Kyle Cease – “I Hope I Screw This Up”
Kyle Cease – I Hope I Screw This Up: How Falling in Love with Your Fears Can Change the World
To listen to the full interview of Kyle Cease by Victor Fuhrman on Destination Unlimited on OMTimes Radio, Click the player below:
How often have you mused about your career or non-career, your relationships or perceived a lack of relationships or those things you felt missing from your life and thought, “When this happens, I will be happy”? Kyle Cease said he came to the realization, after 25 years of building a headlining comedy and acting career, that, “When this happens, I will be happy,” is a complete lie.
He quit his stand-up career and had a transformation of his life. Kyle is a keynote speaker transforming audiences through his unique blend of comedy and transformation. He’s been a guest speaker at colleges, summits, and Fortune 500 conferences, including Agape International, Gate Revelations, Sun Valley Wellness Festival, Sedona World Wisdom Days, and the Longevity Now Conference, among others.
In addition to leading his own Evolving Out Loud live events, he’s spoken with renowned teachers, such as Eckhart Tolle, Jim Carrey, Michael Beckwith, Louis C.K, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Bob Proctor, David Wolfe, and thousands more. He said, if Eckhart Tolle and Jim Carrey had a baby, that baby could be Kyle Cease. Before being a transformative speaker, Kyle was a headlining comedian for 25 years with two number one Comedy Central specials.
In 2009, he earned a number one ranking on the network’s stand-up showdown. He has been in more than 100 different television and movies, including “Ten Things I Hate About You,” “Not Another Teen Movie,” “The Jimmy Kimmel Show,” “Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” “Chelsea Lately,” “Martin Short Show,” “Comics Unleased,” and numerous VH1 shows. He joins us to share his brand-new book, I Hope I Screw This Up: How Falling in Love with Your Fears Can Change the World.
Kyle Cease – Evolving Out Loud
Kyle Cease: Wow. Thank you. Whenever someone introduces me like that, I don’t even know, I can think of to the audience is just, “Lower your expectations.” We’ve got to level the playing field now. That was very, very nice. That’s amazing. You make me feel like I’m doing something.
Victor Fuhrman: You’re doing something great, and you’re doing it both with humor and real humanity, and I think that’s something we could desperately use in our world today. The need to laugh, the gift of laughter, but also the gift of being human, and I think so many of us try not to be, for some reason or another, and that’s what we’re going to talk about.
Kyle Cease: Well, it’s so funny you say that because, for years, I was a stand-up comic, and then, I shifted from the transformational world. And what I discovered was, in comedy–a lot of times comedy is cynical about life. You’re making fun of what is.
And so, there was kind of a darkness often attached to comedy. So, you’d be very skeptical about life, and you’d make fun of it. And then, you go to the transformation world, and you’re totally accepting the world.
And everything is totally possible, but it’s not funny. So, for me, I was kind of like, “We need a balance between lazy and crazy.” I love the idea of comedy and transformation combining because I used to go to transformational events where they’d have you sit under a tree for seven days.
I would make a joke, and they’d stop everything and be like, “Please, we’re trying to be happy.” I’m like, “I know. But, that’s why I made the joke.”
And they’re like, “Please, we have a six-day process where we need to bring up every horrible thing that happened so we can release it. Does everybody have weird necklaces?”
So, I found that comedy also just gets you right at the moment. We’re supposed to have fun and play too at the same time. It’s like, “Take yourself much more seriously and much less seriously at the exact same time.”
Victor Fuhrman: So, you never had that feeling that many people have in the comedy field that your success or failure was predicated on making people laugh?
Kyle Cease: I think that specific thought didn’t occur to me because I was so fascinated by watching stand-up, and I also was a musician too. I played four instruments and sang. I think I just heard comedy timing when I watched comedians as a child, and I just understood without realizing it until later.
People would say, “Wow, that delivery or that pacing,” and I didn’t think of it on that technical side. It just was natural to me to understand. You say it into a microphone, and, within a few seconds, they’re laughing, and you learn how to pause for a beat, not in a technical aspect.
But, your body just picked it up because, as I was only watching comedy, that was what they did. So, it was like learning a language by living in that country. So, it’s just a second nature thing for me.
Victor Fuhrman: I’ve never thought of comedy the same way you’re describing music because music, as we know, is based on mathematics, and timing in comedy, obviously now that you’re saying it is based on mathematics.
Kyle Cease: Sure. There’s a feeling that it’s almost like a control over the audience, a way that you can lean forward on a joke or you say one thing a little bit louder. Or you create a pause in a certain way or if you fake a mistake and create the illusion of spontaneity and then go with that, so they think you’re in and also truly by being truly spontaneous too.
What I really believe is that, when we discover we are the moment, it constantly wants to express itself through you with that type of timing. And it naturally knows that timing way better than figuring out, “How do I get that kind of timing?” There are all these seminars out there, and there are all these different things where they teach you, “I’m going to show you how to create a business and how to do this.”
And, if you hear how to do it, you’re just doing what they did, and you’re not bringing what’s unique about you. That would be like you learning how to write a song from Michael Jackson, and he just says, “Write ‘Billie Jean.’ That’s what I did.”
And you’re not writing what you feel. But, what we really need to learn is what we naturally have inside of ourselves that show up when we stop trying to do things technically but learn how to listen what our body wants because it wants to unfold something magic all the time. And we never hear it because we’re so busy trying to be like everyone else.
Victor Fuhrman: In your book, I Hope I Screw This Up, you talked about the feeling of excitement when you get a thought or an idea that you know you have to pursue.
Kyle Cease: Yes, and I have kind of a magical story about that. I don’t know if you need to go to break.
But, I can tell you after it on how I actually discovered that feeling and how it transformed every aspect of my life, my career, my impact, my health, my relationships, my income. Everything just naturally changed from following the highest excitement feeling in my body. Well, one thing I think we’ve had a voice that we’ve had in us for years that just tells you. And that voice can only tell you the next step. It can’t tell you the entire thing.
That would be like a GPS telling you the next 20 directions versus the next turn. And the way that GPS works are it tells you the next turn, and it can’t tell you more information until you do it. And we all have that one same feeling in our body that just tells us the next step.
It’s the voice that says, “Ask that person out,” or, “Leave this company,” or “Go to an island right now,” or, “Start writing a book” or whatever. It’s just the next step. So, we have this feeling, and, when you hear that voice, you almost always can feel it in a deeper place in your body.
