Ep #5: Rejection Is Redirection

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Hello, my beautiful performers and seekers of confidence, welcome to episode five of The Confident Performer. Rejection is redirection. This is my favorite thing to talk about with performers, with artists of all genres, really, truly entrepreneurs, people just on the search for what their truest answer is in their career. Whatever trajectory they’re following, wherever they want to be, wherever they wish to be. Now, this is really important. I’m going to give a few points kind of straight out of the gate. I will give you some steps to follow today so that will be fun.

And then I’ll share a little bit of insight on a coaching session I had with my own coach and just some guidance that I actually operate by consistently. So rejection is redirection. What if you knew success for you in the industry, whatever industry you are in was inevitable? What if you knew that whatever you did, whatever failed audition or failed attempt at training in something or advancing in a certain part of your career, that whatever it was would still lead you to a place of great success.

That you would have a career that you were absolutely proud of, that you will make it, that you would be this beautiful kind of happy and proud legacy of these lived dreams, that you did not give up on yourself. That you were true, and you were honest, and you were consistent and constant. What if you knew every failed audition was a meeting or a redirection to what was exactly right for you? And I’ll give an example.

I was in auditions recently for a show I was working on. And it was so fun and cool to watch some of these artists kind of sing and do what they’re doing. And they had no idea but the casting director I was working with, she had in mind people, if they were not right for specific jobs that she was currently working on in that room. She had people in mind for other jobs that she was working on. And that is the most fun and the most cool information I love to think when I go into auditions.

When I am in the middle of something and I think, you know what? I have no idea how this is going to turn out for me. I am just going to go. I’m going to try my best. I don’t even know if I’m ready. I even shared with you some information on a previous podcast of what happened when I was not ready. And that kind of feeling of an absolute feeling of failure you could take away with you and you could actually put that in a box. That was a mental kind of promotion to what was next of, you know what? Even though that felt like a failure, I’m not going to attach anything to it.

I’m not going to mean that just because I had a rough audition that I’m not a good performer or that I shouldn’t be performing. Any of those thoughts that you have that attach to something like I suck at my job. I suck at performing. I am not a strong auditioner. I can’t memorize well. Any of those thoughts or feelings that you may ever have, I want you to not attach to them at all. Meaning they don’t make you a bad performer. They don’t make you bad at memorizing. They don’t make a more challenged individual. Well, I have this problem, or I have that challenge.

And don’t get me wrong. I know that those challenges and those abilities or disabilities or whatever it may be are a realistic thing. I know that’s an absolutely real thing. But I want to talk about the everyday aspect of just deciding, you know what? I’m not going to let that be a hindrance to me. I know so many people who are dyslexic and have found a way to easily memorize and it’s impressive to me.

I worked with an artist, actually, a dear friend now, but I worked with an artist early on and they’re greatly dyslexic and had a challenge even remembering the tune of a song. So we could play it over and over and over again, but if all of her senses and sensory responses were not challenged at the same time, she wouldn’t retain the information. And so it’s really, really intriguing, but now she’s since worked past that and even created this kind of whole really cool feature that she’s wanted to learn multiple instruments and play them on her recordings.

And it’s just really cool to kind of see that evolution of someone who does have that hindrance and then say, “You know what? I’m going to just do it anyway. I’m not going to attach it to any meaning, and it doesn’t mean that these things are going to stop me or slow me down.” So that’s kind of a side tangent on that, but I did definitely want to kind of speak to any of the thoughts that we may have that potentially slow us down from being our best self and understanding our capacity as the artist, as the entrepreneur, as the person in pursuit of great success in whatever we’re doing.

So I want you to think of this in this kind of example. Sometimes we morph ourselves into what we think others want us to be, losing ourselves completely. And I have worked with a lot of artists, and I have done so in my own life. I have, on a personal front, adjusted myself so much to kind of try and be what I thought everyone thought I should be for a very long period of time, especially in my early 20s in my career. I mean, I had guidance from my manager, “You should be a country singer. You should do a country album. You should do a standards album. You should be a pop singer, you should.”

All of these different things of what I should be doing that by the time I actually went out and started doing the thing, I had no idea what I actually was supposed to be doing. Because I had no connection with my authentic foundation of do I even want to do this? Do I even want to be a country singer? Do I even want to be in a girl band? Do I even want to do any of this? And throughout my career, I did learn some lessons the hard way. I’m really, really happy for those. I’m really happy for those.

And so thinking about that, I want to share that with you. Do not get into the place where you morph yourself into something that you lose sight of what you want and your vision for your life and your career. That is the most important information you can stay true to in the now. So I promise you, everyone that’s close to you, especially if you have a close knit family, I call that the permission slip. They think it’s a permission slip to tell you how to live your life. And you don’t have to have that. You don’t have to do that.

So just because your Aunt Nancy is a really, really close person to you, she doesn’t have to influence everything that you do in your entire life because she may think that you should be a singer in the church, for the church. That’s the only thing you should do. You should just sing for the church. And then you may have big dreams for yourself to go on the road and to share information with all these other people. And be an example of what you can be as an artist, living and singing secular music. Who even knows?

So what I’m saying is, be open to what it is you truly want to be and do not feel as though you have to adjust and morph yourself into something else in order to be victorious or to achieve in any realm. So I want to talk about that as that aligns you to being in your closest, most authentic self, being very, very clear on your own goals. So once you are very clear on those goals, I want you to first and foremost, stop comparing yourself to anyone around you. No one is you. No one is on your same trajectory. No one is on your same foundation and belief system. It is just you doing your life for the rest of your life.

I don’t care how close you are with your family. I don’t care if you have the best friend in the whole wide world. I don’t care if you have a twin and you guys eat, sleep, drink the same thing. None of that. You are still an individual person, individual human being, individual life, and trajectory. So keep your mind and sight very clear on your goals for yourself unless, I mean, don’t get me wrong, unless you want to live someone else’s idea of a great life.

If you think to yourself, self, beautiful self, you should listen to Aunt Nancy. What are you waiting for? She seems to have it all figured out. She has a very easy life. She goes and does her things and does her church on Wednesday, church on Sunday, church on Friday. I want to be just like Aunt Nancy. And if you think that’s what you want to do, that’s your goal, do that, follow that. So if that’s your example, that’s your guidance, there’s no shame to that game whatsoever.

But if that’s not your truest authentic place, move on, move forward. Hug your Aunt Nancy, tell her how much you love all of her handmade things and eat all her cookies and that you’re going to do your career your way. Enough about that arbitrary made up Aunt Nancy. She actually sounds like a great person. I don’t even have an Aunt Nancy. She sounds lovely.

So I’m going to go into the examples of jobs and contract changes. Now, I’m going here because we can think about rejection as redirection if we realize there are shows I’ve auditioned for, and I never heard back from. Then I can circle back and it’s fun because a lot of these jobs, I’ll either know the casting director of the casting agent or the creative team on. And I’ll even say, “Hey, whatever happened to that or what ended up happening there?” And sometimes the show didn’t even go forward. It didn’t go into workshop. It didn’t go into completion.

And so in my brain, early on in my career, I could have thought, which I did, I know, I thought early, early on when I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. Again, one of my favorite phrases is, when you don’t even know what you don’t know, that means there’s so much more to learn. And the more open you are to learning, the better it is for you, for your sanity, for your confidence, and for you and your clarity going forward for what’s next for your career. But some of those jobs just didn’t even happen.

And then some of the jobs that I actually was highly interested in, and I thought, you know what? If that opportunity comes or comes back around to me, I’m going to take it. I’m going to totally take it. And now funnily enough, that did happen to me. There was a contract that I was in that I was very, very, very happy in and then some changes were made in the show and then the opportunity to potentially have that same show again came back around. But I was in a different place in my personal life, and I had found the person that I had manifested and had built and kind of created in my head.

And he was now real life coming into fruition into my life and we’ve been together eight plus years now. But the timing of that was definitely in a place of kind of conflicted space for me. So even though the opportunity was there, my personal circumstances changed. And so that changed that job for me. So that rejection in some other ways was an absolute clear redirection to what I wanted or what my life was next. And I was so truly grateful to embrace everything that that was.

So in that example, so first and foremost, we’re going to go back to we’re never going to compare. We’re not going to let anyone should all over us. Remember we say, no shoulding, so you should do this, you should do that, you should do that. That was the Aunt Nancy kind of explanation there. So stop comparing. No shoulding, being ultra clear on your goals. If you are clear on your personal goals that are not impacted by other people’s shoulds on you, that is going to help you immensely reach what is next in your path.

And then stay consistent in showing up whether you fail or whether you succeed. So if you have an attachment to what the failure looks like, so if you go to an audition and you don’t get called back or you don’t get the part. And you look at that as a failure, you can do that if you want. But if you attach that failure to anything like I failed at this audition, that means I’m bad at acting. I failed at this audition because I didn’t look the part. So that means I shouldn’t do this as a career. All of those things fall into those lanes of no shoulding and then attachments to failure or success.

I don’t attach to failure or success in any realm. I look at my life as this kind of seat of consciousness. I get to sit in this life that watches Amy Adams go and live and do her things and make her mistakes. And sometimes be the leading lady and make all the right choices. And then sometimes do things and then be a beautiful example of what not to do, especially if you’re focused on any realm of success whatsoever. I had to work a lot on a lot of things for myself in getting to this space because I would absolutely get discouraged. And I would think, am I doing the right thing? Am I on the right path? What am I doing with my life?

So in order to stay constant, in order to stay consistent and not attached to those positive and negative results, that’s what I had to do. Give myself that clear self-talk of this doesn’t mean anything bad about you. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person or a bad actor or anything. It means that you need to work harder. You need to train harder. You need to show up for more dance classes. You need to really get clear on what you really want to do. Do you want to take a year off performing and just really work on your performance conditioning? Then do that.

If you want to take a year off so that you can drink some wine and eat some hot Cheetos and do whatever you’re doing, then do that. So I’m able to control the trajectory of what I want to do with my career now. And that’s the fun part. So at the end of the day, I’m content showing up for what I’ve planned for my life. And that, I think being content is the truest happiness. Being content in your thoughts, being content with your work, knowing the true 50/50 of life. There’s going to be good days, there’s going to be bad days, but they don’t have to define you. They don’t have to mean anything about you.

And that’s the same thing with positive and negative and that’s usually why, if I hear someone say something bad about me or someone has maybe said a mean thing about me. I remember after being on the show and being super public for a while, people had a lot of ideas and opinions and things they would share with me. I met so and so, and they said you’re blah, blah, blah. And some of it was nice and some of it was rude. And some of it was things, obviously internet trolls do and just pop on and just put in social media.

But it’s one of those things that if you have a strong self-concept, you don’t attach to those either way because you know they don’t mean anything about you. They’re merely a projection of someone’s own place in their life. And I don’t attach to them, and I don’t make them mean anything about me. So that really, really helps as far as information as a performer. I know that helped me substantially.

Now, I do want to let you know that I’m going to announce my winners of those sweet singers baskets in the next episode. But I do want to talk about something that I am creating that is coming up. And I do want to open it up for all of my listeners. But I want to do, it’s a performers confidence campaign and it really is a journey into great self-confidence. It’s a journey into awareness of your current functioning capacity and the ways and the steps to take to step into your overall capacity for your greatest potential. So I’ll talk more about that later, but I want to leave you on this note.

Now, this is where I stay in my place of contentment on rejection is just redirection and keeping focused on myself. I am not rushed, I am driven. I am not worried, I am resolved. I am not comparing, I am inspired. My success is inevitable. I want you to think about that. I want you to never forget that. And anytime you get lost, I want you to try that idea, just that one beautiful, big idea that you have inside of you. And if it doesn’t work, that’s okay. You just try it again and you just try it again. And if that idea doesn’t work, that’s okay too. You try another one.

All life is, is beautiful, big ideas. They can live in us and live on outside of us, or they can die in us. But the best thing to know is that you have the capacity to deal with all of it. And we’ll talk more about the feelings and the strength that it takes to walk into dealing with all those later. But remember, rejection is just redirection, redirecting you to exactly the path that you need to live for your own proud legacy and your life’s dreams.

Alright, my beautiful people, take care, be well. Share these episodes with all those people you know would absolutely benefit from this information. Take care.

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Thank you for listening to today’s episode of The Confident Performer. If you want to learn more about living your truth and showing up as your most authentic, beautiful self, visit www.amyadamscoaching.com. See you next week!