012: Thoughts on Finding Your Voice
“Nobody can believe in your idea if you don’t believe in your idea”
In this first edition of Native Conversations, I was joined by podcast extraordinaire and world-class coach, Rob Lawrence (you can watch the full conversation below). The main theme of our conversation was about finding your voice, as well as being yourself in a world where others may have particular expectations of how you should be.
We spoke about that illusive term of ‘authenticity’, the challenge of embracing the true version of yourself and the sense of vulnerability (or fear) that being yourself can bring.
You can watch the full conversation above, but if you haven’t got 30 minutes right now, the main points are listed below:
Executive summary
As a first question, I asked Rob about what he believed was the right balance between acting and just being yourself. His view was that there shouldn’t really be any difference between the version of you that you present to the world and the version of you that is inherently you. He argues that perhaps we spend too much time, energy and effort trying to mould ourselves into the way we perceive that others think we should be.
I then asked Rob about confidence and how he empowers his clients to feel like they have more of it. For him, where he sees people struggling with confidence is when they have taken too big a leap in one go. He then spoke about the importance of taking micro steps when trying to push yourself out of your comfort zone (Watch the video at around 5 mins for more on this).
Rob then spoke about the high level of confidence that a child has and the reasons why we lose this over time. In his view, a lot of the work around building confidence is actually about recovering confidence (the confidence we had from childhood).
We then discussed success / failure criteria for projects. Rob spoke about the differences between commercial endeavours requiring external validation, whereas artistic endeavours can more often be based on internal validation.
Rob also discussed thoughts about ‘people pleasing’ (See around 9 min 30 for more). He spoke about it being tricky to give your full self (and what you really think) to something whilst simultaneously going through the motions of just doing what the client wants. In other words, he says that when we offer a service with care, we shouldn’t be offering it up for someone else’s validation. We should be happy with it as a product or service that has value intrinsically within it - as it is. Otherwise, we could be doing the client a disservice by becoming an echo chamber for their views.
Following this, we spoke about where Rob’s boundaries were between three particular aspects of every project. These aspects were: What the client wants, what he wants and what the end result needs to be. For this, Rob acknowledged that he didn’t really have the answer. But in his experience, it helps by deciding: “What’s for you, what’s for them and what you are willing to negotiate on”. One trick for him is to have different boundaries depending on the type of work he is doing.
I then asked Rob for his approach to weaving character, personality, soul and vibe into a session when working with a client in a producer role (See 19 mins approximately). For Rob, it comes back to having confidence in self and striving to gain more and more experience over time. He believes that when you have more experience, and therefore confidence, your true self is more likely to shine through. His biggest trick though, when seeking to approach a project authentically, is to try not think about it too much, to just dive in and do it. Ultimately, Rob believes that so much of what we do comes down to attitude and approach rather than the method we follow.
Then, he spoke about ways he is able to connect with people from ‘heart to heart’ in a commercial environment (Around 27 mins). The most important thing, in his view, was about connecting with people based on where they are now and taking them on an incremental journey (rather than starting with where you want them to be).
Finally, to sum up, Rob believed that finding your voice requires you to create positive habits to help you to step out of your comfort zone. But he also thought it was important to do this with a bit of discipline (i.e. taking small, but regular, steps to the edge of what feels safe for you). With this process in place, he argued that we can build a powerful creative practice and a space for us to explore ourselves within.
What do you think? Send me an email at james@nativeorigin.co.uk and let me know your thoughts.
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