Practice makes permanent

Malcolm Gladwell states in his book ‘Outliers’ that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill.

That assumes that every minute of those 10,000 hours was spent on proper practice. Because if you practice the wrong thing, you master the wrong thing.

And as with anything that is worth doing, it takes time, nurturing, courage, skill, knowledge, support investment, thought and RIGHT practice.

When I first decided to pursue a post-graduate degree in theatre in 2015, every step I took was a calculated, deliberate one. I made choices daily - usually numbering in the thousands I’d imagine - about where to spend my intellectual and emotional energy because I knew that I needed to create and nurture a practice that would give me the best chance of success at a long career in the performing arts.

It sounds relentless, obsessive and exhausting. But it wasn’t. Rather than pressuring myself to make the “right” decision, I grounded every decision in my purpose. Once I did that, the right decision for me - in that moment - became clear.

And so it is with building a healthy inner life practice. We all have different needs and it is critical to apply conscious thought. Don’t just take what someone else has done and apply it to your practice. Think. What do YOU need? What SMALL STEPS can you take to get what you need? For example, I attend Musical Theatre dance choreography classes - specifically dance choreography as opposed to skills classes - because I know this is what I need to feel comfortable in stressful audition environments.

Having a healthy inner life practice does not make you immune to the sting of rejection, the inertia of repeated failure and the crushing weight of inadequacy. What it does is it gives you a path to re-direct your energy. I have found that creating a healthy inner life practice that comes from what EU JIN specifically needs gives me the space to see more than just my fears when they threaten to overwhelm me. And even when they do overwhelm me, I know that I will eventually see a way past them because I am practicing what is right for me.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!

And what about our darkness?

How do you look into your own darkness? How do you face it over and over again, live with it without feeling like it wants to consume you? How do you stop it from seeping into your every pore, into the hidden spaces you keep safe, into own soul and into your entire being?

I believe we all have darkness within us, and recently I’ve had the privilege to be trusted with the opportunity to look closely into the darkness of others. It was very unsettling and my instinct for self-preservation started to kick in. Yet at the same time, I felt strongly that there was something I was not seeing. So I stopped pulling my walls up, calmed myself and took a look.

Is our darkness the stain of original sin? As someone who holds the Christian faith, I believe in original sin. At the same time, I don’t believe it justifies any behaviour - like a catch-up excuse for things we aren’t proud of. It’s far too convenient.

Or is it the modern world we live in today - with all its pressures and its conveniences, its stigmas and its rules, its structure and its liberties, its expectations and its judgements, its momentum and its history? What strikes me the most about modern life are the unspoken “shoulds” of the world - that for all the freedom it affords us, modern society has created a ceiling woven into its very fabric which demands these standards and blind comformity. For example, “I should be stronger”, “I should have this figured out”, “I should try harder”, “I should be better”, and so on. And a lot of the darkness I have seen comes from decades of not living up to these standards.

But there was still more to the picture I wasn’t seeing, so I continued to stay still - probing and allowing myself to take a closer look. What I began to make out was some sort of spectrum within this darkness. On one end of it was apathy, purposelessness, hopelessness and despair - which is what many people associate with this darkness. And on the other end was a realization that darkness is inseparable from light, and that our fear of darkness comes only because of the association we have made to light.

So why is light “good” and darkness “bad”? Do apathy and purposelessness exist so that we CAN discover purpose? Do hopelessness and despair exist so that we can see hope more clearly?

What if we stopped for just a moment and befriended our darkness? Instead of talking to it from behind our inpenetrable wall, sit down with it for coffee. What would it say?

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!

See with your heart, not with your eyes

We all compare ourselves to others. What started out as an innocent by-product of the industrial revolution has become a world-wide, defining characteristic of modern society. Comparing ourselves to others is in itself not a bad thing; wanting to do well in our endeavours is in itself not a bad thing. What - however - has become harmful is the association we have made of that result to our value, or future and our self-worth.

Just look at the number of kids in some 1st world countries who commit suicide because they didn’t achieve the grades that they are expected to?

Everyone I know struggles with this. Even the one who has become the best in the world must now struggle to hang onto their position. It never ends. And yet, the cycle of comparisons continue.

How else are we going to determine our place in society if we don’t compare ourselves? Modern society has decided that a certain level of accomplishment (be in educational, financial, etc.) decides your place on the ladder, and unless we decide to remove ourselves from modern society, it is impossible to get off the ladder.

And I want to stress that being on the ladder is not a bad thing. What is bad is how our self-worth and value are inextricably linked to how successful we are.

In my journey out of the corporate world of supply chain management (which was a very good marker) for how “successful” I was in society) into the world of the performing arts (which suffers from a bad reputation as “real work” and therefore is not as “valuable”), I’ve had to find a way to decouple my value and self-worth from what I do. I’ve had to learn to see with more than just my eyes. I’ve had to learn to see with my heart.

And what did my heart say? Fortunately, it did saying run off and become an actor, live of love and joy … no … what my heart said was “find our what you want your life to mean, then do the things that bring you there”.

In many ways, my work in supply chain management was work which gave my life the meaning that it wanted. But because I took time to discover what meaning I wanted my life to have, I started to see other avenues I could accomplish this with.

And let me say this: it is something I ask myself every day. Is this task something which moves me closer to giving my life the meaning that I want it to have? And when I asked myself that question, it becomes clear what I have to do … and all of a sudden, aligning it to what society says is the “right” thing to do becomes a lot easier.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!

Do we communicate to be heard, or do we communicate to be understood?

I recently met someone at a fitness class, and we got to chatting as we were leaving. When I shared with her that I was an actor, her immediate reaction was one of bewilderness and excitment. She exclaimed loudly: “You’re the first actor I’ve ever met!” Over the course of our 10 minute conversation, she repeated the same exclamation: “You’re the first actor I’ve ever met!” another 4 times.

Truth be told - after the 2nd time she said it, I started to feel like a zoo animal being looked at by a large crowd. After the 4th time, I started to feel like an alien from another planet surrounded by trigger-happy scientists ready to dissect me with a scalpel.

I felt extremely uncomfortable.

But then I realized: maybe it’s because people don’t understand. And if I - consciously or even unconsciously - draw a line in the sand and stand on one side, hoping people understand me, nothing will change. What I need to do is to erase the line in the sand and consciously stand TOGETHER with everyone else.

I need to communicate to be understand, not to be heard.

There is a clear difference. Communicating to be heard is like that teacher we’ve all had in school who is clearly brilliant but simply regurgitates fact after fact. Communicating to be understood is that teacher we love - who makes learning exciting, who deciphers what we need, who meets us halfway on our learning journey, who succeeds in helping us demystify, de-codify and even begin to appreciate and love a perilously complicated subject.

So back to the lady from my fitness class. Perhaps when I see her the next time, I need to stop and listen to what she needs to understand. Because once we listen and we understand, perhaps the next realization will be that we aren’t all that different after all.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you!