Barker / Cooley / Wood Developing Your Emotional Health: The Compact Guide

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78850-399-0
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Reihe: The Compact Guides

This practical, empowering guide provides performers and creatives with a toolkit of techniques to improve, manage and maintain good emotional wellbeing - helping you navigate and overcome the pressures and demands of a career in the arts. Inside, you'll find key, evidence-based concepts and ideas about emotional health, as well as the benefits of taking a holistic approach to your brain, imagination and body. There are dozens of creative exercises and meditations to help you build resilience, develop your emotional intelligence, reframe negative thoughts, stay motivated, and embrace change when it comes. You'll also discover strategies for tackling auditions, preparing for performances and coping with periods of unemployment, plus guidance on creating your own personalised emotional health plan. Invaluable for anyone working in the creative industries, this book will equip you to assume responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing, and pursue your passion whilst still enjoying a life of fulfilment and satisfaction. The Compact Guides are pocket-sized introductions for actors and theatremakers, each tackling a key topic in a clear and comprehensive way. Written by industry professionals with extensive hands-on experience of their subject, they provide you with maximum information in minimum time. Andy Barker, Brian Cooley and Beth Wood have all worked in the arts in various roles, including as actors, writers, directors and stage managers. Together, Andy and Brian run Mind Fitness, an organisation dedicated to developing mental health and wellbeing and business effectiveness, and Beth is Artistic Director of Prospero Theatre Company.

Andy Barker is a certified performance coach, trainer and author with diverse work experience in the arts and corporate senior management. He has worked in the music industry, the film industry, the world of theatre, videogames, and learning and development. Highlights include working with Jim Henson's Muppets and with Andrew Lloyd Webber's numerous West End productions. Amongst a wide range of backstage credits, he was part of the original London productions of Evita, Starlight Express and Chess, transferred Single Spies from the National Theatre to the West End, enjoyed a run on Me and My Girl in London, and was Company Manager of the D'Oyly Carte Opera at the Savoy Theatre. With Brian Cooley, he runs Mind Fitness, an organisation dedicated to developing mental health and wellbeing alongside business effectiveness. He is the co-author of Developing Your Emotional Health: The Compact Guide (Nick Hern Books, 2024) with Brian Cooley and Beth Wood.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barker, Andy

Cooley, Brian

Wood, Beth

Leseproben

1.

Your Emotional Health

We could define a state of wellbeing as feeling more calm, confident and happy. For a performer it must also include feeling creative, motivated and connected, perhaps even inspired. In this chapter, we’ll take our first look at how you can feel better more of the time. It is a key concept – and we will expand upon and reference back to it as we move through each chapter.

Essential to the process of becoming healthier and happier is building your emotional resilience. But what do we mean by resilience? It’s not the old-school definition of ‘pulling yourself together’ or ‘manning-up’, but something that’s bound up in flexible and adaptive thinking, emotional intelligence, and the capacity to accept and even to embrace change.

We have noted already that actors, performers and those working in creative industries need to possess high levels of resilience. Let’s do a quick exercise to get an idea of what this strong sense of resilience might look like, and why it’s so essential for performers.

Exercise: Resilience for Performers 1

•  Make a list of five aspects of your professional life as a performer that require resilience – for instance, periods being out of work, bad reviews, last-minute auditions, and so on.

•  Next to each of the five items on your list make a note of a specific example of when you had to cope with that challenge, and give yourself a score from 1 to 10 on how resilient you were at that time. Then make a note of what emotions you felt, and for how long the challenge lasted.

•  We will revisit these situations a few times as we work through the book, but before we move on to look at what an emotion is and how to harness them to help us towards good emotional health, just look at your own answers for a couple of minutes. Are the resilience levels those that you would have expected? Do they vary widely? Do you know why? More on this later.

Emotions

You may be feeling a concern that to achieve a calmer and happier life it might mean suppressing your emotions. Not only do emotions give our world colour, texture and even purpose, but we fully recognise that they are the quintessential tools of your trade if you work in the creative industries. By the end of the book, we hope that you will see and value your emotions as a richer and deeper resource to be drawn upon and employed in performance, as well as in everyday life, both with a skilful control that boosts creativity and better mental health.

Negative emotions will no longer be controlling your life. When one comes along, you will know how to give it its proper weight and respect, but not get drawn to a place where it takes over and destroys that which is good.

Emotions impact our health, performance, wellbeing, motivation, sense of fulfilment, and ability to make effective decisions. They also determine the strength and quality of every relationship we make.

What is an emotion? Scientists disagree about how many emotions there are and, to some extent, on the description of what an emotion is. Here we are defining an emotion as a conscious or semi-conscious experience characterised by mental activity and a certain degree of pleasure or displeasure.

We are essentially an organic computer with 100,000 chemical reactions per second. Every emotion is induced by the release of a chemical or compound of chemicals instigated by our thoughts. So, by changing the way we think, we can release a different set of chemicals and change the way we feel.

The most frequently referenced emotions are love, hate, desire, anger, fear and envy, which collectively drive the majority of human behaviour. Emotions can last for decades, sometimes a lifetime, and negative emotions can lead to serious emotional and mental ill-health. Later in the book we will look at the ABC model used in Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) to reframe unhealthy negative emotions.

It may be useful to draw a distinction between emotions and feelings. Feelings are brief and episodic, often the fleeting awareness of the emotions that lie underneath. As we go through the book you’ll get used to identifying the emotion that is giving rise to the range of feelings we experience, such as irritability, disappointment, insecurity and tension. This is the beginning of owning, understanding and realigning your emotions.

Exercise: Long-lasting Emotions 2

•  Begin by writing down two negative emotions that have lasted or recurred over a long period of time, and two that are positive. For each emotion write down when you first remember experiencing it, and a time when you experienced it strongly.

•  Keep these answers to hand. They are the first step in the journey towards full awareness of your emotional responses and patterns, and an understanding of how these have impacted your life.

There is no agreement between emotional theorists on the exact number of human emotions. Most commonly accepted is somewhere around thirty, but some believe it is possible to identify hundreds, even thousands.

If we accept that there is a vast range of subtly different, nuanced emotions – let us say as many as there are countries on the earth – then many of us may not even be aware of which ‘country’ we are standing in right now.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that we are trained as children to recognise the ‘biggies’ – angry, unhappy and happy; sometimes referred to as ‘mad’, ‘sad’ and ‘glad’ – and many continue to rely on these throughout their adult lives. Coaches and counsellors often have to drill down, asking, for example, ‘Exactly what are you experiencing when you say you are sad?’ In my experience, even performers who are highly skilled at analysing the nuanced emotional states of characters they are portraying are likely not to have the same understanding of their own emotions.

The second reason is that our emotions are constantly changing (an emotion is energy in motion), so an in-depth understanding of how we feel demands a consistently high level of awareness and vigilance.

Exercise: Emotional Audit 3

We’re going to follow on from the last exercise to do a quick Emotional Audit, to get an idea of where on the ‘globe’ you think you are. We’ll do another in the final chapter.

•  Begin by drawing four columns like the table below or turning to the relevant page in the workbook:

Emotion

Level of Intensity

Experience

Possible Cause

•  Now spend ten to fifteen minutes completing the table by listing every emotion you know you have felt (or think you might have felt) in the last week; the level of intensity with which you experienced it; whether it was a positive or negative sensation/ experience; and what you think might have caused it. Finish by putting a star by any of them that you are worried about.

Negative Emotions

There’s a lot of evidence that the human tendency to suppress negative or painful emotions is, in fact, damaging. ‘The tendency to avoid emotional suffering is the cause of all mental illness,’ M. Scott Peck observes in , ‘we must face problems directly, and experience the pain involved.’

When difficult or traumatic events occur, experiencing the emotion is an important part of the journey to recovery; when we postpone that experience, we postpone the recovery. We cannot travel through an emotion and emerge on the other side without becoming intimate with it.

We are going to explore the important mindfulness practice of simply sitting with an emotion, and address the issues of mental noise: the myriad thoughts that clutter our mind.

The number of thoughts we have each day has not been pinned down by scientists, but it is likely to be about 60,000. You may be surprised to learn that only 5% of these are spent on the task in hand. The rest we refer to as ‘noise’ – largely past noise, where we dwell on what has already happened; and future noise, where we imagine future potential problems, creating little mental movies that often lead to worst-case scenarios.

What tends to happen is that one automatic negative thought (ANT) leads to the next, which leads to the next and so on. And before you know it you are on the downward spiral, you have lost ten minutes in negative introspection, and you are feeling low. If we have suffered some kind of loss or rejection, it’s important to give time and respect to the emotion we are feeling. What that include, however, is letting your brain begin that spiral downwards.

An important mindfulness exercise is sitting with a negative emotion. Let’s say you’ve just found out you haven’t got a job you were hoping for....