This is your career. Being an actor is a career. It isn’t always fun and easy, there is hard work, a lot of hard freakin’ work, that goes into creating your career and turning it into exactly what you want it to be. There are so many things you do to prepare for your auditions, callbacks, and the jobs you book. You take classes, do private coaching, tape yourself, read it out loud, yell the material, whisper it, anything to get it right and make it sound and look exactly the way you want it to. But what is the best way? What is the way that is going to book you the role every single time you are right for the part? That’s the thing that works best for you?
     The only way to figure out exactly what you need to be doing in order to book as many roles as you possibly can is to keep detailed notes. Keep a daily journal, keep a spreadsheet, write down every single thing you did or didn’t do that you believe, or don’t even believe, lead you to the audition, the callback, and finally, the job. Make sure you include what you did to prepare, who you prepared with, how you felt about it, and anything else you need to do the exact same thing again and again.
     Practice makes perfect and the only way you can practice booking the job is by doing the same thing you have done before in the past that worked well for you. If this means that you rehearsed with your mom, your best friend, a friend from class, or did private coaching, then that is what you should do for the next audition! Keep your career constant, and don’t change things when they are going really well. The only way to know when something is going well though is to keep at it and keep track of it.
     I personally have a journal and a spreadsheet that I keep all information in about my career, auditions, callbacks, and jobs. I know that when I have a question or wonder, “What did I do at this audition that made me feel so good?” I can just turn back to the date and figure it out so that I feel great every time at every audition. It’s like a cheat sheet and it makes things so much easier; you know what to do that is right, and even better, you know what not to do because it is wrong. I have started coaching with someone and been able to tell in a couple of days if I should keep with them or not because of keeping track of my progress.
     When you keep really great track of everything going on in your career you end up saving yourself money, time, and a whole lot of work in the end because things become far easier when you have a specifically laid out plan of what to do and what not to do. So do yourself a favor and start learning what works and what doesn’t work in your career so that you can put yourself more and more in charge of your acting career and life as an artist.