0:00 about 17 different levels of human consciousness where people sit throughout their life and that that'll be shame grief guilt anger fear all the way up to joy love enlightenment now which one is your default so i'm this is maybe coming a little bit from out of the box who are you and where are you going what do you want together we'll find the ideal path
0:35 on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel one of the things you learned living here in los angeles the entertainment capital of the world is how resilient a mindset you have to have in order to be successful as an actor or actress or just in the entertainment business writ large our guest this week is roz gentle who has done pretty much all you can do in that business for decades although she still looks
1:11 pretty young so we're going to talk to her about how do you take that performer's mindset and use it in whatever field that you you want to get into but first we're going to mix up a cocktail with phillip so what are you going to do for us all right so today we're going to be making a cocktail that dates back to 1908. it's oh it's named after a song called my affinity that aired in a play called the souls kiss so it requires sketch so we're going to start off with an ounce of sketch okay little trivia affinity
1:48 was what um back in the early 1900's affinity meant love or like my significant other oh and i feel like an affinity for so like if you look at valentine's cards back in the 1910s it would say to my affinity yeah you know if i gave that card to my wife i'm sleeping on the couch [Laughter] so this cocktail is named after that there so it is my significant other equal parts dry and sweet vermouth an ounce each as well so announce each all around wow okay so
2:24 scotch sweet and dry vermouth and then you have and then you've got a little fernet so a little bittering agent to this cocktail here just to just half an ounce of that time take the edge off the sweetness okay and we're you're using the the scotch i have here on the bar which is johnny walker black so perfect sketch yeah it's a beautiful scotch some dashes of bitters here and we're just gonna stir
3:00 i like to stir for about 20 seconds just so it dilutes everything and shields it all down here nice and then that is it i think i'm going to steal a taste of this before we give it to our guests and all this needs it's just a little lemon twist oh okay a lot a lot of layers of flavors in this huh [Music]
3:36 just helps brings out the bitterness and helps mutes it just a tad here was this an american cocktail it is an american cocktail yeah so i always think of american thing you know cocktails as being more on the sweet side because we we tend to have that sweet tooth here but back in the like pre-1920s everything was actually more bitter so really really bitter it it was a form of medicine back then oh gotcha okay there you are thank you sir let's see
4:12 oh wow yeah that's to be honest with you thinking about those ingredients i wouldn't have gone oh yeah that of course that makes a great cocktail but it sure does it's very simple cocktail as well only four ingredients yeah wonderful cheers thank you sir of course i think roz is going to like this my pleasure [Music] so philip mix this up for us this is called an affinity thank you okay but you have to know my wife is my affinity
4:47 you're not my affinity but we have an affinity that's true um i'm going to read a short biography about you so so our viewers will know a little bit more about you so as a lifetime performer producer and director roz general knows what it takes to move and impact an audience and while it would be fun to talk to you about life on the wicked stage we were reminiscing before we're going to focus on roz's work as an acting teacher and coach and founder of life master seminars
5:22 through which she has helped people in areas such as becoming better leaders and gaining greater self-composure and when the the proverbial see i had i had i wrote a joke in here and i messed up the joke you always mess up jokes that's right we're just gonna leave it at gain greater self-composure um you'll you'll be able to if you haven't heard this already you'll be able to tell that uh roz is a native australian and so she but she's bicontinental except for the last sort of year or so and but we're we're benefiting by having you here in the united states to have you in
5:57 studio having a cocktail to uh which is a very nice cocktail i have to say yeah right what's it based on it's a it's a scotch uh dry and sweet vermouth and frenette or frenet depending on you know one of those things yeah and then a little bit of i mean a twist of uh lemon a lemon peel yeah i thought it was a big um mango core i thought no it's a bit smaller thinner oh yeah it's lemon it's lemon yeah not wearing my glasses
6:33 so you you talk about the psychology of performance right having that that that mindset so connect for us with connect for us that performance psychology with the ability to meet just the everyday challenges of life um psychology of performance is the the course i teach at knifer so it's it in that course i teach the first half of it is all about them it's really
7:08 understanding how they work how they function as a human being but just in terms of actors generally and how to relate that to every day and the mindset of as an actor you know when you go into a scene you have choices you can go this way or that way or that way or this way or whichever way the director wants you to go so you have choices and i think that's one thing i think that is very clear with the actor's mind however when young actors come in they think they have to go with their gut all
7:43 the time which is you know okay to do that but you might play cary grant forever you know so there are actors who play themselves like carrie did very well and there are actors like leonardo dicaprio who or philip seymour hoffman who can you know those sort of people who can dissolve into a whole other character um so i think as actors it's our job to be able to replicate the consciousness of every human being on the planet that's no small thing so you have to
8:18 understand how the mind works and i think the first thing i like to get actors to do is to really start to understand themselves and how they function as a human being so you you bring in a really interesting thought to mind and that is you know today there seems to be so much emphasis on being authentic and as a chaplain in the navy oftentimes the biggest problems came when the sailor or marine was being authentic i.e i'm mad i'll put my fist through this taxi window right and and so
8:55 would you say that when an actor assumes a character that's let's see even at odds with his own is that being inauthentic no because i think there's everything in all of us so you have to find that part of you that can get angry and that's why i help them find out who they are because if that's a part that you've suppressed for a long time you're not going to be able to do that and when you go to do it you'll try and squash it because it's not part of you so we have to get to know the strengths and the weaknesses our own weaknesses
9:32 if we don't know them we will push them aside we won't want people to see them and what is vulnerability other than letting people see the very parts of you you don't want them to see and that is being vulnerable and you can only do that when you recognize okay so that's a part of me but it's not who i am so then conversely let's say for someone who habitually and inhabits anger there's a calm in them and they have to find that calm absolutely yes yes and what the book i use is a
10:07 book called power versus force by david hawkin and in it he um what's the word identifies let's say about 17 different levels of human consciousness where people sit throughout their life and that that'll be shame grief guilt anger fear all the way up to joy love enlightenment now which one is your default there are many people who default to anger it is like the habituated behavior that they have got gotten stuck into so
10:42 i help them discover where they're at and go okay well where is where are other level excuse me need another sip of this i think where are other levels what are the other levels i can go to but i always get them to come back to what i call neutral which is that peace place so we do a lot of meditational techniques we do a lot of a lot of those different techniques i don't have a particular meditation i promote by any means i just help them to find
11:17 their way to come to neutral because if you're going through a scene and you start out all jolly and happy and then by the end you're in this raging thing you've got to be able to get back to one for the next to start the scene again right and when people you know really tap into that anger and it sort of becomes part of them and they can't get up no no i can't start it again for another 10 minutes that's 10 minutes of time gone the director's not going to bring you back for the next filmfall so so let's say you've got um a student who for whatever reason that they're they they're they feel a block
11:53 either when they need to go from that calm place to the angry place or the happy place if you will or vice versa they they could they can easily access those extremes of emotions but then to get back to that centered place where they can move on to the next scene they can't do how do you help them work through that block to more readily access these other emotional levels perhaps the whole course in 30 seconds 30 seconds
12:28 i get them to take responsibility that they're they're the creators of their own experience that everything they're creating every emotion every feeling they're the creator of it so if they're the creator they can uncreate and they can transition into something else so i get them to be very flexible with their emotional state so they're really becoming masters of emotion masters of energy i like to call them because that's what you have to be able to do so most of the blocks i find
13:03 all of our blocks i venture to say and of course there will be exceptions but i'd say most of the blocks come down to self-respect the underlying block of nelly every the underlying cause of nearly every block is self-respect whether it's financial illness um your relationships with people i there's a whole thing i could explain here but but basically all of our blocks and all of our self-sabotaging anything that comes in the way is being created by our
13:39 state of mind and if that state of mind is not present is not fully aware of itself and loving itself and in that very calm place we're not able to my thought has just totally gone out of my head where i was going can anyone tell me it was so good wasn't it well you know you made me so this is this is what you made me think of um i had a situation once where um someone called me a pretty egregiously anti-semitic
14:14 slur right and um and my response was kind of yeah whatever um and and people around me were incensed that someone would have the temerity to call you know a jew something and a rabbi to boo right it's like yeah they're they're like righteously double whammy right and and i said you know what i know who i am exactly i'm not what he described um so i don't really need to respond to it but he did he gave me a
14:49 really important piece of information and that is this is not someone i want to be involved with and that was that was my response yeah and so i is it am i on the right track is that what you're talking about or am i sort of off in left field here no no you're absolutely right that you have to know who you are or otherwise as an actor you'll be looking at the critics and you'll be believing them all or you'll be looking at the praise and you'll be believing it all and you can't you can't take one without the other so you have to know yourself and just say thank you very much or oh really okay so
15:26 i'm this is maybe coming a little bit from out of the blue from out of the blue so many times in in my career especially when i was in sales people you should take an acting class it will really help you what do you what do you think about that advice i think it does i i did this in canada once when i first left australia i was in canada trying to see if i could work up there before i came in here and i ran a course up there for people who weren't actors
16:01 every one of them across the board said oh how fantastic i learnt more about myself than i've learned in 30 years or whatever it was um because i think it does it does show you where you're reactive because you you start acting with people and all you start all these buttons getting pressed everywhere and you go oh gosh sorry i didn't mean that but you know it it does help you to learn about yourself things that you may not have known before maybe didn't want to know maybe didn't want to know definitely so i i think it's a great idea it's a great creative expression
16:36 i i encourage anyone to do a course in acting i had so many directors in australia who used to do my acting classes one they wanted to find out the mindset of an actor and what an actor actually has to go through because people think it's so easy you know everyone can do that but uh there's a lot more to it yeah yeah of course of course uh it just it it it seems to me e even if we're talking about i mean we're sort of you know ragging on cary grant but he seemed when you watch his movies he seems to be very in touch with the
17:11 emotions he's very present he was very much in touch with him him and his emotions definitely no i'm not i'm not saying he was a bad actor that you have a choice as an actor you can play yourself and if you're charming and very charismatic you can play yourself through your whole career but some actors prefer to be able to mix it up and play all kinds of characters right because that's fun too yeah yeah and you can learn a lot more about yourself actually yeah i i yeah so i i can see so i think
17:48 you know actors actors make choices as to which what kind of actor they're going to be yeah and it's because i don't think most of us look at actors that way we think you know oh well either they're just kind of doing whatever they're doing or the director saying okay now walk from here to here and um but really it's it's an it is an expression of life in front of a camera on a stage totally i mean you get to express all the different emotions that you never do in your life we all make choices to use about three or four or five maybe different ways of expressing emotion in our life
18:24 and we are habituated to only expressing that way and they're probably choices we made at two years old and then as an actor you have to go oh she does what really i would never do that but okay let me try and you have to go a whole different way to expressing anger yeah you know some people are very wrong and others are like you know pierce right inside yeah causing all kinds of illness in there but you know every everyone has all their ways they've
19:00 they've become very habituated to acting but as an actor you now have to open that box and go oh gosh when i do the the class on emotion they all go oh i thought i was being emotive motive but now i'm going i don't know how to get to that one you know so i i go okay well think about someone you've seen on television someone you know in real life just just pretend just play and see if you can get to that what is begging has anyone begged in their life for anything that's a really hard emotion to tap into if you've got any sense of self-respect right because we never go there yeah so you know they have to once
19:36 you've hit that note that frequency if you like of that emotion you go oh wow yeah that's what it is but if you've never hit it it's scary for an actor if they first think they come on set and they go now beg for your life you go how do you beg for your life i've never done that so you know there's all sorts of sorts of things to learn yeah for for someone who wants to have perhaps at the same time deeper access to their emotions but also
20:13 better control of their emotions i think that would seem to me to be the ideal absolutely right so where where should they start what's you know they're they've just finished watching our interview and and they're they're fired up yeah this makes sense to me i want to do this what should they do just off the top of my head i give you two answers to that and the first one is meditation find a way to find the quiet inside there are all kinds of meditations out there
20:48 any one of them will work find the one that works for you because we all command different things the second thing is one of the things that blocks a lot of emotional work is anger so bring forgiveness into your life heart forgiveness it's one of the techniques i use in the class to help clear the blocks because a lot of the blocks are around anger we've all had a lot of [ __ ] happen sorry can i say that word it's happened to some of us and there's a lot of anger around it and it blocks emotional state it makes you get stuck it's like an
21:24 iceberg stuck inside and it's heart forgiveness not just forgiveness from your head but really feeling it in your heart and there's there are different techniques around that ross thank you so much for coming in and talking with us today you're very welcome very welcome it's been lovely what's going on you have to push the one
22:00 he's only been doing this for about 50 years so you know no i'm really ready find that calm place okay whenever the director says go all right settle in everybody and action kevin roz thank you so much for coming and talking with us today you're very welcome kevin lovely to see you again and thank you everyone
22:36 that's our show for this week ross gentle's wisdom was manifest thinking about her two suggestions for both getting more deeply connected with our emotions but at the same time being able to exercise greater control over them probably something we all need to do find that that quiet place within maybe through meditation or some other practice like that and then let's all forgive ourselves
23:11 we probably make mistakes every single day say i'm sorry to the person you're hurt and then forgive yourself and then life can move on to a more productive more place of wow if you have a thought about a subject within one of the realms you want us to talk about let us know go to our website thewaywowshow.com drop us a comment courage at all times my friends
23:46 marie darling you are still my bell [Music]
24:32 you