Midweek Motivator - 7th June 2023
This week sharing Jimmy Carr's NLP hack and Alva Claire as this week's Hungry woman.
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This motivator is designed to pull you out of the midweek slump and inspire you. This week I wanted to address the idea of reality, and definitions of truth. Because, of course, there is no such thing most of the time. Its all about perspective.
“Fundamentally you have to decide, do people live in your world or do you live in theirs?” - Jimmy Carr
When it comes to building a career as a musician, rather than always looking to other musicians for guidance I like to look to other industries. The level of detachment helps me make more strategic, rational decisions - I get less stuck by the fear of failure or comparison.
Comedy is great for this as I find comedians obviously very entertaining, but also quite fascinating. I think they have one of the hardest industry’s to crack, and similarly to DJs their careers rely on consistent grind and moments of luck. Jimmy Carr is one of the most successful names in UK comedy, but he could have had a very different journey, starting out on a grad scheme for Shell (yep, the petrol guys).
He was making some money, and by all accounts doing ‘quite well’ in life. Yet he felt unhappy and unfulfilled. He credits discovering NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) as being the tool which allowed him to make a change and make it successfully.
NLP (as illustrated in the image above) is a communication model, focused on your communication with yourself. It looks at the way our thoughts affect our behaviour and by recognising the language you’re using, encourages you to asses it and change it. It’s a tool to ultimately impact the way you think, allowing you to review limiting beliefs you may have and change these.
Great leaders and innovators tend to be extremely good at always shifting their perception of events, so that it serves them.
Examples..
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas A. Edison
"Because you are alive, everything is possible" - Thich Nhat Hanh
Or, one I love from Ruth Bader Ginsberg..
“I became a lawyer when women were not wanted by the legal profession… I did see myself as kind of a kindergarten teacher in those days because the judges didn’t think sex discrimination existed.”
She could have said “this is impossible, I’m punished constantly for my gender, I’ll never make it”. Instead she saw herself as a teacher, and acted accordingly.
So the message is this: if you feel blocked in some way, how can you rethink the ‘blockage’ to put you in a more advantageous position? What would be a more positive, or a more beautiful way of viewing things?
Our world is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. Change your perspective and you change your world.
Hungry Woman: Alva Claire
You might not have heard of Alva Claire but it’s likely you’ve seen her face, as she’s recently been up on billboards, in a campaign for Mulberry as well as being one of the faces of MAC, and featuring in the Savage x Fenty show.
Described by Vogue as the ‘model of the moment’, Alva is definitely getting some bright spotlights, but what I love about her story is that, unlike models of the past who were picked up at 13, Alva’s been working her way into the industry for over 10years.
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