Are You Cutting The Lawn? Or Just Trimming The Edges?

well hey there hero it’s David H
Lawrence the 17th and a something came
up this week I found myself doing
something that was a tactic of avoidance
that I wanted to share with you and I
wanted to tell you what I did about it
and maybe it’ll help you the concept
came to me that sometimes we have to cut
the lawn
sometimes the lawn needs a good cutting
something needs to be changed about how
we do our business how we’re recording
our auditions how we’re dealing with our
clients something big something that is
right in the middle of the target that
needs to be made better and what we do
sometimes to avoid that is we start
nibbling around the edges rather than
aiming squarely at that big thing in the
middle and we’ve talked in these videos
before about how difficult it is
sometimes to take a big huge chunk of
something and get it done and the way to
handle that is to start with some of the
smaller pieces and work your way towards
getting the entire operation done but
sometimes those little tiny pieces
become our focus our only focus like if
we really need to get better at doing a
particular category of voice work for
example like say we can’t quite figure
out how to have a more natural feel in
our conversations when we’re doing
commercials that’s a very specific thing
we have this background in radio and so
we tend to become a little artificial in
our delivery and we need to work on that
so what we’ll start to do is think okay
how do i how am i what about my mic
maybe my mic needs to be replaced maybe
that’s the problem I’m using a broadcast
mic and that’s mm that’s what’s going on
there or maybe maybe the software that
I’m using is
two highly compressed we’re avoiding
the actual issue that’s bigger and that
is upping our skills in terms of
performance that’s a much bigger thing
than ordering a new microphone from
Sweetwater or from Amazon installing it
and going there you go now how does that
sound not much different so when you’re
faced with something as I was this past
week and I basically just said look I’m
just gonna take it on I’ve got one big
thing that I need to deal with and I’m
gonna take it on and I did and it was
tough but when it was finished
everything was a lot better and I’m
gonna share that with you in a couple of
upcoming videos or I’ve also seen other
people take on projects and worry about
some of the details that really don’t
matter in the end but it gives them
something actionable because the big
thing is so much bigger so what I say is
recognize that notice that and really
understand that avoiding the big issue
avoiding that big thing that you need to
take care of by taking care of little
tiny things that you know probably don’t
matter that much is different from
nibbling away at the big problem by
starting with the small blocks of it and
that was never more true this week than
when I took on a fairly big project with
one of my coaches so it’s hard sometimes
to recognize whether you’re doing that
or not but you will if you look at the
results and say yeah that’s not moving
me any closer to the target I did the I
did the replacing of the microphone and
that didn’t really help and I started
using you know the new version of
of ProTools and that didn’t help either
so what am I not looking at what am I
not what am i avoiding right so ask
yourself am i cutting the lawn or am I
just trimming the edges that’s the
phrase that I came up with this week
that I’ll use from now on to check to
make sure that that’s the case anyway
let me know what your thoughts are on
this if you found yourself in a
situation like this where you just
really don’t want to you know take on
the big things so you start just kind of
trying to figure out what you can do
while you’re sipping on your iced tea
tell me in the comments below if you
want to be on my list I’d love to have
you go all the way down to the bottom of
the page and jump on the list where it
says get on the list and we’ll tell you
when these when these videos are coming
out I’m David H Lawrence the 17th I
thank you so much for watching and I
will talk to you tomorrow.