From The Archives: When 'Boring' Is Powerful

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All right, let's do this thing.
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Cue the fake music.
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Howdy.
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It is me, the Grand Poobah, your Commander in Chief, Lord High Admiral, Archbishop, Lord Mayor, and Lord High uh everything else.
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Welcome to The Right Questions.
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And today, I'm gonna tell you a story.
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And I'm telling it because this idea that drives this story has come up a lot for me lately.
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I find myself asking people, whether I'm asking them face to face or I'm reading it in their Instagram feeds or their LinkedIn stories, but particularly some of my coaching clients, it's come up.
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And I'm I have to ask, why are you so afraid of your own voice?
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It's a good question.
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It's a decent question.
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It's a real question.
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Why are you so afraid of your own voice?
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Literally, your literal voice, your your metaphorical voice, your your creative voice.
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Why can't you let that fly?
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Why can't we let it loose and be comfortable with that?
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So I'm bringing you this story to illuminate this idea, to to illustrate this idea for you.
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And the story's about someone else, not about me.
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It's a story about a former student of mine, a woman named Lena Jensen.
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But like all stories, this is about you.
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The reason it's about you is because we see ourselves in mythic adventures.
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We see ourselves in stories, we recognize qualities we have.
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Like like like the girl on fire in the Hunger Games, or we recognize our qualities in Frodo Baggins.
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Or we want to we want qualities like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.
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Right?
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That's the thing about good stories.
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They're always about us.
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Because in the particular lies the universal, right?
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It's almost an inverse law, this this making something particular and small and special and precise, so it becomes universal.
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Meaning the more authentic and personal and vulnerable we can be, the more our story, the more our lives, the more our work speaks to others.
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And sometimes the simplest and most powerful story is just the uncomfortable truth.
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But here's the thing: no matter how common or boring you perceive it, if told honestly, you become a hero to others and light the way for them and their struggles.
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Your common becomes uncommon.
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Your vulnerability becomes your power.
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And that's what we hear at The Right Questions.
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We, you and I, that's what we seek.
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So Lina was a workshop guest of mine from a few years ago.
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And she had come to me from Denmark.
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I remember her as being very smart and very talented, but somewhat unsure of her purpose.
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She had a small design studio that she called Smoke and Mirrors that didn't make her very happy.
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And I don't think it really brought in much much bread either.
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And the funny thing is, I told her to ditch that name and use her own.
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But I think I she must have thought I was crazy because I didn't know that the name Lena Jensen in Denmark was much like Mary Smith in the United States.
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I was telling her to like blend in, right?
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But she was not happy being a designer.
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But her drawings were delightful and she wanted to be an artist, but to her the learning curve seemed too large.
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So in 2002, Lena Jensen was a struggling artist and a new mom on maternity leave.
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And during this forced solitude, she began to share her life on Instagram through her drawings.
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She chose not to draw all the adorable little things about motherhood, but rather the frustration with the dishes that accumulate, the quarrels with her boyfriend, the laundry, and the exhaustion.
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And because of all that, her debut graphic novel, chronicling her life, was titled Every Day It Starts Again, won first prize in the Danish Cartoon Awards in 2018.
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Her drawings were not elaborate or refined.
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They're honest and human and unpretentious and humorous.
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I recorded a conversation with Lena in 2020.
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And my first question was, what made you weird as a kid?
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And following are Lena's words from our conversation together.
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And starring in the role as Lina Jensen will be James Victory.
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Here we go.
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The funny thing is, I actually never felt that weird.
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On the opposite, I always felt super normal.
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Boring to really boring.
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I was a regular kid doing my homework and minding my own business, and doing what the grown-ups told me to do.
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I was always drawing.
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But it was always after doing my homework and whatever task I was told.
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I was minding my own business, thinking my own thoughts, and just being in the world.
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I kept a journal and diary since I was eight or nine.
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It was really personal and a safe space for me.
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In university I studied art history.
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It was super boring.
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And I changed to graphic design so I could be more creative.
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But that was still doing a lot of other people's work.
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And I was always trying to be somebody else.
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I was trying to copy great graphic designers.
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I wanted to be cool like they were.
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And I always felt like I couldn't really come up with anything myself.
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I really wanted to do more me work.
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I wanted to tell more personal stories, or stories dealing with how the world works and how people work.
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But I never knew how.
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I have always been funny, and I've always been very ironic and self-deprecating, telling shitty things about myself in order to make other people feel better.
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I was really good in conversations with others because I could quickly understand if people felt insecure, and I would immediately tell a very embarrassing story about myself in that regard.
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That would make others feel like, oh my, okay, I can relax.
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That's always been my superpower.
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But it's also really been annoying for me to feel like that because often, if people are not ready to react to that, they go like, oh, really?
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You did that?
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I never do that.
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And it just becomes super awkward.
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It really depends on who you talk to, how that works.
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Right now, you're thinking, oh man, I wish James Victory could be my mentor, my guru.
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Hell, I wish he was my coach.
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Well, you can make that happen.
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Go to your workisagift.com.
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There's a questionnaire that will probably help you out, but it'll also give you access to a free call.
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So let's talk.
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Let's free you from overwhelm and creative frustration.
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Let's build your business and help you get paid to do what you love.
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Again, go to yourworkisagift.com.
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Let's talk.
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I was about to go on maternity leave.
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In Denmark, maternity leave is a year if you want, which for me was so depressing to be at home alone with a baby for a year.
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I needed to do something with my work, to develop my skills.
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And I didn't want to come back to my business just doing the same jobs that I've been doing for 15 years.
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I really needed to change something in my work and my life.
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But how am I going to do anything now that I'm going to be home alone for a year?
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What I really wanted to do is draw.
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But the only thing I can draw is my life, which is shitty.
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And the only story I can tell is mine.
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But this is my life right now, and it's super boring, and it's super normal because I'm home alone with the kid.
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Isn't everybody?
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So I drew every day.
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Some days I would draw with my left hand, because I was breastfeeding, holding the baby with my right.
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Or I would sing kids to sleep in the dark, and the room would get darker and darker, and I would come out of the room with a drawing like, uh, okay, what did I draw?
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But this was really helpful for me, because I lost the self-censoring worries about if it's good enough.
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It was just, okay, this was the time I had today.
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It got done in the middle of the night with lousy lighting.
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Just take a picture of it and put it on Instagram.
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So it became this dogma that was working really well for me because I couldn't think too much about it.
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I had no plan.
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So it was just, okay, this is what happened today.
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In the beginning, I was drawing plants in the window or boring stuff.
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But when I started drawing situations and feelings that I was in the middle of, I just immediately felt the reaction.
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And I had 200 follower friends from my Facebook.
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So it was mainly for my friends.
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And I was mainly drawing to say, okay, I might not pick up the phone, but when you call, because I'm here in the middle of laundry and breastfeeding and changing diapers and screaming kids, so I'm kind of lost to that world.
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But this is a little glimpse of what I'm going through right now.
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But it was life-changing in the way that all of a sudden a lot of strangers came into my Instagram account.
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And everybody was like, oh my God, that's exactly how I feel.
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I was afraid to tell my husband that I feel that way.
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How can I put it like that?
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How can you write like that?
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How can you draw like that?
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But that's how everybody feels.
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So it's not like my story is very spectacular in any way, it's normal.
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And it's just that I tell my really, really super normal story that everybody can relate to it somehow.
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So I found out slowly that I was able to do something with my drawings that I didn't realize before.
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And even if my drawings were really bad or not natural, I could transfer a feeling.
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I could sit home alone with a weird feeling, and I could draw it on paper.
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I just put it out there, and people immediately understood my feeling one-to-one.
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So to me it was magic.
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Sharing was never an issue for me.
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I never thought, oh, I need to do this and I need to be honest, and I need to break the taboo and talk about these things.
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I was always sharing my feelings and my doubts with whomever I met.
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I think that was what made me weird as a kid.
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I remember a lot of friends telling me to be to be more uh mystic, more cool, and not so honest.
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That was just what came natural to me because that's how I am.
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Now I was sharing my drawings, but also my emotions, fears, and even shame.
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And I think that's what people relate to still.
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Back then I did my drawings super quick because I had no time.
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But somehow it's become my way of working, and that's still how I work.
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I'm always too busy to sit down and actually make a nice drawing.
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But it's become my style to draw like that.
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It's become my way to cheat myself into drawing.
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Because if I get too conscious about, oh, I need to make this perfect drawing, I can't draw at all.
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If I have to make it all right in the beginning, I would just be sitting for ten years thinking about it all night and never doing anything.
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This process has been super freeing for me because I no longer have to pretend to be someone else.
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I no longer have to go to work and pretend to be cool and like I'm figuring things out.
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And I can go into a business meeting with people that I never dreamt of meeting with, but everybody knows me, and they're like, well, we want you because you're chaos, and the kids are screaming, and there'll be coffee all over the place, and it will probably be probably be late.
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I can be very true to who I am in all of my relations, which is freeing.
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But also being that it's become so big and so public has always been really weird for me because I never wanted to be a public figure.
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And now I'm recognized in the street, and I'm I'm all the opposite of what people think I am, and they say, Oh, you're really cool and successful, and I'm like, No, I'm just me.
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I have a lot of fans, and people write me the most touching messages, like, I thought I was being wrong, but your work made me realize that it's okay to be who I am.
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It's really powerful to make people feel okay about how they feel instead of being ashamed.
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My drawings have made moms and women give up on the idea of being perfect or flawless or endless love fountains, and instead become real human beings with faults and frustrations and ambitions.
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Being a mom and being a person is hard work.
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It's tough.
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Sometimes you feel shitty and embarrassed about it, and feel like you have to hide that you feel that way.
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So there's this new layer of shame and shit that you put on top of the thing that's already shitty enough.
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So if I can take away a little bit of that shame and just talk about what's shitty already, I think that's fantastic.
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Those were Lina Jensen's words.
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And the last time I spoke to Lina, she reminded me that I asked her to use her uber-common name, Lina Jensen, and she told me with a big smile, she said, James, now I am the Lina Jensen.
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Listen, if you were breathing and you are here right now and you're listening to me, I'm telling you, I'm telling you honestly, you have a story.
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And it is righteous and it is vibrant, and it is truthful.
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And no matter how boring you feel it is, the world wants to hear from you.
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I'm James Victoria, and this is the right questions.
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Thank you all for being here.
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Thank you for supporting this program.
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Without you, there is no right questions.
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By the way, send in questions if you have 'em.
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I'm ready to answer them.
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Otherwise, everybody, be cool.
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Everybody be strong.
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I'm James Victory, and this is the right questions.