My Personal Thoughts

I have worked in various professional settings over the past several years in varying capacities and fields. Professionalism comes from a number of sources, the foremost being experience. Obviously, this is not to say that experience alone makes someone a professional, nor does it mean that they will model professional behavior and choices. This has been apparent to me over the course of working on some recent projects. But recent adventures in my life have been highlighting the fact that a lack of professionalism can be a very irritating thing and is truly an enemy of progress, success and quality production.

Working as an Actor

I have been working as an actor semi-professionally, as an amateur and voluntarily through independent works for a decade and a half. I have been very spoiled for the most part with the quality of training and experience that I have received. I have had mentors, directors, producers and production staff that often times modeled not just professional behavior, but such behavior and practices of the highest quality. As a young adult I worked with several directors and vocal and acting coaches that did then or do now work in a professional setting doing the same thing with other professional actors as their primary source of financial support. Not only do they do this for a living, but they're damn good at it, some receiving exceptional accolades and notoriety.

This kind of experience comes as a double-edged sword. On one side, it means that I have been able to grow much more as a professional than I may have been able to otherwise. It also means that I'm spoiled and when I work with amateurs I have to remind myself how spoiled I am and not get frustrated as green actors, directors and staff make mistakes. Mistakes I can handle, lack of professionalism I cannot. At any level of skill and experience, behaving in a professional and adult manner will lend itself to the most potential for growth. As a good friend put it, "if I wanted to learn carpentry, I may not be a master carpenter, but I would want to try and emulate the behaviors of master carpenters so that I could achieve similar levels of quality."

Qualities of a Professional:
1) Self-Reflective
2) Maintains a desire for self-improvement
3) Capable of accepting criticisms
4) Open-Minded
5) Respectful of others
6) Holds quality of product above personal preferences
7) Exhibits a high-level of responsibility

I list these qualities because I think many people may not realize that these are the qualities you need to have in order to be a professional. The world is ever-changing and we're never perfect. Thus, in order to perfect ourselves, we need to be forever changing and improving.

1) You must be able to look at yourself and your performance and determine what's working, what's not, how to maintain the good and improve the not-so-good.

2) You need to WANT to be better. Always. Complacency is the enemy of progress. Progress happens elsewhere with or without you. If you do not progress, the level of success will move without you and you will no longer be able to measure your performance as successful. Several large American corporations of the past can be use as prime examples of complacency leading to decline or even failure.

3) We don't always see all our of our own strengths and weaknesses. We need mentors and peers to offer us criticisms and accolades to learn how to improve. If we can't be coached, we won't get better. Coaches exist for a reason. A very important reason.

4) You have to be open to the fact that the best way for you, at the time, may not be the best way to do something. You never know if something is not going to work until you try it and fail. You also never no if something will work until you try it and succeed. Granted, this comes with a level of scrutiny for the obvious outlier examples that don't need to be tested. i.e. I don't need to jump off the Empire State building to prove that I can't fly.

5) In the real world, there are other people. If you do not respect them, you cannot learn much from them. They will also not want to work with you. Human beings are social creatures and the fact of the matter is, you're not going to get far in life unless you learn how to work with other humans.

6)This is the biggest one. You can't be part of something bigger than yourself unless you understand that it IS bigger than just you. You are one person in a huge world. You alone are worthless by relative to the rest of the world. So if all you value is yourself, then that is a pretty poor measure of success. To have true success and stand out in the world, your achievements need to speak louder than your lone voice. They need to shine brighter than just your face. Furthermore, you can't call something success just because YOU like it. For example. A carpenter makes a square table. He needs to think about the quality of the table, not what he thinks it's cool. He may think it would be awesome to have a three-legged square table. But that is not the best way to make a quality table. The table itself needs to supersede his own preferences. This is not to say that his preferences will never align with the "greater good," but it if preference and quality do not agree, it is best to err on the side of quality.

7) Simply, get your shit done. Take care of your responsibilities.

I recently worked on a stage production that was, overall, the most rewarding stage experience of my career thus far. The frustrating thing about it was not that it was bad. It was great. The thing that pissed me off was that this production should have be THE single-most amazing thing of its kind in the area and my life. And it wasn't. It was just great. Great would have made me happy if our entire company was just great. Great would have made me ecstatic if our entire company was less than great. The thing that pissed me off was that the talent we had in the company was phenomenal. The product with which we were working is widely regarded as THE greatest of its kind. We had the product, we had the skills and we failed dismally at the professionalism aspect in my eyes.

Many people will say, "Skitch, you admit that it was a great success. Why aren't you happy with great? It's great!" I can refer to my previous statement about complacency to rebut that. I can also speak of opportunity cost. If on a 1 - 100 scale I could rate this production an 80 and we could have attained 95, that gives us an opportunity cost of 15. That means our net gain in performing in this manner was -15. On a net scale of -99 to 99, 0 could be considered average. Or I would even go as far as to make a comparison to IQ where this would equate to an IQ of 85. Thus, from an economist's perspective we created a below-average product. I look at it partly from this point of view. This is why I'm not happy with the outcome.

Here is where we failed as a collective: Professionalism. Following are some specific examples.

1) A close friend of mine thought that they were already doing well enough early on in the rehearsal process. Because of this they were not self-reflective. They made very little progress until the very end when they received a lot of external pressure to rethink their work and dedication. They are immensely talented and were still able to pull off a hell of a job, but I can't help but think about that extra fire that would have been there in the end had they really taken themselves seriously and asked themselves daily about their own progress.

2) I don't like to really refer to this example openly. As a matter of fact I have, for the most part, avoided or tried to tactfully remove myself from conversations criticizing our directorship during the entire creative process. I believe that it becomes to easy to undermine their authority and level of experience and knowledge should we not be careful. But really upon reflection, aside from the example I gave above, the directorship as a whole seemed to be, by far, the most guilty of being complacent with themselves and thinking they were good enough. When questioned about motivations and reasoning, the response was almost universally, "because I said so." That sort of response does have it's own time and place. And I must also point out that when I got those responses, I simply complied. However, as students, employees, proteges, we need to understand why we're doing what we're doing in order to really get the most out of it and learn. This is a basic and important premise of pedagogy and it is important to understand that it applies to ALL effective supervisor-subordinate relationships. Looking back, it has become abundantly clear that "because I said so" was a rough translation from the real meanings of "I don't know" or "because it's good enough". "Why?" is the question that they should have been asking themselves the entire time just as the rest of us should have been asking ourselves and each other.

3) Several actors (two in particular) would talk back, yell, argue or be otherwise disrespectful when given simple direction that really only required a simple "thank you" as a response. This would make my blood boil. If you don't want to be directed, go work alone and leave this to the professionals.

4) Open-mindedness didn't serve as a huge stumbling block, but there were a few mildly frustrating instances where something was clearly NOT working at all and other people involved refused to listen to alternative solutions. This halts the creative process in a dreadfully quick manner.

5) How juvenile of a society do we live in when grown adults don't know to leave other people's shit alone? If it's not yours, quick f-ing with it. Don't call people out in front of others. The thing that bothered me the most personally was a clearly visible lack of respect afforded me from one of the directors that immediately carried it's way down to my peers as I had to spend the majority of the rehearsal process receiving snide destructive criticisms and back-handed compliments at best.

6) A specific actor was constantly trying to put herself more in the spotlight, doing things that she thought made her look better at the cost of the performance quality and general safety of others. She was constantly trying to "steal the show" in ways that were detrimental to the overall quality. I can honestly say that I hope I never work with her again. There is no place in a professional collective for somebody that will so blatantly sacrifice the good of all for her own personal gains. I don't care how cute you think you or the things that you do are. You are not the star for a reason, do not take away from what the people really came to see. And do not take away from the hard work of others. I feel so passionate about this, that I seriously can hardly compose myself as I write these very words.

7) Many people didn't get their shit done. They didn't do the things they needed to do. I was guilty of this on several occasions as well. We're human, this happens. Everyone just needs to understand that this will always be an area that they will need to work on. Be responsible.

Lack of skill, talent or experience I can live with. I know I'm spoiled, so it can be frustrating from time to time, but I'm willing to forgive. What I can't stand is willful failure. To me, a lack of professional qualities is a near-equivalent to willful failure. If you want to suck, do it somewhere else.