Latest / Wanzology / Emotional Floatation Device
Transcript
- Emotional Floatation Device Ooh, there comes a time in every man's life or a woman life that you gotta stand up!! Stand up, stand up!! Welcome to another Wednesday!! And if it's Wednesday, then you know it's time for a new episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz. Nice to be here. Nice to have you here. I wanna thank you for checking it out. There are a lot of things going on in this world, and you know what? I realize that there are a lot of things going on in your world specifically, meaning that none of us are boring. Not in the traditional sense of, oh my God, I can't find anything to do. I'm just so disenchanted with life. Yeah, if you're thinking that way, you've got a problem that a mental professional would love to talk to you about. What I'm saying is the overwhelming, ‘I can't get everything done in a day, so I have to postpone stuff till tomorrow, and then tomorrow's things are gonna have to be postponed.’ All it does is add up to this big accordion thing going inwards. You have less time to do more things, I get it! And not getting those things done leaves residue. Don't think so? I bet you can recall the last three mistakes that you made before you can recall the last success you had. We all tend to focus on, oh, we messed up. It's normal. I'm not sure why it's normal, but it's normal self-evaluation. It's a thing. It's a real thing. Now, when that self-evaluation turns itself on its owner and the owner starts believing and in the subconscious way, internalizing these things, well, then attitude just goes crazy, goes out the window. It leads to, well, in my case, it leads to ‘I'm not good enough.’, ‘Nobody likes me, like I like them.’, ‘Nobody really wants me around.’, ‘I'm not very good looking.’. All these negative things, right? I made a discovery on a video that I was watching earlier, how do we get these bad thoughts ingrained in us? Well. They keep being repeated. That's how we keep repeating the negative things that go on inside of our heads. When we do, it reaches a subconscious level, and the subconscious is the thing that really kind of rules your mental faculties. The conscious mind catches a lot of the stuff that the subconscious is doing and kind of molds it and shapes it and makes it more pliable and then adapts it to whatever situations that we're in, but for the most part, man, it's working in the shadows. Nobody knows what it's doing. It can lead us into places we don't want to be. I am sure that you've gone through the experience of I know that I'm gonna do ‘X’, and doing ‘X’ means that I'm gonna have to think about solving problem ‘1, 2, 2-A and 3’. Great. So you start going and you're getting through one, and you get the two and two A comes and you're like, wait. I, I, oh wait, I don't know what I'm doing. Wait, wait, wait. And then it starts. “Well see? Told you you'd messed that up!”, the inner voice says. “Whatever got you to think that you were ever gonna be successful at this?”, says that little voice inside of you. That happens and has been happening in most of our lives for so long that it becomes the norm. The way to break out of it, I'm actually experimenting with, I am calling it, you have to throw yourself an ‘emotional flotation device’, an ‘emotional flotation device’. So you already get the gist of what a flotation device is, that's the little round buoy things that they have on boats, right? Usually called a ’Life Ring’ , life preserver, right? Well, what about one for your head? I mean the inside of it, where the emotions bubble and swirl and sometimes ooze out. What about an emotional flotation device that you can hold onto, that you can use against the negative things that we tell ourselves? Sounds like an interesting concept. Not sure what I mean. I'll use myself as an example. I am a Grammy award-winning vocalist. I have the Grammy sitting in a case right over there behind me. They don't give those to just anyone, but I spent the longest time wondering, “How did that happen? Why do I even have that?”, the question is asked. Because if I were that good, other people would be calling me and asking me to sing with them or to sing for somebody or something like that, wouldn't they? But I don't get phone calls. I don't get emails. Nobody wants me to come and sing for them, and I mean that in the sense of, oh, I'm doing a television special, “Let's get Wanz! Let's get Wanz! He'll come and do something, right?”. I was on Jimmy Fallon once by myself with The Roots! It was thrill of a lifetime until it actually started to happen. Part of the happen part was rehearsal. So here I am, In a room with all of the roots we're getting down to business, I've already given them songs that I wanna sing. We get a third of the way through the first song and my voice decides,” Eh-eh, I'm not staying! I'm outta here!”, and it just up and left. My voice just disappeared completely! Now what? Can't get another guest, show's gonna air in like three hours. What am I gonna do? I limped through a second song and there was nothing, I mean, I couldn't even talk. So the rehearsal was called, and then it was like, great, what do I do between now and when we start filming the episode? Well, I was in my dressing room getting fed every warm drink you can possibly imagine. Wasn't allowed to talk, but all I could see in my head was disaster. I finally get a chance on a national stage by myself, and my voice disappeared. It was devastating. But as they say, “The show must go on!”, so what did I do? The best that I could. I came out and the band started playing a song and I tried to sing to it as best I could, I talked a lot and I interacted with the crowd and got through the song. Great.!! Now what? Well, they start taping the show, introduced me, Jimmy's out there and doing his monologue, and here it comes, his monologue is over, they're gonna start playing a song and I'm supposed to sing! So they start playing and I start trying to sing and it's barely coming out, not very well…uh-huh, and it's over. That part is over. Meanwhile, I have an earpiece in and I'm listening to QuestLove, talk to everyone else in the band, and then every once in a while he will throw me a bone, ask me how I'm feeling, and that sort of stuff. That lasted for an hour and a half. Every time there was a break, I was supposed to sing a song. ‘Great!’ The taping is over now ‘Great!’ At the end of the taping, the in studio audience is clapping and the band is playing and Jimmy comes over to shake my hand. He says, “Thanks a lot for coming!!”, and I said, “I'm sorry, I lost my voice!”, and he said, “Oh! I guess you're gonna have to come back again!!, and I thought, wait, what? I could come back? Okay, well that kinda lessened the blow a little bit. Goodbyes were said and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and off I go to my hotel to get something to eat. Trying very hard not to panic. Like I said, they didn't have time to get another guest. Sure enough man time for the show to air and wouldn't you know it, they took part of the rehearsal recording and put it over the band playing live in front of the studio audience. So on TV you heard the band, but the vocal you heard was the vocal from the rehearsal. It was like as soon as you recognized that someone was singing, it was over. Probably two seconds max. They had me singing and they did that for every commercial break of that broadcast. I was devastated and disappointed. Why? Because this was my chance to show myself, aside from “Thrift Shop”, this was my chance and I blew it. No, I didn't blow it, circumstances changed. Let's go one month into the future from that show. I'm thinking all the time, “Well, I guess you're gonna have to come back!”, so Mr. Fallon told me, and I'm watching the show and I've watched it many, many nights in a row. All of a sudden it hit me, anyone who appears on that show has something new. New song, new album, new book, new play, new movie, new kid, always something new. What did I have? Nothing new. All of a sudden getting back to that level, you might as well have given me feathers and told me to fly to New York. Wasn't gonna happen. What did I end up doing? I ended up figuring out, over time, I wouldn't have been there in the first place if I weren't any good. After that, “I wouldn't have been able to perform anywhere if I were not ‘good enough’ to perform anywhere!”. That mantra has come back and rejuvenated me because I gave myself an emotional flotation device. I went back into my memory all the way back to the third grade where I stood in front of my elementary school and sang, “Jeremiah was a bull frog, was a good friend of mine. Never understood a single word he said, but I helped him drink his wine!, and you know the rest. Then I went through every performance that I could remember since then, including that night, October 11th in Portland, Oregon the first time I ever performed thrift shop in front of a crowd. 1100 people the first night, and then the next night, 7,500, same thing! And all of a sudden it's, I'm touring all over the world just had to be that good! Now, this emotional lifeline that I'm talking about, we all come equipped with, it's in our heads. The trick is, how do you attach a different emotion to an experience? You do it through the subconscious, that's how, and the subconscious is really, really good at remembering feelings, but not words. So you have to think of a time when you were feeling better in whatever circumstance you're in, and you repeat remembering what you felt like in that memory, and that talks to your subconscious. Can you do it for three days in a row? How about five? How about 10 days? How about two weeks? How about three weeks? It is said that it takes about 21 days to instantiate and keep a new habit. Now that you are armed with an emotional flotation device, which is going through a similar circumstance, having a different emotional connection to that circumstance, and now you're regurgitating that to your subconscious, so much so that it has no choice but to swallow it and you start feeling different than you did before. That's how it works. Emotional flotation device, keeping your ass afloat until you get your right mind, right again. Dig it? I dig it. Are your results gonna match my results? I dunno. Can't wait to find out. So let me leave you with this, there's more than one way to get anywhere in our lives. I have been turned onto a new tool called an emotional flotation device, and I'm gonna see how well it works by repeating past situations that are similar to present situations that usually make me feel ‘less than’, and we'll see what happens. You better try it now, why? Because later you want to be doing something else! That's how our life works! Don't procrastinate! Do a little bit at a time, just like you'd eat a pizza, one bite at a time, and we're all gonna make it through, you feel me? Yeah, I know you do!! Thanks so much for being here today, I really appreciate it! Go out there and cling to your flotation device and I'll see you next week, later.