Kids Commit Harder Than Adults: Relearning That
Oh man, okay. Last lesson we talked about what a "choice" even means in a scene. This one's the harder half: making the choice is easy. Committing to it once you've made it is where adults fall apart.
Here's the opinion, right up front, because it's the whole lesson: you commit to the choice or you don't do the choice. There's no in-between version. A half-hearted attempt at something is more embarrassing to watch than a full-hearted wrong one. I've seen it a hundred times. Someone decides their character is furious, and then they play it at about 20% because they're worried about looking silly, and it reads as nothing. Meanwhile the person next to them decides their character is furious and just goes for it, and even if it's the "wrong" choice for the scene, it's fun to watch. Commitment is the whole trick. Not talent. Commitment.
Kids don't have this problem. Adults do.
My oldest, Jackson, did an elementary school program years ago where at one point he was supposed to freeze in place. That's it. Freeze, hold, scene moves on. Instead he slowly, dramatically melted to the floor. No reason for it, nothing in the script called for it, he just decided that's what his body should do and he committed all the way to the carpet. I was mortified sitting in the audience. I was also delighted. Every kid in that gymnasium was watching him instead of whatever else was happening onstage, because he was the only one doing something with his whole chest.
That's the thing about kids. They don't pre-apologize for their choices. They don't do a choice at 60% so they have an exit if it doesn't land. They just melt to the floor. Somewhere between elementary school and adulthood we learn to hedge, and it makes us worse at this, not better.
Why adults hedge
I think it's because we've learned that looking silly has a cost. At work, hedging protects you. In a scene, hedging just makes you boring. Nobody's grading you on whether the choice was smart. They're watching whether you meant it.
The exercise: pick one, go all the way
Here's what we're doing at home this week, and it doesn't need a partner.
- Pick an ordinary action — pouring cereal, tying a shoe, waiting for a bus.
- Pick one emotional choice to layer on top. Not "sad," something more specific: you just got embarrassing news, you're trying not to laugh, you're furious at the cereal box specifically.
- Do the action twice. First time, play it safe, maybe 40%. Second time, go to 100%. No apologizing gesture at the end, no little laugh that says "ha, just kidding, that was dumb." Hold the choice all the way through, even past when it feels done.
- Notice the difference in how it feels in your body. Most people tell me the 100% version felt worse in the moment and looked better after. Trust that gap. It's real.
If you've got a kid or a niece or nephew around, watch them play for five minutes sometime this week. Not asking them to perform, just watching normal pretend play. You'll see zero hedging. That's the muscle we're trying to get back.
A caution, gently
Going all-in emotionally, even in a living-room exercise, can bring up more than you expect sometimes — a scene about anger or grief can land somewhere real. If that happens, that's fine, it happens to trained actors too. Just don't push through something that's actually upsetting you in order to "commit harder." Commitment is about follow-through on a pretend choice, not about digging into real pain for an exercise. Different thing. Save that for a scene where you actually want to go there, on purpose, ideally with someone else in the room.
When commitment goes sideways anyway — and why that's fine
I'll tell on the whole cast for this one. Years ago, doing a roadshow, we had a musical number and at the same exact moment, every single person onstage forgot the same chunk of the song. Not one of us. All of us. We just stood there humming, nobody committing to anything because nobody knew what to commit to.
Then someone — I still don't know who — started clapping in rhythm. And because it was a clear, simple, committed choice, the rest of us grabbed onto it immediately and clapped our way through until the words came back. Nobody in the audience clocked that anything had gone wrong. They thought the clapping break was choreographed.
That clapping saved that number, and it wasn't because it was clever. It was because somebody committed to it instantly and fully, with no hedge, and gave the rest of us something to commit to as well. That's the real lesson under the lesson. Commitment isn't just about looking good. It's what your scene partners grab onto when everything else falls apart.
Good data either way. Melt to the floor, clap in rhythm, whatever it is — do it all the way.
Before next time: try the pour-cereal exercise once this week, both versions, and notice which one you wanted to laugh off. That laugh is the hedge we're trying to unlearn. 💛