The Audition Room – love it or loathe it? Actors spend a good part of their career in blank rooms, auditioning in front of strangers, hoping to get cast, dreaming of their big break. But standing there, it’s not unusual to feel like you don’t belong. Like you’re faking it. Or that everyone else knows something you don’t.
Audition anxiety – sometimes it’s your inner critic insisting you haven’t earned your place. Other times, it whispers that you haven’t worked hard enough, or nags you about what you should be capable of. This is your audition mindset at work – the automatic combination of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that kicks in whenever you face evaluation. When that mindset tells you you’re an impostor who doesn’t belong, the feeling becomes achingly familiar.
And there’s a particular irony here, isn’t there? Actors are quite literally professional impostors – the job asks you to step into someone else’s skin and pretend to be someone you’re not. Talk about mixed messages. In this instance, your audition mindset is actively working against what you’re hoping to achieve. You’ve walked – voluntarily – into a space designed for judgement, where your most valuable professional skill is pretending to be somebody else, yet your nervous system, paradoxically, treats feeling like an impostor as something to be scared of.
So What Do I Mean by Audition Mindset?
Mindset, in general, refers to the dynamic interplay of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in any given situation. It’s not a fixed attitude or personality trait – it’s your automatic response system that kicks in based on context.
Your audition mindset, then, is the specific subset of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that activate the moment you hear you’ve been called in, continues through your preparations, while you’re in the audition room, and even continues afterwards during your audition autopsy. Each experience affects the way you think, feel and behave and can colour over time whether your attitude towards auditions is generally positive or negative.
The good news though is that your audition mindset is something you’ve learned, which means it’s also something you can unlearn and reshape. But before you can shift anything, you need to understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface of your anxiety.
Why Your Brain Treats Auditions Like Danger
Audition anxiety begins as soon as you get the call, and continues through your entire audition timeline. Throughout this entire journey, your anxious mind races through best-case scenarios, worst-case outcomes every permutation you can think of. Being judged. Rejected. Found wanting.
Those polite industry smiles? Your nervous system can’t tell if they’re welcoming or predatory. While scanning for danger it over-reads micro-expressions. It misfires in the service of keeping you safe.
This is called cognitive fusion – when we’re so entangled with our thoughts and fears that we can’t distinguish what’s real from what’s imagined. As I mentioned in my blog post on performance anxiety, the brain cannot distinguish between what is happening and what it imagines is happening. this obsessive need to predict the outcome can skew our attitude towards always expecting the worst situation which means we enter the audition with an attitude aligned with defeat
How CBH Helps You Understand Your Patterns
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy for actors offers a framework for mapping your unique audition experience. Rather than focusing on quick fixes, it helps you become an expert on your own patterns a helps us identify the areas and strategies required to strengthen your audition toolkit.
The goal isn’t to eliminate your thoughts or feelings, but to create enough distance that you can observe them without being overwhelmed by them. This is called cognitive defusion – learning to step back from the fusion between you and your anxious thoughts, so you can see them as mental events rather than absolute truths.
With that distance, it’s easier to notice the scripts that we’ve been performing over and over again, without knowing if they allow us to perform at our best. Once you can see these scripts clearly, you can begin to question whether they’re serving you – and start the process of rewriting them. And then hypnosis helps us to use the brain’s incredible capacity to learn and change to create new pathways that transform the way you respond.
Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy weaves together CBT’s practical clarity with hypnosis’s capacity to access deeper awareness. Together, they help you understand exactly how your thoughts, physical sensations, and behaviours interconnect to create your current audition experience.
How to Get to Understanding
CBT puts a focus on being experimental and gathering data. I recommend to all my clients that they get a notebook – it can be paper, on your phone, or even voice notes. It’s one of the things I suggest on my consultation calls. In your notebook, make a note for each audition as it comes in: how do you feel about it? Do you feel positive or negative? How did the audition go? What could you do differently? The more you gather information, the more you will get to understand your mindset. The wonderful thing is that over time you can review and get an understanding of how your mindset shifts over time.
Mapping Your Audition Experience
Understanding your audition mindset involves examining your entire audition journey – from that call from your agent through to walking back out of the room.
This involves exploring:
Thoughts: The excitement that raises stakes, fears of judgement, anticipation of failure, scripts inherited from past experiences. What story does your mind tell about auditions?
Body: Where tension lives, how breath changes, the jaw that clenches, the heart that races – or the body that goes numb. How does your nervous system respond to audition pressure?
Behaviours: Overpreparing as armour. Avoiding preparation as protection. Arriving impossibly early. Rushing in late. The subtle patterns that feel like safety but might be self-sabotage.
For each pattern, the key question becomes: Is this serving your goals, or is it maintaining your anxiety?
Once you can see these patterns clearly, you begin to understand why auditions feel the way they do – and where change might be possible.
What Really Drives Your Audition Experience
Understanding your audition mindset also means getting honest about what success means to you. Often, our anxiety stems from unclear or inherited definitions of success.
You might discover that internal “scripts” are running the show – voices insisting you’re not enough, pushing you to overcompensate or disappear entirely. These scripts usually developed as protection, but they might now be creating the very problems they were meant to solve.
Becoming aware of these deeper drivers – your values, your fears, your inherited beliefs about worth and belonging – is essential for understanding why auditions trigger you the way they do. In fact, it’s a good thing to note in your notebook: what does success mean for you?
The First Step Towards Change
Understanding your audition mindset isn’t about immediate transformation – it’s about developing the awareness that makes real change possible.
Think of this understanding as learning the language of your own experience. Once you can name what’s happening – “My jaw always clenches when I see other actors in the waiting room” or “I avoid looking at the casting director because I assume they’ve already decided against me” – you create space between automatic reaction and conscious choice.
This awareness work is collaborative and curious rather than judgemental. It recognises that your current patterns developed for good reasons, even if they’re no longer serving you. The goal isn’t to shame yourself for having anxiety – it’s to understand that anxiety so you can begin to work with it differently.
Where Understanding Leads
Once you understand your audition mindset – the specific thoughts, body responses, and behaviours that create your current experience – you can begin to work with these patterns intentionally.
This isn’t about forcing positivity or pretending anxiety doesn’t exist. It’s about developing a different relationship with your nervous system, your thoughts, and your habitual responses. It’s about making room for audition anxiety, recognising that auditions are important to you and the way you currently experience auditions isn’t fixed or permanent – it’s just familiar.
The understanding itself often brings relief. Many actors tell me that simply naming their patterns feels like taking off armour they didn’t realise they were wearing. They begin to see their anxiety not as a character flaw, but as an understandable response to a genuinely challenging situation.
From this place of understanding, real change becomes possible. Not because you’ve forced yourself to be different, but because you’ve created space for something new to emerge.
Ready to Understand Your Own Audition Mindset?
The first step towards overcoming audition anxiety is understanding exactly how your mind, body, and behaviour create your current audition experience.
If you’re curious about what drives your specific patterns and where change might be possible, let’s explore this together.
Book a free 20-minute consultation and we can begin mapping what’s really happening beneath your audition anxiety.
