Hey guys, it's Kevin here with MixCoach. Hey, I've got a question for you. Do you think it's important who you hang out with?
Do you think it matters who you surround yourself with, who gets to influence you, and who you influence?
I do, and I won't say that I've been the best at it, because sometimes, to be honest with you, I can alienate myself. I don't like that. I can start feeling insecure, and I can start just kind of distancing myself, because I don't like confrontation a lot.
I'm not afraid to face it if I need to. I will dig into it if I need to, but I tend to want to keep the peace. I'm an Enneagram eight, and I want to keep the peace. So sometimes, what I'll do is alienate myself. And what I find sometimes is that that's not good for me. I need to be around people. I get fuel from people. I've decided I'm not gonna walk very fast, because the camera's too shaky.
I get fuel from people, and I think it's important that you surround yourself intentionally with people who fuel you, and who inspire you, and who make you want to do better, and who make you feel good about yourself, and who not just mindlessly affirm what you're doing, but keep you in check, and ask you why you do the certain things that you do.
I think it is. I tell my daughter, it's really important who you hang out with. And I think a lot of intentionality comes from that, because you have to surround yourself with people. And I'm guilty. Sometimes I'll, like I said, I'll alienate myself. But I just wanted to kind of get a discussion going here, and I thought I would go ahead and do two things at once. I wanted to keep the Mix Coach podcast going,
and I'm kind of shifting gears a little bit, and I'm finding myself not in the studio as much as I used to be, but still love mixing, have a lot of experience to pull from, but just don't enjoy mixing like I used to. I enjoy, though, being one of those people that surround people and encourage people.
So, I thought I would just mention that there's a car behind me.
I feel silly.
Maybe I should interview him.
Yeah, he's surrounded by one person. Anyway, this is gonna be a live one-take. I don't really care how it comes out. Just wanted to kind of get my heart out, walk around my neighborhood a little bit, get a little exercise, make my hair fly up like crazy.
But anyway, I have noticed that some of the people that inspire me, they are surrounded by people who are going the same direction they are. One thing I notice here is that I've got a dog. His name is Peanut. I've even done a devotional on Peanut.
He inspires me because I feel like he is the way God made him. He doesn't question why he wasn't born
with the hair of a poodle,
the curly hair of a poodle, or the build of a pit bull, or the temperament of a golden retriever. He doesn't question that. He just is what he is. But Peanut's not all great, because Peanut, all he wants to do is lay on the couch in your lap under a blanket while you watch TV. So if that's who I choose to surround myself with all the time, then guess what I'm gonna become more and more of? A couch potato like Peanut. So today I'm excited about this. I've got a volunteer at the church, and he is a Southwest pilot, and he lives in a fly-in community here in Locust Grove, Georgia. He lives in a fly-in community, Southwest pilot. He's restoring Cessna 182, and he also owns a Cessna 152 that he just, and he lives on a landing strip. He lives on a grass landing strip. And I just think about those pilots there, they surround themselves with people who get the fact that it is not impossible to own an airplane. It's not impossible to use it as just another mode of transportation. You know, in this community that I live in right now in Georgia,
most everybody has a golf cart.
There was a time, I have a golf cart too, there was a time when I thought it would be silly. Why would you have a golf cart if you don't play golf? It just seems silly. And it is, unless you live in a community where that's the standard, and that's what people do. And back to my friend that owns an airplane, lives on an airstrip, I'm going out there today to help him work on his plane. He is restoring a Cessna 182,
and I'm gonna go out there. I get to do three things that I love to do. One,
be around airplanes.
Two, be around people who love to be around airplanes. And number three, I get to use a soda blaster to strip the paint off of an airplane. I love learning new stuff. And soda blasting is probably not a good career path. But I wanna be more intentional about the quality of people that I hang out with. Because these people will pour into you and take out of you at the same, not at the same time, but certain people can pull from you, and you feel depleted when you hang out with them. You feel like you're not good enough. You feel like you're doing the wrong things. You made the wrong choices. You can't seem to get anything right. I've been around people like that in my life. It's depleting. It's discouraging.
But to be able to hang out with, and intentionally hang out with, it is not easy when you're my age, my wife and I's age in our 50s. It seems like it's harder to make friends than it used to be.
And it seems like I heard, oh, it was from the book from Mel Robbins.
And I can't remember the name of it. It's her latest book right now. But she was talking about how hard it is to make friends as you get older.
It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it means you have to be more intentional about who you surround yourself with. Because if you think about it, when you're in high school, everybody's at the same age. Everybody's in the same grade. Everybody's doing the same sports. Everybody has the same teachers. Everybody has the same schedule. Everybody does the same thing. When you get in out of high school, then it changes somewhat if you go to college, but everybody's in college. Everybody kinda has the same schedule.
And then after you get out of college and you establish your career, if you're in a career that is group-centric, like a recording engineer or creating music, or if you're in a band, or you're doing something like that, then it's easy to make friends like that. But as you get older, it gets harder because like my wife and I, we didn't have kids until we were married almost 20 years. So we're in a stage where a lot of our friends had kids and we didn't have kids when we were growing up. And then 20 years later, we have kids and all of our friends have grown kids. So we're in different stages of our lives. So it makes it a lot harder to make friends. So anyway,
if I were you, I wouldn't expect for people just to come near you. I mean, God can do anything. So if you pray about things like this, God can send you people, but you have to notice when he sends you people.
But for the most part, I would say that you have to be intentional about who you hang out with. We had some friends over Friday night or Saturday night. We cooked pizzas, which was awesome.
We've got some friends coming over in a couple of weeks that we met through Kalin's volleyball. Looking forward to that. But I have found that the older you get, the harder it is to make those things happen. And when you get those opportunities to make things happen, definitely try to make them happen. Even like when you're, the dog wants to interrupt my YouTube video.
(Dog Barking)
Maybe when I get out of the shot, he'll stop barking. Anyway,
so I'm trying to be more intentional about who I'm surrounded with. And when the people don't come around me that I wanna be surrounded with, I want to be guilty of pursuing great people. I want to be able to pursue people that I want to help shape me.
That can be people from the church group. That can be people from a Bible study. That's something I've actually thought about doing a lot. It's just to surround yourself with people who wanna know more about God. I mean, that's a good start. I mean, I'm talking to myself more than anything, right? Surround yourself with people who want to,
this sounds like a pitch, it's not, it is, but it's not.
If you wanna learn to mix music, surround yourself with people who are doing that. That's hard to find because typically,
mixing engineers are a solo breed, right? You hire a mixing engineer and he mixes in his studio. And these days you just go by the studio when he's done. And so it makes it kind of hard to do that. I found that, as I was mixing records and more that the trend became, hey, I'll send you your files. I got to work with some artists like,
I worked with Dolly Parton one time. I worked with Willie Nelson one time. And they would not be able to pick me out of a lineup because I never met them. Their files were sent to me over the internet and I mixed them, I sent them back. They said, attaboy, and that was it.
So if you're a recording engineer, finding a community of people who are recording engineers
is hard because like I said, it's a solo game. So I've got a membership site called Mix Coach. I've had it since 2012, I think. And even though it's been a long time in the making, there are members that I've had in there for 12 years. And the thing I noticed, I just had a call with them this past Saturday and we were on the phone, we were on a Zoom call like we do twice a month. We were on a Zoom call and
we talked about a lot of things that weren't necessarily mixing. We talked about some mixing stuff and plugins and stuff like that, but the thing I'm finding is that that community is so much more than just mixing. It's a,
(Laughs)
it's about doing life together. All these guys are close to my age. Some of them are just getting started. Some of them are, well, most of them are mixing at a very high level. And I've been doing some thinking about this. It's really important who you hang out with. Not the fact that you're gonna be talking about the same stuff, but these are people that have a lot in common. These are the people in school
where you're taking the same subjects and you don't necessarily take the same classes, but you know the same teachers. So anyway,
I have been looking at a lot of people online
who are business and faith forward, and I really appreciate it. Graham Cochran is one of them. Omar,
I can't pronounce his last name right or I'm not sure I will, but they talk about business and their faith. They're very strong Christians, and they talk about their faith a lot. And I'm like, I like that. I want to surround myself with people like that. The problem is that it's expensive to do that
because they know how valuable it is. So, but anyway,
so I'm gonna challenge myself on this call here. Hi there. I'm gonna challenge myself on this call here or on this video to be proactive about surrounding myself with people that are on the path that I want to go to. And I would recommend you do the same thing. If you want to do mixing,
I've got a good solution for you. It's mixcoachmember.com. Just go there. You can sign up for $39 a month right now. And we have two calls a month,
one around the middle of the month, where we just talk about studio stuff. That's what we just did. And then one at the end of the month where you turn in a mix and we will all, collectively as a group, while we can,
listen to your mix, give you feedback on it. And that is the best way to improve what you do is just get feedback from people that you like, know and trust. So anyway, hopefully this has been helpful. This has been something that I have been reluctant to do because I hate seeing myself on camera. I love helping people and I have to think about that. I have to think about, hopefully, if somebody's sitting there going, "Man, I don't know why my life is not going the direction it should be." And you might just want to take a look at who you're hanging out with. If you're hanging out with Peanut on the couch all the time and you're getting addicted to reality shows, that could be who you're hanging out with Peanut. And if you're getting better at your mixes or whatever your craft is, it could be Sunday school class or small group or Bible study or working on planes.
Think about who you're hanging out with and be more intentional about it, okay? All right, talk to you soon.
