How do we pace ourselves?

Seasons are changing! This Fall brings apples, cooler weather, and…auditions. As we start this Fall audition season, how are we pacing ourselves?

Auditions tend to bring out a go-go-go attitude. There’s last minute rearranging of our schedule, getting a reader, editing our self tapes, racing to a call, callbacks… This flurry of activity can give us tunnel vision. Doubly so for those of us that live in a metropolitan area (here in NYC, we just move at a faster speed).

And that hyper-focus can help us sometimes! It can motivate us to learn our lines, sustain us on long days in the waiting room, keep us on the task that’s right in front of us, and even connect us to the material. At its best, this is that good stress.

Yet even good stress can tire us out, especially if we’re on the go, go, go. If we’re only focused on what’s right in front of us, over time that can make it harder to zoom out to the bigger picture. Like how we’re going to keep this pace for the next two months…

No matter the stress, we will always need time to recover and recharge.

So how do you pace yourself?

Pacing is a practice of doing something while respecting our limits and bodies. It’s part awareness, managing energy, effort, taking breaks, and resting to recharge. When we pace ourselves, we don’t run the risk of wearing or burning out.

For a lot of us artists, we learn pacing the hard way. We learn how to respect our limits by constantly pushing ourselves too far. At least that’s how I learned. I was always told to give 110% to every performance, audition, or class. This was reinforced by a culture of “raise the stakes,” “the show must go on,” and any time I gave less than my all, then I was “less than” as an artist.

I had to learn the difference between stretching my craft and exhausting myself. And look, we love to stretch our artistic limits! Be they physical, emotional, or psychological, give us all the juicy, endurance laden, cerebral parts!

Yet there is a difference between expanding our creative edge and constantly blowing past it. Think about it like stretching a rubber band. We want to pull it gently, little by little so that it always bounces back. If we pull it too hard, too fast, too often, over time that can make the band less (not more) stretchy.  And the last thing we want is to snap our band.

Pacing allows us to respect our limits while still encouraging our growth.

Okay, so how do we do that?

Not many of us artists are taught how to recharge as we go, waiting instead for a vacation or pushing through to the end of the day. A lot of us think “if I relax, I’ll collapse.” And it’s true! When we are go-go-go and then we relax, we may feel more (not less) tired.

This is because stress can disconnect us from our bodies. So when we relax, our bodies come back online. That’s when we realize how hard we’ve been go-go-going! The last thing we need is to be too exhausted to continue at that callback. That’s a motivation killer!

Instead, what if we didn’t have to fully relax? What if we recenter a little bit here, a micro amount there? When we ground bit-by-bit throughout the day (or longer), that is going to reclaim a lot of our energy and let us recover as we go. We can then use that energy to keep pace on those long audition days, months, seasons…

Let’s talk practical tips.

Breaks can help us keep pace longer. Now I’m going to be real here: it is one thing to say “I can always take a break,” and it is a whole other thing to actually take a break when we’re on the go-go-go. When that energy starts flowing, especially if it feels like good stress, the last thing we will want (or remember) to do is take a break.

Try scheduling these breaks on long or stressful audition days. Use phone reminders, a grounding tool, have a snack, call a loved one, walk around the block, look up from the screen… Having tools and practices already baked into our day will make it easier for us to rely on them when (or if) we need them.

Next, let’s celebrate our daily practices. Small daily practices over time can help us shift our baseline. When we feel more grounded overall, we are in a better position to tackle that big audition, that big burst of stress. And when we’ve built a practice of this, we can then trust that it’ll be there for us when we need it.

Lastly, we can pace ourselves with how we ground too! We performers are used to going really deep, really fast. Yet we don’t always need to ground fully and completely every time. Remember, we don’t want to collapse! Sometimes just a micro adjustment is all we need to unlock our creativity or bring us back from the edge.

If you’re curious about how to upgrade your personal practice and level up your creativity, reach out to me here.