"Wow," I thought, "I frigging love learning!!" I had a bit of experience with acting, so I adopted his body language, movement patterns, and mindset. He was quite autistic, moved his face and body in unusual ways, but he loved learning and always read the books before term even started. I tried to put myself in the shoes of the best student I knew. One day I got fed up with that huge pressure / inability to move and said, "Damn, how is this so easy for Anne, or Josh!!! How do they do it?" Then suddenly, "wait. I was behind in every single class and the stress created a vicious cycle where it became harder and harder to study due to the paralyzing anxiety. When I was a teenager, I had incredible difficulties getting myself to study. I can attest to the power of "acting" even in private. The book "The Alter Ego Effect" by Todd Herman goes into this further, but my favorite material on this is "Impro" by Keith Johnstone. These are YouTubers, Streamers, Conference Speakers, and really anything where there's a concept of a "stage". I believe many people adopt an alter ego without knowing it today. Another common thing I would teach is that you can alter your characters in scenes easily by adopting one of those personas of the character you're portraying. I do believe we also have an alter ego in three different situations such as work, home, and play. This helped so many different people such as accountants, pre-k teachers, stay-at-home moms, and even university professors get out of their shells, prevent their stage fright, and to be more energetic on-stage when their normal persona is calm, cool, and collected. One tip I would give new performers is to adopt an alter ego for the stage (a fun fake name and/or personality) and to choose a totem (an object) that they wear to do just that such as shoes, a shirt, watch, etc.
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