The Comparison Trap, Social Media, Envy, and the Garden You Stopped Tending

Albert (00:01.908)

I can tell you when a text was sent without even looking at the time.

Officially at least. So after twenty years of representing actors, I've gotten the certain kind of message more times than I could count. And they almost always come in around one in the morning. Sometimes they're long.

And they're often a little carefully worded, which is how I know they were rewritten several times before they even got sent. And they're always on the surface, sometimes about me or about another agent, if it's an actor I'm not representing at the moment. And usually the theme of the message is my agent isn't sending me out enough. Am I still a good fit with the agency?

I'm thinking I might need a bigger team. You know, that kind of thing. And here's what I've learned. The text is never really about me.

Albert (01:12.842)

I represent actors like family, not like inventory. So when one of them is hurting at one in the morning, I tend to pay attention to it. And every single time when we actually talk.

The one in the morning text turned out having nothing to do with me or even the agent at that time. It had to do with something they saw about four seconds before they started even typing. Somebody they know just booked something. And a feeling moved through their chest, warm and sour at the same time. And their brain reached for a story to explain it. And the story it grabbed was always about.

The representation. If you ever sent a version of that text to your agent or manager, it could be your partner, it could be a group chat. I'm not here to make you feel bad about it. I'm here to tell you what that feeling actually was, because it wasn't what your brain told you what it was. And then I'm going to give you a way to turn it down tonight with your phone in your hand.

Welcome to Mental Rehearsal, the podcast for struggling actors and actors who struggle. In this business, talent gets you noticed. Mindset keeps you in the game. Meet Dr. Albert Bramante, talent agent, hypnotherapist, and NLP practitioner. Every episode will expose the metal traps that hold actors back and give you practical tools to build confidence, beat, self-sabotage, and perform at your best.

So stop rehearsing your fears and start mentally rehearsing your success. Today, comparison. The specific modern glowing screen kind, what it really is made of, and why it makes you want to fire everyone around you. And a two-part reset you can use tonight to take the power away.

Albert (03:23.022)

So I want to tell you about an actor I used to represent. We'll call her Elena. And I changed enough so that you wouldn't know her. But if you're an actor, you're going to know her anyway because she might be you. Now Elena was good. That's the part people always assume is the problem. And it almost never is.

She's trained, working. She had two nice regional theater contracts recently. And she had booked four commercials a few months before that. By any honest measure, she was doing the thing. And she was a working actor.

And she was miserable because she was not booking film and television. And she wasn't miserable all the time. It was a very specific window. And that window often was light at night alone with her phone.

She would see them, the classmate who booked that recurring role, the girl from her old conservatory who suddenly had a manager, a lawyer, and a publicist, and a whole team. And every time Elena came to the same conclusion. And that conclusion was I don't have a good team. My agent may not necessarily believe in me. My agent isn't fighting enough. I'm not being sent out enough. Or I didn't believe in her.

I would get sometimes these texts, like late and long ones. And I want to come back to what these texts were actually made of because it took me a while to really understand it. And when I finally did, it really changed on how I talk to and communicate to all the actors that I represent. Now, here's something I noticed over 20 years of representing actors. And I've never really fully said it out loud on this show.

Albert (05:19.212)

The actors who compare themselves the most are not the ones who are behind. Very often, they're the most talented people I've actually represent. And that used to confuse me. Because you think the person with the most to feel good about would feel the most secure. It's always the opposite. And then there's a second half to the pattern, and it's even stranger. The comparison spiral almost never hits after a class.

It almost never hits after a good audition or a rehearsal when they're actually doing the actual work with actual hands. It's late at night, alone, doing nothing, holding a screen. So the feeling shows up at a very specific time in a very specific state. And I think that's a clue. I think that's telling us what the feeling is actually about. But I'll come back to it because I want you to notice when it happens to you.

Before I tell you what I think it means. Let me tell you about a gardener. Now this one's a bit of a fable, so stay with me. A man plants a garden in the spring. There's good soil, good seeds, there's good depth, it's watered, and then he goes to bed. Now that should be the whole story. But this gardener has a neighbor, and the neighbor also has a garden too. And one night our gardener couldn't sleep, and he took a flashlight out and he walked.

To the fence and shine the light over his neighbor's yard to see how their garden is coming along. Now, in the flashlight, the neighbor's garden looks incredible. It's green, it's tall, further along than his. So he walks back to his own garden in the dark and he kneels down and does something strange. He digs up one of his own seeds just to check.

Just to see if it's growing yet. And it is a little. It's starting but now it's in his hand, in the cold, in the dark. So he puts it back, pats the soil down, and the next night he can't sleep again, and he goes back to the fence. And he comes back and digs it up again. Just to check. Hold that picture, the man in the dark with the flashlight and the dirt on his hands. Because at the end of the episode, I'm gonna tell you why.

Albert (07:43.916)

His garden never grows. And once you see it, you won't be able to unsee it in your own life. Now, what's actually happening here in your head when you're holding the phone? Back in 1954, a psychologist by the name of Leon Fessinger wrote down something that sounds obvious once you hear it, but almost nobody applies it to their own life.

He said human beings have a built-in drive to evaluate themselves. And when there's no objective meaning stick, we do it by comparing ourselves to what to other people. That's the whole engine. Now we really can't answer the question, Am I doing okay in a vacuum? So we answer a different question instead. We answer how am I doing compared to them?

And the trap that Fessinger named is the fact that we compare ourselves upward.

We don't go looking for people that are doing worse than us to feel better. We instinctively find the person to step ahead and measure against them. A hundred years ago, the person to step ahead was someone in your village. You had maybe a few dozen people to compare against, and you saw their whole lives the good, the boring, and the hard work. Now, look at what we built.

You're not comparing yourself to a few dozen people anymore. You're comparing yourself to every actor you've ever met all at once, all night, forever, and you're not seeing their whole life. You're seeing that single best thing that happened to any one of them. You're comparing your regular Tuesday, the auditions you didn't book, the callback that went quiet. Nothing.

Albert (09:43.074)

But other people's booking announcements. It's the most unfair comparison a human mind has ever been asked to make. So that's a machine, but the comparison itself isn't the real problem. The comparison is the match.

We have to talk about what it lands on. Now, when Elena texted me at midnight, and when you type that text, could be to your agent, to your friend, the words are always about somebody else, my agent, the business, the other actors. But the feeling underneath the words is not about anyone else. Underneath is a very old, very quiet question. And the question is, am I enough? That's what's actually on fire.

And the thing about the question, it's unbearable to feel directly. It's too vulnerable. So the mind does something protective and honestly kind of brilliant, in my opinion. And my enough is unbearable. My agent isn't doing his job, is completely bearable. Now you can be angry at that and you could do something about that. You can send a text about that, you can have a conversation, or even change representation.

Now, anger that points outward does feel like power in the moment. Insecurity points inward and it feels like drowning. So the mind trades one for the other automatically. About half a second, and you never see the trade happen. You just feel the anger and believe the story.

There's a researcher by the name of Krista Neff who studies self-compassion. And she draws a line that I think about constantly. She says self-esteem is comparative. It's a report card. It goes up when you're ahead and it craters when you're behind. Which makes it useless exactly when you need it at one in the morning. And when someone else just booked, self-compassion is different.

Albert (11:54.048)

It doesn't ask, are you winning? It asks, are you a human being having a hard human moment? And the reason that matters tonight is that you cannot reason your way out of a comparison spiral. You tried it, it doesn't work. Because it isn't a thinking problem. It's a state problem. And you don't fix the state with an argument. You fix the state with a different state. That, my friend,

Finally is a door that we're gonna go into tonight. Now, let me name the thing that makes this worse because you're doing it and it feels like the most responsible thing to do. Now, when the filling hits you investigate, you go back to the feed and you look for more evidence. You check to see how many followers this actor has that booked. You read the comments, you go to the casting site and refresh your own submission. You look at your submission report that your agent had sent.

And the dark at one in the morning. I didn't want to see the agent doing anything. Now, you think you're gathering information. You think you're staying on top of your career. You're not. You're the gardener with the flashlight. Every refresh is another night at the fence. Every time you check your own submissions or look at your own submission report with that sick feeling in your stomach, you're digging up your own seed.

To see if it's growing. And I need you to hear the mechanism because it's not a motivational point. It's an actual one. Nothing you could do at one in the morning with a phone in that state is gonna move your career one inch. The audition has been submitted. Or it hasn't been. The only thing that midnight session produces is more of the feeling. So you're not gathering information. You're manufacturing an emotion.

And then calling it research.

Albert (13:52.952)

So let me reframe this for you. I'm not gonna tell you to try harder. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you to be more grateful.

Or get off social media. Because you and I both know you are not gonna be quitting social media anytime soon. You're not gonna be deleting Instagram.

But I want you to think of a reframe from a line from Dr. Jordan Peterson that I keep coming back to because it's the whole thing at the root of all this. And what Jordan says is you said compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Sit with that for a second. Because it's something sneaky and important.

It doesn't tell you to stop comparing. Your brain isn't going to stop comparing. That's built in Fessinger told us that in 1954. It tells you to change who you were compared against. Not the person who's a step ahead of you tonight, the person you were a year ago. And when you make that switch, you start seeing the other trap you've been in, which is that you compare your beginning to someone else's middle.

You look at an actor who's booking now, and you measure yourself up against where they are today, you never really see where they started. The ten years of the same auditions and the same silence you're living in right now. If you actually went and find the early tapes, their first read, the roles that nobody remembers, you'd see someone who looks a lot like you. So you're not behind them. You're earlier than them.

Albert (15:45.228)

These are completely different things. And one of the problems

And it's not the one you're losing sleep over. Now, let me put my agent hat on. Because there's a practical piece to this that no one really talks about. And the thing I end up saying on the phone about once a week. A client will call me and say, Everyone's booking except me. And I always ask one question. I said, Okay, what are they actually going out on? And almost every time there's a long pause on the other end, they don't really know.

They know what got posted. Now those are very two different things.

Now let's talk about what actually gets posted. It's a photo on set or in their trailer, the call sheet with the details burned out. What is often never posted is the 90 self tapes or auditions that went nowhere. Nobody puts up a story that says, I had two auditions this month, and one of them was for a regional furniture commercial. Now, I'm not here telling you that these people are lying to you. I'm telling you everybody edits. You edit too.

And then you take your unedited life, all of it. The dead weeks and the rest of the callbacks that went silent and you hold it up against somebody else's edit. And then you decide you're losing.

Albert (17:12.023)

But let's end this argument altogether.

And this is where I can get a client to be really start spinning their wheels. So oftentimes when these calls come in, we'll sit down and look at the actual role. Not the feeling about the role, the actual character breakdown. And I would say three times out of four, when we pull it up, you were never in the running for the job. It's not because you weren't good enough, because it wasn't your part. I'm just using this an example. She's twenty four and you're thirty eight.

He reads the attorney and you read the guy that the attorney is defending.

The role could have been written for a Latino woman in her fifties, and you're not that. So different age range, different gender, even sometimes different ethnicity, different type entirely. So you didn't lose that job. You are never a candidate for it. Any more than a cellist loses a gig to a drummer. And I want to be careful how I say this, because it can land like a consolation prize. Like I'm patting you on the head and telling you it wasn't your fault.

That's not what this is. This is better than that. Most of what you saw tonight that made your chest go tight was never yours to lose. Your competition is not every actor you've ever met. It's much smaller room than that. It's really the handful of people who read the way you read in your range for the kind of part, and there are not too many of them. And you're almost never.

Albert (18:52.33)

See them on your feed. The feed is not your competition. The feed is a crowd. So you've been running a race against people who aren't even in your event. And then you get angry at your agent when you lose it. One more piece, and then I'll present the tool to you. Dr. Peterson has another line that's important. You should surround yourself with people who want the best in you.

Albert (19:19.894)

The algorithm does not want what's best in you. It wants your attention at one in the morning. And it will show you exactly the thing that keeps you scrolling and aching. So part of the of this reframe is remembering that the feed is not your peer group. Your peer group is the few actual working actors you can call, the ones who will tell you that they had the same dead month you're having. Comparison dies in a real conversation.

It only thrives at one AM in the morning at the glow of your phone.

The great hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to say that people already have the resources they need. They just file them somewhere that they can't really reach in the moment. You already know how to feel steady. You felt steady. We're just going to build you a way to get back to it on purpose in about 90 seconds, with the phone still in your hand.

Now here's what we're going to do.

We're gonna do something in the field of NLP, which it's a process of therapy which is older than the phone in your hand, and it completely works. It works on something called submodalities, which is a technical word for a simple thing. Your mind doesn't just store what you saw. It stores how you saw it, how big the picture is, how bright it is, how close, whether it has a sound.

Albert (20:55.946)

And one part that changes everything. When you change how the picture is stored, the feeling attached changes too. And it's automatically. You don't even have to argue with the feeling. You reach it through the picture. Now we're gonna do this in two parts. Part one turns the trigger down, and I call it the dimmer switch. Part two replaces it with something of yours. That's a swish. Now

Let's do part one. So I need you to get comfortable.

Wherever you are. And as long as you're not driving or operating heavy machinery, you can close your eyes if you feel it's safe to. And as you close your eyes, take one slow deep breath in and let your shoulders come down from around your ears. Because they're up there. They usually are.

I want you to bring up that picture, the post, the one that's got you, the one the booking announcement, the signing, or whatever it was. Let it come up the way it normally does. And just notice how your mind is showing it to you. Notice it's probably big. It's probably bright. It's probably right up close, like an inch from your face.

There might even be a feeling of a sound with it.

Albert (22:31.97)

The imagined congratulations, the little cheering. Just notice how loud and how close your mind has been keeping this.

Albert (22:45.112)

Good. Now gently take that picture and make it smaller. Shrink it down from filling your whole mind down to the size of a playing card, and now push it away from you, send it back further and further until it's across the room, until it's the size of a postage stamp on a fur wall.

Now reach for the color and turn it down. Drain it until that little faraway picture goes gray. And then imagine sound that little cheering. Turn it down all the way down till it's silent. Let it get small and far and gray. And quiet.

Albert (23:40.07)

Notice what is happening to the feeling. It came down, didn't it? It didn't disappear. We're not pretending, but it came down.

That warm sour thing in your chest just got quieter because you turned the picture down and the feeling that is attached with the picture. That's the whole mechanism. You just did it. You can do that anytime you want. Whenever one of those picture grabs you, you can make it small and far and gray and quiet and let it just lose its grip.

Albert (24:25.59)

Now, we don't want to leave an empty space where the picture was because your mind does not like empty spaces. And it'll just put the old picture back. So we're gonna give it something better to reach for, something of yours. Now let's build a different picture. This one is you. And it's not you winning some external thing, not you in an award show. That's just comparison in a nicer outfit.

I want you as the actor you are on your best working day. Picture yourself in the room. In the work, doing the thing you actually love. The reason you started. Maybe it's you in a rehearsal when a scene finally clicks. Maybe it's you walking out of an audition knowing you were fully there. Whatever the result is. Now let's build that picture and make it.

Everything the other one isn't. Big, bright, up close, full color. It's so vivid. I want you just to feel it in your body.

Albert (25:38.656)

In your mind, put that small gray faraway picture of the other person back up for just a second. And then, just like that, let your big bright picture come back in its place. The grave one shrinks and it flies off.

Your picture fills everything. Okay, let's switch again to the little gray one and then let it go and switch again. And now let that full picture just come across your face. Feel how wonderful it is. Okay, one more time, gray one up and let's switch it out. Your picture, and this time.

Maybe a little smile comes on your face because it's your work. It's your reason.

And nobody, your social media feed can touch it. So let's do that five or six times. Again, switch to the small gray picture. Now move it further away and switch again to the bright color picture of yourself having a great moment in a scene. Okay, let's switch again to that gray one.

Little distant, a little small. And switch again now to a large, absolutely wonderful glowing image of yourself. All right, one more time. Switch. Small gray one. Let the color just drain completely and let it just disappear. And switch again and now let this big, wonderful picture of you doing such amazing work just let it feel good.

Albert (27:35.298)

Now, see what we're doing here, you won't even have to do this on purpose anymore.

The trigger itself starts to pull up that picture instead. See, we're not fighting the comparison anymore. We just rerouted it. Now, let me answer the objection because I I know you have one. Now you're thinking, come on, Albert, this feels a little silly. Making pictures bigger and smaller in my head. I get it. Now here's what I'll say. Even making a comparison big and bright.

and close involuntarily every single night. And it's been running your emotional life. And it really could have cost you some relationships in your life. You've just never chosen the settings. Tonight you found the dial. And this is not silly. It's the most practical thing you could do all week.

Albert (28:34.84)

So let's go back to the gardener. And let me tell you why the gardener's garden never grows. It's not the soil. It is certainly not the seeds. His seeds are fine. It's the same seeds as his neighbors. And it's the same soil. His garden never grows because he keeps digging it up to check on it.

Growth in a garden happens underground in the dark where you cannot see it exactly during the time you're most tempted to go check. See, every time the gardener digs up the seed to compare it, he breaks the roots that were just starting to hold. The comparing is not separate from the failing. The comparing is the failing. And here's what makes this relevant to you. Your career grows underground too.

It grows in the classes nobody claps for, the auditions that nobody sees, the two years of work that maybe no one will notice. The feed is a flashlight over your fence and checking your submissions at midnight, looking at your submission report over and over again.

And that's a digging. So you're not behind. You're standing over your own garden in the dark with dirt on your hands, wondering why it isn't tall yet. Put that flashlight down. Let it grow when you where you can't watch it. That's not falling behind. That's how growth actually works. And remember that pattern that it's the most talented actors who compare the most.

And it always hits at night alone doing nothing.

Albert (30:19.756)

And the clue was telling us the whole time the comparison was never the information about their careers. If it were about their careers, it would hit after the bad audition when there was real data. It doesn't. It hits in the dark when there's no data at all, which means it was never a career signal. It was a state signal. A weather report about being tired and alone at one in the morning. And they kept reading the weather report as if it were a verdict on their whole life.

You don't have to do that anymore. Now you know what the feeling is. It's weather. And you have a way to change the weather.

Albert (31:00.63)

And let's get back to Elena. And I even said this text is not about me, your agent. You send them the exact same time every night, or at least consistently. And it's after you've been on your phone.

You're not telling the world that the agent is failing you. What you're doing is you're telling me that you're scared that you're not enough.

And you put it as a complaint so you don't have to feel scared. So we did something a little unglamorous. We pulled up those bookings that were eating her alive. And we looked at the actual breakdown side by site in the daylight. Now she had been submitted to one of them. Two of the others were a full age range away from her in a different necessity. The force wasn't even part she would have wanted, and admitted out loud when we're reading it.

required nudity and sexual situations, which is not something that you wanted to do.

She was grieving things she never even had.

Albert (32:09.208)

And that's exactly what you're doing a lot of these times. And you've been doing it every night for years.

Albert (32:19.006)

And we did this. Now, I cannot promise you that you're gonna book a huge job in a week after doing these patterns. Because that's not how this works. I'm not gonna lie to you. Oftentimes the change is much smaller and bigger at the same time. The urge to be frustrated about your career, the certainty that everyone was conspiring against you, that will quietly go away. Because see, the thing is it was never really there. What will happen is you'll stop auditioning for everyone else's approval.

and start doing the work again. And the work will get better. Not because you become more confident in a very fluffy way, because your attention is back.

You stop spending it at a fence.

You bring it home to your own garden. So here's what I want you to take away as we come to a close. The next time you're up too late and someone else just booked, and your brain starts handing you a story about the agent or the industry or the business, I want you to stop and remember that the story is a costume.

Underneath it is just someone who could be a little tired. And you're just asking if you're enough. And you don't answer the question by checking the feed one more time. You answer the question by putting your own picture up and comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. Now let me leave you with one question to sit with this week. I don't want you to answer it for me.

Albert (34:01.782)

I just want you to hold it. How much of your attention have you been leaving at someone else's fence? And what would grow if you brought it home? If you're wrestling with exactly what we talked about today,

I can send you a recording about the unshakable actor mindset. Feel free to get in touch with me at mentale rehearsal dot show slash five.

Now, next time we're gonna pull back the curtain on the very technique you just used. A lot of people hear the words hypnosis and NLP and get a little suspicious, like it's mind control or stage trick. And the next episode we're gonna demystify it all because we're gonna discuss what hypnosis actually is and what it is not, and actually why actors of all people tend to be the best hypnotic subjects on the planet.

If tonight gave you the tool, next week I'll show you how the tool actually works.

Albert (35:07.352)

Thanks for listening to Mental Rehearsal. If this episode made you think, share it with another actor. Then visit mentalrehearsal.show for more tools and resources. And don't forget to follow the show. Until next time, don't just rehearse your lines, rehearse your mind.