Five For Your Hive: The Voice No One Hears

The Voice No One Hears, It's A Sign, The Office, Bruce Springsteen, Litany Against Fear

The Voice No One Hears

Performance psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr spent many years working with athletes. He listens to the stories they tell themselves by having them wear microphones during training sessions and competitions. “And I began to realize,” Dr Loehr says, “that what really matters, in a really significant way, is the tone and the content of the voice in your head.” The stories you tell yourself shapes the truth in your life. “The power broker…is the voice that no one hears. How well you revisit the tone and content of that voice in your head is what determines the quality of your life. It is the master storyteller, and the stories we tell ourselves are our reality.” The voice in your head that shapes who you become, that’s the idea for today.

It’s A Sign

In her freshman year at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, a design teacher told Paula Scher that she had no future as a designer. He even questioned her legitimacy in the programme. “I said, ‘I want to be an artist.’ And he said, ‘Cooking is an art.’” After graduating in 1970, Paula moved to New York City. When she told her mother about it, her mother said, “Oh Paula, don’t do anything like that. That sounds like it takes talent.” Eventually, she became one of the most influential designers in the world: Her clients include Bloomberg, Microsoft, Adobe, Bausch + Lomb, Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, Perry Ellis, the Walt Disney Company, and she received hundreds of industry honours and awards. When asked if her self-confidence was shattered after being told by people that she no talent and will not succeed, she said, “Of course, but at a certain point, you do it because if you don’t do it, you’re going to be stuck doing something you don’t want to be doing. And I felt then as I do now that if something you want to do scares you,” if the voice in your head is constantly trying to beat you down and tell you that you’re never going to be good enough, “it’s a sign that you have to confront it and try to do it. Otherwise, eventually you’ll become bitter or you’ll regret not having tried. Why do that to yourself?”

I’m Odd, I’m Weird

In 1999, Rainn Wilson got cast in a lead role in his first Broadway play, London Assurance. Before that, he had this impression that Broadway performers had to be “some formal classical actor-man.” So he suppressed his quirkiness and eccentricity to fit the persona, making him “stiff and disconnected.” And because all his choices were “broad, fake, and strangely puppet-like,” Wilson produced a subpar performance, resulting in a complete obliteration from critics. One wrote, “As the young lovers, all that is required of Kathryn Meisle [Wilson’s co-star] and Rainn Wilson is that they be good-looking and charming. At least Meisle is good looking.” It hit him hard, and he started to have weird thoughts about quitting the acting business, until one day something snapped in him. “Never again,” Wilson said, “Never Again am I going to hide. I’m odd, I’m weird—I’m going to embrace that. I’m not going to try to be something else to please someone else. I gotta be me, baby.” Since he started embracing who he was, his style, his identity, it paved the way up to the pinnacle of his career. “Finding Dwight was all about embracing my nerdy weirdness.” If he had continued to let the voice live in his head rent-free, he said, “I never would have gotten the role of Dwight.”

Mental Jiu-Jitsu

In 1972, Bruce Springsteen was in an elevator on the way up to audition for John Hammond—the legendary record producer who had sign big names like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin. Springsteen was in “a state of complete panic,” but instead of letting the voice in his head paralyse him in fear, he “performed a little mental jiu-jitsu” on himself. “I thought,” he writes, “I’ve got nothing to lose…if nothing happens, I’m going to walk out of here the same person as I walked in.” In psychology, this is known as “cognitive reframing” where you reframe in your head a situation—a job interview, a sports competition, a high-stakes audition—as something that isn’t actually that important. And with a quiet voice in his head telling him he has got nothing to lose, Springsteen walked into the audition full of confidence and performed It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City. “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records…That was wonderful.’” Springsteen went on to sign a ten-album deal and spent the next fifty years with Hammond and Columbia Records.

Only I Will Remain

There’s a scene in the beginning of the novel Dune where Paul Atredias recites the Litany Against Fear moments before he undergoes a pain test (watch the movie scene in which the litany was instead recited by his mother). All he had to do was to put his right-hand in a box and not remove it. Doing so will result in instant death. A being with a animalistic nature instinctively retreats from pain, seeking to escape it to preserve its life, while someone who is destined for more—like Paul Atredias—endures it by controlling the voice in his head:

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

May this be the story of your life. May this be the tone and content of the words you speak to yourself. May this be the little voice in your head that no one ever hears, but you.