BOLD JOURNEY MAGAZINE Featuring Holly Mandel
We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Holly Mandel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Holly below.
Holly, so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.
People would’ve said I was a confident person most of my life, but that wasn’t my experience. It felt more like a façade than something I actually felt in my body. What I’d call real confidence, AUTHENTIC confidence, was something I had to uncover, and develop…or maybe just feel safe enough to finally allow.
I started to notice something deeper taking shape when I began studying and performing improv. At the time, I was working at Walt Disney Studios, my first job after college, and thought I’d found my career path: the fancy studio life, nice expense accounts, surrounded by celebrity, the whole “Hollywood” thing. Then I took a class at The Groundlings in West Hollywood, and something completely shifted. And then, improv wasn’t mainstream like it is now. It was not as well-known. So, I didn’t totally know what I was walking into.
If you’ve never taken an improv class, it’s a very live, interactive, on-your-feet experience. Each game offers something different, and over time, you start to see and think in a whole new way. I learned to listen more deeply, to build on what’s given, and to stop trying to control the outcome. The unknown became more thrilling than scary. The known started to feel flat.
What surprised me most was how much I was changing. I now see this happen with students all the time. To improvise well, you have to use a different GPS: your intuition. Viola Spolin, the mother of improv, said that was the whole point — to strengthen intuition. That was exactly my experience. In improv, there’s no right or wrong, so trying to figure out what you SHOULD do gets you nowhere! You have to go with what you WANT to do, what you FEEL is next. That reconnected me to a part of myself I’d unintentionally cut off.
I had gotten in the habit of questioning everything — what’s pleasing, what’s right, what’s acceptable. That meant I wasn’t asking what I, myself, actually wanted. I grew up in the Midwest. I’m a Gen-X woman. I’m fluent in niceness. Making sure others were comfortable, likable, happy with me…that was the air I breathed. And while I had a strong personality, the confidence was often surface-level. Underneath, I was just trying to fit in and not screw it up.