Acting Benefits: 8 Top Reasons to Join an Acting Class

On a Monday night in our adult class you’ll find a working actor or two, and next to them people who came straight from a hospital shift, a sales floor, a classroom or a real estate closing. Most of them are not there to be discovered. They’re there because something in their life asked them to be better in front of other people, and acting class is the only place I know of where you rehearse that on purpose, every week, with someone watching who will tell you the truth.

I wrote in my book that we train doctors, lawyers, CEOs, real estate professionals, sales associates and everyone in between. That wasn’t a marketing line. It’s a description of the room. So here is what those people get out of it, in the order they usually notice.

The top acting benefits for your life

When people hear “acting class” they picture accents, mime and someone pretending to be a tree. Not here. What we do is closer to a gym for the part of you that has to walk into a room and be present in it. Eight things that part of you gets stronger at:

1. Acting classes build confidence

If the thought of standing up in front of people and speaking, let alone improvising, makes your heart pound, welcome. You are in the majority, and so was I. The fear is primal, which means it does not answer to logic. You can know perfectly well that nothing bad will happen during the quarterly report and your body will still hand you the racing heart, the tight throat and the shaking hands, because some old part of your brain thinks you’re about to be eaten.

So how do you beat a response you can’t reason with? One word. Rehearsal. You can’t think your way out of stage fright, but you can practice your way out of it, and an acting class is a place built for exactly that. Every time you get up, whether it’s a commercial, a monologue, a scene or an improv, it gets a little less scary. Your body learns that people watching is survivable. And a relaxed instrument, which is you, is the only one that communicates anything.

The trick is walking through the door the first time. My advice in the book is still my advice: sign up and walk in before you have a chance to think.

2. Teamwork

Improvisation runs on two words you’ve probably heard: “yes, and.” Your partner offers something, you accept it and you build on it. Try refusing and the scene dies right there. Do that for two hours a week and it becomes a reflex, and the reflex follows you into the meeting where somebody floats a half-formed idea and the whole table goes quiet.

I’m a hawk about one thing in this building: cliques do not get to form. School sorts teenagers into groups and this room refuses to; the quarterback and the freshman who never raises his hand get the same exercise and the same standard, and it’s a great equalizer. Adults are no different. Everyone is being brave at the same time, and people who are brave together tend to root for each other. Friendships come out of this place. I can’t promise you a best friend, but I can promise you’ll be surrounded by people who want you to do well.

3. Poise

Poise sounds like a pageant word. Here’s what it actually is: balance. Ease in the body. And here’s the thing about it that nobody tells you: tension and poise cannot exist in the same body at the same time. Nervous habits, the bouncing knee, the hands that don’t know where to go, the talking too fast, are all tension looking for an exit.

Acting class gives you exercises for breath, body awareness and grounding, and they work on the tension at the source. The first thing most of my adult students discover is that under pressure they stop breathing. Fix the breath and the other habits fall over one at a time, like dominoes, because the breath was holding them all up.

4. Conversation

Put yourself in a room full of strangers. On a scale of one to worst nightmare, where are you? I don’t mean the weather-we’ve-been-having kind of small talk. I mean actually making a connection with a person you just met.

Some people seem born with that. Most of them practiced. Charisma is a skill, and like every skill on this list it begins with listening. There is one word painted on the back wall of our theater, and it’s that one: Listen. It is the foundation of being a good actor and a good conversationalist, and most of what we do in class is designed to make you better at it.

5. The ability to understand others

Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump. Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles. Every great performance is a person willing to see the world through eyes that are not their own, and that willingness is a muscle. Acting class is where you work it. You spend an evening inside someone else’s story and you walk out a little more able to imagine what it’s like to be the person across the counter from you.

Empathy, the ability to understand what another person is feeling, is what the best leaders and the best salespeople run on. It looks like better customer care, like listening to a colleague before you answer, and as the difference between managing people and leading them.

6. A better memory through memorization

Can memorizing things improve your memory? Twenty years of students say yes, and the ones who say it loudest are the adults who came in convinced they couldn’t memorize a grocery list. Memorizing is a habit, pure and simple: the habit of holding information and getting it back when you need it. Every new script asks your brain to build the pathway again, and the pathway gets easier to build.

In our classes, memorizing is a given. A commercial for an audition, a scene for Monday, and in masterclass, pages of Death of a Salesman, Doubt, A Streetcar Named Desire. If pages sound impossible, start with anything. A poem. A prayer. A paragraph. There’s no wrong place to start, but start.

7. Stress reduction

This is the part where I get to tell you how much fun it is. Students tell us all the time that class feels like therapy, and I think I know why.

Your phone goes in a box in the lobby. Silent mode isn’t enough. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine found that after an interruption it takes about twenty three minutes to get fully back to what you were doing, and just feeling the phone in your pocket is an interruption waiting to happen. So we take it at the door. For two hours, the day is in the lobby and all of you is in the room, because your whole self, body and mind, is the instrument.

What’s on the other side of that is play. Real, out-loud, laughing-until-you-can’t-breathe play, of the kind most adults haven’t done since they were nine. It is very hard to worry about email while you are pretending to be a lighthouse keeper.

8. Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence has become a buzzword, so let me define it the way we teach it. It is the ability to hear what a person is really saying underneath what they are actually saying. Tone. Pace. The pause before the answer. The thing they didn’t say. An actor has to read all of that in a scene partner in real time, and the exercises that teach it are the same ones we run for kids, teens and adults.

It matters on the schoolyard and it matters in the boardroom. It’s the difference between a salesperson who hears an objection and one who hears the fear behind it, between a parent who hears “I’m fine” and one who hears the rest of the sentence. We call it listening for the truth, and it’s the whole job.

What an acting class is actually for

Repetition exercises, improvisation, movement, scene work, memorization, voice. Some nights it’s ridiculous and some nights it’s revealing, and one thing is guaranteed: you will try things you have never tried. Worst case, you leave more confident and better at a dozen things that have nothing to do with acting. Best case, you find out you love it. Either way, confidence built in this room translates to every room.

This isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. If you want someone to tell you you’re wonderful, there are easier places to hear it. If you want to get better, here’s where to go next.