20040830
today i want to share an article i read in a book.
You can create a self that doesn't care that much what people think. You can motivate yourself by leaving the painful self-conciousness of high school behind.
Because of our tendency is to go so far in the timid, non-assertive direction, it might be a profitable overcorrection to adopt these commands: Look Bad. Take a Risk. Lose Face. Be Yourself. Share yourself with someone. Open Up. Be Vunerablee. Be human. Leave your comfort zone. Get honest. Experience the dear and do it anyway.
The first time that I ever spoke to author Devers Branden it was over the telephone and she agreed to work with me on building my own self-confidence and personal growth. It wasn't long into the phone conversation that she asked me about my voice. "I am very interested in your voice," she said. Hoping she might be ready to give me a compliment I asked her to explain. "Well," she began. "it's so lifeless. A real monotone. I wonder why that is."
Embarrassed, I had no good explaination. This conversation took place long before I had become a proffessional speaker, and it was also long before I ever took any acting lessions. Yet I was completely unaware and very surprised that it seemed to her that i was coming across like someone out of
Night of the Living Dead.
the truth was, during that period in my life, i was living scared. thing weren't going well for me financially, I had serious health problems in my family and i had that mildly suicidal feeling that accompanies an increasing sense of pwerlessness over my problems. I think tone way a lot of men hide their fears is by assuming a macho kind of indifference. I know now that's what i had done. That a psychotherapist could hear it immediately in my voice was unnerving.
Trying to understand why i covered fear with indifference, i remembered that in high school, the "cool" guys were always the least enthusiastic guys. They spoke in monotones, emulating their heroes James Deand and Marlon Brando. They were so indifferent and unenthusiastic you couldn't even understand him when he spoke.
One of the first homeowkr assisgnments i got was to study how clarke gable in gone with the wind revealed his female side. This sounded appalling to me. gable a female? I knew gable was always considered a true "man's man" in the movies, so i couldn't understand what Devers meant, or how it would help me. But when i watche the film, it became clear. Clark Gable allowed himself such a huge emotional range of expression, that i could accutally identify scenes where he was revealing a distinctly female side to his chracters personality. Did it make him less manyly? no. curiously, it made him more real, and more compelling.
from that time on, i lost my desire to hide myself behind an indifferent monotonous persona. i committed myself to get on the road to creating a self that included a wider range of expression, without a nervous oreoccupation with coming off like a man's man.
this is from a book by steve chandler. i just wanted to voice my opinion about how being indifferent and monotone, especially for boys, makes them look more like fools than being the cool crowd. they make themselves sound so stupid, it's as if they cannot string a few words together to form a sentence. but nevertheless, most will grow out of it... or so i hope.
Love, lixximajig : 21:00