It seems insane that the words you use would make any difference in your music career, doesn’t it? And yet, words are how we communicate. Everything that’s available, is basically available in language. So, if we’re asking for something, how we ask makes a difference. If we’re communicating our value as performers, how we communicate our value makes a difference.
In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, David shares how words impact perception and how perception shapes your music career.
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Podcast Highlights:
00:16 – You are what you say you are
00:39 – Limiting past-based language
01:46 – Completing past pains and hurts
02:45 – How do you describe yourself?
03:51 – Closing thoughts
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Transcription:
Hey, it's David Andrew Wiebe, and today I wanted to talk about something. I think this is a breakthrough that's available in language. The concept is you are what you say you are.
Now, this could easily be misconstrued as some kind of woo-woo nonsense, but it's not. It really is the power of words, and there is something to the power of words.
With remarkable frequency, we tend to talk about things through the lens of the past, so we start sentences with things like, "based on my experience," "what happened last time was," "it's never gone that way before," "I'm always this way," "they're always that way," "this is always how it turns out."
And so, we automatically limit what we think is going to happen based on some other experience we've already had. We impose the past onto the future.
We impose the past onto the future.Share on X
This could come up in a situation where, "well, we already played at that venue and last time we only 15 people came out." Maybe if you did the same things in the same way, you'd end up with the same results. But if you've only played there once and you don't have much experience with it yet, how do you know there's only going to be 15 people coming out next time? You don’t. You're trying to base it on something that already happened, but what happened is in the past, it has nothing to do with the present, and it certainly doesn't have anything to do with the future.
What happened is in the past, and it has nothing to do with the present.Share on X
How Past-Based Thinking Is Limiting Your Opportunities
The point here is that you could arbitrarily limit your own opportunities based on the way things went. Usually, that's an indicator of... not necessarily trauma, but a little bit of hurt, a little bit of pain about something that didn't go right.
Whenever we encounter things like that, there is an opportunity to create completion with them. And oftentimes we're not complete with anything, right? But if there was pain or hurt, we can acknowledge that pain or hurt. We can have conversations with the people who we feel may have offended us.
Of course, we still want to take ownership of it. We don't want to show up in front of them and be like, "Hey, you know, you really made me mad." No, that doesn't work. It's more like "When you said this, it made me feel this way," and that's taking ownership of your own feelings. But there is an opportunity to complete pains and hurts and move on and to create something new out of that.
So that's how we can easily limit ourselves and our opportunities by basing everything on things that have already happened.