begging for it

Amanda Palmer- indie popstar and dark cabaret artiste among other things was famous a few years back for raising a million dollars on kickstarter for a new album. She then toured and in accordance with her usual practice invited local musicians to join her perfomances as volunteers to be paid in fun, beer and hugs. There was a backlash. People not connected to her twitter complained she was exploiting people. She relented and paid 'volunteers' a hundred bucks. But what if she had offered 'playing with Amanda' as a kickstarter option and CHARGED for it. A quick search revealed the band The Polyphonic Spree had done just that- asking $1500 for the priviledge of playing onstage with them. No one had complained, indeed it seemed kind of good sense in these days of hard to monetise pop music...

So as long as money changes hands exploitation has not happened.

Third Law of Confidence

The third law is devastatingly simple: saying your own name loudly and clearly. I don’t mean shouting it out, or enunciating it like a prat, I mean saying it so that everyone who needs to hear it can; and that they will hear it said with ringing clarity and…confidence. Or that is what they will infer. Even if your little heart is beating a hundred a minute and your palms are sweating, if you can say your name loudly and clearly when someone asks you, you will strangely become confident. The sweat will miraculously start to dry, the heart subside.

There are supporting acts to this law which I have gleaned from the always fascinating sci-fi author A.E. Van Vogt. These are- be able to offer sincere congratulations to someone- be it for birthday, promotion or new child, to be able to say Hello in a clear and unaffected way and to be able to ask again if you did not catch someone’s name when it was first spoken.

This is it. Nothing more. Confidence doesn’t start on the inside. It starts on the outside. If you act confidently, you become confident. Everyone has an anxiety machine inside them. Turn it to your advantage. Use that anxious voice to focus and deliver external behaviour. Don’t let it cripple you with inner dialogue. Just say to yourself- how can I use this excess emotional energy to my advantage? OK I’ll use it to be super sharp and precise in what I say.

The power of names

I was at a party and a woman of about thirty five introduced herself as Scraggy. She was good looking, had an attractive manner and yet she was proudly calling herself by a name that surely no one found anything less than repulsive. It was of course, as she told me, a school nickname. “Everyone calls me that,” she said with defiance, “I couldn’t care less.” Maybe not, but I could. It’s like telling someone about a novel you like that has a stupid title. It’s embarrassing; it may even stop you recommending it. Though Scraggy was admirably unconcerned her school name lacked dignity. And it showed a willingness to bend to old school ‘pals’ who wanted to trap her in the submissive position of having to live with a daft nickname.

I’ve noticed that many successful writers and artists date their success from the moment they renamethemselves. There is something magical about a good name – and I speak as someone who has had to invent names for novels and short stories I have written. A good name brings a constellation of associations and is just easier to write dialogue and action for. A bad name is positively deadening. In between are the usual familiar names that are neutral- offering neither inspiration nor its opposite.

Some people have a habit of repeating their own name to themselves as a kind psyching up technique- how much more effective that is if your name is one that has the right associations and overtones. My good friend Helena Edwards, a writer and traveller, changed her name from Joan after a meeting with the celebrated Russian thinker G.I. Gurdjieff, “Joan? Joan? Everybody called Joan!” he said on meeting her. Helena told me she had always disliked the name but just stuck with it out of habit. And the thing was, Helena suited her much much better.

Traditional tribes- meaning people still living with an intact understanding of ancient knowledge- often have three names- the ‘public’ one that is used for dealing with the outside world, one that is used in the tribe and one that is reserved for the most secret purposes. To some extent this mirrors the ‘state name’ that many marginalised folk in the UK maintain alongside their ‘street name’. The ancient fairy story of Rumpelstiltskin shows the power of a secret name- once known, the knower has power over the named one.

Names summon up an identity in condensed form. They affect how people view you in the crucial first 30 seconds in which they make up their mind about you. Though there is something admirably uncaring about sticking with a silly name (the jokes Ed Balls must have lived through…) there is no harm in benefiting from the slipstream of a good name that people like to repeat. All this has a bearing on your ability to say your name clearly and loud enough.

So find the version of your name you are comfortable saying out loud in front of strangers. If it isn’t ‘you’, change it- or start using another. Or simply practice saying your name to the mirror in a blank and unstressed way- focusing on clarity and lack of overt emotion- no need to sound as if you’re laying an egg. A fairly flat unemotive tone can be your baseline as long as it is clear and pervaded by conviction. Of course people might mistake you for a copper…With practise, though, you will develop a way of speaking that convinces both yourself and the listener. Don’t shy away from videoing yourself offering congratulations and saying your name. It’s what actors and TV presenters do, so in this video-saturated age- why not you too? It may show up some alarming glitches and previously unknown habits, but it will improve your performance ten times over.

Performance? Exactly. You may have been labouring under the misapprehension that it is ‘the real you’ people are perceiving when you stride into a room. Nonsense. Only your closest friends and family know the real you in any kind of meaningful detail (and even they are probably half in the dark). No, the real you is something that people who meet you CANNOT perceive. You need to perform, to act, to present in order to re-present. You re-present your inner self by providing an analogousversion of your real self. And by real self I mean the ideal self- the best version of you. Who is naturally calm, collected, confident and coherent.

So you need to perform confidently in the way you speak. We have dealt with the neurological feedback of posture already. A confident way of speaking also feedsback and helps stem the anxiety. People barely register the content of what you say compared to HOW you say it (this varies, depending on how intellectually oriented they are, but broadly all people react to container not content). And the container is: the tone and volume of your voice. That is the real message you convey during such seemingly meaningless interchanges as saying your name and asking another person theirs.

Why do you think many Americans seem so much more confident than Brits in everyday encounters? Because these very skills- speaking clearly and offering congratulations- are things they learn early. I have seen some very shy and introverted Americans delivering witty and amusing and ‘confident’ speeches when they have to. Inside they’ll admit they are churned up and nervous- but the culture- in which being ‘relaxed’ is almost an artform- has encouraged them to disregard these feelings. Lacking ‘confidence’ of this kind is simply unAmerican…

Contrast this with the Japanese where it is good manners to act ‘nervous’ on a first encounter. It’s funny when you meet someone obviously relaxed doing their best to appear a little nervous and wary when meeting you for the first time. Of course the next time you meet it can be very different. But even the Japanese are taught from a very early age to shout out their name loudly and clearly when asked.

Nervous or not, the act of speaking with clarity and a decent volume will communicate confidence. And confidence breeds confidence. Your interlocutor will assume you are self-assured and act accordingly. Which will increase your steady bearing and so on in a virtuous cycle.

How deep is your voice?

Studies[1]have shown that deep voices are correlated to higher earnings as a CEO of a big corporation. Since such jobs are as much acting as substance, this isn’t too surprising. The fraudulent CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes- who was listed by Forbes in 2015 as the youngest and wealthiest female billionaire in the US (before it was realised her blood sampling invention didn’t work) managed to raise colossal sums of start-up money with a stellar list of investors. The ability to convince investors was her speciality and she was known to have a special, unnaturally deep, voice for presentations… and a much higher voice for her private life. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, suffered from voice problems for several years after he adopted a fake deep voice while he worked in the corporate world. He claimed that though he was incompetent at his job he was always seen as promising owing to the ‘respect’ garnered by his deep voice. People thought he sounded confident even though he was talking bullshit…

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not recommending the ‘con’ side of confidence. I am just revealing that confidence is NOT about inner state, it is about outer behaviour.

Status again.

Certainly higher status is signalled in primates by a deeper voice. A louder voice also has the same effect. As with our earlier discussion about posture and status, a kind of reverse high status can be achieved by having a very quiet voice- like the Godfather actor Marlon Brando- when a loud deep voice is expected. (Oddly enough many real life tough guys like Mike Tyson have high pitched voices.)

But confidence is not just about being high status. You can be confident and low status too. As long as that posture serves your needs. The hilarious Fast Show sketch that features the intrusive menswear shop assistants who keep saying ‘suits you sir’ ostensibly act low status- as befitting their humble occupation- but they end up dominating the poor customer with their lewd questioning. The fall guy or the straight man in a comedy act make act high or low status- it doesn’t matter which since it is all in the service of making people laugh. We in the West get too hung up in status without realising how malleable it is and how it is there to be used, rather than using us. It’s easy to confuse a high status manner with confidence, but real confidence is measured by what you do, not how you appear. Isn’t that a contradiction of the whole importance of speaking loud and clear? Not really- functional confidence requires good and clear communication skills- nothing more or less. The purpose of the third law is to eliminate hang-ups you may have about your ‘inner state’ when you are about to open your mouth. By greeting and congratulating people clearly and loudly enough you slay those fears.

How to speak on any subject for 15 minutes

Anxieties about speaking in public famously rival those of possible death. It is something that can reduce the most confident seeming person to a drivelling wreck and yet the solution to the ‘problem’ is fiendishly simple and based on improvised acting. From impro acting classes you learn to lose inhibitions about going on stage unprepared- which is as close to real life as it gets. The following exercise is from impro coach Keith Johnstone and it will give you everything you need to quell inner anxiety about public speaking- I mean if you can talk on ANY SUBJECT for 15 minutes what else is there to scare you?

It is irrelevant whether you know anything about the subject or not. For the first five minutes simply state what you are thinking. If it’s hot in the room, say so. If you had a bad car drive there, say so. If you are feeling nervous, say so. The bizarre fact is, once you admit you are feeling nervous in front of an audience you will no longer feel paralysed by that fact. What’s more, the audience will now be on your side and you’ll feel it. Just as a wedding audience are on the side of the best man, so an audience you tell the truth to, will be on your side. And by truth I simply mean what is going on in your mind and in the theatre. You have ceased mining your memory for a ‘good speech’ and become simply a transmitter of existing material.

After five minutes of this though your audience may be expecting more.

The next move is always interesting. Ask the audience. You’ll be surprised how often an expert in the subject you are supposed to be discussing is actually sitting in front of you. Partly it can be explained by the need of people who know a subject to test others in the same field. Partly, too, many experts are rather shy of putting themselves forward but wait for opportunities to do so that are created by others. Your talk could be such an opportunity. And if you are tasked at the last minute with talking on a subject you know absolutely nothing about for 15 minutes you need all the help you can get. You ask the audience politely and when you find your man or woman you introduce them respectfully to everyone in the room. You converse with them in an interested way and then you thank them sincerely and also ask the audience to give them a big hand too.

That’s another five minutes gone.

Now you are in the back straight and you have a final trump card: change the emotion. If you have been talking positively about nuclear power, killer bees or orchids you must now make a stunning revelation to the audience, “I am actually something of a fraud as I really hate XYZ”. You then go on a rant espousing the opposite point of view employing hate instead of admiration. If you have earlier been talking in an aggrieved manner, reverse it and start speaking in a relieved manner. Whatever you do REVERSE that emotion. The audience will be stunned…for another five minutes. At which point you wind up your impromptu speech.

These techniques can be used anytime and in any situation when you have to engage your ‘talking machine’. You can reverse emotion in a conversation to get things going. You can relay what you are feeling RIGHT NOW. You can show a real interest in another person and find out the subject they really know about.

When you know that never again will you be stuck for words it will cause a considerable dip in the anxiety you feel about speaking in public- and a consequent rise in all round confidence.

What’s your job?

Many people feel somewhat unnerved when they meet strangers and have to answer the inevitable question “and what do you do?” Some feel their job title is boring- so they answer “I’m a boring accountant”. Some soldier on and then chose to ignore the glazed eyes when they answer. But there is another way.

Instead of answering ‘accountant’ you could say what you really do each day- “I move things into different categories in order to get money for the things I want to get done.” I sometimes answer instead of writer, “I mostly write proposals for books that get turned down, maybe four out of five times, but sometimes become bestsellers.”

It doesn’t take much thought to come up with a description of what you reallydo rather than the tired old usual handle used to describe your work. And it is genuinely informative as many people don’t actually know what an accountant or a tax inspector does on a day to day basis. So, shift the emphasis from the usual to an unusual description in the active concrete present not the abstract and generalised past.

Another interesting tack is to say what you did that day- people are always interested in a day in the life of a stranger…

But the source of this anxiety is deeper, lying as so much does, with our sense of identity. Who am I? the philosopher has always asked and so, of course, does just about everyone else, I mean, who am I really?

Doubts about your real identity, the real you, your core, afflict everyone from time to time. If it strikes when you actually have to do something active and it gets in the way it looks very much like a failure of confidence. The fact is, your identity is made of up of multiple strands of self. Different ones come to the fore depending on the situation. Some can lie dormant for years, only to reappear with a vengeance. If you are wise you’ll weave these strands into an integrated self- as much as you can. And the ones that seem to contradict each other you just acknowledge and establish a work-around. For example – you may love the outdoors but your ambition has driven you to take an office job. In that case every month take off with no tent, minimal food and some warm clothing and simply rough it in the wilderness. Get an extreme version of the outdoors to counteract your long days indoors. Once a self-contradiction is acknowledged its destructive power is curtailed. It is when we try to force ourselves to be one thing or another but not boththat we face a backlash, when the dismissed self stages a comeback.

Establishing who you are, is less about introspection and more about being observant- especially when you are in a new or unfamiliar situation- such as travelling abroad. Watch what you do and what you gravitate towards and what you avoid. All this will supply useful information about who you really are.

The kind of attention we can work with

When you reply in a clear and loud enough voice you are being functional. The needs of the situation have been met. People standing near will know you know the score: that being shy and hesitant is a non-useful attitude. Their palpable relief (unless they are weird and sadistic and like picking on the timid) will result in easy conversation and follow up behaviour. But what has really happened is that you been in an attention exchange and behaved honestly. You have not demanded more attention from it than the situation can supply. If you talk over loudly, or in a whisper that people can’t hear, you are demanding attention, more than the situation is equipped to dish out. You are being needy and no one likes a needy person. When you realise that a lot of life’s misunderstandings stem from people who have too little attention trying to get more out of situation than it is designed to yield, you’ll be able to adjust your own behaviour- and instead of having that attention denied (what we do to ‘punish’ needy folk) you’ll get your fair share. Constructing a day so that it has enough fair attention interactions is not a difficult thing to do. And knowing how to get enough attention is a key part to being confident.

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[1]https://www.lifehack.org/372669/science-explains-why-having-deep-voice-critical-our-success-2

Theoretical Polymathics

Though I am much more interested in practical polymathics there does seem a need to clarify, in a theoretical sense, what is meant by polymathics. If only to highlight the dramatic difference in this way of thinking from all others[1].

Even where polymathy is advanced as a good thing it is treated rather tamely as mixing arts and sciences, in other words a compote of head knowledge. But the human organism has, we know now, a distributed intelligence. Because much of what we thought was done by the brain is actually performed and influenced by other areas of the body, we literally think with our entire bodies. And we use our bodies and include our bodies in all our activities. If you can't sit still for a long time you won't be able to do maths or write essays. So sitting still is a necessary academic skill. Beyond such simple examples there is the language we use. It is not derived from being brains in vats, it is derived from millenia of human experience involving physical exertion and physical skill. This provides both metaphorical and scientific clout to a new  perspective- that of polymathics.

Every area of knowledge- including mathematics has both tacit and explicit components. Typically, the tacit components are doubly hidden from view as they are the preserve of the people who are ‘good at’ a subject and seek to maintain their advantage. Being good at maths means more than memory and logical reasoning. It includes such diverse things as liking numbers, seeing patterns, having a feel for geometry, being enthusiastic about swapping algebraic forms around. Nietzsche was the first philosopher to promote the idea that foremost in knowledge is the value, the importance we attribute to a statement. Now we might add that how interested and enthusiastic we are is a key part of our ability to understand and perform in a subject area.

Maths is the province of people who are good at maths. People without maths ability have to take things on trust. People who are good at physics may understand Einstein, those who aren’t have to take it on trust. To be ‘good at’ art also involves tacit knowledge. Knowing how to cross hatch with style has many many applications but it is something made explicit with some difficulty and has to be learned as a skill. Indeed one definition of the tacit is that it is a ‘skill’ and not simply a series of logical moves made with information remembered.

So each area has a tacit component that is often overlooked – for various reasons, not the least of which being that it is difficult to write about and academic subjects are conveyed using textbooks and other written materials.

Tacit knowledge is built through experience rather than reading, though a certain kind of reading- autobiography for example- can really help speed up the acquisition of tacit knowledge.

Though there may be great differences between the explicit knowledge of a subject- a huge difference between integration and the history of Rome, there is something common about all tacit knowledge. Or there is more linkage here.

Polymathics focuses on the tacit knowledge aspect of all subject areas. It finds commonalities and is therefore a substitute for long experience in any area. It is a path to rapid skill and knowledge acquisition.

Academic study is based on the essential difference between subject areas. Indeed to receive funding for research your subject is prejudiced if it does not fall in an existing area. So funding- which is crucial in many areas- just reinforces the splintered image of knowledge.

But a premise of polymathics is that all knowledge is linked by a wider context. Also, that the context of a subject is vastly important. The denial or reduction of context is the simplest way to achieve odd, interesting and ultimately damaging results in any area. The more context you include the harder it becomes to ‘solve’ problems. It may be frustrating but it is better for everyone.

If all knowledge is linked in a Fortean way and if the tacit component of knowledge is much more common that we imagine we have some insight into the connection between genius and polymathy.

Polymathics is concerned with ranking the scope and range of knowledge from a new perspective. This is: how connected is the subject under study to the rest of the world. Instead of maths and physics at the top they might come at the bottom. Physical activities such as dance and martial arts may take their place. Artistic pursuits and making could also rank highly.

Polymathics starts from the position that we are humans- with minds and bodies that are interconnected and a social system that is interconnected. There could be no language without this prior interconnection. Before man spoke he was part of a primitive primate group that nevertheless communicated using rudimentary versions of language. Taking this anthropological view of language, refusing to privilege it simply because of its logical efficacy, is the final act we must take in discarding the obvious errors brought about by the Cartesian fallacy.

Polymathics is able to treat static and dynamic knowledge with due deference to each. Instead of treating dynamic knowledge as an inferior and limited version of static knowledge.

Polymathics is able to integrate both right and left brain perspectives.

One of the key questions in knowledge is: A) when does what I know cease to apply here?

And B): can I understand what I am seeing with my current stock of knowledge as my only interpretative guide?

Obviously B is a version of A. But the key point is: we are usually poor at recognising that we don’t understand what we are looking at. We are much more likely to represent it using existing knowledge, even if it’s wrong. This is modern version of a primitive man looking at an aeroplane and calling it a flying horse. That we are just as easily mislead as primitive men when it comes to the unfamiliar is a point of faith in polymathics borne out by countless observations.

Bending what I know out of shape to increase it’s scope is where falsehood begins. There are no ‘truth’ tests or handy Popperian gambits to help here. Everyone, in every area, is capable of being lead astray by their own enthusiasm and by the structure of the subject itself, into making statements that are unsupported, except by internal reference.

How do we know when we are going off course? Experience, usually. Making mistakes over a lifetime teaches some real lessons. We begin to get a feel for the nine tenths of the iceberg that is tacit knowledge. But some subjects have less experiential feedback than others.

Polymathics aims to simulate tacit knowledge, indeed is a substitute for it, enabling far more rapid understanding, far more accurate understanding and the ability to master subjects outside one’s ‘field’.

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[1]Except perhaps those philosophies influenced by Eastern thought- Sufism, Daoism and Zen.

Inner Freaks and the Conformal World

I watched the other day one of my favourite films: Tod Browning’s controversial 1932 movie Freaks. It’s set in the world of the sideshow carnival in America and starred real life freaks- including a limbless man who with stunning dignity rolls and smokes a cigarette with just the use of his mouth. The freaks are victimised by their life sized co-workers and achieve a chilling revenge…by the end of the film you want to be ‘one of us’ as the freaks sing, their membership chant reversing their outcast nature.

Why the film exerts so much power is that it portrays a simple truth. On the outside someone can be freakish, but in their character and actions a beautiful person. And a beautiful person in conventional terms (the bad guy in the film is a stock blonde beauty) can be evil inside. A simple truth but one which the everyday world continually masks. I call this conformality. It’s a con, it’s about making conformism look good and it uses an arbitrary notion of normality as a bench mark.

We are now living in a conformal[1]world. It is a world in which the ‘normal’ is utterly different from any age in human history. That’s quite a claim but let me expand a little. The ‘normal’ in the past was directly linked to how people made a living. Hunting, fishing, tilling the land and performing manual labour- all done in groups. These activities served to fulfil basic human physical, emotional and psychological needs. There may have been many downsides in terms of comfort and health- but I am not talking about that. I am simply referring to the fact that being ‘normal’ was a pretty good stance to take when it came to mental well being.

But that has changed.

The current projection of the normal involves the idea of working eight hours a day in front a computer screen, often alone, with a social life spent largely in front of the same screen. Maybe a bit of binge drinking thrown in for good measure. Or ‘clubbing’. Add some driving around in a car that looks like it’s been pressed from a jelly mould and you have ‘normal’ life. The effort to look normal in such a world is extraordinarily high. The sheer relief when you stop posing as normal and accept your ‘inner freakishness’ is immense. The power of eccentricity is just that- it releases a lot of energy bound up with trying to copy others and look like them.

I recently discovered that when I’m hill walking I go much faster when I’m leading than when I’m following. I thought it was about some need to be first or something but it was actually about pace. By setting my own pace, a bit faster here, slower here, adjusting my gear, looking for a certain path I was conserving energy, energy I was able to use in going further and faster than when I tried to conform to another’s pace.

But the conformal world is hard to outpace or leave behind. It’s everywhere- TV, social media, the news, commercials, the products we buy, the way we live our lives. I need to re-emphasise that trying to be normal in the past at least brought the comfort of numbers, of group satisfaction. Now ‘normal’ is increasingly working from home, alone at your work station, telecommuting. And if you work in an office- doing a bullshit job. The creeping ascendancy of bullshit jobs- documented so well by David Graeber- is an outcome of corporate feudalism- the real era we currently inhabit. 37% of Britons believe that their jobs are essentially pointless…

So it is no surprise that the price of trying to conform to the conformal world is failure, unhappiness and mental health problems. But the price of fighting the conformal world without knowing about basic human psychological needs for attention, friendship, human support can also be failure, happiness and mental health problems.

Oddly enough it may be that the real deal breaker for many is that the conformal world is just too expensive. It is cheaper to be different. You have to do something different to survive in a world where property and utility bills make ‘normal’ living impossible.

By embracing your inner freak you establish the first necessary condition to surviving and ultimately thriving in the conformal world. You establish that your ‘difference’ ‘weirdness’ ‘nonconformity’ is a good and healthy thing, a powerful motor to help you find happiness. Indeed you celebrate all the things that the conformal world has made you doubt, the thousand ways it has undermined your confidence in being ‘you’. Why do we live in age obsessed with identity? It is a reaction to the extreme pressure of conformality, to erase difference and promote ‘one size fits all’ thinking.

Eccentricity- the way of the freak- has always been the motor of real achievement throughout history. But in the past being normal had as its reward a healthy and fulfilling psychological life. But being normal now doesn’t supply that. That’s why the option of eccentricity in the past is now a necessity…

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[1]Conformality is a term derived from mathematics. It means whatever the projection you make of a shape the angles remain the same. Which of course is something that doesn’t happen in the real world. It has overtones of conformity ie. the angles never change and normality, meaning it’s unchanging shape become the norm. It is also a formal construction- something, as we mentioned, couldn’t happen in the real world where ever increasing scale means other forces distort lines and angles- in the real world all lines are curved.

transition awareness

Think of all the transitions you make in one day. Going from one task to another, one persona to another. Each transition requires emotional energy. And as you get older and more set in your ways it requires even more energy. 

In the past, in the UK. shops were shut on Sundays. Kids sometimes thought it was 'boring' (I didn't as I was off in the woods mucking about with my pals). But that kind of Sunday was a perfect ritual to make the transition to a new week. 'Boring' rituals can actually be among the most effective as they take the stress and tension out.

Some transitions are thought to be major- becoming an adult, having children. Others seem minor- going from visiting a friend to making a complaint at a shop that over charged you. But all transitions can be immensely stressful if we don’t know what is going on.

It makes sense to identify the common structure of a transition. There is the build up, the wall, the ritual, and the breakthrough. When you know the structure you know how to make transitions without being stressed all the time.

Ancient cultures are riven with strange rituals and taboos. Modern man generally mocks them, or studies them as evidence of the engaging folly of ancient thought. Yet, as we are discovering in so many areas, ancient man had a very good reason to devise these rituals. They were to enable a transition to be bridged WITHOUT psychic disorder being left behind.

In the modern age though, there are no rituals. As if this wasn’t damaging enough, the 24 hour style of living enabled by the internet and digital computing means you can live and work with no OFF button. No natural transitions at all. Which means you have to instigate your own, which takes even more psychic energy.

When we are stressed, transitions are harder. When we de-inhibited by alcohol and certain drugs, transitions are easier. When we have more energy, transitions are easier. It is no accident that in the hyper stressed modern world we are reaching for ever more ways to reduce the impact of transitions.

Gatekeepers and Lineworkers

In this world you’re either a gatekeeper or a lineworker. Some people are both, but the different roles are not easy to reconcile. Did you ever line up to wait to get into a nightclub or restaurant? Then you’re lineworker. Do you own such a restaurant- then you’re gatekeeper…for now. 

The power of gatekeeping was made personal – became an experience I could use because I owned it- when I edited a book published by a well known imprint. In it I got to choose who appeared or not. I asked world famous names and they ALL agreed. No one said no. Why? Because after a while- I started by asking the less famous first- a kind of band wagon effect started and no one wanted to be left out of the party.

If you can instigate a party and then exclude people – you’ve arrived- you’re a gatekeeper.

But what if you can’t attract people to your own cause; or maybe you don’t have one? Then you hijack or manoeuvre your way into controlling an existing gatekeeping organisation. This is what many people call ‘a career’. There are numerous gatekeeping orgs out there. Some are harder to infiltrate than others. One that is not so easy to enter successfully but promises handsome rewards in cash and prestige is politics. Prestige you say? Yes, although politicians are universally reviled they are also accorded a great deal of air time; politicians are handsomely paid in what they mostly crave: attention.

But what of the rest- the lineworkers? Aren’t they fools to be taken for a ride time and again by the gatekeepers? Well take my own trade of writing. Many writers I know cavil and groan under the command of publishers- but they wouldn’t want to publish their own book. They want the kudos of a famous ‘house’ behind them. Was ever thus- at least in the current age of American style publishing- Hemingway famously manoeuvred his way out of publishing deal to be accepted by Knopf- the leading firm of his time. 

Does anyone care who published Milton or Shakespeare or even Hemingway for that matter? Of course not. Gatekeepers perish with their age- that is their fate, their punishment for assuming the riches generated by others. Lineworkers get to live on after their death. Or some do. But beyond this superficial analysis it makes sense to understand the actual work the gatekeeper does- and it is not fun and games- but usually dull and repetitive- work that is offloaded onto other lineworkers who sell their hours for a crust of bread. So you have a choice of linework- either way you are kept waiting by the gatekeeper.

Isn’t it a form of addiction? Maybe. I was just reminded of that Lou Reed song about heroin: “I’m waiting for my man/25 dollars in my hand/he’s never early, he’s always late/ the first thing you learn is you always got to wait.”

Some people hate waiting. A man I knew who started a financial PR firm (gatekeeper for finance companies once his ‘name’ was made) pushed in front of me in a very friendly way while we were queuing for food at a charity supper- “I just hate waiting in line,” he explained. And we, with a laugh, let him barge in. Not everyone is in the same rush and we shouldn’t always envy those who are.

Gatekeepers exclude for profit. We all exclude. If Bill Gates gave all his billions to everyone on the planet we’d get about a fiver each…he excludes healthy folk to concentrate on curing diseases instead. You don’t invite everyone on the street to Christmas, usually. But we try to include everyone who wants to come, don’t we?

Gatekeepers use the mass media to create an open invitation. Then they make you wait. But the mass media is fickle- the other day a young woman with 2 million Instagram followers couldn’t sell 36 tee shirts of her own design. The party she was gatekeeping was too easy to join. Numbers aren’t enough. You need desire too, a fierce desire to belong, to join. Make it hard. This is where the power comes in, the ugliness. Gatekeeping isn’t cost free.

Why do gatekeepers exist? Because people want to party. They want to band together and feel cosy against the cold and dark outside. And they want to feel special. They want to exclude others but they don't want to do the dirty work. Let the gatekeeper take the blame, shoulder the hard task of saying 'no' day in in day out. The lineworkers want to feel special, to be given power; the gatekeepers simply push in, smilingly assuming power. So why not be a gatekeeper but a different kind. Why not have your own party? Invite all your friends. All of you become both invitees and gatekeepers- alternating in turn…

second law of confidence

The Second Law of Confidence: posture- how you stand.

Why are soldiers taught to stand up straight? Why do martial artists spend years perfecting kamae- stance? Why do dancers glide into a room and seem to own it?

Because confidence, as with all mental states, is NOT something independent of your body. We forget sometimes we are not a brain in a vat (with a couple of legs to get us around), we are a highly integrated mind-body continuum, and we ignore at our peril the benefits, and disadvantages having a body attached bring.

Try this experiment: walk into a room full of strangers, ideally a party of some sort. Observe what you feel like doing. Probably it’s what most people do, slide along the wall trying to fit in and not look conspicuous. And then oddly enough you’ll have a yearning to be spoken to and an equally strong fear of starting a conversation with a stranger. You’ll conclude something like “I lack confidence” or “I’m an introvert” or some other excuse (we will look at the introversion fallacy later on).

Leave and come back in. This time do the crucifixation pose- arms outstretched, as if stretching and encompassing everyone. Now you ownthat room. Walk towards the centre and without even trying you will start some kind of conversation.

It always works. Like magic. Why? Because you changed your status, and therefore your confidence, through posture, a very powerful move indeed.

The Mysteries of Status

For a more in depth study of status I suggest you read the books of Keith Johnston, starting with Impro, but for the time being I’ll detail all you need to know with regard to status and confidence.

Johnston, who is a theatrical director and teacher of genius, more or less invented all the improvisation games now used to teach students of acting. He studied the way primates acted and he studied the way early comic genius’s such as Chaplin and Keaton created stories. From this he realised that status is never far from any dramatic interchange. 

Dr Johnson (no t), the great English wit and thinker, wrote that two men can never be together more than half an hour without one thinking he is the superior of the other. 

And even if it isn’t conscious, we unconsciously project our assumed status wherever we go.

The reasons aren’t hard to find. Higher status primates get more food, a mate, and more ‘respect’. And since, sadly, most human behaviour is on a par with the monkey house, status is very prevalent. Especially in situations where your confidence may be threatened.

The good news is, that will all change from today. Impossible? Not if you really take on board the way status can be manipulated. And, secondly, when you recognise status moves made by others you won’t be floored by them. You won’t be taken in; instead you’ll be noting to yourself “ah, a classic high status move”.

Remember the impartial spectator again? That part of you we might call ‘the observing self’? Well you can empower it by going into ‘scientist’ mode. Instead of imagining you are a ‘manager’ who has to be on top of everything and control everything think of yourself as a ‘scientist’ who is there to observe and note down exactly what is happening. By being ‘a scientist of status’ you will be amused and interested rather than intimidated by people who habitually play high status.

For observational purposes we can think of behaviour as high, matching or low status. High status behaviour tends to bring out low or matching status behaviour in others. Low status behaviour tends to bring out high status behaviour in most people (the bastards!). People who lack confidence have usually inadvertently learned how to act low status. It’s their factory setting. And of course it can be changed.

We signal high status mainly through posture, then tone of voice, then how we speak and lastly what we say.

The signifiers are quite precise as Johnston has found. For example keeping the head completely still conveys high status. Watch how military commanders talk when they deliver a briefing or report- their heads never move. You can try this experiment. Next time you are talking to a stranger keep your head very still and do not touch your hair (what teenagers, acting low status, tend to do). As if by magic you’ll find that your interlocutor starts to move their head, probably even touch it. 

No try this: talk without blinking. You’ll find the person you are talking to starts to blink! And maybe even hesitate and fumble for words as you become more fluent. Blinking is a low status activity. Watch A list Hollywood stars as they perform- they very rarely blink (especially when dead…). One of the great examples of this is Kurosawa film Living- where a low status bureaucrat takes on the yakuza and wins- and you can see how his blink rate changes as his status rises.

Tiny cues signal status. A louder voice is high status. So is a lower one. And just to confuse things there is double bluff status where a quiet voice signals status as people are forced to listen carefully- think mafia don here. 

An overbite signals very low status- hence the rush for dental braces to cure this problem. Yet a little research reveals overbite is connected to posture. If you stand up straight and look straight ahead any overbite is much reduced. Standing up straight, head not moving, hands not touching head- this is the high status, high confidence pose to have.

Experiment out on the street. Replace your over bite with top and bottom front teeth matching together, the lower lip loose, lower teeth almost bared, rather like Marlon Brando in the Godfather. Sure as hell you’ll feel more confident, even aggressive as you march down the street (though talking can be problematic).

Experiment with posture, what in martial arts is known as ‘stance’, and you’ll discover some interesting things, the main one being, you can change your mental state by changing your posture. If you walk head held high, with or without a swagger, you’ll be thinking different thoughts to slouching along the street staring at the ground. You will start to discover that most of us keep our centre of consciousness, where we imagine ‘we’ are located as somewhere between the chest and the head, but mostly in the head. If you could imagine yourself as one of those diagrams that show the sensitivity of each part of the body drawn to a scale that reflects the relative sensitivity of that part (the tongue is huge as are the lips with a tiny back and legs) then you’d be a huge wobbly head on a pair of walking sticks.

No wonder you lack confidence! A huge wobbly head thinks too much and is fearful of getting damaged. Now walk the street imagining your eyes are at groin level, yep, right in your genitals staring out. Suddenly you feel far more connected to the ground, your centre of gravity is lowered, and you’re more perceptive, less judgemental. What’s more, the inner chatter will have slowed to a halt, replaced by observational noting.

You can practise shifting you imaginary eyes to the stomach, to the feet, to the finger tips. You can also practise an old kung fu trick of walking as if you are transparent, totally see through, just a skeleton, which is see through too. All this shifts your attention ‘out there’ which as we learned in Law One, is the first step in combatting confidence problems.