The Market's Story is Not YOUR Story.
Last Thursday I had an audition I needed to get through fast.
I had Bruce Springsteen tickets with four of my friends and I was the driver. My first pickup was at the exact time my audition was scheduled, so I got there an hour early, hoping to get in a little earlier and be on my way.
There were about 30 actors in that room. I knew at least 25 of them.
I mean knew them — not casually. I'm talking about people I've been crossing paths with in waiting rooms for decades. The mom category, the dad category — at least three of them had been series regulars on television shows. One woman I'd known for years was also on her way to see Bruce that night. We figured this out and had a moment of solidarity about it.
It was genuinely warm in that room. It was also — underneath that warmth — a little heartbreaking.
The Weather Nobody Ordered
Because the narrative was there too — and nobody was whispering it.
The industry is slow. Nobody's working. Everything's contracting. Said out loud, confirmed, co-signed. The way it gets said by people who've earned the right to say it, which makes it feel less like a story and more like a weather report. And maybe it is a weather report. It's just not the forecast for every single person in that room.
If you work in entertainment, you know this feeling intimately. But if you work outside it, I'd invite you to notice how familiar it sounds anyway. Because this happens everywhere. In every industry, every sector, every waiting room, every Slack channel, every lunch table where smart, experienced people are telling each other how bad it is out there. And they're not wrong. The data is real. The contraction is real. The fear is real.
But collective fear has a way of becoming its own weather system — and it doesn't actually care whether you personally deserve a good year or not. It just keeps raining.
What Social Media Does to All of This
Here's the thing about that story: social media has turned it into a 24/7 IV drip.
Your feed becomes a Greek chorus of everyone else's fear dressed up as insight. Which means by the time you walk into any high-stakes situation — an audition, an interview, a pitch, a negotiation — you've already been told twelve times today by people you respect, people in your exact situation, that this is a bad time to expect good things.
This is new, and it's worth sitting with. For most of human history, the stories you absorbed about your industry, your economy, your prospects — they came from your immediate circle. Maybe twenty, thirty people. Now they come from thousands, curated by an algorithm that has learned, with depressing accuracy, that fear travels faster than hope.
So the narrative of a slow market doesn't just exist anymore. It gets confirmed. Constantly. By people you admire. By people whose careers you respect. By people who are absolutely not trying to hurt you and are absolutely, inadvertently, handing you their fear to carry along with your own.
Even the people who should know better.
Several months ago I was at a restaurant when I spotted Matt Weiner — the creator and showrunner of Mad Men, a show I had the privilege of working on. I said hello and we shared a moment of, “God, it’s been a long time…” and then with great authority he said this: "Adria, no one is working." And in one way, that was oddly comforting. It made me feel like the dearth of work in my own career wasn't personal. Of course, it usually never is.
But here's the thing. Matt said this while sitting directly across the table from Danny DeVito.
Danny DeVito, who at this stage in his life — when most actors his age have quietly faded from the conversation — is somehow running a more robust engine than ever. Still shooting It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Still the face of an entire national campaign for Subway, which is not a small ask and not a coincidence. He has never been the obvious choice. He has always been working.
The person telling me no one is working was having dinner with someone who cannot stop working.
The narrative of a slow market is real for the market.
It is not automatically real for you.
What 2014 Taught Me
More thoughts on this…
In 2014, my commercial agent lost his house — that's how bad the market was then. Genuinely, objectively terrible. I was also out of town for four months that year. And this was pre-COVID, when auditioning for a commercial meant showing up in person — there were no self-tapes, no remote submissions, no workarounds of any kind. You were physically in the room or you didn't get seen. Which means every job I booked had to happen in the eight months I was actually in LA, in person, in the room — no shortcuts, no exceptions.
That year I booked five national commercials.
A GoDaddy commercial with Jean-Claude Van Damme, filmed in Vancouver, in which I owned a flower shop and JCVD showed up to do the splits and motivate me. (This happened.) A Prego commercial in which I reflected on every bad hair decision I'd ever made in my life but was absolutely confident about choosing Prego over Ragu. An Allstate commercial in which I was married to a Steve Zahn lookalike and we had four completely feral children. A Comcast commercial in which I played the weird mom to my even weirder, obnoxiously Harry Potter-obsessed kid. And a fifth one I've apparently blocked from my memory entirely.
My agent was losing his house. I booked five nationals in eight months.
I wasn't ignoring the reality of the market. I was just — somehow, maybe partly because I'd been away, partly because I wasn't in the rooms absorbing the frequency — not marinating in it. The signal I was transmitting had nothing to do with what everyone else was broadcasting.
The Signal You're Transmitting
That phrase — the signal I was transmitting — is the thing I keep coming back to.
When you spend enough time absorbing a collective story, it stops feeling like a story. It starts feeling like the truth. And when something feels like the truth, it shapes everything: how you carry yourself, how you walk into a room, what you think you deserve, how much you bother. Not consciously. Not dramatically. Just quietly, incrementally, in the way that water shapes stone — slowly, and then all at once.
The people who consistently outperform their markets aren't necessarily more talented. They aren't necessarily working harder. They're often just — somehow — less saturated with the market's version of events. They've maintained some separation between what is happening out there and what is possible for me specifically.
That separation is not denial. It is not toxic positivity. It is not pretending the slowdown isn't real or that the challenges aren't legitimate. It is simply refusing to let the market's story overwrite your own before you've even shown up to write it.
The Feed that Matters Most
Which brings me to the feed nobody talks about — the one that matters most. Not your Instagram feed or your LinkedIn feed, but the very first thing your mind absorbs when you wake up. That threshold moment, before the noise rushes in, is more precious and more vulnerable than most of us treat it.
There's a scene in Somewhere in Time — the 1980 film with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour — where he has traveled back in time to be with the woman he loves, and the whole fragile magic of it depends on him staying completely immersed in that world. The moment a single object from the present catches his eye, he's yanked back. The spell breaks. He can't return.
I think about that scene a lot when I think about mornings.
We have a choice, in those first waking minutes, about which world we step into first. The one we're building toward — or the one that's already narrating itself at us. And most of us, without even deciding, hand that threshold moment straight to our phones.
A couple years ago I created a journal called Dream. Believe. Achieve. — drawing on the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza, James Clear, and Julia Cameron — because I wanted a different kind of morning feed. One that starts with dreams, the literal ones from sleep that are still warm and close, and moves into gratitude, free writing, intention. Julia Cameron's morning pages idea is in there — which she describes as a mental detox, like brushing your teeth for your brain. Getting the noise out so something clearer can move in. Dispenza's work on how our thoughts and emotions shape our reality. Clear's understanding of how small, consistent actions compound into profound change.
The whole thing is designed around one simple premise: what if the first voice you heard in the morning was your own? Whisperings from your Higher Self. Your wise, all-knowing self. The one that knows exactly what you want and need. Not the market's noise. Not your feed's. Not the Greek chorus of everyone else's fear dressed up as industry insight. Just yours — connected to what you actually want, what you're actually grateful for, what you're actually building.
It doesn't make the slow season disappear. It just makes sure that when you walk into the room, you're carrying your story — not everyone else's.
This Is a Curation Problem
And here's the part that's actually actionable, because I don't believe in ending with a feeling when I can end with something you can do.
What you swim in shapes what you think is possible. Before you've made a single move, before you've walked into the room, before you've opened your mouth — the inputs you've chosen have already been working on you. Shaping your expectations. Calibrating your sense of what's realistic. Telling you, quietly and persistently, what kind of year you're allowed to have.
So the question worth asking isn't just how do I stay positive when everything is hard. The question is what am I actually feeding myself, and is it serving me or just confirming what I'm afraid of?
Audit your feed. Notice who you follow, what you read, what you listen to on the way to work. Notice what the first thing you consume in the morning is doing to your nervous system. You don't have to become someone who only consumes good news — the world doesn't work that way and pretending it does is its own kind of problem. But there is a difference between being informed and being marinated. One is useful. The other is just weather you chose.
I found an Instagram account while doom scrolling — which felt appropriate. It's full of reels and posts that are genuinely inspiring without making you feel like you need to fix yourself. One post in particular stopped me mid-scroll: a roundup of good things happening in the world that nobody is talking about. A women's gym in China charging membership every 37 days instead of 30, to account for cramps. Uzbekistan now requiring men who raise a hand against a woman to leave the country. A stem cell treatment in Japan showing real results for Parkinson's. Finland — happiest country on earth, led by five women. Great Britain about to ban boiling lobsters and octopuses alive.
None of that is in your feed. It should be.
Back to the Waiting Room
I went back to that Thursday waiting room in my mind a few times this week.
Thirty actors. At least three of them series regulars. One of them on her way to see Bruce. All of us in the same room, having built careers across the same decades, crossing paths in the same hallways — and all of us soaking, to varying degrees, in the same collective story about how bad it is out there.
And maybe it is bad out there. I'm not disputing the data. I'm just sitting here thinking about 2014, and my agent's house, and Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits in my flower shop, and the year that was objectively terrible for everyone around me and somehow — against all logic — my best year yet.
The market's story and your story are not the same document. They can run parallel for years without ever touching.
Curate accordingly.
Adria Tennor is an actor, writer, and coach who helps actors, entrepreneurs, executives, and creatives communicate with greater confidence, authenticity, and presence in high-stakes situations — from auditions and meetings to presentations, self-tapes, and difficult conversations. Her work explores performance, mindset, creativity, and the stories we unconsciously absorb about what’s possible. Subscribe to her newsletter here or check out her Free Resource page.
