John (00:04)
Welcome. Today we're looking at the chaos and disruption caused by digital overwhelm. I'm joined by Kerry Lynch. Kerry is a performer. She's a musician. She's a researcher. Together with her partner, Jacopo, in Scotland, she runs a program called The Confident Performer. Kerry, welcome to the show.
Kerry (00:23)
Hey John
John (00:25)
Let's begin with the chaos, shall we? What was your experience of digital overwhelm?
Kerry (00:30)
My experience is that instead of spending time doing the things that I loved, my brain was just spinning in 50 million directions because of pings from my phone, email, social media, and it's just, yeah, total chaos is the right word.
John (00:47)
What effect did that have on your day?
Kerry (00:50)
So instead of the ideal of getting up, working on your instrument, that's what all musicians just want to do, it was a case of you're awake and straight on your phone and your attention has just been pulled in so many different directions.
John (01:05)
How often would you check your phone per day during this period?
Kerry (01:09)
So it would be a case of just throughout the day. it's, you know, it's here right now, but it's the thing is these, ⁓ yeah, my phone is just with me most of the time, even though, although my relationship with it is different than it was a few years ago. It would be a case of, know, when you get a ping, it could happen at any time. So very, very frequently throughout the
John (01:30)
But to be fair, it's a bit complicated for a creator, isn't it? Because to some extent, it's part of your stage, it's part of your art. Being on social media, being on digital stages is very real. What are the challenges for a creator?
Kerry (01:52)
So you're bang on with what you just said, you do need quote unquote to be on these things. When you're a creator, so much of it is letting people know that you're here. And if people don't know what you do and where you are, how do you expect them to engage with you? So I totally understand and things have shifted now. And maybe, you know, a few decades ago, it was a case of going out and just talking to people and that was just the way society was. Whereas now there has been this big change.
and it is just a part of how people communicate now. So on one hand, you know, I totally appreciate that, but on the other hand, you know, you're losing so much when you don't have that physical connection with other people.
John (02:32)
So
what impact does this checking your phone have on your day?
Kerry (02:36)
Okay, so the impact was that rather than being here in the moment, working on whatever I was working, a part of me probably, well, part of me was, but another part definitely felt like it was somewhere else. And there's been so many studies done that, you know, even one that just came to mind there, they did a study with children and doing exams in schools. And they found that when they had a phone or a device in the room with them, that the performance scores were markedly lower. And that was just because they have
proven that a part of your focus really is waiting, it's expecting, it's looking because we've just been trained to have that kind of relationship now with pings and social media and all of that stuff so they have shown that it does.
John (03:16)
Gosh.
You're saying it doesn't even need to ping. We just need to be waiting for it to ping. Yeah. Or the distractions take it.
Kerry (03:26)
It's just the nature of the relationship, I guess, with how you engage with it. And yeah.
John (03:30)
Well,
very interesting. So let's look at the impact on you then. That's your day, slightly distracted by pings or waiting for things to happen. But how does it affect your relationship with yourself?
Kerry (03:46)
So much of the way even that I just grew up engaging with social media was that there was a, you can call it an avatar of you, there's a digital version of you and you're constantly, I guess, working on that. you know, it's very common for people to put up pictures of just themselves or yeah, and very edited, not particularly real photos, but there's this kind of thing where you put up things of you and...
It's quite strange even just seeing it out loud, you're putting them up there generally for people to click a like button or a love button on you. So if you think about psychologically what that actually is, there's a lot of quite alarming points that come up. One of them is definitely looking for this sort of validation of yourself, but it's not really you because you can hyper edit and a lot of people do these pictures. And so it's not really you. there's
There's space for this almost sort of split self to start developing where there's this digital avatar and then there's the real you. And so many questions come up about, you know, what that means, what that means for your sense of self. So many questions.
John (04:50)
Yeah, I mean, we're really getting into quite deep, who am I here? Am I the avatar or, you know, am I the original of the species? It almost raises the question of which is now primary in the digital economy.
Kerry (05:07)
A lot of people spend so much more time in this digital realm than they actually do in the physical one, so it's bang on what you just said there.
John (05:16)
Wow. Yeah. I once saw a very momentary glimpse of that. I was with my daughter in the Vatican at one point and I saw this guy with an iPad. It was back then. Walk in front of a statue and he clicked on the image of the statue and moved on. And because he was using an iPad, I noticed that he had never seen the thing itself. Only ever seen the representation that appeared in the frame of his iPad.
And he moved straight on to the next thing without ever having seen the original object. And this was my first realization some 10 years ago. my God, from an ontological perspective, reality and the image have changed places. Anyway, I digress. Coming back to yourself then, what happened? Where did all of this end up?
Kerry (06:07)
So, I think, yeah, was years of just growing up with this being normal. Everyone around me was doing it. And yeah, social media being so connected with your phone was just a normal part of life. And it got to the point where a few years ago, I just realized that if it was to keep going on that way, I wouldn't be spending time doing this thing that I actually loved. And yeah, there was just a few strange points.
where I was looking at it and I just saw it almost as if I was disassociated out just looking at it like, whoa, this is actually quite strange. You're putting up a picture of yourself just doing something random. You're checking it to see if people have liked it. And there was a whole kind of stepping out actually looking at that going, what is that all about? And what you just said about being in the Vatican, can totally relate to being on really good trips around just different places of the world and doing exactly what you just said there.
rather than being immersed in this amazing place and this stuff I'm seeing, I'm taking pictures of it because I want to put it on social media for then people to like it. And I just had a bit of a light bulb moment with that, that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life engaging with people that way, but also the world around me. And so I just went quite cold turkey and I took off all my social media platforms, which I've got email now, but I don't do the other ones. The downside of that is that because I am a
content creator, I'm a musician and you know, I do a lot of work here in Scotland, but the limitation to my work now is that my outreach isn't really big out with that. And so right at this moment, myself and my partner, Jacopo, we're trying to explore how we can start to reintroduce social media, but changing the parameters with which we engage with it. there's a, there's much more of a purpose to it rather than it being.
kind of open ended my sense of self is attached to this thing and it's about me. It's about divorcing, think, sense of self from that.
John (08:11)
Well, there's a clear distinction there in what you've just described between social media itself and the attachment that we have to it. I mean, there's two quite distinct things here. There's social media as the medium, and there's the attachment as to what it means if people don't like or share our posts. It sounds like that's rather significant.
Kerry (08:31)
Yeah,
no, for sure. I think it's quite interesting when you start looking at it from, you know, how social media is actually engineered. In itself, it's not a bad thing. And I can sound quite against social media when I talk and I'm not. But if you look at how it's actually engineered just objectively, I think it touches on so many of the human needs that we all have and it attempts to meet them in various ways. And so it's very smart how it's being designed as a thing.
And for all the benefits that there are, think if you're not aware of your needs and how social media will try and meet them, it can be very easy to get sucked in to just spend a lot of time on it. Because, you know, for example, if you had quite bad social anxiety, which a lot of people do, it's very, very easy for you to meet the need of connection, talking to people, feeling part of something on social media rather than doing it with actual people.
And so there's lots of questions like of this nature that start to come up. And if there's not awareness around what social media actually is and also how damaging it can be by not meeting these needs in the real world too, then it's bringing up loads and loads of points.
John (09:47)
Very interesting. What other insights have come to you as a result of this battle with social media?
Kerry (09:55)
Like the big one for me is that your sense of self, how you perceive yourself, your worth, your value, these things, it's really dangerous if they're attached to likes and things that are so, I want to say fleeting because there's so many things that you can't control. for example, how many likes you get on a social media post, that's actually much more complex than what you think. There's an algorithm involved, the time that you post, what's in the picture.
The way that I think people in society are trained to think is that I'm going to put something up there, everyone's going to see it, and the more likes I get on it, the more worthy I am. And it's a very, very dangerous slippery slope to go down. for me, the big insight is that your sense of self-worth, it needs to just come from within you. And that's something that can be cultivated and that it's not, it doesn't sway. So the more likes you get, shoots up. The less likes you get, it shoots down.
this can be something that can be much more stable and no matter what's going on, your sense of self-love, self-worth, it can be there regardless. And that's a place that I really strive to be. ⁓
John (11:09)
Well, let's go there. Let's come back to the social media question and let's come back to the digital overwhelm, which is more than social media to be fair, but let's come back to it with that awareness of self-worth. What difference does an awareness of intrinsic self-worth make when it comes to social media, for example?
Kerry (11:31)
Well, the primary focus can be on what do I want or what am I wanting to achieve rather than trying to do something to get as many likes as possible. So for example, I just give you a brief one from my work with Jacopo. So maybe before when we would have made content to put on social media, it would have been, you know, pictures showing us with, you know, huge audiences watching us or, you know, we've just sold lots of CD. Things that we would think would look really impressive or we would go to
you know, we do a concert somewhere really cool and it would be pictures of the cool place and we're just trying to, it's trying to almost manipulate people to think certain things about us, how successful we are and how cool we are. Whereas now the way that we are viewing it is that, you know, we're doing this thing that we love and that we have had a wonderful experience doing it. It's not so much about trying to get people to think how cool we are, but instead it's about how can we share what we do so more people can come.
our next concert. So it's a different thing. It's not really about trying to get people to see us as something, but it's about, you know, we love to play music for people and we want people to come to our concerts. So how can we use social media as a vehicle just to reach people instead?
John (12:46)
That's very different, isn't it? Because you're now expressing the joy of your art and your performance together on social media, rather than trying to use social media in order to establish some credibility or whatever it might be. Very interesting. I'm also hearing a great sense of choice about all of this.
Kerry (13:11)
Well, that's the thing when you're self-worth, to use that word, if that's attached to likes on social media, there's actually very little choice because a sense of self-worth is just so much a part of our wellness in general. And so if you're feeling lacking in that regard, you know, we're wired just to want to go towards things that's going to make us feel good about ourselves. so again, social media is a very easy way to get that quick hit on that. So that's why so many people do it.
Choice is a thing. It stops becoming a choice and almost like a need. And it can be quite dangerous when those two are not clearly defined.
John (13:49)
Very good. Now you also work with other performers. You work with other creatives. You work with people who are exploring their creative side, sometimes even in later life. Tell me a bit about the work you and Jacopo are doing on the Confident performer.
Kerry (14:04)
So the competent performer, it stemmed really from, I did a masters in psychology of the arts, with music being the main focus. And so that was really looking at the brain and how music, you know, were to do with developmental psychology, social psychology, and all of these things. What the music will do to your brain and how it responds, et cetera, et cetera. And I got really interested in performance anxiety and how that manifests in the body. And I was learning all these things about, you know.
sympathetic nervous system and what it does to you when you go into fight or flight. It was explaining so many things of my experience as being a music student and then a performer and things that nobody had really explained to me before. So, Jacob and I got together to make a workshop to really demystify the whole science behind the experience that all performers will experience to some degree. So, the workshop we made, it goes really into the science of everything.
It gives people the chance to understand their biology a little bit more. But then it shifts into much more of a coaching structured workshop where people start bringing issues and challenges that they have. And then we kind of work with them to reframe them and to start bringing out this confidence that actually it's not so much result based, but it's about the process and being able to work with yourself no matter what actually comes up in them.
John (15:28)
Yeah, because the art can be very competitive and particularly music. mean, intensely, mean ballet as well. say it's not the only art form that is competitive. What are the typical issues as far as confidence is concerned? What are the typical issues that ⁓ musicians have at this level?
Kerry (15:47)
So a huge one is comparing themselves to other people. And again, just because we're speaking about social media, you can see why as a society we've just been cultured into that way of thinking. But there's this comparisons or when things are not absolutely pristine or absolutely perfect, there's this real sense of them, of beating yourself up and that things are not correct. And again, we can link it to this flawless nature, this avatar that we're all so used to presenting to people that
you know, unfiltered, raw, is sometimes viewed as not as good as. And in the arts, actually so much of the good stuff is the raw stuff. you know, the wrong notes actually can be the right notes. And there's all these things that if we're so hyper, hyper controlled and hyper processed, then it can actually remove a lot of that.
John (16:42)
Yeah, very interesting. Well, I hope we all get to practice this when we put this podcast episode out, Kerry, because it is raw and unfiltered with absolutely minimal editing. So we'll be walking the talk when this goes out. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Kerry (16:59)
Pleasure John. Thank you.
