End Of The Year Assessment

One trap of being a goal-oriented person is that I tend to focus on the negative.  If I miss a goal or it's obvious that I'm never going to reach a mark I set for myself, this loss tends to dominate my thoughts. And this is an easy trap that I fall into, time and time again.  Since we're drawing to a close on 2010, I've been thinking about what happened and what I could have done better.  And then I stopped.

And I said to myself "Self, shut up already."

While I didn't get to a bunch of things I really wanted to get done this year (my VO demo, more auditions, booking... stuff), I did get other things done.  And instead of beating myself up for missing goals or not being the best I could be and being at the beck and call of my judgmental Type A part of my persona, I'm going to focus on the long term.

As many of you know, my father is an architect.  He started his own practice when I was 5 years old, working out of our house.  I worked from him on and off from when I was 12 years old until I was 27.  The main thing I gleaned from all those years of watching my father work through good times and hard times was that being a creative person is a day-to-day struggle.  You apply yourself everyday and some days you do well and others you don't.  Some years you do well and others you don't.  That old tried-and-true statement about how life is a series of peaks and valleys is true.  What gets you through is perseverance; it's picking yourself up every day with the belief that it indeed gets better.  Things may suck now but it'll get better in the future.  And, conversely, enjoy and appreciate your success now 'cuz a while from now things won't be so good so you need that memory of good times to get you through the bad. Watching him go through this has stuck with me every since.  And that's why I'm still in this. 

I've said before I'm focusing on the long term, the long game.  And the one thing I focused on this year to get going on the long game was the huge element that was preventing me from attacking my acting career with all the vigor it needed: debt.  See, Tom and I made a movie a while ago and after the distribution company went belly up, we accumulated a good deal of debt.  And after a lot of hard work, a lot of smarts and a bit of luck, we finally got our debt situation under control.  It's in a managable state, something that allows some breathing room.  As most Americans know now, debt is a scary thing.  It eats away at you, wearing away at your confidence.  So, by putting aside some of stuff I wanted to do and focus on the story producing and squarely attacking our debt, Tom and I can now really go after what we want.  We still have more debt to eliminate, and that'll still be a very high priority.  But now I can go back to acting classes again with vigor without worry.  Debt was stealing my focus and now I have it back. 

So, while I was starting to slip into the "Another year gone and you haven't done anything" crap my psyche tries to whip up for me every year around this time, I am putting a stop to that.  I have some nice headshots now (which I'll put up on here very soon), a good story producing career going, a great family, my health, my kickass awesome husband, some marvelous friends, and some good stuff.  2009 was about survival, 2010 was about recovery.  I'm thinking 2011 will be more of a rebirth.  What do you think?

Comments

[O.]

I know you're going to win the long game, because good things happen to people with skills and the perseverance to stick it out until the opportunity presents itself.

If you didn't achieve some things you were looking for, what good things/opportunities happened that you didn't look for? It can be easy to forget those if they were not on your list.

[Matt]

Amen

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I can just hear some of my best friend's saying it's inevitable sometimes.