Intimacy Directors and Coordinators Podcast
Where Intimacy Professionals in TV, Film, and Theatre come together to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry.
Intimacy Directors and Coordinators Podcast
The Importance of Integration
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🎙️ Podcast Show Notes Introduction
You can know the definition of consent. You can understand the process. You can check every box on the checklist.
But does that mean you’re ready to do the job?
In this episode, Marie Percy and Claire Warden explore the difference between knowing how to do something and actually having the skills integrated enough to do it under pressure.
They break down the stages of learning, the importance of practice and failure, and why intimacy professionals need to understand their level of competency before taking on higher risk work.
Because learning the information is only the beginning.
👂 What to Listen For
- Why knowing something is different from being able to do it when the pressure is on
- What an intimacy professional is actually managing when an actor changes their boundary on set
- The four stages of learning and how to recognize where you are in your own professional development
- Why safe practice and failure are essential to becoming a competent intimacy professional
- How to assess your level of competency and the level of risk before saying yes to a job
🔗 Important Links
- How to Become an Intimacy Professional Free Webinar
- Intimacy Directors and Coordinators Home Page
- How Aspiring Intimacy Professionals Can Build Their First Kit
💡 Learning the information is only the beginning. The real work is practicing, integrating, and building the skills you need to do this work well.
Hello, and welcome to the Intimacy Directors and Coordinators Podcast, the place where intimacy professionals come to keep their finger on the pulse of what is happening inside the entertainment industry. My name is Marie Percy. I'm one of the co-founders here at IDC. And I have chatting with me here today, Claire Warden, who is our head of advanced training and leads basically all of our certification in-person trainings. She is amazing. Let's chat, Claire.
SPEAKER_01Let's do it. Why not?
SPEAKER_00Let's do it. So, like so often happens, she and I were talking in a meeting about how our participants are progressing and how they're doing inside our programs and what we're noticing happening. And something came up, and we were like, we need, we need to share this with the peoples because the peoples need to know. Because something that is incredibly human that we all do, we're noticing is impacting intimacy professionals' ability to be successful in the field and do the job successfully, right? And here's the thing, the very human thing that we're all subject to is that we don't know what we don't know, right? If you don't, if you if you don't know, you don't know. And that's that's just part of being a human being. And having information is different than being able to do a thing, right? So early career intimacy professionals and people who are aspiring to become intimacy professionals and who are just figuring out how to do this will often we notice be like, okay, I understand how to do this. I got the knowledge, I got the information, I got my checklist, I check, check, check, I know how to do it. And knowing is very different than doing, being, having it integrated in your body, right? So, like, for instance, my six-year-old daughter theoretically knows how to ride a bike, right? And I feel like this is kind of a cliche example, but let's just roll with it, pun intended. She knows how to ride a bike in theory, right? She knows that she's got a balance, she knows that she's got a pedal, she knows that she's got a steer. What she currently can do is ride a bike with her training wheels, right? So she's steering, she's practicing her pedaling, she's practicing her balancing, but she's never done it before without the training wheels. So she doesn't actually know how to do it. She can balance on one leg when she's standing. She knows how to balance on a balance beam or climb on something. She knows how to pedal, she knows how to steer something, but she's never done all three of those things together. And so if I were to just like pop her training wheels off, I guarantee she would pretty immediately, if I wasn't spotting her, smash.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I bet also like just that technical aspect of it, right? Yeah, having to hold the bike up now, having to control it without that extra support. But also like the feelings that are going on in her body, that sudden fear, maybe a little bit of panic, maybe a like doubting of herself, or maybe a not knowing what it's gonna feel like until she's actually in it. And that new sensation also affects what she's gonna do with her body that she's already learnt, right? So, like, she might know you hold on to the handlebars, but when she gets scared, she might automatically just ah, let go of them, right? Because that's our instinct.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, hands come off, baby. And it it takes repetition to be able to move through all that, all that learning process to actually integrate the individual skills to be able to do a more complex task, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I have an example from my early days as an intimacy director of kind of what this might look like. One of the one of the ways it might look for an aspiring intimacy professional, someone who's just getting their C legs. So I'm working on this show, and we're just in the process of introducing intimacy direction to the theater that I am resident at at my university. And I'm like, hey, other faculty, I think we should have some audition notices and some opportunities for students to like opt in and out. And I got a lot of pushback, and I was just like, okay, I guess there's nothing I can do about it. I didn't realize that I, as the professional, needed to advocate for my professional boundaries about like what I need to do my job. So I didn't get what I needed to do my job well in the first place. And then ended up in a series of ongoing conversations where now I've got student actors cast in roles who didn't fully understand the expectations of those roles. And so we've got like a consent backup issue where it's like, not only am I trying to figure out do they truly consent to this like action in the moment we're doing, but I'm also like, okay, I actually have to ascertain like, do they actually consent to the story, to play telling the story with their bodies to the role, right? And so it, it, it resulted in an ongoing process for me and like 10 times more work, right? Like this job was this show was so much work. And it's because there was a level of integration for me as a professional where I had not yet integrated that like I have to set my professional boundaries, and I can't do the job if I don't have this, and I can't do the job if I don't have all these pieces in place so that the job can actually happen. So that's just kind of like one example of what this can look like. You've got like one little unintegrated piece, and then it's like dominoes, and the whole, like it just creates a ripple of problems throughout the whole production.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, and that that example really highlights like if you're unable, or if you miss a step of building like the foundation at the beginning of a process, the whole process gets thrown off. And then you are scrabbling and, as you said, working hard and trying to retroactively fix the thing that wasn't that foundation stone that wasn't laid properly, because everything is now wobbling on top of it. And there's so many aspects of I think the work of an ID or an IC that are those kind of foundational parts, whether it's your skill or whether it's the process, but like those foundational parts and often like the core aspects or the core skills that not only do you have to kind of know and check off, but you have to really be very present and instinctive in bringing them in so that you can make sure that's happening while you're doing all the other stuff that the role has. I think what's what I hear a lot is surprise as people continue along their journey in this, surprise at how many things we're doing all at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Something I often say to folks is that when an ID or an IC is doing their job really well, most people don't see about 85% of the thing they're actually doing. Like you'll see about 15, 20%. You'll see like they're asking questions and they're giving mints. You know, like, oh, that's just what the job is. Oh, all they have to do is show up with mints? Awesome! And be like, do you want to do this? Okay, let's do it. And so I think that does lead to this kind of it not being particularly clear, or people not knowing quite how involved and how much work and how much nuance this role requires and how much plate spinning, juggling, multiple things all at once that you're doing when you're when you're working.
SPEAKER_00Okay, Claire, I have a scenario for you, and I want you to break down for our listeners what you would be doing in the first like 60 seconds and first 10 minutes in this scenario. Here we go. You've had your actor calls, everybody is on board, everybody's excited. You show up on the day of, and an actor's boundary has changed, and they're like, actually, this thing is not okay with me anymore, and they're freaking out. What do you do? What are the 20 million things you are doing in the next 10 minutes?
SPEAKER_01Well, the very first thing I have to do at that moment is instantly manage my own nervous system. Because when they say that, there can be a oh God, oh panic, this is not what I expected, this is not what I wanted. So I'm calming my own nervous system, and I'm also trying to send out a co-regulation to the actor so that they can calm, because that's a hard thing for an actor to say as well. So I'm calming my nervous system. I'm really actively listening, not only to what they're saying to me, but to also how their body is, so that I can really get full context of what's happening. I'm using, I'm gonna have to use really high-level consent-based non-coercive communication to get more understanding of why this change has happened and the specific details of what's now available to us compared to what we did talk about and how this actor needs and wants to move forward and the care the actor has. So, all of that instant high levels is happening in the first 20 seconds or so. I had that conversation then. What I need to be thinking about is A, what have we already discussed? What are our camera, if it's an IC, like what are our camera angles? Um, and what's what is our setup, and what have we agreed? What is costume if if it affects like what modesty garments we're having or what costume we have, I need to kind of make sure that we have the right equipment for them. I now need to do employ really careful diplomacy and kind of conversation facilitation because now I need to go to our director, perhaps even our DP, and let them know about this change and then present the shifted of information and help facilitate the conversation to finding a solution. Now, that solution may be that we do a different thing than we agreed on. That solution might be that there's more restriction around what we thought we had. That solution might be we might need to bring in the writer, talk about the story. Is it is it that vital that, you know, we see the hand go on the breast, or can we mark it? If it is vital, can we change that? And probably the answer is no. And then I have to like think about okay, in this, how much time is this going to take? Do I need to let our first AD know that we've got to have this discussion, we've got to figure this out. How our our rider shouldn't be affected if they've reversed their consent, but if there are other ideas of things to do, I have to be thinking about the rider and whether they're trying to put something in the rider that we can't add because we're after our 48 hours. I'm trying to calm the crew, I'm trying to calm myself, I'm trying to think through various possible choreographic solutions to making this shift. Am I even going to need to end up talking to their agents or their reps if the director decides they absolutely will not change? Is the producer getting involved? Do I have the right equipment in my kit? Should we need to make a shift? Who else needs to be involved in this? Like, this is all all of this is having to happen five minutes ago because no one expected this on the schedule as well. And I'm sure a bunch of other stuff that, depending on what happens from each little part of the chain, that then sets up a whole other chain of events that I then need to follow through and facilitate.
SPEAKER_00And that's why I asked about the first 10 minutes. Because every single one of those additional conversations you are then having also then sets off its own chain of events, right? Its own process of regulate myself, help the person I'm talking to stay regulated, go into the creative problem solving of what we're working with, think through the legal implications of the changes or the creative implications of the changes, right? And like as you were talking, I was like, oh, I'm sweating over here, right? Like, you know, and those are all things that are happening in order to essentially pull complex pieces of information from different areas of responsibility of the job and integrating all that information into the moment and and then finding the right thing to say in the moment that's going to move the process forward and help everybody feel good and stay calm.
SPEAKER_01Right. And within that, to be doing that in an inclusive and consent-based way, resisting urgency on which the entire system that we are inside works on. And as the pressure in a situation goes up, those really important, like people call them soft spoke skills, like soft but mighty, you know, like those really core skills of how I am managing everybody else's reactions, nervous system, mine, the the way I'm communicating at each level, the amount of advocating I'm doing on behalf of the actor, but also my job is also to support the director. So I also have to advocate for their needs and the writers and their vision production because this was part of it. And I think that that really kind of it makes me realize time and time again the depth to which a lot of these skills need to be settled in our body. Because as you were saying earlier about the difference between knowing and doing, right? I think the difference between understanding a concept, or even understanding, oh, this is the thing you need to do, this is what consent-based communication consists of, is very different to the amount of practice that you need to do in order to do it at a competent level in a situation like that, or in an everyday situation while you're also trying to create choreography and think about camera angles and listen to the director and make sure that the garment's staying on, right? Right. And I think I think this comes from like at the heart of this work is the disrupting and the adjusting of a myriad of harmful and oppressive systems that have worked together for so long to inhibit consent. And these are like, yes, they're big, large systems like the film industry or the theater complex or academia, right? And also like societal oppression and exclusion. But it's also the kind the smaller, more intricate, less obvious systems like our cultural way of speech, like habitually asking closed questions, or our communication being influenced by our intention or our want, right? Or this kind of societal lack of practice and resilience about being in discomfort, or how let's be honest, living in this world right now can need us, lead us out of necessity to dissociate slightly. So we're not present in our bodies, or we're not able to actively listen, not just with our ears, but with our bodies and to other people's energy. And in fact, some people have never learned or practiced that, or a lack of understanding about the autonomic nervous system and how it affects our functioning and how it's affected by trauma and how we can affect other people's, etc. etc. etc. Like so many of these systems and behaviors and influences we we have we, and I mean we, IDs and ICs and training IDs and ICs have become conditioned into. And that for me is that difference. It's not just learning new information, it's actually often in these core skills, these soft skills, unlearning and reprogramming numerous like fundamental aspects of ourselves so that when we are working and we get into a situation, or just generally in our working life, we can switch programs and we can come into this in an instinctual way. And it's often the opposite of how things usually work or what people usually expect or the way people usually behave. So that for me is like part of that integration, is that it's not enough to be like, well, I read it on the sheet and I did my checklist. It's it's got to be a reprogramming that is that you can just like hit go and runs whilst with the multiplicity aspect of doing and thinking about seven to 14 other things all at the same time. And if you drop one of those, if I drop my intention and deeply entrenched consent-based communication at any point during this, all your dominoes are fallen down.
SPEAKER_00You got a domino situation, and the next thing you know, you as the intimacy professional are in a panic. Yeah. Because you're like, things are going wrong, people are upset, the director's pissed off, the actors freaking out, you know, like things are falling apart. And it just takes like one little thing to start off that chain reaction.
SPEAKER_01Or even if, like, if I'm doing great on my consent-based communication, but I'm forgetting some of my production processes and protocols. Well, great. I'm advocating like hell over here for the actor, but I've blown it. I'm not getting into the right person. I've blown the entire shoot day up or the whole rehearsal up because I'm not engaging what has to happen from the other side.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a participant at our certification, our in-person that we did in Minneapolis. So this was 2025. So we were in Minneapolis and it was on a lunch break, and I had a participant come. I was doing like sort of office hours during lunch break, right? Like if anybody needs support, anybody's struggling, you know, anybody has questions, I'm gonna sit and eat my lunch, come come chat with me. And we had a participant come up to me, I had a participant come up to me, and I remember her being kind of in a state of distress, being kind of upset and unsettled. And she was like, she was like, Marie, you know, I I did the lessons and I learned about urgency and I thought that I had tackled that in myself, right? Like I learned about it, I looked into it, I, you know, it changed how I was thinking about my life. And now that I'm here in the room with other people who are doing the work and practicing doing the work with the kind of in-person support, I am uncovering a whole well of emotional experience and realizations about the ways in which urgency has personally impacted me. And and and she was struggling in some ways in the training because she was trying to practice her choreography and you know, all the things she's learning, but also was going through this internal process of uncovering this unconscious relationship that she had to urgency and the way it had impacted her life. And and it so she was doing like all this emotional work at the same time that she's like, okay, now I need your head to go 15 degrees this way because it still doesn't look like you know, the sexual act that we're trying to simulate is actually happening. Right. And and and so I think it's like bring us back to this riding a bike metaphor. There's there's there's riding the bike with your training wheels, right? There's and there's understanding that you have to balance. Then there's do do riding the bike and Balancing. And then there's riding your bike on a tight wire, a tightrope over a pool of sharks, right? Which is like what Claire just described, right? You're like you're working on your an HBO set. The stakes are incredibly high. There's so much money behind it. You're dealing with big personalities, right? And it's like you're threading that needle, riding the bike on the tightrope over the pool of sharks, which is a whole new, requires a whole new level of mastery and integration. And so I think there are natural like levels or levels is a bad word, but but some projects require more of us than others. Right. So in the example that Claire was talking, that I pitched to Claire, where like last minute you're on set, and an actor is like, actually, my boundary changed. That's a much higher stakes situation than you're working on a theater production. You're gonna be in rehearsal, you know, you know, several times over the next two weeks, and something comes up, and you're like, great, let's work on something else today. You know, you've got an opportunity to pivot in rehearsal, and then you've got a week to have the conversations you need and get things squared away so that you can move forward, right? So, so there are different challenge levels depending on the project that you're working on. And I want to get nerdy for a second. I am a total nerd about learning and teaching. I love digging into what makes learning work. So we're gonna break it down here for you. So, so there are four natural phases that we all progress through while we're learning, right? So the first thing, the first stage is being unconscious of how incompetent we are, which is really an uh not fun place to be because you this is the place of not knowing what you don't know, right? And that's the place where you are most likely to make a mistake that will either harm the people you're working with or impact your ability to get future opportunities. And then you move to a place where you become conscious of your own incompetence. Right. And that's the point where you learn what you don't know. And that's part of what I'm hoping you all will take away from this episode is get a sense of what do I know? What do I not know? What am I, what is knowledge and what is integration, so that you can make really smart choices about what gigs you are and are not taking. Because when you're conscious, it's like it's like learn you're learning to drive the car, right? And you've never driven a car, it's not automatic yet. So you're like, I don't know how hard to press the brake, and you push it and the car goes donk, right? And everybody goes, ah, in the car, right? You're conscious that you don't know how hard to press on the brake pedal yet. And then you start to learn how hard to press on the brake pedal, right? You become conscious and competent. So you're thinking about it. I'm like thinking about how hard do I press the brake pedal. I'm thinking about, okay, this actor just told me this thing. I have to regulate myself, I have to regulate them, I have to use non-coercive communication. Okay, am I doing it? I think I'm doing it. Okay, I'm present with no, I'm thinking about what I'm doing. I'm present. Okay, now I'm present with you, right? So you're conscious and you're doing it and it's happening, but you're still thinking about it. And then ultimately we arrive at this place of unconscious competence where you're like Claire, and Claire in 60 seconds hears that. She goes, Thank you so much for telling me. I have a few follow-up questions, right? And in that 30, 20 seconds, she has done or started to do all the things she mentioned before. And she is not conscious of all the things she's doing most of the time. She's just doing them. It's instinctual, right? And what I want for everyone who is aspiring to do this job is to sort of fall off the cliff into conscious, being conscious of their incompetence in the safest, lowest stakes environment possible. There's a way to learn that lesson the easy way, and there's a way to learn that lesson the hard way. And I want to save you all from having to learn the lesson the hard way.
SPEAKER_01No, I love that. And I also think like those words are just a state of being. Like there is no shame or lack of value in not knowing it all yet. Like the real value is realizing the work you have to do, the practice you have to do, the extra information you have to get, the where it's sitting in your kind of spiral of learning, so that you know like how integrated is it, or how how competent am I getting at this? That's the really smart, excellent, and value-laden thing to focus on. Rather than like trying to rush through and just like, well, I've got to get to a place of yes, I do this. And the the you never stop learning in this work. Never. You know, I've got to unconscious competence after 11 years at this point of doing this work and thinking about this work pretty much all day, every day, for those last 11 years, and actively having to talk about it and explain it and break it down and teach it. So it's taken enormous amount of application to get to that, and that is part of the journey. And that's, I think, what makes that real striving for excellence is that the the amount of time you're putting into that and the amount of effort that you're gathering together in order to each little aspect of the work, of which there are 110 million, like each to really be like, I'm gonna really hone and practice this part, and then as that gets good, I'm gonna weave in this part, right? So that you're building each brick of that foundation incredibly strongly, so that when you do step forward to to do the work, you have built yourself and therefore those you work with a really safe and solid platform to go from.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I just I just want to echo what what you started off with there, Claire, that that I started this episode by saying we're talking about a human thing here today. This is, we are all humans, we're all on a learning journey, and we're talking about the stages of learning, right? And how to learn to do this. And and if you think you're gonna roll out of bed and be great at anything, you are you are probably A, kidding yourself, and B, need to address your perfectionism, which I wouldn't know anything about. Because I've never been a perfectionist about anything in my life.
unknownI'd like to challenge that.
SPEAKER_00Moving on. No, but these are all like just that, you know, like we have to have so much compassion and grace for ourselves in in this learning process and be making smart decisions.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and there's so much urgency in the world, in the industry, in our wants to support and make a difference and to really be conscious of is that is a sense of urgency driving me forward at a faster speed than I'm responsibly in in order to serve myself, able to really integrate this knowledge. Like slow down, it's it's not gonna go away. You'll get there when you get there. You'll be better for having got there and built well along the way than rushing forward and jumping into this work because you feel like you should be there.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so on this topic, I was in a meeting with Claire and Amanda the other day, and we were sort of talking about the learning journey in our programs and how we see people progressing. And I was like, oh my gosh, y'all, I know what we need. We need the Kobayashi Maru for our programs. And they both were like, What? What is what is what is that? What are those words you just said? And for those of you that are familiar with the Star Trek universe, you'll know that the Kobayashi Maru is a test that Starfleet captains have to take before they can formally become captains. And this test is set up to for them to fail. There is no way to pass it. It's impossible to pass, and it's like this opportunity for them to meet their humanity and and fail before they have to potentially fail in a real life situation with real crew members at stake. And I was like, this is the thing that our participants need. And all I think all aspiring intimacy professionals need is they need a safe place where they can really fail and test the limits of their skills, which is going to then reveal the things that that are not yet integrated and are not yet in a place of at least conscious competence. And so, you know, I think training programs are a really great place for that. I know we do that in our certification program, and I know there's other opportunities to train elsewhere where you can probably do that. But but having a safe place to be like, okay, it's time to practice and it's time to fail so that I can do that before a real actor is depending on me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And it's it's that it's that word practice, right? That willingness to practice and then take something. Like if the reason we practice is because we do something, we're like, hmm, okay, how can I improve in some way on that? And then we do it again. And then we're like, oh, I improved on that, but now I need to improve on that. And time and time again, I think what's what's encouraging is that time and time again, people who train with me tell me that the skills we learn or they learn in our IC and ID courses have big impacts on their like general personal life as well, like especially the listening, the kind of those soft skills. And so those fundamental core practice skills can be practiced in everyday life with your family, in meetings, at the doctor's office, like the opportunity to get curious about these and try and go, okay, failed that one. Interesting. And what was the effect? And what happened that led to not getting that? Okay, great. All important information. Let's have another go in the same situation or in a different situation. Oh, now I've got information about doing it in that situation that informs how I could be more successful in the previous situation. So that approaching it with curiosity to expand your understanding of the whole concept that we're working on, as opposed to got to get the answer to tick the box to move forward, I think is a really helpful mindset that can make learning more fun and engaging.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think they're this is something I talk about in our programs as well, but learning happens in a spiral, especially when we're talking about a deeply embodied skill that needs to be integrated, where there's multiple sub-skills. You got your choreography, your advocacy, your liaison, and all the sub-skills under all those things, right? So you're learning each of those skills. And the first time you touch one of those skills, you're you're getting a first brush of it, right? You're learning, you're getting some knowledge, some understanding. You're like, oh, I recognize that. I can name that, I understand that, right? Those are some of the learning objective words I would use, right? And then the next time you come around to it, you start understanding, okay, maybe this is how I would apply that idea in this situation. This is what I would do with it, or this is how I would use this piece of information with this other piece of information to create a particular outcome, right? So the next time you come around, you're starting to think about how do I apply it? How does it go together? How do I actually get it in my body and do it, right? And then you come around to that idea a third time and you're like, okay, now I know how to put it together. And now the question is, you know, how does it come together as a whole? And it's a deeper level of integration and understanding as you as you're building and learning. And and it if you think, okay, I'm just gonna be blunt for a hot second. If you think you're like, oh great, I understand the definition of consent. It's crisp, it's these things that it has to be. And you're like, great, I got it. You you have you understand it, which is a beautiful thing. And that doesn't mean you can facilitate it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that kind of that leads me on in the in the vein of being blunt. Like I have to say, it's incredibly important to get those core fundamentals skills and learnings before you try to do this job. And yeah, I'm gonna say, like, yes, access inclusion is vital and part of what we advocate. But this job requires enormous integrity, enormous and skill, and inclusion in that and access does not mean that you can enter without a responsible level of knowledge and training. You have to train and become competent before you gamble with other people's well-being, because at the end of the day, that is what it comes down to.
SPEAKER_00Right. Like, I've used this metaphor in other places before, but no one would be like, great, my heart surgeon read the textbook. Good to go. You know, you want to know that your heart surgeon has read the textbook, had the practices, been tested, failed in a testing environment, and then practiced again so that, so that, you know, your outcomes are favorable. Yeah. And and look, there's always risk when you're doing this job. Even the most unconsciously competent, integrated, amazing intimacy professional will still come upon situations where something goes sideways and something goes wrong that you couldn't predict. This is in general a high-risk job because we are dealing with hyperexposure. We're dealing with simulated sex, we're dealing with sensitive material, we're dealing with heavy power dynamics. And if you're doing it in the higher levels of like Broadway or, you know, a network television set, we're also dealing with a lot of money. So there is an enormous amount of pressure on a very sensitive topic. This is a high-risk job. You are never gonna step into this role with zero risk. But your main protection as a professional from risk of something going on is your level of skill. And so, what I what I want for all of you to hear is not that we're trying to hold you back or saying, don't go do this work because this work is so important and we need people doing it. But what we're saying is you've got to be conscious of your level of competency and you've got to assess the level of risk on any particular gig and assess if you are willing to take on that level of risk and if you think you are able to safely bring that project home to Harbor. And that's not just about protecting your collaborators, that's about protecting your career. Because if you're like, I got this, and you show up on a high risk, high stakes, high-profile project and you don't got it, you're not gonna, you're not getting a callback on that one.
SPEAKER_01And I think this even comes in, you know, it's not just a Netflix show, you know, it's like your community theater where no one has really done a lot of this work and there isn't a lot of structure and skill to hold.
SPEAKER_00So that is even harder.
SPEAKER_01Even harder to bring that work to and everything in between, and that willingness, you have to have that willingness to build your competency in order to keep doing this work. And it's fine if you don't want to, but then maybe it's just not the work for you.
SPEAKER_00I think that's a beautiful thing to say. Like, if you are not obsessed with learning about this and practicing and like actually putting in the time and effort, this job might not be for you. And that's okay. That's fine. Not a big deal.
SPEAKER_01And the joy, the satisfaction, the expansion of spirit, of emotion, of knowledge and of community that I have got. And I know so many people, all the people in our program have got, from being like, yes, I do commit to learning. I am interested in putting in this work and doing this practice. It just never stops because you can never stop learning. And that I think is something that makes that effort and that commitment so worth it.
SPEAKER_00It's worth it. I think this is the most fulfilling career you could possibly have in the entertainment industry. It's incredibly fulfilling and rewarding. Thank you so much for listening today, everybody. We are 100% behind you. We've got your back. You can do this. I know that was a lot, but there's so much to learn. There's so much beautiful opportunity right now. So thank you for being here with us. Thank you for listening. As always, don't forget to subscribe, follow along. We want to hear from you. So you can reach out to us on Instagram at IDC Professionals, or you can email us at info at IDC Professionals.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time on the IDC Podcast.