How do I get a reference inside of a notify state?

I know I’m probably just unaware of or not thinking about something pretty obvious here but I’m struggling to get a reference to my player in a custom notify state script. For reasons, my player actor and the notify skeletal mesh are not the same thing.

This is what it looks like:

I’ve tried a bunch of different ways to get the actor but it either crashes, like if I tried to use GetPlayerController.GetPawn, or fails to find the class and just doesn’t trigger.

I want to use a function written in the PlayerCam script which has the player controller. I can’t put that in the CharParent script because it creates a circular dependency.

I feel like there has to be something obvious that I’m either missing or just not thinking about. Any suggestions/insight would be appreciated.

I figured out a different way to solve the issue altogether that I really like but I would like to still know what I’m missing/not realizing in the event I really needed to do this.