How to Be a Better Actor: Working Harder Isn’t Always the Answer
You can take acting classes, work with coaches, practise your skills, and spend hours working on your craft, and still feel like you’re not getting any better. When you aren’t seeing obvious progress, it’s tempting to conclude that you simply aren’t talented enough. But there is another possibility: you may be working hard without having a clear process for improving.
If you’re wondering how to be a better actor, it’s easy to assume the answer is simply to work harder. However, becoming a better actor isn’t necessarily about doing more.
Key takeaways:
- Working hard does not necessarily mean you are working on the right things.
- You need clarity about what you are trying to improve before you can make meaningful progress.
- Consistency gives your efforts time to produce results.
- Self-efficacy can help you persist when improvement feels slow.
- A growth mindset allows you to treat weaknesses as opportunities to develop rather than evidence that you lack talent.
Why It's So Easy to Work Hard Without Making Progress
Acting is a craft with an enormous number of possible areas for development.
You might want to improve your audition technique, voice work, movement, accents, character development, memorisation, improvisation, or ability to play a particular type of character. You might also want to learn completely new skills, such as singing, dancing, playing an instrument, or a particular sport for a role.
All of these things can be useful. The difficulty comes when you try to work on all of them at once. However, if you don’t know how each activity is contributing to your development, you can end up spending a great deal of time and energy without knowing whether you’re actually getting better. This is the difference between working hard and working hard at the right things.
Working Hard vs. Working on the Right Things
Working hard at the right things means focusing on something that is genuinely relevant to your development as an actor. Busy work, by contrast, can fill your time without producing visible progress.
This doesn’t mean that every activity you do as an actor needs to have an immediate, measurable impact. Exploration is an important part of developing your craft.
The question is whether you have enough clarity about your priorities to know what deserves your attention right now. If you continuously move from one activity to another, you may never give any single area enough time to develop – and this can be particularly frustrating because you may feel as though you’re doing everything you possibly can.
A lack of effort isn’t necessarily the problem; rather, it’s a lack of direction.
You Need Clarity Before You Can Improve
If your goal is simply, “I want to get better at acting,” that’s difficult to act on. Better at what?
Your audition technique? Your voice? Your ability to play a particular type of character? Your confidence in the room? Your ability to learn lines? A specific weakness that is affecting your casting opportunities? The more clearly you can identify what you’re trying to improve, the easier it becomes to decide where your time and energy should go.
For example, instead of deciding that you need to “become a better actor,” you might realise that you tend to rush your delivery during auditions. That gives you something concrete to work on. You can practise slowing down, experiment with different pauses, record yourself, seek feedback, and observe whether your delivery changes over time.
Identify what is most useful for you to work on next. This is an important part of understanding how to be a good actor. It isn’t simply about collecting skills or demonstrating that you can do lots of different things. It’s about knowing which aspects of your craft need attention and being willing to work on them.
Clarity also helps you avoid spreading yourself too thin. You may have ten things you would like to improve. That doesn’t mean you need to work on all ten this week.
Sometimes, deciding what not to work on is just as important as deciding what to work on.
Set Goals That Tell You What Progress Looks Like
Once you’ve identified an area you’d like to improve, the next step is to make your goal specific enough that you can recognise progress. Instead of: “I need to improve my acting.” You might identify a particular area of your craft that needs work and establish a goal around improving it.
For example:
- I want to become more comfortable with spontaneous choices during improvisation.
- I want to improve my ability to sustain a character’s physicality throughout a scene.
- I want to become more consistent at learning lines.
- I want to feel more prepared and focused before auditions.
- I want to develop a particular accent to a level where I can use it confidently in performance.
Then comes the important part: measure your progress. This doesn’t necessarily mean attaching a number to everything you do. It means looking for evidence that your ability is changing.
Think about:
- Setting goals
- Making time to work on your craft
- Measuring progress
- Reviewing your goals as you improve
When you start thinking about how to be a better actor, goals give you somewhere concrete to direct your attention.
Get Tools to Support Your Road to Becoming a Better Actor
When you understand the psychology behind how we learn and improve, you can make clearer decisions about what to work on, how to measure your progress, and how to stay consistent when improvement feels slow.
If you want practical psychology tools to help you develop your craft and keep moving towards your goals, join my Psychology for Actors newsletter and get Psychology Tools for Actors for free.
Consistency Matters More Than Constantly Changing Your Approach
Actors can continuously switch focus: New class → new technique → new coach → new skill → new project. Each thing may seem worthwhile individually, but if you keep changing direction, nothing has enough time to build.
This connects nicely with the concept of a process you can trust. You don’t necessarily need to discover the perfect acting technique. You need a process that allows you to keep working on something consistently enough to find out whether it is actually helping.
What Is Self-Efficacy and Why Does It Matter for Actors?
Self-efficacy is your confidence that your actions can produce a desired result. If you’re working hard but can’t see whether your efforts are making any difference, you may start questioning yourself: “What’s the point?”
And once you stop believing that your actions will lead to improvement, persistence becomes much harder.
Whereas if you have a process you trust, and you can see evidence that you’re making progress, you’re more likely to continue when things get difficult.
Beware the Fixed Mindset
It’s not only actors who believe they lack talent who can get stuck.
An actor who believes: “I’m naturally talented.” can also develop a fixed mindset. If ability is something you’re born with, then struggling can feel like evidence that you’re not as talented as you thought.
That can lead to avoiding difficult areas, comparing yourself to other actors, or worrying about whether you look talented rather than focusing on improving.
Develop a Growth Mindset About Your Acting
A growth mindset offers a different way of looking at your development. Instead of treating your current abilities as a fixed reflection of your potential, you can view them as skills that can be developed through practice, effort, feedback, and experience.
If another actor is doing something exceptionally well, their ability doesn’t have to be evidence that you are inadequate. Instead of asking, “Am I better than them?”, you can ask, “What can I learn from this?”
A growth mindset gives you more useful questions like:
- What could I do six months ago that I can do better now?
- What weakness am I currently working on?
- What evidence do I have that my practice is helping?
- What do I need to focus on next?
A Simple Process for Improving Your Acting
If you’re serious about figuring out how to be a better actor, you don’t need to improve everything at once. A simple, consistent process can help you identify what matters most and give you enough time to develop it.
- Choose one area to improve: Don’t try to fix everything at once.
- Define what improvement means: Be specific about what you want to be able to do differently.
- Set a goal: Give yourself something concrete to work towards.
- Create a regular practice routine: Make time for the work rather than relying on motivation alone.
- Measure your progress: Look for evidence that your ability is changing.
- Stay with the process: Don’t abandon something simply because improvement isn’t immediate.
- Review and adjust: Once you’ve made progress, decide what needs attention next.
Reach Your Full Potential as an Actor
If you want to understand more about the psychology behind meaningful improvement and how to apply deliberate practice to your acting, Excellence for Actors gives you practical tools for turning weaknesses into strengths and making measurable progress in your craft.
FAQs About Being a Good Actor
There isn’t one quality that determines whether someone is a good actor. Strong actors develop a combination of skills, including their ability to make choices, respond to direction, work collaboratively, understand character, and continue learning.
Just as importantly, they need a process that allows them to keep developing their craft.
There isn’t a fixed amount of time it takes to become a better actor. Skill development depends on what you are learning, how you practise, your experience, and many other factors. Meaningful improvement generally requires sustained effort rather than a quick fix.
Instead of focusing only on how quickly you should improve, focus on creating a process that allows you to keep developing over time.
Working hard doesn’t automatically mean that your efforts are directed towards the right things. If your goals are vague, you’re constantly changing your approach, or you aren’t measuring your progress, it can be difficult to know whether your work is actually helping.
Developing greater clarity about what you need to improve can help you use your time and energy more effectively.
