Training Tidbits

Hello everyone!

I am back and here and alive! I know its only been like 6 days since my last post but it feels like a millennia. Yesterday I finished training and I can't even begin to say how happy I am about that. Training has been a huge emotional roller coaster for me. I had moments where I was like Ya! I can do this!, moments of I got this! and then moments of feeling that I totally sucked and just wanted to crawl into a little hole and cry. Unfortunately I ended training on one of those moments.

I hate to write a debby downer blog post but it will probably be therapeutic so I'm going to write it anyway.  I was in a group of 8 trainees which was really small compared to the group that started on Saturday (we started on Friday). I like most of my fellow trainees but one somewhat annoys me. No big deal though. All of them either have dance, cheer, or theatre experience or really just performance experience. As has been documented in this blog I on the other hand have pretty much no performance experience. While that really doesn't matter I think it fed into my feelings of inadequacy. There were times when we were doing inprov and things like that and I just felt like I had no idea what to do and that I sucked at it while everyone else was good at it. I also kept remembering that I had failed to pass my audition 2 other times while everyone else passed on their first attempt. I kind of felt like I just wasn't very good at this role.

The final down note I ended my training on was my assessment. Everyone who trains for a role at Disney must complete an assessment at the end of their training program so that they can be approved in their role and begin working. For performers it is no different. Part of our assessment is signing the names of some of our furry friends. We had to do 4 and we are allowed to know which ones before hand. So when the time comes for the assessment I complete that part before going on the the multiple choice section. Halfway through the multiple choice section I glance up when I hear one trainer ask something of the other in a rather loudish whisper. I notice that they are talking about some signatures and that one of them picks up a paper which has the name of a certain bear who loves hunny. I was the only one who had to sign that certain bears name so I knew they were talking about mine. I don't remember what was said but I do remember them saying something about making me redo them. So before I ever finished my multiple choice section I knew I was going to have to redo my signature section. So when I turned in my multiple choice section I waited a few minutes and then one of the trainers, Perry, came and brought me my signatures back. They had glorious (read all sarcastic like) blue marker corrections all over it. After explaining all the things wrong with them, he gave me another sheet on which to redo them.

At this point I am just trying not to cry in front of everyone when all I want to do is just curl up in a ball and cry. I have no idea why this set me off but I guess with feeling a bit inadequate and then being the only one asked to redo all 4 of my signatures was just the icing on the cake. My redos were honestly worse then the originals. The harder I tried to make them better the worse they got and when I had no more squares to attempt to fill I just turned it in. Those then got more blue corrections and returned to me with more comments from Perry. The rest of the time we spent wrapping up training I spent trying not to cry. What was supposed to be this uplifting ending turned into a torturous waiting period for me.

I know I took that little incident far more personally then I should have but on the other hand I don't think it necessarily went the way it should have. Other people had comments and things wrong with their signatures but I was the only one that had to redo all of them. And for the most nit picky things too!! It just very very frustrating and it still makes me upset to think about it and write it now.

While I had a variety of trainers through the last 5 days I can say that the person I am most grateful to isn't even a character trainer, but instead an attendant trainer. Ashley, who actually spent one day training me while I was in attendant training, was there yesterday to help out with our lines since we didn't have an attendant group training with us. She commented at some point in the day that I was really hard on myself and was even when I went through attendant training. I do remember being hard on myself and thinking I would never learn and become good at all the things I needed to do, but I eventually did become good at them and honestly I was a damn good attendant. I don't know if her pervious experience with me gave her insight into what I was thinking but she seemed to know that I was getting down on myself. At the end of the day after we were finished she told me that I had to stop beating myself up because I was just going to psych myself out and gave me a hug. I am going to have to force myself to remember what she told me. I know I am amazing and it seems I am my own most harsh critic.

So that is all the bad stuff that happened during training. I guess I will just make another post with all the other stuff. I can already tell this is a massive post and I know if I add the other stuff in here it will just make it that much longer. So! on to Training Tidbits part 2!

-M