Acting is reacting: feel the feel, then take the wheel.

After 20 years as a professional processor of emotion, here is what I have noticed about feelings.

As a theatre director my job was to create a safe space for actors to accurately experience authentic emotion, in service of the playwright’s story.

So we mined for the invisible, unconscious, split-second process that happens for a character in the heat of the moment.

We reverse-engineered it.

Then replicated it.

As a coach, my job is to create a safe space for my clients to feel, decode, heed, process, respond to and then intentionally act upon their emotions, in service of the life they most want to design for themselves.

So we co-create a process that acknowledges feeling, interprets the important messages those feelings are sending us and then allows us to decide what we want to do next.

We strategise it.

Then execute it.

In other words then, I hold space for feelings and choices.

As two separate parts of a process.

Both of these practices - Directing and Coaching - one creative, the other a service - are predicated on the belief that if we can understand what we’re feeling, we can select a response that best serves what we most want to happen next.

And one of the most powerful skills I have observed is the ability not to react, but to respond.

To create even the tiniest gap between stimulus and response.

And into that gap insert choice.

Responsibility.

‘Response-ability’.

Not reacting impulsively but responding rationally.

Acting - on stage and in life - is reacting.

Or as Oprah Winfrey puts it: "Feel the feel, then take the wheel."