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[0:00] Justin Guarini: Hello, I'm Justin Guarini, and welcome to Audition Secrets, the podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you haven't had a chance to go to auditionsecrets.com to see all the great things that we have for you there, please go to auditionsecrets.com. I would love to answer your questions. You can write me an email at justin at auditionsecrets.com if you want to clack it out instead. I'll read your questions, comments, concerns, thoughts about the entertainment industry here on the air, because at the end of the day, this is about serving you, making sure that you have the tools that you need to nail more auditions and book more jobs. So this episode is a quick hit because I was recording my interview with Laura Bell Bundy, which is going to, I think, air next week or within the upcoming weeks, and we talked about something that resonated so much with me that I had to do a separate episode about it even before we talked about it.

I'm not ruining anything, but it's something that we just touched upon, but I wanted to dig into it. And it's this. There is so much success waiting for us on the other side of the willingness to completely fail. I'll say it again. There is so much success waiting for us on the other side of the willingness to completely fail. I love that. I love that. I love that because I know for me and many of the people that I've spoken to, one of the biggest fears we have as performers is looking like an asshole, especially doing it in front of a lot of people, failing, falling flat on our face, looking stupid, and just completely embarrassing ourselves. I know I have done it plenty of times, but it wasn't until I got older and it wasn't until I really, really started experiencing high level craziness in the entertainment industry that I realized that failure is one of my greatest assets.

Failure has always been one of my greatest assets. And I was able to turn that into the unabashed willingness to fail. And so there are about three reasons that I'm going to cover right now about why it's great to fail, why that's okay to fail and why that can be failure can be one of your greatest assets.

[2:28] Justin Guarini: The first one is all about trust. I like to say, let go and let God. And at the end of the day, it could be God, Buddha, Yahweh, good orderly direction. It doesn't necessarily mean a religion, but when we trust and push through the moments of failure, for example, if you're in an audition and you go up on your lines, you forget your lines or something goes wrong. If you push through that, if you do something the character would do, if you say something in the character would say, if you do anything but stop and apologize and do the things that we normally do, when we mess up in an audition, there is gold on the other side of the horrible feeling. And believe me, I've been on Broadway stages.

I've been on television. I have been everywhere hosting on a red carpet and something goes terribly wrong. And I, at the end of it, after it's done, I go to whomever and I say, man, was that like two hours? Was that whole thing, that whole horrible moment happening for two hours? And in reality, it's probably like five or six seconds. And in the audition room, it's the same exact thing. Things are going wrong. And it's like time stretches and the world stops and everyone is staring at you. And it feels like you shit your pants. But if you push through that feeling, if you have done the preparation, which by the way, you shouldn't walk into the audition room unless you have done your homework and done the preparation.

But if you've done that, then you will be able to push through that feeling and find something that the character would say, do something the character would tell you. And don't you dare stop until the people on the other side of the table stop you. And that's all about trust. And that's a, it's a two way street in this instance, because it's trust in yourself, trust in yourself, knowing that you are able to make it to the other side, trust in your technique, trust in your preparation, knowing that, okay, it could all go completely to hell, but I can get through this. I have done the work. I have gone to university. I've done all the things that we do on a daily basis or in the process of doing all come into play, especially when we are in moments that we usually call failure moments or that we perceive as failure.

And so it creates a trust in ourselves. And if it happens again, you know that it's happened before and that you've gotten through it. But the interesting thing is that there's also trust coming from the people on the other side of the table. And this is something that we don't think about when we mess up in auditions. We don't think, oh, we think, oh my goodness, they're going to hate me. They're going to see that I can't do it. And when we fall apart and then the shit's over. But if you push through that moment and you get to the other side of it, and even if they stop you, just the fact that you tried, the fact that you put the effort in to try and do, say, be something that the character is, creates trust in the people on the other side of the table, because they see not you messing up and that you're a terrible person, that you're shit and you should have never gone to university for this in the first place.

No, they see, okay, that was a mistake. But if this actor makes a mistake on stage or in film, whatever the medium is, then the proscenium, the sandbags, it's not all going to come down. They're not going to run crying off the stage. This person has what it takes to get through those difficult moments and then they stop you. And then we do the whole scene over again and you get another chance and another bite at the apple. But do you see how that's different? Do you see how that perspective, instead of beating yourself up, knowing that if you do the work and push through that moment, that not only are you creating a better relationship with yourself, but those mess-ups create a better relationship with the people on the other side of the table.

[6:04] Justin Guarini: The second part is experience. Do you remember the first time you ever went on a roller coaster? Your first kiss? Those moments where you're just like, oh my goodness, those nervy moments, especially my first kiss. I don't remember my first kiss. I was in a bomb shelter. It was just ridiculous. It was in someone's basement in the town that I grew up in and they had a bomb shelter, some sort of underground thing that you could get into and it was large. I mean, there was probably like 10 of us down there. And I remember her name was Cara Batstone and we were both in junior high together. And my first like real true kiss, I will never forget how nervous I was. And then it happened and it was the most magical, wonderful thing that had ever happened to me at that point in my probably 12 years of existence.

And I remember walking back up the stairs after we'd kissed and like, I just was, I was buzzing all over. I was electric. Well, when you have a moment like messing up in front of an audience, in front of casting directors, in front of people on the other side of the table, you get the experience. You have that horrible moment and it is imprinted upon you. And guess what? You get through it. And the next time it comes around, there's less trauma. And the next time it comes around, because by the way, as I'm sure you no doubt already know, it's going to keep coming around and around and around and around, whether you like it or not. I mean, I have done shows for six months, been on Broadway, doing the same lines, the same choreography, the same everything for six months.

And then all of a sudden out of the blue, I'll just forget something or I'll miss a step of choreography. And had I not had the experience of completely falling down flat on my face and were I not to be willing to have the experience over again, I wouldn't be able to make it through. And nine times out of 10, nobody in the audience, unless they've seen the show a bunch of times, even knows that I made a mistake. And you go backstage and you have a little kiki with your friends, your castmates and friends about it. And so that experience tends to reduce the trauma the more that you have it. And the more, again, it goes back into the trust that we have with ourselves as well. So experience that, be willing to experience the pain and the trauma of that because it will only make you stronger.

[8:43] Justin Guarini: And then that leads me into my third and final point, which is that strengthening of, I don't want to say it's a muscle, it's kind of like a muscle, I mean, it's your brain. But when you are going through the absolute hell of trying to make it from everything was fine through massive mess-up or mini mess-up, whatever it is, to the other side, you are literally, and I'm sorry if I sound like a nerd when I say this, but you're literally building synaptic pathways in your brain that are connecting and are able to fire more rapidly the more you do it. It's like learning any skill, right? It's like, I'll never forget the first dance class I ever took. I look like an asshole. I did. I mean, I still kind of look like an asshole from time to time when I'm dancing, but I really truly was like capital A asshole the first time I went into a dance class, but I kept doing it.

I kept going back and my legs and my feet and my hands and my fingers and my neck and everything, my head, everything started to do what it is that I wanted it to do because I was building those neural pathways. And it's the same thing when you find yourself in a situation where you're like, oh shit, what do I do now? Because guess what? Your brain is brilliant. Even though you feel dumb as hell sometimes, especially when you make mistakes, your brain is the greatest single machine in the universe and it will always give you an answer. You just have to ask it a good question. If you ask it a bad question, like what's wrong with me? It will give you an answer and the answer most likely will not serve you.

However, if you ask it, how can I make it through this? How can I get through this moment? What would the character do? How can I find my success? How can I call on the years, sometimes decades of work that I have done in my career, in my life in order to get to this point? How can I make it through this piece of holy hell to the other side and be successful? And guess what? The more you ask your brain that question, the better the answers will become, the faster the answers will come to you, and the more quickly you will be able to move through what you used to think of as a failure, but is just another experience that gets you one step closer to the success that you want in your life and your career.

[11:04] Justin Guarini: All right. Well, that's all I got for you today. This was a quick hit of Audition Secrets. If you have any comments, questions, concerns, please reach out to me at auditionsecrets.com or you can send me an email to justin at auditionsecrets.com. I would love to hear from you. In the meantime, I'm Justin Guarini. You've been listening to Audition Secrets, and remember, you're only one audition away. Thanks for listening.