🧠 3 Brain Hacks for Setting Actor Goals

By Faith Hibbs-Clark, CMFA Founder

If you’re like many actors, you have big dreams for your future. But how do you get there? Goal setting is scientifically proven to help actors achieve their goals when a science-based method is used. Though many of us are great at setting goals, most of us know that sometimes they don't work out despite our best efforts. When this happens, it can be a bit upsetting to our self-esteem and deter us from wanting to set any new goals. Likely, those goals didn't work out because you didn't know the science of goal setting.

Here are three important brain hacks to help you achieve your goals without failure.

Just do it! Goal setting for actors and motivation go hand in hand. The goal is your journey, and the motivation is your fuel to get there. You may have gallons and gallons of fuel but no journey to go on. You may have many goals but no motivation to get there. What can stop you from going on that journey? There are many more things holding you back than you realize. I have taught this a lot in my classes when I discuss the brain and how it affects your auditions, but I will say it again, your brain is designed to do two things very well: survive & evolve.

A big part of your survival is not to try anything new. From your brain's perspective, familiarity equals safety. The problem is that your brain also needs to evolve. Therefore, you are often at odds with yourself. Perhaps you overthink things? Overthinking is just your brain's way of stalling. The best way for you to move past survival and into evolution is just to do it. Don't allow yourself any time to think about it. Set an alarm and train yourself to work on your goals as soon as that alarm sounds. The moment you start to think about it, you will start convincing yourself not to do it.

Make it emotional! Your acting goals should be emotionally based. If they aren’t emotionally based, the subcortical circuit involving the amygdala will not prioritize the information in your brain. This is important because stimuli that are emotional are given prioritized access to certain areas of your brain needed for optimal performance. Namely, the amygdala in your frontal lobe regions can subconsciously break down your goals in order to solve obstacles, even when you are not consciously thinking about them. The strong emotional importance that you have assigned to your acting goals makes the obstacles less significant in relation to the perceived benefit of obtaining your goals.

Make it visual! The brain associates visual stimulation with emotion because these two things are processed in the same portion of the brain. Prime your brain with external cues, such as images that trigger a subconscious memory in your mind that motivates you toward a goal without you even realizing what prompted you. It turns out those cheesy vision boards, cutting out images from magazines to reflect what you want in life, might have been onto something. If you want to be a bit more academic about it, try color-coding or creating charts or graphics that reflect your materialized goal. Want to take it a step further? You could try some meditation and try to visualize your future in your mind’s eye, and then ask yourself to walk into that picture.

Congratulations – you now have 3 brain hacks to help you with your goal-setting! The next thing you need to do is take full action and join me for the "Science of Goal Setting Special Topics Workshop & Program!. Sign up now!

Science of Goal Setting

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© This information is copyrighted 2021 Communication Method for Actors, LLC

Why You Shouldn't Set Goals Today!

By Faith Hibbs-Clark, CMFA Founder

You’ve probably been told that to be productive: you should set goals. Big goals. S.M.A.R.T. goals. Stretch goals. All these fancy goal-setting ideas are just that … ideas. They all have one important thing in common -- to cause you to fail at reaching your goals.

What is it? It’s science!

Most goal-setting programs set you up for failure. Work with your brain, not against it. 🧠 If you don’t understand the science of your brain, then setting goals is just something fun to do while drinking champagne with your friends on New Year's. Without science, you are setting yourself up for failure. 

The thinking behind these other goal-setting programs is that to achieve anything meaningful, you need to turn it into a goal.

Well… maybe.

While goals can be really helpful, they aren’t always ideal.


Goals have one big problem: they have a termination point.

In other words, you’re not successful until you’ve actually reached your goal, and until this happens, you might feel like:

• You’re spinning your wheels, not going anywhere.

• You’re a failure.

• You haven’t achieved anything since the goal seems so distant.

Measuring success this way can make you feel defeated, especially if you have big, ambitious goals.

For example, if you want to be an academy award-winning actor, nothing you do until you reach that goal will make you feel like you’re enough. You may make incredible strides in your acting career, but they will fall flat compared to your hard-to-achieve goal.

Since a goal has an “end," you will never feel like a success until you’ve actually achieved it. And even when you achieve your goal, you simply have to start all over again with the next one.

And the reality is you might not even know what the “next” goal should be. I mean, what’s next after an Academy Award? Does that become your new bar?

So, you feel aimless. You know you should be seeking to accomplish something, but you’re not sure what that something should be.

Even worse, you might feel like since you have already accomplished your goal, you can go back to your old habits instead of pushing and growing. You could lose all the forward progress that you made.

It’s a setup to make you feel like a consistent failure. Our society and culture thrive on it because feeling small keeps many other people rich and in power.

In this seminar and program, I will give you a goal-setting system that will work with your brain and not against it. I am going to help REWIRE your brain for true actor success!
 You guessed it... using SCIENCE!

Are you with me?

Science of Goal Setting

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© Copyrighted 2021 Communication Method for Actors, LLC

That Creepy Thing You Do!

HOW TO DEVELOP A SCARY CHARACTER FOR FILM & TELEVISION

It isn't so much what your character says but what your character does that makes them scary. Take, for example, the use of a SIGNATURE HAND GESTURE.

A SIGNATURE HAND GESTURE is a hand gesture used by that person more often than other hand gestures and can show insight into that person's personality.

Actors can use signature hand gestures to show the personality of the character they are playing. You can show the subtle creepy side of your character just by adding a well-placed signature hand gesture into the performance.

Let's look at an example.

the SHUSHING HAND GESTURE!

Here is a small excerpt from the SCARY CHARACTERIZATION workshop. To learn more register below.

The "shush gesture" is a menacing motion of putting your finger to your mouth as if to tell the other person to be quiet. It can have other meanings but in the right context, it can be horrifying.

Can you think of a character that did this signature hand gesture in a movie or television show? (Email me your favorite clip)

Of course, it takes more than one shushing gesture to bring a scary character to life. If you want to learn more about building the scary character or you need to try it out for yourself in a workshop environment first. Now you can!

Join me for this 1-night LIVE on ZOOM workshop!

October 27th, 2022

1-night workshop, 2.5 hours Thursday, 6-8:30 PM MDT

$75 early / $99 after October 21st

Limited to 15 students for plenty of on-camera time. The last section of this class sold out!

Written by Faith Hibbs-Clark, Founder of the Communication Method for Actors, casting director for 25+ years, body language expert