123 | Your Acting Career is Stuck Because of This Pattern

0:00Okay, so picture this. You're sitting there at 11 p.m., you've refreshed your inbox about a thousand times and crickets. Again, and why? Because you are trained, you've been submitting. You've done every single thing that everybody has told you would work. And still you are not booking. Well, if that's you, I have a free tool that is going to show you why. And in this video, I'm gonna talk you through what you'll find. So if you haven't done the actor career DNA decoder yet, the link is in the description. You should definitely do that first, but if you haven't done it, hey, you're in the right spot. So let's get into it. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what your three scores mean, how they work together, and where your real gap is. So I built the actor career DNA decoder because after working with literally hundreds and hundreds of actors, I kept seeing the same thing. Talented, trained actors all doing everything that,

1:00you know, they felt like they were supposed to be doing, and they were still not getting higher, still not getting auditions. And almost every single one of them was wrong about the reason why. And that's what your results are going to show you. Your results start with three scores, and each of them are on a scale of one to 10. So if you scored between a one and a five, hey, you know what, you are in very good company because that's where the vast majority of actors who take this thing land. It is not a judgment. Trust me, I have definitely been everywhere. It's a GPS reading. It tells you where you actually are so that you can stop guessing and get to where you want to go. It's not any one single number. It's how the three interact with each other. One high score with two low scores. They can leave you just to stuck as three low ones. So the first score that we need to pay attention to is the decision maker proximity score.

2:02This one is super simple. It just measures how close you are to the people who can actually hire you, or at least offer you an audition. Not to you know who they are, but to they know who you are. And are there people with the actual power to cast you or call you in or recommend you? Do they know your work? And do they think of you more importantly when something that you would be right for comes up? So if you scored a one, two, a three, unfortunately you are invisible to the people who hire actors. You may be submitting through platforms, sending self tapes into the void. And if a casting director sat down tomorrow to make a list of all the actors they've recently had a real exchange with, the question to ask yourself is, are you going to be on it? And the answer if it's no is it's not because you're not good. It's because that relationship has not yet, yet been created.

3:03The actor career DNA decoder is a free tool in the description. It walks you through a conversation and gives you all three of these scores plus your specific bottleneck patterns. And it takes about 15 minutes. So if you scored a four to a six, you've been in some room, so that's good. Maybe you have an agent, but maybe you also feel like you're just a name on somebody's roster. Or maybe you did a workshop with a casting director and it went really, really well. And then six months later, you never followed up. And the dots exist, but they're just not connected. Now if you scored a seven or above, congratulations. People do know who you are, but that alone doesn't mean your career is working. Matthew McConaughey, before Dallas Buyers Club, is a perfect example of this. Every decision maker in Hollywood and around the world, frankly, knew his name. His proximity was 10 out of 10.

4:06But he was typecast as the shirtless romcom got. And he knew he was capable of more. But he first had to destroy his body. He had to say no to millions of dollars in roles before anyone would even consider looking at him differently. And that's what happens when proximity is high, but your other two scores. This is why it's so important to have all of them working in tandem together. So the next score that you need to be attention to is the strategic clarity. This is the score that tends to hit people the hardest. It measures the gap between what you think is keeping you from working, and what is it truly keeping you from working. So if you went into the Dakota with a story like, I just need a better real, or I need an agent, or I need a better agent, or the market's just slow right. The Dakota is going to be comparing that story against everything else you said, your habits, your defaults, what you avoid,

5:09how you reacted to the scenario as it gave you. And it's going to be synthesizing them. So a low score here means you've been trying to fix the wrong thing, which is good news, because when you know that you've been doing that, you can stop pouring all of your energy into that thing, and start putting it in to the thing that is going to make a difference. So maybe you've been perfecting your headshots when the people who need to see them don't even know you exist, or maybe you're signing up for another class, when your gap is not, you are craft, it's access, and access is the hardest thing to build without a plan. You could perfect that one thing for the next 10 years, you're craft, and still be exactly where you are right now. Now, a mid-range score means you can feel something deeper is off, but you can't quite put your finger on it.

6:10You're partly right about what's wrong, but you're missing a piece, and a high score means you see it clearly, but you just don't know what to do about it yet. Again, that word yet, it's an important word, because that means things are going to change. Now, these scores do not work alone. The low proximity plus low clarity means you're invisible and fixing the wrong problem. That's the combination that, honestly, I see the most. The high proximity plus low clarity means people do know you, but you keep putting energy in the wrong direction, because you can't see exactly which piece is broken. Every combination tells a different story, which brings us to actor aligned. And this one measures whether what you're actually doing week to week lines up with where you say you want to be, and they must line up. Now, here's what a typical work week looks like

7:12for a lot of actors when they first come to me. They go to class, they scroll casting platforms, they submit to everything that's vaguely right, and they redo their real for the third time, or they reshoot their heads, or they complain about their agent. Look, all of it feels productive, and some of it is necessary. But if you added up all the hours and asked yourself, how much of this is actually going to put me in front of someone who could cast me or recommend me? The answer is usually almost none. You can also score low on this, even if you're doing what looks like everything you're supposed to be doing. But if those things are pointed at a market, you can't actually work in, that it won't work. I see this constantly. I see European actors all the time, spending all of their money flying the workshops with American casting directors, that they will never be able to audition for, or frankly work for,

8:13unless they're able to jump through a set of very specific hoops that have to do with bureaucracy, and not with their talent, instead of focusing their attention, where they live, where they could actually be working. It makes them feel like they're really busy and doing something towards their career. But they're aiming all of that energy at a locked door. This score doesn't care how hard you're working. It cares whether the work is aimed at something that can surely say yes to you. And when it's not, that's how you end up exhausted and unmotive. And I don't want that to happen to you. So once you've got these three scores, they tell you where you are. Your bottleneck patterns tell you why, and this is also super important. The decoder identified a primary bottleneck, and a secondary bump. These are the habits and beliefs that are running your career without you even knowing it. And they come in three flavors. The first group is about getting ready to get ready.

9:15You keep telling yourself, one more thing that I'll start. And that one more thing keeps changing, or the bar keeps getting raised. You're doing a lot. You could fill a spreadsheet with everything you've got going. But if someone asked you what all that activity actually has led to, what concrete result came from it, you probably not have a lot to say. The effort is real, but the direction is on. The third group is about the stories that you treat as facts. The ones that quietly decide what you'll try and what you won't. Measuring yourself against other actors, highlight reels, believing you have to figure everything out on your own or the big one, sitting back and believing if you're good enough, the right people will even truly find you. These are the hardest to see because they don't feel like patterns. They feel like truths.

10:15Your primary bottleneck is doing the most damage right now. Your secondary bottleneck is feeding it, and they work together. And that's why we'll power alone will not fix this. You cannot push past something that you can't see. And that is what I call your blind spot. This is where the decoder connects everything. Your scores, your patterns, your bottlenecks, and the stuff you said during the conversation that you probably didn't even think twice about. And it draws a line between how you're operating and why your career looks the way it does. Here's what that actually sounds like. So for instance, if your proximity is low, your clarity is low, and the decoder flag to pattern around waiting to be chosen, what that usually means is you have been investing in being ready for opportunities instead of doing the things that create actual contact with the people who hire.

11:15In other words, creating your own opportunities because underneath it all is a belief that if you are good enough, the industry should come to you. And everything you do makes perfect sense inside of that belief. That's exactly why you can't see it. So now you've got the picture, you got your three scores, you got your patterns, you got your bottlenecks, you got your blind spot, but seeing the pattern and breaking the pattern are two completely different things. You can read your results 10 times, 20 times, 1000 times. Nothing changes until you do something and that's what the Sidedoor Challenge helps you to do. So the Sidedoor Challenge is a live five-day event where we take everything that the decoder showed you and we build you a personal 90-day plan that gets you in front of the people who can actually live here. Plan built around your gaps. The link for that is also in the show notes.

12:17Look, you have been doing the work. It is time to point it somewhere that will actually start to get you some yeses. See you at the Sidedoor.