A few weeks ago I spent five days in an acting workshop. My first time taking an acting class.
I didn’t know what I was walking into. I’m a writer. A speaker. I work with words on a page and a room full of faces. Standing in front of strangers pretending to be someone else was entirely new terrain.
I’ve written before about how I see emotions as e-motion. Energy in motion. That’s what it is. Energy moving through you. And when we don’t let ourselves feel it, when we stop it, it doesn’t move through. It gets stuck. It stays.
In real life, the order goes one way. Something happens. The emotion rises in response. Your body reacts. The feeling comes first, and the body follows.
Acting reverses it.
In acting, you already know what’s going to happen in the scene. There’s no surprise to react to. So you can’t wait for the emotion to arrive on its own. Instead, you create the motion the emotion would have. The posture. The face. The specific pattern of breathing. The way grief curls the shoulders. The way pride lifts the chest.
And here’s what’s interesting.
When you make the motion, the emotion comes to meet it.
Your body already knows what these feelings feel like from the inside. It has felt them before. So when you build the shape, you invite the feeling into the space you made for it. You’re reverse engineering the whole thing. Motion first. Emotion follows.
If it works on a stage, it might work off one.
If I’m nervous before something. Standing backstage before a keynote, heart going, hands cold. Can I invite the motion of confidence? Not to bury the nerves. Not to pretend they aren’t there. But to build the posture confidence would take. The stance. The breath. The way a steady person stands in their body.
And let the feeling come to meet the shape.
It’s a version of fake it until you make it. I know. But I don’t think this is the cynical version of that phrase. You’re not performing a self you don’t have access to. You’re using a door your body already knows how to open.
This isn’t something to lean on all the time. If you’re always reverse engineering your feelings, for what you want in the moment, you’re performing. And you stop hearing what your true emotions came to tell you. The energy connected to your authentic experience still needs to move through.
But in strategic moments. The ones where the nerves would keep you small. Where the feeling you have isn’t the feeling you need to do the thing you actually want to do. There, I think you can borrow the motion to call in the emotion.
A little burst. Built on purpose. To get yourself onto the stage.
I went to that workshop to try something new. I came out with a tool I didn’t expect.
