Intuition

We have an amazing emotional brain that makes millisecond calculations as to whether something is good or bad, dangerous or safe, funny or unfunny, before our rational brain can even consider the evidence.

Your emotional brain is normally right.

Thus your intuition is probably the best way to find things that others will connect to. Because it finds things that emotionally satisfy.

Learn to trust your intuition, and find ways to unlock your unthinking brain.

Further reading: Malcom Gladwell, “Blink”.

Impact

People aren’t moved by logic, or by ethics (by what’s right or deserved). They are moved by emotion:

1.       Anger.

2.       Dominance. Authority. Power. Energy. Charisma. Conviction. Power-differentials. Promise of safety. (as in you show these things)

3.       Surprise/novelty, exciting.

4.       Inspired, hopeful, important, ten feet tall. Passion. Vision. Optimism. Enthusiasm. Aspiration.

5.       Momentum. Feel good-factor.

6.       Humour.

7.       Story.

8.       Fear. (especially fear of loss)

9.       Status, competitive.

10.   Kinship. Group mentality. Hatred of others. Leverage difference.

11.   Sentimentality and nostalgia.

Basically make them anticipate experiencing pleasure or pain in the future, in all their shades. Or tell a story about someone else experiencing these emotions, and people’s empathy will allow them to imagine these feelings in themselves.

What makes emotion more powerful? Contrast. Impact is all about contrast. Something loving followed by something ambivalent and thoughtless increases attraction. Hot followed by cold makes the cold colder and the hot hotter. And so on.

Rule number one: don’t be boring.

Rule number two: don’t be right, make an impact.

The Hole-part 3

In this final section, I’ll look at overcoming “the hole”.

How do you know if you’ve overcome it? People will start using words like “strong”, “composed”, “poised”, “confident”, “conviction”, “presence” to describe you.

It is an aura. A special energy. It shines out of every pore on your body when you have it.

It is about how much you think you’re worth. Not what society or other people think.

But what specific techniques can you use to achieve it?

1.       For most people, school, sometimes university too, defines them. If they weren’t popular there, or had experienced some sort of person trauma (been fat, spotty, nerdy etc), they carry around that baggage forever. Don’t let failing at a popularity contest once define your decisions for the rest of your life. Make friends with your past and focus on the future. Memory management is key: focus on the memories that empower you. What is the story you tell yourself, about yourself? Make sure it’s a positive one.

2.       Affirmations can help if you don’t find them too wanky.

3.       Get comfortable receiving. Also, promise yourself to be honest with people about how you’re feeling.

4.       Your attitude to failure is crucial: Move away from outcome dependency. Embrace uncertainty and risk, understand it is normal and exciting. Have an abundance mentality: if this doesn’t come off, then there are plenty of opportunities round the corner anyway.

5.       Make sure you have a sense of narrative in your life, a plan, a feeling of momentum towards a better future, some goals. This does wonders for self-esteem.

6.       Glover’s method is as follows, and is basically a form of CBT:

Have awareness of these ridiculous thoughts you have, and then get good at interrupting and challenging them. Slowly you can change these thought patterns, these neural pathways.

Identify how your thoughts are distorted, then develop the skill of rational responses. This is not positive mental attitude bull shit. You come up with an alternative interior dialogue that is closer to reality, that sucks the power out of negative thought, out of the distorted thought.

7.       One of the biggest realisations you can make is that people in general don’t want you to be perfect. Perfect is robotic, and people can’t relate to robots. They want warts and all. They want flawed people. People they can see themselves in. That’s who they connect to, sympathise with: commonality makes them care. People with “the hole” spend their lives trying to change themselves for the better, making themselves into superheroes (or at least hiding their flaws). The tragedy is that this won’t make them more liked. If you are embarrassed  by your flaws, and find your own human limits undignified and shameful then you won’t show them. And ironically you doom yourself to becoming unlovable.

8.       Leverage the pain of your present: how much you hate how you are, make it vivid. Don’t sell yourself short, denying yourself peak experiences/moments, by cowering. And leverage the pleasure of being centred and self-sufficient mentally: imagine that feeling.

9.       Remember fear is illusory. Fear is a superficial consequence of a lack of self-worth. Personal value is an antidote to fear, and a perfect preventative measure. Fear is thinking “I’m going to look stupid”, but if you’re not worried about looking stupid, if you have a core sense of self-worth to buffer you against embarrassment, there is no fear.

Finally: it’s doesn’t matter where you are, what’s gone before. We are defined by our decisions in the present. Martine Wright lost her legs in 7/7. The day after, she told herself she was going to compete in the 2012 Paralympic games. And she did, in the sitting volleyball. In that one decision she took back control of her life, and ripped meaning and purpose from disaster. She decided to be positive and not let one event define her. What’s your situation like compared to hers? Probably a tad easer id imagine. There is no excuse.

Andrew Carnegie, the great industrialist, wrote “A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.”

 A journalist asked Ian Poulter how, under the most immense pressure, he made 5 straight birdies on the last 5 holes of his Ryder Cup match on Saturday evening to win what proved to be a vital point for Europe. His answer: “It comes from within”. He believed. He had prepared his mind. Just like you can.

The Hole-Part 2

So, how do you know if you have “the hole”?

Do you cower in the corner? Are you afraid to lead? Do you struggle to say no? Are you afraid of intimacy? Do you feel unsexy? Are you submissive towards aggression? Do you say yes to requests for favours from people even though you are too busy? Are you obsessed with work? Do you shy away from social situations? Do you never argue? Does the idea of people disagreeing with you or not laughing at your jokes fill you with dread? Do you feel sex needs to last 2 hours and everybody needs to cum a dozen times? Do you assume your opinions must be wrong? Then there’s a hole.

The biggest example of people with “the hole” is the classic “nice guys”. I know because I am a recovering nice guy. The dichotomy is not between nice guys and dicks, obviously no-one wants to be a dick. The difference that matters is between nice guys and strong guys. Strong guys have fixed the hole. That is where you want to be.

I want to look at nice guy syndrome in depth because it is one of the biggest symptoms of “the hole”.  Most of the stuff below is borrowed from a psychologist called Robert Glover who specialises in this topic.  How do you know if you’re a nice guy?

Nice guys believe that if they put other people needs before theirs, then they’ll get their needs met.

Nice guys are a child of their past, which seems a tautology, but it summarises the key point that inner feelings of not-being good enough, or low self-worth, of having something to prove, are a result of childhood trauma. And I use trauma in its broad-sense. You don’t have to be have been raped for it to affect your future, you could simply have gone to boarding school. If things have gone wrong in the past, children tend to decide that it was their fault. And when they take responsibility for things, they come to believe that intrinsically they are pathetic and lacking in some way.

Nice guys think “If I’m a nice guy, then everyone will like me”, and they think also that being nice will be enough to get women to have sex with them.

Nice guys find it uncomfortable to receive, which is why they have trouble expressing their needs and wants. They feel they are not worthy of the love of others, and are afraid if they express what they want that if will drive away other people. Nice guys end up being involved in relationships therefore which are akin to mother and child relationships: with women, with their friends, with their colleagues. The love becomes unconditional, but other people rarely love them back in the same way: they don’t reciprocate because they don’t know the nice guy wants it because he’ll never talk about or express what he wants.

At some level, everything a nice guy does is aimed at getting someone else’s approval or avoid their disapproval.

Nice guys find it easier to relate to women rather than other men, because they have alienated themselves from their own natural masculinity. They seek validation from women, and external validation from everyone in-fact, and by being different from other men, by being good listeners, by hiding any sexual agenda from women they think women will value them and think they are good people.

Nice guys are fundamentally dishonest. If you are trying to get people’s approval you won’t say what you really think, or what you really want, or what you really feel, you’ll shy away from conflict. If you’re not honest you’re never get what you want, because being honest is a way of tacitly asking for something, and if you don’t ask you’ll never get.

Nice guys are secretive because they don’t want to seem imperfect. But if you aren’t willing to be imperfect then you aren’t willing to let people know you.

“The hole” leads to perfectionism: trying to be perfect, brilliant, hiding ones flaws. Nice guys live in a perpetual state of anxiety: you aren’t going to get everybody to like you, and you aren’t always going to do everything right. You will never relax, and if you can’t relax then others can’t relax around you. Including crowds!

Sexual desires are what nice guys tend to hide most. Because they are ashamed of them, they have somehow learnt culturally that they are dirty.

Shame is a core component of nice-guy syndrome.  Shame is a sense of core defectiveness. That you are not enough, that you are deficient in some way. It comes from an inaccurate interpretation of life events: that it is your fault, and the problem is permanent and pervasive.

Glover talks about the integrated male, the opposite of a nice guy, who has a strong sense of self, takes responsibility for getting his own needs met, is comfortable with sexuality, does what he thinks is right, he’s a leader, he’s expressive of his feelings, he’s nurturing but not afraid to set boundaries.

It’s a model of masculinity which isn’t anxiety driven. The aim is to not be driven by feelings of self-loathing and low self-worth, or worrying you are not good enough. The nice guy tries to manage his anxiety by pleasing people. The integrated man has learnt how to soothe is anxiety, to combat it as source. He is self-aware of his anxiety and manages it from within, rather than trying to manage it by attaining results outside himself: by achieving things, or pleasing people.

Becoming an integrated man (or woman) shows you have fixed “the hole”. You have abolished approval seeking behaviour. You have established a core sense of self-worth.

As soon as you seek someone’s approval you assume they have higher value than you, you put them of a pedestal and this will make you anxious. Individuals and crowds are turned off by anxiety, anxiety is contagious and makes people feel awkward, people are security seeking creatures and want to be with a guy who makes them feel relaxed and secure in the knowledge that everything is going to be alright. The crowd, as a group of security seeking creatures, doesn’t want to feel like the most powerful person in the room, they want to feel like the man they’re with is stronger and more powerful than them. There is a dominance factor going on: crowds respond to dominance. If you’re seeking a crowd’s approval you’ve made them dominant, and they will assume you have low value. 

The Hole

This article is about improving your mind-set in order to make you a better creative. It might make you a more successful and happier person too. Personal development (becoming a better stand-up or whatever) is not domain specific. It is a holistic process, an ideology, a life philosophy. The ideas in here may seem tangential to what you are trying to do, but I believe they are crucial, and I’ll explain why. I’ll post this article in 3 parts over consecutive days.

Part One

I saw shows in Edinburgh this year that possessed something that I don’t have in my locker at the moment: conviction. This was vividly present in some of the best performers I saw up there: Daniel Kitson, Josie Long, Alfie Brown. In comparison, my persona and my material is slightly apologetic, needy, validation seeking. That is, it lacks a deep sense of confidence in the show or myself. This influences the content (you go for crowd pleasing, easy laughs) and the perception (conviction is seductive: stand-up, life indeed, is all smokes and mirrors, it is a magic trick).

In stand-up, people often perform to fill a hole in themselves. Your aim is to perform to fill a hole in other people. Find something worth saying, and say it with conviction.

Your hole cannot be fixed by performing. It can only be fixed by changing how you think about life and yourself. And if you leave the hole unfixed, you will have a tangible neediness which will affect the performance, your relationships, your life.

What is the hole? It is a lack of self-worth, which results in outcome dependency. It can be hard to admit to yourself of others that you have “the hole”, but an honest analysis of your current reality is the first essential step in self-improvement. This article is my admission, and it has been difficult to write.

We live in a society which attacks our self-worth pretty much constantly. Our culture convinces us that personal value and happiness is something that must be attained, that it lies outside of us, something that needs to be achieved, bought, worn. But that isn’t true. Who you are, the person you’ve become and are becoming, your vision: that is enough.

This all affects your creativity because it negatively colours your attitude to risk: you need affirmation so you don’t risk not having it. Therefore: you go for clichés, for the mainstream, you take a consequentialist approach. You end up with something boring, average, easy.

People often say “you must be confident! You’re a performer!” People think being a performer is a symbol of strength. It is often actually a symbol of weakness. Performance is an addiction (like alcohol, co-dependency, or drugs) that we use to fill the hole. Skill won’t fix the hole though, sex won’t fix the hole, getting bigger muscles won’t fix the hole, stuff won’t fix the hole: you can only fix the hole by changing the way you think about yourself and the world.

TBC

Perception is a prison: cause a jail break

Photos show us the reality.

Paintings help us to see it better.

This is true of all great art.

Great art gives us new glasses.

Magic

Seth Godin did a great blog post the other day which I thought I would share. You can read his blog here. Here is the aforementioned post:

A figment

It seems like the only thing you can be a figment of is someone's imagination.

Andy Warhol wanted the word FIGMENT etched on his tombstone. He understood that the only place he actually existed (and will exist forever) is in the imagination of other people.

No, the falling tree in the empty forest makes no noise, and your project or your brand doesn't exist except as a figment in someone else's imagination. The challenge, then, isn't to worry so much about what's happening in the real world, outside, but to work overtime to be sure you exist in the figment world, inside.

You don't need proof. You need belief.

The takeaway: people’s perception of you or your product is all that is real.

Life is a magic trick. That’s all it is.

If you are trying to win reality, rather than perception, you will lose.

I read a book by a famous US election pollster once, his mantra was “it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear”. This reminded me of another Godin blog the other day about categories…

I want to put you in a category

When I meet you or your company or your product or your restaurant or your website, I desperately need to put it into an existing category, because the mental cost of inventing a new category for every new thing I see is too high.

I am not alone in this need. In fact, that's the way humans survive the onslaught of newness we experience daily.

Of course, you can refuse to be categorized. You can insist that it's unfair that people judge you like this, that the categories available to you are too constricting and that your organization and your offering are too unique to be categorized.

If you make this choice, the odds are you will be categorized anyway. But since you didn't participate, you will be miscategorized, which is far worse than being categorized.

So choose.

Make it easy to categorize you and you're likely to end up in the category you are hoping for.

What’s the point I’m making? The truth about you and your art is irrelevant. People don’t see the nuance, the texture, the shades of grey. They see black and white and they make lazy comparisons to what they’ve seen before.

This can occasionally serve you. But it can work against you. One reviewer in Edinburgh accused me of being hack. That is a serious criticism in the comedy world. Why did they do this? Well, I had material on some topics that hack comedians use. So she put me in the “hack” category, ignoring the vast amount of material that wasn’t deserving of this.

This can work in lots of different ways. Think your one wanking gag doesn’t make a difference and people will ignore it? Think again. In one joke they’ve put you in a category with the wanking guys. Think the fact that you wearing just a t-shirt on stage doesn’t make much difference? Think again, you’ve been put in with the rest of the pack. They assume mediocrity because you dress like the mediocre guys. Think girls will see beyond your shyness and see the real you? Think again, you've been put in the category of "gutless loser" with all the other guys who didn't have the balls to challenge them.

You need to care about people’s perception of you, not about who you really are. That is the only thing that will impact their decisions on you: to like or hate you, to buy or not buy your product, to hire or note hire you.  The pre-existing categories make it easy for them to make a category error with you. You need to work to ensure they don’t do that.

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