Top 10 Skills You’ll Learn in Acting Classes (That Go Beyond the Stage)
- CHARLIE SANDLAN
- 18 minutes ago
- 11 min read
Most people think acting classes are about memorizing lines or pretending to be someone else. That misunderstanding is exactly why we have so many hack actors.
Serious, professional actor training is about learning how to create organic, vivid, fully realized human behavior, consistently. It demands emotional courage, mental rigor, discipline, focus, and the willingness to be truly seen. This is vulnerability.
The best training in acting techniques is actually human work. If you end up a Meisner trained actor, you will absolutely become a more open, present, vulnerable, and empathic human being.
In this blog, I’ll break down the top 10 skills you should be learning in legitimate, professional acting classes. The skills that will refine your instrument, deepen your understanding of the human condition, and instill the technique and craft that can sustain a long, productive career.
If you’re looking for acting classes in NYC that actually train actors, the Maggie Flanigan Studio is one place where real artists are forged.
Key Takeaways
Good actors truthfully do, and bad actors indicate. Any reputable NYC acting program should be dedicated to the truth of the human experience.
The skills you build in class: discipline, empathic listening, emotional accessibility, and open-hearted vulnerability, will shape not just the actor in you, but the person.
Serious training separates amateurs from professionals, and that difference is immediately recognizable to casting directors.
1. Listening: The Bedrock of Acting
Most actors wait for their cues. They don’t care what's being said to them by other actors or their scene partner. They just want to hear their cue so that they can give their line reading. This is hack acting 101.
On day one of the Meisner Technique, you begin to learn how to listen with your entire instrument. Listen to any first-rate actor talk about their process, and it always begins with listening. This means you must be fully present, in the moment, responding personally to not only what has just been said to you, but how.
This level of listening grounds your work in the moment and allows for true experience to unfold. Being malleable to the nuance of another person’s behavior is what will keep your work fresh and spontaneous. It’s what will make take one different from take two, three, and four. It makes eight shows a week feel like they are happening for the first time. When you are truly listening, you are fully present.
2. Getting the Attention Off Yourself
Your placement of concentration is a fundamental of acting, and the key to freeing up your instrument. It is also the key to public speaking. The last thing you want to be is self-conscious, worried about how you sound and how you look. Get your attention on the other person. Make them more important than you. It is not only a key acting fundamental, but a great note for how you interact in life.
In serious acting training, you learn to speak simply, directly, and truthfully. Lead with curiosity and fascination, and you will become less self-absorbed.
Through the Meisner Technique, actors are trained to always be connected to an acting object, either the other person or what they are doing.. That shift is profound. It carries into auditions, interviews, leadership, and any room where connection matters.
3. Emotional Intelligence: Getting Comfortable With Vulnerability
If you cannot access your emotional life, your acting will lack depth and insight. It will prevent an audience from ever being able to live vicariously through your work. Emotion isn’t acting, but the best actors know how to access the full gamut of human emotion.
Emotional depth should not be an excuse to give in to emotional indulgence or misuse emotional recall. Rigorous acting training, like the Meisner Technique, develops an emotionally fluid and truthful artist. It is rooted in craft and the actor's capacity for vulnerability.
At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, emotional access is developed through disciplined work. It requires hard work on your entire instrument: your voice, body, and temperament. To really allow yourself to be permeated by another person, to be played upon and changed from moment to moment, is what a really good actor can do.
For actors, it's important to remember that emotion should never be forced, pushed, or squeezed out. In truth, we do everything we can not to feel, we try to keep our shit together when we are falling apart. An actor must have fluidity and ease with their emotional life. The quality of your emotion is far more important than the quantity.
This emotional intelligence extends beyond the stage. It shapes how you relate to the world and to those around you. Your sensitivity and vulnerability as an actor will naturally bleed into your everyday life.
4. Creative Problem Solving Under Pressure
Struggle is at the center of the artistic process. Solving problems is what artists do. Sometimes it’s painful and frustrating. You’ll solve one thing, and then you are stuck on something else. What’s my idea for the part? How do I approach this scene? What am I doing with this beat, this moment, this entrance? You need to have an appetite for that if you want to sustain a professional artistic career.
I believe in a conservatory approach to acting training. The best NYC acting programs function in this setting. Script analysis, cold reading, clown, mask & character all provide the actor with tools to solve the problems that will arise in their work.
A top NYC acting studio should teach you how to solve problems; they should be giving you a toolbox to carry with you for the rest of your professional life. You must learn how to take something complicated and boil it down into something that is simple, easily stated, and actionable. Your problem-solving ability must be rooted in your ability to craft in a simple, specific, and personal way.
In disciplined training, you learn to make bold, playable choices while remaining fully present and spontaneous. The ability to stay creative under pressure is essential in auditions, rehearsals, and any professional environment where stakes are high.
5. Collaboration: Working with Others
Acting is a collaborative art. Actors are really just one piece of a larger whole. Your accountability, your attitude, your willingness to cooperate, and your ability to check your bullshit at the door when you step into a professional setting are essential qualities to have.
In a serious acting program, you should be learning how to be a professional. In my studio, I expect my students to conduct themselves in this way. You show up on time, prepared, without bullshit excuses, ready to pay full out with yourself.
Treat everyone with respect, and honor their part in the collective endeavor. Don’t be self-absorbed and self-centered. The actor as diva is such a turn-off, and no one likes to be around it. So approach every collaborative opportunity with humble confidence. This will benefit you in everything you choose to pursue.
There are only two things you can really control, the quality of your work and your reputation. Don’t tarnish either with immature horseshit.
6. Discipline: Showing Up When You Don’t Feel Like It
Most actors are lazy hacks. They don’t work hard, don’t train, and don’t take themselves seriously. They chase the superficiality of fame and celebrity. I am interested in working with those who see acting as an art form.
Life will never be convenient for you when it comes to your career. You will go through triumphs and tragedies, and you will still need to be accountable. You will still need to show up and do your work.
In the professional world, no one really gives a shit about you. People want you to show up and do your job. Those that can do that are the real pros. The best acting classes should demand the same accountability. You show up when you are tired. You show up when you feel blocked. You show up when it would be easier not to. This builds more than professionalism. It builds character.
The difference between an amateur and a professional is not passion. It is consistency. And that consistency is developed in the classroom. This self-discipline and work ethic will benefit you in anything you choose to pursue.
7. Memorization Techniques That Actually Work
Memorizing lines is the most basic requirement of the actor, but it has absolutely nothing to do with acting. It’s the equivalent of a carpenter’s ability to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. Not having your lines memorized is one of the most unprofessional things you can do.
Memorization is a tedious task, and you must find for yourself the techniques that work best for you. It requires an obsessive commitment and a persistence to lock them down. It’s the only way you can be truly free and out of your head. There is nothing worse than heading to a set unsure of your lines. You will absolutely embarrass yourself.
At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, memorization is ingrained into the actor’s process. The first year of the Meisner Technique teaches the actor how to memorize without getting locked into line readings. Ultimately, you will need the ability to memorize quickly if you want to sustain a professional acting career.
This skill applies beyond performance. Your ability to commit something to memory will help you in whatever profession you pursue.
8. Taking Constructive Criticism Without Falling Apart
The last thing you want to do is project your childhood insecurities onto constructive criticism. You should not be expecting any of the best NYC acting teachers to be stroking your ego.
In my classroom, you are not praised for the mere fact of being a creative human being. You should be paying for serious, specific, and honest criticism of your work. Anything less is bullshit. If you need to be patted on the back constantly, avoid a serious professional acting program.
Actors must learn to receive notes without defensiveness. That requires having a healthy relationship to failure. It means giving up the need for approval, giving up the need to please. Come into an acting class craving feedback. It’s what you're paying for.
The ability to take feedback and grow from it is one of the clearest markers of a professional actor. It is also a life skill that extends far beyond the classroom. It will help you in any work setting.
9. Authenticity: Knowing Who You Are and What You Stand For
There is no one like you. If you want to be a serious artist, you’d better be able to function from your authenticity and the truth of you. As an actor, you must develop the ability to fully utilize your imagination, your insight, your life experience, and your sense of humor.
If a casting director sees 200 actors for a part, I promise you that at least 160 of them will do the same thing. The same cliched, conventional, cookie-cutter horseshit. It’s those forty that can do something original, who bring their own individual take on the material, that stand out.
For actors, your authenticity rests on your ability to be spontaneous, to act before you think. The Meisner Technique is the greatest way to train actors to get on their impulses. This will require you to do the exact opposite of what you have been raised to do; to think before you speak, choose your words wisely, don’t rock the boat. Working this way as an actor will keep you cautious, tepid, and untruthful.
Authenticity is all you really have. Operating from yours, no matter what you do in life, will leave a mark on everyone you interact with. When you encounter anyone who functions fully from who they are, it is something to be grateful for. There’s too much fake, inauthentic, and superficial bullshit in life. Make sure your acting training helps you embrace your truth.
10. Presence: Learning to Live in the Moment
Presence rests in your ability to be fully in the moment.
When your concentration is disciplined and your instrument is free, you are not thinking about how you look or how you are being perceived. You are engaged in the truth of the moment. If you want to be a serious actor, it starts with this. Getting your attention off of yourself and onto the other person is the key to presence. It makes you far less self-conscious.
This is what an audience is drawn to. This is what casting directors appreciate. You can’t function from your insecurity and self-consciousness. Get out of your head and into the moment. The Meisner Technique is excellent at honing this skill in actors.
If you are taking any legitimate NYC acting classes at a serious acting school, you should be developing this aspect of your craft. If not, you are wasting your money.
Presence is developed. It is the development of technique and the application of craft that will separate you from the morass of hacks that pursue this career. In any life pursuit, people will be drawn to you when you are fully in the moment, leading with curiosity and a sense of wonder.
Why These Skills Matter to Casting Directors (and Everyone Else)
Casting directors are always looking for good actors. Always. The amount of hacks they have to wade through is enough to drive anyone crazy. So the ability to do good work consistently is the mark of talent. Anyone who thinks they can do that without serious acting training will have a rude awakening at some point.
If you think that’s you, that you don’t need to train, by all means, have at it. Good luck. Most likely you will be doing something else in three years.
The actors' job is one thing: to create behavior. The best actors do that from an organic, experiential place. Hack actors indicate. Acting is no different than any other art form or profession. You must study, you must practice, you must master your instrument.
Technique matters. Preparation matters. Integrity matters.
These are the qualities that lead to consistent work, meaningful collaborations, and long-term sustainability in a competitive profession.
Acting Classes in NYC That Actually Teach You How to Work
At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, NYC actor training begins with the belief that acting is an art form. It rests in the understanding that any serious artist masters their instrument.
Rooted in the full two-year progression of the Meisner Technique, our acting classes in NYC challenge actors to take themselves seriously and establish self-discipline and a solid work ethic. I want to put students into the industry who are real pros. Actors are always the hardest working people in any room they enter. I develop actors who really want to be great, not just good.
Our Two-Year Conservatory forms the foundation of the studio, integrating the Meisner Technique, Script Analysis, Voice, Movement, breathwork, Chekhov, Improv, On-Camera Technique, mask, and clown, into a cohesive professional actor training program.
For those beginning their journey, the Core Acting Program and Bare Essentials provide the necessary groundwork. Each summer, our Meisner Summer Acting Program offers an immersive introduction to this disciplined process.
If you are serious about your craft and committed to doing the work, this studio is built for you. Schedule an interview and begin the kind of training that shapes both the artist and the person.
Conclusion
Acting, at its best, is an illumination of the human condition.. It must be grounded in the rigorous pursuit of truthful, human behavior.
The skills developed in serious acting training—discipline, listening, emotional depth, and simple, specific and personal crafting, will shape more than just your performances. They shape who you are and how you function in the world.
The work is demanding. It asks for courage, humility, and persistence. But for actors committed to a long career, these lessons are not optional. They are foundational.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the skills needed for acting?
Acting requires technique and a solid craft, something most acting classes fail to fully develop. You will not be able to sustain a career if you just slap shit together. If you are a lazy person, I would not recommend this profession.
You must be able to be out of your head, onto spontaneous impulses, listening with empathy, crafting in a simple, specific and personal way. You need to be able to break down a script, implant meanings, justify text, create impulses, and do actions. If you know exactly what I'm talking about, for it. If you don’t, get trained.
Discipline and consistency are non-negotiable. Without serious acting training, you are essentially a hack. With it, you have the potential to be a real artist , not just someone with an acting resume.
What are the 7 performance skills in drama?
Seven core performance skills define strong dramatic work:
Voice control – clarity, breath, resonance, and clear communication.
Movement – a pliable body capable of processing a deep experience without tension.
Emotional availability – full access to the gamut of human emotion with ease and fluidity.
Listening and responding – the ability to be played upon and changed by another human being.
Script analysis – the ability to break down a script.
Imagination – the ability to function from your creativity, rooted in your insight and life experience
Authenticity – the ability to be out of your head, and fully on your spontaneous impulses.
Technique and craft can lead to artistry. Attention to detail makes you an artist, and slapping shit together makes you a hack. Remember that.
What do you learn in an acting class?
In a real acting class, you learn how to create behavior, pursue objectives, and live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
Training includes script analysis, character development, voice, movement, listening, emotional preparation, and disciplined repetition.
More importantly, you develop the habits and integrity required for a professional life in the arts. Without that foundation, an actor cannot sustain a career.
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