Episode 1

Do you find that your message is not connecting to your audience? Maybe you are struggling with confidence in your voice, or perhaps, you know, something is off because you aren’t seeing growth and want a solid podcast or YouTube audit. Come on over to the podcasters forum.com and set up a time to talk to me about my vocal audit or messaging mini packages.

Now let’s get into the show.

[00:00:34] Intro

This is gritty birds, 2.0, I’m here to help you reconnect to your passion for life, change your patterns, and ultimately empower the grit you already have within you to thrive as a creator. I’m your host content creator, media coach, artists, and owner of The Podcaster’s Forum, Jeni Wren Stottrup.

It’s our first episode and I’m here to remind you that the beginning of anything doesn’t have to be good. Today, I’ll be sharing with you why strengthening your muscle to finish messy things is one of the most powerful tools you have as a creator. Now let’s get going. This is Gritty Birds, and it’s time to create

[00:01:19] We all started somewhere

Do you recall the first time that you rode a bicycle? I bet that you fell down at least once or twice, unless you were that random kid that had pre natural strength and was able to do it right away. If you picked up an instrument for the first time, or if you’re a podcaster, the first time you wrote a script, I bet that the first time when you wrote as a kid, it wasn’t necessarily perfect.

In fact, I know you had to start off learning how to write a single letter. Everything that we know how to do as adults started off messy, because nobody knows how to do everything when they first get started. Sure. I know that you have things that you were really good. That are easier to you than other elements.

And a lot of times when we create, we like to lean into those pieces, we like to really play them up on our strengths while there’s a lot of positive to that. We can’t learn the game. If we don’t play all the way through and we can’t create a healthy creation habit, if we’re skipping out on or just getting comfortable, staying stuck on certain elements of the game.

Can you imagine if there was a baseball team and they never learned how to hit the ball into the air, they only did ground ball. I can promise you. They might be able to win games sometimes within that strategy and get really, really good at it. But they’d be missing out on a ton of opportunity in the long run.

Why are you holding yourself back?

[00:02:39] Creating confidence with habit loops

The more that you’re able to gain the confidence and trying different things that are not your strengths, the more that you’re going to be able to have the strength all the way around, because what we want to build is a creative habit loop and the stronger that we can make it, the better that we can be.

And what’s amazing about all of this is that it’s only really you versus you. The only person in the process of creation that you’re competing against is yourself. When we lean into the imperfect, it allows us to build our confidence. Confidence is built in a lot of different ways. Of course, there are elements that you’re really good at, and you don’t really have any worries about, but just like anything, you need to be able to practice them.

[00:03:21] Strong beginnings and poor endings

And you need to be able to go all the way through them simply to know how the game runs. You have to be able to repeat that and to be able to go through the whole process, even if it’s not right. When I was little, I played piano. And at the very beginning, I would play really, really fast. And I felt really confident in playing fast, but my rhythm was off.

So my teacher had me start using a metronome, but when I was using the metronome, I’d notice that I’d have more mistakes. So I go back to the beginning and start over again, every time that I’d make a mistake. And despite my warnings about this, this is a habit I still to this day have to be very conscious of.

It’s easy to have great beginnings and poor endings if all we’re focused on is when we make a mistake. We’re missing out on all the naturally great moments that come up when we get into a rhythm and we’re sacrificing the bigger picture for what saying a word. I’ve experienced this a lot with my coaching clients, especially when it comes to voice work, where instead of just continuing through they’ll stop and then repeat the sentence over and over again, because they want to get that particular statement just right.

But we still have to actually finish the whole piece. All of a sudden we’ve lost our momentum and we don’t have the same drive we had before. And the more we do it, the more we get in our heads about, oh, I should try it this way, or I should do it here. And all of a sudden you realize you never even finished the sentence.

You never even finished the thought you never even finished what you were talking about in the first place that voice in the back of our head is telling us we can’t do it and it gets a little louder and it comes out in the energy of the work that we’re creating. That’s definitely problematic.

[00:05:06] “It’s something I’m working on”

Yesterday, I celebrated one year sober and I’m really excited about that. Over the last year I got fit, I lost 25 pounds, gained a lot of muscle. I rebuilt my body through PT and going to the chiropractor and I’m really strong. I completely changed my eating habits. I got my life organized amongst a lot of other things.

And one of the things that I did was a 75 day challenge. And while I did a lot of pieces for my fall, I made a conscious choice to do one thing that I was definitely going to finish before everything started a year ago, I had really lost a lot of confidence in myself. So making that one choice was really big for me.

And the one that I made was that I made sure every night my house was picked up before I went to. I’ve always known myself as a messy person that I’m disorganized. See, I have ADHD and it’s pretty normal, very common that people with ADHD experience messiness, I did that for 75 days and nights in a row.

And ever since then, well, my house isn’t perfect, but I’ve never experienced the same level of personally accepting myself. Something that I used to think was defining me no longer did. There was such a strong confidence in that. And the same thing can be said about whatever it is that you’re stuck in right now.

Everyone I’ve talked to has a different part, that they have a challenge with a different thing that they experienced because of we’re different people. We have different strengths, so we’re going to have different weaknesses. We want to have our celebrations and the things we’re really good at, but it’s really easy to say, oh, I can’t do that thing.

So I’m going to avoid it. That’s not something that I can do. But the more that we say that the more that we reinforce, I can’t do that. The more we drill in our head that our negative bias is fed that we can’t do that. But if we can finish it and say, yeah, I can do that. It’s something I’m working. That’s a totally different statement, right?

This is something that I’m working on, but I can finish it. All of a sudden you’ve changed that sentence. You’ve moved it forward. You don’t have to keep talking about the thing you’re growing because you know the stuff that you’re good at, but you can say to yourself, this is an area I’m getting better at and I can finish it.

And that is the goal. I want you to be able to finish it, have a sense of completion. I want you to be able to get through the script, even if it feels uncomfort. So, first of all, we’ve gone ahead and said that we’re going to work into stepping into our messy starts. Right? And then we’ve talked about how we’re going to finish things so that we can build our confidence in the whole completion cycle.

[00:07:57] Trusting our intuition

The next thing is we want to learn to trust our intuition. There are going to be moments where you’re going to need to stop and fix something later on down the line. The more that we can determine whether it’s our nervous system freaking us out. Or if in fact our intuition is saying, Hey, that wasn’t quite right.

The stronger we are as a whole. And to do that, we have to build a different relationship with our nervous system around the areas that we feel less confident in. So let’s take a look at record. I’m stepping into the session and let’s say I’m really nervous about recording. I don’t want to sound stupid.

This is probably one of the most common ones that I hear. And one that I work with people on to be able to help them build more confidence. Maybe they hate listening to themselves. That ends up being a big piece of it. When we practice more, we also hear ourselves more and we’re able to get more comfortable with it.

If we prepared ourselves more, we feel more calm. Now, how do we prepare ourselves? Well, we prepare ourselves by following through, by doing it. There are obviously elements that you’re going to be able to refine later on, but when you’re on a production schedule, you have to move forward and there isn’t always time to do the extra practice that we would ideally like to do in between.

So we try to keep the goal, like in podcasting or any kind of content creation. Let’s say, if you’re a business owner, if you want to create that consistency, you’ve got to let certain things go. All of us have the ability to grow.

[00:09:32] Starting where are at

I have a million stories I’m going to share with you all about people who have overcome things that are insane to me. And it was because of the fact that they said they were going to do. And there are ways that you can overcome all of these. There are skills that you can learn to overcome any of these difficulties, but you can do those unless you actually learn to follow through and are able to continue doing the process.

Because if we can’t walk through the whole process and go through the whole game, we can’t have a consistent show.. But we have to start off with where we are and the tools that we have at our disposal right now. I can’t suddenly invent for you a skill that you don’t have yet, but if you don’t step into it, where you’re at, you can’t finish the episode and put it out.

[00:10:20] Working through anxiety of our challenge

What ultimately is your bigger goal? Let’s come back to our voice. Let’s imagine that you’re starting to speak and you’ve got your script in front of you and you’re feeling really nervous. And your gut, you might notice your having some butterfly. And that your chest is restricting. So you got to remember, we’ve got to breathe.

If you start noticing that you’re getting caught in your head, remember to take a breath and let your brain actually get some oxygen. So we can think that’s your first step. Then know where the feeling is coming from in your body. If your head is telling you things like stop, stop, stop. This is terrible.

I want you to say to it. Hey. This is okay. If it’s something that you are experiencing anxiety around your mind is going to tell you to stop, because it is trying to protect you from danger. That doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t exist, but your brain is sitting there saying a Cougar is coming after me. And I promise you, there is not a Cougar coming after you.

It’s just a microphone and it’s just you speaking. And let’s just get through it today so that you can have that feeling of finishing. That you’re stain. Tell it that you’re staying that you’re okay. Yeah. I’m all right. Then go back to where you left off, then go right back to where you left off. Pick right back up and keep on moving.

[00:11:45] Showing your bravery

Whatever your intuition is. Go with it. Have the confidence of a little kid about to jump off the high board at the pool. He is giving caution to the wind. Given his parents a heart attack, but I want you to have that amount of confidence, give it every ounce and just go with it. Who cares? Just move through and keep going.

When you finish reward yourself, whatever it is that you feel good about, whether it’s going to the gym afterward, visiting with friends, watching a show, having some chocolate, something that you really love. Perfect. ’cause that was brave and you actually finished it. You’re going to have room to gain those skills later on, but the more practice doing it and finishing it and then rewarding yourself, the easier the creation process is.

And that habit loop is going to form. And it’s going to save you from getting caught in the sticky middle, where you start to draw. And it’s going to make the whole process way less fun. I believe that you have the ability to move through these actions and make this a positive experience. This is just where we start.

[00:12:59] Outro

It’s going ahead and finishing something no matter how sticky, no matter how messy it is showing up at the mic writing. Putting things onto social media that you haven’t done before. It’s going ahead and standing in front of that camera for the first time. I believe in you. We are going to celebrate our wins that are imperfect.

thank you so much. I’ll be back again next Tuesday. I’m Jeni Wren Stottrup, and this is Gritty Birds. You can follow the show on any of your favorite pod players or watch it on youtube.com/pretty birds. And you can find out more about the show. At the podcasters forum.com. You can follow me on socials at the pod-casters forum on Facebook and Instagram, as well as gritty birds media on Instagram and Tik TOK, and at gritty birds on Twitter, head on over to thepodcastersforum.com and I’ve got some freebies over there.

If you would like to join our mailing list and have episodes straight to your inbox, find out more about how you can grow. So that is everything here. As I’m starting with my messy beginning, I can’t wait to see where this show leads us. Cause I promise you we’ve got a long ways to go. I can’t wait to see what I think of this episode someday when I’m at number 300, but you know what I did it, and that is all that really.

I’ll see you all again. Next week. Stay creative. .