Latest / Wanzology / Doing That Inner Work
Transcript
- Doing That Inner Work Do-dah do-dah doot, do-dah!!. Hi, welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY. I am your host, The Wanz on another Wednesday, which is different from last Wednesday and probably won't be like next Wednesday, will it? Probably not. I hope that you are well and that you find yourself in a great place, meaning you're not too high, you're not too low, you're not too left, you're not too right, you're right sized. And it is a struggle sometimes to be right sized now isn't it? Yes, it is. This week, I want to tell you what I just got done doing. I just was listening to a webinar about fearful avoidant attachment style. I've been interested in attachment styles and been kind of circling the drain, trying to figure out where my place is in that world. I did not expect how spot on this was going to be. I feel very interesting right now. Um, I'm tired, I wanna go to bed, but I gotta finish this. I'm gonna stay up for a little while, even after I finish this because, I think it's important that you guys know that I'm working on myself (two words), and I want to be better. I want to be a better me. I want to be more secure. I want to be not freaked out by the behavior of others, or my misperception of what people think of me 'cause it's really none of my business. What other people think of me is really none of my business. But being that I'm a human just like you, I wonder what they're thinking. What are those two people looking at me for? I don't know them. Why are they looking at me? Have I got something in my teeth? This kind of work is interesting because, uh, how, how can I say this? This kind of inside work is interesting to me, because of the patterns that I recognize. I recognize that even though I may come across as being confident and brave and you know, considerate and polite, inside I'm scared inside. I'm afraid that you're gonna find out who I am, and when you do, you'll leave. You won't want anything to do with me. It doesn't matter what the reality is, what matters on the inside is that little voice that is telling you or telling me, “You're messed up man. You're defective, you're you're a virus. Why would anybody want to have anything to do with you?” I spent most of the year, 2017, 2018, every day looking in the mirror and asking myself, who is the person that these people say they see? I don't see that person. I don't see a, a, a, a talented, sensitive, caring individual. I see a screw up. I see a guy who tries really hard, but rarely ever succeeds, and it's not true. It's not. Those things that we tell ourselves, that little voice on the inside that's telling us stuff, the negative stuff, the bad stuff, that's not true. And the reason that it's not true is because if it were, nobody would want to hang around you, and I do mean nobody. It has been said that the biggest challenge in life is finding those people who can pick up what you're putting down. That's how you know your people. They understand what you're shooting for, not what you shoot, but what you're shooting for. So if you're trying to be a nice person, most people will recognize that you're trying to be a nice person, and they like that. If you're not trying to be a nice person, well, most people recognize that you're not that nice and they will leave you to your own devices. But most of us, myself (one word), most of us are trying to be the best person to everyone else we encounter. We would love that everyone sees our best side, right? Or else why would we do the hair? Why would we put on the make-up? Why would we always have nice clean clothes? If you didn't care, why would you shave? We do a lot of things in order to fit into what we think others will like. You may not think so, but man, you gotta pay attention to this because it's true. So how are you going about figuring out how you fit in? How are you going about understanding what your inner critic is saying and being able to evaluate what is NOT true? Because your inner critic is the thing that says, “Ooh, those jeans, they make my butt look big.”, “Oh my God, I can't wear that color eyeshadow.”, “Oh, oh, my hair is just too frizzy.”, “Oh, oh, I'll never lose ‘X’ amount of weight.” I'll never fit into this, I'll never that, I'm so . That's the inner critic, and nine times out of 10, more like 9.5 times outta 10, your inner critic is wrong. Your inner critic is in a backwards way trying to protect you, but most people don't take it that way, I know I don't. My inner critic tells me that I can't do a lot of things. Sometimes, I use it as motivation to prove that I can. And sometimes I don't try because I don't imagine myself being able to do things. Case in point, I love a bunch of musicians that play at this club here in Seattle, and they've been playing every Friday night at the same club for a couple of decades and these guys are great musicians. Very, very accomplished. Very, very nice people. So imagine my surprise when these professional musicians, people that I revere, because they are so bloody good, ask me to come sing with them!! “Here, why don't you pass whatever you're smoking around to everybody else so they can be as happy?” Yeah. No, they were serious. And I said, “Okay, well, what, what should I sing? Three songs that were proposed. I looked at those three songs, I spent five days looking at the damn songs, convincing myself that there's no way I could sing them, even though I could. One of them was out of my range, but I still had a way around that in my head. But I just couldn't imagine singing this duet with another person and having them understand what was going on in my head so that we could like collaborate in a performance. So I put that one to the back of the bus and those other two, I'd really worked hard at trying to memorize how these songs went. When I dug into him a little bit, it was like, “WHOA!!!! Where's this been all my life, or at least since 1974? I could sing! I could sing these songs and not have to stretch my voice like I usually do, which is why I don't do karaoke. All the great pop singers, their second and first tenors, their first altos, second sopranos, all of them. I'm not, I'm barely a baritone. I think that I do pretty well with what I've got. I enjoy singing so much. I enjoy performing, singing, eh, but performing, man, I love to perform, not because I'm egotistical about it. Some people just have a knack for being able to fix things. Some people are really good at cooking, some people are really great with kids, some people can build things. I perform and I, I'm pretty good at it. But I only figure that out after I've already done it, 'cause before, man, I'm just trying to rip myself down and figure out all the reasons that everything's gonna go wrong and, and nobody's gonna like it…So I try to learn these songs to do this gig, and it's gig day, it's time, and I show up and I'm nervous. Why am I nervous? Why should I be nervous? Well, I'm nervous because I'm about to go on stage singing songs. I'm not confident that I know in front of a whole bunch of people who are not my people. I mean, there was a lot of 20 somethings, 25 somethings in the room. I don't hang out with those folks. I certainly don't sing for those folks, but I was about to, and when I was introduced, I did what I usually do. I just focused on the music! When the band started playing and I started moving, It was all I could do to focus on what word comes next. I just wanted to just move around on the stage, I loved being on stage!!! And when I started singing, I wasn't sure if I was singing the right stuff, but I pretended I was I pretended that I was singing the best song any of these knuckleheads had ever heard!! And that song got over and people are like, “YEAH, yeah! Clapping and screaming!! Started another song and this one I knew better than the first one! And that one I had a lot of fun on!!I didn't even have to look at my cheat sheet notes for the lyrics that often. I mean, I've. I wouldn't say that I blew the doors off, but I did pretty well! I did pretty well. And then came the third song. Well, I didn't wanna really do the third song and neither did the person I was supposed to sing it with, so I did what any professional musician would do, I called an audible! And for me, with this caliber of musicians, I had no problem thinking that they could pull this off, and I just yelled out to everybody, “Bill Withers, Use Me in E!! A couple people looked at each other and they looked at me and the bass players liked fiddling, trying to figure out how do I play this? How do I work this? The guitar players with him and showing him how the riff goes, and all of a sudden, in like 15 seconds, they figured it out and the drummer started drumming, people got comfortable with the riff and I started singing, “My friends feel their appointed duty…”, and I closed my eyes and I had the biggest smile on my face because I've been singing this song for YEARS! I know this song!! And I kind of got lost in it. I could point at the crowd and articulate a verse, I could make a look at somebody and articulate what I wasn't saying, I could let the band breathe. It was better than I imagined it could be!! And when the song was done, everybody cheered!! Everybody in the band was wanting to shake my hand and hug me, and, “Great job!!!”, and oh man, “You killed it!!!” and blah, blah, blah. And I don't mean that in a egotistical way, “blah, blah, blah”, I mean that, I wasn't listening to him, I was too in my head. And what was I doing in my head? I was saying this, “See? See? You did that!!” Now, I tell you that story, not because I'm trying to toot my own horn, but it is an example of what each of us goes through. Each of us has our own insecurities. Each of us doubts our own abilities, and it is very easy to forget that most of the situations that we're going through at any given time, we've been there before. We may not remember them exactly moment by moment, second by second, but you made it from every horrible thing that has happened in your life. You've made it from back there to here, and it's very, very powerful when one recognizes, “Hey, I'm still here!” We're human beings. We are fallible. Some of us make more mistakes than others, some of us say that we don't make mistakes, but that's because we don't try to go beyond our comfort zone. We don't try to expand our experiences. Challenge yourself. You've done it before. Eating at a restaurant you've never eaten at before. Just striking up a conversation with someone that you're intimidated by, be they the most beautiful girl in the world, or the best looking dude you've ever seen, or the person who's driving that fancy fricking car, the person who, where'd they get those clothes, which is a question you ask them, “Hey, where did you get that?” Takes balls, takes courage, it takes self-confidence, and you have it, or else you wouldn't be here! None of us would. Something would've taken us down long ago. It is not easy being us, but we've made it this far. Do you think we can go farther? I do. I am willing to try. Tomorrow's gonna be another day, and hopefully all of us will wake up to see it. If not, none of us will have to worry about that crap anymore, but the odds are we're gonna wake up tomorrow and do what we did today all over again, just a little different. So, keep this in mind, your only job is to be the best ‘YOU’ you can be, and it shouldn't be hard, you've been ‘YOU’ all your life! You know you better than anybody knows you!! So show 'em what you know!! Show everyone what you can do. Show them how polite you are, how sweet you are, how nice you are, how stern you can be, how smart you may or may not be. How curious, how courageous and how loving you can be. Since there's only one you, who the heck are you competing against? If it's outside of your skin, wrong playing field, you need to turn that inside. The only person that you compete against should be yourself. Every day consider this, the only goal is to be just a little bit better than you were yesterday. That's what I'm trying for. I hope to see you out there digging and trying and failing and getting back up again and laughing at the fact that you tried when there are so many people who don't. Go forth and conquer y'all but be nice to one another! All right, I'll see you next week!