Meet Patrick McGowan

We recently connected with Patrick McGowan and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Patrick, appreciate you sitting with us today. Maybe we can start with a topic that we care deeply about because it’s something we’ve found really sets folks apart and can make all the difference in whether someone reaches their goals. Self discipline seems to have an outsized impact on how someone’s life plays out and so we’d love to hear about how you developed yours?

For the first 21 years of my life, the better question would’ve been “where is your self-discipline?” I was pretty messy through high school and the first part of college. I don’t just mean that my backpack was chaotic and my locker a catastrophe; I was constantly behind and scrambling to meet my responsibilities. I couldn’t keep an assignment pad and often couldn’t find the homework when I had actually done it. I would sometimes go weeks at a time without having my own pen to use in class. I never started a paper until the night before it was due. Breaking out in hives just thinking about it. I got by because I was clever, and by then I was pretty good at flying by the seat of my pants. I could memorize information in a night and then dump it out of my head the next morning.
The first few years at Brown (where I attended college) went the same way…except instead of writing papers the night before, I shifted to waking up at 3am and writing papers the morning they were due. I wanted to be better, but I just didn’t have the habits. I got knocked down from A’s to B’s a couple times just for not showing up to enough classes.
The switch flipped for me in my junior year of college, when I directed my first play. All of a sudden I was finally overwhelmed by responsibility. I couldn’t survive with my old habits, and the messiness of my life was directly impacting other people. I made all kinds of obvious adjustments that just hadn’t quite been necessary before. I started waking up early and going to breakfast at the dining hall every morning. I bought a notebook and actually kept a to-do/assignment list. I cut way back on my drinking/partying. I made all of these positive changes to my life because I was afraid of letting other people down. To be more specific– I was afraid of what other people would think of me if I did a bad job. Nowadays I can look back at that motivation and think hey that sucks, why couldn’t those changes come from a place of self-love or service. At that point in my life, I wasn’t ready to treat myself like someone I cared about. I was fortunate enough to leverage that fear of other people’s opinion into bettering myself. The fact is that shame is a motherf***er. So wily that you can make improvements in your life, do good things that genuinely help people, and shame will double back around to try to convince you to feel bad about why you did those things. Truly, though, it was fear. I was terrified during the whole rehearsal process that I was going to blow this and end up wasting everyone’s time.
But I got by. The play went off without a hitch, and the fear of failure started to dissipate. More than that, I could feel my opinion of myself changing, as I watched myself follow through on commitments. Suddenly I was one of the most organized people I knew. I learned how much more enjoyable class is when you’re not crapping your pants hoping the teacher doesn’t call on you because you didn’t do the reading. I learned that having twelve beers in the fridge doesn’t have to mean I’m drinking twelve beers tonight. Maybe I wasn’t inherently a mess, maybe I just hadn’t been giving myself a chance. When I graduated a year later, I won the theatre department’s award for academic excellence.
Sometimes people in my life will comment on my self-discipline or compliment my dedication to structure and routine, and it still doesn’t quite resonate. Part of me is still that 20-year-old, waking up hungover and realizing he was supposed to lead the conversation in Shakespeare seminar today that started 45 minutes ago. I can recognize that the way I move through life has completely changed, though it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. The dial sometimes turns too far in the other direction and I become a task-master. I get wrapped up in perfectionism and shame-spirals, and I experience all the challenges most of us are familiar with. Fortunately, I’ve collected enough months of consistent self-discipline that I know I’m never too far gone that I can’t come back to that life of freedom. Basically, my self-discipline comes from an intimate knowledge of what my life is without self-discipline. And I’m not interested.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I wear a few hats: primarily I’m an actor and acting coach, and I also direct, write, and script consult. My superpower is paying attention, and my mission is to help artists get out of their own way. When I read a script or watch a rehearsal, I ask myself, “what is the story that’s trying to be told?” or “what does this actor want to do?” So much of what keeps us from our full potential is plain interference, which can come in many different forms. We read a script and we start to hear or see a clichéd, surface version of the scene. We try to “make sense” of it, to figure out some formula and give casting what we think they want. Perhaps we take a big swing, making a bold choice we hope will stand out, even if it doesn’t serve the story. Or we veer in the other direction, and avoid making any choices in the hope that someone will be wowed by our “stillness.” The Last Acting Studio—where I teach—hosted a public conversation with the legendary casting director John Frank Levey a couple years ago, and he gave this beautifully succinct piece of audition advice: don’t strategize. The moment you’re making choices based on what you expect to be the reaction of the decision-makers, you’re lost. In my coaching, I help people to find their personal connection to the role and the story and build out the piece with a sense of ownership and communion–this is what I would do with it, this is what this means to me.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

The most important element of my journey has been the time spent helping other people on their journey. Acting in particular can be a very self-centered pursuit. I’ve spent hours deciding which pictures of my face best capture me and taking workshops on how to brand myself, what “type” I am, how to present myself to the world. I find it exhausting to spend this much time thinking about myself. I’m fortunate that I get to counterbalance this with my work as a GRE/GMAT/LSAT tutor as well as an acting coach. For the blissfully uninitiated, that string of letters back there represents the three standardized tests required for grad school, business school, and law school. I tutor a few students a week for those tests in addition to the acting coaching I do. I find tremendous relief and inspiration from putting my own ambition and goals in the background for an hour or two. Pitbull (yes, that Pitbull) said this thing in an interview once about how yes money can make you happy, the trick is that you have to give it away. I’m completely dedicated to achieving what I want to achieve, and also thoroughly confident that nothing will fulfill me as much as helping someone else’s dreams come true.

A helpful realization I had a few years ago is that talent is irrelevant. Or rather, wondering how talented you are is pointless. Perhaps we all come into the industry or begin our training with a certain level of “talent.” But that pales in comparison to how much improvement we can achieve through mindful practice and training. I know there was a time in my life when I would be working on a scene in acting class and if the teacher said I did a good job I thought I might have a future in the industry, and if I got too many notes I thought, that’s it, I’m wasting my time, I’ll never make it. I was among the crowd of people who thought “If I’m good enough then I’ll be successful, if I’m not (good enough) then I’m delusional and I’m wasting my time.” But there are two huge errors in this way of thinking. First of all, do any of us genuinely believe that the best actors alive are the actors working the most? That there’s a perfect correlation between skill and success? Obviously not. Second, this way of thinking sets “talent” as a static attribute I have, like my height. Any moment spent trying to evaluate my talent is a moment I could have spent increasing it! I don’t care how good an actor I am. It’s sort of none of my business; I’m the only person I don’t consider to be my audience. Instead, I care how dedicated I am to getting better, how resilient I am in the face of setbacks. The talent portion will take care of itself whether I worry about it or not. So why would I?
Last, the skill that has been the deciding factor in any growth I’ve made or thing I’ve accomplished is my courtship of boredom. It’s so unbelievably easy to avoid even a single second of boredom these days. I know, it’s not exactly original to say that these phones are messing with our heads. But I can’t deny that anything beautiful I’ve ever been a part of has started with an ingredient of boredom. Without letting the dust settle, I don’t know what I have to say, I don’t know what I want, I’m being piloted by something outside of me. I try whenever possible to court boredom, to take some minutes after work and not dive into a podcast, social media, watching something. To just sit and not follow the first impulse that comes up, since that first impulse is almost always to find a way to avoid the boredom of the present moment and instead to find something novel or fascinating to look at.
There’s this particular exercise I do: if I have at least 10 minutes to spare, I lie down on my bed or couch and I don’t move. Any thoughts that arise I say thank you but we’re taking a break from thinking right now. Inevitably, I’ll remember something I meant to do, something I wanted to buy, someone I wanted to message, etc. And I write those thoughts down, but I don’t get up and follow them. If something comes up three separate times in a session, then I allow it to compel me to take action. You get to watch all the inconsequential thoughts come and go, and feel a sense of purpose when something nudges you repeatedly that this is actually how you want to spend your time. I think if we all spent our time the way we intend to, we’d be living in a different world, and probably a cooler one.

Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?

So many actors that I connect with say the same things about how self-tapes suck, how they love the work but hate self-tapes: why do they have to be so awkward, why can’t they be fun, why do we have to produce the whole audition ourselves now? If that sounds like you, you might be my ideal client. I love helping people to reinvigorate their audition process. I’m not the first person to tell you this, I’m sure, but I’ll repeat it: the job is auditioning. You’re going to spend much, much more time auditioning than you will spend in front of the camera on set. So unless you want to be miserable for the better part of your career, let’s see if we can find a way to make auditioning fun. Let’s see if we can find freedom and imagination, so that we actually get a kick out of making a self-tape, instead of seeing it as this obstacle between us and what we *really* want to do. In my own auditions and in my audition coaching over the past three years, I’ve come to believe two things: self-tapes can be fun, and fun self-tapes book. My ideal client is someone who reads that and thinks, “Yeah, right. This guy’s just a weirdo who likes self-tapes.” Let’s work on one together and see.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thelastactingstudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickmcgowan13/