Tips for Aspiring Actors: How to Set Goals That Keep You Motivated
Have you ever set a new goal for your acting career and suddenly felt full of energy? You feel excited and motivated simply because you’ve decided what you want to achieve. There’s a psychological reason for this.
The mere act of setting a goal stimulates dopamine, which can give you energy and motivation to pursue that goal. Your brain also responds to having a clear finish line, a path towards it, and smaller milestones along the way. But there’s a catch!
Your brain doesn’t only like achieving goals. It also likes setting new ones. This can lead to what I call shiny new idea syndrome: abandoning your current goal when a new one comes along, because the new goal gives you another burst of motivation.
So, if you’re looking for tips for aspiring actors on how to stay motivated, don’t focus only on finding more motivation. Learn how to set goals that help you sustain it.
Key takeaways:
- Setting clear goals can increase motivation and stimulate dopamine.
- Avoid shiny new idea syndrome by staying focused on your current goals.
- Give your goals a clear finish line and a path towards it.
- Break bigger goals into smaller, achievable milestones.
- Use goal-setting and external structure to build momentum without relying on willpower alone.
Why Setting a Goal Feels So Good
Motivation isn’t simply something you either have or don’t have.
One of the key ideas in the psychology of motivation is that intrinsic motivation can grow. It isn’t necessarily a personality trait that you’re born with. External factors, including the way you structure your goals and your daily life, can help create the circumstances in which intrinsic motivation develops.
Building an acting career can take years. There may be very little outside validation, particularly in the early stages. You may have to juggle acting with other work, deal with uncertainty, and continue developing your skills without knowing exactly when your next opportunity will arrive.
If your motivation depends entirely on getting external rewards, it can be difficult to keep going. Learning how to create your own momentum gives you another source of motivation, and this is where goal-setting becomes useful.
The Problem With Setting Too Many Goals
Setting a goal can give you a motivational boost, but that doesn’t mean that setting more goals will give you more motivation. In fact, it can have the opposite effect.
Setting a new goal can itself be rewarding, so you can become tempted to move on to something new whenever your current goal becomes difficult.
Imagine you’ve decided that your goal is to find an agent. You start researching agencies and preparing your submissions. Then you have another idea: perhaps you should make a new showreel first. Then you decide you should take another class. Then you start thinking about producing your own work.
All of these things might be worthwhile, but if you keep moving from one goal to another, you may end up with a long list of things you’ve started and very little that you’ve actually finished.
This is shiny new idea syndrome. It means shifting your attention towards a new goal when you’re running into difficulties with your current one. The problem is that the new goal gives you an easier dopamine boost, while abandoning your current goal makes it harder to experience the satisfaction of eventually completing it.
Over time, repeatedly giving up on goals can also make you doubt your ability to get things done. So sometimes the best acting advice isn’t to find another exciting idea. It’s to stay with the one you already have.
Goal-Setting Tips for Aspiring Actors
If you’re looking for acting advice for beginners. When you’re starting, it can be tempting to focus on everything you think you need to achieve at once. Instead, use your goals to create a clear sense of direction and give yourself achievable steps along the way.
The following acting advice can help you structure your goals in a way that supports motivation rather than relying on willpower alone.
Give Your Goal a Clear Finish Line
One of the principles that can help your brain release dopamine is having a defined end-point. A goal is easier to pursue when you know what you’re working towards and what completion actually looks like. Compare these two goals:
“I want to work on my acting career.” | “I will research ten agencies that represent actors like me.” |
The second goal gives you somewhere to go. You know what needs to happen and, importantly, you know when you’ve finished.
This doesn’t mean that every acting goal needs to be small. You can still have ambitious long-term goals for your career. The important thing is to create a clear path between where you are now and where you want to be.
Break Big Acting Goals Into Milestones
Long-term acting goals can be difficult to use as a daily source of motivation because the finish line may be very far away.
For example, finding an agent might be an important career goal, but you don’t know exactly when it will happen. Instead, you can break that larger goal into smaller milestones.
For example:
- Research ten agencies that represent actors like you.
- Personalise one submission email each day.
- Ask two industry contacts for recommendations.
- Attend one networking event this month.
These smaller goals give you regular opportunities to make progress rather than requiring you to wait for one major outcome – this is particularly useful acting advice for beginners, because when you’re starting, it’s easy to look at the entire acting industry and feel that you have to do everything at once. You don’t.
Choose what you’re working towards, and then work out the smallest useful steps that will move you in that direction.
Achievable Goals Can Help You Build Momentum
There’s another important distinction to make when setting goals: ambitious goals and achievable goals don’t affect motivation in quite the same way.
An ambitious goal can initially feel more exciting because it is more appealing. Your brain may release more dopamine in response to the prospect of a bigger reward, but ambitious goals can also require a great deal of willpower and energy, particularly when the finish line is a long way away.
And willpower is a limited resource. If you continually have to rely on willpower to keep yourself working towards a distant goal, you can eventually run out of energy and become demotivated.
Achievable goals work differently. When you break a larger task down into the smallest possible steps, you need less willpower to complete each one. Reaching one achievable goal and then another allows you to maintain consistency and build momentum over time. For an acting career, that distinction matters. Remember, building a career is a marathon, not a sprint.
Looking for Practical Tools to Build Your Acting Motivation?
When you understand more about the psychology behind motivation, you can start creating the conditions that make it easier to keep moving towards your goals.
If you want to learn more about the psychology of motivation and how it applies to an acting career, join my Psychology for Actors newsletter for practical tools you can use in your work.
Don't Rely on Willpower Alone
Another common misconception is that successful actors simply have more willpower than everyone else, but willpower is limited. You have a certain amount available before you need to replenish your energy through rest and relaxation.
This becomes particularly relevant when you’re pursuing acting alongside a job or other responsibilities. Your bill-paying work may already have an external structure around it. You have somewhere to be, a schedule to follow, and other people expecting you to turn up.
Your acting career may not have any of those things.
If you rely entirely on willpower to make yourself work on your acting goals, those goals can be the first things to get neglected when your energy runs low. A more useful approach is to create an external framework that supports your intentions.
This might be as simple as scheduling time for a particular acting task, deciding in advance what you will work on, or breaking a larger project into smaller actions.
The point isn’t to make your life more rigid. It’s to make it easier to do what you’ve already decided matters to you.
Use Willpower Strategically
I like to think of willpower as the ignition of a car. You need it to get started, yes – but the ignition isn’t what gets the car all the way to its destination.
In the same way, willpower can help you take the first step towards an acting goal, but you don’t want to depend on it for every step that follows. The aim is to create circumstances that support your motivation and reduce how often you need to force yourself to act.
This is one of the most useful pieces of acting advice I can give: don’t make “trying harder” your only strategy. Instead, ask yourself: “What could I change about the way I’ve structured this goal that would make it easier to keep going?”
Watch Out for the Next Exciting Idea
If you’re someone who has lots of ideas, you don’t need to stop having them. The skill is learning to recognise when a new idea is genuinely worth pursuing and when you’re simply being pulled away from something because the new goal feels more exciting.
When you’re struggling with your current goal, notice whether you’re suddenly tempted to start something completely different. You might ask yourself: “Am I changing direction because this new goal is genuinely more important, or because my current goal has become difficult?”
That small pause can help you recognise shiny new idea syndrome before it takes over. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is write the new idea down and return to it later.
Turn Your Acting Goals Into Momentum
If you want to understand more about the psychology behind motivation and learn practical ways to keep making progress in your acting career, Motivation for Actors offers psychology-based tools to help you build momentum, overcome procrastination, and stay focused on your goals.
FAQs About Acting for Beginners
Start by identifying what you want to work towards and turning it into a clear, achievable goal. Rather than trying to improve every area of your acting career at once, choose one useful next step and build from there.
It can be difficult to stay motivated when you’re not receiving much external validation. Focusing on goals you can actively work towards can give you a sense of progress even when opportunities are uncertain.
A useful goal should give you a clear sense of direction and a finish line you can work towards. If you can’t tell what completing the goal would actually look like, it may need to be made more specific.
Instead of assuming you simply need more willpower, look at how your goal is structured. Breaking it into achievable steps and creating an external framework around the work can make it easier to keep going.
Having another job can mean your acting goals have less external structure around them. Scheduling specific time for your acting work and deciding in advance what you will focus on can help create some of that structure for yourself.
