Tying Up Loose Ends

Hello hello! It is the first day of a new month! Happy Monday and a very happy first day of April. How much more of a clean slate can you get in the middle of the year?

It feels like a new beginning of a sort and who doesn’t love the first blank page right when you open a new notebook? That is what today is. 

For good reason too! Maybe it’s time to start a new chapter in our life book or hell even write a new book. It’s time to turn the page of the first quarter of the year, turn the page on March and head into April. Or personally what I am looking forward to most, welcoming SPRING and the SUN. Possibilities are endless. To celebrate its time to dust the cobwebs off of our winter caves and hibernating selves. 

Yep. Decluttering and spring cleaning. 

I LOVE doing this because the physical act and actual visual of donating things, taking things out to make room for new is exciting. Instead of looking at it as a mundane chore, think of it like you are making room for new things, new opportunities, new energy, that Spring energy ;) 

So today I am decluttering my physical space, my digital space (sounds silly but we utilize this platform too and sometimes it needs a good clean up) and my mental space. 

For my physical space, this one is pretty self-explanatory but I am going to put all of my belongings in categories and go through all of them and donate what I don’t need or want any longer. For digital space I am going to go through my email, the apps on my phone, social media, my photos, the notes on my phone, google drive and my computer to give it all a good clean. 

As for mental decluttering, this is the one that I feel could really benefit us the most. Get to a place of center and quiet and reflect on the past couple of months, the beginning of the year. What worked? What didn’t? What did you learn about yourself? How can you better set yourself up for success for this next month? What types of things do you want to bring in to your life these next few months? What’s exciting to you that you want to make sure you do more of? 

Then make a huge brain dump of all of the things on your to-do list. Sit with it as long as you have to but it will be so much better and you won’t feel like you’re forgetting to do something because you wrote it all down. From there, prioritize to what is urgent and important to not as urgent and important. 

From there revisit or write down all of your goals. See how you can include everything you need to get done on your to-do list as well as the work you need to do to accomplish your goals. How can you start making these into actionable goals and then get it done? Make deadlines for yourself and put all of those as well as any other important dates down for the next month.  

So what do you say? Care to join? Let’s set ourselves up for success by doing everything in our control to make joy and positivity. Even if that just means giving our spaces a good clean. Take the week to tie up all of your loose ends, catch up and make room for all of the new opportunities coming your way! Let’s make this month and the next quarter of our year better than the first. 

What part of your world if you took care of it or cleaned out would make you feel SO good? Work on that this week! I’d love to hear from you and thank you for supporting and for reading. Xox

-O

Consistency is KEY and the Use of Three

You’re back for a third time!? No way. Thank YOU for being here again! Let’s get into it!

It doesn’t pay off as much as we would like to only work on something for a day or two, or even a week sometimes.  If there is something that you truly feel you need to alter, it is something you are going to have to pick up, until it becomes engraved, and you form a habit. I have been really interested in habits recently because I have a couple rather negative habits that I am VERY interested in breaking. Some are things that others have told me I do, some are things I notice I do. Some are as simple as what I want my mornings to look like, writing more, or reading more. Some others look like healthy eating and exercising. Then there is comparing myself to others and negative self talk that take a lot of work and deep dive into self to break. 

The key word through breaking or creating any sort of habit is CONSISTENCY. So I started a habit tracker. My habit tracker is a little chart that has every day of the month with a box below it and the habits I want to focus on next to it. That way I can go through each day and check off which habits I successfully completed. I find that instead of writing, for example, “Not comparing myself to anyone” I write the habit I want to pick up instead. This allows me to actually substitute the negative with a positive, healthy habit. Another example is “Not watching Netflix at ___ time” to substituting it for “picking up a book and reading it at ___ time”. Already it’s an easier shift because you’re saying you are doing the actual healthy habit instead of saying “don’t”. Substituting a positive word for a negative is really helpful. 

Comparing myself is something I have struggled with a lot. I didn’t realize exactly how much so but I do so it’s going on the habit tracker! I added two positive habits, because when you compare yourself to someone you are typically comparing their wins to your “behind the scenes”. If something good happens to someone, in that moment I am comparing their best moment to my moment happening then. It could be bad, it could be normal, daily life, but I am just seeing that at that moment this person got something really good and I did not. (Wow ego much, I know I’m working on it) Comparing someone’s highlight to my not so best moment, is unfair for any party involved. One of the habits I want to start implementing is to reflect upon my own wins at the end of the day. No matter how big or small. It could be something so small as drinking enough water, or getting out of bed, or taking time for a couple of good big breaths. That counts. Write them down, and give myself a pat on the back. The other habit is when someone gets a win, celebrate them solely, without any sort of commentary from my brain and shower them in all of the praise, love and goodness that they so deserve. Letting them know that I am proud of them and that they can even do bigger and better things. It’s unfair for them to receive anything else. This way, people I care about are receiving proper accolades for their amazing work and I am also getting celebrated at the end of my day too for all of the things I have accomplished. 

Don’t get me wrong, I will of course fall off track. We’re only human! Everyone is bound to have flops. Don’t get discouraged. It’s okay, everyone has days! Be gentle with yourself. If you have a day where you fall off, instead of starting from square one at the beginning again, take a breath and say today was a day, I recognize this, I’m going to keep going because I am going to get this! (Because you will, duh! :) ) Don’t make yourself stuck in a negative cycle when you deserve so much more, ESPECIALLY with negative self talk.

Another helpful tip is knowing yourself and figuring out where you could go wrong. Me, I love clean slates, new projects and blank notebooks. Fresh starts. I get easily excited by different things and have a hard time following through on something I really really care about, because I get distracted by something else MORE new. Knowing this about myself and going into a period where habit wise, I decided I will be working on only three habits for a prolonged period of time, I can trick my brain into thinking that every day is new! It doesn’t have to be the beginning of a week or a month or starting a new habit to feel new.  Know how you talk to yourself and know what works for you. Not everyone is the same. Do you work better in a group? Do you need an accountability partner to check in on you? Do you work better alone, writing and reflecting? Make your brain work for YOU, don’t give in and work for your brain. Be consistent with it. With any sort of habit you have to keep consistent.

I’m a huge procrastinator, I am dream really big. Sometimes when it comes to day to day I think of all the things I want and neglect that one thing that could actually push me. When I was first starting out with habits, I was looking at ten habits at once. Saying I wanted to meditate, but also exercise daily but also eat really healthy and also write and read. All things that I was and am fully capable of doing BUT if I put all of them down and expect that at the end of the month, everyday I had done all of those, it’s just not realistic. It got incredibly exhausting and overwhelming.

Pick three things that are really important to you. Stick to those three things for three months (or whatever timeline works best for you). If you fall off the bandwagon, that is totally okay, pick yourself up and keep going, tomorrow is another day! And of course, celebrate you because this is HARD. WORK. 

My three habits are going to be writing daily when I wake up, recognizing my wins at the end of the day, and solely celebrating other people’s wins when opportunities come along for them and showering them with how proud I am, no comparisons or commentary. 

What are some habits you are interested in working on? Would love to hear! Enjoy the rest of your week. Xox

-O

Create, Create, Create!

Happy Monday everyone! Thank you for checking out my first post! I received so many wonderful comments, please keep reaching out if you have any ideas or input. Of course, thank you very much for being here now. Let's get into it!  

I am an actor. I like to create things, different characters, use my voice and self to create meaningful works. I like to write, draw, cook, bake, and garden too. I also consume a lot of content. Some days I consume way too much content. More than I create and it makes me feel very overwhelmed. So here is some advice to start the week with, for me as well as to anyone else this could resonate with…. Instead of watching that next Netflix episode or going down a youtube rabbit hole or listening to the next episode of that podcast, turn the noise off, sit by yourself, or get into nature and write, work on a scene, or a monologue, or draw or sing, or dance even. 

I just realized the other day that I am rarely ever sitting completely by myself in silence with just myself. I am always listening to something in the background or watching something and to me, the excuse is I am utilizing my time better when actually I am confusing my brain by trying to do multiple things at once. And I end up not really getting something done or "fake" getting something done because I wasn’t actually present. My advice is to turn off all of the noise including your own brain's inner monologue if you can, (meditating or stream of consciousness writing).

Create something and be fully present while you’re doing it. Maybe by the end, you’ll hate the product you created by hey! You made something! And THAT is a wonderful use of time. Arguably the best use of time. At the end of the day, we are here for such a short amount of time. Day after day you don’t want to overstimulate yourself with all of the things that we could be consuming, because it’s a heck of a lot. It all ends up repeating itself anyways. The other day I watched a “what I eat in a day” video. Of course, that opened up a rabbit hole of countless food videos coming up on the sidebar.  I took a step back and asked myself - was I really going to change what I was eating to match someone else’s food plan? Probably not. Maybe if something is really unique and I wanted to try it. But I would probably end up bookmarking it and then forgetting about it. What I am trying to say is one less “what I eat in a day” video is not going to kill you it might end up making you feel a lot better. And you might get something done by utilizing that extra time and creating something that you are really proud of. We have such easy access to so many things.  Just turn it all off for an hour and be with yourself, see what you’re avoiding. 

I’m writing about this today because we are artists. What we do is create, but in a world where content is at every corner, you can sort of lose yourself a bit. Pick the things that inspire you, that you 

want to support, that inspire you to create. Tune out the things that overwhelm you.

 Make something today, make something this week! It's Monday, a blank page in a notebook. 

Start a new project today, share it or keep it to yourself, but I am always open to being shared art with :)

 Have a wonderful week!

-O

Speaking of creating... if you are a singer/performer and need any sort of instrumental piano track for an audition, cover, rehearsal preparation, PianoTrax is so helpful! If you have any last minute self-tapes and not enough time

 to find an accompanist, or just want to brush up on material this is a wonderful website and app. 

Click the link here to check out if you need... http://lddy.no/8rjq

"Done is Better Than Perfect" or the Journey of Starting a New Project

Hello Hello! Welcome to my little corner of the Internet! Wherever and whenever you are reading this, thank you so much for taking the time to hear what I have to say. 

I started a blog in 2016 because it had been something that kept popping up in my brain. So I started… and then stopped. After two posts. I was very critical and wanted any of my writing that was going to be posted and potentially seen by people to be “perfect” (perfect is in quotes because that is made up and there is no such thing, ha, anyway). It got to the point where the two posts that were up on the blog had been edited by multiple peers, myself and it took weeks to make one post. That’s no fun for anyone.  I couldn’t be consistent with this obscene pressure I was putting on myself for something that was supposed to be fun and was definitely not any sort of big deal. We are back though and better than ever because now I have an IDEA. A clear direction and so I had to make the leap. After all, “done is better than perfect” so here we are. It still needs to be explored, but let me know what you think.  

As an actor, we get hired to play humans (usually ;) ) Being human, shockingly, is no small feat. As an artist it is so easy to get sucked into your work, the industry, walking into audition after audition to class to work to home and do it all over again. Anyone in any industry probably feels that way, after getting into the same routine day in and day out. We, I, forget to be present and forget what it means to be human. This probably sounds funny because we are innately all human, obviously.  I mean more in the sense of being alive, being present, being grounded. FEELING human rather than just walking through life and as an actor, only doing actor things. Believe it or not, we are not always going to get cast as an actor. This was something I struggled with a great deal. I wanted to be good at acting, heck I still do, I have so much more to learn. Just doing acting things all day every day proved to not work for me. I was forgetting me. There has to be a balance, which is a word that plays in my head quite frequently. Spend a part of your day being an actor, while also putting the focus on the other things that make you tick. Doing other things in your life that are fulfilling AND that are things you can control. It will ultimately add to the work anyways. 

I guess this blog is for being human in an industry that pays you to be human. Any sort of artist or creative. If you are reading this and saying that is not you, valid, but everyone is creative. There are just people who actively pursue being creative more than others.  Meaning this blog can be for anyone and everyone. You do not have to be an actor or in the entertainment industry to relate or have something resonate with you (hopefully)! I only will say actor and artist because that is what I can speak to. I also can’t really speak for all artists and actors as well because this could be a very different take on that journey, since… let’s all say it together…. Everyone’s journey is different! Ahhh what a beautiful thing too. It makes life so much more interesting.

That’s what I am interested in exploring and I really hope you will care to join and help explore it with me. Let’s just sit in that discomfort together. Exploration, constantly discovering you, being self-aware takes discomfort. It’s okay though because we’ll be doing it together and I will be sending you love and positivity all the while.  It is something that has come to my attention more and more since I graduated from college some months ago. Without having a constant set schedule, it has made me reflect a great deal on me and what I can bring to a space, what kind of art I want to create, who I am as a human and how do I want to live my life when I don’t have a project?

I want to ask better questions. Questions like how are you? How is your heart? What makes you tick right now? What are your rituals and daily practices? Questions that bring us all deeper to our core, that ultimately impact the work. Our work as artists. Bringing pieces of our heart and breathing life into characters from these things that contribute so much. You can’t just be an actor to be an actor. You have to be a person first. Who are you when you’re not in a show? This was a hard pill to swallow because I haven’t had to sit with that. For eight years there hasn’t been more than only a couple of months where I wasn’t in a show.  Now if you know me, you know I’m always working on something, but sometimes it’s not in the way I wanted, expected or was hoping for. 

I’m nervous and excited to start this! I truly hope you will join me. 

-O

P.S. I am still trying to figure this all out technically so I am always looking for suggestions, feedback, your thoughts! Please feel free to send me a message or comment below. Thank you. Xox