So I recently had my first Livestream ever on Youtube.
It was a lot of fun, and I created a really cool story excerpt and a painting, but I didn’t feel like I was in the moment enough and had enough of a connection to the audience. I felt like I was watching myself and out of my own body
Talking to multiple people, I’ve come up with some ideas:
Invite people to do something in their life that centers on presence that they have been putting off
Yoga, working out, drawing, painting, stretching, cleaning
Create a wheel of ridiculous things
Ask lots of questions and when I get little or no engagement, spin a wheel of ridiculous things
Create a discussion with people
Minimize the windows so I don’t see myself most of the time
One of the things that came out from our discussion is that he said there are two types of content on social media – educational and entertainment. Some realization I came to is that social media is all about being social. It’s not about looking cool or saying the right things.
In the conference I was at, there was a guy with 10 million followers, and he said to be yourself. If yourself is introverted, act introverted. If you are a geek, act like one.
I think the key is that people desire to connect socially. Even if its a virtual social thing. So if your content doesn’t feel like you are talking directly to someone, then it probably isn’t getting big.
That and consistency. The only lesson from my marketing coach and the 10 million follower guy. Post once a day he said.
So something that I’ve been sort of obsessed with recently is how to face your problems head-on. In so many areas of my life, I struggle to do that. In my professional career, tasks that stress me out send me to my couch with my phone. When I don’t know what to say to my mom and my dad, I immediately turn on my audiobook, eager to dull the pain in my chest. When I am feeling stressed about a fight in Valorant, I rush and try to ignore the mounting feelings of anxiety.
I would really like to find a way to flip the script because it is so rewarding. When I do a task that I worry about, I feel energized, and not tired from work. When I focus on my feelings of anxiety in Valorant, I become much more aware of what my intuition is telling me, that I need to slow down and play the situation very carefully.
I think this is a really interesting concept. I want to make a bit of an amendment. In the video they talk about trying to get better problems, that being able to have money problems when you are rich vs money problems when you are poor is much better (where you invest, vs how to survive). But I kind of disagree. The problem of survival is ultimately a much more rewarding problem for me than where to invest.
I do think that this is a powerful idea, and a way to reframe problems. My thoughts are as follows:
Avoiding problems comes from the fear of failure
We can address this by embracing failure
But we don’t want to just fail at anything…this is where choosing your problems come in
Instead of failing at a random problem, embrace failing and learning from a meaningful problem
Ex: I am afraid I don’t know how to respond to my parents
The meaningful problem here is to learn to create a bond with my parents while standing strong in my own life and boundaries
Accept failure and believe in my ability to learn from a failure at this problem
Essentially, turn every problem into a challenge
Another example: I don’t know what to do next in my demo build and it’s overwhelming and a lot of work
The meaningful problem here is finding how to be efficient at my job, and to work as a team without people pleasing to my own detriment (creating boundaries)
Accept failure at this and my ability to learn from that failure
So things have been interesting recently. I have a lot of outlets in which to express my thoughts in: Instagram, video, blog post, journal, and slack channel. I don’t know where to post what. But I recently realized that I am taking my blog waaay too seriously. This blog is meant to be a place where I am boldly myself, but also giving me a staging ground to work things out, not come up with the final product. It is my place to draft out ideas, write poems about how I feel, try out videos that I’m not yet ready to publish. It is a place where I’m being unafraidly myself.
With that being said, I wanted to work out some of my thoughts with Instagram on this blog post. I have three Instagram accounts with an idea for a fourth one:
personal account
art account
coaching account
+ valorant account.
I’m going to take a stab at dividing purpose of different outlets:
Instagram – personal
Place to relax and talk to friends
Ask for help, suggestions
Practice challenges
Instagram – art
Place to work on art
Build worlds, characters
Find beauty
Ask about works in progress
Instagram – coaching
Place to remind myself different life lessons
Homepage for coaching, where I direct everyone
Write down what helps me reconnect with art
Instagram – valorant
Place to create training videos for myself to become the best
Reclaim mental
I don’t really know what the purpose of the slack channel is as current. Perhaps I can use it as a place to repost things that I post in different areas.
I’ve started to master singing and I think there are three main mentalities that allow you to produce a good sound, maybe a 4th step as well.
Step One: Relaxation
The mentality is that you feel completely and totally relaxed in your shoulders, neck, but MOSTLY the throat and vocal chords. Literally, every note has to be zero effort.
This is achieved by (in order of importance):
Breathe support
Keeping open for high notes
Warmup
Step Two: Sit on the Note
Work on sitting on the note in the back of your throat instead of moving up or down (especially when going up). A good trick is to imagine moving down when you are going up for a note.
Step Three: Let the Consonants Carry the Sound
The last step is focusing on enunciating, basically letting the “speech level” words carry the sounds.
After all these steps, you should be left with clear notes that are on key, but the final step is always letting your voice and tonality tell a story and the emotions you feel.