The New Me

Why do we choose to be somebody else when the essence of our being is right there in front of us?

We spend years and tears trying to find the path that would eventually take us back to our real self.

But what is our real self?

Who am I?

What defines ME?

Sometimes people think ME is my job.

“Hi, I’m Mathew and I’m an engineer.”

No. Your NAME is Mathew. You are NOT an engineer. YOUR JOB is engineering.

You are much more than that.

Along the way, I’ve discovered that most of us identify ourselves with our jobs. And most of the time, we play the role that the job requires.

The job could also be being a single mother raising a child. A father working as a driver to feed his family.

In most cases, we shrink our life to that function and play that role, wasting all the capacities, spaces, and possibilities that we don’t even imagine exist.

That is why playing fictional roles can open the door to raising our awareness about ourselves and the possibilities we can discover around us.

Take the case of Svenia — real case, changed name.

She is a CFO in a multinational firm. Apparently, her life is going well. Great job, stable financial situation, regular travel, grown children with a great education…

Despite all that, she feels the pain inside her.

She feels that her life is limited to her job.

“There is something missing,” she said. “Something that I cannot express. I know it’s there. But I can’t name it… I feel the anger in me… and that makes me sad.”

Svenia couldn’t find out why she felt that anger. Why she had this sadness inside her while everyone looking at her life saw beauty and harmony.

She started to drink alone when her son was not at home. She would watch a TV series with a bottle of wine until she fell asleep.

She started dating online. Traveling to find some intimacy and fun in several exotic beds. She tried some spiritual retreats…

Everything she tried worked very well, but only for a short period of time.

And every time she escaped herself with a trendy idea to find a solution, she came back to the couch, the TV series, and the bottle of wine.

Ironically, I met Svenia on a dating app.

I was looking for a long-term relationship, as I had newly arrived in Los Angeles. We barely met because she traveled all the time.

Me too.

So we became friends.

We went to dinner, had walks, visited museums…

Gradually, I discovered a sad woman behind that beautiful smile.

A wounded soul was hiding in the shadow of that strong woman, proud of her professional accomplishments.

We started to talk and walk.

We decided to discover a little bit more of what was going on in the shadow.

We stepped into other roles to express what she had never had the chance to fully admit.

She was playing all over the different spaces of her inner world.

The only difference was that there were other KPIs when it came to internal achievement.

There are fewer performance indicators than presence indicators.

The inner world has different rules.

We are all grabbed by everyday life. So we often avoid the inner mirror, the path of discovery, the experience that opens the door to an unexplored space.

With Svenia, I started to understand something I had already observed for years with actors.

Sometimes it is easier to tell the truth when you are not being yourself. Ask somebody directly, “Why are you angry?” and you may receive ten explanations, twenty justifications, and a very intelligent story.

Give that same person a fictional character who is angry and suddenly something else may appear.

The body speaks and the voice discovers another tone.

A sentence that belongs to somebody imaginary touches something very real.

Yes. There is protection in fiction. You can hide behind the character long enough to stop hiding from yourself. This is one of the fascinating paradoxes in acting.

Sometimes pretending is precisely what allows the truth to come out.

With Svenia, we played: We created situations, different characters and situations.

At one point, she played a woman who had absolutely nothing to prove. That was not easy for her as her whole life had been built around proving. But this fictional woman didn’t care about any of that. She had no promotion waiting for her. No board meeting. No children to impress. No social image to protect. She was just there.

Svenia became curious in exploring the character. Little by little, through that role, she started seeing how much of her life was organized around performance.

This is where acting becomes interesting to me beyond cinema. Because when you consciously play another person, you create distance from the person you believe you are and start to create perspectives. And every perspective can create choices.

If I can become somebody else for ten minutes, maybe that role can teach me about myself, my habits, my way of thinking and all the inherited stories I told around me to build that shell and to survive something that maybe no longer exists.

Instinctively, professional actors step into roles without learning anything about themselves.

They know its objectives, fears, weaknesses. They embody it perfectly, look to the world through its eyes, walk, talk and think the way it should be incarnated in front of the camera or on stage.

But what do they learn from that role about themselves?

The answer is probably a mixture of avoidance, emptiness or lack of awareness.

For some, it’s just a profession where they jump from one illusion to another financial opportunity. That’s fine. But it’s not enough, as they might be missing the crucial part that could help them grow internally.

No one is to blame here. It’s just that this territory is still unexplored.

As per her real role in life, Svenia didn’t need another achievement. She needed to meet the parts of herself that achievement had pushed into the basement. And every achievement will give her more professional credits, but might reinforce her identification to her job.

We don’t need to kill those achievements, and actors don’t need to kill their roles. We just need to explore through the role, beyond the role.

Even the actor — and especially the actors — should play other roles out of their professional contexts, to step out of the ego-system that our profession would unconsciously reinforce.

That process would definitely provoke revelation. Real transformation. Less glamor and more awareness, depth and reconciliation with oneself.

While actors rehearse, human beings mostly react.

What if we rehearsed differently, in a way that reveals other ways of being? In a rehearsal, for a moment, you live another possibility.

This understanding became one of the foundations of the Integral Acting Method.

Not because everybody should become an actor but because acting possesses that “something” very particular: the fictional role as a path to discover ourselves.

That is probably why, after so many years directing actors, I am still fascinated by what happens when a person steps into a role.

I used to look mainly at the character that appeared.

Today, I also look at the person who comes back with new awareness, knowledge, and possibilities.

The new ME.

That’s the essence of IAM — the Integral Acting Method.