Self Esteem through Acting Classes

Acting Classes are a great way to instill self confidence in you or your child.

One of the major flaws in education and the work environment is the way that they deal with failure. They don't.

Our society becomes so afraid of rejection and failure that they don't act. They don't act on anything if there is the chance of rejection and the chance of failure. In school, the kids with learning disabilities, organizational issues, bullying issues and those that have run afoul somehow of the curriculum have their self esteem robbed from them. Self esteem issues lead kids to act out, to act up, to become bored, disinterested and cynical. In the education system where style trumps substance, where penmanship trumps quality of content, it becomes difficult for kids with substance and kids with disabilities to succeed. How many parents have seen their happy pre-schooler become depressed or anxious at school. Perhaps the child is often in trouble. Boys of course bear the brunt.

How many boys have their emotions imprisoned by drugs such as Ritalin because they committed the crime of being a boy? The school system, at least at the elementary level is taught mostly by women who can't handle normal boys. Thus the self-esteem of boys takes a dive at school. If these boys are lucky enough to be good at sports then they have an outlet and a positive way of dealing with the self-esteem issues that the education system crushes,

If they are not good at sports, then they have to find some sort of extra-curricular activity that can develop their potential and promote the positive in them.

Many girls succeed by being people-pleasers. They tend to be liked by their teachers. But that is certainly a triumph of style over substance. Girls learn to avoid failure like the plague and they suppress the things that they might actually have an interest in. Any type of failure becomes a great source of anxiety.

For adults, weaned on the school system, they learn to embrace the middle of the road, the mediocre, because they don't want to stick their neck out and risk getting it cut off. Fear of failure and rejection stops people from going after the things that they really want, of avoiding the risk of embarrassment or failure.

In today's society failure is never an option.

But successful people have many failures, many rejections and many embarrassments. It just doesn't stop them. Most people would rather avoid failure than embrace success.

Acting Classes are great for developing the potential within adults and kids because it has safe built-in failure possibilities. When an improv game bombs, when an actor in class is learning disabled and struggles to learn their lines, when a child is rejected for a part, it becomes part of the learning process. The whole class is in it together, so the whole class learns the positive effects of failure at the same time. Being allowed to fail in a safe supportive environment allows one to succeed. Kids learn to walk in a supportive environment of family members thrilled with each failed attempt.

One of the most anxious times for kids is reading. From my experience it is a great source of anxiety. In acting classes, it doesn't matter. Dyslexic kids might take a lot longer to translate the word scrabble on the page but they do. And then nothing can stop them

Self esteem is achieved through actual achievement. Self esteem is accomplished through dealing with failure in a positive way. When everyone is working on a common goal, such as a play, and when every kid or adult gets the same-size part based on their particular strengths the group succeeds only as much as every individual in the group succeeds.

In acting classes, one learns that failure is only one possibility of many. You learn from it and you move on.
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For more information about Acting Classes in Kingston go to
Bottle Tree Productions/Acting Classes