During my university career, I received six credits for yoga. You may be asking yourself a couple of reasonable questions: first, how is one graded for downward dog? And second, why would that be part of any curriculum?

I am a systems engineer by training and trade. But I also studied theatre acting in university, sneaking in enough credits — in fact — to earn a second degree. Yoga, every second morning for two terms, constituted six of those credits. It was a course load designed to help me lose my stiff, uncoordinated engineer body and work toward something else, a neutral actor’s body.

The thought process goes like this: an actor’s job is to be a physical and emotional vehicle for storytelling and to embody a character on stage. You can’t do a great job of embodying a character if your body is either limited in what it can do, or brings with it a ton of baggage and bad habits. In a nutshell, you want to be a fit actor who chooses to slouch in character, not a dude who can only play characters who slouch.

So we practiced yoga (and pilates), three days a week, to get ourselves into better physical shape, to learn how to carry our own weight, and to lose the physical baggage our bodies bring with them that gets in the way of our work.

To say that I still apply my acting training daily to project and product management may be a minor overstatement. But this felt like a concept I could benefit from recalling. I still play several roles at work: managing customer and supplier relationships, attending and running meetings with colleagues, and helping to brainstorm and troubleshoot engineering design problems. To be present in any of these tasks, it’s valuable to shed the residue of conversations and frustrations past, so they don’t get in the way of the current effort. It’s worth taking the time to reset to zero, to get back to neutral, before assuming the next role.

Returning home to spend time with my wife and baby girl demands the same discipline. The transit commute now is my present-day yoga class. It lets me put the day behind me and come back to neutral. It helps me lose my slouch.

I came up with this post after opening my acting journals for the first time in almost ten years, the daily chronicles of my theatre training at Simon Fraser University. I expect to flip through them a few times over the next several weeks and I am interested to see if they still offer any pearls of wisdom I can apply to my life and work today.

In the mean time, I’ll do a sun salutation or two for old time’s sake.

For a long time, I’ve prided myself on the things I’m good at.

Growing up, I regarded myself as a skilled tennis player, a good student, and — later in my youth — a decent actor. School aside, “good” — it turned out — was entirely relative. Truthfully, I mostly played tennis against people as or less capable than I, so I didn’t lose often. In fact, one of my clearest tennis memories is losing my first ever tournament match to a kid two years older than me, eight inches taller, and clearly stronger and more skilled. I cried. Not when I got home, as I walked defeated to shake his hand mid-court. I didn’t handle losing well.

As an actor, even in a high school that placed significant attention on its theatre program, males were in the minority. So, of course, I got some decent roles and even a little recognition. At university, again, there were lots of great male roles and few men to compete against. So I didn’t lose out on many auditions. Fast forward to my brief career as a professional actor, where the talent pool grew and the bar was raised. After early success getting a couple of voice gigs, a commercial, and a bit part on series TV, I struggled to consistently earn roles. Not really used to such challenges, I didn’t push hard enough to get better and become successful. Quickly, my time as a professional actor fizzled.

I now realize I was missing a key skill: I needed to be better at failing.

In truth, sucking at stuff makes up most of the time we spend on the path to getting good at anything. And now that I’m a new dad, I want to make sure that I’m ready to instill this notion in my daughter. The more you avoid failure, the fewer things you allow yourself to get good at. It’s okay to be bad for a while. More than okay. It’s imperative.

So my new resolution is to be willing to be terrible. I’ll try to write some awful blog posts, some poorly conceived screenplay pages, some badly structured code, and maybe even record some half-baked podcasts. I need to be willing to let these things be awful, or I’ll never get good at any of them. And above all these, I’ll need to be ready to make some parenting mistakes, too. Because there’s no other way to get good at that job, either.