skills, fears and habits

When you are creating, rehearsing and performing material there are certain things that you need to be aware of to help and aid you in developing as an actor and not hold you back from reaching your full potential. These are qualities that me and my class will be working on throughout the duration of our course. They can be split up into 3 different categories of skills, fears and habits.

Skills
Confidence- Within yourself and your work. If you cannot get up in front in your class and be confident within your acting then how do you expect to make it in the industry. This is one of an actors biggest early blocks when it comes reaching their full potential.
Awareness- You have to be aware of the changing factors within yourself and your performances and become conscious of these so that you can change them at your choice. Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) worked around the idea of Psycho-physical awareness which focuses on the conflict between your inner body mind and your outer body. He taught that if you take care of your characters actions and they are in line with your given circumstances then the emotions naturally take care of themselves.
Imagination/Creativity-
Collaboration- Within our course we are going to be working in different groups and different people all the time and we need to learn how to blend all of our ideas together. This links into openness.
Discipline- If everybody in the class is well behaved, focused and ready to learn then less rehearsal time is wasted meaning more work can be developed. If people in the group are not concentrating then it pulls the attention of everybody else.
Openness- When devising a piece of material you should be open to everyone's ideas and give them all a go to see what works not matter what your initial thoughts are. You cannot be narrow minded when it comes to creating and developing. Also you need to be open to other peoples pieces of work and the way that they have interpreted certain things that you may not of thought of before. You need to remember everybody has a different way of working.
Voice- As an actor your voice is your most important and valuable tool. You need to make sure that you are looking after it with vocal warm ups and not straining it unnecessarily. The voice helps us embody the role and the lines we are saying.
Observation/Listening- You need to be able to respectively watch and observe other peoples work and explain what is working and what needs improving. This skill can help you in improving your own work by reflecting other peoples work onto yours regarding your feedback.

Fears 
Rejection- It is always on the back of our minds that some of the ideas we have in our heads might not sound as good out loud or people might not want to go with them but how will we ever know if we never say anything?
Getting it wrong- When performing our work we may forget our lines or say something wrong. the more we think about this then the more chance we actually have of tripping up somewhere because we are not fully focused. There is nothing bad with getting something wrong now and then and with every mistake there is a lesson to be learnt.
Fear of failure- When we are worried that we might not be as good as everyone else or  all it does is holds us back.

Habits
Being shy- this links into the skill of being confident. If you are shy about your work and go into a shell when developing your pieces then you will not get your ideas across and will always end up performing material you had no input in. This will make you feel disconnected to your character and will be a hardship in the long run.
Forcing emotions- This links into the skill of awareness. The basis of acting is actions not emotion and therefore you should not have to fore your emotions because if you follow all the right techniques then it should just flow naturally. When you force emotion it just comes off unnatural and its not convincing.
Puppet acting- this is when actors rely on the director or others around them to tell them all of their characters traits and don't think by themselves to take the initiative to develop the role.
Cheap laughs- When we are doing things such as improvisation it is very easy to say certain lines that we know will get a laugh out of an audience such as insults. As actors we should try and steer clear of these jokes and come up with fresh and original contents.