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Voice

you guys ready? Okay let's do this. How to affect perfection. Chapter one Voice. Let's read the opener. Your voice is who you are. Maybe not the you you carry around every day, but the one yelling from inside demanding to be heard. Your voice is the way you see the world and how you translate it back when you train your voice and allow it to grow and be heard. That beautiful sound will carve a path for you to follow for life. Conversely, if you fail to use your voice, others will be in charge of it and you never give in, never surrender your voice is your most powerful tool. I have learned so much since I wrote this book, especially about this idea of of owning your voice. I've got my notes. Let's go through this when you own your voice. The biggest thing about that is it frees you from following trends or begging for ideas. Right? Looking around asking, what do they want? What do they want? Right. So now you have the most powerful tool within you. So now instead of asking, what do the...

y want? You now get to ask yourself, what do I have to say, write that down, What do I have to say? What's my opinion? Because if you play it safe and choke back your voice, you're like a rudderless ship right? Taking directions from the waves. The question I'm asked most often is James, how do I find my voice. Um that's all we want. That's all we want. We want that authenticity. We want the autonomy of our lives and we want authenticity and vulnerability in our work. Um But it's not about finding your voice, right? It's not about finding your voice. Your voice isn't in your other pants. You didn't you didn't lose it or leave it in a drawer, right? It's worse. It's worse than that. Your voice is buried. Your voice is buried. Let me explain two things first. Um There's an american gospel song called This Little Light of Mine. Alright goes this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine this little light of mine. I'm gonna let it shine, right? It goes like that. Um sadly most of us don't let our little light shine. And for two reasons, right? First because it's too easy, right? It's too easy. Our voices too easy. Our gifts, we poop who are gifts because they come so easy to us, right? They were they were granted to us at birth oh my ability to you know, dress people and put put their clothes together. Oh that little thing. Oh my silly little marks I make with my left hand, right? Even I suffer from that. Like like like I still can't believe that people like my handwriting, right? Because we poo poo are natural gifts because they come too easy to us. The second reason we don't trust and we don't allow our little light to shine is because it's too hard because when we do recognize that we do have a gift and that people do appreciate our gift. Now we have to share it. We have to put it out into the world and we live in fear that someone may not like it please. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. So we don't let our light shine because it's too easy and because it's too hard. Um here's a big idea I said that your voice is buried and what I mean is your voice, your voice is buried under other voices, right? It's this big idea by Carl young and Carl Young says unless we take our subconscious and make it conscious, it will direct our lives and we will call it fate or as I say, you will call it your character, right? It's who you are. So our subconscious our ego is full of other people's voices. Let me explain. So there's this really wonderful story attributed to it as a native american story. Grandfather telling his son, there are two wolves inside of you and they are struggling, right? The first wolf is anger and resentment and low self esteem and false pride and superiority and ego. Right? And the second word wolf is joy and love and peace and compassion and the grandson says which wolf wins and the grandfather says the one you feed, right? And those those wolves are the voices and your voice is joy and love and compassion and your ego and all the all the people who have given you bad advice and all the sleigh z teachers and all the your siblings and all the trauma. Those are the other voices, Right? Those are the other voices in your head. So who you think you are is built up of one part of you and your natural joy and your natural illumination and your natural sense of fun and play. And it's also built on those other voices that are in there to protect you or to maybe tease you or taunt you. Right? Mhm. So who we think we are, the majority of who we think we are is actually made up of other voices. People from our past, but we've practiced them out of habit and they have become a level of us. So um the problem is is that these other voices chafe up against who we are. We wake up with these beautiful natural urges to create. And then all of a sudden the other voices come in and say, you don't have the technology, you don't know what you're doing, they won't like it. How do I get paid? And you end up imagining yourself dying in a trailer eating cat food on crackers. So literally other people's voices come through us and become our words. We regurgitate other people's voices. They literally excuse my french um their shit becomes our words right? And words matter. We don't realize it because these voices have become a habit that we've become comfortable in us. Um But we also unconsciously or consciously follow a set of rules that were, that, that, that were not made by us. Um or laws, they were given to us by our parents or society or customs or traditions that were supposed to follow, right? That's not living a conscious aware life that's following the herd. What they say about following the herd, the view never changes. So who we think we are is often at odds about where we want to go and who we want to become. So we need to be conscious of our voice. We need to take control of our voice. And where do these blocks come from? They come from our past? We we we we call it, we call it trauma, right? Um, trauma is any negative, any, any occurrence in your life that impact you negatively. It doesn't have to be bodily harm. It could just be constant teasing by siblings. It could be like I said, the lazy teacher who mentions that you'll never be good at math. Ergo you're not good at math. I had a teacher, I had a teacher once tell me that I would never be able to afford a house. I've bought and sold three already, right? Perhaps um, your parents wanted to uh, to shield you and, and and protect you, right? So they became very um overprotective and now we're afraid of risks. Were afraid of taking risks. You know, we have to understand and be conscious about these these voices. This is the hard work, this is the hard work of finding your voice. Even a boss when a recent boss or, or you know your first work experience that was less than pleasant. You know, we need to understand that these affect us. For me when I was a kid I got all the downs right? I got all the downs. I was told to dial it down, quiet down, slow down, calm down. Uh stay down. Right. When I was a kid, I was told I was shy when I was a kid, I was told I was shy and because authority told me I was shy, I became shy and it's taking me years to work myself out of that, right? Because I want a bold and beautiful future. I can't do that as a shy person. I can't do that, reacting as a shy person would shy is not bad on its own, but if it stops you from achieving your goals, then you should be a conscious of it and start taking some actions to help you focus on where you want to go. So we need to be curious about the voice is right? We need to be curious about who they come from, whether they're yours or not because most of them are a lie that we're telling ourselves. Um your, you know, and it's in the form of your ego and those voices do not serve you okay. They are a lie that we keep telling ourselves, write that down most of the voices that tell us we can't do something or were ill equipped or we're not ready are a lie that we keep telling ourselves write that down. Here's an example from the book. I'm just going to read it straight from the book. It's A Chapter 10. Your lot in life. I had a young protege, he wanted to be a screenwriter but his father encouraged him to be a bricklayer like himself. It was his lot in life. His father said the arts don't make money. Bricklaying is a decent wage and the world needs bricklayers, you'll be one like me For 10 years. My young savant laid bricks and swallowed his dreams. one day his father's best friend died presumably of laying too many bricks at the funeral. The father got up to read a eulogy he had written, my friend was moved to tears not by the eloquence of the goodbye, but but by the realization that his father was a writer. Right? Your voice is your opinion, your voice is your attitude and your perspective. Another famous James, William James, Merrick father of American psychology and a philosopher in the late 1800s, he says the biggest idea of our generation is that your attitude creates your reality. Your attitude creates your reality, not your circumstances, not the your ego, write your attitude and with the right attitude, you can become who or what you want. Um um it comes by having faith in yourself and then your ideas and trusting those ideas, saying I can do this, I belong right. It's not about faking it or percent presenting some false bravado is just by relaxing into who you are and trusting your voice and trusting that you were born with all the answers you don't have to go seeking. And that little gift of yours, that little light of yours is so much more powerful than you can even imagine. Okay, the practice practice becomes a habit. This habit becomes your voice, Your voice is how you see the world, it's your opinion and then how you freely translate it back and if you fail to use it, others will be in charge of it. That's the sin. That's the sin. The worst sin you can make is to not ever experienced the power of your voice, right? And the secret of the universe is that nobody has the answer, nobody knows shit. Everybody is making it up. Everybody is just trying to follow their own voice. That's the secret of the universe. Um how do I find my voice, my own personal voice. Um My secret is that my superpower is not that I'm more talented than anybody else. Certainly not. It is not that I'm smarter than anybody else. It is not that I work harder than anybody, although I probably work harder than most people. My secret is that I allow my voice. I allow I come up, I make shit up for a living and I go that's a perfectly good response, That's a perfectly good idea, right? I come up with the wrong list answer and present it as my professional opinion. I allow my voice. So unless you are in control of your voice, your opinion, your boundaries, somebody else is right, It's either your ego or your partner or your boss or someone else right. Through practice. You can learn the power of your voice, how to affect perfection. Chapter One Voice The show and tell hands on demo, let me show you a couple of pieces from the book and how I made them. Okay and why I made them. Uh First up is a break, it's just a brick, right? But it's from the from the story of your lot in life. Remember the story about um my protege who wanted to be a writer? So basically um he was a bricklayer instead of a writer. So I went out and tried to find a brick that looked like a book, right? A brick that had some kind of like some level of typography on the front. This is a butler bric, a very texas brick right? And then basically whitewashed the sides and then with a pencil. Just just just an H. B. There's a soft pencil just drew the the pages on it. So it would really kind of look like a book. Um Yes, it's uh it's going directly into the cliche bricklaying and book, but um I think it ended up really sweet. I really like this and it's been sitting on my, sitting on my shelf um ever since but I I failed to do one thing which I will do now, always kind of sign my own work, right? Artist signs their work, so that's my brick. Mhm. Come on. Um There's another piece that I talked about literally talk about having a voice is there's another piece from in, from the book which in the book is a little bit different than this. So in the book it is just the voice balloon and the flames. And the reason it's changed is because this piece, which is the original drawing when I made this piece. Um It was a gift, it was written for a purpose. So it was, I forget what, why I had drawn this and um then it says thank you victoria. So I had drawn drawn this for somebody and then photographed it and send it to them. Or I don't know how I sent it, I don't know how I got it back, but and I repurposed it for the book because it made sense. And like I said, I have no problem repurposing artwork if I've made it for one reason and I'm using it for another. I have no problem with that. Um And if anybody does then it's their problem and not mine, You see how that works. Huh? Interesting one other little piece I want to show you this was a Goofy little piece and the reason I'm showing it, because it was a bugger to make it was for me to figure out how to do this was really difficult. Um and it's the it's the artwork for the piece that says um um your parents were wrong. So basically I wanted to use a picture of me and show everything I wanted to be when I was a kid, you know, when I was a kid, remember that artist, musician daredevil, a writer and a comedian and somehow I've kind of become all those things, right? So what I'm trying to do here is is right, all those things and then cross them all off because they were on my list, but they weren't on society's lists. You know, these were not things that you, things that you grow up to be right, you don't grow up to be an artist or a musician, you have to quit that stuff, you know, you uh you know, when you become adult, but it was really hard to figure out. So I took this photograph of me as a child and basically took it to a copy shop and had it blown up a bit and then just tried to figure out how to draw on it and the best way that I could come up with was drawing on actually on vellum, unclear vellum to get the kind of look that I want and then figure out how to photograph that and make it like super flat. So it would look good in the book. So that is that peace. And the last thing I want to show is um uh in the book there's this beautiful spread. Let me show it to you. Beautiful spread of a a skateboard, right? And on the skateboard says creativity is dangerous. Um and what I was doing was trying to make the illusion of like how you see the stickers or signs that say skateboarding is illegal, right? Having fun playing is illegal. And I wanted to have that same illusion to graphic design or to creativity and how creativity is dangerous and what I did and how I came about that was just basically went and bought a skateboard and sanded it down, whitewashed it. And then drew that typography on it. And the actual skateboard is this, right? Is this here? Um This one is a little bit more beat up than the original because we've been using it. You know, this is like my daughter's skateboard now she rides on this and and the way I did this lettering was I did the lettering small, like I always did, I always do and I just blew it up on a copier and put a template on the board and then just traced all of my clumsy letters and then went in with a with a big paint pen and basically filled in the gaps. Just colored it all in, right? So there's no real magic to like I can't just like I can't draw a mural in one shot, the same thing. I can't draw a skateboard in one shot. I have to I have to draw it small and then blow things up on the copier and then it becomes this. So this is my creativity is dangerous skateboard. It's a beautiful piece. It rides like the wind. My daughter loves it. So that is from voice Chapter one, how to affect perfection. I'll see you in chapter two. Mm. Mhm.