#I’m also attached to the idea of Scott not liking the comparison

[call-me-casual]

So I’m thinking a bit about how I headcanon TosScott and yes he’s gonna be into very “un-masculine” things and more sassy than canon just because he can

But also because he wants to do things his father would never do. Because behind plastered on smiles and forced laughter he hates when people say how much they are alike. Because Scott Tracy is fighting to have a sense of identity beyond “Jeff Tracy’s clone”.

[boiling-paint]

Please do elaborate about LL!Scar and Bad by Deluxe Royal, I'm interested 👀

Ohooho. You got it! I uh... went ham,

*claps* OKAY! SO,

It all starts with the sounds.

The theme of this music is almost cartoonish in the way it wants to portay 'big, bad, evil' (chanting in a low chorus like a boogeyman "im bad I'm bad as bad can be." behind the main voice.) It reminds me of "How Bad Can I Be?" Which, ahem, while a meme song fits Scar's happy-go-lucky attitude that he upholds regardless of the guts and gore of the situation.

With a dramatic western attitude, the voice is very confident in his own image. It just screams Scar. Big Bad Scar trying to be spooky in that disney villain way he admires and reflects in his video and performance style. Its natural for him, but hes also careful with his words. He pauses, thinks, stalls for time when he speaks to people because if they get him rambling he'll give it all away. He is very very cautious this season in that sense.

Now, the lyrics! Oo I shiver at how well they fit.

If you'd like, we can imagine this "devil" as Grian. People have consistently seen him as a threat, Scott even dramatically and repeatedly calling him a monster. Hes death itself- the one who started it all.

Or, it can simply be other reds. People that Scar so far seems to be cautious of, but never fully intimidated by.

[I made the devil run

I gave him poison just for fun

I had one friend, now there's none

I made the devil run]

The last two refer closely to the comparison of the first season to this one. Grian was quite literally his only true ally, and now Grian frequently leaves him behind at any given moment. It's not fully Scar's fault, but Grian does take some care in talking and making deals with Scar. The game has changes course and they're keeping distant tabs on one another. Scar currently drives people away from staying at his mountain, despite claiming he wants friends. And for some reason (could even be dumb luck) Joel the first and possibly most unstable Red Lifer, lives right next to him and hasn't lifted a finger yet. This I'm certainly exaggerating, but I wonder how cautious Joel is of Scar ("I made the devil run.")

These next 2 lines are the only ones that dont fit easily, as Scar is incredibly clumsy lmfAO. However, I think it speaks poetically with 3 and 4.

[I broke so many bones

But none of them were ever my own

They were an army, I was alone

I broke so many bones]

From Scar and Grians perspective things are very, very light in s1. It does not apply to the others'. In the previous season Scar was terrifying. Ren and others wanted to protect their friends and stay together. Scar wanted to win or put on a show trying. It's why him and Grian make such a good team— they know there are limits to how they can rely on one another.

From the other perspectives all Scar did was talk people out of their resources and scheme to destroy them, regardless of any sort of spoken friendships. He was very, very dangerous. He broke many structural bones so-to-speak in the other teams, including trust and physical resources.

And in the end? It was Scar's little team against Rens whole army that won 3rd Life. ("They were an army, I was alone, I broke so many bones.")

The CHORUS IS MY FAVORITE THO.

[I'm bad, as bad can be

So bad that it's hard to believe

Oh, what they say about me

I'm bad, take a look and see

So bad that it's hard to believe

I don't care what they say about me]

Scar this season is lying to everyone around him. People are cautious, but only the very, very perceptive ones (to name a few: Etho and Scott) are actually catching Scar in his lies. Even then he doesn't let up his own act. This gives him such a good facade.

People are going to underestimate him. Hes so polite to some and to others hes burning them at the stake. Other people talking about Scar are going to find plot holes, twists and turns in attitude that just don't make sense. No one will know what to believe or not. His kindness feels genuine, but so do his threats. ("So bad that it's hard to believe what they say about me.") His gentle attitude makes it really difficult to grasp his violent intentions at times.

And recently, especially with the destruction of a recent horse he seemed to be attached to, he's revealed a little to others about his values. "So bad that it's hard to believe, I don't care what they say about me." He is first and foremost a businessman and a showman. If people are scared? Great! If people think him kind? That's just good for business.

That's the most frightening thing about him being isolated this season: He doesn't care as long as he gets what he wants. But he'll pretend he will up until the second he knows it doesn't matter. No attachments, all deals. If people don't show him kindness he remembers and returns the favor later, and explicitly states he will frequently in his perspective.

Now, to remember 3rd Life S1 again:

[I watched an empire fall

I stormed the gate and scared the walls

They wouldn't share, so I took it all

I watched an empire fall]

A refusal of resources, a few missteps and misconceptions here and there and they had a war on their hands. To Ren, he was fighting for his team and his empire. To Scar, he was made into enemy #1 for... what reason? They did nothing wrong! Just having a bit of fun. All of this is a game and something Scar's character takes much more joy in than some other perspectives. It's not a game in some views, which would make him... what?

Crazy? Literally insane in some sense that he would treat this battlefield like middleschool capture the flag?

They targeted him and Scar simply didn't like it, so he took up arms with Grian and the rest and killed Ren himself. ("They wouldn't share, so I took it all, I watched an empire fall.")

[I'm bad, as bad can be

So bad that it's hard to believe

Oh, what they say about me]

You can't trust what anyone says about Scar, including Scar himself.

(I'm bad, I'm bad, as bad as can be)

I'm bad, take a look and see

So bad that it's hard to believe

I don't care what they say about me]

And he doesn't care about rumors as long as he gets what he wants. He'll take advantage of them.

Akdhakd also this isnt a dig and moreso just a dramatic retelling of how I think this song brings out a more dark idea of Scar's character. All in good fun :). Thank you for enabling me PFTHAHAHA

[doomonfilm]

Ranking : David Lynch (1946-present)

Film is definitely an art, and yet, it seems to be distinct from other forms of visual art such as painting or sculpture.  Perhaps that is what makes David Lynch such a fascinating director, as he has the ability to tap into the surreal stimulus often found in the most famous paintings and transform it into brain-bending moments on film.  Whether it his fear-fueled fascination with fatherhood present in his debut film Eraserhead, his ruminations on Hollywood society present in Inland Empire, or any of the stopping points in-between, it’s safe to say that David Lynch sits in the rarified air of directors like Ingmar Bergman, Alejandro Jodorowsky and the other few who can turn film into something deeper, more visceral and more meaningful.

With one of the most unique collections of films credited to his name, including a couple of curveballs in the early portion of his career, ranking the films of David Lynch is as perplexing as it is entertaining... so, without further ado, we attempt to climb that hill.  I’m not even going to pretend that I can break down all of the symbolism and meanings of these films, but I can give my honest opinion about them.

10. Dune (1984) For a film that is supposed to be such a science-fiction gem, it’s a bit funny that nobody can seem to make a coherent, entertaining version of Dune.  After nearly 15 years in pre-production hell (and three iconic names attached to versions of the production), the film landed in the laps of Dino De Laurentiis and Ridley Scott, but after another extended period delaying production, Scott bowed out, leaving the door open for David Lynch to step in.  For what it’s worth, he did bring a huge list of names to the project, but the fact that the directing credit for Dune belongs to the throwaway pseudonym Alan Smithee should clue in any perceptive viewer that the project may not be one that Lynch cares to stand behind.

9. Inland Empire (2006) David Lynch isn’t the type of director that revisit ground he’s already covered, which is what makes Inland Empire (the seemingly final film from Lynch) such a confusing choice.  Had this film not been released after a five year gap between it and the stellar Mullholland Drive, another film that focuses on the dark underbelly of Hollywood, fame and the tolls of the acting craft, perhaps it would hit a little different to me.  That’s not to say that the film isn’t good, as it is definitely a slight adjustment from the style that Lynch basically trademarked, but when a director like Lynch experiments on what feels like general principle, it makes experiments that feel like a step backward lose impact.

8. Lost Highway (1997) Technically, you could count all of the Lynch “mystery” films as noir in some capacity, but Lost Highway feels like a direct skewing of what we know as the traditional noir structure.  At its core, the film is a simple murder mystery, but it doesn’t take long for the Lynch signatures to begin appearing in every form from a mysterious, unnamed character to our protagonist literally changing into another person with no base explanation provided.  Perhaps the latter choice was a look into split personalities and the disassociated nature that can come with brutal crimes... as I said before, I’m not here to try and decode the David Lynch mystery.  While Lost Highway serves as a good entry point into the David Lynch catalog, it sits on the back half of the rankings due to no fault of its own... it’s more of a situation where the other mysteries are so stellar, that even the strange seems simplistic by comparison.

7. The Straight Story (1999) If you played a game of “one of these things is not like the other” with the films of David Lynch, it would not be difficult to make a winning choice, as The Straight Story is clearly the most accessible and standard of all the Lynch fare.  What the film lacks in oddness and style, however, is more than made up for in terms of heart and performance.  The use of a lawnmower as the main source of travel allows for some beautiful landscape cinematography, and the sheer force of will exhibited by Richard Farnsworth pays off in spades when he is reunited with Harry Dean Stanton.  If you’re looking for something creepy, eclectic and mind-warping from Lynch, there are plenty of other films to choose from, but if you are looking for an excuse to shed a tear or two, this is the film for you.

6. The Elephant Man (1980) It’s funny to think that if not for The Straight Story, the Joseph Merrick biopic The Elephant Man would serve as the most normal film of the Lynch canon.  This sophomore film dialed back on the abstractions present in Eraserhead, but it brought some extraordinary makeup and costuming to the table, not to mention it gifted viewers with a powerfully moving performance from John Hurt.  Though memorable in its own right, the film really made its mark by tying Raging Bull at the 53rd Academy Awards, garnering eight nominations (and sadly losing in all categories, going home empty-handed).  The backlash for the Academy’s lack of giving The Elephant Man special praise for its makeup effects also led to the creation of a Best Makeup award for the Oscars.  It is quite possible that the combination of shock from Eraserhead in tandem with the skill and prowess shown in The Elephant Man opened all of the creative control doors for David Lynch, as not even Dune could derail his career and artistic oddness. 

5. Blue Velvet (1986) While Twin Peaks is where I first heard the name David Lynch, it was Blue Velvet where I first got a taste of why Lynch was held in such high regard.  The suburban paradise presented in the opening credits is immediately shattered by the discovery of a random ear, and the weirdness rabbit-hole gets deeper and deeper from that point on.  The classic look of the film stands in powerfully beautiful contrast to the extreme darkness of the narrative, and Dennis Hopper turned it all the way up to 11 for his performance in the film.  If Lost Highway serves as the best introductory film for those curious about Lynch, then Blue Velvet serves as a good midpoint to determine how much weirdness, abrasiveness and shock you can handle in a Lynch film.

4. Mulholland Drive (2001) I really and truly do not know where to begin with this insane rollercoaster ride of a film.  The first time I watched this film, I thought I had everything figured out, every mystery solved and every bait and switch identified, but upon repeat viewings of Mullholland Drive, I’ve determined that I either had a brief moment of harmonic brilliance or I was fooling myself.  The film makes sense at its root, if really and truly dissected, but when taken at face value and in real time, it’s almost impossible not to get completely lost in the sheer immersive nature of everything thrown at you.  Naomi Watts is brilliant as the viewer guide through the film, and it’s good that she is so powerful in her lead role and guiding task, because Mullholland Drive is not afraid to get downright bonkers on more than one occasion.  While films about the trappings of Hollywood and stardom are nothing new, I’m hard pressed to think of another film that approaches these in a manner even remotely close to that of Mullholland Drive. 

3. Wild at Heart (1990) Quite possibly the most enjoyable of all the David Lynch films, despite some downright brutal moments of celebratory violence sprinkled throughout.  The combination of Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern is nothing short of electric, and the presence of Willem Dafoe as antagonist is the perfect spark to ignite an already volatile mixture of leads.  The energy level of this film starts on ten and only continues to rise as the film progresses.  If/when I ever get the chance to program theater showings, I am putting this film on a double bill with Natural Born Killers immediately.  While I can’t say that Wild at Heart is my favorite David Lynch film, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it’s my favorite Lynch film to gush about with other fans.

2. Eraserhead (1977) More often than not, directors the caliber of David Lynch have stunning debut films to their name, and Lynch certainly exploded onto the scene with a gamebreaker in the form of Eraserhead.  Upon first viewing, there is enough “WTF?!” going on to confuse most people, but for those brave enough to watch the film more than once, it becomes painfully obvious that all of the madness and shocking imagery on display is a clear metaphor for Lynch’s fear of fatherhood.  The simple act of taking a fear that resonates with most humans and turning it into the equivalent of a black and white bad drug trip works perfectly, and Jack Nance’s iconic look and performance are almost recognizable enough to know without knowledge of the film.  Eraserhead is one of those films that leaves you different than you were prior to watching it.

1. Twin Peaks : Fire Walk with Me (1992) In all honesty, was there every any doubt that Twin Peaks : Fire Walk with Me wouldn’t be in the top spot?  Of all the properties that the David Lynch name is connected to, none of them have even come remotely close to touching the sheer size of the lore and fandom that has emerged from this modern day masterpiece.  The story of the high school princess with deep, dark secrets to hide is not new territory, but the way that Lynch handles it all with Twin Peaks takes the familiar to all new realms of weirdness, including the creation of iconic places and characters like the Black Lodge, the Log Lady, the production mistake that created the infamous Bob, and the eternally iconic Laura Palmer, and oh yeah, the film’s not half bad either.  I doubt that David Lynch ever had any intention of reaching the heights of fame that Twin Peaks : Fire Walk with Me afforded him, but it would be dumb to think that he isn’t impressed with the magnitude of the world he created based on that single idea for a film.

[jimmythejiver]

For the first time in a long time I went to the movies in forever and then to Target. At Target I see some Godiva bars on discount yellow tags and I was ecstatic until I read 70% Cacao, Dark, Salted Caramel and was deflated.

Anyway that's how I felt about seeing The Green Knight. What you thought this was about chocolate?

No see since the pandemic I've been back on my perennial King Arthur kick. I've for a long time since I was a young preteen thought, someday I too will write my own King Arthur epic and it'll be gay, magical, gangster and culty too, but for now I'll make up my own stories for practice and then with every story I got attached too, it got too involved and convoluted to the point that when it came down to actually writing a novel, I threw it all away and made a space opera I only planned in two weeks and wrote in a month. Anyway...so now I've been writing this very gay, magical, gangster and culty take on Final Fantasy XV with my boyfriend and just fell in love with Somnus Lucis Caelum who nobody has any insight about him than to make him the Mordred to Ardyn's Arthur, which is a strange flex, but okay, I thought about what if I wrote a Dark Age prequel about Ardyn and Somnus, but Ardyn becomes king and Somnus his shogun and they play games of seduction and power because I'm twisted like that. Anyway...I was like I'm never going to write this and I have to keep making up characters based on FFXV characters and King Arthur tropes because there's not a lot of stories that take place during the Dark Ages, it's always some Roman Empire story, or High Middle Ages and FFXV gave no room for either society to happen after the fall of Solheim and the rise of King Somnus...so we left with Dark Ages, y'all, the King Arthur comparisons are obvious, but Ardyn is no Arthur and Somnus is no Mordred, Aera is only Guenevere if you make up an affair with Somnus, Gilgamesh is no Bedwyr/Bedivere, but uh...they both amputees and the oldest companions to their respective kings so...I guess. Anyway making an ancestor of Cor Leonis and deciding well he's Owain/Yvain, or am Ignis type as idk Sir Cai/Kay I guess, they both cook, but Cai's more like Seifer Almasy than any FF character... Anyway I'm losing people.

My plan was to just scrap the FFXV prequel, leave my Somnus ideas into Overtime (a gangster and gods story) and just plan an actual King Arthur adaptation. I'd have King Arthur the treasure hunter, leader of a warband turned founder of Camelot who fights giants, giant cats and dogheads, but also fights King Claudas of the Franks and King Aelle of the Saxons and Cerdic a Briton who puts in his lot with the Saxons, etc. It'd been a a glorified turf war, meanwhile Arthur's gotta make alliances with King Pelles, The Fisher King and his strange cult he's founded because, why yes I find the ends justifies the means prophecy of the Holy Grail Quest very culty because Christianity then does not resemble it now. Meanwhile you got the secondary plots of Mordred, Gawain, Lancelot, Percival, Tristam and other's going on because they matter and too many modern King Arthur stories sideline the knights.

So many have always sidelined Mordred as a final boss eldritch abomination in mortal flesh conceived of sin and give him no personality, or complex motives, or even just a relationship with Arthur. I also have noticed the general sidelining of Lancelot, or give him a chad villain upgrade if you must include him at all, and the villainizing of Gawain to the point that you don't even have to have Mordred, or Agravain as a catalyst shit stirrer in court, just slap Gawain's name on Liam Neeson in a top knot and you're good. Mordred can just be a child offscreen until last act...fuck that, while Morgan Le Fay can either be a villainess plotting her cabal through men, or a well-intentioned, ineffectual idiot. Fuck that.

Now Hollywood just be doing King Arthur first acts that suck ass, only for said director to get rewarded failing upwards by giving this same jerk the Aladdin remake. The tonally shitty, crammed in blockbuster mess of a cliche heroe's journey that sucks.

With that background I was excited for The Green Knight. I read an illustrative version as a kid, I read Tolkien's translation as a teenager, I read Simon Armitage's superior, but with liberties taken translation. I was prepped to go knowing that indie, or not they were going to make changes to weave the disjointed poem together. I'm excited that because this movie exists Project Guternberg's finally thrown Jessie Weston's prose rendition up on their website. I'll be reading that at some point when this blows over.

The movie adaptation makes a lot of...choices, many I wouldn't love, but would forgive had their been a payoff. There was none.

The journey was fine, the cinematography was a breath of fresh air after crappy slo mo, glossy action scenes ruined another. Guys, I don't think I want to see a Zack Snyder Excalibur, it'll marginally be better than Guy Ritchie, but that ain't saying anything. Leave Excalibur to the post-Star Wars 80s where it is impeccable for it's time. I liked Green Knight's breathable pacing, it's color palette's in the forests and mountains made up for the muddy grey of every Ridley Scott send up in the castles and villages in every other Dark Ages/Medieval story in the last I don’t know since the shitty 00′s. For all the dark tones when there was blues, greens, yellows or reds, they were vibrant in this movie to contrast the gloom of Britain. The soundtrack was good. This isn't all what makes a movie, but it enhances it so let's get to the story and what I did and didn't like.

Things I Liked: Gawain is still a novice in his career The Costume Dressing Everyone pronounces Gawain's name different. I pronounce it like Gwayne, or Guh Wayne, but here you got Gowen (like Owen), Gowan (like Rowan), or even Garlon who I'm pretty sure is the Fisher King's heir in some versions of that Arthurian story, so uh... The reference to Arthur slaying 960 men with his bare hands (Nennius for the win!) The Waste Land that is implied to be a site of a battle (an important aspect of the Arthurian landscape) The Fox companion No long grisly, drawn out hunting scenes. The Fox lives! No misogynist speeches

Things I'm Mixed: This being a dream, is the magic real? Are the giants? Is the Green Knight a figment of Gawain's imagination from a spell Morgan casted in him to hallucinate? Is Lord and Lady also figments? It's...a way to interpret the poem, but lazy and I don't see why it's got to all fantasy, or all dream...this movie makes it too vague you're stuck picking one camp than to accept it's a fantasy with dream and hallucinatory sequences.

Things I'm Meh: Morgan Le Fay as Gawain's mom. Look I fucking hate Morgause as a character and these two get merged and steal each other's aspects so much at this point the difference is who did they marry, King Urien or King Lot? Both are attributed to being Mordred's mom, Mordred is Gawain's brother...both practice magic depending on certain incarnations, both love and hate Arthur their brother and are in conflict with him. Saint Winifred. I actually liked this sequence, but I don't appreciate her as the tacked on wife in the later dream sequence as like...a contrast between the wife you should marry than the whore next door you don't respect anyway? I don't even know what lesson I'm supposed to get out of the damn dream sequence, or any of it? That Gawain should've married his girlfriend and then he'd be a just ruler? That he shouldn't be king? That he'd never have to make the same heartless, impartial choices? I don't know, he seemed like a king doing king shit because guess what? It never gets easier. Wars will be waged. The world didn't become better because he married the right woman, respected her and lived in obscurity. The world didn't become better because he made her his queen. We certainly don't know the world would be better Gawain had his head chopped off and dead XP They never reveal the Lord and the Green Knight as one and the same because of this shit.

Things I Hated: Arthur withdraws from the challenge because he's old. In poem he takes it on and Gawain takes it so he don't have to and he finds himself more disposable than the king. Gawain only takes the challenge because of arrogance. Arthur and Gawain had no prior personal relationship. I'd not have hated this so much if it wasn't compounded by it cancelling out the first two things. Gawain is portrayed as having no respect for his woman, or any woman, maybe his mother? He has to be pushed by Winifred to regain her head. Gawain is portrayed as arrogant, covetous and ready to pass the buck, or the bare minimum than have any honor or decency. It didn't matter the kid in the wasteland was shithead bandit, the way Gawain acted towards him, when he gets robbed, it almost feels like he deserved it and Gawain doesn't learn a damn lesson. I'll admit him taking the sword to cut his ropes and cutting his hands was a neat sequence, it shows him go from stupid, to almost clever and having will to survive...you know traits he had in the poem, but he stops showing these traits or growing. Basically Gawain has to be dragged kicking and screaming to help people and shows no fortitude when facing temptation, or when showing respect towards others, it's exhausting. You don't make this kind of journey story without character growth. Why are you skipping this? Also is it just me, or is this like when you take Frank Miller Batman and transport him onto a Bill Finger story? This is at best Thomas Malory Gawain (and this is charitable) transported on the earlier Pearl Poet's story. Stop it. It's not tonally correct and goes at odds with the story and the set up characterization you'd need to tell it. Speaking of which, you know how I get through the oof... of Liam Neeson Gawain in Excalibur? By pretending he Agravain instead. Here...I don't even think Gawain could pass as Mordred in spite of his covetous nature, lust and entitlement. Why? because I don't think even Mordred is this dumb to warrant this hubris. Essel being invented as a tacked on love interest just to be shit on utterly and for what? I don't think I have much commentary here as there is no Essel I'm aware of to compare, or stack up. I just notice this trope of like...usually if you include a sex worker in Hollywood she often has a heart of gold, she often has her own sense of values that goes at odds with society, but is more true and less hypocritical than a privileged lady’s. I thought that's what they would've done with the added trope of back at home sweetheart to contrast and pit her against the despicable femme fatale of Lady Bertilak and her adultery and her ladyship...and I'm glad they didn't...but you did nothing with Essel than to shit on her for existing when you made her exist, you know. Lady Bertilak being portrayed as the seductress devil incarnate. Look I know adultery is a touchy taboo, but uh her and Gawain hit it off in the poem, dammit! Her values and his values come to clash, but here it's played off as Gawain is stupid and covetous and Lady Bertilak wants to prove something because...? If my brother's theory that she's a figment of Morgan Le Fay's magic, then I'll take this as a lesson of Gawain is impulsive and covetous and his mom knows it, but he don't want to fuck his mom, but he wants her power, and Morgan wants to teach him a lesson... I guess. Hey we don't have misogynist speeches in this movie, but we'll make sure to have the movie drip with it with no point, or commentary. Pass. Lord guilting, extracting and initiating the same sex kiss and only once. Poem automatically better that Gawain don't have to keep being reminded to keep his part of the bargain and he does it willingly more than once. What he doesn't do is give up his belt...gods how did we get more homophobic as a society that the homoeroticism here is worse? Catholics of the middle ages officially had no issue doing same sex, passionate kissing until it lead to sex. The Ending: The gods damn ending. In the movie as is, Gawain waits to uphold his end of the bargain and get his head chopped off. He imagines, even though we don't get any fuzzy or distortion to indicate this is a dream, but I already knew this was coming, he runs away and comes home, is regarded a hero, he sees his lady, takes her from behind and if you saw Brokeback Mountain (I didn't, but DJ has) you know this is a sign of disrespect to women. He gets her knocked up, pays her off for the kid she wants to keep, he is crowned king, marries the ghostly saint lady he helped retrieve her head earlier from a lake in the movie (this right here is the damn tip off). There's no more dialogue by this point and everything is montaging, so you know by now it's a dream, though nothing is out of focus. He rules as a heartless king, his whore son dies from war he waged, he has a daughter, his wife dies. Gawain then takes off the belt that would've saved his life and his head falls off. This would've been the one good twist, except... In this sequence of events he never had his head cut off so uh... now we back in present day. He decides not to bitch out, Green Knight in a sexy way is like "now off with your head," movie cuts to credits with no resolve...uh what the fuck? What the fuck? This is not good. You wasted the one twist in your dream when idk, you could've...

How I'd fix it: No dream sequence at all. No Incident At Owl Creek twist. Gawain comes home a hero and survivor of this game and ordeal. He wears this belt of shame. He becomes a well-renowned knight, but he bears a shame. One day he goes to take off his belt and his head falls off because he cheated to get this belt and to survive this encounter. There. Done. Improved your high concept movie that couldn't play any of the lessons straight from the damn poem without making everyone an asshole for no reason! Ugh! But nope you had to end it on we don’t know if Gawain lives or dies...because...it's dream magic made from his momma's witchcraft...?

Last Thoughts So then post-credits scene because Marvel because Pirates Of The Caribbean existed. A white girl who looks nothing like Gawain's daughter we see who didn’t pay off, or any child I can remember through this whole movie picks up King Arthur's crown that dream Gawain inherited and puts it on her head. Who is this girl? Are we gonna have an indie equivalent of of the Marvel Movie Universe/Universal Horror Monsters thing with ancient British legends? We gonna get a Life Of Saint Patrick next that crosses over? I don't know. What is this?

[eoleolhan-a]

I am STILL on my MonProm bullshit bc I’m grinding through Monster Camp so let’s do some more headcanons! This time it’s gonna be Jin’s opinions on the some of the more prominent characters from the two games, and what I think their relationships (platonic or otherwise) could be like. Obviously these are just my opinions, anyone who has any of these muses is free to disagree, ofc. I won’t include player characters (yet, maybe once Reverse comes out I will update) since the PC personality is kind of fluid to interpretation and change based on the player. There are spoilers for both Monster Prom and Monster Camp regarding main and side characters.

This is in alphabetical order just to make it easy to navigate.

Aaravi

He doesn’t trust her, straight up. She’s a monster slayer with a history of targeting demons and even with her therapy and growth in Monster Camp he’s wary. He’s worried she would turn on him and try to slay him too. He steers clear when possible but could learn to trust her if he could see her progress with monsterkind more directly.

Batniss

He really doesn’t know what she’s talking about most of the time. The main character thing is weird to him, but at least she’s interesting. He respects her combat skills and her archery prowess.

Calculester

He thinks Cal is cute, in the way someone thinks a puppy is cute. He’s just so clueless sometimes it’s endearing, like watching a baby giraffe take its first steps. On the other hand, though, something about this sentient computer robot is a bit uncanny. Since Cal is generally so nice, though, he tries not to let the whole “potential robot uprising/singularity” thing bother him.

Dahlia

He has absolutely no interest in being anywhere near Dahlia because of her reputation as a warmonger. He thinks she’s dangerous and doesn’t want to risk being the one who gives her the idea to try and invade the 2nd Circle. He absolutely doesn’t trust her, and is honestly a bit afraid of her. If he were able to give her a chance (ie probably forced to do school or camp things with her, or if they had mutual friends for some reason) he could grow to appreciate her determination and at times enjoy her exuberant personality. She has the capability to grow on him if given the chance.

Damien

Similar to Dahlia, he distrusts Damien. He knows of the LaVeys, and as mentioned in my big ol 2nd Circle/Cubi lore post sees their whole “we made love popular” reputation as a bit unearned (because I’m sorta canon divergent, but see that post for the details of that). He also doesn’t want anyone from the 8th Circle’s royal family to get anywhere near the 2nd Circle lest they try to take that over, too. He would also probably resent having to go to school or camp with a prince from Hell juuuust a bit, especially since Damien is considered one of the coolest/most well known students/campers. He would be envious of Damien’s wealth and status since that’s something he lacks, which colours Jin’s perception of him. He doesn’t know about Damien’s softer side, so he sees him as abrasive, dangerous, and annoying. Like Dahlia, if he were to give him a chance though he’d grow to like him, especially his fondness for hairstyling and makeup since Jin enjoys the latter (and being fashionable in general). He does, however, reluctantly admit that Damien is indeed hot even if he is an annoying LaVey baby.

Dmitri

Jin doesn’t really know Dmitri but he knows of him. He doesn’t really care about whatever the Coven is doing, but hey at least Dmitri is a hot vampire who never seems to wear a shirt. He doesn’t mind seeing him hanging around because he’s easy on the eyes. Jin would probably find his dramatic villain monologuing and cape swishing a bit funny.

Faith

Out of the Coven members he would probably like Faith the most. She seems pretty relaxed and chill, and he would respect her intelligence and skill as a witch. In general he appreciates the Coven’s colour scheme and fashion sense, though.

Hex

He thinks Hex is straight up irritating but if he was high then he’d probably like their company more.

Hope

His feelings towards Hope are similar to Faith. He isn’t all that bothered with their Coven shenanigans but does respect them. He would be confused by all of the Hope reincarnations but he doesn’t have much of a problem with her. She seems nice enough.

Interdimensional Prince

Although he can be kind of weird at times (maybe even a bit creepy) Jin has to admit the idea of being whisked off to another dimension by some handsome anime-alien-looking prince is kind of appealing. He would like the attention and ego-boost it would cause if the Prince ever flirted with him.

Joy

Jin would enjoy her company. They’d probably get along, but he does find her “main character saving the world” thing to be a bit Intense at times. Despite that he think’s she’s smart and cool and likes being around her, especially given how wild some of their classmates/campmates can be.

Kale

They smoke weed together and vibe. That’s all. 10/10.

Leonard

Jin wants to kick him in the face so hard that he flies into the sun. -10/10.

Liam

Usually he likes Liam and likes being around him. He appreciates his creativity and sense of taste, but sometimes Liam can be a bit pretentious and annoying. That’s fairly manageable though, and sometimes he’s quite the breath of fresh air compared to some of the more exuberant characters he encounters. Jin would especially enjoy indulging in fancy, rare artsy gourmet food so Liam could take pictures of it and he could eat it.

Milo

Out of everyone, Jin is fondest of Milo. Their sense of style, taste (wine and cheese platters? yes please), flirtatious streak (and not to mention good looks) would have Jin swooning. He would also find their personality a lot more calm in comparison to some of the other monsters at camp. The only annoyance would be Milo’s constant attachment to their phone and their somewhat self-centred nature. It takes attention away from Jin, after all. Competing egos.

Miranda

Jin likes Miranda most of the time. Sometimes he thinks her royal merfolk ways are a bit confusing, and he is a bit distrustful of foreign royalty in general but less so of Miranda; he doesn’t see any reason why the Merkingdom would attack the Cubi or really have much to do with them at all, but he knows that royal life can be vicious. He does find it interesting to hear about the culture and society of the Merkingdom, though. He also appreciates her manners and poise. Plus, they’re both pink so he’s a bit biased in that regard. Sometimes he does find the more murderous aspects of the Merkingdom a bit unsightly, and it can be a little frustrating at times trying to explain commoner things to her. He doesn’t like that he would sometimes feel a bit condescended or spoken down to by her, but sometimes this has more to do with his perception than anything she would be saying or doing.

Morty

He likes looking at Morty but his personality is a bit too self absorbed and intense even for Jin. Still, he appreciates the confidence and the sex positive energy. Sexual tension always makes rivalries better so Morty is a perfect candidate for Camp Rival Camp in Jin’s opinion and his presence is at least entertaining and engaging. Also he quite likes the heart-hole shorts, a bold fashion statement.

Polly

Polly is fun to be around. She can be boisterous, but at least she knows how to have a good time. Jin also likes that she isn’t bloodthirsty or a war criminal or something, so in theory they could just hang out like normal monsters/people. It doesn’t hurt that she can get good drugs, too. 

Scott

Scott is a himbo, Jin likes himbos. Case closed. In all seriousness, he would find Scott endearing because of his good nature and cheerful personality. Sometimes his airheaded antics can be a bit annoying, but he knows Scott means well. Jin thinks Scott would be a good friend because he seems honest, loyal, and kind. Those are also qualities that would make him a good date, plus he’s a big cute wolfman who Jin wants to pet in more ways than one.

Valerie

He respects the hustle and the on campus hook-up for all sorts of oddities. Plus she’s Vera’s sister, and he has mostly positive feelings about her so by relation he thinks Valerie is pretty alright. Also soft because cat.

Vera

Vera is intimidating but he respects her, in a sense. As someone who isn’t affluent he’s more wary of her scams and often disapproves if he thinks it’s taking advantage of vulnerable people, but so long as she’s scamming rich people he’s down for it. He definitely thinks she’s smart and an interest conversationalist.

Wolfpack

Bad, stinky, 0/10. Only tolerable because of their connection to Scott but otherwise obnoxious.

Zoe

Last but not least, Jin would like Zoe. He’d appreciate her creativity and particularly her ship fics. They would have a good time talking about crushes, who should date who, and the latest books in their respective favourite series (or perhaps shared shows or books). She also tells Leonard to shove it and since he wants to punt the kappa into the sun he likes that a lot.

[tomeandflickcorner]

Episode Review- The Real Ghostbusters: Aint NASA-sarily So

Okay.  This episode? It nearly broke me.  

The episode starts out in space, aboard Experimental Space Platform Galileo.  The crew of the Galileo consists of Captain Ivan Kirov, Lieutenant Irahqua, Lieutenant Commander McTavish, Lieutenant Dostoyevsky Sato and Yeoman Whitney. Right away, it’s painfully obvious that we’re looking at an unapologetic Star Trek parody, as the whole crew of the Galileo are unmistakable spoofs of the original crew of the Enterprise.  Captain Kirov is a combination of Kirk and Chekov (well, that’s a weird combo), Irahqua is Uhura, McTavish is Montgomery Scott, Sato is clearly Sulu and Whitney is Janice Rand.

Anyway, it’s the Galileo Crew’s second day of their current mission, and it appears everything is smooth sailing. Until alarm bells begin going off. It appears something has collided with the space platform.  Moments later, both McTavish and Whitney enter the bridge to inform Kirov that they think they’ve just seen a ghost.  Obviously, there’s only one solution to this- spend millions of dollars in government money to send the Ghostbusters up to the space platform via space shuttle.  And it’s here, dear readers, that my brain crashed.  And not just because we’re seeing the Ghostbusters piloting a space shuttle (because who needs astronaut training, amiright?)  According to this episode, the Ghostbusters coexist in the same reality as a Star Trek-esque crew.  But we saw in the episode Station Identification that there’s also a Star Trek parody TV show in The Real Ghostbuster’s universe.  So, in other words, this episode is telling us that, not only do they have a Star Trek-like television program in this show’s universe, but there’s also an actual Star Trek-like crew roaming about space at the same time. Yeah, Star Trek’s a great show.  I like it as much as the next person.  But COME ON!  It is possible to have an overkill of Star Trek parodies.

Upon arriving at Space Platform Galileo, the Ghostbusters are greeted by Kirov.  And yes, this scene is overflowing with Star Trek jokes, with Winston commenting on how the crew looks familiar and Peter saying that they’re space explorers busy with ‘exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations.’ (Don’t bother keeping a count of how many Star Trek jokes they squeeze out in this episode. I guarantee your Star Trek Joke Meter will overheat and explode relatively quickly.)

Egon, upon checking his PKE Meter, determines that he does have a reading on an ectoplasmic entity, but that it consists of ‘empty ectoplasm.’ Meaning it doesn’t give off any psychokinetic energy and therefore isn’t a real ghost.  Almost instantly after he says this, the lights on the space platform go off. Sato announces that the Creature has attached itself to the solar energy converter and is draining the space platform’s energy.  So McTavish brings the Ghostbusters down to engineering, where they find the Creature, which is a large tentacle monster with multiple eyes and mouths.  For some reason, Peter makes a comment about never wanting to put marshmallows in his hot chocolate again, which seems like a strange thing to say, as the Creature looks nothing like a marshmallow.  And we also get McTavish making yet another Star Trek joke by saying that the way Egon talks reminds him of ‘an old shipmate.’  Basically comparing Egon to Mr. Spock.  

The Ghostbusters then prepare to fire their Proton Packs at the Creature, but this only results in the Creature growing even larger, as it’s able to feed off the energy of the Ion Streams.  To make it worse, the Creature then begins to feed on the energy in the ship’s anti-gravity unit, so the Ghostbusters begin to float in midair for a bit.  Until the Creature decides that it liked the taste of the Ghostbuster’s Ion Streams a bit more and ends up going after the Proton Packs instead. The Creature proceeds to chase after the Ghostbusters and soon manages to catch Winston.  And, for some reason, the others don’t seem to notice Winston’s cries, so they don’t realize they lost Winston until Peter happens to look back.  (Not very observant of the three team members with actual Ph.Ds.)  Fortunately, Winston is able to slip out of his Proton Pack, allowing him to get away unharmed.

The Ghostbusters then return to the bridge to fill in Kirov on what happened.  And Kirov is not happy that they haven’t been able to stop the Creature.  Especially when the lights once again go off, with Sato announcing the Creature has begun feeding off the ship’s life support systems. Thankfully, McTavish is able to tap into the space platform’s emergency reserves for power, but this only has bought them a bit more time, and they only have four hours to deal with the Creature before the emergency reserves run out.  But the Ghostbusters are not quite sure what to do, especially since the Creature has grown to be too big for the Ghost Traps they have on hand. Winston comes up with the idea of trying to communicate with the Creature, as it could be intelligent enough to be reasoned with.  But this doesn’t really go anywhere.

Thankfully, Ray seems to have an idea of his own.  This idea involves McTavish switching off the power for the space platform for a bit.  With the power switched off, the Ghostbusters can lure the Creature to the center of the platform with the energy of their Ion Streams.  Rather like a carrot on a stick.  Ray initially tries to rope Winston into being the bait, but Egon manages to come to Winston’s defense by pointing out that, considering this is Ray’s plan, he should be the one to act as bait, to ensure it all goes well. Ray’s plan ultimately works, and the Creature is successfully lured into the center of the space platform.  And, even though it didn’t seem to work before, their Proton Packs are now able to work on the Creature, holding it in place and allowing the Ghostbusters to capture it within four separate Ghost Traps.  Not exactly clear why the Proton Packs were effective now when they only seemed to be feeding the Creature before, but whatever. It’s the final few minutes of the episode, so they have to wrap it up somehow.

But of course, they can’t have the episode end without churning out a few more Star Trek jokes, with Kirov stating that they’re on a five year mission and Irahqua saying that Egon really does remind her of a certain pointy-eared science officer.  (Yes, okay. Egon is like Spock.  We get it.)

Oh, this episode.  It just made me cringe.  Look, I have no problem with spoofs.  I love movies like Spaceballs, Men in Tights and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  But there’s a certain point where a joke stops being funny and it feels more like they’re bashing you over the head with it.  And that was what happened with this episode.  Even when it first began, I couldn’t believe it was actually happening within the actual episode.  I was sure the stuff with the Galileo was going to end up being revealed as just a show or movie someone was watching.  But when I realized that it was actually happening, I’m pretty sure I groaned internally.  Combine that with the fact that we’d previously established in the episode Station Identification that there already was an in-universe show that parodied Star Trek, and my brain short-circuited.  

In fact, I think the only good part of the episode was the Creture itself.  During the episode, Egon determines that it had the same basic ectoplasmic makeup of a Class 4 Free Floating Spirit, but the PKE Meter couldn’t detect any psychokinetic energy emanating from the creature.  So, does that mean we were dealing with the ghost of an Alien lifeform? For a basis of comparison, let’s look at the 2001 movie, Evolution.  Yes, I know some people might not consider Evolution to be a good movie, but I say it was an entertaining popcorn flick. (Also, it was directed by Ivan Reitman, who also directed the original two Ghostbusters movies.  So that alone makes it relevant.)  Anyway, in that movie, it was determined that the Alien monsters were nitrogen-based organisms rather than carbon-based like all organic life on Earth.  So maybe that’s what was going on here.  Maybe the reason why this particular creature didn’t seem to give off psychokinetic energy despite being an ectoplasmic entity was because the Ghostbusters’ equipment was designed around Earth-bound ghosts.  But this was the ghost of something from off-planet.  Can you imagine how awesome the episode could have gotten if they actually built on that?  Think about it.  The Ghostbusters have already essentially proven the possibility of life after death simply by proving the existence of ghosts.  They could have also proven the existence of intelligent life on other planets, too!  But alas, the writers were too busy throwing the endless Star Trek jokes at us to realize the potential.  Talk about a missed opportunity!

(Click her for more Ghostbusters reviews)

[newx-menfan]

X-Men #2 Review

 *Spoilers!* 

 The issue starts with Cyclops inviting Baby Cable and Rachel to explore a new island that popped up after Xavier's assassination, that Krakoa has fled to (Maybe Krakoa just wants a vacation, Cyclops!) 

 During the flight Scott mentions how stupid it was to let Doug go into space (and arguably how stupid the ENTIRE plot of 'New Mutants' is...but alas...).

 We get on the island, where Cyclops makes a rather insightful and psychoanalytical crack at himself (personally I think therapy is a million times better than being essentially adopted by Xavier...but maybe that's just me...). 

 Rachel does a psychic scan and finds a human-ish life force on the island. 

Scott and group bond over vacation spots (seriously I think 'vacation' is just the overarching theme of this issue...), when they run into a weird looking rhino (don't get attached!). 

 The rhino immediately gets eaten (add some 'Death to Smoochie' joke as my comment...) by a tentacle creature before attacking the Summers clan. 

 At the 'Arak Maw' we find out this is the lost land of 'Arakko' and that the 'Summoner' controls all flora and fauna. 

 The Summers clan runs into the Summoner, who can't understand English. 

Baby Cable has the idea to trade with they (I don't know the pronouns of this character, so that's what I'm going with to be safe) and gives they a grenade; this goes exactly as expected and the Summoner accidentally sets it off (I REALLY miss adult Cable 😒). 

 The Summoner than does exactly what's in the title and summons all the creatures of the island to attack. 

 For what takes forever despite being completely obvious- Rachel finally talks to they telepathically and things calm down. 

 Apparently Krakoa came to this island...not for a sweet a** vacation, but for love (yes...yes I'm being 100% serious...). 

In something that feels like it should be out of James Cameron's 'Avatar', the islands consecrate their love and now the X-Men have a new neighbor in the 'Summoner'... 

 Also apparently the Summoner originated from Apocalypse's horseman 'War'...so... 

 Opinions: 

 Overall I think where this event had a good premise... and Hickman and crew are throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it... 

 Do we really need TWO ancient islands and this, when you already have an interesting story in mutants building their own nation? 

 Between Space adventures, magic and mysticism, Apocalypse's backstory, the Xavier assassination, Groundhog Day Moira, etc...

 It all feels a little much. 

 And before anyone argues it- the difference with Claremont was, Claremont let things build naturally. 

He could have magic and space operas side by side, because he took the time to build these stories. 

 THESE X-titles in comparison feel hastily patched on with random settings or plot points and for reasons like 'Well, we can't NOT have a group of X-Men NOT in space...'. 

 Theories: 

 Shocker! Bringing Apocalypse into the fold was and IS a terrible f****** plan (😱)....

[alexanderessex3dstoryart]

Character Design - Style Referencing and Silhouette Research - 30/12/20

For today’s research on character design, I thought I would look into the style referencing for my characters as I’m still not sure weather to go for a realistic art style or a cartoon based one. On top of that, I’m kinda not sure what kind of art style I would then go for either style I end up choosing which is something I plan for today to understand and find out for myself. 

Starting off with looking at the realistic depictions, Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely one I’m already hooked with having already covered it previously in my blog posts. It’s dark, gritty, noir-style visuals give it a rough environment to be in but also an emotional one whether its trying to be sombre on your mood or trying to show the sadistic nature of the world that those characters live in. The visuals of the characters are very mute looking with their colour palette with the exceptions being gangs like the Maelstrom with these bright neon lights emitting from their faces standing themselves from the crowds. In fact, neon colours are the only ones that seem to stand out on any character from the universe other than a few colours being saturated highly. I think this is to go alongside the tone of the game as whilst it can be a chaotic game, there’s a real human element to it’s art style and narrative that you can see from looking at the characters which is most established in it’s launch trailer for the game. That goes for the environment too as it’s often muted in colour to help further emphasizes that realist tone to the story and the characters that live in it. 

In addition to it’s use of colour, the way characters are made and rendered are very hyper-realistic as it looks like a natural progression of human life in the future with us adding cybernetic parts to ourselves. This also goes for the clothing of the characters too being very detailed and natural to the world created. I think this style of render is what i’m so far attached too from how these elements have come together especially for my kind of setting being in a Cyberpunk universe. 

Another source of render that I was influenced by and a bit of a comparisonment to Cyberpunk 2077 is another game called Final Fantasy VII Remake which contrasts Cyberpunk’s mute palette as whilst it’s set in a similar styled environment, there’s a lot more colour and freedom to be found as characters are distinguished from each other with colours popping out in their uniforms to many different and unnatural colours illuminating the city. Even somewhere like the slums that we see in the opening cinematic look busy, healthy and vibrant to look out from how brightly lit the city is. Character's like Aireth (the one in the red jacket) are really defined in the city by how she pops out of the dark city with her reds and pinks in her colour palette. The characters themselves have a much smoother render to the much more realistic style of Cyberpunk 2077 with the characters looking a bit plasticy in comparison. However for close up’s of the characters, details of them looking realistic are more present like close up of eye’s where we can see eyelashes and skin particles/textures evident. Unlike Cyberpunk 2077′s different usage of designs on the faces of their characters, FFVII Remake’s faces are a lot cleaner looking which whilst mostly looking the same-ish across all the characters from the game, the designs of their outfits really help the characters define who they are as people which makes them easy to identify. This also links into the silhouette design of these characters too as if you were to only create a black mask of their neutral poses, you would easily be able to identify who’s who from their body structure as well as key characteristics which is a lot more than Cyberpunk 2077′s visuals. Characters like Cloud are defined by his thin statuerette and his rectangular sword which is very identifiable in this space and somebody like Baracus who is known for his immense body and gatling gun arm. Details like these is something that’s going to be really important to me when I come back to making my characters again.

Final Fantasy VII Remake - Opening Movie | PS4

Cloud Strife Pose

One of the last renders I looked at today was from the Skylanders Games for it’s cartoonish art style as well as looking a little bit into the characters as I’m still considering of going with a dynamic animalistic design for my characters. The style of these characters is similar to the plasticy nature from FFVII Remake’s design but works alongside the dynamic and exaggerated features of the characters like the bug eyed eyes of the characters as well as the specific details of each character that makes them unique. One of my favourite characters Wham-Shell helps bring this point across through not only his eyes but the exaggerated size of his weapon and his crustation on arms which you could also say for the body of the character too. Looking at him and the rest of the characters that are featured in the game’s universe, they all provide a very glossy finish to the characters like they’ve been made in a factory and are brand new looking. This gloss tends to evolve overtime with each new iteration for the game as the characters get a lot more glossier as they progress 

Wham-Shell Character

Skylanders Spyro's Adventure Opening Scene

[HD] Skylanders Swap Force Opening Cutscenes + First Area Tutorial !!!

I think overall looking at the skylanders games as ideas for my render, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to pursue a more realistic depiction of my characters both look wise as well as render. I think this decision mostly comes from the overall tone and setting for my characters as I imagine a darker but gritter environment for them to manifest in which I can’t see with the cartoony style of the skylanders games and think sources like Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy are tonelly more correct. However, there are some details I would like to carry over into the realistic art style such as looking into the big eye designs that a lot of the characters posses from the games into my characters. 

After my research and conclusions with render research, I looked into silhouette designs after being inspired by both Final Fantasy VII Remake as well as one of the natural progressions I needed to take with my character in order to make an effective model/character for the project. I first started by looking into different websites for creating effective silhouette theory which I stumbled across this really nice set of pages of showing  how you can use silhouettes effectively from developing your ideas. The pages show a complete page of developed silhouettes that have been used to express different ideas for a character which those designs have been inspired to create drawings from to eventually lead to a final character. I think combined with Jon’s suggestions as well as from these pages is where I would really succeed in developing my character for the project as this feels the most comfortable avenue for me to advance the designs of my characters as well as understanding the flow of the character too.

(Note: Artwork is from "The Skillful Huntsman" Copyright 2011 Design Studio Press & Scott Robertson - artwork by Mike Yamada.) 

Looking into the term itself, silhouettes are used to help define a character by using shape language to suggest what a character may look like and act just by looking at them. This is usually done by using different types of shapes to help build up the character and what kind of emotion they’re suggesting in their pose which range from; organic, geometric and abstract shapes. ‘Concept Start’ was a really good website that highlighted this way of working as it uses the characters from Madagascar as examples to expressing emotion through silhouette. Below they detail that Alex (Lion) having such a wide expression to him makes him very inviting from his silhouette as its very inviting to us if we were to see his shadow. For Gloria (Hippo), she comes across as very round and smooth and very much like shes comes straight from a cartoon from the light bits of details suggested in her design. And then for Melvin (Giarffe) his body and and appendages are very jumbly and clumsy which perfectly describes the kind of movement and character he is. But going back to the term again, the best thing you can do with a silhouette is if the character is still recognisable if you block them in, then it makes the silhouette strong and readable.

Overall, I’m happy with my research as not only have I understood what kind of style I want to aim for my characters mainly Hyde, but as well looking into how I can create characters more effectively using silhouettes as well as having that extra bit of info from the tutorial notes I was given. I think looking forward, I plan to create my Hyde character through using silhouettes designs the same way as the image above as well as maybe trying it with my Jekyll character too. 

The use of Silhouettes in Concept Design

http://characterdesignnotes.blogspot.com/2011/03/use-of-silhouettes-in-concept-design.html

SHAPE LANGUAGE & SILHOUETTE IN ART & DESIGN

https://www.conceptstart.net/art-tutorial/improve-shape-language-silhouette-in-concept-art-design-illustration

How to Design Characters with Bold Fashion and Strong Silhouettes

https://www.clipstudio.net/how-to-draw/archives/157653

[pricebullington]

Joshua Dildine Interview

The Joshua Dildine Interview is finally here. We take a deep dive into the duality of his work, the friction and synthesis between instinct and intellect. 

Cave paintings made of poop, sci-fi and spirituality along with the otherworldliness permeating through his oeuvre, are all explored as I probe to get a better understanding of what drives his mysterious, yet familiar, compositions. Read along to see how these seemingly paradoxical elements come together, as past, present and future merge.

Joshua Dildine, Life Well Lit, 2012

PB: Hey Joshua, thank you for taking the time to do this. Your work is so viscerally powerful I feel like words almost become redundant, but in any case I've had a strong urge to talk to you to learn more about the dimensions you open up. One of the things that struck me when watching some of the interviews you've done, is how down to earth and level-headed your approach seems to be, in contrast to your works, which strikes me as being almost out of this world in terms of space and language. More often than not, I find the opposite to be true in a lot of artists, where the lucid descriptions of the work fall flat in comparison to the external reality of forms. In that sense I found it quite refreshing to see your humble approach, and it made me even more curious about your philosophy and how you approach art in a general sense.

It seems as though you came across your style, for lack of a better term, as we know it today in 2011. And I was wondering how your personal perception of it have changed and evolved in the past 6 years? I know it's a broad question, so feel free to highlight what you find most interesting and, or, surprising in the course of this development.

JD: I am really a pretty down-to-earth guy, despite what my paintings may say about me. Ive always been interested in creating atmosphere and depth in abstract painting. My personal perception has changed quite a bit ever since I started painting over photos in 2011. I started doing it as a somewhat sarcastic response to some criticism I had to my work prior to the photos; something about the work was not personal enough. So in a humorous effort to make it personal, I painted over a photo of my face. I continued to do this and started pulling from other family photos. I realized that there was an inherit power that the images had over me, as well the people that I was painting over. For example, when I pulled my parents engagement photo off the wall and painted over it, my mom was pissed. She initially didn’t realize that I’d scanned the original and reprinted it to paint over the copy, and even then was slightly disturbed by the act. There was a connection there that was more powerful that just a painted ground to work over. Another thing I realized at this time, was scribbling out the faces of my parents was not easy. In other words, my personal attachment to the subjects made it hard to scribble their image out. So in the earlier work, my intention was to deny the power of the image and use it as a visual armature from which to create my paintings.

As I continued to work through this process, the idea remained as an undertone, but not the main idea that pushed the work forward. I started to focus on the visual language that the photographs contained (depth of field, light source, lens flair, motion blur, color deterioration, color, atmosphere). I was using photographic means, and still do, to answer questions of abstraction (borrowing that idea from David Reed). In contrast, I set out to answer photographic questions through abstract means. I started embellishing elements of the photographs that would confuse the space. I was reading a lot of sci-fi, Orson Scott Card at the time, and had “antigravity” on the brain. Gravity has more power in photography than abstract painting, so in a way to deny those "powers" as well, I would switch the orientation to provide influence to the composition.

The word "defacement" got old and outdated pretty fast. I was no longer interested in that conversation. The gestures themselves could change the way we perceive the intention behind the act of painting over someone. If I took a thin brush, pen, or pencil and "scribbled" out the faces in fast lines, it reads aggressive and hostile. If I have a thick blob looking gesture it is a lighter color, done slowly, intentionally, it’s a less hostile read.

Joshua Dildine, Rediscover Delicious Harmony, 2011

PB: The dangers of being pigeonholed is like a mine field when establishing your work, I guess, so it seems like a good idea to proactively avoid the traps that reveal themselves early on. Can you elaborate a bit on how you steered the evolution of your work in that regard?

JD: The way I view the power that images have changes with each image I choose. I couldn't say that to a white canvas. Using photographs as a ground has a multi-faceted advantage for me; there is an emotional response to the act, then there is the strictly visual challenge of being presented with questions to answer with paint. And now, there is a possessive point of pride that the subjects of the photographs have with the paintings. As if they were portraits. My siblings refer to a painting as their own, when it has an image of them underneath. “How many of Matt, or Taylor, or so-and-so are in this show?”, might be a conversation we have leading up to an exhibition.

At this point, I have been reevaluating what I've been doing and have discovered another aspect to interacting with the photos I had not expected. Over a year and half ago we moved to my hometown to take over my grandparents’ house. The act of moving into a house that you have a historical connection with, changing it and making it your own, in some ways is the same thing I have been doing to the photos. There were boxes and boxes of old family photos and slides when we moved in from generations beyond my memory, as well as some relics of furniture and trinkets. Using these to work from connects me to the people that owned them, but the fact that I’m living in the space provides little differentiation between my life and the work. I am constantly re-evaluating what makes my work so personal, and drawing from that.

Joshua Dildine, Be First More Often, 2012

PB: I think it's very interesting that you discovered your style in such a serendipitous fashion, and then stuck with it and let it evolve from there on it's own terms. It can be quite hard to comprehend that it all happened on a lark, in a way, and yet now manifest itself in such a powerful and fully fledged way. I'm guessing the only way it could happen like that was because you were open to it, and then when you found it, you stuck with it because you recognized it's potential. For which I applaud you, by the way, because I think your work is brilliant.

Compliments aside, the reason I point this out, is because your work strikes me as being intuitive in many respects, as opposed to calculated, in the sense of you trusting your instincts and going with the flow. I remember seeing an interview you did, where you talked about how your son made some moves on one of your paintings one day while you were out of the studio, but instead of discarding it, you embraced it. I found that anecdote beautiful, but also telling in regards to your process. I think that's a delightful way to approach art, because it allows you to go beyond your own understanding and play with the chaos and randomness of the world in a constructive way. 

On that note I'd like to know more about your process, I imagine it can be a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to balance family life with your work as an artist sometimes. How does a perfect day in the studio look like to you? How do you approach the work, and what's your setup like?

JD: My work is a fine balance between spontaneity, intuition, structure, chaos/destruction, and reconstruction. My process is so wrapped up into the way I live my life; This goes back to how I want to keep the work as personal as possible. As a parent, you rely on spontaneity and intuition. For example, if you are getting ready to leave the house, and you realize that your toddler thought it was a good time to make cave paintings in his bedroom... with poop, you have to change plans, be spontaneous, clean it up, be late to where ever you are going, discipline, laugh, learn, and live on. I had the best intentions to leave the house, we eventually left the house, but our destination changed. Connecting poop murals back to my painting: I can have an agenda, I can have set parameters for where I want each piece to go. I am always open to a change of destination. Additionally, I do not think it is about using the photos as a constraint or a restriction on spontaneity. It is more like a play between structure and intuitive choice. The two ideas each have a place in my work, they both exist.  As a parent I've learned that situations like these can be multi facetted. Poop murals by a toddler is inappropriate but it can also be funny. They are both allowed to exist in this space. Intuition and structure are allowed to exist in the same space and do so beautifully. Each has influenced the other. The photos have changed and improved the way I paint abstraction just as, I hope, the paintings have improved the space of the photos.

With that said, a "perfect" day in the studio, is when the lawn is mowed, chores are done, bills are paid, all the studio prep-work has been done, and I have zero distractions. The day will start with a cup of coffee, end with a glass of wine. Sure this sounds like a "unicorn" of studio days and completely unrealistic now that I write it out . A great day doesn't have to be a perfect day. I have a lot of great days in the studio. Often those "great" days are realized in hindsight. The distractions from the kids, spontaneous lunch dates with my wife, my pin-striper neighbor stopping by and having painting discussions that are unrelated to art. But, great days must start with a cup of coffee and end with a glass of wine.

Joshua’s studio, Installation view.

PB: I love it, and thank you for bringing back the nuance, as I realize now how limited the question I posed was. What I mean here, is that I posed it as an "either, or" when in fact, as you point out, it's more of a synthesis between instinct and intellect. Wine and coffee. 

I think it would be reckless of me not to get into the aesthetics of your work, now that we're talking. Your work is obviously coming from a very personal place, but when I look at it, it's more of a mystery, like a David Lynch movie. The look of the photographs you use as "backgrounds" send my mind back to film camera's from the 70s, while the strokes you use in the foreground, and the color combinations seems almost futuristic, or at least highly contemporary. It seems you're building on artists like Albert Ohlen and Gerhard Richter in terms of the handling of paint and layering in many ways. Can you talk a little bit about your influences in this area, and what the aesthetics of art means to you in terms of your own work?

JD: My inspiration changes all the time. I try to pull from visual resources that are personal, honest, and current to my state in life. I avidly study current and historic art as well as amateur and commercial artists. The Aesthetics of my pieces predominately respond, and are a departure from, the photographs. Photos from the 80’s with 70’s décor make for interesting color combinations to work with but I love that you picked up David Lynch. I was reading a lot of Frank Herbert and Orson Scott Card, and binge watching seasons of Dr. Who, back when I first started to work on the photographs. So naturally, I responded to that interest. I love the language used to illustrate alternative worlds and alternative space, basically any ideas that take you out of this world. 

I think what I find fascinating in science fiction are the familiar themes and vocabulary, that we know, jumbled and placed in a setting that makes us experience something new and unfamiliar. I view my work in a similar way. The painted gesture, to an abstract painting, acts very much like words in a story. Each mark represents different vocabulary. For that reason I am drawn to Albert Oehlen’s work. His work is very “articulate”, there is so much variety in the mark making. I attempt to make my works articulate; there are a lot of different styles of marks through-out each piece, and the result is an altered visual plane of the photograph and painting. Within my paintings, space will expand and collapse, and mass will solidify and vaporize. The way that people move paint fascinates me, and I often look in uncommon places, like seeing a spray paint artist make a space scene using just spray paint with magazine clippings as brushes. I learn a lot from my pin-striping neighbor who approaches painting from a very different perspective. Ultimately, I am a collector of photographs and a collector of visual vocabulary.

Joshua Dildine, False May Minds, 2015

PB: That’s a great approach, because I think there’s a strong trap-like tendency within contemporary art, because of the rich history of art, to become insular and self-referential. The postmodern Ouroboros. I’m always more interested in the way life itself informs art, like poop murals, pin-striping neighbors, or that time Salvador Dali was sitting at a dinner table, watching a camembert cheese dissolve, which he then connected to Einsteins theory of relativity, and then proceeded to create his iconic painting The Persistence of Memory, portraying melting watches.

In my own work I often portray gold, which is one of the heaviest metals, floating in dreamlike spaces. That antigravitational friction, is something that is quite common in music and dreams. The idea of moving on another wavelength, in another dimension is something that speaks to me on a deep level, because of the transcendentalism it conjures up, and it seems that’s where our interest overlap. Just to tap this vein a little further before we wrap up this interview, I was wondering why you are attracted to this otherworldliness?

The reason I ask is because I’m very curious about the duality in your work of the personal (photography) and the interdimensionality inherent to the forms you introduce through your application of paint on the metaphorical / philosophical level.

JD: Thanks! That is a great question. You are the first to really tap in on that interdimensionality, but, it is definitely there. The sublime is not a new concept to be explored in art.  Many abstract painters in particular, recognize that there is something going on beyond them, in those moments lost in painting. The act of painting, for me, as controlled as I can be, has always been somewhat spiritual. I feel like I tap into something that is just out of my reach. Pairing this with the springboard of photographs adds a grounded element that really speaks to the past as a frozen moment in time. Painting feels like a movement outward, toward the future while the act of painting is very present. I am a Christian and I am a contemporary artist. These two identities don’t always seem to blend well in the world that I grew up in and I have, for a long time, wrestled to keep them somewhat separate. Yet, this parallel keeps popping up in my work. Perhaps that duality, inadvertently parallels the painting and photography elements in the work, and the success of the piece depends on the interaction of these two identities.

I am constantly reminded that I am apart of something much bigger than myself. Using photographs, like I said, is a powerful link to a sense of history and legacy. When I use old family photographs I feel a connection with the people in them and the spaces they inhabited. Just the other day, I was looking at old colored slide of my great grandfather, and I noticed that he had the same colored walls and the same type of stains, that could only be caused by a toddler, on those walls. It was profound to see the likeness in our facial features, but even more profound to see those stains on those walls. Yes, that is something subtle and abstract, but there is beauty in spending the time to observe and witness this.

I feel this link strongly as I am living in and remodeling my grandfather’s home. It feels like painting over photos at times, changing the space little bits at a time and thinking of what they might have when the original elements of the home where put in or changed along the way.

Since becoming a father, I have felt more connected to the future, how to foster the potential my children have to leave a positive impact. This is a different kind of legacy. These dualities of past, present and future as well as a physical grounding paired against that otherworldly sublime are the beautiful subtleties of life that I cannot help but see make their way into the work that I do. Not in a contrived way, but in a natural outpouring of reflected life.

Joshua Dildine, The Games We Play, 2013

PB: I think that's a perfect way to end the interview Joshua, thank you so much for taking the time, as well as opening up. It's been a great pleasure learning more about the deeper levels of your practice. 

What are the best ways for me and the readers to stay updated on your work? And do you have any upcoming shows we need to know about?

JD: Thanks Price, It was my pleasure. I appreciated your read into the work that was so intuitive and probing to truly try to understand it at a deeper level. 

Joshuadildine@gmail.com and joshuadildine.com are the best ways to get a hold of, and keep track of me.

[jimmy-o-face]

Cyclops & Phoenix’s Treatment In The X-Men Films (Part 2 of 2)

Click here for Part 1

Death of Scott

Sorry for the long wait. But I needed a break from this stuff. I was burnt out after making three post like these in a short amount of time. But now it's back to business!

Anyway, I actually stand corrected about there being no in-story reason for Jean killing Scott. Recently, I rewatched the scene where Jean kills Xavier and it states that she killed Scott because she couldn’t control her power. So basically it was by accident after she held his beams back.

Now the out-story reason why Scott was killed off is because James Marsden who played the character had signed on with Singer to do Superman Returns. Thus he didn’t have enough time for X3 and Tom Rothman axed the character. Killing off a major figure in X-Men lore only three movies in and off-screen? Seriously? There were other ways to solve this problem. Thankfully he was brought back to life by the events of Days of Future Past and giving more screen time in the next film. 

Now in my previous post I mentioned that the only good thing that came out of The Last Stand was that it makes Jean’s storyline in Apocalypse more compelling. One of those reasons is that when Jean says “I think I’m going to hurt someone” Scott’s death is instantly comes to mind. The Last Stand is being use to make the viewer care about Jean’s struggle with the power she possesses. A great example of turning a negative into a positive, if I do say so myself.

Scott’s Role In The Films

Now in the original trilogy Scott’s characterization amounts to disliking Wolverine for having the hots for his girl and being a cuck. The only time where they deviated from this was when she shows affection to Xavier when he is poisoned in X1.

In Apocalypse there is a much better attempt with Scott’s characterization but its not completely executed well. Here we kind of get an origin for him as we see how he enrolled into the school, his motivation for being a superhero(mentioned in Part 1), and how his relationship with Jean started. Which I already talked about in Part 1.

The one thing they did screw up with Scott is the death of Havok. We don’t see them interact much and as a result we don’t feel much emotional weight to his death. That is due to a scene being of them together being cut for pacing.  

This issue resembles Avengers: Age of Ultron in regards to Quicksilver, in which scenes that make the audience have some attachment to the character were deleted. Just like with Quicksilver Havok’s scenes with Scott got cut. Though, we were already attached to Alex through First Class but still.

Relationship Parallel 

Out of all the deleted scene that one above should have been caught in as it also shows how Scott feels about his new found powers. And it's through this inner turmoil that plants the seeds of his relationship with Jean in the film. Scott destroys his surroundings when he opens his eyes, Jean destroys her surroundings when she closes her eyes as she states. They also changed Scott’s blasts from purely concussive blast to generating heat, so he could be more similar to Jean. And no, it's not that Singer didn’t know about the concussive blast because in the previous trilogy they didn’t generate heat.

There is also an attempt to make a full circle story for Mystique with these characters. She makes a comparison with the older and younger generation. Such as them flying on a plane to battle and Alex being a handful similar to Scott. It made me noticed how Scott and Jean’s relationship is very similar to Hank and Raven’s relationship in First Class. As both pairings developed through sharing a struggle with their mutations. The older relationship was due to sharing abnormal blue appearances, while the younger relationship was due to sharing destructive powers that they couldn’t control. And this parallel is what completes her arc set-up in Days of Future Past and she comes home. She wants to give guidance to kids who were like her.

But Mystique doesn’t overshadow Scott and Jean like many thought she would. The two get roughly the same amount of screentime as her and more heroic moments. They and Nightcrawler are the ones that save Raven, Hank, Moira, and Peter from Weapon X which was staged by Scott. Jean saved Logan from Weapon X. They and Nightcrawler are the ones to save Professor X from getting his body stolen at the last minute. Jean defeated Apocalypse. I actually found it amazing that many people still think they got overshadowed.

Future Films

Now lets get back to the events of X3 and how the films are building off of that. I strongly believe that film will factor in the sequel to X-Men: Apocalypse. Because according to Bryan Singer the plan is to play around with Beast’s time travel theory in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

So here’s the plan. What happens when you use Days of Future Past to erase movies like X1, 2 and 3, yes you can erase those events that occurred, but I also was very adamant about having what we call “The Tivo Scene.” The scene in that room with all the video cameras in Days of Future Past, I call it the Tivo scene. “I developed this piece of technology that records television.” The point is time’s immutability. The idea that time is like a river. You can splash it and mess it up and throw rocks in it and shatter it but it eventually kind of coalesces and this is, again, theories of quantum physics. It’s all based in quantum physics. So what I’m doing with these in-betweenqueels is playing with time’s immutability and the prequel concept, meaning that yes we erased those storylines and anything can happen.

Apocalypse does indeed play with the concept of time being immutable in a few ways, which I will be discussing in another post. But right now I want to talk about the one regarding Jean and her visions of the future, which Charles doesn’t take seriously at first and think they are just a nightmare. That is until of course when he sees Apocalypse who appeared in her dream is real, with his response being “Oh my god”. 

According to Singer prior to the film's release, he says that he wanted to show that Xavier was blindly optimistic and how he changes. 

He chooses to teach and preach and hope that people follow his message: peace and unity. And I’ve gotten to see him as a drug addict and a loser, and in this movie you’re going to get to see him prosperous and almost blindly optimistic, and how he changes.

This is consistent with his characterization in Days of Future Past, where Charles doesn’t believe in Beast’s theory on time being immutable. He believes that he can show people a better path. This is the reason why he doesn’t form the X-Men before the events of Apocalypse, because he believes the world is better and there is no war in the future.

But Beast is hinted at to still believe in the theory, as he says that he has prepared for the worst and the world needs the X-Men. Which Charles agrees with by the end of the movie and forms the team. And it seems to me that the reason why he changes his mind is because he realizes that Jean's "dreams" are not just dreams. And remember, he knows of the events of X3 through looking through Logan’s mind. 

The sequel to Apocalypse will no doubt be a very Jean focused film. This could go in very interesting direction by expanding on Jean’s inner demons. Her learning of the original timeline, Hank’s theory, and her dreams being actual visions of the future would be very fascinating. They’ll likely and hopefully go down that route. Which would bare a strong resemblance to want was done with Jean in All-New X-Men.

Conclusion 

These two have had a bad start. Despite the missteps Apocalypse look it looks like they are stepping in the right direction with these two character.

[amorremanet]

Sorry if this is a weird question but Is Sebastian the only one of your OCs you have a fancast(?) for or are there more 👀

Well, he’s the one whose fancast is the most set in my mind, but that’s mostly a function of: 1. him being around the longest (since… this whole thing got started, originally, as me writing background for him when he was an RP character, so my DM could have more ammunition for future plots and/or character torture);

and 2. me going, “Kassie, no, do not imagine him looking like Hayden Christensen, istg” — which clearly worked out about as well as telling a goat to do your calculus homework, since going, “don’t do this thing” only made me continue thinking about it so much that it stuck

But some other fancast thoughts I’ve had are:

Todd initially looked like Aidan Turner, but that’s currently in a state of, “ehhhhh, not quite so much” — they still have a few things in common but not enough that I like the fancast anymore

I’m annoyed that Margot, in my head, looks basically like Scar*Jo in Ghost World, if she were about 4’11”, less skinny (like, Margot is in that irritating, “in-betweenie” body type where you’re not really thin, but you’re not fat, but your weight isn’t distributed in the right way for people to mean it in a nice way when they call you, “curvy”), and had black hair and glasses

I’m annoyed with this because I’m annoyed with Scar*Jo in general — but I’m mostly letting it go and hoping that someone else comes to mind, because the last time I fought myself too hard on fancasting these losers, I went, “No, stop it, no Hayden Christensen”…… and now Seb looks like Hayden Christensen, so?

Maybe if I don’t argue with myself too hard, Margot won’t look like Scar*Jo forever.

Lucy changes between Kat McNamara and Sophie Turner, because I really do like both of them for her.

That said, I wish I knew what either of them looks like with short hair, because the long hair works for a little while, but eventually, she’s going to cut it short (because if you’re going to run headlong into things where fights could ensue, then giving your hypothetical opponents something they can easily grab onto, like long hair, is a really bad idea)

(also because I personally find the idea of an eager beaver go-getting young autistic hemokinetic with short, bright red hair and no chill…… super cute)

For Sara Grace, I really love Asha Bromfield, who’s currently playing Melody Valentine on Riverdale

I am perpetually cranky that I don’t have a fancast for Pete, because I love him more than GRRM loves Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister — and I initially thought of Karl “Manila Luzon” Westerberg, because Manila and Pete are both white/Filipinx biracial (and as I just found out, they are apparently the same height)…… but Manila’s skin is a few shades lighter than I see Pete’s, and their respective tones are pretty different, too

Convenient points of comparison: I see Pete’s skin tones and shades being closer to Bianca “Jiggly Caliente” Castro’s or Ryan “Ongina” Ong Palao’s (who are both also Filipinx, though not biracial afaik) than to Manila’s

Pete’s older brother Jimmy is closer to Manila in terms of shading, though their skin-tones are still different

I do know that Emerson, one of Pete’s cousins from his Dad’s side of the family, looks like Eddie Redmayne, but that’s just because Emerson used to be in a different project, and I moved him to this one, and he’s looked like Eddie Redmayne since, like, 2009.

He’s also a really secondary/tertiary character, so it’s kind of a cheap consolation prize to not having a fancast for Pete that makes me happy

Like, Emerson is not quite to, “I could replace him with an interesting lamp and have the same effect” levels, but he’s not a big deal.

I mean?? He’s Pete’s cousin. Both of them are the gay cousin, but Emerson is a gay Libertarian who works for the FBI and Pete is completely certain that he’s making up his alleged boyfriend because why would someone who sounds so cool and nice want to date Emerson

He’s not making up his boyfriend. But Pete’s enjoying himself in trying to prove that Emerson is making Asa up, just like how he made up two separate girlfriends before he accepted that he’s gay, and Pete’s had a pretty rough time of things in the past few years, and he really is Em’s favorite cousin, so Emerson figures he can let Pete enjoy the, “prove that Emerson’s boyfriend is a big conspiracy theory” thing until about Thanksgiving

But that’s beside the point, and seriously, about the most relevance that Emerson has is being Pete’s cousin and being employed by the FBI’s department of mutant shenanigans

Josie, once upon a time, looked like this goth model who I’ve never seen anywhere else but the face-claim suggestions/resources blog where I found the banner and icons that I used for Josie, back when they were a character in an all-dudeslash RPG because in those days, all-slash games were one of the only ways you could play any characters who weren’t 100% hetero without it being hella mocked and/or hella policed

—unfortunately, said goth model’s name is, “Aaron Gilmore” which makes him impossible to Google because there are a ton of people named, “Aaron Gilmore” and none of them has ever been the one I want, excepting the one of whom very few pictures actually exist

He’s also only good for Josie c. high school and undergrad, and?? idk, I kinda like Ben Whishaw, but I also have reasons why I don’t entirely like him for Josie

Another minor character whose face I know: Nick, who is Seb and Pete’s sponsor and Stephen’s boss, looks like Nathan Lane, and pretty much wandered into my head looking like Nathan Lane as soon as I decided that Seb and Pete’s sponsor existed, his name was Nick, and he has an art gallery

I’m kind of annoyed that I have no freaking clue where to start looking for Stephen’s fancast, but I’m also not surprised because he’s tall, and chubby, and a dork whose favorite colors are hot pink and acid green, and who laughs at his own jokes so much that he cannot finish telling the damn joke, and his Dad is black/white biracial while his Mom is Puerto Rican mestizx, and here we are

There is, to the surprise of absolutely no one, a side-character who looks like Tyler Posey. He… needs to be renamed, because I named him at like three in the morning and only just realized why I felt weird about him being named, “Rafael Delgado” (…because Melissa McCall’s maiden name is Delgado, and Scott’s blobfish-shaped gene donor was named Rafael, oh jeez)

—but anyway, he’s a member of the Wardens, who are “totally not” a middle finger to a lot of my issues with how Marvel has handled the X-Men over the years, and he teaches music at their attached school for “the gifted”

This wasn’t the first time that I did something like this, either.

For example: Pete has an ex-boyfriend, who is very much an, “I could replace him with an interesting lamp and it would be essentially the same”-level character. I named him Wade, first as a placeholder, and then I liked it so it stuck but something felt a little off about it

It took me about a month to remember that Spidey*pool is a Thing, and their civvies names are Peter and Wade, respectively, and ohhhhh, that’s why it felt weird…… well, shit. (Interesting Lamp Ex-Boyfriend has since been renamed Blake)

I also have “fancasts” for all of Sebastian’s dogs (Lola, Achilles, Angel, Oscar, Renly, Chewie, Toby, Biscuit, and Cat) and for Nick’s cat (Ms. Dorothy), but that literally just means, “I decided what breed I wanted Ms. Dorothy and Seb’s dogs to be, I went on Google Image Search, and I found the ones I liked the best, yay cute animals”

[seo75074]

Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals

Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals

Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Would you consider yourself a protectionist? I certainly would not consider myself a traditional protectionist, but I wonder if there’s times when viewing my view of the world through other people’s lens has cost me, has held me back, has stopped me from doing what I was meant to do

In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast we visit with Petra Kolber, she’s the author of The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. I think you better check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto and to help support the show Gusto is offering out listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Petra Kolber. She’s international renown fitness expert and wellness leader. Also, the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today called The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. So Petra, thanks for joining us.

Petra Kolber: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me John.

John Jantsch: And I also forgot to mention that you are, you’re gonna shoot me, Scottish.

Petra Kolber: Oh, my god. You are so off. I am British. My dad was Scottish though. I have to be honest, my dad was a Scott.

John Jantsch: There’s a little Scot in your accent still, what’s left of it.

Petra Kolber: If you say so. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, because my mother’s turning in her grave right now going, Scottish?

John Jantsch: I could have called you Australian.

Petra Kolber: That too. I’ll answer to anything John. If I’m just talking to you, whatever works. I’m fine with that.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me ask you this first. Is this book autobiographical?

Petra Kolber: Well they say you teach what you need to learn, so yes. For me it was autobiographical in a sense, but again for me the pain point of the book, as you know with sales and marketing speak to the pain point. That was definitely my own personal pain point for many years and I thought, if I can help people fast track the seven year process or so that it took me, John, to figure out that you don’t have to be perfect to do great things in this world, then I though it’d be a book worth writing.

John Jantsch: So detoxing is really hot right now. I mean there’s probably half a dozen books in every book store about it, and diets and what not. What does that speak to you think?

Petra Kolber: Well I did the name Detox to be honest, like we had talked about before, my background was fitness for 30 years, so detoxing, nutrition is definitely a piece of that and if you look at the books cover, The Perfection, Perfection is very lightly written, so I do believe many people who pick this up thinking it’s a juicing book, but again, so hey why not build on a cultural trend. That’s not why I called it that. Like with detox from anything is basically cleaning out the crud, and that’s what this book is about. It’s not cleaning out the crud from your body or your nutrition, but really your mental aspect and whether you’re gonna go for a job of your dreams, you’re gonna start that business you’ve been thinking about. It really is about, not what you’re doing, but do you feel worthy enough to even begin the dream and how do you feel about yourself along the process?

John Jantsch: Okay, so let’s start here. What does perfection look like?

Petra Kolber: Ha, great question.

John Jantsch: I’m probably saying that because I have no idea. It does not enter into my life in any sense.

Petra Kolber:  You are so lucky John, let me tell you. So I do believe perfection means different things to everybody and I do believe a lot of people have asked me. Why did, this book as you know is definitely got the woman perspective, yet I speak to men and woman across the board, and many men come up to me and go, “Oh my god, you were speaking to me.” Perfection means different things to everybody and what I ask people to consider is, when you think of the word perfect in the three main areas of your life, self care, the relationships of your own personal family relationships, and your work. When you think of the word perfect, does that add joy to your life or does it suck the joy out of you? Because perfect and perfection is only a word until you attach a meaning and an emotion to it. So this book, this idea of perfect, you know detoxing from perfection, some of your listeners might go, “Well, hey perfect works really well for me in my business.”

I strive, and this is not about not working hard. This is not about wanting to be the best that you can be. It’s not about wanting to be the leader in your field and what it is about is how are you feeling about yourself when you’re striving for these high goals? Do you ever reach them, or they are so high where perfections become the basement level. Maybe we can look at different metrics and a different definition of success.

John Jantsch: So I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things that I see is almost rampant in that community is that they didn’t define what perfection was. They’re striving for somebody else’s view of perfection because they see somebody else being more successful in their view, or whatever, having more customers, a bigger launch, a bigger house, you know, whatever it is, and how much do you think that, that plays into it? Is that we don’t step back and even define perfection. We just try to hit somebody else’s target?

Petra Kolber: Oh, that’s so interesting John. Nobody’s ever really put it to me that way. Yeah, I agree and I think whether it’s comparison … I think we are comparing being by definition. We need to look at other people for inspiration and I think Jon Acuff was the one that said, “Don’t compare your beginning to everybody else’s middle.” And what happens, especially in this world of social media and the online culture where everything is coming across our feed so fast and if you’re like me, for many years I never had this idea that I had anything unique to say, so who was I to be doing a book, a bran, an online course and so whether you see it as perfection, like you had said, or you see it as a lack of confidence or the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, I think it’s all about the same thing John. We start looking at ourselves, unwittingly comparing ourselves to others, and then out negativity biased, which is a part of our evolution, is automatically gonna hit on the things that we think we are not enough of.

Or in some cases, we think we’re too much of this and what happens is then, we then stop beating ourselves up and judging ourselves, and I should know better, I shouldn’t be comparing my brand, or my launch to someone else’s launch. The challenge is the part of our brain that’s the strongest, it’s not part of your character flaw, it’s a part of our genetic makeup and unless it goes managed and unless we notice these thoughts John, like “Oh, my god, their launch was so perfect. Or, “They wrote the perfect book, ” or, “Their online program is so perfect,” and unwillingly we’re comparing our back story and our struggles to what we see as their overnight success, which in reality is 10,000 hours of hustle and hard work, and failure after failure and iteration 2.0. This is when we get stopped in our tracks and so it’s where we stop doing, we start watching and then we start becoming paralyzed because we start judging what we think we’re doing to everyone else’s highlight reel.

John Jantsch: So physical toxins, are quite often aligned with something you’re familiar with, as a cancer survivor. How is perfection toxins, what’s that costing us?

Petra Kolber: You got some great questions John. You know what, the interesting thing about this, people often say, “Ah, it’s just a thought. I’m just having these thoughts. I’m beating myself up.” And now science is showing that these thoughts have a physical reaction, a chemical reaction to your body. So what we’re seeing now in this world of elevated stress, elevated anxiety, in the entrepreneurial world and in the life’s of our children, elevated depression, although with our kids, they’re saying anxiety is going up, as depression is coming down a little bit. Every time we have these thoughts, our brain, every time we have a thought of self judgment and doubt, or worry it’s not a status quo, it’s gonna trigger irresponsible in your body. It’s either gonna be fight or flight, or tandem befriend and this cortisol, the adrenalin, and placed on top of the adrenaline and cortisol that gets triggered every time we have an email alert, or a text come in our we have an argument with our partner, or work partner.

This is all having a physical impact on our body and our immune system, our health, our joy, our happiness, and so again, people go, “Oh it’s just a thought.” “Uh, yeah, no.” Because your body can now not … This is science, the science of neuroscience. Your body cannot tell the difference between an actual something we should be afraid of and go on physical defense or a thought where we ramp up and have this same toxic, like you said, toxic emotion built into our body and often to put on top of that John, this work is often happening behind a computer and we’re sitting and you and I just spoke about this before. Sitting is the worse place for our body, our health, our happiness, our focus, our agility, our resilience. So you put all these thoughts on a body that’s now static, it’s just compiled and exasperates to a magnificent and an unfortunate level.

John Jantsch: For the record, I’m at my standing desk right now as we record this interview. I want everybody to know. So let’s pick on social media a little bit now. So let’s pick on social media a little bit, shall we. You know my last interview that I … Who knows when people will actually be listening to these. They probably won’t come out back to back, but Dan Schawbel, Back To Human: How Greatly Leaders Create Connection in an Age of Isolation, and one of the main thrusts of his book is that technology, while it does enable us to do some cool things, it’s probably made us more isolated than ever, and I suspect that in the perfection game, social media is a pretty big culprit isn’t it?

Petra Kolber:  Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea. I think the currency of the future is gonna be connection and I heard Gary V. speak recently at an even and he held up his phone, and he goes, “Technology doesn’t have and opinion,” and I was like, oh that’s good, ’cause I had become silently very judgy about social media and technology. It doesn’t have an opinion, but it’s how we feel about ourselves and how we decide to use it and what our intention is when we’re going onto social media, or any form of technology. So again, it does magnificent things. You and I are having this conversation across the country because of technology. My thought is with social media in particular, there’s many great aspects of it. It allowed me John, over the course of two years recently, to pivot my branding from fitness to happiness and now to this idea of becoming our best selves versus our perfect selves. Social media will allow me to do that without paying a PR company, yet we often use social media to deflect, distract.

We often go on when we’re bored, when we’re a little bit lonely and that is the worst place, the worst time for us to jump on, because then that negative bias, our inner critic is quick to ramp up and then start again, going into that comparison mode, and even though we know that what someone is posting on social media there, there are a million dollar launch, or that perfect this, or we know that’s probably not the exact truth. Maybe it’s a little bit highlighted a little bit, while our brain knows that and for females especially, we see the pictures going across out feed, with that million Instagram followers. Our heart has a really hard time discerning what’s real to what we’re seeing across our feed. So I just say, there’s nothing wrong in social media, but make sure you’re going on with full attention and with what intention. There’s so much noise out there. Do we want to add to the noise or can we elevate the conversation. Add things that make people think, make them feel good, make them want to share what it is that you’re sharing about your thoughts and your view of the world today.

If we’re there to elevate the conversation and make people feel less alone, than it’s a great thing, but then again I keep coming back to this idea of when you step off your time on social media, do you feel more joyful, or has the joy been sucked out of you, and then maybe it’s time to look at who you’re following, your intentions, and just kind of do a quick little detox on your social media too.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits, that stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

So I probably wasn’t gonna bring this up, but you opened the door to it. Do feel that men and women approach this idea of perfection differently?

Petra Kolber: Yes, I do. I mean I think … This is why I wrote the book form a female perspective, ’cause while I’ve had many conversations with men, and I think the suffering is there, but I think it’s a little different. I think, and again, tell me, correct me on this John, I would imagine that sometimes it’s easier for men to compartmentalize their areas of their life. So my job is, I’m crushing it, I’m succeeding, my goal is to be perfect, and their like great, but perhaps your relationships are suffering, or maybe your self care is suffering, whereas I think women have a harder time separating their self care to their relationships, to their work life, to their family, so there’s more of a trickle effect. If I’m not feeling great in this area of my life it’s gonna kind of have a little bit of a trickle effect where I think, and I hope I don’t get a lot of blow black on this.

It might be easier for men to compartmentalize just a little. So while perfection’s working in their work life per se, maybe their self care’s suffering, or their family life is suffering and it doesn’t have the ripple down effect quite as much, and feel free to correct me on that.

John Jantsch:  No, no, I agree 100%. I think society plays a huge role in that too. I remember when my kids were little and I’d take them to … I might have one of them, well I have four, so I might have had all four of them and I’d be carrying one in the grocery store checking out and you know it never failed. Somebody, “Oh you’re such a great dad.” And I wonder what it would take for somebody to actually say, “You’re such a great mom,” if my wife was doing the exact same thing. I think society really … You know, we have much lower expectations I think on men sometimes.

Petra Kolber: It’s a great point and again, not to do any bashing, but I think this expectation that women also place on themselves and the conversation is absolutely changing, a little bit, but even if the conversation is changing externally it’s really hard on the internal conversations that we have with ourselves to ease up the judgment and the self doubt in that area of our life.

John Jantsch: Okay, so we’ve talked a ton about perfection. Let’s talk about detox. Where do you start?

Petra Kolber: Well like with anything I would love to say with this book we start with the joy, but unfortunately you have to clear out the muck. So the first part is just clearing out what’s not working for you and it’s not everything, especially with perfection. Any kind of detox you want to keep what’s working. So you’re gonna keep the flowers but pull out the weeds. So I’m gonna jump back a little bit about perfection John, because there’s many aspects that you want to keep, you’re a hard worker, you strive for excellence, you triple check your work, you’re a great friend, you’re a great coworker. None of that we want to get rid of, but whatever you’re detoxing from, we need to get rid of the stuff that’s not working for you right now. So first bit is clearing out the muck. Then the universe in your brain does not like a vacuum, so you got to put something good in there and this is where my work and my studies with positive psychology enter in. Again our brains default ids the negative, so if we leave a space, then more negative’s gonna come in.

It might have a different voice, a different accent. It might have a Scottish accent, but it’s gonna come in. So we got to put something positive in there and then we want to really be robust for the future. So it’s kind of clearing out the clutter, the muck, which often has happened from our past. Cementing a really positive presence and then from that there’s actually sustainable steps, like creating new habits. As we know, it’s those many daily habits of small, small steps that create magnificent change over time. So how do we do sustainable actions, sustainably new habits around our thinking especially that allows us to create a flourishing future.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that replacement idea is so big. I just read a post, a friend for a long time in this content world and he wrote a post recently. He talked about how he just one day decided to stop drinking alcohol and it just turned into months into year and then he turned around and realized he’d gained 40 pounds and how to like, okay, now I need to replace that with exercise. I think that is so true of our condition isn’t it?

Petra Kolber: Yeah. I mean the thing is, it’s that familiarity. It’s that we’re gonna come back to a habit, whether it’s negative thinking, negative actions that we do, without even realizing that they are negative. They have negative impact. So again, it’s just … And again with this world of becoming, we’re in this attention economy where we’re our lack of full attention. So often times these habits, I think, the negative ones creep in even faster these days, because we’re kind of partially focus, we’re partially engaged without even realizing it. We’re think we’re multitasking, we know there’s no such thing, and I think that has an effect on our inner dialog also, because we’re not fully aware of even the inner habits that we’re maybe replacing, what we thought was a negative just with another negative. So again it’s bringing attention and full intention to all aspects of your life, which is exhausting. So it’s, you do the best you can with what you have.

John Jantsch: Well and you certainly make this point fully in the book fully, but I do think a lot of people when they kind of wake up one day and say, “I have to change something externally.” They really don’t have much success, or at least they don’t stick with it until they change something internally first do they.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day you can want whatever you want. As an entrepreneur, a small business, you can have all the right desires, but unless we’re really looking at the why, what is our driver? Are we being driven by creativity, possibility, seeing failure as just proof that we’re trying, and there’s data in the disasters. If we’re not secure in our foundation John, where we’re building it from a place of, “We are enough,” not meaning there’s not a ton of work that we still need to do to get better at certain aspects of our business, but what often happens is, we can sustain these habits, because the foundation their built on is floored. It’s from an idea of I’m not enough. I’m trying to prove something. I’m trying to prove my worth, versus how can I add worth to the people I’m trying to serve. So again, it’s just with kindness and a curiosity, just continually asking ourselves, why I’m making these choices? Why am I wanting to do this business? What is it in the end that I want to leave? Our legacy. It sounds like a little be grandiose to say, but it really is at the end of the day, don’t we all want to leave the world a little better than when we found it?

That means that we have to continuously and consistently explore our whys and our feelings, not about just the work that we do, but as we grow and evolve and also one thing to make clear is, the closer you get to doing work that really matters, the more you’re gonna struggle with this, because fear is gonna show up, because it just … To me it’s a sign that you’re doing work that you really care about, but when you can flip that wear and stop worrying about, like Seth Godin says, “To be remarkable, means you’re gonna be remarked upon, not just the good but the negative.” When we can flip the fear about what are people gonna say about me if they don’t like my work, onto I’m afraid that I don’t get my work out there and maybe that one person their life could be made easier, by me sharing what it is I believe in, then that’s work worth doing. So, but again, it’s not easy. Our brains gonna notice the negative, the critics, the behind the screen warriors, but when we can believe more in our work, than more about what people think about us, that’s when we can take action behind our dreams.

John Jantsch: So let’s end on a cynical note, shall we?

Petra Kolber: Okay.

John Jantsch: Some might say that perfection has it’s benefits.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, no, again, I mean I never said it didn’t...

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Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals

Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals

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John Jantsch: Would you consider yourself a protectionist? I certainly would not consider myself a traditional protectionist, but I wonder if there’s times when viewing my view of the world through other people’s lens has cost me, has held me back, has stopped me from doing what I was meant to do

In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast we visit with Petra Kolber, she’s the author of The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. I think you better check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto and to help support the show Gusto is offering out listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Petra Kolber. She’s international renown fitness expert and wellness leader. Also, the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today called The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. So Petra, thanks for joining us.

Petra Kolber: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me John.

John Jantsch: And I also forgot to mention that you are, you’re gonna shoot me, Scottish.

Petra Kolber: Oh, my god. You are so off. I am British. My dad was Scottish though. I have to be honest, my dad was a Scott.

John Jantsch: There’s a little Scot in your accent still, what’s left of it.

Petra Kolber: If you say so. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, because my mother’s turning in her grave right now going, Scottish?

John Jantsch: I could have called you Australian.

Petra Kolber: That too. I’ll answer to anything John. If I’m just talking to you, whatever works. I’m fine with that.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me ask you this first. Is this book autobiographical?

Petra Kolber: Well they say you teach what you need to learn, so yes. For me it was autobiographical in a sense, but again for me the pain point of the book, as you know with sales and marketing speak to the pain point. That was definitely my own personal pain point for many years and I thought, if I can help people fast track the seven year process or so that it took me, John, to figure out that you don’t have to be perfect to do great things in this world, then I though it’d be a book worth writing.

John Jantsch: So detoxing is really hot right now. I mean there’s probably half a dozen books in every book store about it, and diets and what not. What does that speak to you think?

Petra Kolber: Well I did the name Detox to be honest, like we had talked about before, my background was fitness for 30 years, so detoxing, nutrition is definitely a piece of that and if you look at the books cover, The Perfection, Perfection is very lightly written, so I do believe many people who pick this up thinking it’s a juicing book, but again, so hey why not build on a cultural trend. That’s not why I called it that. Like with detox from anything is basically cleaning out the crud, and that’s what this book is about. It’s not cleaning out the crud from your body or your nutrition, but really your mental aspect and whether you’re gonna go for a job of your dreams, you’re gonna start that business you’ve been thinking about. It really is about, not what you’re doing, but do you feel worthy enough to even begin the dream and how do you feel about yourself along the process?

John Jantsch: Okay, so let’s start here. What does perfection look like?

Petra Kolber: Ha, great question.

John Jantsch: I’m probably saying that because I have no idea. It does not enter into my life in any sense.

Petra Kolber:  You are so lucky John, let me tell you. So I do believe perfection means different things to everybody and I do believe a lot of people have asked me. Why did, this book as you know is definitely got the woman perspective, yet I speak to men and woman across the board, and many men come up to me and go, “Oh my god, you were speaking to me.” Perfection means different things to everybody and what I ask people to consider is, when you think of the word perfect in the three main areas of your life, self care, the relationships of your own personal family relationships, and your work. When you think of the word perfect, does that add joy to your life or does it suck the joy out of you? Because perfect and perfection is only a word until you attach a meaning and an emotion to it. So this book, this idea of perfect, you know detoxing from perfection, some of your listeners might go, “Well, hey perfect works really well for me in my business.”

I strive, and this is not about not working hard. This is not about wanting to be the best that you can be. It’s not about wanting to be the leader in your field and what it is about is how are you feeling about yourself when you’re striving for these high goals? Do you ever reach them, or they are so high where perfections become the basement level. Maybe we can look at different metrics and a different definition of success.

John Jantsch: So I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things that I see is almost rampant in that community is that they didn’t define what perfection was. They’re striving for somebody else’s view of perfection because they see somebody else being more successful in their view, or whatever, having more customers, a bigger launch, a bigger house, you know, whatever it is, and how much do you think that, that plays into it? Is that we don’t step back and even define perfection. We just try to hit somebody else’s target?

Petra Kolber: Oh, that’s so interesting John. Nobody’s ever really put it to me that way. Yeah, I agree and I think whether it’s comparison … I think we are comparing being by definition. We need to look at other people for inspiration and I think Jon Acuff was the one that said, “Don’t compare your beginning to everybody else’s middle.” And what happens, especially in this world of social media and the online culture where everything is coming across our feed so fast and if you’re like me, for many years I never had this idea that I had anything unique to say, so who was I to be doing a book, a bran, an online course and so whether you see it as perfection, like you had said, or you see it as a lack of confidence or the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, I think it’s all about the same thing John. We start looking at ourselves, unwittingly comparing ourselves to others, and then out negativity biased, which is a part of our evolution, is automatically gonna hit on the things that we think we are not enough of.

Or in some cases, we think we’re too much of this and what happens is then, we then stop beating ourselves up and judging ourselves, and I should know better, I shouldn’t be comparing my brand, or my launch to someone else’s launch. The challenge is the part of our brain that’s the strongest, it’s not part of your character flaw, it’s a part of our genetic makeup and unless it goes managed and unless we notice these thoughts John, like “Oh, my god, their launch was so perfect. Or, “They wrote the perfect book, ” or, “Their online program is so perfect,” and unwillingly we’re comparing our back story and our struggles to what we see as their overnight success, which in reality is 10,000 hours of hustle and hard work, and failure after failure and iteration 2.0. This is when we get stopped in our tracks and so it’s where we stop doing, we start watching and then we start becoming paralyzed because we start judging what we think we’re doing to everyone else’s highlight reel.

John Jantsch: So physical toxins, are quite often aligned with something you’re familiar with, as a cancer survivor. How is perfection toxins, what’s that costing us?

Petra Kolber: You got some great questions John. You know what, the interesting thing about this, people often say, “Ah, it’s just a thought. I’m just having these thoughts. I’m beating myself up.” And now science is showing that these thoughts have a physical reaction, a chemical reaction to your body. So what we’re seeing now in this world of elevated stress, elevated anxiety, in the entrepreneurial world and in the life’s of our children, elevated depression, although with our kids, they’re saying anxiety is going up, as depression is coming down a little bit. Every time we have these thoughts, our brain, every time we have a thought of self judgment and doubt, or worry it’s not a status quo, it’s gonna trigger irresponsible in your body. It’s either gonna be fight or flight, or tandem befriend and this cortisol, the adrenalin, and placed on top of the adrenaline and cortisol that gets triggered every time we have an email alert, or a text come in our we have an argument with our partner, or work partner.

This is all having a physical impact on our body and our immune system, our health, our joy, our happiness, and so again, people go, “Oh it’s just a thought.” “Uh, yeah, no.” Because your body can now not … This is science, the science of neuroscience. Your body cannot tell the difference between an actual something we should be afraid of and go on physical defense or a thought where we ramp up and have this same toxic, like you said, toxic emotion built into our body and often to put on top of that John, this work is often happening behind a computer and we’re sitting and you and I just spoke about this before. Sitting is the worse place for our body, our health, our happiness, our focus, our agility, our resilience. So you put all these thoughts on a body that’s now static, it’s just compiled and exasperates to a magnificent and an unfortunate level.

John Jantsch: For the record, I’m at my standing desk right now as we record this interview. I want everybody to know. So let’s pick on social media a little bit now. So let’s pick on social media a little bit, shall we. You know my last interview that I … Who knows when people will actually be listening to these. They probably won’t come out back to back, but Dan Schawbel, Back To Human: How Greatly Leaders Create Connection in an Age of Isolation, and one of the main thrusts of his book is that technology, while it does enable us to do some cool things, it’s probably made us more isolated than ever, and I suspect that in the perfection game, social media is a pretty big culprit isn’t it?

Petra Kolber:  Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea. I think the currency of the future is gonna be connection and I heard Gary V. speak recently at an even and he held up his phone, and he goes, “Technology doesn’t have and opinion,” and I was like, oh that’s good, ’cause I had become silently very judgy about social media and technology. It doesn’t have an opinion, but it’s how we feel about ourselves and how we decide to use it and what our intention is when we’re going onto social media, or any form of technology. So again, it does magnificent things. You and I are having this conversation across the country because of technology. My thought is with social media in particular, there’s many great aspects of it. It allowed me John, over the course of two years recently, to pivot my branding from fitness to happiness and now to this idea of becoming our best selves versus our perfect selves. Social media will allow me to do that without paying a PR company, yet we often use social media to deflect, distract.

We often go on when we’re bored, when we’re a little bit lonely and that is the worst place, the worst time for us to jump on, because then that negative bias, our inner critic is quick to ramp up and then start again, going into that comparison mode, and even though we know that what someone is posting on social media there, there are a million dollar launch, or that perfect this, or we know that’s probably not the exact truth. Maybe it’s a little bit highlighted a little bit, while our brain knows that and for females especially, we see the pictures going across out feed, with that million Instagram followers. Our heart has a really hard time discerning what’s real to what we’re seeing across our feed. So I just say, there’s nothing wrong in social media, but make sure you’re going on with full attention and with what intention. There’s so much noise out there. Do we want to add to the noise or can we elevate the conversation. Add things that make people think, make them feel good, make them want to share what it is that you’re sharing about your thoughts and your view of the world today.

If we’re there to elevate the conversation and make people feel less alone, than it’s a great thing, but then again I keep coming back to this idea of when you step off your time on social media, do you feel more joyful, or has the joy been sucked out of you, and then maybe it’s time to look at who you’re following, your intentions, and just kind of do a quick little detox on your social media too.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits, that stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

So I probably wasn’t gonna bring this up, but you opened the door to it. Do feel that men and women approach this idea of perfection differently?

Petra Kolber: Yes, I do. I mean I think … This is why I wrote the book form a female perspective, ’cause while I’ve had many conversations with men, and I think the suffering is there, but I think it’s a little different. I think, and again, tell me, correct me on this John, I would imagine that sometimes it’s easier for men to compartmentalize their areas of their life. So my job is, I’m crushing it, I’m succeeding, my goal is to be perfect, and their like great, but perhaps your relationships are suffering, or maybe your self care is suffering, whereas I think women have a harder time separating their self care to their relationships, to their work life, to their family, so there’s more of a trickle effect. If I’m not feeling great in this area of my life it’s gonna kind of have a little bit of a trickle effect where I think, and I hope I don’t get a lot of blow black on this.

It might be easier for men to compartmentalize just a little. So while perfection’s working in their work life per se, maybe their self care’s suffering, or their family life is suffering and it doesn’t have the ripple down effect quite as much, and feel free to correct me on that.

John Jantsch:  No, no, I agree 100%. I think society plays a huge role in that too. I remember when my kids were little and I’d take them to … I might have one of them, well I have four, so I might have had all four of them and I’d be carrying one in the grocery store checking out and you know it never failed. Somebody, “Oh you’re such a great dad.” And I wonder what it would take for somebody to actually say, “You’re such a great mom,” if my wife was doing the exact same thing. I think society really … You know, we have much lower expectations I think on men sometimes.

Petra Kolber: It’s a great point and again, not to do any bashing, but I think this expectation that women also place on themselves and the conversation is absolutely changing, a little bit, but even if the conversation is changing externally it’s really hard on the internal conversations that we have with ourselves to ease up the judgment and the self doubt in that area of our life.

John Jantsch: Okay, so we’ve talked a ton about perfection. Let’s talk about detox. Where do you start?

Petra Kolber: Well like with anything I would love to say with this book we start with the joy, but unfortunately you have to clear out the muck. So the first part is just clearing out what’s not working for you and it’s not everything, especially with perfection. Any kind of detox you want to keep what’s working. So you’re gonna keep the flowers but pull out the weeds. So I’m gonna jump back a little bit about perfection John, because there’s many aspects that you want to keep, you’re a hard worker, you strive for excellence, you triple check your work, you’re a great friend, you’re a great coworker. None of that we want to get rid of, but whatever you’re detoxing from, we need to get rid of the stuff that’s not working for you right now. So first bit is clearing out the muck. Then the universe in your brain does not like a vacuum, so you got to put something good in there and this is where my work and my studies with positive psychology enter in. Again our brains default ids the negative, so if we leave a space, then more negative’s gonna come in.

It might have a different voice, a different accent. It might have a Scottish accent, but it’s gonna come in. So we got to put something positive in there and then we want to really be robust for the future. So it’s kind of clearing out the clutter, the muck, which often has happened from our past. Cementing a really positive presence and then from that there’s actually sustainable steps, like creating new habits. As we know, it’s those many daily habits of small, small steps that create magnificent change over time. So how do we do sustainable actions, sustainably new habits around our thinking especially that allows us to create a flourishing future.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that replacement idea is so big. I just read a post, a friend for a long time in this content world and he wrote a post recently. He talked about how he just one day decided to stop drinking alcohol and it just turned into months into year and then he turned around and realized he’d gained 40 pounds and how to like, okay, now I need to replace that with exercise. I think that is so true of our condition isn’t it?

Petra Kolber: Yeah. I mean the thing is, it’s that familiarity. It’s that we’re gonna come back to a habit, whether it’s negative thinking, negative actions that we do, without even realizing that they are negative. They have negative impact. So again, it’s just … And again with this world of becoming, we’re in this attention economy where we’re our lack of full attention. So often times these habits, I think, the negative ones creep in even faster these days, because we’re kind of partially focus, we’re partially engaged without even realizing it. We’re think we’re multitasking, we know there’s no such thing, and I think that has an effect on our inner dialog also, because we’re not fully aware of even the inner habits that we’re maybe replacing, what we thought was a negative just with another negative. So again it’s bringing attention and full intention to all aspects of your life, which is exhausting. So it’s, you do the best you can with what you have.

John Jantsch: Well and you certainly make this point fully in the book fully, but I do think a lot of people when they kind of wake up one day and say, “I have to change something externally.” They really don’t have much success, or at least they don’t stick with it until they change something internally first do they.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day you can want whatever you want. As an entrepreneur, a small business, you can have all the right desires, but unless we’re really looking at the why, what is our driver? Are we being driven by creativity, possibility, seeing failure as just proof that we’re trying, and there’s data in the disasters. If we’re not secure in our foundation John, where we’re building it from a place of, “We are enough,” not meaning there’s not a ton of work that we still need to do to get better at certain aspects of our business, but what often happens is, we can sustain these habits, because the foundation their built on is floored. It’s from an idea of I’m not enough. I’m trying to prove something. I’m trying to prove my worth, versus how can I add worth to the people I’m trying to serve. So again, it’s just with kindness and a curiosity, just continually asking ourselves, why I’m making these choices? Why am I wanting to do this business? What is it in the end that I want to leave? Our legacy. It sounds like a little be grandiose to say, but it really is at the end of the day, don’t we all want to leave the world a little better than when we found it?

That means that we have to continuously and consistently explore our whys and our feelings, not about just the work that we do, but as we grow and evolve and also one thing to make clear is, the closer you get to doing work that really matters, the more you’re gonna struggle with this, because fear is gonna show up, because it just … To me it’s a sign that you’re doing work that you really care about, but when you can flip that wear and stop worrying about, like Seth Godin says, “To be remarkable, means you’re gonna be remarked upon, not just the good but the negative.” When we can flip the fear about what are people gonna say about me if they don’t like my work, onto I’m afraid that I don’t get my work out there and maybe that one person their life could be made easier, by me sharing what it is I believe in, then that’s work worth doing. So, but again, it’s not easy. Our brains gonna notice the negative, the critics, the behind the screen warriors, but when we can believe more in our work, than more about what people think about us, that’s when we can take action behind our dreams.

John Jantsch: So let’s end on a cynical note, shall we?

Petra Kolber: Okay.

John Jantsch: Some might say that perfection has it’s benefits.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, no, again, I mean I never said it didn’t...

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Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals

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John Jantsch: Would you consider yourself a protectionist? I certainly would not consider myself a traditional protectionist, but I wonder if there’s times when viewing my view of the world through other people’s lens has cost me, has held me back, has stopped me from doing what I was meant to do

In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast we visit with Petra Kolber, she’s the author of The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. I think you better check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto and to help support the show Gusto is offering out listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Petra Kolber. She’s international renown fitness expert and wellness leader. Also, the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today called The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. So Petra, thanks for joining us.

Petra Kolber: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me John.

John Jantsch: And I also forgot to mention that you are, you’re gonna shoot me, Scottish.

Petra Kolber: Oh, my god. You are so off. I am British. My dad was Scottish though. I have to be honest, my dad was a Scott.

John Jantsch: There’s a little Scot in your accent still, what’s left of it.

Petra Kolber: If you say so. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, because my mother’s turning in her grave right now going, Scottish?

John Jantsch: I could have called you Australian.

Petra Kolber: That too. I’ll answer to anything John. If I’m just talking to you, whatever works. I’m fine with that.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me ask you this first. Is this book autobiographical?

Petra Kolber: Well they say you teach what you need to learn, so yes. For me it was autobiographical in a sense, but again for me the pain point of the book, as you know with sales and marketing speak to the pain point. That was definitely my own personal pain point for many years and I thought, if I can help people fast track the seven year process or so that it took me, John, to figure out that you don’t have to be perfect to do great things in this world, then I though it’d be a book worth writing.

John Jantsch: So detoxing is really hot right now. I mean there’s probably half a dozen books in every book store about it, and diets and what not. What does that speak to you think?

Petra Kolber: Well I did the name Detox to be honest, like we had talked about before, my background was fitness for 30 years, so detoxing, nutrition is definitely a piece of that and if you look at the books cover, The Perfection, Perfection is very lightly written, so I do believe many people who pick this up thinking it’s a juicing book, but again, so hey why not build on a cultural trend. That’s not why I called it that. Like with detox from anything is basically cleaning out the crud, and that’s what this book is about. It’s not cleaning out the crud from your body or your nutrition, but really your mental aspect and whether you’re gonna go for a job of your dreams, you’re gonna start that business you’ve been thinking about. It really is about, not what you’re doing, but do you feel worthy enough to even begin the dream and how do you feel about yourself along the process?

John Jantsch: Okay, so let’s start here. What does perfection look like?

Petra Kolber: Ha, great question.

John Jantsch: I’m probably saying that because I have no idea. It does not enter into my life in any sense.

Petra Kolber:  You are so lucky John, let me tell you. So I do believe perfection means different things to everybody and I do believe a lot of people have asked me. Why did, this book as you know is definitely got the woman perspective, yet I speak to men and woman across the board, and many men come up to me and go, “Oh my god, you were speaking to me.” Perfection means different things to everybody and what I ask people to consider is, when you think of the word perfect in the three main areas of your life, self care, the relationships of your own personal family relationships, and your work. When you think of the word perfect, does that add joy to your life or does it suck the joy out of you? Because perfect and perfection is only a word until you attach a meaning and an emotion to it. So this book, this idea of perfect, you know detoxing from perfection, some of your listeners might go, “Well, hey perfect works really well for me in my business.”

I strive, and this is not about not working hard. This is not about wanting to be the best that you can be. It’s not about wanting to be the leader in your field and what it is about is how are you feeling about yourself when you’re striving for these high goals? Do you ever reach them, or they are so high where perfections become the basement level. Maybe we can look at different metrics and a different definition of success.

John Jantsch: So I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things that I see is almost rampant in that community is that they didn’t define what perfection was. They’re striving for somebody else’s view of perfection because they see somebody else being more successful in their view, or whatever, having more customers, a bigger launch, a bigger house, you know, whatever it is, and how much do you think that, that plays into it? Is that we don’t step back and even define perfection. We just try to hit somebody else’s target?

Petra Kolber: Oh, that’s so interesting John. Nobody’s ever really put it to me that way. Yeah, I agree and I think whether it’s comparison … I think we are comparing being by definition. We need to look at other people for inspiration and I think Jon Acuff was the one that said, “Don’t compare your beginning to everybody else’s middle.” And what happens, especially in this world of social media and the online culture where everything is coming across our feed so fast and if you’re like me, for many years I never had this idea that I had anything unique to say, so who was I to be doing a book, a bran, an online course and so whether you see it as perfection, like you had said, or you see it as a lack of confidence or the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, I think it’s all about the same thing John. We start looking at ourselves, unwittingly comparing ourselves to others, and then out negativity biased, which is a part of our evolution, is automatically gonna hit on the things that we think we are not enough of.

Or in some cases, we think we’re too much of this and what happens is then, we then stop beating ourselves up and judging ourselves, and I should know better, I shouldn’t be comparing my brand, or my launch to someone else’s launch. The challenge is the part of our brain that’s the strongest, it’s not part of your character flaw, it’s a part of our genetic makeup and unless it goes managed and unless we notice these thoughts John, like “Oh, my god, their launch was so perfect. Or, “They wrote the perfect book, ” or, “Their online program is so perfect,” and unwillingly we’re comparing our back story and our struggles to what we see as their overnight success, which in reality is 10,000 hours of hustle and hard work, and failure after failure and iteration 2.0. This is when we get stopped in our tracks and so it’s where we stop doing, we start watching and then we start becoming paralyzed because we start judging what we think we’re doing to everyone else’s highlight reel.

John Jantsch: So physical toxins, are quite often aligned with something you’re familiar with, as a cancer survivor. How is perfection toxins, what’s that costing us?

Petra Kolber: You got some great questions John. You know what, the interesting thing about this, people often say, “Ah, it’s just a thought. I’m just having these thoughts. I’m beating myself up.” And now science is showing that these thoughts have a physical reaction, a chemical reaction to your body. So what we’re seeing now in this world of elevated stress, elevated anxiety, in the entrepreneurial world and in the life’s of our children, elevated depression, although with our kids, they’re saying anxiety is going up, as depression is coming down a little bit. Every time we have these thoughts, our brain, every time we have a thought of self judgment and doubt, or worry it’s not a status quo, it’s gonna trigger irresponsible in your body. It’s either gonna be fight or flight, or tandem befriend and this cortisol, the adrenalin, and placed on top of the adrenaline and cortisol that gets triggered every time we have an email alert, or a text come in our we have an argument with our partner, or work partner.

This is all having a physical impact on our body and our immune system, our health, our joy, our happiness, and so again, people go, “Oh it’s just a thought.” “Uh, yeah, no.” Because your body can now not … This is science, the science of neuroscience. Your body cannot tell the difference between an actual something we should be afraid of and go on physical defense or a thought where we ramp up and have this same toxic, like you said, toxic emotion built into our body and often to put on top of that John, this work is often happening behind a computer and we’re sitting and you and I just spoke about this before. Sitting is the worse place for our body, our health, our happiness, our focus, our agility, our resilience. So you put all these thoughts on a body that’s now static, it’s just compiled and exasperates to a magnificent and an unfortunate level.

John Jantsch: For the record, I’m at my standing desk right now as we record this interview. I want everybody to know. So let’s pick on social media a little bit now. So let’s pick on social media a little bit, shall we. You know my last interview that I … Who knows when people will actually be listening to these. They probably won’t come out back to back, but Dan Schawbel, Back To Human: How Greatly Leaders Create Connection in an Age of Isolation, and one of the main thrusts of his book is that technology, while it does enable us to do some cool things, it’s probably made us more isolated than ever, and I suspect that in the perfection game, social media is a pretty big culprit isn’t it?

Petra Kolber:  Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea. I think the currency of the future is gonna be connection and I heard Gary V. speak recently at an even and he held up his phone, and he goes, “Technology doesn’t have and opinion,” and I was like, oh that’s good, ’cause I had become silently very judgy about social media and technology. It doesn’t have an opinion, but it’s how we feel about ourselves and how we decide to use it and what our intention is when we’re going onto social media, or any form of technology. So again, it does magnificent things. You and I are having this conversation across the country because of technology. My thought is with social media in particular, there’s many great aspects of it. It allowed me John, over the course of two years recently, to pivot my branding from fitness to happiness and now to this idea of becoming our best selves versus our perfect selves. Social media will allow me to do that without paying a PR company, yet we often use social media to deflect, distract.

We often go on when we’re bored, when we’re a little bit lonely and that is the worst place, the worst time for us to jump on, because then that negative bias, our inner critic is quick to ramp up and then start again, going into that comparison mode, and even though we know that what someone is posting on social media there, there are a million dollar launch, or that perfect this, or we know that’s probably not the exact truth. Maybe it’s a little bit highlighted a little bit, while our brain knows that and for females especially, we see the pictures going across out feed, with that million Instagram followers. Our heart has a really hard time discerning what’s real to what we’re seeing across our feed. So I just say, there’s nothing wrong in social media, but make sure you’re going on with full attention and with what intention. There’s so much noise out there. Do we want to add to the noise or can we elevate the conversation. Add things that make people think, make them feel good, make them want to share what it is that you’re sharing about your thoughts and your view of the world today.

If we’re there to elevate the conversation and make people feel less alone, than it’s a great thing, but then again I keep coming back to this idea of when you step off your time on social media, do you feel more joyful, or has the joy been sucked out of you, and then maybe it’s time to look at who you’re following, your intentions, and just kind of do a quick little detox on your social media too.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits, that stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

So I probably wasn’t gonna bring this up, but you opened the door to it. Do feel that men and women approach this idea of perfection differently?

Petra Kolber: Yes, I do. I mean I think … This is why I wrote the book form a female perspective, ’cause while I’ve had many conversations with men, and I think the suffering is there, but I think it’s a little different. I think, and again, tell me, correct me on this John, I would imagine that sometimes it’s easier for men to compartmentalize their areas of their life. So my job is, I’m crushing it, I’m succeeding, my goal is to be perfect, and their like great, but perhaps your relationships are suffering, or maybe your self care is suffering, whereas I think women have a harder time separating their self care to their relationships, to their work life, to their family, so there’s more of a trickle effect. If I’m not feeling great in this area of my life it’s gonna kind of have a little bit of a trickle effect where I think, and I hope I don’t get a lot of blow black on this.

It might be easier for men to compartmentalize just a little. So while perfection’s working in their work life per se, maybe their self care’s suffering, or their family life is suffering and it doesn’t have the ripple down effect quite as much, and feel free to correct me on that.

John Jantsch:  No, no, I agree 100%. I think society plays a huge role in that too. I remember when my kids were little and I’d take them to … I might have one of them, well I have four, so I might have had all four of them and I’d be carrying one in the grocery store checking out and you know it never failed. Somebody, “Oh you’re such a great dad.” And I wonder what it would take for somebody to actually say, “You’re such a great mom,” if my wife was doing the exact same thing. I think society really … You know, we have much lower expectations I think on men sometimes.

Petra Kolber: It’s a great point and again, not to do any bashing, but I think this expectation that women also place on themselves and the conversation is absolutely changing, a little bit, but even if the conversation is changing externally it’s really hard on the internal conversations that we have with ourselves to ease up the judgment and the self doubt in that area of our life.

John Jantsch: Okay, so we’ve talked a ton about perfection. Let’s talk about detox. Where do you start?

Petra Kolber: Well like with anything I would love to say with this book we start with the joy, but unfortunately you have to clear out the muck. So the first part is just clearing out what’s not working for you and it’s not everything, especially with perfection. Any kind of detox you want to keep what’s working. So you’re gonna keep the flowers but pull out the weeds. So I’m gonna jump back a little bit about perfection John, because there’s many aspects that you want to keep, you’re a hard worker, you strive for excellence, you triple check your work, you’re a great friend, you’re a great coworker. None of that we want to get rid of, but whatever you’re detoxing from, we need to get rid of the stuff that’s not working for you right now. So first bit is clearing out the muck. Then the universe in your brain does not like a vacuum, so you got to put something good in there and this is where my work and my studies with positive psychology enter in. Again our brains default ids the negative, so if we leave a space, then more negative’s gonna come in.

It might have a different voice, a different accent. It might have a Scottish accent, but it’s gonna come in. So we got to put something positive in there and then we want to really be robust for the future. So it’s kind of clearing out the clutter, the muck, which often has happened from our past. Cementing a really positive presence and then from that there’s actually sustainable steps, like creating new habits. As we know, it’s those many daily habits of small, small steps that create magnificent change over time. So how do we do sustainable actions, sustainably new habits around our thinking especially that allows us to create a flourishing future.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that replacement idea is so big. I just read a post, a friend for a long time in this content world and he wrote a post recently. He talked about how he just one day decided to stop drinking alcohol and it just turned into months into year and then he turned around and realized he’d gained 40 pounds and how to like, okay, now I need to replace that with exercise. I think that is so true of our condition isn’t it?

Petra Kolber: Yeah. I mean the thing is, it’s that familiarity. It’s that we’re gonna come back to a habit, whether it’s negative thinking, negative actions that we do, without even realizing that they are negative. They have negative impact. So again, it’s just … And again with this world of becoming, we’re in this attention economy where we’re our lack of full attention. So often times these habits, I think, the negative ones creep in even faster these days, because we’re kind of partially focus, we’re partially engaged without even realizing it. We’re think we’re multitasking, we know there’s no such thing, and I think that has an effect on our inner dialog also, because we’re not fully aware of even the inner habits that we’re maybe replacing, what we thought was a negative just with another negative. So again it’s bringing attention and full intention to all aspects of your life, which is exhausting. So it’s, you do the best you can with what you have.

John Jantsch: Well and you certainly make this point fully in the book fully, but I do think a lot of people when they kind of wake up one day and say, “I have to change something externally.” They really don’t have much success, or at least they don’t stick with it until they change something internally first do they.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day you can want whatever you want. As an entrepreneur, a small business, you can have all the right desires, but unless we’re really looking at the why, what is our driver? Are we being driven by creativity, possibility, seeing failure as just proof that we’re trying, and there’s data in the disasters. If we’re not secure in our foundation John, where we’re building it from a place of, “We are enough,” not meaning there’s not a ton of work that we still need to do to get better at certain aspects of our business, but what often happens is, we can sustain these habits, because the foundation their built on is floored. It’s from an idea of I’m not enough. I’m trying to prove something. I’m trying to prove my worth, versus how can I add worth to the people I’m trying to serve. So again, it’s just with kindness and a curiosity, just continually asking ourselves, why I’m making these choices? Why am I wanting to do this business? What is it in the end that I want to leave? Our legacy. It sounds like a little be grandiose to say, but it really is at the end of the day, don’t we all want to leave the world a little better than when we found it?

That means that we have to continuously and consistently explore our whys and our feelings, not about just the work that we do, but as we grow and evolve and also one thing to make clear is, the closer you get to doing work that really matters, the more you’re gonna struggle with this, because fear is gonna show up, because it just … To me it’s a sign that you’re doing work that you really care about, but when you can flip that wear and stop worrying about, like Seth Godin says, “To be remarkable, means you’re gonna be remarked upon, not just the good but the negative.” When we can flip the fear about what are people gonna say about me if they don’t like my work, onto I’m afraid that I don’t get my work out there and maybe that one person their life could be made easier, by me sharing what it is I believe in, then that’s work worth doing. So, but again, it’s not easy. Our brains gonna notice the negative, the critics, the behind the screen warriors, but when we can believe more in our work, than more about what people think about us, that’s when we can take action behind our dreams.

John Jantsch: So let’s end on a cynical note, shall we?

Petra Kolber: Okay.

John Jantsch: Some might say that perfection has it’s benefits.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, no, again, I mean I never said it didn’t...

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John Jantsch: Would you consider yourself a protectionist? I certainly would not consider myself a traditional protectionist, but I wonder if there’s times when viewing my view of the world through other people’s lens has cost me, has held me back, has stopped me from doing what I was meant to do

In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast we visit with Petra Kolber, she’s the author of The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. I think you better check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto and to help support the show Gusto is offering out listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Petra Kolber. She’s international renown fitness expert and wellness leader. Also, the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today called The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. So Petra, thanks for joining us.

Petra Kolber: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me John.

John Jantsch: And I also forgot to mention that you are, you’re gonna shoot me, Scottish.

Petra Kolber: Oh, my god. You are so off. I am British. My dad was Scottish though. I have to be honest, my dad was a Scott.

John Jantsch: There’s a little Scot in your accent still, what’s left of it.

Petra Kolber: If you say so. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, because my mother’s turning in her grave right now going, Scottish?

John Jantsch: I could have called you Australian.

Petra Kolber: That too. I’ll answer to anything John. If I’m just talking to you, whatever works. I’m fine with that.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me ask you this first. Is this book autobiographical?

Petra Kolber: Well they say you teach what you need to learn, so yes. For me it was autobiographical in a sense, but again for me the pain point of the book, as you know with sales and marketing speak to the pain point. That was definitely my own personal pain point for many years and I thought, if I can help people fast track the seven year process or so that it took me, John, to figure out that you don’t have to be perfect to do great things in this world, then I though it’d be a book worth writing.

John Jantsch: So detoxing is really hot right now. I mean there’s probably half a dozen books in every book store about it, and diets and what not. What does that speak to you think?

Petra Kolber: Well I did the name Detox to be honest, like we had talked about before, my background was fitness for 30 years, so detoxing, nutrition is definitely a piece of that and if you look at the books cover, The Perfection, Perfection is very lightly written, so I do believe many people who pick this up thinking it’s a juicing book, but again, so hey why not build on a cultural trend. That’s not why I called it that. Like with detox from anything is basically cleaning out the crud, and that’s what this book is about. It’s not cleaning out the crud from your body or your nutrition, but really your mental aspect and whether you’re gonna go for a job of your dreams, you’re gonna start that business you’ve been thinking about. It really is about, not what you’re doing, but do you feel worthy enough to even begin the dream and how do you feel about yourself along the process?

John Jantsch: Okay, so let’s start here. What does perfection look like?

Petra Kolber: Ha, great question.

John Jantsch: I’m probably saying that because I have no idea. It does not enter into my life in any sense.

Petra Kolber:  You are so lucky John, let me tell you. So I do believe perfection means different things to everybody and I do believe a lot of people have asked me. Why did, this book as you know is definitely got the woman perspective, yet I speak to men and woman across the board, and many men come up to me and go, “Oh my god, you were speaking to me.” Perfection means different things to everybody and what I ask people to consider is, when you think of the word perfect in the three main areas of your life, self care, the relationships of your own personal family relationships, and your work. When you think of the word perfect, does that add joy to your life or does it suck the joy out of you? Because perfect and perfection is only a word until you attach a meaning and an emotion to it. So this book, this idea of perfect, you know detoxing from perfection, some of your listeners might go, “Well, hey perfect works really well for me in my business.”

I strive, and this is not about not working hard. This is not about wanting to be the best that you can be. It’s not about wanting to be the leader in your field and what it is about is how are you feeling about yourself when you’re striving for these high goals? Do you ever reach them, or they are so high where perfections become the basement level. Maybe we can look at different metrics and a different definition of success.

John Jantsch: So I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things that I see is almost rampant in that community is that they didn’t define what perfection was. They’re striving for somebody else’s view of perfection because they see somebody else being more successful in their view, or whatever, having more customers, a bigger launch, a bigger house, you know, whatever it is, and how much do you think that, that plays into it? Is that we don’t step back and even define perfection. We just try to hit somebody else’s target?

Petra Kolber: Oh, that’s so interesting John. Nobody’s ever really put it to me that way. Yeah, I agree and I think whether it’s comparison … I think we are comparing being by definition. We need to look at other people for inspiration and I think Jon Acuff was the one that said, “Don’t compare your beginning to everybody else’s middle.” And what happens, especially in this world of social media and the online culture where everything is coming across our feed so fast and if you’re like me, for many years I never had this idea that I had anything unique to say, so who was I to be doing a book, a bran, an online course and so whether you see it as perfection, like you had said, or you see it as a lack of confidence or the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, I think it’s all about the same thing John. We start looking at ourselves, unwittingly comparing ourselves to others, and then out negativity biased, which is a part of our evolution, is automatically gonna hit on the things that we think we are not enough of.

Or in some cases, we think we’re too much of this and what happens is then, we then stop beating ourselves up and judging ourselves, and I should know better, I shouldn’t be comparing my brand, or my launch to someone else’s launch. The challenge is the part of our brain that’s the strongest, it’s not part of your character flaw, it’s a part of our genetic makeup and unless it goes managed and unless we notice these thoughts John, like “Oh, my god, their launch was so perfect. Or, “They wrote the perfect book, ” or, “Their online program is so perfect,” and unwillingly we’re comparing our back story and our struggles to what we see as their overnight success, which in reality is 10,000 hours of hustle and hard work, and failure after failure and iteration 2.0. This is when we get stopped in our tracks and so it’s where we stop doing, we start watching and then we start becoming paralyzed because we start judging what we think we’re doing to everyone else’s highlight reel.

John Jantsch: So physical toxins, are quite often aligned with something you’re familiar with, as a cancer survivor. How is perfection toxins, what’s that costing us?

Petra Kolber: You got some great questions John. You know what, the interesting thing about this, people often say, “Ah, it’s just a thought. I’m just having these thoughts. I’m beating myself up.” And now science is showing that these thoughts have a physical reaction, a chemical reaction to your body. So what we’re seeing now in this world of elevated stress, elevated anxiety, in the entrepreneurial world and in the life’s of our children, elevated depression, although with our kids, they’re saying anxiety is going up, as depression is coming down a little bit. Every time we have these thoughts, our brain, every time we have a thought of self judgment and doubt, or worry it’s not a status quo, it’s gonna trigger irresponsible in your body. It’s either gonna be fight or flight, or tandem befriend and this cortisol, the adrenalin, and placed on top of the adrenaline and cortisol that gets triggered every time we have an email alert, or a text come in our we have an argument with our partner, or work partner.

This is all having a physical impact on our body and our immune system, our health, our joy, our happiness, and so again, people go, “Oh it’s just a thought.” “Uh, yeah, no.” Because your body can now not … This is science, the science of neuroscience. Your body cannot tell the difference between an actual something we should be afraid of and go on physical defense or a thought where we ramp up and have this same toxic, like you said, toxic emotion built into our body and often to put on top of that John, this work is often happening behind a computer and we’re sitting and you and I just spoke about this before. Sitting is the worse place for our body, our health, our happiness, our focus, our agility, our resilience. So you put all these thoughts on a body that’s now static, it’s just compiled and exasperates to a magnificent and an unfortunate level.

John Jantsch: For the record, I’m at my standing desk right now as we record this interview. I want everybody to know. So let’s pick on social media a little bit now. So let’s pick on social media a little bit, shall we. You know my last interview that I … Who knows when people will actually be listening to these. They probably won’t come out back to back, but Dan Schawbel, Back To Human: How Greatly Leaders Create Connection in an Age of Isolation, and one of the main thrusts of his book is that technology, while it does enable us to do some cool things, it’s probably made us more isolated than ever, and I suspect that in the perfection game, social media is a pretty big culprit isn’t it?

Petra Kolber:  Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea. I think the currency of the future is gonna be connection and I heard Gary V. speak recently at an even and he held up his phone, and he goes, “Technology doesn’t have and opinion,” and I was like, oh that’s good, ’cause I had become silently very judgy about social media and technology. It doesn’t have an opinion, but it’s how we feel about ourselves and how we decide to use it and what our intention is when we’re going onto social media, or any form of technology. So again, it does magnificent things. You and I are having this conversation across the country because of technology. My thought is with social media in particular, there’s many great aspects of it. It allowed me John, over the course of two years recently, to pivot my branding from fitness to happiness and now to this idea of becoming our best selves versus our perfect selves. Social media will allow me to do that without paying a PR company, yet we often use social media to deflect, distract.

We often go on when we’re bored, when we’re a little bit lonely and that is the worst place, the worst time for us to jump on, because then that negative bias, our inner critic is quick to ramp up and then start again, going into that comparison mode, and even though we know that what someone is posting on social media there, there are a million dollar launch, or that perfect this, or we know that’s probably not the exact truth. Maybe it’s a little bit highlighted a little bit, while our brain knows that and for females especially, we see the pictures going across out feed, with that million Instagram followers. Our heart has a really hard time discerning what’s real to what we’re seeing across our feed. So I just say, there’s nothing wrong in social media, but make sure you’re going on with full attention and with what intention. There’s so much noise out there. Do we want to add to the noise or can we elevate the conversation. Add things that make people think, make them feel good, make them want to share what it is that you’re sharing about your thoughts and your view of the world today.

If we’re there to elevate the conversation and make people feel less alone, than it’s a great thing, but then again I keep coming back to this idea of when you step off your time on social media, do you feel more joyful, or has the joy been sucked out of you, and then maybe it’s time to look at who you’re following, your intentions, and just kind of do a quick little detox on your social media too.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits, that stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

So I probably wasn’t gonna bring this up, but you opened the door to it. Do feel that men and women approach this idea of perfection differently?

Petra Kolber: Yes, I do. I mean I think … This is why I wrote the book form a female perspective, ’cause while I’ve had many conversations with men, and I think the suffering is there, but I think it’s a little different. I think, and again, tell me, correct me on this John, I would imagine that sometimes it’s easier for men to compartmentalize their areas of their life. So my job is, I’m crushing it, I’m succeeding, my goal is to be perfect, and their like great, but perhaps your relationships are suffering, or maybe your self care is suffering, whereas I think women have a harder time separating their self care to their relationships, to their work life, to their family, so there’s more of a trickle effect. If I’m not feeling great in this area of my life it’s gonna kind of have a little bit of a trickle effect where I think, and I hope I don’t get a lot of blow black on this.

It might be easier for men to compartmentalize just a little. So while perfection’s working in their work life per se, maybe their self care’s suffering, or their family life is suffering and it doesn’t have the ripple down effect quite as much, and feel free to correct me on that.

John Jantsch:  No, no, I agree 100%. I think society plays a huge role in that too. I remember when my kids were little and I’d take them to … I might have one of them, well I have four, so I might have had all four of them and I’d be carrying one in the grocery store checking out and you know it never failed. Somebody, “Oh you’re such a great dad.” And I wonder what it would take for somebody to actually say, “You’re such a great mom,” if my wife was doing the exact same thing. I think society really … You know, we have much lower expectations I think on men sometimes.

Petra Kolber: It’s a great point and again, not to do any bashing, but I think this expectation that women also place on themselves and the conversation is absolutely changing, a little bit, but even if the conversation is changing externally it’s really hard on the internal conversations that we have with ourselves to ease up the judgment and the self doubt in that area of our life.

John Jantsch: Okay, so we’ve talked a ton about perfection. Let’s talk about detox. Where do you start?

Petra Kolber: Well like with anything I would love to say with this book we start with the joy, but unfortunately you have to clear out the muck. So the first part is just clearing out what’s not working for you and it’s not everything, especially with perfection. Any kind of detox you want to keep what’s working. So you’re gonna keep the flowers but pull out the weeds. So I’m gonna jump back a little bit about perfection John, because there’s many aspects that you want to keep, you’re a hard worker, you strive for excellence, you triple check your work, you’re a great friend, you’re a great coworker. None of that we want to get rid of, but whatever you’re detoxing from, we need to get rid of the stuff that’s not working for you right now. So first bit is clearing out the muck. Then the universe in your brain does not like a vacuum, so you got to put something good in there and this is where my work and my studies with positive psychology enter in. Again our brains default ids the negative, so if we leave a space, then more negative’s gonna come in.

It might have a different voice, a different accent. It might have a Scottish accent, but it’s gonna come in. So we got to put something positive in there and then we want to really be robust for the future. So it’s kind of clearing out the clutter, the muck, which often has happened from our past. Cementing a really positive presence and then from that there’s actually sustainable steps, like creating new habits. As we know, it’s those many daily habits of small, small steps that create magnificent change over time. So how do we do sustainable actions, sustainably new habits around our thinking especially that allows us to create a flourishing future.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that replacement idea is so big. I just read a post, a friend for a long time in this content world and he wrote a post recently. He talked about how he just one day decided to stop drinking alcohol and it just turned into months into year and then he turned around and realized he’d gained 40 pounds and how to like, okay, now I need to replace that with exercise. I think that is so true of our condition isn’t it?

Petra Kolber: Yeah. I mean the thing is, it’s that familiarity. It’s that we’re gonna come back to a habit, whether it’s negative thinking, negative actions that we do, without even realizing that they are negative. They have negative impact. So again, it’s just … And again with this world of becoming, we’re in this attention economy where we’re our lack of full attention. So often times these habits, I think, the negative ones creep in even faster these days, because we’re kind of partially focus, we’re partially engaged without even realizing it. We’re think we’re multitasking, we know there’s no such thing, and I think that has an effect on our inner dialog also, because we’re not fully aware of even the inner habits that we’re maybe replacing, what we thought was a negative just with another negative. So again it’s bringing attention and full intention to all aspects of your life, which is exhausting. So it’s, you do the best you can with what you have.

John Jantsch: Well and you certainly make this point fully in the book fully, but I do think a lot of people when they kind of wake up one day and say, “I have to change something externally.” They really don’t have much success, or at least they don’t stick with it until they change something internally first do they.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day you can want whatever you want. As an entrepreneur, a small business, you can have all the right desires, but unless we’re really looking at the why, what is our driver? Are we being driven by creativity, possibility, seeing failure as just proof that we’re trying, and there’s data in the disasters. If we’re not secure in our foundation John, where we’re building it from a place of, “We are enough,” not meaning there’s not a ton of work that we still need to do to get better at certain aspects of our business, but what often happens is, we can sustain these habits, because the foundation their built on is floored. It’s from an idea of I’m not enough. I’m trying to prove something. I’m trying to prove my worth, versus how can I add worth to the people I’m trying to serve. So again, it’s just with kindness and a curiosity, just continually asking ourselves, why I’m making these choices? Why am I wanting to do this business? What is it in the end that I want to leave? Our legacy. It sounds like a little be grandiose to say, but it really is at the end of the day, don’t we all want to leave the world a little better than when we found it?

That means that we have to continuously and consistently explore our whys and our feelings, not about just the work that we do, but as we grow and evolve and also one thing to make clear is, the closer you get to doing work that really matters, the more you’re gonna struggle with this, because fear is gonna show up, because it just … To me it’s a sign that you’re doing work that you really care about, but when you can flip that wear and stop worrying about, like Seth Godin says, “To be remarkable, means you’re gonna be remarked upon, not just the good but the negative.” When we can flip the fear about what are people gonna say about me if they don’t like my work, onto I’m afraid that I don’t get my work out there and maybe that one person their life could be made easier, by me sharing what it is I believe in, then that’s work worth doing. So, but again, it’s not easy. Our brains gonna notice the negative, the critics, the behind the screen warriors, but when we can believe more in our work, than more about what people think about us, that’s when we can take action behind our dreams.

John Jantsch: So let’s end on a cynical note, shall we?

Petra Kolber: Okay.

John Jantsch: Some might say that perfection has it’s benefits.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, no, again, I mean I never said it didn’t...

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Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals

Transcript of Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Achieve Your Goals

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John Jantsch: Would you consider yourself a protectionist? I certainly would not consider myself a traditional protectionist, but I wonder if there’s times when viewing my view of the world through other people’s lens has cost me, has held me back, has stopped me from doing what I was meant to do

In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast we visit with Petra Kolber, she’s the author of The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. I think you better check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto and to help support the show Gusto is offering out listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Petra Kolber. She’s international renown fitness expert and wellness leader. Also, the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today called The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy. So Petra, thanks for joining us.

Petra Kolber: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me John.

John Jantsch: And I also forgot to mention that you are, you’re gonna shoot me, Scottish.

Petra Kolber: Oh, my god. You are so off. I am British. My dad was Scottish though. I have to be honest, my dad was a Scott.

John Jantsch: There’s a little Scot in your accent still, what’s left of it.

Petra Kolber: If you say so. Okay, we’ll just leave it at that, because my mother’s turning in her grave right now going, Scottish?

John Jantsch: I could have called you Australian.

Petra Kolber: That too. I’ll answer to anything John. If I’m just talking to you, whatever works. I’m fine with that.

John Jantsch: All right, so let me ask you this first. Is this book autobiographical?

Petra Kolber: Well they say you teach what you need to learn, so yes. For me it was autobiographical in a sense, but again for me the pain point of the book, as you know with sales and marketing speak to the pain point. That was definitely my own personal pain point for many years and I thought, if I can help people fast track the seven year process or so that it took me, John, to figure out that you don’t have to be perfect to do great things in this world, then I though it’d be a book worth writing.

John Jantsch: So detoxing is really hot right now. I mean there’s probably half a dozen books in every book store about it, and diets and what not. What does that speak to you think?

Petra Kolber: Well I did the name Detox to be honest, like we had talked about before, my background was fitness for 30 years, so detoxing, nutrition is definitely a piece of that and if you look at the books cover, The Perfection, Perfection is very lightly written, so I do believe many people who pick this up thinking it’s a juicing book, but again, so hey why not build on a cultural trend. That’s not why I called it that. Like with detox from anything is basically cleaning out the crud, and that’s what this book is about. It’s not cleaning out the crud from your body or your nutrition, but really your mental aspect and whether you’re gonna go for a job of your dreams, you’re gonna start that business you’ve been thinking about. It really is about, not what you’re doing, but do you feel worthy enough to even begin the dream and how do you feel about yourself along the process?

John Jantsch: Okay, so let’s start here. What does perfection look like?

Petra Kolber: Ha, great question.

John Jantsch: I’m probably saying that because I have no idea. It does not enter into my life in any sense.

Petra Kolber:  You are so lucky John, let me tell you. So I do believe perfection means different things to everybody and I do believe a lot of people have asked me. Why did, this book as you know is definitely got the woman perspective, yet I speak to men and woman across the board, and many men come up to me and go, “Oh my god, you were speaking to me.” Perfection means different things to everybody and what I ask people to consider is, when you think of the word perfect in the three main areas of your life, self care, the relationships of your own personal family relationships, and your work. When you think of the word perfect, does that add joy to your life or does it suck the joy out of you? Because perfect and perfection is only a word until you attach a meaning and an emotion to it. So this book, this idea of perfect, you know detoxing from perfection, some of your listeners might go, “Well, hey perfect works really well for me in my business.”

I strive, and this is not about not working hard. This is not about wanting to be the best that you can be. It’s not about wanting to be the leader in your field and what it is about is how are you feeling about yourself when you’re striving for these high goals? Do you ever reach them, or they are so high where perfections become the basement level. Maybe we can look at different metrics and a different definition of success.

John Jantsch: So I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and one of the things that I see is almost rampant in that community is that they didn’t define what perfection was. They’re striving for somebody else’s view of perfection because they see somebody else being more successful in their view, or whatever, having more customers, a bigger launch, a bigger house, you know, whatever it is, and how much do you think that, that plays into it? Is that we don’t step back and even define perfection. We just try to hit somebody else’s target?

Petra Kolber: Oh, that’s so interesting John. Nobody’s ever really put it to me that way. Yeah, I agree and I think whether it’s comparison … I think we are comparing being by definition. We need to look at other people for inspiration and I think Jon Acuff was the one that said, “Don’t compare your beginning to everybody else’s middle.” And what happens, especially in this world of social media and the online culture where everything is coming across our feed so fast and if you’re like me, for many years I never had this idea that I had anything unique to say, so who was I to be doing a book, a bran, an online course and so whether you see it as perfection, like you had said, or you see it as a lack of confidence or the gap between where you are right now and where you want to be, I think it’s all about the same thing John. We start looking at ourselves, unwittingly comparing ourselves to others, and then out negativity biased, which is a part of our evolution, is automatically gonna hit on the things that we think we are not enough of.

Or in some cases, we think we’re too much of this and what happens is then, we then stop beating ourselves up and judging ourselves, and I should know better, I shouldn’t be comparing my brand, or my launch to someone else’s launch. The challenge is the part of our brain that’s the strongest, it’s not part of your character flaw, it’s a part of our genetic makeup and unless it goes managed and unless we notice these thoughts John, like “Oh, my god, their launch was so perfect. Or, “They wrote the perfect book, ” or, “Their online program is so perfect,” and unwillingly we’re comparing our back story and our struggles to what we see as their overnight success, which in reality is 10,000 hours of hustle and hard work, and failure after failure and iteration 2.0. This is when we get stopped in our tracks and so it’s where we stop doing, we start watching and then we start becoming paralyzed because we start judging what we think we’re doing to everyone else’s highlight reel.

John Jantsch: So physical toxins, are quite often aligned with something you’re familiar with, as a cancer survivor. How is perfection toxins, what’s that costing us?

Petra Kolber: You got some great questions John. You know what, the interesting thing about this, people often say, “Ah, it’s just a thought. I’m just having these thoughts. I’m beating myself up.” And now science is showing that these thoughts have a physical reaction, a chemical reaction to your body. So what we’re seeing now in this world of elevated stress, elevated anxiety, in the entrepreneurial world and in the life’s of our children, elevated depression, although with our kids, they’re saying anxiety is going up, as depression is coming down a little bit. Every time we have these thoughts, our brain, every time we have a thought of self judgment and doubt, or worry it’s not a status quo, it’s gonna trigger irresponsible in your body. It’s either gonna be fight or flight, or tandem befriend and this cortisol, the adrenalin, and placed on top of the adrenaline and cortisol that gets triggered every time we have an email alert, or a text come in our we have an argument with our partner, or work partner.

This is all having a physical impact on our body and our immune system, our health, our joy, our happiness, and so again, people go, “Oh it’s just a thought.” “Uh, yeah, no.” Because your body can now not … This is science, the science of neuroscience. Your body cannot tell the difference between an actual something we should be afraid of and go on physical defense or a thought where we ramp up and have this same toxic, like you said, toxic emotion built into our body and often to put on top of that John, this work is often happening behind a computer and we’re sitting and you and I just spoke about this before. Sitting is the worse place for our body, our health, our happiness, our focus, our agility, our resilience. So you put all these thoughts on a body that’s now static, it’s just compiled and exasperates to a magnificent and an unfortunate level.

John Jantsch: For the record, I’m at my standing desk right now as we record this interview. I want everybody to know. So let’s pick on social media a little bit now. So let’s pick on social media a little bit, shall we. You know my last interview that I … Who knows when people will actually be listening to these. They probably won’t come out back to back, but Dan Schawbel, Back To Human: How Greatly Leaders Create Connection in an Age of Isolation, and one of the main thrusts of his book is that technology, while it does enable us to do some cool things, it’s probably made us more isolated than ever, and I suspect that in the perfection game, social media is a pretty big culprit isn’t it?

Petra Kolber:  Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea. I think the currency of the future is gonna be connection and I heard Gary V. speak recently at an even and he held up his phone, and he goes, “Technology doesn’t have and opinion,” and I was like, oh that’s good, ’cause I had become silently very judgy about social media and technology. It doesn’t have an opinion, but it’s how we feel about ourselves and how we decide to use it and what our intention is when we’re going onto social media, or any form of technology. So again, it does magnificent things. You and I are having this conversation across the country because of technology. My thought is with social media in particular, there’s many great aspects of it. It allowed me John, over the course of two years recently, to pivot my branding from fitness to happiness and now to this idea of becoming our best selves versus our perfect selves. Social media will allow me to do that without paying a PR company, yet we often use social media to deflect, distract.

We often go on when we’re bored, when we’re a little bit lonely and that is the worst place, the worst time for us to jump on, because then that negative bias, our inner critic is quick to ramp up and then start again, going into that comparison mode, and even though we know that what someone is posting on social media there, there are a million dollar launch, or that perfect this, or we know that’s probably not the exact truth. Maybe it’s a little bit highlighted a little bit, while our brain knows that and for females especially, we see the pictures going across out feed, with that million Instagram followers. Our heart has a really hard time discerning what’s real to what we’re seeing across our feed. So I just say, there’s nothing wrong in social media, but make sure you’re going on with full attention and with what intention. There’s so much noise out there. Do we want to add to the noise or can we elevate the conversation. Add things that make people think, make them feel good, make them want to share what it is that you’re sharing about your thoughts and your view of the world today.

If we’re there to elevate the conversation and make people feel less alone, than it’s a great thing, but then again I keep coming back to this idea of when you step off your time on social media, do you feel more joyful, or has the joy been sucked out of you, and then maybe it’s time to look at who you’re following, your intentions, and just kind of do a quick little detox on your social media too.

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So I probably wasn’t gonna bring this up, but you opened the door to it. Do feel that men and women approach this idea of perfection differently?

Petra Kolber: Yes, I do. I mean I think … This is why I wrote the book form a female perspective, ’cause while I’ve had many conversations with men, and I think the suffering is there, but I think it’s a little different. I think, and again, tell me, correct me on this John, I would imagine that sometimes it’s easier for men to compartmentalize their areas of their life. So my job is, I’m crushing it, I’m succeeding, my goal is to be perfect, and their like great, but perhaps your relationships are suffering, or maybe your self care is suffering, whereas I think women have a harder time separating their self care to their relationships, to their work life, to their family, so there’s more of a trickle effect. If I’m not feeling great in this area of my life it’s gonna kind of have a little bit of a trickle effect where I think, and I hope I don’t get a lot of blow black on this.

It might be easier for men to compartmentalize just a little. So while perfection’s working in their work life per se, maybe their self care’s suffering, or their family life is suffering and it doesn’t have the ripple down effect quite as much, and feel free to correct me on that.

John Jantsch:  No, no, I agree 100%. I think society plays a huge role in that too. I remember when my kids were little and I’d take them to … I might have one of them, well I have four, so I might have had all four of them and I’d be carrying one in the grocery store checking out and you know it never failed. Somebody, “Oh you’re such a great dad.” And I wonder what it would take for somebody to actually say, “You’re such a great mom,” if my wife was doing the exact same thing. I think society really … You know, we have much lower expectations I think on men sometimes.

Petra Kolber: It’s a great point and again, not to do any bashing, but I think this expectation that women also place on themselves and the conversation is absolutely changing, a little bit, but even if the conversation is changing externally it’s really hard on the internal conversations that we have with ourselves to ease up the judgment and the self doubt in that area of our life.

John Jantsch: Okay, so we’ve talked a ton about perfection. Let’s talk about detox. Where do you start?

Petra Kolber: Well like with anything I would love to say with this book we start with the joy, but unfortunately you have to clear out the muck. So the first part is just clearing out what’s not working for you and it’s not everything, especially with perfection. Any kind of detox you want to keep what’s working. So you’re gonna keep the flowers but pull out the weeds. So I’m gonna jump back a little bit about perfection John, because there’s many aspects that you want to keep, you’re a hard worker, you strive for excellence, you triple check your work, you’re a great friend, you’re a great coworker. None of that we want to get rid of, but whatever you’re detoxing from, we need to get rid of the stuff that’s not working for you right now. So first bit is clearing out the muck. Then the universe in your brain does not like a vacuum, so you got to put something good in there and this is where my work and my studies with positive psychology enter in. Again our brains default ids the negative, so if we leave a space, then more negative’s gonna come in.

It might have a different voice, a different accent. It might have a Scottish accent, but it’s gonna come in. So we got to put something positive in there and then we want to really be robust for the future. So it’s kind of clearing out the clutter, the muck, which often has happened from our past. Cementing a really positive presence and then from that there’s actually sustainable steps, like creating new habits. As we know, it’s those many daily habits of small, small steps that create magnificent change over time. So how do we do sustainable actions, sustainably new habits around our thinking especially that allows us to create a flourishing future.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that replacement idea is so big. I just read a post, a friend for a long time in this content world and he wrote a post recently. He talked about how he just one day decided to stop drinking alcohol and it just turned into months into year and then he turned around and realized he’d gained 40 pounds and how to like, okay, now I need to replace that with exercise. I think that is so true of our condition isn’t it?

Petra Kolber: Yeah. I mean the thing is, it’s that familiarity. It’s that we’re gonna come back to a habit, whether it’s negative thinking, negative actions that we do, without even realizing that they are negative. They have negative impact. So again, it’s just … And again with this world of becoming, we’re in this attention economy where we’re our lack of full attention. So often times these habits, I think, the negative ones creep in even faster these days, because we’re kind of partially focus, we’re partially engaged without even realizing it. We’re think we’re multitasking, we know there’s no such thing, and I think that has an effect on our inner dialog also, because we’re not fully aware of even the inner habits that we’re maybe replacing, what we thought was a negative just with another negative. So again it’s bringing attention and full intention to all aspects of your life, which is exhausting. So it’s, you do the best you can with what you have.

John Jantsch: Well and you certainly make this point fully in the book fully, but I do think a lot of people when they kind of wake up one day and say, “I have to change something externally.” They really don’t have much success, or at least they don’t stick with it until they change something internally first do they.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day you can want whatever you want. As an entrepreneur, a small business, you can have all the right desires, but unless we’re really looking at the why, what is our driver? Are we being driven by creativity, possibility, seeing failure as just proof that we’re trying, and there’s data in the disasters. If we’re not secure in our foundation John, where we’re building it from a place of, “We are enough,” not meaning there’s not a ton of work that we still need to do to get better at certain aspects of our business, but what often happens is, we can sustain these habits, because the foundation their built on is floored. It’s from an idea of I’m not enough. I’m trying to prove something. I’m trying to prove my worth, versus how can I add worth to the people I’m trying to serve. So again, it’s just with kindness and a curiosity, just continually asking ourselves, why I’m making these choices? Why am I wanting to do this business? What is it in the end that I want to leave? Our legacy. It sounds like a little be grandiose to say, but it really is at the end of the day, don’t we all want to leave the world a little better than when we found it?

That means that we have to continuously and consistently explore our whys and our feelings, not about just the work that we do, but as we grow and evolve and also one thing to make clear is, the closer you get to doing work that really matters, the more you’re gonna struggle with this, because fear is gonna show up, because it just … To me it’s a sign that you’re doing work that you really care about, but when you can flip that wear and stop worrying about, like Seth Godin says, “To be remarkable, means you’re gonna be remarked upon, not just the good but the negative.” When we can flip the fear about what are people gonna say about me if they don’t like my work, onto I’m afraid that I don’t get my work out there and maybe that one person their life could be made easier, by me sharing what it is I believe in, then that’s work worth doing. So, but again, it’s not easy. Our brains gonna notice the negative, the critics, the behind the screen warriors, but when we can believe more in our work, than more about what people think about us, that’s when we can take action behind our dreams.

John Jantsch: So let’s end on a cynical note, shall we?

Petra Kolber: Okay.

John Jantsch: Some might say that perfection has it’s benefits.

Petra Kolber: Yeah, no, again, I mean I never said it didn’t...

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