San Diego Asian Film Festival 2008

I was thumbing through a book called Everyday Greatness: Inspiration for a Meaningful Life
by Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
and other books on goal-setting, self-improvement, and leadership skills. In this book was an anecdote about how changing two words could change not only your perspective, but quite possibly your results. I want to talk about those two words and how changing them can help you improve your acting career and maybe even other areas of your life.

First, what are the two words? They are “if only” as in:

• If only I had an agent.
• If only I didn’t mess up my lines in that audition.
• If only I got called in for the audition in the first place.
• If only I had better headshots.
• If only they were looking for my type.
• If only there were more opportunities for me to be cast in something.
• And on, and on, and on.

Ever catch yourself having one of these gripe sessions? Look, we’ve all had our woe-is-me moments. It’s understandable. Sometimes our acting careers and lives don’t always go the way we plan. It’s OK to vent a little. But it’s not OK to stay in this downward spiral of negativity. So how do we break the pattern?

Simple. Replace the two words “if only” with “next time.”

Is it really that easy? Well, you do have to do a little more work than that, but yes, essentially, it’s that easy. You also have to reframe what you put after those two words. Using the preceding list, I’ll give you some examples:

• Next time I’ll look up acting jobs myself and submit myself for them.
• Next time I’ll do a better job at preparing for the audition.
• Next time I’ll increase my submission rate so I’ll get called in for an audition.
• Next time I’ll find a great photographer and get great headshots.
• Next time I’ll focus on getting the right auditions for my type.
• Next time I’ll create my own opportunities by writing my own script and shooting my own movie with friends and other actors.
• And on, and on, and on.

You can already see from these examples that “if only” shuts us down and limits us while “next time” opens doors, opens our minds, and creates opportunities. Give it a try and see if next time you get closer to what you want and further away from what you don’t. Oh, and it works on other things besides your acting career. Try it out on your current job, your finances, your relationships, etc. Feel free to share your success stories and positive results.

*This article was reposted here from my newsletter.

Send post as PDF to

ShareThis