Arts & Entertainment, Music

Fear, Shame, and Humiliation

Lesson time 03:52 min

Annie shares her strategies for engaging the world as a creative. Learn how to embrace fear and metabolize shame in order to do your best work.

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Topics include: Metabolizing Shame

St. Vincent

Teaches Creativity and Songwriting

Explore your creative process and embrace vulnerability with St. Vincent, the Grammy-winning, genre-defying artist and performer.

Preview

[00:00:00.33] - Everybody feels weird sometimes. Everybody feels like they don't fit in. Everybody feels self-conscious, and afraid, and all those things. If you can speak to that in a way that's real, then you can move the needle just slightly in a more empathetic direction for the world. [00:00:19.81] [MUSIC - ST. VINCENT, "LOS AGELESS"] [00:00:28.14] Really, the only thing that I think has happened as I have progressed is I've simply become more myself. That's-- and that's the path for every artist. Just become more yourself. [00:00:41.61] You can't try to be somebody else. There's no way you could possibly fill somebody else's shoes. And you don't want to. They're already in them. You do you because nobody else can say what you're trying to say the way that you can say it. [00:00:58.81] I think that shame is the root of all evil. I think the shame is the reason why people are violent. It's people having shame, not knowing what to do with it, and then doing something, making a bad decision. Make shame your friend. [00:01:16.65] And what I mean by that is be able to find a way to find humor in all situations and be able to laugh at yourself because there's no way to get good at something without being bad at it first. Live performance is a big part of that. There's something else entirely that happens when you're in a room needing to perform for people. It's just a different energy. [00:01:44.01] And it just takes a while to figure out how to do. And the only way you get good at it is by doing it a lot. And so, unfortunately, that means people being witness to some of your more embarrassing moments like-- I tried to do a cool stage dive one time in Germany and climb the speaker. [00:02:10.79] I tried to climb through this stack of speakers and got caught. I was just flailing like a roach on its back, just stuck. And it's like, great. Luckily, I had been through enough hilarity and kind of indignation to just find that incredibly funny. [00:02:34.79] Shame will stop you from experimenting. Shame will stop you from trying. Shame will stop you from putting yourself out there. And you just have to be able to face it, compartmentalize it, put its-- metabolize it, in a way, whatever way it is for you. [00:02:51.43] I tend to do it with humor. Find a place to put it so that it doesn't block you from the thing that you love. When you can do that, then you deactivate the bomb. You deactivate the bomb of fear when you can take something and put it through the funhouse mirror to explore it. [00:03:13.25] I think that everybody feels like a fraud at some point. And I think feeling like a fraud is actually kind of helpful and healthy in ways. There's the Dunning-Kruger test where people took this big test. And the people who did the worst thought they did the best. And the people who did the best were like, oh, I bombed it. I bombed it. [00:03:34.31] So the feeling like a fraud, I think, is-- all these things can just be motivators to make you go...

About the Instructor

Under the stage name St. Vincent, Annie Clark has won Grammys while remaining fiercely innovative and true to herself. Now Annie is opening the door to her process to teach you how to explore your creativity. Learn how to record music, write songs, improve your guitar skills, and embrace your vulnerability. Let Annie guide you through the ups and downs of creating art so you can share what’s in your heart with the world.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

St. Vincent

Explore your creative process and embrace vulnerability with St. Vincent, the Grammy-winning, genre-defying artist and performer.

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