This blog is written by Nic Cain, our Marketing Executive – we’ve encouraged him to bring a different perspective to our blog, by saying something about how he uses coaching as a young actor…

For the past 5 months I have been on a tour of a musical around China. This leg of the tour finishes this week, at the end of which the company get flown back to the UK for a few weeks off. Although I am loving my time out here and the work I am doing, it’s fair to say I am very excited to be back on home soil for a bit – a feeling which I share with a lot of my colleagues in the show. The lead up to this time off has been full of conversations about what everyone has planned for their break, and more importantly what the first thing everyone is going to eat! These conversations have been getting me through, or at least they were doing until yesterday. Yesterday, I noticed feelings of anxiety starting to simmer, when speaking about going home. I brushed it off as unrelated to the going home part of the conversation, however it was a feeling I was struggling to shake. When speaking to a friend this morning, she expressed that she has been sleeping terribly because of a rise in her anxiety. I told her I had been feeling anxious too, and that it started when we spoke about going home the day before. A conversation then candidly opened about how although we excited to be back home, there is also part of us that is anxious about it too.

Will the time off be the respite and break we need? Will we get restless quickly? What will come up when we finally stop after five months of constantly being busy and on the move? I think that last one is the bit I am most anxious about.

I noticed when my friend and I were discussing how we felt this morning that I naturally started asking her some coaching questions. I have found this happening a lot on this job, and it brings me a lot of joy to see the skills I have learnt whilst being part of DS being useful in my acting career too.

So how do I feel now? I still feel anxious, but I feel better for having had a casual coaching conversation and uncovering the root of the feeling. And I feel reflective about the root of the feeling. A fear of stopping, of slowing down, of time to process. Does anyone else feel anxious when they know they are about to stop? My plan is to lean into the fear and continue to have coaching conversations about the things that come up.