How To UNLEASH Your SELF-CONFIDENCE & Find PURPOSE Today | Jericho Brown & Lewis Howes

If you can notice and. And make a habit of noticing the abundance of things in the world, you will begin to see the abundance of money in your bank account. If you can begin to believe that there is more than enough of everything that we need, then it will be there for you.

I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah. Please welcome Louis Howes.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our guest. Jericho Brown is in the house. Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Good to be here and I'm glad you're here, my man.

Hey, thanks so much for having me, Louis. I really appreciate you having me.

Of course. I don't know what it takes to be a Pulitzer Prize winning anything, but I can imagine it's had to be an amazing feeling to know that something you've been committed to for a long part of your life is acknowledged in that circle. How did that feel originally when your body of work was acknowledged in that way?

It feels wonderful to be acknowledged for doing what you love to do. It's good to have some recognition of how much you've been borrowing. Most of us get our real work done when nobody's looking. Right. Right now, to see you do the work that you're doing, people think that it is, you show up and you just have a million dollar smile and a good looking nose, and it works out. ask a few questions and people don't realize the kind of networking, the kind of research, the kind of preparation that goes into a moment. And so it's always been important for me to tell people that the Pulitzer Prize is indeed the recognition, but the poem itself, the poems, the book, they're the achievement. The achievement is the work and getting the work done and getting in the groove of doing the work. As a matter of fact, I've always believed that the worst part of writing a poem is when you finish a poem, because it's over.

It's done.

It's done. The best part of writing a poem is that moment right before you finish the poem. And then when it's over, there's a little bit of a grief because that little love affair that you had with those few words is done. And now it's time to move on, hopefully. to another love affair, to another poem.

Interesting. It's like you're birthing something and then it leaves the womb as you put the final punctuation point and you do your final editing and you're almost like, can I edit anymore? But at some point you got to finish it and let it fly, I guess.

Yeah, you got to let it go and you have to be in love with the process enough not to look forward to recognition as much as you look forward to the process of making the thing you love to make.

Isn't it interesting, every artist, actor, creator that I talk to who has found fulfillment inside, they focus on the process, not the award shows, not the red carpets, not the Pulitzer Prize moments, the acknowledgement, they focus on the craft. And I think whenever we focus on the accomplishment and the praise that I'll gain when I create this, that's when we've kind of lost.

Yeah. That's why it's so important that you find yourself in the midst of doing something you are indeed passionate about doing. You have to do what you love, and you have to go where your love leads you. And you can't spend your time doing things that you think you're supposed to love. I mean, right now, we're always concerned lately in particular, about doctors with bad bedside manner. But that's because so many people who want to be medical doctors are doing it not because they love medicines or the human body. They are doing it because they heard, oh, if you're a doctor, you'll make a lot of money, you'll gain some respect in the community. You have to do what you feel like getting up early to do or what you feel like staying up late to do.

What's the greatest insecurity you needed to overcome in order to become who you are today?

Oh, well, there are like 700,000. I never ranked them to see which one was the greatest. I think the hardest thing was growing up and, you know, it's not special because, you know, it's probably one-third of us growing up queer in the world. It's only recently, I mean, by recently, I mean in the later part of my life when I was really, really writing and I felt like I was writing well, that I realized everything that I was afraid that other people were afraid of was what I would have to embrace about myself. So if what people are afraid of when they encounter queer people is that the men are feminine, I had to figure out what was feminine about me and not hate it because I already had the world to do that for me. I had to figure out what was feminine about, I had to figure out what was what was feminine about me and pull it closer to myself and enjoy it and to notice it when it comes up and to decide that is completely Jericho. Nobody does that. Nobody does that feminine moment the way Jericho does it. And I feel the same way about making love. Why would anybody feel shame about love? And when I was able to begin to express that kind of a thing in my work, then I was also able to pull that thing closer to me and love it more. And the more you can love what you imagine people hating about you, the more you can sort of embrace that and think of it as a part of your God-given gifts. The more you can think about it that way, the more it becomes who you are and the reason why people want to be around you. And it becomes easier then to discern who's a friend and who's not a friend. So I think I was insecure or hiding I think that was the biggest insecurity of my life because there was a long period of time where I was hiding, in hiding about that. And now I'm not in hiding about it. Now I'm completely grateful for it and I wouldn't have wanted to be born any other way. Wow. I wouldn't have these poems, you know? I wouldn't have my, I mean, the poems that won the Pulitzer Prize are a bunch of queer poems. Whether or not people see that, that's true. I mean, there's a lot in this book. This is a book about the natural world. about the way we treat our planet, the way we treat the earth. This is a book about police violence, about the tradition of an institution that has been undergoing reform. The oldest person watching this program has their entire life heard the phrase police reform. So one of the things my book is interrogating is how long you have to hear the word reform before you figure out the thing doesn't work. So that's the kind of thing that the book does. One of the other things that the book is, is a very queer book full of love poems. And so everything I've gotten in this world that I'm proud of, these recognitions and these achievements have indeed had to do with the fact of me loving my entire self.

What do we say to ourselves when we are shameful of the things about us, the things that people say they don't like about us, which is actually who we are. What are we saying when we are shameful of that thing?

When we're shameful of that thing, we're saying that they're right. And depending on what that thing is, we might even be saying we shouldn't be alive.

Ooh.

And that becomes really problematic if you have these ideas from the world going into your mind and you begin to believe them, right? So, for instance, if you're a woman and you believe what men often think about women, you're in a lot of trouble. You have to figure out what you believe about yourself, and you have to love it. And that's what I mean. If I were to believe what half of everybody thinks about gay folks, if I were to believe what half of everybody thinks about black folk, It is not likely that I would win a Pulitzer Prize. If you look at the list of people who have won the Pulitzer Prize, most of them are from the Northeast. I'm from Louisiana. Do you know what I'm saying? But I didn't believe that. I wrote poems anyway. So you just have to believe that you're supposed to be here first. Because the opposite, when you accept some shameful idea of yourself, then you are accepting that you shouldn't exist. And that's, you know, that for some of us, that means literal, Suicide. Yeah.

Or it turns into mental health issues and depression, anxiety, overwhelm, stress, constantly questioning why I'm here, creating addictive personalities, having a bunch of substances over and over to numb the shame.

Exactly. Very good.

When did you set yourself free mentally and emotionally of all shames that you've ever had?

Well, who knows? I'm sure that they still creep in and creep up. It's just that I can identify them better.

Sure, sure.

I would say that the smartest thing I ever did was give up a job. I used to be the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans. When my mayor went out of office, there was a new mayor that came in and I thought, sure, I was out of a job and I'd have to figure out what to do. And at the same time that the new mayor came in, I got accepted to a PhD program for poetry and I wasn't sure if I was gonna go, but I knew that's where my heart was. this is what's interesting about us in spite of knowing where our heart is, we still don't know if that's what we're gonna do. Isn't that strange? Like, I know what I wanna do, but I don't know if I'm going to do it. You know what I mean? That's exactly where I was at that time in my life.

And how old were you this time?

26. Yeah, I was 26, 26 years old. So last year. So.

You'Re still 29, right? It's your 29th birthday.

Right, so I was 26 years old and I had these two offers on the table 'cause the new mayor said I could keep my job as speechwriter. And there was this whole idea of the way the world worked that I knew I could go with if I was a speechwriter for the mayor. I could see my life in front of me, right? I could even see the wedding, you know, not just my career, but everything about my life was sort of, could be mapped out by the fact of that job, definitely my finances. And then there was this other world of poetry.

The unknown world.

That was telling me directly, very directly, it was not going to pay me any money. Zero.

You're gonna be paying to get into it.

Yeah, everybody who does anything in the arts is always overcoming this, what I believe to be a myth, that you're not going to be able to survive. And so I made a decision that I had survived so much in my life. By the time I was 26, I was like, you know, I know what it's like to be poor. I know what it's like to be in pain. I'm pretty good at that. You know, I have been poor and in pain and laughed while that was happening. So I made the decision to take the leap. And I think that was the beginning of getting rid of all of the shame. Me taking that step for myself was me. It was also the time I moved. I never lived outside of Louisiana. I left New Orleans for Houston, Texas, which at that time seemed like a super big city to me. I remember driving in Houston and looking at all the lanes on the interstate thinking, wow, why so many lanes?

So many.

And I remember thinking of it as an opportunity to completely reinvent myself. That summer before I went off to school, I changed my name to Jericho Brown, which is the name you know me by.

And I used to be Nelson Demille.

Nelson Demille, the third. Yeah, so you know, I was a third. So it was real trouble for me to be out here changing my name. So I changed my name Jericho and I decided to become Jericho.

Why change your name?

Because I wanted a 100% reinvention of self. I wanted a 100% transformation. I didn't know that was what I wanted. I actually dreamed the name. And in the dream, when I woke up, I had this sense. I got the word Jericho in the dream. And then I met somebody when I woke up out of my dream that same night, I met somebody and I told them, they asked me my name and I told them my name was Jericho. And after I told them my name was Jericho, they said, oh, so you're straightly shut up. And I said, what? And he said, oh, the name Jericho. It literally translates, straightly shut up. It loosely translates defense. Another word is good smelling that it, you know, so they were giving me all of these ways you could translate the word Jericho. And I was like, what are the chances of me having this dream, waking up and meeting a person who tells me all these things? And so that was the beginning of me changing my name. And really intuitively following what was given to me, which is how I try to live my life now.

What's the difference between changing your name and a transformation of identity and having an alter ego?

Yeah. I think the difference for me is that changing my name and the change of identity came with real life goals of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be and things I knew about myself. So for instance, I knew I had some talent as a writer. I knew I could write. Was I a great writer? No. Was I at that time some who could have been a Pulitzer Prize winning poet? Hell no. Do you understand what I mean? But one of the things that I knew I could do is become that. I could get better as a writer. Another thing that we just talked about was the fact of queerness, right? I understood, I knew there was nothing wrong with me, but I needed to go away and be by myself and I needed to go figure out why I was acting like there was something wrong with me in spite of the fact that I knew better. so that was another thing, that was another goal of mine, sort of accepting that about myself and being able to fall in love with the people I wanted to be able to fall in love with without any shame so that I could be there for them and they could be there for me whole. So there were a lot of little goals that I had about how I would carry myself, about how I would talk to people, about being on shows like this one, about really embracing the belief I'm myself as a creator of my own life, and what that would mean. So that's the kind of thing that I think makes it different.

It's almost like you had a psychological death of a previous way of being and stepped into a new way of being, a new identity of who you want to become.

Yeah. Well, I'll say, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I'll say, I knew that I needed to figure things out and I just needed a second. I mean, a literal second to figure out that there were things I wanted my life to look like. And therefore, in order to make them look like that, I would have to practice them. And today, would I change my name? No. But at the time when I was a 25, 26 year old kid, I really felt like I needed to do that in order to do this other thing. And that other thing is creating disciplines. creating habits, creating practice around what I love. And when I say that, I'm not just talking about a career. I'm not talking about being a writer.

I'm talking about life.

Yeah, I'm talking about laughter. I'm talking about quite literally in this time in particular, during this pandemic and being shut in in the ways that we have been shut in and not as active as I usually am. It has been very important to me to laugh. I'm not out being gregarious with my friends. And so laughter is something that I've noticed I've got to go find. I've got to go figure out how I'm going to do it. And so I have to be as purposeful about making sure I laugh every day. And I have to put a laughter plan together. And for me, you know, like I could just watch Golden Girls every night before I go to sleep. And I'm fine, you know. And then I've done it. Then I've made sure I'm probably laughing throughout the day, but then I've made sure that it's happened. And I know I did that for Jericho. You know, I set aside time just for Jericho to laugh.

I'm curious about the thing you had to heal the most. You know, because I don't think you can truly laugh until you start to heal. Like it's kind of masked in something if you're laughing, but you haven't truly healed the past. Were you always laughing? or was it not until you started to truly accept who you fully were, embrace the things that people hated about you, that you loved about you, and heal certain traumatic things where you were able to very fully laugh all the time?

Yeah, I think I laugh more fully and more loudly now than I ever have in my life. And the older I get, the more I laugh. When I was a kid growing up, I didn't have the best relationship with my dad. And I think it was really difficult for him because he had this idea of how everything would be and go. And any derivation from that idea would send him into these rages, you know?

Really? Yeah.

I mean, really horrible rages. He was very violent. But he also loved us. You know, my dad, if I got up at church to give an Easter speech, the first person in tears is my dad. You know what I mean? But part of the reason why he's in tears also is he's been like practicing that Easter speech with me, driving me crazy. Do you know what I'm saying? So I think that was one of the things that was most difficult for me because I had to figure out as an adult how I was going to shut off that influence of what life had to be like. Because my father, for instance, didn't understand that there were careers for people other than being a doctor or a lawyer.