I have a very clear memory of my kindergarten class play acting a wedding and when my teacher, Miss Yu, asked for someone to perform the ceremony, I immediately raised my hand. I had never witnessed a real wedding ceremony or had any idea what to say. My yes was driven by the pure, uninhibited willingness of a child to try something new.
When we all took our places, Miss Yu played the wedding march on the piano, the couple slowly walked up the center of the classroom to me and the music stopped.
Silence… more silence…
“Steven, don’t you know what to say?” asked Miss Yu. No I didn’t. I was quickly replaced by my classmate Matthew, who immediately went into, “We are gathered here today . . .” and did the whole ceremony! The embarrassment of that yes has remained with me for forty-two years and as I reflect on it, the lingering of that feeling floating in my mind could be the subconscious reason behind some of the no’s in my life.
If you’ve ever watched any of Tony Robbins’ interventions, it’s amazing to see how so many of his clients’ issues are linked to a memory, a subconscious emotional state, that once identified as the root of the problem, is dealt with in a way that sets them free and they can finally move forward.
Every yes and no makes a difference, in varying degrees. While it’s important to have that awareness as I do now and really think, before saying no to something, it’s equally important to let go of your past no’s, the feelings of regret, the missed opportunities or stumbles and falls when you’ve said yes. This dwelling in the past will only paralyze you and follow you to the grave. A great speaker I listened to in college was Les Brown and he made quite a jarring statement about those who never acted on their dreams.
“The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream.”
Another quote I’d like to share is one I just heard last weekend on a Brain-a-thon webcast. The host, John Assaraf, talked about advice from a mentor, Alan Brown, that changed his life when he had low self-esteem and never thought he could achieve his goals because of his past.
“Whatever happened in the past in your life is totally irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what you choose and decide to do for yourself starting right now. The past is your history. Choose your future and make your life a commitment to that future.”
This week I’d like to share the first of two big no’s that could’ve changed my life. For years I’ve revisited those choices and mentally kicked myself over and over again. But I’ve learned to embrace them as part of my journey and move forward.
I was pretty shy and kept to myself growing up. In fourth grade, I discovered I had a knack for doing different voice impressions like the comedian Rich Little, who was on TV often in my youth. One of them was Howard Cosell, a popular sports journalist and announcer, for those readers who may not know. He was on a show called “Wide World of Sports” and I created my own show called “Wide World of Nuts” and challenged my classmates to come up with crazy stories about fellow classmates as I interviewed them with a microphone made of a clothespin wrapped in electric tape capped with a piece of plastic that looked like a microphone windscreen and a string attached for the mike cable. Amazingly, classmates did come to me to tell their stories into a clothespin during lunch as I interviewed them in my Cosell voice.
The next time a desire to perform returned was high school, when the VHS camera was available to the public. I used my cousin’s camera for an oral report in Italian class. I interviewed myself as Italian motorcycle racer Virginio Ferrari, talking to the TV as if I was speaking to him via satellite and perfectly timed the questions and responses. After seeing a broadcast on PBS of Sam Shepard’s “True West” with a young Gary Sinise and John Malkovich and performing a scene from that play in my Cinema class, an interest in exploring acting was piqued.
In college, I found the acting classes easy and not challenging to the point that I went on autopilot and was still told I was good. My friend Mark, who attended the College of Staten Island, was also interested in acting, but for his video production classes, needed to be behind the camera for the grade. So I ended up being in front of the camera for him and won two “Best Actor” awards from his school. Back at Queens College, I was pursued by multiple people in the Directing classes to act in their scenes from “The Glass Menagerie” to “Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton.” The Television Studio class was always entertained when I went before the camera.
Then my acting teacher pulled me aside and told me I needed to audition for the school’s next production. It was time for me to really get in there and act. Despite all the positive experiences I mentioned, awarded by a school I didn’t attend and strongly urged by my teacher, I said no.
Why? There were times I was insecure about my acting because it seemed too easy and I wouldn’t believe it was a natural ability. That small voice in the corner of my mind took advantage of how I felt and convinced me if I auditioned and didn’t get the part, I would be exposed as a fraud. That I was a big fish in a small pond, that what I thought was my natural ability was just luck. It’s amazing how your inner negative dialogue can counter so many positive points and make you believe its version as truth. Fear stopped me from auditioning then and for anything after. I acted in a friend’s off off Broadway play a few years after college, but that was it.
Could my life be different now if I said yes? Possibly, but my love of shooting and editing was much stronger than for acting. That’s why I could move on. Once in a while there’s an itch and if there ever was a role I would really want, I would be more willing now to give it a try and say yes.
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