You can't live off exposure, fame and likes

One of the biggest reasons why I started focusing on a healthy inner life practice is to help performing artists - and by extension myself - discover what it means for us to fully live in the daily experiences of being a performer. That includes living in the real world filled with very fiscal and practical resposibilities, and it includes creating a lifestyle that gives us the best chance to access our creative potential.

The financial conversation is always a challenging one, and the perception that performing artists all wait tables, serve coffee and live in artiste communes is a stubborn and inaccurate misconception. I know plenty of people in the performing arts who are as financially stable as the next person.

All the performing artists I speak to want to provide for their families, want to be able to build a future and want to be financially secure. I mean … who doesn’t? Because honestly, no one can live off exposure, fame and likes.

So what can we do?

1) Get out of the mindset that you will be living from pay cheque to pay cheque for the rest of your life. Sure, it’s doable for the short term, but year after year? It wears on you and will kill your artistry. If you’re worried about where next week’s rent or next week’s grocery money is coming from, then you’re not in the right mental or emotional space to be creative

2) Taking a job outside the performing arts isn’t a cop-out and it isn’t a compromise. You’re buying time now so that you can spend it on your craft later on

3) Get help on financial management from family or friends who manage their finances well. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Honestly, it really doesn’t. It just needs to be practical and it needs to work for you. But you must manage your finances

4) Set financial goals for the year. Practical ones with stretch targets. Look … even if you don’t achieve them, many people will come a lot closer to them by simply having set and monitored them. But not setting goals is the best way to ensure you don’t get to where you want to go.

5) Start from where you are. Everyone comes from a different financial circumstance so this is the one arena that you REALLY don’t want to start comparing. Every single cent counts

6) Buckle down for the long haul but take it one day at a time. Financial stability doesn’t come from having a high paying cushy job or from winning the lottery. It comes from a deliberate management of your finances and the discipline to make every day decisions that move you closer to your goal

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you.

The courage to keep starting over

I wish I could say that the last 3 years have been smooth sailing. It would be the easiest thing in the world to sugar coat this “fairy tale” of a middle aged man finally discovering his true passion in life, breaking free of the misery of corporate slavery and achieving remarkable success in his new career in a very short span of time.

And it is a commentary on how the modern world recognizes success that I started to get messages from strangers and acquaintences after news of my casting in The King and I became public. Before this, I was just another actor looking for work - and in the eyes of some - a deluded fool going through a mid-life crisis and an idiot for leaving a fantastic career. But all of a sudden, this wasn’t just a phase. All of a sudden, this was real and all of a sudden, people wanted to talk to me. And when I probed just a little, all they really wanted the magic formula for what they thought was a “fairy tale” success so that they could replicate it in their own lives.

But there is no magic formula. What there is - when you peel back every coat of sugar the world puts on your story - is sheer grit and tenacity, a lifetime of emotional resource, the unwillingness to give up, the clarity of purpose, gratitude and humility, and the ability to accept that there is no binary relationship between effort and result.

What there must be is the courage to keep starting over.

You have to be willing to start over. You have to be willing to quieten the voice in your head that constantly screams at you to go back to the emotionally safe life you had before. And you need to be able to start over again and again and again and again and again. Because your ego is going to keep telling you that you are a moron for allowing yourself to go back to grade school when you could be a University professor.

You have to be willing to surrender so much control of your life and discover just what you are made of are when you strip away everything else. Because those are the only things that you can take with you on this journey when you have to start over.

So, no … the last 3 years have not been smooth sailing. They have challenged me I never thought possible. But I am also immeasurably more grounded than I ever was before, and every day is a journey to discover just how badly I want my life to be a force for good.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you.

I have nothing to fix

Change is scary. Being in new environments unsettles many people. Whether it's a new job, a new country, a new school, a new family or life-altering news, it can be destabilizing, stressful and sometimes downright terrifying ... and often for long periods of time. We find that we don't know the rules, the lingo, the culture, the cliques, we can't be ourselves and we constantly look for validation.

Two weeks ago, I started my very first job in a brand new industry in a new country after coming from 20 years in another career, and if I am completely honest, I have spent the last 2 weeks feeling like an imposter in head lights. I'd created stakes that were so incredibly high, and put so much pressure on myself to be perfect in every way ... and for the first 2 days, I succeeded in being a robot. But on the 3rd day, the one thing that I had been the most meticulous and fastidious about in my preparations unexpectedly faltered. All of a sudden, I had to tell the company that I could not deliver what they had planned for me to deliver, and my fear took on a whole different reality. I found myself becoming hyper sensitive to every look the team made my way, every word that was said (as well as every word I made up that wasn't said), and I found myself dreading that I would be called up for a 'come to Jesus' conversation. More than before, I started looking for validation, for approval and all that I saw was the lack of it ... and it was crushing.

But decades of practicing self-management and self-awareness also kicked in ... and much like an app running in the background, a part of me started looking for a way through this emotional muddle. I am - if one thing - stubbornly tenacious about learning from what life gives me. After 2 weeks, I discovered this: I have nothing to fix. I have everything to learn, but nothing to fix. Fixing implies that something is broken, and for the longest time in my life, I thought that I was broken. But I'm not. I am exactly the way that I am. And I can learn. There is something to learn from every person and circumstance.

While I may be new to this particular industry, discipline, resilience, patience, trust, courage, awareness and an ever-thoughtful practice are universal recipes for success.

And that validation that I was desperately looking for to justify my place? There is only one person in the world who can give that to me: MYSELF.

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you.

How old is too old?

I’ve felt many things in my life, but rarely have I ever felt like I completely fit in. I was always not clever enough, not fast enough, too tall, too big, too clumsy, too intense, too friendly, too Westernized, too Asian, not Asian enough, too Catholic, not Catholic enough, too loud, too soft, too emotional, not emotional enough, too logical, too playful, too disrespectful, not experienced enough, too experienced … the list goes on and on. It’s almost as though we’re meant to spend our lives in an ever revolving and perfectly balanced combination of traits to suit the needs of society in every moment of our lives.

Throughout all of that, I clung onto a vague sense of an inner self that I could neither articulate nor describe to anyone, but that I knew was constant.

But when I was told “but you’re too old to change direction”, I struggled to accept that. I could accept the rest of my “societal non-conformity”, but not this.

Perhaps it had something to do with wanting to leave a positive legacy for future generations (something important to me). Or perhaps it had something to do with feeling like I was running out of time and that I still needed time to figure out what my life was meant to mean. Or perhaps it was because I resented someone trying to rob me of what was mine and mine alone.

I needed to shift, but what became very clear was that I would not do it to prove someone wrong. People’s opinions of me were just that - opinions. It became clear that my shift needed to come from a place of knowing what that sense of inner self was.

4 years later, I’m accomplishing what most people thought was impossible. The reality is that society can say all they want. But if you take ownership of your own path and be brave enough to carve one out where there wasn’t one before, then you can call your life your own.

Too old? Pfft …

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My name is Eu Jin. I embarked on a career as a professional actor after 20 years in the corporate world. I am a big advocate of personal growth in the performing arts. I dedicate time and energy in performing arts education, specifically in the arena of practical approaches to inner health because I believe that this lays the groundwork for a sustainable career as an artiste.

If you would like to engage in a conversation about a healthy inner life practice, please leave me a message on the "Contact" page of my website and a way to contact you. Thank you.