The Art of Relaxation and Perfectionism in Front of the Camera

I'm gonna look more relaxed and that's going to yield a feedback from the audience, so I already had that as somewhat of an operating maxim when I started filming MythBusters. I had already had a lot of stage experience, um, and I knew that, um, and so that was the kind of thing that I would bring. I mean, and there are also other mitigating factors to help like I would tell terrible jokes just before pieces to camera, just like telling a Shaggy Dog joke and getting my crew laughing it's a great way to kind of for me is a great way to settle into settle into an on-camera piece and my crew will tell you I've told some of the most horrifying delightful jokes uh and then there's the and then there's just that moment when the camera's rolling, you feel like you everything feels like it's on you. I've had this experience, and the camera rolls, and you think none of this matters I'm just gonna serve the material, it's not always possible but you know the the the but it is doable it doesn't even feel like it's possible sometimes but it is doable.

I would ask to see the takes to camera and see what I could see coming through uh I you know I'm trying to think if there's one other thing I want to say about this, it is that with practice everything gets easier. This is totally also the other thing um it's not binary whether you are your authentic self or not depending upon your mood or what you're outputting to a camera or to an audience it's not binary at all it is it is a bandwidth right um and I will say there's this, I don't know who said this, who said this at the beginning it might have been the painter Francis Bacon, said that anybody who practices a lot can get a piece of artwork to like 85 to 90 percent. And I really believe that I believe that just practice with no Talent, no natural Talent can get you to about 90 but that last ten percent is your whole freaking life, that last ten percent is everything you've got um it's not a linear scale it's logarithmic.

um and so in those moments when I have had to go on stage when difficult things were happening or I've had to shoot pieces to camera I rely on the professionalism of just knowing my craft of knowing you know how to slow down a piece to camera if it doesn't feel right or watch the take and understand that what I'm doing, enough to modify and attenuate it to the camera. It is not easy our emotions are not rational and they should not be instructions for action but they so feel like it they really really do um but frankly I think the whole world would be served by everyone realizing my emotions are not rational they are not here they are fight or flight responses they are coping mechanisms they are evolutionary however you want to couch them, they are rarely rational they are understandable and they're reasonable given what it's like to be a person but they're not rational responses to the situation.

The Degree of Danger You Might Feel is Not the Actual Danger You Might Be In

I hope um but it's a lovely question Sean, and I don't think that I've given a specific answer to it, but that is often the case with the questions on this um but it's worth chatting about it's worth talking about it is worth inquiring to yourself how much of your emotional life your co-workers have to deal with oh yeah ask yourself that question then look around um one other thing I will say about this is that a tremendous Aid I got for doing on-camera work and for managing all you know all of these things has been meditation has been specifically vipassana breathing meditation. I've been doing it on and off now for 30 years, my practices in the shambles I'm terrible meditator, and even being a terrible meditator the skills that I have learned from it about relaxing, about taking stock, paying attention to right now, understanding this is what's happening moving forward are inestimable.

Meditation Has Been a Game-Changer for Me

If you're thinking that meditation is too hard to take on just please no I am the worst meditator and still I cannot bang on enough about the benefits it has given my life. Thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further, you can by becoming a tested member uh details are of course below But it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time. You get Advanced word and behind-the-scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams, and we have some members-only videos including the atom Real Time series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much I'll see you on the next one

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enSean Reedy righty r-e-i-d-y Sean Reedy says do you find it difficult for your profession to require you to not be your authentic self at times and he goes on to explain they go on to explain we refer to it as acting but in other terms it could be described as masking most people experience this in their workplace but without the camera I am sure there were days when you may have been feeling distraught or overwhelmed but for the sake of the show had to smile and put on the Persona that the public eye was accustomed to yes yeah that totally happened all the time uh and it's real and there's a few different places from which I want to address this I'm gonna address it from the hard part first and the hard part is the hard part is that yeah your your sub question most people experience this in their workplace is real but not everyone experiences it in their workplace to the same degree I think that women have the experience that men uh get to show their feelings at work a bit more than your average person uh I just think that I just think that culturally women are far more practiced at hiding and masking their emotions in social situations then men tend to be uh there's also the fact that uh I just want to talk about mood and how it affects the people around you because when you're at the apex of the thing uh which Jamie and Carrie and Grant and Tori and Scotty and Jesse all were on camera um you know everyone around you wants to get the job done they want to get the product out they want to help you get that product out and if you are in a bad mood they're going to work towards helping you um the joke on MythBusters was that I needed a cookie around 4 pm um but that joke was based on the fact that I tended to get I tended to reach the end of my rope around then on a difficult day uh and the reason I'm pausing so much in my talking about this is because really the long and the short of it is there was a point on MythBusters when I realized how much my mood could affect my crew and I I'm I'm not a yeller I don't take I don't take out my emotions on the people that work with me uh as John Belushi once said while giving somebody a tour of the SNL set I only yell at the executives not the not the staff that has absolutely been the way that I like to manage myself and my people and I've definitely gotten salty with the people above me I I think that I think that there are some in my past who would think of me as difficult talent but only the people that worked above me I hope uh but there was this point at which I realized on MythBusters and I look I went through all sorts of stuff over the 13 years in the very beginning I was in the middle I was in a divorce uh uh uh uh that you know had several appearances in court over the years all relatively minor stuff all you know just the normal rigmarole of separating two lives and co-parenting to Children um but at the same time going to court is expensive and it's stressful not necessarily in that order it is it is yeah it is super stressful and there were some really really rough days uh on set when I was dealing with that kind of personal stuff at home and having to maintain um and it's difficult your your question do you find it difficult to require you to not be our authentic self yeah absolutely um and after a certain period of time it doesn't matter what you're feeling you've got to deliver the thing so how did the wait so I just wanna yeah uh so sorry I guess what I realized is I know I'm bouncing around here but I guess what I realized is when I realized that my mood would have a significant effect upon the crew I sought to be more circumspect about how vocal I was about what my mood was specifically because uh you know I was on sets in early days of colossal pictures some of the directors I worked for were absolute yellers they were looking for someone to blame they loved nothing more than chewing somebody out and I was on the business end of a few of those over my early commercial days and that sucks but even more than its sucking interpersonally it's like when a director is walking around and they're fuming the whole ah the whole room is it's rough and when they're pretending that they're not it feels like you're being gaslit you know I've definitely was I definitely learned to be more in the camp of if I'm feeling a certain kind of way just to say listen I'm going to take some time away and deal with this and come back and that is like just that just making making the coming to the clarity that that was the right way to deal with that I couldn't turn off those emotions when they were happening but I certainly could really localize them and not make them somebody else's problem um but you asked about being the authentic self so let's talk about that uh I did a an appearance at a Tech Conference in Puebla Mexico earlier this year that was a really really amazing event and uh a young uh a young Mexican science Communicator came up to me this young man he was super charismatic and he was like I am starting a channel I want to talk to people I want to communicate science what advice do you have for me and it's always such a hard question because you're like I I you know there's so many things you want to say to Young your young self but right there I realized that I had something to give him which is you might not always feel relaxed you might not always feel at ease in doing your science communication but if you're tense it doesn't mean that your body has to be tense and the more relaxed you are in your body the more relaxed the people you're talking to are going to feel that is a just a truism and so you know for stage fright or for stage nervousness I don't really have stage fright but I've definitely had moments where I was like you know I I did a I hosted an event at the Royal Albert Hall a sellout crowd for the Royal Albert Hall that was a heady moment and I'm sitting there backstage trying to memorize my lines and make sure I'm going to go out and it's going to work and I'm realizing that I'm super tense and that's gonna that's gonna show you can see that and so I sat there and did a meditation exercise and relaxed the muscles in my head and my face and my neck my shoulders and my chest my clavicles and my stomach and my diaphragm and my arms and I sat and I worked through that because I know intellectually even though I might not feel any more relaxed after that exercise I'm gonna look more relaxed and that's going to yield a feedback from the audience so I already had that as as somewhat of a operating Maxim when I started filming MythBusters I had already had a lot of stage experience um and I knew that um and so that was the the kind of thing that I would bring I mean and there are also other mitigating factors to help like I would tell terrible jokes just before pieces to camera just like telling a Shaggy Dog joke and getting your crew laughing it's a great way to kind of for me is a great way to settle into settle into an on-camera piece and my crew will tell you I've told some of the most horrifying delightful jokes uh and then there's the and then there's just that moment when the camera's rolling you feel like you everything feels like it's on you I've had this experience and the camera rolls and you think none of this matters I'm just gonna service the material it's not always possible but you know the the the but it is doable it doesn't even feel like it's possible sometimes but it is doable and I would ask to see the takes to camera and see what I could see coming through uh I you know I'm trying to think if there's one other thing I want to say about this it is that with practice everything gets easier this is totally also the other thing um it's not binary whether you are your authentic self or not depending upon your mood or what you're outputting to a camera or to an audience it's not binary at all it is it is a bandwidth right um and I will say there's this I can't remember who said this who said this at the beginning it might have been the painter Francis Bacon said that anybody who practices a lot can get a piece of artwork to like 85 to 90 percent and I really believe that I believe that just practice with no Talent no natural Talent can get you to about 90 but that last ten percent is your whole freaking life that last ten percent is everything you've got uh it's not a linear scale it's logarithmic um and so in those moments when I have had to go on stage when difficult things were happening or I've had to shoot pieces to camera I rely on the professionalism of just knowing my craft of knowing you know how to slow down a piece to camera if it doesn't feel right or watch the take and understand that what I'm doing enough to modify and attenuate it to the camera it is not easy our emotions are not rational and they should not be instructions for action but they so feel like it they really really do um but frankly I think the whole world would be served by everyone realizing I mean and I say this because I have to tell myself this all the freaking time my emotions are not rational they are not here they are fight or flight responses they are coping mechanisms they are evolutionary however you want to couch them they are rarely rational they are understandable and they're reasonable given what it's like to be a person but they're not rational responses to the situation the degree of danger you might feel is not the actual danger you might be in I hope um but it's a lovely question Sean and I don't think that I've given a specific answer to it but that is often the case with the questions on this um but it's worth chatting about it's worth talking about it is worth inquiring to yourself how much of your emotional life your co-workers have to deal with oh yeah ask yourself that question then look around um one other thing I will say about this is that a tremendous Aid I got for doing on-camera work and for managing all you know all of these things has been meditation has been specifically vipassana breathing meditation I've been doing it on and off now for 30 years my practices in the shambles I'm terrible meditator and even being a terrible meditator the skills that I have learned from it about relaxing about taking stock paying attention to right now understanding this is what's happening moving forward are inestimable and if you're thinking that meditation is too hard to take on just please no I am the worst meditator and still I cannot bang on enough about the benefits it has given my life thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member uh details are of course below But it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get Advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams and we have some members only videos including the atom Real Time series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much I'll see you on the next oneSean Reedy righty r-e-i-d-y Sean Reedy says do you find it difficult for your profession to require you to not be your authentic self at times and he goes on to explain they go on to explain we refer to it as acting but in other terms it could be described as masking most people experience this in their workplace but without the camera I am sure there were days when you may have been feeling distraught or overwhelmed but for the sake of the show had to smile and put on the Persona that the public eye was accustomed to yes yeah that totally happened all the time uh and it's real and there's a few different places from which I want to address this I'm gonna address it from the hard part first and the hard part is the hard part is that yeah your your sub question most people experience this in their workplace is real but not everyone experiences it in their workplace to the same degree I think that women have the experience that men uh get to show their feelings at work a bit more than your average person uh I just think that I just think that culturally women are far more practiced at hiding and masking their emotions in social situations then men tend to be uh there's also the fact that uh I just want to talk about mood and how it affects the people around you because when you're at the apex of the thing uh which Jamie and Carrie and Grant and Tori and Scotty and Jesse all were on camera um you know everyone around you wants to get the job done they want to get the product out they want to help you get that product out and if you are in a bad mood they're going to work towards helping you um the joke on MythBusters was that I needed a cookie around 4 pm um but that joke was based on the fact that I tended to get I tended to reach the end of my rope around then on a difficult day uh and the reason I'm pausing so much in my talking about this is because really the long and the short of it is there was a point on MythBusters when I realized how much my mood could affect my crew and I I'm I'm not a yeller I don't take I don't take out my emotions on the people that work with me uh as John Belushi once said while giving somebody a tour of the SNL set I only yell at the executives not the not the staff that has absolutely been the way that I like to manage myself and my people and I've definitely gotten salty with the people above me I I think that I think that there are some in my past who would think of me as difficult talent but only the people that worked above me I hope uh but there was this point at which I realized on MythBusters and I look I went through all sorts of stuff over the 13 years in the very beginning I was in the middle I was in a divorce uh uh uh uh that you know had several appearances in court over the years all relatively minor stuff all you know just the normal rigmarole of separating two lives and co-parenting to Children um but at the same time going to court is expensive and it's stressful not necessarily in that order it is it is yeah it is super stressful and there were some really really rough days uh on set when I was dealing with that kind of personal stuff at home and having to maintain um and it's difficult your your question do you find it difficult to require you to not be our authentic self yeah absolutely um and after a certain period of time it doesn't matter what you're feeling you've got to deliver the thing so how did the wait so I just wanna yeah uh so sorry I guess what I realized is I know I'm bouncing around here but I guess what I realized is when I realized that my mood would have a significant effect upon the crew I sought to be more circumspect about how vocal I was about what my mood was specifically because uh you know I was on sets in early days of colossal pictures some of the directors I worked for were absolute yellers they were looking for someone to blame they loved nothing more than chewing somebody out and I was on the business end of a few of those over my early commercial days and that sucks but even more than its sucking interpersonally it's like when a director is walking around and they're fuming the whole ah the whole room is it's rough and when they're pretending that they're not it feels like you're being gaslit you know I've definitely was I definitely learned to be more in the camp of if I'm feeling a certain kind of way just to say listen I'm going to take some time away and deal with this and come back and that is like just that just making making the coming to the clarity that that was the right way to deal with that I couldn't turn off those emotions when they were happening but I certainly could really localize them and not make them somebody else's problem um but you asked about being the authentic self so let's talk about that uh I did a an appearance at a Tech Conference in Puebla Mexico earlier this year that was a really really amazing event and uh a young uh a young Mexican science Communicator came up to me this young man he was super charismatic and he was like I am starting a channel I want to talk to people I want to communicate science what advice do you have for me and it's always such a hard question because you're like I I you know there's so many things you want to say to Young your young self but right there I realized that I had something to give him which is you might not always feel relaxed you might not always feel at ease in doing your science communication but if you're tense it doesn't mean that your body has to be tense and the more relaxed you are in your body the more relaxed the people you're talking to are going to feel that is a just a truism and so you know for stage fright or for stage nervousness I don't really have stage fright but I've definitely had moments where I was like you know I I did a I hosted an event at the Royal Albert Hall a sellout crowd for the Royal Albert Hall that was a heady moment and I'm sitting there backstage trying to memorize my lines and make sure I'm going to go out and it's going to work and I'm realizing that I'm super tense and that's gonna that's gonna show you can see that and so I sat there and did a meditation exercise and relaxed the muscles in my head and my face and my neck my shoulders and my chest my clavicles and my stomach and my diaphragm and my arms and I sat and I worked through that because I know intellectually even though I might not feel any more relaxed after that exercise I'm gonna look more relaxed and that's going to yield a feedback from the audience so I already had that as as somewhat of a operating Maxim when I started filming MythBusters I had already had a lot of stage experience um and I knew that um and so that was the the kind of thing that I would bring I mean and there are also other mitigating factors to help like I would tell terrible jokes just before pieces to camera just like telling a Shaggy Dog joke and getting your crew laughing it's a great way to kind of for me is a great way to settle into settle into an on-camera piece and my crew will tell you I've told some of the most horrifying delightful jokes uh and then there's the and then there's just that moment when the camera's rolling you feel like you everything feels like it's on you I've had this experience and the camera rolls and you think none of this matters I'm just gonna service the material it's not always possible but you know the the the but it is doable it doesn't even feel like it's possible sometimes but it is doable and I would ask to see the takes to camera and see what I could see coming through uh I you know I'm trying to think if there's one other thing I want to say about this it is that with practice everything gets easier this is totally also the other thing um it's not binary whether you are your authentic self or not depending upon your mood or what you're outputting to a camera or to an audience it's not binary at all it is it is a bandwidth right um and I will say there's this I can't remember who said this who said this at the beginning it might have been the painter Francis Bacon said that anybody who practices a lot can get a piece of artwork to like 85 to 90 percent and I really believe that I believe that just practice with no Talent no natural Talent can get you to about 90 but that last ten percent is your whole freaking life that last ten percent is everything you've got uh it's not a linear scale it's logarithmic um and so in those moments when I have had to go on stage when difficult things were happening or I've had to shoot pieces to camera I rely on the professionalism of just knowing my craft of knowing you know how to slow down a piece to camera if it doesn't feel right or watch the take and understand that what I'm doing enough to modify and attenuate it to the camera it is not easy our emotions are not rational and they should not be instructions for action but they so feel like it they really really do um but frankly I think the whole world would be served by everyone realizing I mean and I say this because I have to tell myself this all the freaking time my emotions are not rational they are not here they are fight or flight responses they are coping mechanisms they are evolutionary however you want to couch them they are rarely rational they are understandable and they're reasonable given what it's like to be a person but they're not rational responses to the situation the degree of danger you might feel is not the actual danger you might be in I hope um but it's a lovely question Sean and I don't think that I've given a specific answer to it but that is often the case with the questions on this um but it's worth chatting about it's worth talking about it is worth inquiring to yourself how much of your emotional life your co-workers have to deal with oh yeah ask yourself that question then look around um one other thing I will say about this is that a tremendous Aid I got for doing on-camera work and for managing all you know all of these things has been meditation has been specifically vipassana breathing meditation I've been doing it on and off now for 30 years my practices in the shambles I'm terrible meditator and even being a terrible meditator the skills that I have learned from it about relaxing about taking stock paying attention to right now understanding this is what's happening moving forward are inestimable and if you're thinking that meditation is too hard to take on just please no I am the worst meditator and still I cannot bang on enough about the benefits it has given my life thank you so much for watching if you'd like to support us even further you can by becoming a tested member uh details are of course below But it includes all sorts of perks and we're building them all the time you get Advanced word and behind the scenes photos of some of our projects questions you get to ask direct questions during my live streams and we have some members only videos including the atom Real Time series of unbroken unedited shots of me working here in the shop they are weirdly meditative thank you guys so much I'll see you on the next one\n"