but when the Band Tutor tried to change him to a “larger” instrument, he directly refused. I was proud of him and he went on to do two more years with the flute. His determination to carry on playing was his passion. This was not the same scenario with his baseball!

So I guess my message today is this: DON'T make life too complicated, find what speaks to your heart, live it as if it was a stage, you are the leading role, follow your passion, and don’t ever give up!