Tom Ainsley, the British actor, has been in award-winning feature-length motion pictures, commercials, West End plays and television series. He is an established actor who resides in London but works both sides of the pond. He has a successful career and he is a successful human being whether he acts or not. His clear mind is unafraid of criticism because he sees it as a learning and motivating tool to pushes him toward becoming a better actor. He sees each experience as an affirmative part of the puzzle that is life. Each film he participates in, each character that he plays and each person that he comes in contact with on the set or on location is a part of life that he benefits from. He feels that perhaps the actors who never look close enough at themselves don’t believe life and all its experiences can better not only their performances but can also improve the quality of their lives.
When he was attending drama school he noticed a lot of things that he didn’t quite expect when he signed on: getting up early each day, all the long hours of study and learning and the actual physical and emotional exertion required for each class. Those things were commonly shared observations of all the students but Tom also found that he was comparing and hence competing mentally with other students. Other classmates might have gone through similar experiences but they were never talked about. When he noticed he was doing that he realized that if he continued along that vein that a huge toll might have to be paid in the future which would affect his acting ability and his characters’ expression of genuineness.
So, he took an objective look at the whole process including the inner thought and emotional process of acting and then he made a change. He decided not to worry anymore about what his peers were doing or how good or bad he might think they were. Instead he turned all of his focus on himself and only himself. When he did that he began to see positive changes in his performances, an increased ability to learn and to retain information and just an overall improvement in his life. Acting had always been fun for him but after that minor alteration in the way he looked at life and his profession, acting became more satisfying than he ever imagined it could be.
