78: Cathy Heller | Being Creative in Spite of Your Day Job

Transcript for Cathy Heller | Being Creative in Spite of Your Day Job (Episode 78)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFillippo. And today's conversation, we're talking with my friend, Cathy Heller. Cathy's got a lot going on. She's a mom to three girls. She's got a successful podcast. She was able to crack the music licensing code when even successful indie artists struggle to make a living in L.A. And I thought this was kind of an interesting fit for the show because she gets her royalties from her music and TV and ads, everything from McDonald's to Walmart and American airlines. But she's also -- she's my kind of woo, right? You've heard me talk about woo and I'm normally not about this at all, but I've really liked what she had to say here. And she's fond of saying things like purpose is the opposite of depression. And of course, before I roll my eyes I like to think about this kind of thing. And she grew up in a family with anxiety, depression, and her parents fought all the time, and she's really funny, unique way out of that and found success in a niche that was not her plan at all when she came to L.A. And I think it's very effective stuff for you as audience members here.

[00:00:58] Today, we'll discuss branding herself as a creative in a way that's effective. In fact, have enough to mix with the world of corporate business. We'll also explore how creatives can market in a way that doesn't contradict your brand or make you feel like you need an acid bath afterwards. We'll also learn how to talk to non-creatives and pitch them and sell to them in a way that's effective enough to get you doing what you want to be doing instead of hammering out pitch decks all day long. And I'll admit when I went into this episode I knew it'd be fun because I'm friends with Cathy and I think she's a great person, but I actually didn't know she'd be dropping this type of knowledge during the show. So it was really a pleasant and fun surprise for me to spend time with her on this show, and I hope you all like it as much as I enjoyed recording it. Don't forget, we have worksheets for today's episode so you can make sure you understand everything we talked about here and everything that Cathy wanted to teach you here on the show. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. All right, here's Cathy Heller.

[00:01:54] Tell me if this is true of you, as a creative person, which I don't necessarily consider myself or hadn't in the past. I still have to do certain things to engage my brain enough where creativity comes out, did you find that at all?

Cathy Heller: [00:02:07] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:08] So what do you do in that situation? Because I know like a lot of people are like, “Oh I get all these great ideas in the shower.” But if you're writing songs, I don't know if that's possible, for example, in the shower.

Cathy Heller: [00:02:18] I feel like it takes time to just put yourself on pause. Like we spend a lot of time where we're like consuming things, but I think in order to be creative we need to make time for there to be space. Like take a walk or even though it's anxiety provoking, like don't have your phone all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:37] Oh my God.

Cathy Heller: [00:02:37] You know like I know Steve Jobs was famous for talking about like taking walks, and I recently interviewed Julia Cameron for my podcast who wrote this awesome book called The Artist's Way, which a lot of people have cited as being this thing that they did. They talk about this book as something they did, because it gives you stuff to workshop. And Jenna Fischer, when she was on my show, she said she did The Artist's Way, and that got her in this habit of like making things instead of just auditioning for things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:04] Oh! Interesting.

Cathy Heller: [00:03:05] It's important to cultivate your creativity, and I think part of it is like in The Artist's Way, she talks about doing these things called the morning pages, which could also be just journaling. But I think creating a space where you're like writing in a journal, even if your hands just writing, I have nothing to write and you just keep writing because after a while you will find that you have stuff in there to say and it starts to come out and then over the course of four days or 12 days or six months, you start to see patterns of things that you keep talking about and you're like “Wow, I don't really stop to even really know myself.” People are very precious about their identity. Like this is who I am and this is who I am not, do we really even know like we're so much more multifaceted and multidimensional and I think we just -- we want so much to have control and to be able to put ourselves in this box it's because right tight precious little like neat thing, and “This isn't me, this is what I am, this is what I'm not,” because there is this unknown that is a little scary but it's also exciting. You might discover like you have ideas in there, but then the question is I have to face that and go, “What am I going to do with that? Anything or just stay comfortable and sit over here.”

[00:04:15] So, but I think making time to journal, making time to walk, making time to meditate, making time to just try and see what's in there, or even just two things that strike your creativity. Like go to a movie by yourself, go take yourself to a museum, go to a concert. Like do things that evoke high-stake emotion and see what it does and see what winds up coming up.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:37] Do songwriters like yourself have writers block like a novelist would, does that happen?

Cathy Heller: [00:04:42] I think everybody feels like they don't know what they're going to write. And every time I get asked to do something, like recently I was asked to write this theme song for a Netflix show and I was like, I just immediately typed into my phone the like the reply to the email and I was like, “Thank you so much, but I can't.” And then I went delete, delete, delete, because it's just an excuse.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:01] Why did you think you couldn't do it?

Cathy Heller: [00:05:02] Just say always I never think I'm going to write anything good. Never.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:05] Really?

Cathy Heller: [00:05:05] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:05] So even though you've licensed hundreds, is it hundreds of songs?

Cathy Heller: [00:05:08] I think -- I think there's been quite a bunch, but I always feel like I don't have anything good to do or say. And on my way to a writing session with a co-writer, I'll be like, “I'm such an idiot, why am I even going?” And I'll come up with a million things I have to do. Like, “Oh I should work on my taxes even though it's July,” or like, “Oh, I think I need to organize like the basement.” Like I'll just come -- what it really is, is we all have a hard time facing our own feelings of inadequacy. And it's not fun to feel mediocre. But Ed Sheeran has this great quote and I love him and he's such a great songwriter. And he says, “You know, imagine if you went to a cabin in Vermont, you hadn't been there for like three months and you go to turn on the water in the kitchen or in the bathroom and the water comes out like brown water.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:52] Brown.

Cathy Heller: [00:05:53] So he's like, let the water run, right? You wouldn't just like leave the cabin and be like “The water! Something's wrong.” You'd be like, “Oh no, no, no, I know what happens. You just let it run for like 45 seconds and everything's good. You can drink it, you can shower in it.” So with ourselves --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:06] Might boil it first, juts throwing it out there.

Cathy Heller: [00:06:08] Maybe boil if you're Jordan Harbinger is like extremely now we know germaphobe, but like, “Yeah, you know that eventually this water is going to be useful.” And so what happens is you stay in the game, but as humans what we do is we sit it out because the pain and the discomfort of facing the fact that we might not be brilliant and perfect every time we get up to bat, it's so awful for us that we say, “I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell myself I don't want this thing or I'm going to tell myself I just can't, therefore I don't even have to try.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:39] You run, run. I mean, who wants to write a theme song for a Netflix show that could go on to be viewed by millions of people. Pass, right?

Cathy Heller: [00:06:46] Pass. And then I used to say to myself on the way to doing something that was uncomfortable, which I still do all the time. I mean getting married was scary, having kids is scary, and I left the hospital with each one of these kids. I was like, “Did they know they gave it to me?” Like “I don't know what I'm doing,” but every time I’m asked to do anything and I want to say no, I think to myself, am I going to allow this really uncomfortable feeling to stand in the way of what could be just this really awesome life and really fulfilling, and am I going to like give this up because I'm scared and then go build someone else's dream every day and sit at a desk and feel miserable my whole life? So no, let's not do that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:28] So this is like impostor syndrome, creatives addition, right? Because lawyers and doctors and people like that that I talked to you often, they have imposter syndrome where they're like, “I'm the person who got into Harvard Medical School where like I slipped through the cracks.” So they only let me in because they needed another white dude from Vermont, right?

Cathy Heller: [00:07:46] Oh yeah, yeah. They were just being nice. They were just being nice, clearly. They just had extra time to bring in a person that they didn't need. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:52] Right. And eventually they're going to figure out, I don't belong here.

 

Cathy Heller: [00:07:55] Yeah, everybody has doubt.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:56] Kicked out and fired.

Cathy Heller: [00:07:57] Everybody feels this way. And I think that the thing that winds up happening at some point between the age of zero and four or eight, is that somewhere along the way you get this message that you're not worthy of being loved exactly as you are. And either it's because someone tells you to those kinds of things because they're not being nice, whether it's a parent or an uncle or somebody kind of tells you that. Or you see your parents feel that way about themselves and you absorb like, “Oh, in order to be loved I have to earn it, or in order to be whatever I have to be this or I have to be that. So if I'm not perfect there's something wrong or there's something just wrong with me in general.” And we sort of see other people feeling that way all the time and we don't recognize that that is the most normal human thing to think and feel. And you don't need to do anything to be great because the truth is every person is bruised and scarred and broken. All of us, like we've all -- we've just all got our stuff and our idiosyncrasies and so it's like, “It's all welcome and it's all great.”

[00:09:08] And the thing that people don't realize, and I was telling somebody this recently because she was like, I want to start a podcast, but I don't have an email list or I don't have anything great about my show or what's going to make it successful and why would it be good? And I said, “Well, you don't realize as people are starving for authenticity and people don't realize that when you can just show up and be vulnerable and give yourself permission to just speak like genuinely about whatever your stuff is, whatever, people are really interested all of a sudden.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:40] Yeah, it's interesting. You know there's -- I think there are a quote unquote too many podcasts because people do it to like to like, “I'm going to make a ton of money doing this.” Instead of being like, “I want to produce something useful.” The shows that don't have any listeners are the 20,000th sports show with dudes We're like, “We're going to get drunk and then we're going to talk in the garage and everyone's going to love it.” The shows that do have listeners are the guys that are like, “Hey, want to get drunk in the garage and then talk about stuff we talk about anyway, but turn on microphones.” Those shows have tons of fans because people want to hang out with those guys. The people that who don't have an audience are the ones that are like, “All right, I need to tailor this and I'm going to try really hard to be funny and I'm going to try to make it like a commercial production and then drive Facebook traffic to it.” Like those are the people that really struggle more. And it took me years to realize this because people were like, “How do I market myself or my show?” And I'd go, “Well I don't know. I do a terrible -- I had -- especially in the past, done a terrible job of doing that.” But what I was doing was not trying to treat this as a business for the first six years, which ironically made it more popular than people who were.

Cathy Heller: [00:10:42] Yeah, yeah. Just being genuine. And when we had on my show, we had Seth Godin on the show and he said something and I was like, “Oh my gosh, the way you just said that,” and it kind of ties into what you said. He said, “Any endeavor that's successful at the core of it, there lies radical empathy, radical empathy.” And so we do live in like an empathy deficit, and we always have, because human beings don't necessarily lead with that but especially now. And so when you just said I wasn't worried so much initially about making money, I just wanted to make something that was great.

And I think when I'm doing my show, I think about the one person listening and she's going to the gym or this one's on their way and they're in the subway. And I'm like, “What's their pain point? What would they find interesting?” And it wouldn't matter if my show was about -- like my show is very aspirational and people said, “Well that's cause your shows about that.” “What if my shows about vegan food?” Again, like what's the pain point of the person listening? Do they need recipes? Do they need you to show them that it's doable? Like I feel like in my own music career, actually when I first came to L.A., I wanted to get a record deal, and I worked super hard to get a record deal, and I finally got a record deal and I was at Interscope and it was super exciting. And then I got dropped from the label, and then I did this again, and I got signed to Atlantic, and I got dropped from this label and I thought, “Ah yes, that's it. There's either Beyoncé or nothing.” And I went on to like, “I'm going to just go get a job job. I'm never going to be able to do music then, because it was never modeled for me any other way.”

[00:12:20] So I wound up spending two years just finding my way through like terrible jobs that I hated and didn't enjoy real estate and didn't enjoy teaching preschool and didn't enjoy taking a floral design class. I didn't enjoy any of it. And I was like, I got to find a way to do music. But when I went back to music, I put in the radical empathy instead of just saying, “I'm just going to go write songs and then see what people think.” Like this is my art, “What do you think of it?” Like it's my art.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:45] If you don't like it, screw you.

Cathy Heller: [00:12:46] Yeah, because I'm an artist. And so if I'm an artist, I'm never going to sell out and think about you. But the difference between a hobby and a business I realized is other people. If it's a hobby, do whatever you want and enjoy it and more power to you. But as soon as you're like, “I would love to make dollar bills from doing this so I can pay a mortgage and buy sushi.” Well somebody else is going to pay you that, so they need to be involved. So it's time to think about -- so when I went back into music, I was like, “You know, I had heard that people were licensing songs for TV shows and I didn't know what it meant.” And I thought “I'll be resourceful and I'll reverse engineer and I'll look into it.”

It took me like time to figure out what that meant and what kind of songs were being used for Grey's Anatomy and different TV shows at the time. Like One Tree Hill and ads for iPad and ads for Target and Coke. And I was like, “Well, what are they using?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:35] You’ve done all of these is, are these examples of things you've done?

Cathy Heller: [00:13:37] Some of those are examples. Like I've done a couple of McDonald's commercials and I've worked on Kellogg's and I've worked on tons of TV shows, like Pretty Little Liars and Criminal Minds. And I wrote songs for the American Girl movies and I just wrote the theme song to a Netflix show called Llama Llama, which is based on a series of books and it just got picked up for a second season. But I've done tons of ads and TV stuff and movies. I did a movie called Southpaw with Eminem. It was like a funny soundtrack because it was like Jake Gyllenhaal has a daughter, so he's a boxer. So there's a lot of Eminem like music that really supports his sort of mission in his life's work, but then he has this daughter and so the scenes with the daughter, you just hear like my music. So it was fascinating to hear the soundtrack with like Eminem and me, which is interesting.

[00:14:22] In any case, when I went back into music, what actually gave me a leg up was that I was really concerning myself with solving the problems of those who are choosing the songs for these ads and for these movies. And I would study these directors and look at the past and say, “What does David O. Russell using in his movies? What is Wes Anderson using in his movies? What does Coca-Cola -- what's their mandate?” “Oh, it's aspirational. Oh, it's all about diversity and being an original.” “Okay, so I'm getting this.” And then instead of being like, “Harrumph, I'm such a loser.” I was like, “Look, you know, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the Sistine chapel.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:02] Yeah, that's a good point, yeah.

Cathy Heller: [00:15:03] Like real artists from the beginning of time, they weren't starving. This idea of the glorified like starving artists, like it's so miserable, it’s such a terrible story and it's not a true story. Like I just said to you like, “Oh, who have you interviewed in the Latin?” I'm not going to give it away in case it's secret, but like you've interviewed a lot of interesting creative people. They're not starving. They're really far from that and they are creative. So it's something where we have to really understand like if you want to be successful, you should care about what other people find beautiful. If you're a potter, if you're a songwriter, if you're a storyteller, if you're making clothes, you really should care. And so when people say to me, “I have an idea. What do I do?” I'm like, “The first thing you should do is validate it and test it and go talk to the people who might eat the cupcakes.” Or here the songs and say to them like, “Can I just get really curious about what you need and what you like?” And then this is the tough part. It has to be authentic and cool, and at the same time it has to do the things that they needed to do. So I started to do that and do that, and it took time until the songs were really good, like they were great and they sounded like me having a blast doing my thing. And yet they also were able to communicate universal messages where the stories were not just my own stories.

[00:16:21] And then I did so well that I actually just wanted to do that. I didn't want to leverage it and go on tour. I wanted to be a mom. I wanted to be able to just chill and go get a sandwich and not have to deal with anyone like noticing me. I wanted to just have a normal life and I was able to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, every year. Licensing my songs and I was written about and Billboard and Variety and LA Weekly, like these full page stories. And then I thought, “Oh, maybe now I'll get a record deal and what will I do about that?” And instead I just got a lot of artists saying, “Can you help me?” And I started to do other things with my life, like start a podcast and start an agency and start teaching courses to artists, and that was something I'd never saw coming.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:17:04] You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Cathy Heller. We'll get right back to the show after this brief word from our sponsors.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:39] Do you think if you've got a record deal, you'd be like, “No, thanks. I'm doing what I want to do now.”

Cathy Heller: [00:19:43] I don't want to do that. Yeah, I wouldn't want to do that, because I get to sit in my pajamas now and do a podcast.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:49] I mean as far as you know, we're both just in our pajamas right now.

Cathy Heller: [00:19:51] Yeah. That would be hilarious if we really, and little awkward.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:55] It'd be a little awkward depending on yours.

Cathy Heller: [00:19:56] What would yours be?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:57] You know, I'd probably just have really those thick -- what's the brand Lululemon Sweatpants on, and then like a shirt that says like “hardcore gym,” that I'm too embarrassed to wear to the gym because you're like, “I'm not that guy.” I'm not going to wear like a Tapout shirt in public, sorry, Tapout.

Cathy Heller: [00:20:16] Sorry Tapout guy. So yeah, what's cool like our podcast, I started at a year and a half ago and I mean your way beyond me. You started it way before me and you're really good at it. But we just hit like two and a half million downloads.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:31] That’s awesome!

Cathy Heller: [00:20:31] Which for me is I don't want to go on tour now, because I can just talk into a microphone and people listened to me and I do want -- what I did realize, which I think is cool, that goes back to our creativity conversation from the when we started, is that when I started out coming to L.A., and I was like, “I know who I am. I'm a songwriter, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. This is me, this is not me and this is it.” I thankfully kept allowing myself to keep exploring, and then here I am hosting a podcast which was never going to be part of the path, at least that I could see. And what happens is you find out that there's other things that you love and isn't that something like when you allow yourself to just keep exploring.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:11] Did you resist it at first? It sounds like you resisted a little like, “Oh, I have one from one record deal and then another one in, and then I get these jobs and I hated them.”

Cathy Heller: [00:21:18] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:19] Is that sort of a processy had to let go?

Cathy Heller: [00:21:21] I mean along the way every time like here I went, “Oh, I'm not going to have a record deal. What's that going to mean?” I think what I had to do is realize that growing up I had this need to be seen. I wanted my parents to stop fighting long enough that they could see me, and they were so consumed in their own issues. They had like a horrible divorce and even beyond the divorce, they just themselves are so stuck. My mom struggles with depression and my dad suffers from a lot of anxiety, and they were always so busy being self-involved, and so I think deep down as a kid I made a decision a long time ago like “You don't see me, but one day the whole world will listen and the whole world will see me.” So when that wasn't going to happen, I had to like own that and figure out what I was going to do with that emptiness. And I probably still suffer from that and I'm working on it. And I think being a mom helps because if I have this idea somewhere in my head like if I can be there for my kids somehow it heals whatever I didn't get or whatever.

 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:16] I think that's probably true in some way. I mean you can't go back in time, but--

Cathy Heller: [00:22:21] Yeah, it's like there's something about like me being present for them and I take it to think an extreme because I'm super hard on myself about that. But I think that the idea is I, I did have this thing like I want to be a famous superstar and then when it wasn't going to happen, I think it was actually really good for me and I had to learn to sit with my pain and stop running from it. And I started doing things I wasn't comfortable doing. Like I went to UCLA for three years and took all these classes at the Mindful Awareness Research Center. And I was like, “Who are these people who sit here in silence? What the hell is wrong with these people?” And then I learned like, “Oh, why do I have such a hard time sitting here?” And then I learned to like be with that feeling and then it passes. And I learned also that like, “I'm not these thoughts.” These thoughts that are like constant that just don't leave me alone. I'm the thing like observing them so I don't actually have to buy every single one of them as being true, and so that was a good process. And so then when I went back to being a creative, I was like, “Oh great, I found a way to license music. Cool, cool!” But then when I had all these artists reaching out saying, “Can you be my agent?” I was like, again, resistant. I'm not an agent.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:26] I'm not an agent, yeah.

Cathy Heller: [00:23:27] I’m an artist. Does that mean that you don't think I'm talented? So then I resisted, but then I thought, “Why not?” Again, if it's about solving problems for these people at the brands and at the music – at music professors at the TV shows and stuff, I would just have more stuff that I could help them to clear music, whatever. So I did that, and then I actually -- my own career just did better after that, which was weird. My own artistry, and then the next thing I did is I had artists saying, “Why aren't you signing me?” And then I'm like, “Well, because the music, it needs to be this and this.” And then I thought maybe I should start a course, and again, I resisted that. And then I thought, “Okay, I'll start a course.” But this whole thing of like, “I can't do three things. What will people think?” Nothing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:08] Nothing.

Cathy Heller: [00:24:08] People will think nothing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:10] Yeah, they’re too busy with their own crap.

Cathy Heller: [00:24:11] Yeah. I feel like I just was recently at Paradigm for a meeting with one of the agents, and I said--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:16] Paradigm is a record label?

Cathy Heller: [00:24:17] Paradigm is like a talent agency. It's like a CIA or whatever. They're like two blocks from here. And so I said to the agent, “What makes someone really successful?” And he's like, “Multihyphenate, multihyphenate. Don't just be the writer, be the writer, be the actor, be the producer, be the,” and I was like, “Yes, it’s like this whole idea, Amy Schumer, she's doing all of it.” Jenna Fisher was like, “So if you're not getting cast in something, shoot it, write it.” Stopped being like, “I'm so protective of my identity.” So I started teaching classes and then the class has helped me find more artists, and then I had more music that was helpful for the people I was reaching out to you, and then I was able to actually get more of my own stuff done. So it's like, I don't know, I feel like people just have so many things, like excuses when really they're just scared and it's so normal to be scared and uncomfortable. We just have to kind of learn -- I think when I look at you or anyone who is successful, I don't just think like, “They're just great at it. They're just great. That's it.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:14] Don't listen to earlier episodes. If you want to keep that fiction up, right?

Cathy Heller: [00:25:17] It's like “You are great at it, but you have courage.” You have courage to put yourself out and be uncomfortable, and means not a perfect human being and like you keep doing it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:29] You mentioned earlier about not being put into a box or not putting yourself into a box. How do we juggle that with branding ourselves as a creative? Because you said multihyphenate but I think there's a -- there's also the cliché, especially in Hollywood of like, “I'm a singer, actor, photographer, model writer, producer.”

Cathy Heller: [00:25:49] It’s a lot of things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:49] And it's like, “Oh gosh, so you work at Equinox.” Right? Like that's what we always kind of secretly think about that. How do we balance -- okay, I've got to have a brand that I can sell as a creative, but I also have to have my skill stack intact.

Cathy Heller: [00:26:04] Yeah, I do hear that. I mean I feel like in general, it's good not to say like “I'm going to build it and they will come.” Like this whole waiting for opportunities thing is really, really prevalent. So I kind of want to err on the side of like, “You should try lots of things.” But I do think that if you're being honest and you really are listening. If the feedback is not coming back, that this is like, “Yes! Yey! The world loves when you're modeling. The world loves when you're whenever.” If that's not happening, I feel like sometimes people are like, “I'm just going to be persistent and then I can do anything.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:43] Never give up!

Cathy Heller: [00:26:45] Never, never! And I'll do all of it and I can be the artist and the this and that. I feel like part of that is a little delusional. I think I like to say, “Alignment is the new hustle.” Because I see so many well intentioned people who come out here, and I live in L.A. I've been here 15 years. I've been here long enough to see the people who are like, they're still at it and it's not good.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:09] It's just painful.

Cathy Heller: [00:27:10] It's painful. And so I think what we need to be willing to do is say, I heard Oprah say it really in a beautiful way. I went to her -- I was out of the taping of the SuperSoul sessions, and she's like, “Early on I was reading Gary Zukav’s book.” She said it was called Seat of the Soul. She's like, “And it totally clicked.” She's like, “I finally got what this whole thing is.” And she said, “Basically he says, in this book that you have this, You are this little ship and your job is to be in sort of the direction of the mothership.” And you know, she says that for her that's God. But the idea that like, there is a thing that is your thing, right? And if you're really listening and you're really in it for the big picture of like, “I want to serve in the way I'm supposed to.” Like if I'm a blue cran and I'm trying to be pink, that's a problem, right? And there's something special that I should be blue.

[00:28:08] So everyone has their thing, and I think what people do is they either were told early on, “This is your thing. You're a good writer, you're not a good dancer, you're good.” So that's confusing. But then there's also, we tell ourselves, we're like, “This is it, and if I'm not this, I'm nothing.” And like Jenna Fischer, I brought her up again because she made a good point and she said, “I'm an actor.” And she's like, “I have friends who were like, I'm an actor, I'm an actor.” And they weren't not getting the validation that they were really great at it. So what she said happened is one of her friends made this choice to like see what maybe I should be writing. And people were like, “Yes, you're such a good writer.” And then the person went on to be a really successful writer. So she's like, “We need to put in the time.” And I think the clarity follows the action. You have to do, do, do, but then you have to assess.

[00:28:58] So I feel like if you want to be true to your brand, don't be so quick to know what it is before you've actually gone ahead and tried a lot of things, which I know, again, that's not what you want to hear. What you want to hear is “Here's the shortcut.” You go to this fortune teller woman and she's going to tell you the three things you are. I think you know, I look at people like Jenna Kutcher who's been on my show. She's got a podcast and she started out working in corporate at Target, then picked up a camera, quit her job, became a wedding photographer. Then started teaching people how to be a successful wedding photographer, then started a podcast and like “What is her brand?” “Uhm, well, her brand is her,” which is the best thing you could do for your life, sort of like what you've done. But I feel like you have be willing to try things, and then the hard part is you have to be willing to take a bite of that humble pie and say, “Here's where I'm really in the flow, and here's where the world” -- if they're saying no. So actually that's probably a blessing because then just like a scientist in a lab who goes, “Oh, that didn't work. So yey!” Now I know what's not working -- that's supposed to go like “Forget it! It'll never work!” Like who would be curing diseases if they're like, “If I go to work today and I don't get the cure, I am a failure.” Nobody would pursue that. Jonas Salk never would have lived, like he had been over and out done.

[00:30:18] So we need to see all of these things as wins. And so I think what happens is if you're willing to listen and be honest, you've got to get in there. But what a lot of people do is they don't take enough action to have any data. Like, I went to get an echocardiogram recently and the doctor's like, “Okay, we're going to put this thing on you and we're going to like put this thing underneath your -- the side of your chest.” And it actually hurts a little, it's a little uncomfortable. So I'm like, “How long is this happening three minutes?” He's like, “No, like 30.” I go, “30 minutes? It's a really uncomfortable.” He's like, “It feels a little bit like a mammogram if you're a woman getting this done.” And so I'm like, “Why is this, why is this 30 minutes?” Because it doesn't my heartbeat several times a minute. And he's like, “Yeah, like on average your heart beats like a hundred times a minute. But I need to see it not a hundred times. I need to see it for 30 minutes to even know what is at all happening.” So what does that mean? Like what people do is they go, “I tried it, I wrote it. I sent in my proposal. They didn't like it.” Oh my God, you have no data. You have no data. Please stop. Like don't tell me, “I wrote one record and I sent it out and nothing happened.” Okay, so you can't use that. But if you do something a few times, you can step back and go, “Oh, you know what happened is I thought I was going to make these cupcakes, but every evening when I would have people come over to try things, they kept commenting on these like floral arrangements that were just on the side of the table.” I wasn't even intending for anyone to notice them, but everyone kept talking about this like twine that I use and maybe I'm good at hosting parties, but the cupcakes are not actually the most delicious product. The party of how I create this like vibe. Okay, maybe I should create an Etsy shop now where I'm selling those things. Like that's getting consistent feedback until you can finally get some like data. So these are the things, like everyone wants to have these existential crises and questions. It's like you have no existential crisis, you don't have any data, you haven't left the station, like try it and do stuff. And then what people say is, “But that would be uncomfortable because I might make a fool of myself. “Yes, that's correct.” And then at the same time you will learn and you'll be liberated and you might have a lot of fun. And if you don't look at it like, “If I don't hit it out of the park the first time I'm a failure, rather if I try things that scare me and I learned from it, I'm winning, then you won.”

Jason DeFillippo: [00:32:40] We'll be right back with more from Cathy Heller after these brief messages from our sponsors.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:52] You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of that Notorious B.I.G song where he goes, “Jesus, the notorious just pleases us,” which a policygenius.com. Oh hey, by the way, I'm going to Fireside Conference in Canada here in September. Should be a lot of fun, Jason's coming with me, aren't you Jason?

Jason DeFillippo: [00:34:09] Yes I am. I cannot wait.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:12] And Jen's coming with me. It's kind of like entrepreneur camping. I don't really know how else to explain it. It's a conference, but it's kind of an unconference. Imagine campfires and probably some beer and some good food and stuff like that and a lot of goofing around. No cell phones. It's not too late to register. This is not my event. It's the Fireside Conference. It's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of entrepreneurs and business folks, and they've got 50 spots left. It's the final 50 as they say, and I just think it's going to be a really fun time. It's going to be sort of unplugged. It's going to be taking place about three hours from Toronto, Canada, on 750 acres of private green space on a beautiful lake, so should be a lot of fun. A lot of mindfulness slash mindless stuff like water skiing, canoeing, rock climbing, yoga, fitness, boot camps, meditation, real campfire chats. Not the fake fireside chats that are on a stage. I mean they'll probably be some of that too, but also lakeside keynotes and stuff like that. So it should be really fun. A lot of cool people going. There's no VIP, there's no restricted access, everybody's sort of hanging out together and you get a 500 dollars discount if you apply and you're accepted. That's 500 dollars Canadian. So it's September 6th through 9th, and I'm looking forward to it. You can find info at firesideconf.com/jordan, firesidecomf.com/jordan.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:35:31] Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/advertisers, and if you'd be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It really helps us out and helps build the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, head on over to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe. And now for the conclusion of our interview with Cathy Heller.

[00:35:57] So there's a difference here that I'm hearing. Try as many things as you can and continue to get that feedback versus, I'm trying to separate this from the people who are 15 years in L.A. still [indiscernible] [00:36:09] right?

Cathy Heller: [00:36:09] Ah! God bless you guys.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:12] But those people aren't necessarily getting any sort of learning experience or feedback. They're just getting the feedback that they're banging their head against the wall and they can continue to bang their head against the wall, but they're not really like getting better at -- or getting that useful feedback.

Cathy Heller: [00:36:24] No, don't do that. I feel like every single human being is magnificent because here's what I know. This is what's insane and weird. My daughter's two best friends, they're twins and they don't have the same fingerprints, right? There's no evolutionary need for people to have different fingerprints. There is no need for that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:43] Yeah, good point. We could all have the same fingerprints.

Cathy Heller: [00:36:45] We can all have the same -- there's no -- so I personally have like a connection, I believe in God, and I'm spiritual and all of those things. But let's say you're not at the most just basic, basic looking at it. Well, everyone's unique, so you just know that, okay? That means every single person has some something slightly different about them. So what I like learn out from that is, you know, no one ever was you and no one ever will be. So don't do this thing where you're like, “I'm beating my head against a wall.” Nothing's happening, but I've decided that this is the only way for me to express myself in this world, and I'm just going to keep doing it because I feel like you're robbing yourself and the world of whatever is intrinsically the reason that you are here, so I would say be willing to try a lot of things.

[00:37:35] And what I do realize from all the people I interview on my podcast is they are willing for the bigger picture, for the greater good of really just figuring out what the heck am I really ultimately supposed to do? They do try different things and I think successful people are -- they're known for that. And then people go, “Well, they're a failure.” They tried having this, and P.Diddy tried to sneaker thing and then it's like “Yep, because they're always in the practice of saying like, “What else should I try?” Which you can look at it and go, “But see eight of those things failed.” It's like they don't look at it that way. They're just continuing on like, “What else should I be building?” And by the way, I really do feel like as long as you have a smartphone and a computer, there's so much you can be creating. Whether it's -- it doesn't even happen -- I mean, yes, it could be a blog or a podcast, but I'm like you can literally like without being an artist, like you can create graphics, you can create a t-shirt company, you can start making journals, you can start making a candle company. You can -- I have a friend who doesn't even touch the things she makes. She just works with a company in India who makes things and they send them to Amazon and she's making all these amazing product. My point is so much can happen without you waiting for someone to come along and notice you and give you a shot at your life.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:47] Right. Give you permission.

Cathy Heller: [00:38:48] So go ahead and try making things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:51] You must have some clients or at least people that you know where you're like, “Oh, stop doing this thing.” How do you evaluate that? Because that's got to be news that those people don't want to hear.

 

Cathy Heller: [00:39:03] They don’t.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:03] And also you can't just go, “Hey, you're a terrible singer.” I mean maybe you do that, but how can you evaluate that and get people to listen? Because I think a lot of people who are listening to this right now are either in the process of trying something and they're like, “I'm in year eight of trying to make it past open mic night as a standup comedian.”

Cathy Heller: [00:39:23] Right. Good for you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:24] Or we have friends who are like, “Look, I don't know how to tell my friend Angela this, but all of her handbag designs are terrible. Universally no one likes them, but she feels like she needs to do this because if we dig deep enough, it has to do with someone's insecurities. Or like you said, their mom didn't love them but loved handbags, whatever.

Cathy Heller: [00:39:43] Exactly. The thing is people, they just don't listen for feedback. But in any realm, what I would do is I would encourage people to get feedback. I think the feedback is the thing. Like if you look at Serena Williams and you're like, “She's just great. She's just born that way and she's a fierce machine.” So she works with her coach, and it's like two millimeters of difference in her swing, literally makes the difference in her being an Olympian or her not. So the feedback part of anything is so important. Like in a marriage, if you don't get feedback, you might think like, “I love this person. I'm just going to do it, and shoot from the hip and it's all good.” And they're like, “Yeah.” So you're constantly getting feedback. If you or anyone who's married knows you're constantly getting feedback and what does it do? Over time, if you're willing to let this person who you love be an influence on you, you become a better version of yourself, and anything you need feedback. So I would say to create a people, “Where can you get feedback?” So I often suggest to songwriters, there's so many Facebook groups of like the music schools like Berkeley and Belmont, Brooklyn Music School in Boston. All these musicals, there's like alumni pages and groups on Facebook. Those people listen to music and they've studied it. That's like a free place where you could be like, “I want the truth, what do you think?” And like allow it in. And if a lot of people are like, “Something's good about the melody.” And by the way, when I first started, I got a lot of constructive criticism, but again, there was enough of like, “Yeah, like people would say, when I started writing and I was trying to write for -- I wanted to be able to make living. So I was thinking about, I love for McDonald's to use my song for $100,000 in an ad.People would write back and say like, “The lyrics are really on the nose. It's not really interesting music. It's really -- it's kind of like cheesy.” Okay, “What do you like about it? Anything?” “The Melody's great.” “Your voice is really good.” “The lyrics are not good.” “Okay, got it.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:47] On the noses is bad. I felt, I thought on the nose it'd be like nailed it!

Cathy Heller: [00:41:50] Oh, yeah. There's ways of doing that where it doesn't feel exactly like you don't want to license a song to a diaper commercial that talks about babies or diapers or like it's a sunshine day. You want to just talk about feeling good. Anyway, there's a way to do it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:04] Like a Sharman commercial where the bears rolling around and then it's like, “Oh yeah, toilet paper too.” Because you can't really make that sexy.

Cathy Heller: [00:42:10] Oh right. Oh, that's cute though. So I feel like getting feedback, there is a way over time you just know, you have a gut and you know, like which things they keep coming back. It's hard for people. I even see this with people in dating, like people who are still single and they don't winna listen. They're just like, “There's no good men!” It's like, “Okay, that's a story.” That's an interesting story.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:34] But that’s nothing to do with you.

Cathy Heller: [00:42:36] Nothing to do, or are you brave enough to go like in high fidelity when John Cusack goes back to his like five ex-girlfriend and he's like, “What's wrong with me? And they're like, “You're a narcissist.” And there he's like, “Ah!” Right? So, and “What do you love about me?” “You're adorable. You're interesting. You're smart.” “Well, what can I fix?” “You're really self-involved.” “Okay, got it.” So like, I'm just making this up, but I feel like people, they're not really wanting to listen. So I think that we do need to listen and then I think you can start to discern, no, no, people aren't telling me to give this up, there is something great but maybe it's this one direction or maybe I just need to improve this part of it. Or maybe they're saying it's actually all headed in the right direction. You just need to keep at it, because there's always going to be a gap. Like Ira Glass, one of our contemporaries if I can be so bold he says, “There's a gap when you begin something, there's a gap between how good you can make the thing and what you can identify as being great.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:37] Definitely. That’s like learning a language where you can understand a lot more, but you can't say it.

Cathy Heller: [00:43:42] So sometimes, my feedback to somebody is I actually see that all of this is really working. You just got to keep going because it's going to go from what's going on now, which is sort of hitting all the marks and good to really great. And so I think people don't stay in it long enough to go from good to great. When I talked to Ellen DeGeneres actually about six months ago. I was at this like preview she did for something. She was doing a Netflix and a bunch of journalists were there afterwards, and I got to be there and I said to her, “What makes people successful?” And she said, “An unrelenting, unrelenting drive to be really good at your craft.” And so she's like, “I did the same standup act for six years until it like the timing got really great,” and it is painful if you really literally put yourself in her shoes and you're like, “Every night for six years going to some dive bar in Kansas City.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:36] Smelly sticky floors, imagine that.

Cathy Heller: [00:44:40] Like living and she was living in an apartment where there were like fleas and she was like, “It was awful.” But she's like, “By the time I got to Johnny Carson, because the booker kept saying like, “Are you ready? Are you ready?” And she's like, “No.” And by the time she went in she's like, “I'm ready.” He called her over to the couch, right? That's her big claim to fame. She's the first female comedian he called over, and she's like, “It took time until the joke landed like, and it really landed, and I was willing to put in the time.” But, but all along people were saying to her, “It's great.” And she's like, “It was great, but it wasn't as--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:10] She still saw the gap.

Cathy Heller: [00:45:11] So I feel like we need to find ways and one thing is like, I mean take a class, the training never stops. Why should it be that like LeBron James is being asked to take 400 jump shots before breakfast, but you, you're above it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:26] Oh, I agree.

Cathy Heller: [00:45:26] And if you're being asked to do a class. Who are they to -- so let's humble ourselves and let's realize that even the great masters are still training. And so I would say whatever is your thing, is there someone who can mentor you? Is there someone who can learn from you? Can you go to some Jack Canfield workshop for three weeks and try to get some feedback? Like feedback would be really essential and then you can start to make little micro changes and those micro changes might actually make everything hot, I think.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:51] Those are the huge difference, especially at a higher level. It does crack me up. I know you've seen this, you make me laugh here on this, these folks that go, “Oh you know, I don't really think I need coaching on this per se.” And I'm thinking that's interesting because you're asking me how to get better and I'm telling you that I have a vocal coach, a broadcasting coach, a production coach, a coach, a full time producer who's coaching me whether or not he thinks of it that way all the time. My wife's listening to stuff, my whole team's listening to stuff, giving me honest feedback. But you are a beginner, you definitely don't need it.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:22] You don’t need it. Good to go.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:23] You need my one tip on my Instagram inbox.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:26] One tip.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:27] That's going to make a difference in your life.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:28] Right. Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:30] It drives me crazy.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:31] Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:32] What I see are the true professionals. You looking at Howard Stern, I'm not a huge fan of that type of show or whatever.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:40] I’m a pretty big fan of Howard Stern.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:41] He prepares more than anybody.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:43] Pretty big fan. I'm a pretty big fan of Bill Burr also, both chauvinist. I like them both very much.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:48] Funny.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:48] I love bill Burr. But he talks about that. He's like, “People are like,” he talks about how like people think he was like this overnight success. He's like, “No.” He's like, “I was roofing in 110 degree weather as a red head, and basically it was a 27 years slow climb where I was like taking hits to the jaw.” He goes, “I've seen enough Toyota Camrys to know that most people give up on their dreams.” And it's funny and it's true, and it's every time I meet someone like you -- someone who's doing something that they love, they're very curious person. They want to ask people, they want to learn from the best. They're want to seek like some people love him, some people hate him. But I know Tony Robins is always like, “All I do is surround myself with successful people.” And I ask them, “What they're doing?” And constantly he's like, “I'm constantly literally giving myself an education.” I'm like, “Who are you, sir? Can I have five minutes to ask you about yourself? So I can learn,” like having a mentor, the greatest way to get from here to there is like, look at someone who's done it and figured out what they did, or go without a hiking guide to Hawaii and you on your own. You go try to find the best hike and that waterfall just blind. Just of course, you can do it right? Sure.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:57] Sure.

Cathy Heller: [00:47:57] Have the best day. Don't ask the local guy who knows where all the best things aren't. Just go, you're going to be fine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:04] Don't get bitten by a snake, and die alone on a volcano.

Cathy Heller: [00:48:06] No, you won’t die. You'll never die that way. You'll just be fine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:10] Yeah. That's a really cool analogy because I think a lot of folks, we would never go do something. I'm not going to go like, “Hey, do you want to go kiteboarding?” “No, I've never done it.” It cannot be that hard where you'd be like, “Hell no, I'm not doing that, and I'm not letting you do that,” but “Oh, you want to stumble through your entire career blind? No problem, let's do that because you can do whatever you believe in because you're the best.”

Cathy Heller: [00:48:33] You're awesome. I love it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:35] Yeah, I love that, because I do think it's really easy to look at someone like you and go, “Well, she just showed up in L.A, and is like crushing.

Cathy Heller: [00:48:42] Just totally showed up. Like I have three kids and every single one of my kids, I had to go through fertility treatment, but like not one time. Like I look back over the seven and eight years that I was working on trying to have a kid and I think I went through like 15 rounds of different like fertility treatments, surgeries, like miscarriages, giving myself injections. And then people were like, “She has it all. She has the most hunky husband.” He would laugh if he heard that. She’s had a perfect husband, three great kids. She just snapped her fingers. It's like, “Dude, everything has been a fight. Everything has been like the most uphill.” And I'm prepared for that every day, like I'm prepared for traffic. I'm prepared for people to feel like they don't just want to roll out the red carpet to me. And it's like, “Okay, so what am I going to do about it?” So that resilience and this is the thing -- everyone who's listening right now, you are so much more capable of that grit than you give yourself credit for. You really, really are. You just have to be willing to say like, “Okay, it's all normal and I'm going to, I'm going to survive it, so I'm going to be uncomfortable.” “So what?” You've already -- if you're listening to this, you've been through the hardest stuff already. It's already been done. You've gone through heartbreak, you've gone through loss, that's the hardest stuff.

[00:49:58] So you're going to put out a blog and be nervous. You're going to go out for an audition, you're going to send someone an email about your career, and you're going to be that scared. It's not as scary as what you've already been through.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:07] At what point in your life did you start to build the -- well consciously start to build a resilience? Did you show up thinking how hard can it be? I'm really good at this. And then have like a series of wakeup calls or were you -- did you arrive going, this is going to be really hard and I'm going to have to try a bunch and fail.

Cathy Heller: [00:50:22] So I feel like, it was both, I feel like I didn't realize how hard it was going to be, but I think that I also have this thing, this like naive today, which is like I always think it's like around the corner.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:32] The next one.

Cathy Heller: [00:50:33] Yeah. And we had this woman on my show, Jessica Huey, and she said, “The greatest obstacle to your success, it's not actually a tangible obstacle. It's how possible you believe something is.” And so how possible you believe something is, is really like, that's the thing we have to cultivate. You don't want to go into surgery with your doctor who's like, “Okay, well I hope I'll see you in a few hours.” You want, you want the guy to be like, “I'll see you in three hours. You're good.” And then you're like, you have certainty, certainty, right? So you need that certainty. So I think for me, what was weird, I mean it's always like this, like I just go two feet in, dive in. I'm like I'm doing this thing as if, and I just have this belief like it'll work out and then I'll totally fall on my face and things won't work out. But I'm like, “Okay, that's also cool.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:27] Yeah.

Cathy Heller: [00:51:27] Yeah!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:28] I'm a slow learner too.

Cathy Heller: [00:51:29] I don't know, like I just -- I have this belief and I believe so much that I sometimes I think when people around me they're like, “You believe enough in it for me too.” Like they start to feel that enthusiasm. I definitely feel that way, and I don't know why because my mom has suffered from depression my whole life. She was like suicidal when I was growing up. She totally didn't have that belief. Maybe because I was on the other end and I was there to like cheer her on. I built this like resistance that like made me so much like that. But I think that we have to cultivate, I think the best thing people can do is change their story. Like start to really amp up how much you believe in what's possible, but don't be so precious about it looking a certain way.

[00:52:12] Like have this belief like “I'm here to do something that's going to make this world just more delicious.” Whether I'm making pies or I'm hosting my own podcast or I'm teaching school in the inner city or I'm just like making tee shirts. I know one way or the other, and I'm just going to have that outlook that it will -- I will be led to where I can most just be me. And I think if you can be certain about that, then you can get excited and then you can just take more action because I think the more certain you are, the more action you'll take.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:46] So like I said, lots of useful stuff here. Cathy went into it with one expectation and was flexible enough to make it work with something else. And I think that's one of the major important messages here from this episode. Great big thank you to Cathy Heller. She is at, Don't Keep Your Day Job on iTunes or cathyheller.com. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Cathy on Twitter or Instagram, and tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Cathy. I'm at @jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard from Cathy Heller, make sure you go grab the worksheets also in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. I'm also doing a lot more on Instagram these days. I'm like every putting out a little something some -- a lot of them are videos or little hacks that I do to stay productive or in good spirits or get things done in a different or unique way and sometimes I just post ridiculous funny stuff that I think you guys will also enjoy @jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram as I mentioned.

[00:53:40] This episode was produced and edited by Jason DeFillippo. Show notes by Robert Fogarty. Booking back-office and last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love, and even those you don't. Lots more in the pipeline. Very excited for some of the stuff we've got here in the future for you. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

Transcript for Cathy Heller | Being Creative in Spite of Your Day Job (Episode 78)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFillippo. And today's conversation, we're talking with my friend, Cathy Heller. Cathy's got a lot going on. She's a mom to three girls. She's got a successful podcast. She was able to crack the music licensing code when even successful indie artists struggle to make a living in L.A. And I thought this was kind of an interesting fit for the show because she gets her royalties from her music and TV and ads, everything from McDonald's to Walmart and American airlines. But she's also -- she's my kind of woo, right? You've heard me talk about woo and I'm normally not about this at all, but I've really liked what she had to say here. And she's fond of saying things like purpose is the opposite of depression. And of course, before I roll my eyes I like to think about this kind of thing. And she grew up in a family with anxiety, depression, and her parents fought all the time, and she's really funny, unique way out of that and found success in a niche that was not her plan at all when she came to L.A. And I think it's very effective stuff for you as audience members here.

[00:00:58] Today, we'll discuss branding herself as a creative in a way that's effective. In fact, have enough to mix with the world of corporate business. We'll also explore how creatives can market in a way that doesn't contradict your brand or make you feel like you need an acid bath afterwards. We'll also learn how to talk to non-creatives and pitch them and sell to them in a way that's effective enough to get you doing what you want to be doing instead of hammering out pitch decks all day long. And I'll admit when I went into this episode I knew it'd be fun because I'm friends with Cathy and I think she's a great person, but I actually didn't know she'd be dropping this type of knowledge during the show. So it was really a pleasant and fun surprise for me to spend time with her on this show, and I hope you all like it as much as I enjoyed recording it. Don't forget, we have worksheets for today's episode so you can make sure you understand everything we talked about here and everything that Cathy wanted to teach you here on the show. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. All right, here's Cathy Heller.

[00:01:54] Tell me if this is true of you, as a creative person, which I don't necessarily consider myself or hadn't in the past. I still have to do certain things to engage my brain enough where creativity comes out, did you find that at all?

Cathy Heller: [00:02:07] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:08] So what do you do in that situation? Because I know like a lot of people are like, “Oh I get all these great ideas in the shower.” But if you're writing songs, I don't know if that's possible, for example, in the shower.

Cathy Heller: [00:02:18] I feel like it takes time to just put yourself on pause. Like we spend a lot of time where we're like consuming things, but I think in order to be creative we need to make time for there to be space. Like take a walk or even though it's anxiety provoking, like don't have your phone all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:37] Oh my God.

Cathy Heller: [00:02:37] You know like I know Steve Jobs was famous for talking about like taking walks, and I recently interviewed Julia Cameron for my podcast who wrote this awesome book called The Artist's Way, which a lot of people have cited as being this thing that they did. They talk about this book as something they did, because it gives you stuff to workshop. And Jenna Fischer, when she was on my show, she said she did The Artist's Way, and that got her in this habit of like making things instead of just auditioning for things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:04] Oh! Interesting.

Cathy Heller: [00:03:05] It's important to cultivate your creativity, and I think part of it is like in The Artist's Way, she talks about doing these things called the morning pages, which could also be just journaling. But I think creating a space where you're like writing in a journal, even if your hands just writing, I have nothing to write and you just keep writing because after a while you will find that you have stuff in there to say and it starts to come out and then over the course of four days or 12 days or six months, you start to see patterns of things that you keep talking about and you're like “Wow, I don't really stop to even really know myself.” People are very precious about their identity. Like this is who I am and this is who I am not, do we really even know like we're so much more multifaceted and multidimensional and I think we just -- we want so much to have control and to be able to put ourselves in this box it's because right tight precious little like neat thing, and “This isn't me, this is what I am, this is what I'm not,” because there is this unknown that is a little scary but it's also exciting. You might discover like you have ideas in there, but then the question is I have to face that and go, “What am I going to do with that? Anything or just stay comfortable and sit over here.”

[00:04:15] So, but I think making time to journal, making time to walk, making time to meditate, making time to just try and see what's in there, or even just two things that strike your creativity. Like go to a movie by yourself, go take yourself to a museum, go to a concert. Like do things that evoke high-stake emotion and see what it does and see what winds up coming up.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:37] Do songwriters like yourself have writers block like a novelist would, does that happen?

Cathy Heller: [00:04:42] I think everybody feels like they don't know what they're going to write. And every time I get asked to do something, like recently I was asked to write this theme song for a Netflix show and I was like, I just immediately typed into my phone the like the reply to the email and I was like, “Thank you so much, but I can't.” And then I went delete, delete, delete, because it's just an excuse.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:01] Why did you think you couldn't do it?

Cathy Heller: [00:05:02] Just say always I never think I'm going to write anything good. Never.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:05] Really?

Cathy Heller: [00:05:05] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:05] So even though you've licensed hundreds, is it hundreds of songs?

Cathy Heller: [00:05:08] I think -- I think there's been quite a bunch, but I always feel like I don't have anything good to do or say. And on my way to a writing session with a co-writer, I'll be like, “I'm such an idiot, why am I even going?” And I'll come up with a million things I have to do. Like, “Oh I should work on my taxes even though it's July,” or like, “Oh, I think I need to organize like the basement.” Like I'll just come -- what it really is, is we all have a hard time facing our own feelings of inadequacy. And it's not fun to feel mediocre. But Ed Sheeran has this great quote and I love him and he's such a great songwriter. And he says, “You know, imagine if you went to a cabin in Vermont, you hadn't been there for like three months and you go to turn on the water in the kitchen or in the bathroom and the water comes out like brown water.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:52] Brown.

Cathy Heller: [00:05:53] So he's like, let the water run, right? You wouldn't just like leave the cabin and be like “The water! Something's wrong.” You'd be like, “Oh no, no, no, I know what happens. You just let it run for like 45 seconds and everything's good. You can drink it, you can shower in it.” So with ourselves --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:06] Might boil it first, juts throwing it out there.

Cathy Heller: [00:06:08] Maybe boil if you're Jordan Harbinger is like extremely now we know germaphobe, but like, “Yeah, you know that eventually this water is going to be useful.” And so what happens is you stay in the game, but as humans what we do is we sit it out because the pain and the discomfort of facing the fact that we might not be brilliant and perfect every time we get up to bat, it's so awful for us that we say, “I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell myself I don't want this thing or I'm going to tell myself I just can't, therefore I don't even have to try.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:39] You run, run. I mean, who wants to write a theme song for a Netflix show that could go on to be viewed by millions of people. Pass, right?

Cathy Heller: [00:06:46] Pass. And then I used to say to myself on the way to doing something that was uncomfortable, which I still do all the time. I mean getting married was scary, having kids is scary, and I left the hospital with each one of these kids. I was like, “Did they know they gave it to me?” Like “I don't know what I'm doing,” but every time I’m asked to do anything and I want to say no, I think to myself, am I going to allow this really uncomfortable feeling to stand in the way of what could be just this really awesome life and really fulfilling, and am I going to like give this up because I'm scared and then go build someone else's dream every day and sit at a desk and feel miserable my whole life? So no, let's not do that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:28] So this is like impostor syndrome, creatives addition, right? Because lawyers and doctors and people like that that I talked to you often, they have imposter syndrome where they're like, “I'm the person who got into Harvard Medical School where like I slipped through the cracks.” So they only let me in because they needed another white dude from Vermont, right?

Cathy Heller: [00:07:46] Oh yeah, yeah. They were just being nice. They were just being nice, clearly. They just had extra time to bring in a person that they didn't need. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:52] Right. And eventually they're going to figure out, I don't belong here.

 

Cathy Heller: [00:07:55] Yeah, everybody has doubt.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:56] Kicked out and fired.

Cathy Heller: [00:07:57] Everybody feels this way. And I think that the thing that winds up happening at some point between the age of zero and four or eight, is that somewhere along the way you get this message that you're not worthy of being loved exactly as you are. And either it's because someone tells you to those kinds of things because they're not being nice, whether it's a parent or an uncle or somebody kind of tells you that. Or you see your parents feel that way about themselves and you absorb like, “Oh, in order to be loved I have to earn it, or in order to be whatever I have to be this or I have to be that. So if I'm not perfect there's something wrong or there's something just wrong with me in general.” And we sort of see other people feeling that way all the time and we don't recognize that that is the most normal human thing to think and feel. And you don't need to do anything to be great because the truth is every person is bruised and scarred and broken. All of us, like we've all -- we've just all got our stuff and our idiosyncrasies and so it's like, “It's all welcome and it's all great.”

[00:09:08] And the thing that people don't realize, and I was telling somebody this recently because she was like, I want to start a podcast, but I don't have an email list or I don't have anything great about my show or what's going to make it successful and why would it be good? And I said, “Well, you don't realize as people are starving for authenticity and people don't realize that when you can just show up and be vulnerable and give yourself permission to just speak like genuinely about whatever your stuff is, whatever, people are really interested all of a sudden.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:40] Yeah, it's interesting. You know there's -- I think there are a quote unquote too many podcasts because people do it to like to like, “I'm going to make a ton of money doing this.” Instead of being like, “I want to produce something useful.” The shows that don't have any listeners are the 20,000th sports show with dudes We're like, “We're going to get drunk and then we're going to talk in the garage and everyone's going to love it.” The shows that do have listeners are the guys that are like, “Hey, want to get drunk in the garage and then talk about stuff we talk about anyway, but turn on microphones.” Those shows have tons of fans because people want to hang out with those guys. The people that who don't have an audience are the ones that are like, “All right, I need to tailor this and I'm going to try really hard to be funny and I'm going to try to make it like a commercial production and then drive Facebook traffic to it.” Like those are the people that really struggle more. And it took me years to realize this because people were like, “How do I market myself or my show?” And I'd go, “Well I don't know. I do a terrible -- I had -- especially in the past, done a terrible job of doing that.” But what I was doing was not trying to treat this as a business for the first six years, which ironically made it more popular than people who were.

Cathy Heller: [00:10:42] Yeah, yeah. Just being genuine. And when we had on my show, we had Seth Godin on the show and he said something and I was like, “Oh my gosh, the way you just said that,” and it kind of ties into what you said. He said, “Any endeavor that's successful at the core of it, there lies radical empathy, radical empathy.” And so we do live in like an empathy deficit, and we always have, because human beings don't necessarily lead with that but especially now. And so when you just said I wasn't worried so much initially about making money, I just wanted to make something that was great.

And I think when I'm doing my show, I think about the one person listening and she's going to the gym or this one's on their way and they're in the subway. And I'm like, “What's their pain point? What would they find interesting?” And it wouldn't matter if my show was about -- like my show is very aspirational and people said, “Well that's cause your shows about that.” “What if my shows about vegan food?” Again, like what's the pain point of the person listening? Do they need recipes? Do they need you to show them that it's doable? Like I feel like in my own music career, actually when I first came to L.A., I wanted to get a record deal, and I worked super hard to get a record deal, and I finally got a record deal and I was at Interscope and it was super exciting. And then I got dropped from the label, and then I did this again, and I got signed to Atlantic, and I got dropped from this label and I thought, “Ah yes, that's it. There's either Beyoncé or nothing.” And I went on to like, “I'm going to just go get a job job. I'm never going to be able to do music then, because it was never modeled for me any other way.”

[00:12:20] So I wound up spending two years just finding my way through like terrible jobs that I hated and didn't enjoy real estate and didn't enjoy teaching preschool and didn't enjoy taking a floral design class. I didn't enjoy any of it. And I was like, I got to find a way to do music. But when I went back to music, I put in the radical empathy instead of just saying, “I'm just going to go write songs and then see what people think.” Like this is my art, “What do you think of it?” Like it's my art.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:45] If you don't like it, screw you.

Cathy Heller: [00:12:46] Yeah, because I'm an artist. And so if I'm an artist, I'm never going to sell out and think about you. But the difference between a hobby and a business I realized is other people. If it's a hobby, do whatever you want and enjoy it and more power to you. But as soon as you're like, “I would love to make dollar bills from doing this so I can pay a mortgage and buy sushi.” Well somebody else is going to pay you that, so they need to be involved. So it's time to think about -- so when I went back into music, I was like, “You know, I had heard that people were licensing songs for TV shows and I didn't know what it meant.” And I thought “I'll be resourceful and I'll reverse engineer and I'll look into it.”

It took me like time to figure out what that meant and what kind of songs were being used for Grey's Anatomy and different TV shows at the time. Like One Tree Hill and ads for iPad and ads for Target and Coke. And I was like, “Well, what are they using?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:35] You’ve done all of these is, are these examples of things you've done?

Cathy Heller: [00:13:37] Some of those are examples. Like I've done a couple of McDonald's commercials and I've worked on Kellogg's and I've worked on tons of TV shows, like Pretty Little Liars and Criminal Minds. And I wrote songs for the American Girl movies and I just wrote the theme song to a Netflix show called Llama Llama, which is based on a series of books and it just got picked up for a second season. But I've done tons of ads and TV stuff and movies. I did a movie called Southpaw with Eminem. It was like a funny soundtrack because it was like Jake Gyllenhaal has a daughter, so he's a boxer. So there's a lot of Eminem like music that really supports his sort of mission in his life's work, but then he has this daughter and so the scenes with the daughter, you just hear like my music. So it was fascinating to hear the soundtrack with like Eminem and me, which is interesting.

[00:14:22] In any case, when I went back into music, what actually gave me a leg up was that I was really concerning myself with solving the problems of those who are choosing the songs for these ads and for these movies. And I would study these directors and look at the past and say, “What does David O. Russell using in his movies? What is Wes Anderson using in his movies? What does Coca-Cola -- what's their mandate?” “Oh, it's aspirational. Oh, it's all about diversity and being an original.” “Okay, so I'm getting this.” And then instead of being like, “Harrumph, I'm such a loser.” I was like, “Look, you know, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the Sistine chapel.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:02] Yeah, that's a good point, yeah.

Cathy Heller: [00:15:03] Like real artists from the beginning of time, they weren't starving. This idea of the glorified like starving artists, like it's so miserable, it’s such a terrible story and it's not a true story. Like I just said to you like, “Oh, who have you interviewed in the Latin?” I'm not going to give it away in case it's secret, but like you've interviewed a lot of interesting creative people. They're not starving. They're really far from that and they are creative. So it's something where we have to really understand like if you want to be successful, you should care about what other people find beautiful. If you're a potter, if you're a songwriter, if you're a storyteller, if you're making clothes, you really should care. And so when people say to me, “I have an idea. What do I do?” I'm like, “The first thing you should do is validate it and test it and go talk to the people who might eat the cupcakes.” Or here the songs and say to them like, “Can I just get really curious about what you need and what you like?” And then this is the tough part. It has to be authentic and cool, and at the same time it has to do the things that they needed to do. So I started to do that and do that, and it took time until the songs were really good, like they were great and they sounded like me having a blast doing my thing. And yet they also were able to communicate universal messages where the stories were not just my own stories.

[00:16:21] And then I did so well that I actually just wanted to do that. I didn't want to leverage it and go on tour. I wanted to be a mom. I wanted to be able to just chill and go get a sandwich and not have to deal with anyone like noticing me. I wanted to just have a normal life and I was able to make a few hundred thousand dollars a year, every year. Licensing my songs and I was written about and Billboard and Variety and LA Weekly, like these full page stories. And then I thought, “Oh, maybe now I'll get a record deal and what will I do about that?” And instead I just got a lot of artists saying, “Can you help me?” And I started to do other things with my life, like start a podcast and start an agency and start teaching courses to artists, and that was something I'd never saw coming.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:17:04] You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Cathy Heller. We'll get right back to the show after this brief word from our sponsors.

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Jason DeFillippo: [00:19:19] Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/advertisers. We also have an Alexis Skill, so you can get inspirational and educational clips from the show and your daily briefing. Go to jordanharbinger.com/alexa, or search for Jordan Harbinger and the Alexa App. And now more from Cathy Heller.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:39] Do you think if you've got a record deal, you'd be like, “No, thanks. I'm doing what I want to do now.”

Cathy Heller: [00:19:43] I don't want to do that. Yeah, I wouldn't want to do that, because I get to sit in my pajamas now and do a podcast.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:49] I mean as far as you know, we're both just in our pajamas right now.

Cathy Heller: [00:19:51] Yeah. That would be hilarious if we really, and little awkward.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:55] It'd be a little awkward depending on yours.

Cathy Heller: [00:19:56] What would yours be?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:57] You know, I'd probably just have really those thick -- what's the brand Lululemon Sweatpants on, and then like a shirt that says like “hardcore gym,” that I'm too embarrassed to wear to the gym because you're like, “I'm not that guy.” I'm not going to wear like a Tapout shirt in public, sorry, Tapout.

Cathy Heller: [00:20:16] Sorry Tapout guy. So yeah, what's cool like our podcast, I started at a year and a half ago and I mean your way beyond me. You started it way before me and you're really good at it. But we just hit like two and a half million downloads.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:31] That’s awesome!

Cathy Heller: [00:20:31] Which for me is I don't want to go on tour now, because I can just talk into a microphone and people listened to me and I do want -- what I did realize, which I think is cool, that goes back to our creativity conversation from the when we started, is that when I started out coming to L.A., and I was like, “I know who I am. I'm a songwriter, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. This is me, this is not me and this is it.” I thankfully kept allowing myself to keep exploring, and then here I am hosting a podcast which was never going to be part of the path, at least that I could see. And what happens is you find out that there's other things that you love and isn't that something like when you allow yourself to just keep exploring.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:11] Did you resist it at first? It sounds like you resisted a little like, “Oh, I have one from one record deal and then another one in, and then I get these jobs and I hated them.”

Cathy Heller: [00:21:18] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:19] Is that sort of a processy had to let go?

Cathy Heller: [00:21:21] I mean along the way every time like here I went, “Oh, I'm not going to have a record deal. What's that going to mean?” I think what I had to do is realize that growing up I had this need to be seen. I wanted my parents to stop fighting long enough that they could see me, and they were so consumed in their own issues. They had like a horrible divorce and even beyond the divorce, they just themselves are so stuck. My mom struggles with depression and my dad suffers from a lot of anxiety, and they were always so busy being self-involved, and so I think deep down as a kid I made a decision a long time ago like “You don't see me, but one day the whole world will listen and the whole world will see me.” So when that wasn't going to happen, I had to like own that and figure out what I was going to do with that emptiness. And I probably still suffer from that and I'm working on it. And I think being a mom helps because if I have this idea somewhere in my head like if I can be there for my kids somehow it heals whatever I didn't get or whatever.

 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:16] I think that's probably true in some way. I mean you can't go back in time, but--

Cathy Heller: [00:22:21] Yeah, it's like there's something about like me being present for them and I take it to think an extreme because I'm super hard on myself about that. But I think that the idea is I, I did have this thing like I want to be a famous superstar and then when it wasn't going to happen, I think it was actually really good for me and I had to learn to sit with my pain and stop running from it. And I started doing things I wasn't comfortable doing. Like I went to UCLA for three years and took all these classes at the Mindful Awareness Research Center. And I was like, “Who are these people who sit here in silence? What the hell is wrong with these people?” And then I learned like, “Oh, why do I have such a hard time sitting here?” And then I learned to like be with that feeling and then it passes. And I learned also that like, “I'm not these thoughts.” These thoughts that are like constant that just don't leave me alone. I'm the thing like observing them so I don't actually have to buy every single one of them as being true, and so that was a good process. And so then when I went back to being a creative, I was like, “Oh great, I found a way to license music. Cool, cool!” But then when I had all these artists reaching out saying, “Can you be my agent?” I was like, again, resistant. I'm not an agent.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:26] I'm not an agent, yeah.

Cathy Heller: [00:23:27] I’m an artist. Does that mean that you don't think I'm talented? So then I resisted, but then I thought, “Why not?” Again, if it's about solving problems for these people at the brands and at the music – at music professors at the TV shows and stuff, I would just have more stuff that I could help them to clear music, whatever. So I did that, and then I actually -- my own career just did better after that, which was weird. My own artistry, and then the next thing I did is I had artists saying, “Why aren't you signing me?” And then I'm like, “Well, because the music, it needs to be this and this.” And then I thought maybe I should start a course, and again, I resisted that. And then I thought, “Okay, I'll start a course.” But this whole thing of like, “I can't do three things. What will people think?” Nothing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:08] Nothing.

Cathy Heller: [00:24:08] People will think nothing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:10] Yeah, they’re too busy with their own crap.

Cathy Heller: [00:24:11] Yeah. I feel like I just was recently at Paradigm for a meeting with one of the agents, and I said--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:16] Paradigm is a record label?

Cathy Heller: [00:24:17] Paradigm is like a talent agency. It's like a CIA or whatever. They're like two blocks from here. And so I said to the agent, “What makes someone really successful?” And he's like, “Multihyphenate, multihyphenate. Don't just be the writer, be the writer, be the actor, be the producer, be the,” and I was like, “Yes, it’s like this whole idea, Amy Schumer, she's doing all of it.” Jenna Fisher was like, “So if you're not getting cast in something, shoot it, write it.” Stopped being like, “I'm so protective of my identity.” So I started teaching classes and then the class has helped me find more artists, and then I had more music that was helpful for the people I was reaching out to you, and then I was able to actually get more of my own stuff done. So it's like, I don't know, I feel like people just have so many things, like excuses when really they're just scared and it's so normal to be scared and uncomfortable. We just have to kind of learn -- I think when I look at you or anyone who is successful, I don't just think like, “They're just great at it. They're just great. That's it.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:14] Don't listen to earlier episodes. If you want to keep that fiction up, right?

Cathy Heller: [00:25:17] It's like “You are great at it, but you have courage.” You have courage to put yourself out and be uncomfortable, and means not a perfect human being and like you keep doing it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:29] You mentioned earlier about not being put into a box or not putting yourself into a box. How do we juggle that with branding ourselves as a creative? Because you said multihyphenate but I think there's a -- there's also the cliché, especially in Hollywood of like, “I'm a singer, actor, photographer, model writer, producer.”

Cathy Heller: [00:25:49] It’s a lot of things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:49] And it's like, “Oh gosh, so you work at Equinox.” Right? Like that's what we always kind of secretly think about that. How do we balance -- okay, I've got to have a brand that I can sell as a creative, but I also have to have my skill stack intact.

Cathy Heller: [00:26:04] Yeah, I do hear that. I mean I feel like in general, it's good not to say like “I'm going to build it and they will come.” Like this whole waiting for opportunities thing is really, really prevalent. So I kind of want to err on the side of like, “You should try lots of things.” But I do think that if you're being honest and you really are listening. If the feedback is not coming back, that this is like, “Yes! Yey! The world loves when you're modeling. The world loves when you're whenever.” If that's not happening, I feel like sometimes people are like, “I'm just going to be persistent and then I can do anything.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:43] Never give up!

Cathy Heller: [00:26:45] Never, never! And I'll do all of it and I can be the artist and the this and that. I feel like part of that is a little delusional. I think I like to say, “Alignment is the new hustle.” Because I see so many well intentioned people who come out here, and I live in L.A. I've been here 15 years. I've been here long enough to see the people who are like, they're still at it and it's not good.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:09] It's just painful.

Cathy Heller: [00:27:10] It's painful. And so I think what we need to be willing to do is say, I heard Oprah say it really in a beautiful way. I went to her -- I was out of the taping of the SuperSoul sessions, and she's like, “Early on I was reading Gary Zukav’s book.” She said it was called Seat of the Soul. She's like, “And it totally clicked.” She's like, “I finally got what this whole thing is.” And she said, “Basically he says, in this book that you have this, You are this little ship and your job is to be in sort of the direction of the mothership.” And you know, she says that for her that's God. But the idea that like, there is a thing that is your thing, right? And if you're really listening and you're really in it for the big picture of like, “I want to serve in the way I'm supposed to.” Like if I'm a blue cran and I'm trying to be pink, that's a problem, right? And there's something special that I should be blue.

[00:28:08] So everyone has their thing, and I think what people do is they either were told early on, “This is your thing. You're a good writer, you're not a good dancer, you're good.” So that's confusing. But then there's also, we tell ourselves, we're like, “This is it, and if I'm not this, I'm nothing.” And like Jenna Fischer, I brought her up again because she made a good point and she said, “I'm an actor.” And she's like, “I have friends who were like, I'm an actor, I'm an actor.” And they weren't not getting the validation that they were really great at it. So what she said happened is one of her friends made this choice to like see what maybe I should be writing. And people were like, “Yes, you're such a good writer.” And then the person went on to be a really successful writer. So she's like, “We need to put in the time.” And I think the clarity follows the action. You have to do, do, do, but then you have to assess.

[00:28:58] So I feel like if you want to be true to your brand, don't be so quick to know what it is before you've actually gone ahead and tried a lot of things, which I know, again, that's not what you want to hear. What you want to hear is “Here's the shortcut.” You go to this fortune teller woman and she's going to tell you the three things you are. I think you know, I look at people like Jenna Kutcher who's been on my show. She's got a podcast and she started out working in corporate at Target, then picked up a camera, quit her job, became a wedding photographer. Then started teaching people how to be a successful wedding photographer, then started a podcast and like “What is her brand?” “Uhm, well, her brand is her,” which is the best thing you could do for your life, sort of like what you've done. But I feel like you have be willing to try things, and then the hard part is you have to be willing to take a bite of that humble pie and say, “Here's where I'm really in the flow, and here's where the world” -- if they're saying no. So actually that's probably a blessing because then just like a scientist in a lab who goes, “Oh, that didn't work. So yey!” Now I know what's not working -- that's supposed to go like “Forget it! It'll never work!” Like who would be curing diseases if they're like, “If I go to work today and I don't get the cure, I am a failure.” Nobody would pursue that. Jonas Salk never would have lived, like he had been over and out done.

[00:30:18] So we need to see all of these things as wins. And so I think what happens is if you're willing to listen and be honest, you've got to get in there. But what a lot of people do is they don't take enough action to have any data. Like, I went to get an echocardiogram recently and the doctor's like, “Okay, we're going to put this thing on you and we're going to like put this thing underneath your -- the side of your chest.” And it actually hurts a little, it's a little uncomfortable. So I'm like, “How long is this happening three minutes?” He's like, “No, like 30.” I go, “30 minutes? It's a really uncomfortable.” He's like, “It feels a little bit like a mammogram if you're a woman getting this done.” And so I'm like, “Why is this, why is this 30 minutes?” Because it doesn't my heartbeat several times a minute. And he's like, “Yeah, like on average your heart beats like a hundred times a minute. But I need to see it not a hundred times. I need to see it for 30 minutes to even know what is at all happening.” So what does that mean? Like what people do is they go, “I tried it, I wrote it. I sent in my proposal. They didn't like it.” Oh my God, you have no data. You have no data. Please stop. Like don't tell me, “I wrote one record and I sent it out and nothing happened.” Okay, so you can't use that. But if you do something a few times, you can step back and go, “Oh, you know what happened is I thought I was going to make these cupcakes, but every evening when I would have people come over to try things, they kept commenting on these like floral arrangements that were just on the side of the table.” I wasn't even intending for anyone to notice them, but everyone kept talking about this like twine that I use and maybe I'm good at hosting parties, but the cupcakes are not actually the most delicious product. The party of how I create this like vibe. Okay, maybe I should create an Etsy shop now where I'm selling those things. Like that's getting consistent feedback until you can finally get some like data. So these are the things, like everyone wants to have these existential crises and questions. It's like you have no existential crisis, you don't have any data, you haven't left the station, like try it and do stuff. And then what people say is, “But that would be uncomfortable because I might make a fool of myself. “Yes, that's correct.” And then at the same time you will learn and you'll be liberated and you might have a lot of fun. And if you don't look at it like, “If I don't hit it out of the park the first time I'm a failure, rather if I try things that scare me and I learned from it, I'm winning, then you won.”

Jason DeFillippo: [00:32:40] We'll be right back with more from Cathy Heller after these brief messages from our sponsors.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:52] You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of that Notorious B.I.G song where he goes, “Jesus, the notorious just pleases us,” which a policygenius.com. Oh hey, by the way, I'm going to Fireside Conference in Canada here in September. Should be a lot of fun, Jason's coming with me, aren't you Jason?

Jason DeFillippo: [00:34:09] Yes I am. I cannot wait.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:12] And Jen's coming with me. It's kind of like entrepreneur camping. I don't really know how else to explain it. It's a conference, but it's kind of an unconference. Imagine campfires and probably some beer and some good food and stuff like that and a lot of goofing around. No cell phones. It's not too late to register. This is not my event. It's the Fireside Conference. It's going to be a lot of fun, a lot of entrepreneurs and business folks, and they've got 50 spots left. It's the final 50 as they say, and I just think it's going to be a really fun time. It's going to be sort of unplugged. It's going to be taking place about three hours from Toronto, Canada, on 750 acres of private green space on a beautiful lake, so should be a lot of fun. A lot of mindfulness slash mindless stuff like water skiing, canoeing, rock climbing, yoga, fitness, boot camps, meditation, real campfire chats. Not the fake fireside chats that are on a stage. I mean they'll probably be some of that too, but also lakeside keynotes and stuff like that. So it should be really fun. A lot of cool people going. There's no VIP, there's no restricted access, everybody's sort of hanging out together and you get a 500 dollars discount if you apply and you're accepted. That's 500 dollars Canadian. So it's September 6th through 9th, and I'm looking forward to it. You can find info at firesideconf.com/jordan, firesidecomf.com/jordan.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:35:31] Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com/advertisers, and if you'd be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It really helps us out and helps build the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, head on over to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe. And now for the conclusion of our interview with Cathy Heller.

[00:35:57] So there's a difference here that I'm hearing. Try as many things as you can and continue to get that feedback versus, I'm trying to separate this from the people who are 15 years in L.A. still [indiscernible] [00:36:09] right?

Cathy Heller: [00:36:09] Ah! God bless you guys.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:12] But those people aren't necessarily getting any sort of learning experience or feedback. They're just getting the feedback that they're banging their head against the wall and they can continue to bang their head against the wall, but they're not really like getting better at -- or getting that useful feedback.

Cathy Heller: [00:36:24] No, don't do that. I feel like every single human being is magnificent because here's what I know. This is what's insane and weird. My daughter's two best friends, they're twins and they don't have the same fingerprints, right? There's no evolutionary need for people to have different fingerprints. There is no need for that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:43] Yeah, good point. We could all have the same fingerprints.

Cathy Heller: [00:36:45] We can all have the same -- there's no -- so I personally have like a connection, I believe in God, and I'm spiritual and all of those things. But let's say you're not at the most just basic, basic looking at it. Well, everyone's unique, so you just know that, okay? That means every single person has some something slightly different about them. So what I like learn out from that is, you know, no one ever was you and no one ever will be. So don't do this thing where you're like, “I'm beating my head against a wall.” Nothing's happening, but I've decided that this is the only way for me to express myself in this world, and I'm just going to keep doing it because I feel like you're robbing yourself and the world of whatever is intrinsically the reason that you are here, so I would say be willing to try a lot of things.

[00:37:35] And what I do realize from all the people I interview on my podcast is they are willing for the bigger picture, for the greater good of really just figuring out what the heck am I really ultimately supposed to do? They do try different things and I think successful people are -- they're known for that. And then people go, “Well, they're a failure.” They tried having this, and P.Diddy tried to sneaker thing and then it's like “Yep, because they're always in the practice of saying like, “What else should I try?” Which you can look at it and go, “But see eight of those things failed.” It's like they don't look at it that way. They're just continuing on like, “What else should I be building?” And by the way, I really do feel like as long as you have a smartphone and a computer, there's so much you can be creating. Whether it's -- it doesn't even happen -- I mean, yes, it could be a blog or a podcast, but I'm like you can literally like without being an artist, like you can create graphics, you can create a t-shirt company, you can start making journals, you can start making a candle company. You can -- I have a friend who doesn't even touch the things she makes. She just works with a company in India who makes things and they send them to Amazon and she's making all these amazing product. My point is so much can happen without you waiting for someone to come along and notice you and give you a shot at your life.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:47] Right. Give you permission.

Cathy Heller: [00:38:48] So go ahead and try making things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:51] You must have some clients or at least people that you know where you're like, “Oh, stop doing this thing.” How do you evaluate that? Because that's got to be news that those people don't want to hear.

 

Cathy Heller: [00:39:03] They don’t.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:03] And also you can't just go, “Hey, you're a terrible singer.” I mean maybe you do that, but how can you evaluate that and get people to listen? Because I think a lot of people who are listening to this right now are either in the process of trying something and they're like, “I'm in year eight of trying to make it past open mic night as a standup comedian.”

Cathy Heller: [00:39:23] Right. Good for you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:24] Or we have friends who are like, “Look, I don't know how to tell my friend Angela this, but all of her handbag designs are terrible. Universally no one likes them, but she feels like she needs to do this because if we dig deep enough, it has to do with someone's insecurities. Or like you said, their mom didn't love them but loved handbags, whatever.

Cathy Heller: [00:39:43] Exactly. The thing is people, they just don't listen for feedback. But in any realm, what I would do is I would encourage people to get feedback. I think the feedback is the thing. Like if you look at Serena Williams and you're like, “She's just great. She's just born that way and she's a fierce machine.” So she works with her coach, and it's like two millimeters of difference in her swing, literally makes the difference in her being an Olympian or her not. So the feedback part of anything is so important. Like in a marriage, if you don't get feedback, you might think like, “I love this person. I'm just going to do it, and shoot from the hip and it's all good.” And they're like, “Yeah.” So you're constantly getting feedback. If you or anyone who's married knows you're constantly getting feedback and what does it do? Over time, if you're willing to let this person who you love be an influence on you, you become a better version of yourself, and anything you need feedback. So I would say to create a people, “Where can you get feedback?” So I often suggest to songwriters, there's so many Facebook groups of like the music schools like Berkeley and Belmont, Brooklyn Music School in Boston. All these musicals, there's like alumni pages and groups on Facebook. Those people listen to music and they've studied it. That's like a free place where you could be like, “I want the truth, what do you think?” And like allow it in. And if a lot of people are like, “Something's good about the melody.” And by the way, when I first started, I got a lot of constructive criticism, but again, there was enough of like, “Yeah, like people would say, when I started writing and I was trying to write for -- I wanted to be able to make living. So I was thinking about, I love for McDonald's to use my song for $100,000 in an ad.People would write back and say like, “The lyrics are really on the nose. It's not really interesting music. It's really -- it's kind of like cheesy.” Okay, “What do you like about it? Anything?” “The Melody's great.” “Your voice is really good.” “The lyrics are not good.” “Okay, got it.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:47] On the noses is bad. I felt, I thought on the nose it'd be like nailed it!

Cathy Heller: [00:41:50] Oh, yeah. There's ways of doing that where it doesn't feel exactly like you don't want to license a song to a diaper commercial that talks about babies or diapers or like it's a sunshine day. You want to just talk about feeling good. Anyway, there's a way to do it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:04] Like a Sharman commercial where the bears rolling around and then it's like, “Oh yeah, toilet paper too.” Because you can't really make that sexy.

Cathy Heller: [00:42:10] Oh right. Oh, that's cute though. So I feel like getting feedback, there is a way over time you just know, you have a gut and you know, like which things they keep coming back. It's hard for people. I even see this with people in dating, like people who are still single and they don't winna listen. They're just like, “There's no good men!” It's like, “Okay, that's a story.” That's an interesting story.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:34] But that’s nothing to do with you.

Cathy Heller: [00:42:36] Nothing to do, or are you brave enough to go like in high fidelity when John Cusack goes back to his like five ex-girlfriend and he's like, “What's wrong with me? And they're like, “You're a narcissist.” And there he's like, “Ah!” Right? So, and “What do you love about me?” “You're adorable. You're interesting. You're smart.” “Well, what can I fix?” “You're really self-involved.” “Okay, got it.” So like, I'm just making this up, but I feel like people, they're not really wanting to listen. So I think that we do need to listen and then I think you can start to discern, no, no, people aren't telling me to give this up, there is something great but maybe it's this one direction or maybe I just need to improve this part of it. Or maybe they're saying it's actually all headed in the right direction. You just need to keep at it, because there's always going to be a gap. Like Ira Glass, one of our contemporaries if I can be so bold he says, “There's a gap when you begin something, there's a gap between how good you can make the thing and what you can identify as being great.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:37] Definitely. That’s like learning a language where you can understand a lot more, but you can't say it.

Cathy Heller: [00:43:42] So sometimes, my feedback to somebody is I actually see that all of this is really working. You just got to keep going because it's going to go from what's going on now, which is sort of hitting all the marks and good to really great. And so I think people don't stay in it long enough to go from good to great. When I talked to Ellen DeGeneres actually about six months ago. I was at this like preview she did for something. She was doing a Netflix and a bunch of journalists were there afterwards, and I got to be there and I said to her, “What makes people successful?” And she said, “An unrelenting, unrelenting drive to be really good at your craft.” And so she's like, “I did the same standup act for six years until it like the timing got really great,” and it is painful if you really literally put yourself in her shoes and you're like, “Every night for six years going to some dive bar in Kansas City.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:36] Smelly sticky floors, imagine that.

Cathy Heller: [00:44:40] Like living and she was living in an apartment where there were like fleas and she was like, “It was awful.” But she's like, “By the time I got to Johnny Carson, because the booker kept saying like, “Are you ready? Are you ready?” And she's like, “No.” And by the time she went in she's like, “I'm ready.” He called her over to the couch, right? That's her big claim to fame. She's the first female comedian he called over, and she's like, “It took time until the joke landed like, and it really landed, and I was willing to put in the time.” But, but all along people were saying to her, “It's great.” And she's like, “It was great, but it wasn't as--

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:10] She still saw the gap.

Cathy Heller: [00:45:11] So I feel like we need to find ways and one thing is like, I mean take a class, the training never stops. Why should it be that like LeBron James is being asked to take 400 jump shots before breakfast, but you, you're above it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:26] Oh, I agree.

Cathy Heller: [00:45:26] And if you're being asked to do a class. Who are they to -- so let's humble ourselves and let's realize that even the great masters are still training. And so I would say whatever is your thing, is there someone who can mentor you? Is there someone who can learn from you? Can you go to some Jack Canfield workshop for three weeks and try to get some feedback? Like feedback would be really essential and then you can start to make little micro changes and those micro changes might actually make everything hot, I think.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:51] Those are the huge difference, especially at a higher level. It does crack me up. I know you've seen this, you make me laugh here on this, these folks that go, “Oh you know, I don't really think I need coaching on this per se.” And I'm thinking that's interesting because you're asking me how to get better and I'm telling you that I have a vocal coach, a broadcasting coach, a production coach, a coach, a full time producer who's coaching me whether or not he thinks of it that way all the time. My wife's listening to stuff, my whole team's listening to stuff, giving me honest feedback. But you are a beginner, you definitely don't need it.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:22] You don’t need it. Good to go.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:23] You need my one tip on my Instagram inbox.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:26] One tip.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:27] That's going to make a difference in your life.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:28] Right. Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:30] It drives me crazy.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:31] Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:32] What I see are the true professionals. You looking at Howard Stern, I'm not a huge fan of that type of show or whatever.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:40] I’m a pretty big fan of Howard Stern.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:41] He prepares more than anybody.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:43] Pretty big fan. I'm a pretty big fan of Bill Burr also, both chauvinist. I like them both very much.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:48] Funny.

Cathy Heller: [00:46:48] I love bill Burr. But he talks about that. He's like, “People are like,” he talks about how like people think he was like this overnight success. He's like, “No.” He's like, “I was roofing in 110 degree weather as a red head, and basically it was a 27 years slow climb where I was like taking hits to the jaw.” He goes, “I've seen enough Toyota Camrys to know that most people give up on their dreams.” And it's funny and it's true, and it's every time I meet someone like you -- someone who's doing something that they love, they're very curious person. They want to ask people, they want to learn from the best. They're want to seek like some people love him, some people hate him. But I know Tony Robins is always like, “All I do is surround myself with successful people.” And I ask them, “What they're doing?” And constantly he's like, “I'm constantly literally giving myself an education.” I'm like, “Who are you, sir? Can I have five minutes to ask you about yourself? So I can learn,” like having a mentor, the greatest way to get from here to there is like, look at someone who's done it and figured out what they did, or go without a hiking guide to Hawaii and you on your own. You go try to find the best hike and that waterfall just blind. Just of course, you can do it right? Sure.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:57] Sure.

Cathy Heller: [00:47:57] Have the best day. Don't ask the local guy who knows where all the best things aren't. Just go, you're going to be fine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:04] Don't get bitten by a snake, and die alone on a volcano.

Cathy Heller: [00:48:06] No, you won’t die. You'll never die that way. You'll just be fine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:10] Yeah. That's a really cool analogy because I think a lot of folks, we would never go do something. I'm not going to go like, “Hey, do you want to go kiteboarding?” “No, I've never done it.” It cannot be that hard where you'd be like, “Hell no, I'm not doing that, and I'm not letting you do that,” but “Oh, you want to stumble through your entire career blind? No problem, let's do that because you can do whatever you believe in because you're the best.”

Cathy Heller: [00:48:33] You're awesome. I love it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:35] Yeah, I love that, because I do think it's really easy to look at someone like you and go, “Well, she just showed up in L.A, and is like crushing.

Cathy Heller: [00:48:42] Just totally showed up. Like I have three kids and every single one of my kids, I had to go through fertility treatment, but like not one time. Like I look back over the seven and eight years that I was working on trying to have a kid and I think I went through like 15 rounds of different like fertility treatments, surgeries, like miscarriages, giving myself injections. And then people were like, “She has it all. She has the most hunky husband.” He would laugh if he heard that. She’s had a perfect husband, three great kids. She just snapped her fingers. It's like, “Dude, everything has been a fight. Everything has been like the most uphill.” And I'm prepared for that every day, like I'm prepared for traffic. I'm prepared for people to feel like they don't just want to roll out the red carpet to me. And it's like, “Okay, so what am I going to do about it?” So that resilience and this is the thing -- everyone who's listening right now, you are so much more capable of that grit than you give yourself credit for. You really, really are. You just have to be willing to say like, “Okay, it's all normal and I'm going to, I'm going to survive it, so I'm going to be uncomfortable.” “So what?” You've already -- if you're listening to this, you've been through the hardest stuff already. It's already been done. You've gone through heartbreak, you've gone through loss, that's the hardest stuff.

[00:49:58] So you're going to put out a blog and be nervous. You're going to go out for an audition, you're going to send someone an email about your career, and you're going to be that scared. It's not as scary as what you've already been through.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:07] At what point in your life did you start to build the -- well consciously start to build a resilience? Did you show up thinking how hard can it be? I'm really good at this. And then have like a series of wakeup calls or were you -- did you arrive going, this is going to be really hard and I'm going to have to try a bunch and fail.

Cathy Heller: [00:50:22] So I feel like, it was both, I feel like I didn't realize how hard it was going to be, but I think that I also have this thing, this like naive today, which is like I always think it's like around the corner.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:32] The next one.

Cathy Heller: [00:50:33] Yeah. And we had this woman on my show, Jessica Huey, and she said, “The greatest obstacle to your success, it's not actually a tangible obstacle. It's how possible you believe something is.” And so how possible you believe something is, is really like, that's the thing we have to cultivate. You don't want to go into surgery with your doctor who's like, “Okay, well I hope I'll see you in a few hours.” You want, you want the guy to be like, “I'll see you in three hours. You're good.” And then you're like, you have certainty, certainty, right? So you need that certainty. So I think for me, what was weird, I mean it's always like this, like I just go two feet in, dive in. I'm like I'm doing this thing as if, and I just have this belief like it'll work out and then I'll totally fall on my face and things won't work out. But I'm like, “Okay, that's also cool.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:27] Yeah.

Cathy Heller: [00:51:27] Yeah!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:28] I'm a slow learner too.

Cathy Heller: [00:51:29] I don't know, like I just -- I have this belief and I believe so much that I sometimes I think when people around me they're like, “You believe enough in it for me too.” Like they start to feel that enthusiasm. I definitely feel that way, and I don't know why because my mom has suffered from depression my whole life. She was like suicidal when I was growing up. She totally didn't have that belief. Maybe because I was on the other end and I was there to like cheer her on. I built this like resistance that like made me so much like that. But I think that we have to cultivate, I think the best thing people can do is change their story. Like start to really amp up how much you believe in what's possible, but don't be so precious about it looking a certain way.

[00:52:12] Like have this belief like “I'm here to do something that's going to make this world just more delicious.” Whether I'm making pies or I'm hosting my own podcast or I'm teaching school in the inner city or I'm just like making tee shirts. I know one way or the other, and I'm just going to have that outlook that it will -- I will be led to where I can most just be me. And I think if you can be certain about that, then you can get excited and then you can just take more action because I think the more certain you are, the more action you'll take.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:46] So like I said, lots of useful stuff here. Cathy went into it with one expectation and was flexible enough to make it work with something else. And I think that's one of the major important messages here from this episode. Great big thank you to Cathy Heller. She is at, Don't Keep Your Day Job on iTunes or cathyheller.com. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Cathy on Twitter or Instagram, and tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Cathy. I'm at @jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard from Cathy Heller, make sure you go grab the worksheets also in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. I'm also doing a lot more on Instagram these days. I'm like every putting out a little something some -- a lot of them are videos or little hacks that I do to stay productive or in good spirits or get things done in a different or unique way and sometimes I just post ridiculous funny stuff that I think you guys will also enjoy @jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram as I mentioned.

[00:53:40] This episode was produced and edited by Jason DeFillippo. Show notes by Robert Fogarty. Booking back-office and last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love, and even those you don't. Lots more in the pipeline. Very excited for some of the stuff we've got here in the future for you. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.