Read here the full transcript of Josh Green’s talk titled “How To Challenge Your Negative Self-Talk” at TEDxSurrey 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Power of Perseverance
Hello, everyone. This probably just looks like regular old juggling to you, and that’s because it is. But it’s in dropping the ball that I made such a profound discovery. Imagine what I thought was one of the worst and most embarrassing moments of my life.
You see, when I was little, I wanted nothing more than to be an actor when I grew up, because the weight of the world hadn’t yet crushed my spirit. I hadn’t heard “no” enough. Hadn’t heard that I was too small, too short, too fat, too stupid. Hadn’t heard that I was not smart enough, or not fast enough, or simply not good enough.
The Journey Begins
Because I hadn’t heard some of this until much later in my life, I started the journey of getting myself an agent. It was actually through that process that I started to hear some of those more negative comments. “You’re not ready. You’re not the right look. You’re just not good enough.” And I started to internalize this, unfortunately.
So I had to start in the safest place. I got myself a background agent, which required nothing more of me than to stand still in the background, kind of like the child that plays the tree in the school play, but just happy to be on the team.
The First Audition
One day, though, my agent did call me with my very first audition. No more tree for me. She calls me and she says, “Hey, you can juggle, right?” To which I respond, “Yes, of course.”
“Great. Your audition’s tomorrow, 9 a.m. sharp. Toodles.”
My agent loved to say “toodles.” Now I’d like to make something abundantly clear.
At that point in my life, I didn’t know how to juggle. Like at all.
Learning to Juggle
So I did what anyone would do in a situation like that. I call my friend Adam, who does. I show up at his house at 5 p.m. at night and he starts me off with scarves, slow-moving juggling scarves so my body has time to figure out what it’s doing.
Then he upgrades me to my first ball. Then two. And finally three. And by the end of the night, I’m able to juggle for about five seconds. It doesn’t look pretty and I make a lot of strange focused faces as I’m doing it. But you can technically call it juggling.
The Audition Day
The next day, I show up at the audition on time and it is packed with professional jugglers, clowns, and magicians, all who are nonchalantly carrying on full conversations while juggling six balls at the same time. They’re bouncing them off the walls, they’re so good, and I’m just in awe, staring at my borrowed juggling balls.
And in come these voices. “You are not good enough. You don’t belong here.” All I want to do in this moment is disappear and make sure I don’t embarrass myself or my agent so badly that I’m never able to work in this town again. But I take a deep breath, remember that I have a whole five seconds of juggling under my belt, and I sit down, and then I hear it, “Josh, Josh Green, you’re up.”
The Moment of Truth
On the inside, such grace and confidence on the outside, even though clearly sweating through my shirt. I walk into the audition room, introduce myself to the cast and directors, and wait for them to call action. I start juggling.
I’ve got my struggle face on, I’m biting my tongue in fierce concentration, and I’m moving all over the place. I’m about to reach my five-second juggling limit, and they haven’t stopped me yet. Why haven’t they stopped me? Then it happens.
I drop the ball. At this point, my face couldn’t look sillier. I’m staring at them, they’re staring at me. I don’t know what to do, so I just pick the ball up and continue juggling as if nothing ever happened, trying to smile through my struggle face. They stop me immediately. “That’s it, thank you, that’s enough, next.” And in come those voices again, “I told you you weren’t good enough, you blew it.”
The Unexpected Outcome
The next day, my agent calls me, asking me how I thought it went. And I tell her that I gave it my best shot, and we’ll get them next time. Then I thought she was going to give me a little bit of feedback, but instead she says, “You nailed it, you got the part.”
Wait, what? So she emails me the script with the name of my character at the top of the page, and in bold letters it says, “Stupid Jester.”
Internal Discoveries
In sharing this story with you, you got a really good look at what was going on for me externally, but I’d love to dig into the discoveries I made internally to help me navigate some of those really negative voices.
The first one, those voices, they’re not your voices. No child is born thinking they’re not enough. The voices we hang on to tend to come from a select few people in our lives, a teacher, a parent, a bully, a partner. They start on the outside and they slowly move inside, but they’re not our voices. They’re somebody else’s and we don’t have to listen to them.
And guess what? The casting directors have those voices too. They were given so much information from so many people just saying they needed somebody who could juggle. They also have superiors, so they’re wondering, “Am I doing a good job? Am I getting the right person?”
The person interviewing you probably feels this way. Your date might feel that way as well. No one really knows exactly what they’re looking for, which is why Steve Jobs so famously said, “Nobody knows what they want until you give it to them,” which is why after a long day of amazing jugglers, all pretty much doing the exact same thing, being amazing, I walked in, looked like an idiot, to which they responded, “Oh my gosh, this guy’s perfect.”
The Power of Practice
Another discovery I made was practice. I did not just show up to my first audition, overcome my negative thoughts and bam, I lived happily ever after. No, no, no, no, no. I practiced. I started safe and small. I started as a background performer.
All I had to do was walk around in the background and make it look so uninteresting that it didn’t draw anyone’s attention. What’s the safest place that you could start? What’s your version of background performer? Because once you start, it builds momentum that can’t be stopped. But you do have to start.
The Importance of Showing Up
You also have to show up. I had so many chances to turn down my juggling opportunity. I could have told my agent that I didn’t know how. I could have just not gone to the audition. And I could have just left when I saw all the amazingly talented jugglers that were there. But I stayed, in spite of the voices that said I wasn’t good enough, and I showed up because I could have been exactly what they were looking for, and I was.
Had I not gone, though, the show would have gone on without me, they would have cast another juggler into the role, and I’m sure it would have been fine. But that means somebody else would be living my life right now. Ask yourselves, how many people are living your best life right now because you turned down an opportunity? So say yes to opportunities. Show up.
The Power of Connections
You probably also noticed that I didn’t do this by myself. Though I didn’t know how to juggle, I did know someone who did. Surrounding myself with extremely talented people who know more than me and think highly of me has always been so helpful at helping me expand my horizons, or in this particular instance, growing me out of a pinch.
Think of all the people you have in your life and what they could show you if you just called them and said, “Hey, can you teach me how to play guitar, or how to swim, or I don’t know, whatever a project manager does?”
The Harsh Truth
One of the most painful discoveries I made during all this was that it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. There is a harsh truth that I had to get through. Most of the movies tend to skip over these parts, but the truth is, I was a background performer for over two years before I even got my first audition. The voices were very loud back then, extremely cemented and internalized.
After that, I only landed one in every 30 auditions, one in every 50 jokes got a laugh while I was on stage, and I failed more businesses than I care to remember. This is why it’s so important to start safe, keep practicing, continue to show up, and have the support of others, because all of these proactive actions over time help to silence those negative voices.
The Rewards of Perseverance
It pushes them further away, and it all leads to a much more fulfilling life. Saying yes to acting led to a wonderful and fulfilling acting career. Saying yes also led to a comedy career that allows me to travel the country, it allowed me to be on the bottom of the ocean on just one breath for over two minutes, it allowed me to save a human life, that was pretty cool, and to doing my very first TEDx.
All of this because I embraced the moments when those voices arise. So look, I know that the unseen life is a scary life, so we tend to stick to what’s safe because it keeps those voices quiet. When I took on five hours of juggling to do my first audition, I kept hearing, “No way you’re going to be good enough.”
But rather than shy away from that, I embraced the part of me that felt like I couldn’t do it and said, “Why wouldn’t I be good enough?” I practiced, I showed up, and I took my place, and I encourage you to do the same. Because when you hear that voice that says you’re not good enough, that just means you’re doing something right. It means you’re embracing the human experience and pushing yourself just beyond your edge.
So let’s be honest, dropping the ball does not sound like a good idea, but it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. So the next time opportunity comes your way, you hear that voice saying you’re not good enough, don’t drop the ball, I encourage you to do the exact opposite. Thank you.
