"Old Dogs Taught New Tricks?"
Success Secret #502: 'Decided Change'
From Cork Graham
San Francisco, CA
I was in tears this weekend!
My girlfriend, movie buff and ex-theater worker, had been trying to get me to watch this movie called, “Stage Beauty” for months. Perhaps you’ve seen it already? It was nominated for a few Oscars this year, so perhaps you have…
Well, we watched it and I must say it’s one helluva movie!
What was most stirring to me, as a behavior modification expert and business strategist, is the whole premise of a person, who because of circumstance, must change...and must change radically…
To give you the history, it’s a ‘true’ story, as much as Hollywood can be true—something I’m acutely aware of as preparations are made to turn my memoir, The Bamboo Chest, into a movie in the coming year—about English actor Edward "Ned" Kynaston and takes place during the reign of King Charles II.
As many of you who have studied Shakespeare, or watched the less graphic film, “Shakespeare in Love”, know, women were not allowed to act in theater in England. This law was carried through the time of Cromwell, and was finally done away with by a proclamation from King Charles II.
Can you imagine the number of out of work actors whose specialty was roles like Desdemona, Ophelia, Cordelia and the like, and who were suddenly out of work as women were finally permitted to take those roles?
PANDEMONIUM!!!
Many of these actors couldn’t make the shift, and most hit was the rock and roll star of his time, Ned Kynaston!
Billy Crudup, whom I enjoyed in “Almost Famous” and “Without Limits” was remarkable in “Stage Beauty”…it’s easy to see how his controversial romance with co-star Claire Danes started during the filming.
…before I get apart from myself, I better turn to a less hypnotic track of my collection Ravi Shankar’s “Improvisations”—yes, your Lakota scout, who twenty years after training can still hit a gnat on a elephants ass at 800 meters with a .300 Win Mag, is a CLOSET HIPPIE!…had to have been all those new reel-to-reels (remember the world before CDs?) of the Beatles and Petula Clark played by my dad when we lived in Saigon…
Gotta watch that music…nothing more empowering or distracting than the kind of music you listen to…or the movies you watch…<BG>
So back to the story, which I must say was brilliantly written and directed, takes Kynaston, the proverbial ego-inflated actor through the challenge of CHANGE…THE MOST CHALLENGING EVENTS OF LIFE…especially when you’re on the top of world…as Kynaston was in his theater world.
And like most, if not all people, if you’re on top of the world, why change?
And if you are on top of the world, I say why change, too!
But, what most people do is not just avoid change when they’re on top, and for some reason, a lot of people prefer to stay on the bottom than change…they become AVERSE to change…for only one reason: it’s because it’s comfortable!
Better the monster in view than the one deep beyond your view—did I ever tell you that I love freediving, but that it has been two years since one of my dive buddies met Mr. Grey (randy-gets-bit.com)…there’s a big white cross with abalone shells nailed to it on Highway 1 that makes the site of the attack near Fort Bragg….haven’t been in the water since then, though I’ve suddenly gotten a hankering for fresh abalone this month…the season started of all things on the April Fool’s Day, as every year—think California Dept. of Fish and Game has a twisted streak?
So anyway, Kynaston’s tossed into the conflict change because he thinks he can’t change, or worse that he was actually an actor to the level he had in his mind and protected by his arrogance…
I was actually getting embarrassed for Kynaston...heart-wrenching...as I watched him writhe and claw at himself as he repeatedly tried to take King Charles’ challenge: if he was an actor, act!…Act like a man! He tried, but at that point he hadn’t reached what he could be.
…he was not a GREAT actor, he was just an actor who "made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life" (actual description by theater documentarian of the time, Samuel Pepys), but not until Kynaston was almost beaten to death, lost the one person he could truly love, and had been told by Nellie Gwynne, King Charles’ mistress, something that can easily be said about becoming whatever you want to be, but was used to aid Kynaston in becoming a male actor who could finally take the role of a male character:
“A man is not how he walks or how he speaks…it’s what he DOES that makes him a man!”
Now I won’t ruin the ending of the movie, because if you’re into self-improvement, and success in whatever you do--business or pleasure--and want to see how it really happens...consistently, you must see “Stage Beauty”…THOUGH... I’M SO DELIGHTED to say CHANGE doesn’t’ have to be THAT painful…that is if you don’t wait until you have to, like Kynaston…
What I will say was that when I was in tears I was in tears for three reasons:
First, the movie is so well-done, acted, filmed, and directed that I was no longer watching a movie—I was there…with Crudup’s, Danes’, Wilkinson’, Fox’s (great Puritan rendition!) and Everett’s characters…though Charles was definitely not a fop—he did after all gain the crown after 20 years exile in Holland.
Second, though you may have a lot of tactics, technologies, and techniques (Kynaston spent YEARS learning all these acting techniques…and yet he couldn’t act!), it’s not until you really actually incorporate transference of identity, that you finally BECOME that which you desire…until then all those doo-hickies, tactics and techniques don’t mean a whole hill of beans…
Lastly, it took me back to every time my clients finally made truly profound,. light-speed changes FOR THE BETTER…after years of seeing other ‘experts’!
There is nothing as exciting as helping one person become another, not because that client had to change, or die…as it was back in my days as a drug and alcohol rehab counselor…but as it is now with my business and self-improvement inner circle clients (most are in both because they understand how one supports the other)
...who know that change is something to look forward and is much more than that...that once you really start doing it naturally—not naturally because the outside environment is making the decision for you, but—that you are finally making that decision, INDEPENDENT of your environment…then that is truly fluid thinking--it’s an EDUCATED CHOICE!
Hell waits for those who hesitate and procrastinate, I always say…and Kynaston sure had his painful lessons…
http://snipurl.com/newandimproved
Until next time...
Best of Success to You!
Cork Graham
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