Redefining Success and Failure as a Theatre Professional

I took a deep breath in, and got out of my car. I was fired up and ready to move my career in a different direction, and I had been feverishly applying to jobs. I had one in particular where I was called back for an interview and sat with the team, and we had a great conversation about theatre, Chicago, and the state of the arts that lasted almost 3 hours. I thought I did very well, considering I was being cross interviewed by 6 people I had never met. I walked out of there feeling fantastic. And then I didn’t get it.

C’est la vie.

As theatre performers and backstage professionals, we have been conditioned to deal with rejection over and over. It’s part of the job. We say “ok, that wasn’t for me. On to the next thing!” And I used to think that defining your own success was going against the grain, being an iconoclast, giving a big fat middle finger to what society deems as successful and running in the opposite direction. And yes, that sometimes helps, if the grain is rooted in systems of oppression (for example).

But I’ve come to realize that it’s so much more than that. Defining what success means to you also includes redefining what failure means. They are two sides of the same coin and you cannot have one without the other. The dictionary flat out defines failure as “lack of success.” (1) When we normally think of redefining failure and success, we think of it in future terms, as if defining our successes differently will fix our failures or make them cease to exist.

But here’s the thing: in the performing arts, it is incredibly difficult to move through your life and career without goals.

And failure is simply an absence of a goal or behavior coming into fruition. Once you define it in those terms, it becomes a fact and not an opinion. Failure as an opinion has a resolute ending, whereas the absence of a goal implies nothing about the future.

Let’s put it in simple terms: if my house is a mess, I could say I’m a failure for having a messy house. But if I reframe it as “my house is not clean,” it becomes a statement that can be changed. My house is not clean, but it will be. My business makes no profit, but it will eventually. I have not worked on Broadway, but I could at some point. I did not get that job, but that doesn’t mean I will never work again with that company. THAT is redefining failure. THAT is what coaches call “thought work.” (2) It is changing your own narrative to promote positive, forward thinking.

And this is why “thought work” is so, so important for creatives’ mental health.

Redefining success and failure on a daily basis and not just a yearly planning session will always leave our lives continuously open for new opportunities. It changes the definition of success from being driven by external forces to internal forces. Internal forces are so much easier to control in a chaotic world. And yes, you should make clear, concise goals and define what success means to you in the long term. But defining your successes in the long term still means that sometimes you’ll have to handle the absence of them in the short term. And the sooner you reframe your narrative and state those absences objectively and not in terms of failure, the sooner the world will open up to you.

I can’t wait to see what you’ll accomplish when it does.

Also by Rachel Stiles:

5 Easy Ways to Manage Stress at Work

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