"We ARE that bitch!" organizing your mind and heart to produce transformative work.

Hi. I think that this is working this time. The last couple of weeks I had some problems with putting Life Writing Live on my public page. I hope that, I hope that won't happen this time. So I'm going to talk and hopefully if you're seeing this, please give me some comments so that I know that I figured out what the problem was. Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live on Easter Sunday. So I hope everyone's having a happy Easter. What I wanted to talk about today is related to a project that is due in on Tuesday. And I need to be slightly artfully vague about this due to business and non disclosure and just discretion, but let's just say that it is a writing project and if this project went well, if this project goes well, if this project does, if the project does as well as the recent projects we're doing, in other words, everything that we're doing. And I understand that I'm being a little bit, you know, you can hear a little shakiness in my voice. There is a lot of anxiety around this, to be totally honest with you, because if you take a look at the hero's journey, anytime that you move from one level of your life to another, there is going to be not just massive risks of failure and things of that kind, but there's going to be uncertainty, there's going to be doubt, there's going to be fear. So heading into this particular experience and I guess, I guess I can say that it, it's a television project and it is a television series project. It is a television series pilot. Now, a pilot is the first episode of a series and it has to, it has to rock. I mean, it has to show all the values that the audience is going to see by the end of the first hour or hour and a half of the pilot. The audience has to know what this series is about, who the characters are, what they're going to be, reasonably, what would be reasonable for them to expect to see every week. You know, the tone, the world, the rules, all of that stuff, you'd have to cram that all in to one hour. And if we do this, as I've often said, the potential rewards in Hollywood for getting it right when you can get it right are stupendous. I mean, it's unbelievable the amount of money that is flowing in Hollywood. But more than that, it would give us the ability to help people, the ability to put ideas out into the zeitgeist, into the group mind. I, to be honest with you, over the course of my career, I'VE never had an opportunity that is this massive at a time when I am as capable of doing it. In other words, I can take a look at the flow of my writing and thank you, Kevin. Thank you very much. I can take a look at the flow of my writing over the last year and maybe even the last two years. And what has happened is that consistently I and Tananarive and I are learning the things that we need to learn in order to express the primal creative impulse through our craft. Navigating the business world so that it's produced on time and within a reasonable budget and so forth and so on. All those things have to come together at the same time. If you're writing a short story, all you have to worry about is is the story honest, is it well written? You don't have to worry about whether or not it can be produced, whether or not it'll pass standards and practices and so forth and so on. The ability to juggle all those different balls at the same time is what people who work in Hollywood have to manage to do. It's not just the writing skill, it's also the social skills and the business skills. So one of the things that I allow myself, there's this thing called adrenal burner that a lot of public speakers will talk about and athletes will talk about. It is the fear. Fear response that actually drives the machine. In other words, fear is your body mind telling you that there's something to pay attention to and that it is time to bring your best tools to the job. Whether it's somebody is threatening you in a street fight or one of your children is in trouble at school or whatever it is, fear gets your attention. So I'm not afraid. The danger is not being afraid. The danger is being afraid of your fear. The danger is misinterpreting the signal. What this signal is saying is this is the time to bring your A game. This is the time to pay attention. This is the time to take everything that you know and everything that you are and not leave anything in the locker room, leave all the blood on the field. I'm willing to do that, ready to do that, able to do that. But the fear itself in some ways is non negotiable. Now if you don't resist the fear, then it simply propels you. You're just in the stream of a flow of water that's going in a particular direction. If you're in a boat. Reasonable analogy. That's the non resistance. You want to make sure you don't Hit a rock, you don't get jammed up on the bank, you're going down the rapids. And if you pay perfect attention, what a ride. I mean, it's just an amazing ride. So I wanted to talk today about how if you understand that you're going into a situation where if you do this properly, it's going to change your life, if you do this properly, it's going to take you to another level and, you know, ahead of time. Well, once again, you take a look at the hero's journey. And the hero's journey suggests that you have a young man or young woman who is confronted with a challenge. Initially, they reject the challenge. And the reason you reject the challenge is that anything that is large enough to cause a change in your life will kill your ego in a way, it will kill your current definition of yourself. And the greater the change, the greater that level of fear. Your ego, in essence, is going to try to survive by killing your capacity to change. So it's critical to have that view. And that's one of the reasons I love life writing and I love applying the Hero's journey. Because you can tell in advance what the issues are going to be, you will resist the challenge. You know, I'm a professional writer, so I don't resist that aspect of the challenge. But you can find all sorts of avoidance and, you know, procrastination and writer's block things happening to people all the time. There were instances in my early career where I had an opportunity to work on a television series. And my very first, the very first thing I did for them, they said it was the best first draft they had ever seen. Then the follow up to that, when I tried to do it again, I froze and I was not able to function. And the first time this happened, it was 30 something years ago on the Twilight. Literally, I just froze. I could not rewrite a script to expand it. I just didn't, couldn't do it. So what I had to do is I had to seek resources to help me through that because I never wanted that to happen again. And if I take a look over the last decade of my life, it never has, that whatever it is that I am now is not that guy. But I think that it is valuable to say these fears are going to come up, these issues are going to come up. So if we go back through the hero's journey, I think that this is the perfect framework for this. You're going to be confronted with a challenge and the challenge is to continue to grow. If the definition of success is Napoleon Hill, I think it was, or Earl Nightingale. The progressive realization of a worthy goal. So you have this goal of expressing yourself, changing yourself, growing as a human being. And it's going to be necessary for you to take certain actions along the way. You know this to be true before you start. So accept that challenge. You're simply going to do the thing and you know that the next step says you're going to reject the challenge and it's because of fear. So you know that if you accept this challenge, there's going to be discomfort connected with it, there's going to be fear connected with it. You accept that. That's just the way it is. There's, you know, there's no way around that. So if you accept that, then that's the third step. You accept the challenge. So I accepted the challenge in this particular instance to produce the best work of my life in a way that serves not only my family, career wise, or the little boy inside me creatively, but serves the people who are trusting me to do this. Am I prepared to take all of that responsibility? And the truth is, yes and absolutely. And why? Let's go a little bit further down the hero's journey. If you accept the responsibility, then what do you do? How do you eat an elephant one fork full at a time. You divide the work that needs to be done by the number of days that you have to do it. And that tells you what you have to accomplish every day in order to get it done and stay on track. And you want it to be at the highest level. So you begin to eat one forkful at a time. So that's the road of trials. On the road of trials, you meet allies and gain powers. Now this is where I've gotten much better. Much, much better. I used to be more. I've got this by myself. And then I realized that there are things that I need to learn, ways that I need to grow that are beyond where my ego, identity or my capacity is at a given moment. And there is a way through that. The way through that is allies. You find allies who are already functioning at the level where you need to function. If I want to earn a black belt, I will hang out with black belts. If I want to have a healthy relationship, I hang out with people, you know, people who've been married long enough to have grandchildren. If I want to take my writing to the next level, then I must associate with writers who are better than I am, who are more successful than I am, who have organized their lives, their Time, their energy so that they are producing work at this level. And this is exactly what has happened over the last decade. Now, I will be honest with you, there are in the publishing industry, I managed to do this. I managed to find the people who could help me. People like Larry Niven and Harlan Ellison and Robert Heinlein and Octavia Butler. People who I can say I've spoken to on the phone or been in their homes, or they've been in my home. And they would consider themselves friends. Even if we were not intimate friends, we would consider themselves friends. And I've been very blessed that some of these people, yes, we really were intimate friends. We really were personal friends. Where I could see their humanity. I could see, wait a minute, they're human beings who have invested a certain amount of themselves in what it is that they're doing. If I invest a similar amount of myself, I can get similar results. It's not a mystery. It's a matter of are you or are you not willing to pay the price to accomplish something? Well, one of those allies is my wife, Tananarive. There is no. There is. I cannot put a. I cannot quantify how important it is to have the right partner. See, because I've said this before, Tananariv is in some ways the best prepared human being for the path that she's set out for, that I've ever encountered. And that is directly related to the quality of her mom and dad and her family. She comes from a family of ultra high achievers and she was absolutely prepared to function at the very highest level, to make contribution at the very highest level, to believe in herself at that very highest level. Now, there can be disadvantages about that, but what this means that when we're working on a project together, if part of the process of creation is going through phases of security and insecurity, as you begin to learn new things, do new things, face new challenges, we orbit each other. Which means that when I'm feeling insecure, she's feeling secure. When she's feeling insecure, I'm feeling secure. So there's always. We've never hit a point. We were both feeling insecure at the same time. In fact, if I see that she's feeling insecure, I jump out of self pity. And it's like automatically, it's like, okay, that, you know, no, no, we have to deal with this. Because my commitment is to my family, is to my future self, is to the people who've trusted me with a project. I don't have the right to fail. You know, I don't have the right to give up. I don't have the right to luxuriate in self contempt or that fear any of those things. I have to bring my A game for every conceivable purpose. So the, you know, if you go from, from accepting the challenge to the road of trials, to allies and powers, I have to sharpen every capacity I have. And what are those capacities? If you take, if I take a look, my model, the people who I'm associating with, and that is the greatest gift they can give me. Let me be close enough to you that I can see what is your recipe? How are you baking these cookies? What is it that you're doing to achieve this excellence? Because largely of connections that Tananarive has made in Hollywood that relate to black girl magic, the black female executives that are in place in different places to her work at UCLA and just to how wonderful she is as a writer and how wonderful she is as a person. We've been able to attract people who, frankly, astonish me. I mean, these are people who function at very high levels. And I will use no names and I will mention no projects because they would be instantly recognizable and it would not be fair to them. But these are our friends now. These are our family now. We associate with them, we hang out with them sometimes virtually. You know, there's one of them that we play virtual mini golf with. It is just so much fun. It's just so much fun. I just absolutely love it. But being with them and not needing anything from them, not trying to get work, not hitting them up for a job, not hitting them up for contacts, you know, there's something. If you embrace someone's humanity, they will offer those things to you quite often. But I don't care about that. I care about them. I care about the quality of their lives. I care about making them happy. Why? Because I see they're just like me. They started out without these skills, they gathered those skills, they worked through their insecurities and they have produced work that changes the world sometime. And to the degree that I can see, oh, this is how this person thinks. This is how this person feels. And I compare that to myself and I say, oh my God, the times that I have not done my best work, this is what I did wrong. I can see the path clearly in that sense. So these allies help me understand the powers that are necessary in order to create the very best work in a schedule on a time frame that it needs to be done. So I can move on to the next step, which is the confrontation with evil and defeat. Now, there have been no major defeats in terms of this project. There have just been, oh, okay, there's an issue here. Let's solve it here. I can say that I was a little bit more secure in the ability to negotiate all of those things. I look at projects in Hollywood like a room full of moving needles, and you have to thread all those needles. You have to be sure that you are listening to everyone, you're respecting everyone, that you give them full humanity, that you believe in their intelligence, in their talent, in their hearts, and understand that they're trusting you with their baby, with their money. I mean, I wrote an episode of Baywatch almost 30 years ago, just naked people on the beach that cost $750,000. So you're talking about trust, millions of dollars of your money. To me, I have the responsibility to come correct as an adult, but I also have to bring the child part of myself, because that's the part of me that writes what Stephen King refers to as the boys in the basement. It's not the conscious mind. The conscious mind can just create the context in which you're doing the work. Every day I sit at my desk, I do a certain amount of work. I need to have a process for doing work. So I will use. The adult part of me uses tools. Here's a tool that I use. Scan cards. You know, it's like. Like index cards. And each of these cards represents a different project or a different aspect of the project or something I need to do on a particular day. And so I just kind of go down the list. And that way I'm not holding all of it in my mind. All I have to do is set myself up and then have one hour after another where I'm doing the work, or one minute after another, one moment after another, another. I'm just doing the work in this moment, and then the next moment comes and I'm doing that work. And then the next moment comes and I'm doing that work. If I do that, I look up and I've had a good day. If I do that properly, I look up after seven days and I've had a good week. If I do that properly, I look up after four weeks and I've had a good month. That's all it is, is break it down with the conscious mind and then create a context in which the unconscious mind can just flow. So there has been no moment at which I said, this is not going to work. There were Little moments in which I thought, huh, this line isn't working or this scene isn't working, or this conversation got a little testy, you know, because Tananariv and I. I mean, if I argue with myself, then if I'm working with another person, it's natural that I'm going to argue with them. And there are going to be times when it gets like this and you can't be afraid to fight. You can't be afraid to say, this is what I think is true. I think you're wrong. And this is why I think you're wrong. But one of the rules that Tenamire Eve and I had at the very beginning when we first got married is that the relationship itself is never on the line, that we can argue and we can fight, but no one will ever say, if you don't do this or imply, if you don't do this my way, I will not love you or hug you or kiss you or whatever that is. That stuff. The relationship is completely separate from the business. We have to be free to fight. And if your relationship is critical, then the implication that if you don't agree with me, it's going to damage our relationship. If you don't do this my way, it's going to damage our relationship is actually poisonous. It's poisonous because the little kid inside you, that is the creative part of you, needs, Mommy needs, Daddy needs the safety of a family. Navigating that territory can create situations where you can see the boiling pot of lava over there, but you're not falling into it, you're not falling into the lava. You're kind of saying there is risk here, there is risk there. And you have to do that because art is a high wire act. Art is not doing the thing that you've done before. That is being a hack. And I remember clearly one of the very first book signings I ever had. There was an older writer who gave me his business card and the business card said freelance hack and literary mechanic. And he was dead of alcoholism within a year. That's what happens when you do the safe thing. You do the thing that gets you money, you do the thing that people will cheer for without having real respect for your process, real understanding of your process. You have to do the new thing. Art is a high wire act. Being who you really are is risky in the world. You are exposing yourself every time. Whether you're dancing or doing martial arts or singing or public speaking or whatever it is, you're bringing what you are and applying it through your Craft using your courage to say, you know something, I don't know if this is going to work, but I'm willing to take a stand. I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to trust that the best I can do is the best I can do. I can't do better than the best I can do. I will take pride in that. If it's real. If it's real. So if I look at Tananarive and I say that we are soulmates, we're coming to the same, same point in life from different places. Oh, yeah. Poison. Tom Barkley said, poisonous. And right is right. It was a big hill for us to climb in our marriage. Absolutely. I will not put my marriage at risk. I will not risk my son's home. You know, I will not dishonor my first marriage in which I made mistakes. And one of the only ways that I can make up for those mistakes is to not make them again, is to learn from what happened and to make a commitment to the divine feminine energy on the planet, which is what creativity is, that I will not make those mistakes again. But we work together. And I have made a promise that rather than being afraid of what happens when you surrender your identity to the marriage or the partnership, I'm going to lean into it. I'm going to embrace this. And when Tenananariv and I do the blessing dance, the Sufi blessing dance, it's what we do every day. And it is a sacred thing. And it goes like this. It's multiple parts. You start, you bow to each other. Then I extend my right hand. She extends her right hand. And I place it over my heart. Her hand over my heart. She places my hand over her heart. And we just gaze in each other's eyes for 10 slow breaths. And then we sing to each other. You are my beloved. I open my heart to you. And then we hold each other's eyes for another five breaths. And then we hug for five breaths. And then we bow. And then we can go into our day. The acknowledgement of her as a sacred spirit, me as a sacred spirit. I see the child inside her that needs me to protect her and love her. And also realize that Tonari's heart, she is brilliant. She's friggin brilliant. That if I'm in the flow of myself, I don't need to look at the question of who I am or how smart I am or am not or what flaws are this. I can take my attention off of all of that and recognize I got to this place in My life for a reason. I don't need to ask myself how smart I am. I literally can just acknowledge that I'm married to a genius, that if I can surrender my ego, I will still be everything that I really am. But now we have the capacity to be, frankly, a supermind. We can rise above our individual flaws and failings. And however much insecurity I might have about myself as an individual artist in a sometimes hostile industry, I have real confidence that the two of us together can do anything. I mean, real confidence in that. So there is the insecurity because I've opened myself to actually caring. But then there is the confidence of knowing that if both of us bring everything we have, it's all going to be just fine. So that's the leap of faith. The other side of the confronting evil and failing is the dark night of the soul, where it feels like nothing you do will be enough. And the way through the dark night of the soul is the leap of faith. Faith in yourself, faith in your companions, faith in a higher power. I have all three of those things. If you have those things, then the next step is you confront evil. The task, the work, the fear, and you succeed. And the last step is the student becomes a teacher. I mean, that's necessary. I find that it's useful to talk these things out, to talk the process out, to gain perspective on it, because when I'm in the middle of it, when you're in the raft going down the river, going down the rapids, you don't have time to think about anything except being in the raft going down the rapids. But when you take your boat out of the water for the night at your campsite, you have time to think about what you did and what you will do the next day. But the instant the morning comes and you put your raft back in the water, you're just thinking about, you know, the rocks, the river that, you know, feeling this, that the other, and you're there. And that's what's happening. We're there. Everything that's going on is just what we have worked all this time to get to. So however much fear or discomfort, anything else there is, if we're together in this, she trusts me, I trust her. And it is the natural expression of who it is that we are. In that sense, even the stress is a beautiful thing because we've embraced it and we're not fighting this. So in two days, this project will be done and we will be sending it in, and it will be 100% the best that we can do. And we both feel that it is unlike anything that's ever been on television. And the catchphrase that we have for our confidence in this is whatever ruthless, energetic creature it is that could do this job and do it well. We are that bitch. That's our catchphrase. We're thinking about getting T shirts that say that we are that bitch. This is who we are. This is the life that we chose. This mountain, however tough it is to climb, is the mountain we chose to climb. And looking back over every one of these journeys in my life, there's never been a single time when we brought everything that we had to it, that it was not worth it. It's worth. And you try to choose your journeys for that quality. Is it going to be worth it? This is one where absolutely it's to going, going to be worth it. And not only that, but once you've been on this train long enough, once you've done this long enough, you even enjoy the pain, you enjoy the fear, because you know that that's the path of the hero, it's the path of the warrior. So I just kind of wanted to talk about that. The application of the hero's journey to a work that is going to be of massive importance, massive value, where it's critical to bring the absolute best you can do. And I would suggest that in your own lives, you apply a similar standard. You understand ahead of time that you're going to have to take responsibility, you're going to have to gather yourself the best allies. You're going to have to analyze what capacities you're going to need, what tools you're going to need to do this. You're going to have to get ready ahead of time to deal with fear and the fear that all will fail. You must, you know, that's just natural. It's always there. That insecurity is always there. Don't con yourself about that. Get ready to do it. And then when you've done it, share your path with those who come up, who are coming up after you. They think that their feelings of fear and insecurity are unique to them. No, it's the universal human experience. The hero's journey is what all of the elders of the village were trying to tell the young people in the village. This is what your life is going to be. Well, moving from one phase of your life to another, this is what your life is going to be. This is it. If you'd like to find out more about this, you know the www.real warriorsjourney.com will teach you the very best that I've got on this subject. Other than that, have a wonderful Easter. Have a wonderful week. We're gonna have an extremely productive week, and it's gonna be exciting. Thank you for sharing the journey with me. It's always a pleasure and an honor. Take care.