From Self-Doubt to Stage Success: An Agent's Psychological Insights

0:00 Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball, if you believe you can achieve. Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today, I am joined by Albert Bermonte. Albert has over two decades of experience as a talent agent. He brings a unique psychological and practical insight to his work because he is a certified hypnotist and NLP practitioner, has a PhD in psychology, so we're going to be talking to him about everything that he's up to in his work and how his work is unique.

0:55 So, albert, thank you so much for joining me. Well, thank you, Curtis, for the wonderful introduction and again for inviting me. I'm really happy to be here today. Well, why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself? Well, thank you. Yeah, sure, my name is Albert Bramante. As you know, I am an agent. My company is Bramante Artists. I've been in the business since 2003. I started off in casting and you know so. I've worked all throughout many years representing various artists for film, TV and theater. I consider myself an architect of their careers.

1:36 You know we work together, we work as a partnership into the team, and I also have a strong background in psychology. I have a PhD and been a psychology professor, and also I wrote a published book last year, Rise Above the Script, Confronting Self-Doubt, Mastering Self-Sabotage for Performing Artists. And you know it's been a great journey. Actually, I'm really honored to do what I love to do, and that's working with actors, and just even being a service to others is what really excites me.

2:20 Well, tell the listeners how you got into being a talent agent. Sure. Well, I started dabbling off into acting myself because I was always interested, even as a young child, in performing arts. I was in drama club in high school, I took some theater classes as electives in college and I really enjoyed the process of performing. However, the performing lifestyle was more. I was more suitable for behind the scenes. I really enjoyed working with actors, not necessarily being one. So, you know, after a couple years of acting, you know I've made a lot of friends with actors and I started getting involved behind the scenes, you know, working at film festivals, volunteering at film festivals, working in casting, casting short films, casting feature films and eventually I came to, you know, know some of the actors that I wanted to start representing them and managing them.

3:18 And you know it was 2004,. It was when I made the transition from, like you know, transition from whatever little freelance audience to becoming a full-time talent representative, and it's been 21 years going strong. So that's how I got started in a sense, and it happened by accident too. I was always on track to being I was intending to be when I was growing up, to be an academic psychologist, a research psychologist, and it wasn't until my little foray into acting that really changed a lot of the course of my life.

4:06 Well, what's one piece of advice you would give somebody Because I know you talk about your book but what's one piece of advice you would give somebody that's overwhelmed by self-doubt? The main reason is always connect to the source. Why are you doing what you're doing? What is driving you to do? Whatever it is you do, whether you're an actor, whether you're a performer, or whether you're a professional, a teacher, a practitioner what is the source that is driving you, what makes you passionate and remain connected to that every day by always remembering that, what really gets you out of bed every day, and really stay committed to that so that you always remember what it is you've done and what you know, where you came from and why.

5:07 What direction are you going? Well, tell listeners about your book, that that you just published, you know. Tell us what we can expect when we read it and where we can get it from. Well, sure, it's available on Amazon as well as Kindle, as a paperback or as Kindle as well as an audio book. So I have it on Audible, spotify, apple, and the book is a combination of personal insights as well as research. I did a lot of research for the book, so there's some sound psychological research there, and I start off talking about self-esteem, and then I go into the concept of self-efficacy, which is what that really self-efficacy means is that you have the belief in your ability to do what it is you set out to do, that you're capable.

6:05 And then I talk about personality a bit, and then I go into fear of success, as well as imposter syndrome and even fear of money, and all throughout in these chapters are actionable steps that you can work to improve yourself, steps that you can work to improve yourself, and I peppered that all throughout the book all different techniques, and I'll kind of tell you one here, and that is something that was taught to me that I really found immensely valuable, and that's creating what you call a happy file.

6:46 And what do I mean by happy file? So this is actually something physical. I don't recommend doing this like in an online or you know, or an email. This is an actual journal, you know, an old-fashioned journal, paperback, notebook, whatever it is and every time you get a positive experience whether it's a note on a performance, feedback on a job, good press that you receive document it in your journal, and every time when you're having that moment of self-doubt or that imposter syndrome is coming in, kick out that happy file and remain connected and it'll remind you of why you're You're doing what you're doing, and it'll kind of be like that little bit of a kickstart that you need sometimes when days are hard.

7:47 Another technique that I can recommend is hang out with the crowd. That you hang out with is important, so always associate yourself with people that are either your level or even more advanced than you are. You're more successful than you are at the moment because we're the sum of our peers in a sense. So if you hang out with people that are good, that are already elevating themselves, there's a good chance of probability they're going to elevate you as well, and so I cover like that and other stuff in the book too yeah, speaking of other stuff, in your book you talk about failure extensively.

8:28 So how can artists use our honest, honest failure? And instead of looking at it as a setback, you know that they can look at it as a stepping stone exactly that's exactly what it is. Uh, in my background in neurolinguistic program, nlp, one of the statements, core statements, is that there's no such thing as failure, only feedback. So let each opportunity that you know didn't go your way or didn't go in your direction because that's really all it is is it just didn't go in your favor or go in your way, and so what you can do then is take that failure and take it as an opportunity.

9:11 Look at it as an opportunity to learn, to improve yourself. So, again, no such thing as failure, only feedback. So what can you learn from this experience? And what did you get out of this? Because you might have made new connections, even though the opportunity didn't work out in your favor, you might have made some new connections, or even just some new knowledge. Celebrate that new knowledge, celebrate that. And also, in a business that I work with actors constantly, there's a lot more no's than there are yes's and any performer, the one thing that, again, I always say is thing that again I always say is you know, with that, you know, learn from that and look at it as that no, and frame it as not today, not yet.

10:10 So it's having a growth mindset is really important and I recommend to all your listeners to read a book by Carol Dweck called Mindset, which is absolutely one of my, you know, go-to books and you know in there it talks about the growth mindset, and I mention that in my book. So what can each failure teach you and what valuable pieces of information can you learn from those failures and therefore become more successful each time?

10:50 And that won't? It won't it's. It should not at all be a setback at all. Well, let's talk about how, how learning personality traits, especially the, the big five, you know, if artists learn those, how can that help them in their personal and professional lives? Sure. Well, you know, there's certain elements of the big five that really help someone be successful. So one of them, one of the major traits that's linked to success in a lot of research has backed us up is the trait of conscientiousness. So that's the second. You know, the C in the big five is conscientiousness, which means discipline, which means focus.

11:30 So those that are higher in this trait, those that are more focused and more goal-oriented and more driven and more on top of their experiences, are more likely to be successful. So you can harness that by keeping journals, keeping track of your appointments, putting things on a planner, keeping a word with commitments and follow through. Because the one thing when it comes to conscientiousness, we tend to overestimate how conscientious we are. A lot of people, when they find out or when they take a test that measures the big five traits, a lot of people are surprised at the fact that they're not as conscientious as they thought they were.

12:19 They scored kind of low on that area and that's because a lot of people are not fully aware of. Self-awareness comes in, so we can work on improving conscientiousness by being on discipline and focus. So that's one piece. Another trait is agreeableness. Now, agreeableness refers to how well you can take direction, and part of being successful is being coachable and being open to feedback and learning and adapting from that feedback. And that comes from agreeableness. Agreeableness, now, this is one of those traits where you don't want to be too low on that, but you also want to be too high, because if you're high in agreeableness sometimes too high you can sometimes be taken advantage of or kind of get, you know, pushed over on.

13:20 So you want to have a little bit of disagreeableness, especially when it comes to, like, sales or negotiations, because you know at some point you have to do, you do have to stand up and assert yourself, which might be a little by being a little bit disagreeable. So, um, but it's important to be coachable and it's important to learn and be able to adapt the situations, which also relates to the openness which is another trait in the big five Openness to experience, try new things, and I also talk about this in my book. Step outside your comfort zone, do something that makes you uncomfortable. Comfortable, uh, whether it's giving a, a public speech, uh, going to like a toastmasters and giving a public speak, you know speech.

14:12 Or even something fun is karaoke yeah, I mean, karaoke can be very scary for a lot of people, but it's something that'll step out, you know, stepping outside your comfort zone. So I'm not saying everybody should go out and do karaoke right now, but what I'm saying is that doing something that makes you a little bit uncomfortable, because when you do that you're going to feel empowered and that's going to also be helpful. And you know extroversion well, you know that trait. It's important to have to be like, I would say, a balance of both. You know, because you do, you do have to collaborate with other people most of the time and know how to collaborate, know how to talk to people.

14:56 So I would say, practice again going to different meetup groups and meeting people and communicating and just getting that out there. And the last one is neuroticism, which refers to how easily you are reacting to stress or how easily you can get anxiety or worked up. So those that score high in neuroticism tend to be more prone to anxiety depression. Neuroticism tend to be more prone to anxiety depression. So I think if you work on the other four, it should lower your scores on neuroticism. And you know it's so much related to success recipe for, you know, self-sabotaging behavior or what you would sometimes call shooting yourself in the foot and making you know mistakes or, just, you know, ruining your own chances and also sometimes being low in agreeableness.

16:05 It's going to be hard for you to be coachable, which may make it difficult for people to work with you, so that's why it's kind of important to look at these, these five traits well, let's talk about the difference between toxic self-esteem and regular self-esteem and how artists can make sure that they use this to their advantage and make sure they don't have too toxic of self-esteem. And that's a good point too. Toxic self-esteem is when you know someone has an inflated or grandiose or they say like you know, a really high view of themselves, but at the same time, that's also fragile.

16:51 We're to a point where they're not open to criticism, they get highly insulted and sometimes even with actors or performers, what can happen is, you know, toxic high self-esteem. Related to what we talked about just before was agreeableness, the role in agreeableness, which means that they're not going to really want to hear feedback and they're not going to be comfortable. They can get really angry and upset when they get any constructive criticism or feedback. So, but regular self-esteem and high self-esteem is, you know, respecting and yourself and really coming to the to the notion or realization that you deserve to be here now.

17:33 Toxic self-esteem is more of like you're thinking that you're better than other people, whereas you know healthy self-esteem, you still view yourself as valuable, but but you're still humbled enough to uh, you know, like, treat everybody with compassion and empathy. So you want to, you know, definitely have high self-esteem, but not too high, because, again, you have to learn and be coached and, you know, learn from mistakes too. So there's a big difference, you know. In a sense I feel and usually again, actors that have that or anybody who has that toxic high self-esteem, is going to also be self-sabotaging opportunities.

18:20 Well, talk about. You mentioned a couple of things in your book about raising self-esteem. Talk about that and you know, if possible, share a story of someone who applied what you talk about in your book to raise their self-esteem. Sure Well, self-esteem would be what I talked about earlier. Raising that would be, hanging out with people that are more that build you up, uh, rather than tear you down. So surround yourself a positive, you know, minded individual. That's the main thing. And also, again, can being connected and maintaining your happy file. Uh, I worked with. When I first started working with this actress actress, she was very shy, very timid and you know we kind of like, you know she got a lot of positive feedback when she was in our acting class from other acting students and we started like kind of creating our own happy file just on that feedback alone and then eventually she became more confident in her skin and then wound up booking, you know, a role on orange is new black and also booking a role on the cbs show, fbi something that two years prior to that would have been, you know, a pipe dream.

19:39 So, celebrating your success in the winds surrounding yourself with positive mind people and, you know, keeping you know mistakes or even looking at failures more as learning opportunities. Tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of well, I, on my um website, I have, um, you know, recordings you know for sale, uh, hypnosis recordings, you know, for confidence, for addictions, for, you know, sleep, for um, any other like you know, fears, uh, or if you just need like a little bit of boost on self-esteem, feel free to do that.

20:28 Um, I'll also be, um, you know, launching you know my own stuff this year uh, coach, a group coaching program. Uh, so you can follow me on social media for updates on that. That's what I have lined up. And also I have a couple other ideas for books you know that I'd like to see out in, you know, the first or second quarter of 2026. Speaking of your website, throw it out there so listeners can keep up with everything that you're up to. Sure, my website is just my name, albertbermontecom. Again, you can also follow me on social media, at Instagram, dr Al Bermonte, or even, you know, follow me on LinkedIn and Facebook.

21:13 This is my name, albert Bermonte. Okay, close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe, if that was something I forgot to talk about, that you would like to touch on, or any final thoughts you have for the listeners. Well, just remember why you're here and always a couple other things that you can do. You know mantras that you you know if you're big, you know if you believe in affirmations. I would say always, whatever, regardless, whatever profession you're in is, always say to yourself in the morning when you're waking up and right before going to bed is I deserve to be here, I deserve to have a seat at the table?

21:54 And also another affirmation could be is every day and every way, I am getting better and better. And just keep telling yourself that at least three or four times a day, every day and every way, I'm getting better and better, and you should see changes within a few weeks, if sooner. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, alpabermontecom, please be sure to follow rate review. Share this episode to as many people as possible. Jump on your favorite podcast app, follow the show, leave us a review, share it. For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, check out our new website, wwwcurveball337.com.

22:38 Thank you for listening and supporting the show, albert. Thank you for all that you do and thank you for joining me. And thank you for inviting me, curtis, have a great night. For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, visit wwwcurveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.