And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.

Continued on The Inner Actor

You’re especially prone to the Expert Trap if you mistakenly believe that competence and expertise are one and the same. The belief that, “If I were really competent, intelligent, qualified . . . I would know more” keeps far too many people from striking out on their own.

A lot of men fall victim to this same self-limiting thinking.

Yet my early research, coupled with twenty-plus years of anecdotal evidence, suggests women are more prone to equate competence with knowing it all.

[Image from Rethinking Expertise, by Harry Collins and Robert Evans.

But acclaimed author Germaine Greer says, “No matter how much energy Disney - which makes the TV show Hannah Montana, in which Cyrus stars - might put into denying the obvious, 15-year-olds are sexually aware.”

Continued on Teen / Young Adult Talent

“Now the question is, Are you looking for yourself in what you do? Are you attempting to add more to who you think you are?…

“And ultimately, what is the point of it all? More information, more things, more of this, more of that. Are we going to find the fullness of life through more things and greater and bigger shopping malls?”

Continued in article The Most Important Dimension of Human Existence, By Eckhart Tolle.

Psychologist Anne Paris, PhD.

More on Developing Talent

Continued on Women and Talent.

“Like many sensitive, anxious elementary school kids, I was overwhelmed with my day to day life.

“I thought my sensory overload, deep empathy and social shyness meant there was something wrong with me. At the same time, I felt a strong sense of these traits being very important to my future.” Jenna Forrest

On April 23rd, the new edition of Jenna Forrest’s memoir Help Is On Its Way was officially released.

See this jennaforrest.com page for details.

Also see related Highly Sensitive post: Lost in our reactions, and article: Jenna Forrest on being young and sensitive - and more articles by Jenna.

Part of my job as an actress is to do interviews, but while I find it easy to talk about the work, I tend to frustrate interviewers by avoiding talking about myself. For the same reason I have never been to a shrink.

Actually, I lie; I did go to a shrink once. When I was about twenty-three I was very unhappy and, yes, self-obsessed and insecure.

It seems to me that the years between eighteen and twenty-eight are the hardest, psychologically. It’s then you realize this is make or break, you no longer have the excuse of youth, and it is time to become an adult - but you are not ready.

I just could not believe that anything I desired would happen, and the responsibility of making my own way, economically, artistically and emotionally, was terrifying. So I went to a psychologist.

Now I don’t know whether he did this on purpose, realising that all I needed to do was grow up, but after I had poured out my unhappiness to him, the psychologist very, very quietly, in a strong Scottish accent, began to explain to me the root cause and solution to my misery.

I could not understand a word. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind repeating it. He did, and I still couldn’t understand a word. The fourth time of asking I gave up, and realised that an analyst was not going to work for me.

My next stop on this journey of self-discovery was to visit a hand reader. Though I’ve never been a believer in astrology or the art of reading palms, I was pretty desperate and he came highly recommended.

So I made my way to a nondescript house in a back street of Golders Green and went into the dingy, very ordinary living room where he did his readings. He was an Indian man, more like an accountant than a mystic. I liked him. He handed me cheap paper and a pencil, saying, ‘I will study your hand and then I will speak very fast.

You will not remember what I will say, so write it down as fast as you can.’ And that was exactly what happened. He spent about ten minutes intensely studying my hand, I can’t remember which one, and then he began to speak. I had to write so fast I could not take stock of what he was saying.

After about twenty minutes, I was a fiver poorer and back on the street with my whole future life spelt out in scrawling script on a massive heap of paper. It was quite true, I could not remember any of it. Well, there is one thing I remember. He said, ‘You will be successful in life, but you will see your greatest success later, after the age of forty-five.’

Not something you want to hear at the age of twenty-three, but it turned out he was right.

At least it brought to an end my period of desperate introspection and miserable self obsession.

As I looked at those scrawled pages, I realised that I did not want to know what the future held. I wanted my life to be an adventure. Whatever pleasure or pains, successes or failures, disasters or triumphs were waiting for me, I wanted them to come as a surprise.

I took the pages and stuffed them into the first rubbish bin I could find, then stepped out into the rest of my life.

From In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures, by Helen Mirren.

“Both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I labored in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.”

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, is one of many expressions in literature - and psychology - of the idea we have both “visible” and “hidden” sides. Sometimes “good” and “bad” sides. The quote above by Dr. Jekyll articulates our ambivalence with choosing one over the other as our “real” self.

Eckhart Tolle, author of A New Earth, identifies another typically hidden aspect of our personalities that he calls the pain-body: “It can be considered almost an entity in its own right that lives in you.. it’s an energy form,” he says.

He further explains (in his online class with Oprah Winfrey) that until we become aware enough, we “are identified with that voice in the head, with its repetitive thought patterns.

“And that is what most people are trapped in, and it makes up their superficial personality with all the continuous repetitive judgment, and likes and dislikes, and prejudices and whatever makes up the content of their egoic mind.

“So people are trapped in that and derive a sense of self from that, which is ultimately insubstantial, conditioned by the past and not who they are.”

From article Our Very Unhappy Entity: The Pain-body.

Tolle makes it clear that developing awareness can defuse the emotionally restricting and destructive aspects of our psyche, that this awareness is both possible and needed for our emotional health and life satisfaction, but it is a process, maybe a very long one - not simply a matter of insight.

Psychology, as well as the teachings of Tolle and many other spiritual leaders, can help us gain that awareness.

Professor of Psychology Steven C. Hayes, PhD expresses some perspectives related to Tolle’s concept of ego and the pain-body.

Hayes says that his research on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy shows that “entanglement with your own mind leads automatically to experiential avoidance: the tendency to try first to remove or change negative thoughts and feelings as a method of life enhancement.

“This attempted sequence makes negative thoughts and feelings more central, important, and fearsome–and often decreasing the ability to be flexible, effective, and happy.

“The trick that traps us is that these unhelpful mental processes are fed by agreement OR disagreement. Your mind is like a person who has to be right about everything. If you know any people like that you know that they are excited when you agree with them but they can be even more excited and energized when you argue with them! Minds are like that.

“We get a lot of training in how to develop and use our minds, but we get very little training in how to step out of the mental chatter when that is needed. As a result, this mental tool begins to use us. It will even claim to BE us.

“Learning how to get out of your mind and into your life when you need to do that is an essential skill in the modern world.”

Book: Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Once you have a sense of your meaning-making path, you can begin to decide what sorts of criticisms are going to count and what sorts of criticisms you are going to ignore out of hand.

If you decide that your meaning-making path is writing, you can then shrug off criticism of your singing voice and your snoring as minor and only worth considering insofar as you don’t want to bring down your choir or keep up your lover.

That is, you process criticism of this irrelevant sort to see what it means and what it implies, but you do so without any emotional charge attached because it does not connect to your meaning-making path.

Continued in article The Existential Key, by Eric Maisel, PhD.

Image: American Idol judge Simon Cowell, “notorious for his unsparingly blunt and often controversial criticisms, insults, and wisecracks about contestants and their singing abilities, or lack thereof.” [Wikipedia]