Auditioning by Heart’s Wed2Wed Workshop uses ‘Deliberate Practice,’ which has been proven to excel the mastering a skill. The human brain is optimized to pick up new skills extremely quickly, according to Josh Kaufman, the author of The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast!. Especially when you’re naturally interested in a particular skill, you’ll learn extremely quickly. If you persist and practice in an intelligent way, you’ll always experience dramatic improvements in a very short period of time.

If you believe it’s going to takes years to be a great actor, you’re less likely to stick to doing the work that makes your auditions great. You’ll resort to simply memorizing the lines and performing them in a “natural way”. This leads to what I call “Shmacting”: surface acting, and it tends to be derivative and banal. Instead, I’ll teach you to use ‘deliberate practice’ to quickly get the results you’re looking for; moment-to-moment feeling/thinking/living as the character.

As an Acting Coach, and even prior as an actor, I spent years transforming my method into one for the 21st century. Unlike Theatre, film and television demand a quick turnover with loss of deep connection to the script. Sure, actors practice, but what and how do they practice? This Wed2Wed Workshop doesn’t depends upon plain practice, because ‘deliberate practice’ makes the mastery of auditioning quick, purposeful and systematic. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds, in fact…IT’S FUN!

Actors overwhelmingly tell me that they learn more about acting in just a few days using the Auditioning by Heart technique than they did in four years of college!

‘Deliberate practice’ always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each part, and then integrate your learning into the overall process. In order for you to practice deliberately in the Wed2Wed Workshop, I have broken down the needed skills into ‘micro-skills’, mapped out the order in which you need to learn those ‘micro-skills’, and together we will evaluate, tweak and closely monitor your progress.

As described by respected business thinker, David Finkel, the author of 12 business books, including his newest release The Freedom Formula, ‘deliberate practice,’ will drastically shorten the 10,000 hours often needed to master a skill. Golfer, Ben Hogan, used “Hogan’s Secret” to finish his career with nine major Championships in astounding fashion…and we now call that secret, ‘deliberate practice’.

Geoff Colvin wrote one of my favorite books, Talent is Overrated. In it, he describes how Benjamin Franklin used ‘deliberate practice’ to improve his writing skills (and later to do experiments), and we all know how incredibly well that turned out.

There are just five core elements that make ‘deliberate practice’ work.

1. Intensity (FOCUS)

Rather than long, mindless bouts of repetition of your lines, we’ll concentrate on one particular “subskill” for a much shorter, tighter period of time. (Lines will come later ‘by Heart’…it’s magical) Also, practice the most important “subskill"s” first. A few “subskills” will always be more important than others, so it makes sense to begin by practicing the things that will give you the greatest increase in performance. By intensely focusing on the most critical parts of the skill, you’ll see a dramatic increase in your performance quickly.

2. Purpose (MINDSET)

First, we’ll unearth your BIG WHY, and then each hour of each day will be about concentrating intensely on learning a specific thing…it’s imperative to let go of “how to book the job” and focus on “how to do this one skill”. Your mind-set is everything!

3. Blocks (SMALL GOALS)

Small, crystal clear goals will be achievable and cause you to quickly improve. (See what I did there?) These will eventually work collectively toward creating your very best acting for your very best auditions. FUN!

4. Strategy (TECHNIQUE)
Following the Auditioning by Heart method will make you magnitudes more efficient at script analysis and moving from that to organic, feeling, connected work in your auditions (and your acting in general).

5. Feedback (CRITIQUE)

The critique will be clear about WHY anything that was done is “on the money” or “less than ideal”, and will include how to quickly solve any issue in simple steps so that it is immediately fixable. With shortened time between cause and effect (between audition and critique) your mind will absorb the lessons more permanently.

The following bullet points are again from Josh Kaufman:

• Numerous studies in the fields of motor and cognitive skill acquisition have established that the first few hours of practicing a new skill always generate the most dramatic improvements in performance.

• The general pattern looks like this: when you start, you’re horrible, but you improve very quickly as you learn the most important parts of the skill. After reaching a certain level of skill very quickly, your rate of improvement declines, and subsequent improvement becomes much slower.

• In the research literature, this phenomenon is referred to as the “power law of practice,” and it’s one of the most consistent findings in skill acquisition research. The effect has been widely known since at least 1926, and it’s been replicated many times since in studies of both physical and mental skills. One study I found (“Toward an Instance Theory of Automatization,” G.D. Logan, Psychological Review, 1988) even went so far as to say “any theory of skill acquisition that does not accommodate the power law function for learning should be rejected immediately.” (emphasis added.)

In the Wed2Wed Workshop, we’ll practice the Auditioning by Heart method every day for 8 days, and you’ll find that you will acquire this new career-changing skill with incredible rapidity. If you do the work intentionally, it will definitely speed up your development as a great auditioning actor…which will excel your confidence, as well as your call-back & booking rates!

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585 Cobb Pkwy S, Ste A-1, Marietta, Ga 30067

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