Mental strength requires a three-pronged approach - managing our thoughts, regulating our emotions, and behaving productively despite our circumstances. While all three areas can be a struggle, it's often our thoughts that make it most difficult to be mentally strong.
If there is a person behaving more destructively in popular culture than Mario Lavandeira, I cannot think of one. He has used cruelty as a crass mechanism to build up his own celebrity and has utilized political correctness to protect himself while using it as a weapon to dehumanize those he doesn't agree with.
I think I wish I had never spanked my children, but I have. And they remember every instance like they tattooed it on their palms. I think it's a terrible lesson, to use physical punishment to make a point about not behaving, not being kind to their siblings, to other people. I mean that's just absurd. But I've lost it, I understand it.
I think actors are very obsessed about looking different and behaving differently, but all people need is just a different film. They don't want a different you; they want a different story.
Good parents, who are able to maintain the affection and respect of their children and whose offspring admire them and value their good opinion, can be reasonably certain that their values and ways of socialized behaving will be adopted by the next generation.
As an actor, I endeavor to find the reason in the unreasonable. Because no one thinks they are being unreasonable or unrealistic or demanding or behaving madly. We all see ourselves as being justified.
I try to live my life as honestly as I can, and the last thing I want is to pretend to be something I'm not. To pretend to myself I am a sex symbol would somehow be dishonest. I'd feel, in my heart, that I were behaving artificially and that's the last thing I want to do.
Silos and bureaucracy are well-oiled machines in corporate America, but they are ultimately perpetuated by individual behavior. If we start behaving differently, we can create change. In other words, shifting your focus onto the team - or the ship as a whole, not just yourself - will have meaningful impact.