“Find Your Voice” Is Bad Advice; Here's A Better Option

What Currents Are Carrying You? (Comedy Mindhacks #133)

There’s an old saying in stand-up: “You don’t really find your voice until around the five-year mark.” I don’t buy it. Not at all. Might it be true for some comedians? Sure. Is it true for every comedian? Nope. Frankly, I think it’s one of the worst pieces of advice in comedy. In just a moment, I’m going to tell you about an app I’ve spent countless hours building that deals with this but, first, I need to help you understand why I built it. And part of it started with dismantling this five-year claim about voice.

For one, it’s wrong because it assumes that “voice” is something time eventually just hands you as a reward after you perform long enough to appease her. Also, it’s really just an easy form of gatekeeping: “Ah, you haven’t been performing 5 years yet?!” someone says, “You’ve not even been doing it long enough to have found your voice.” Again, I don’t buy it.

For me, I reject this idea not because experience doesn’t matter. Experience absolutely matters. It’s critical. But I know many comedians who’ve been performing for ten or fifteen or even twenty years and still don’t really know who they are on stage. Sure, they’ve become more polished and more comfortable, sometimes more professional, but when I watch them it just feels like they’re still experimenting every time they pick up the microphone.

Here’s my biggest problem though: When I hear someone say, “It takes 5 years to find your voice,” I disagree mainly because I don’t think we only have one voice. I think we have many voices. They are authentic voices that naturally come from different parts of our lives. I’ve written about that many times on this site, but especially HERE and HERE. And so, if that’s true, then searching for “a” voice, for one voice, is actually searching for something that doesn’t exist.

I’m the same way. I’m a husband, a father, a professor, an author, a businessman, and a comedian. When I’m explaining theology, you’re hearing the professor. When I’m talking about my kids, you’re hearing the dad trying to survive this thing we call parenting. When I’m telling road stories from comedy trips, you’re hearing the comedian and traveler who somehow keeps finding himself in ridiculous situations. I don’t become a different human being in each of those situations, but I absolutely communicate differently because different parts of my personality naturally come forward.

None of those voices are fake and none of them are characters I’ve invented for laughs. They’re all authentic expressions of who I already am, and each one naturally appears depending on what I’m doing or the story I’m telling. And what ties all those authentic voices together isn’t one master voice, it’s persona. Now, let me take a crack at defining persona: Persona is the person the audience experiences regardless of which voice happens to be speaking.

So, on stage, you can expect my stories to change, my perspective to shift, and my character voices to morph, but the audience should always feel like they’re spending time with the same me. I think this is where many comedians get stuck. We can spend years obsessing over joke structure, timing, callbacks, tags, social media, crowd work, and stage presence without ever asking the more fundamental question: Who is the person standing behind the microphone? Or: Who am I when all of my authentic voices come together on stage?

I’ve become convinced that every comedian lives with what I’ve called The Persona Gap, the distance between the comedian a person’s naturally becoming and the comedian they think they’re supposed to become. The wider that gap grows, the harder every creative decision becomes because there’s no longer a stable center from which to make it. Should I become darker, cleaner, more sarcastic, more vulnerable, more political, more personal, or more outrageous? Without clarity about persona, every option feels equally possible because none of them are anchored to who I actually am on stage, which should just be a degree or two away from who I am in real life.

That’s also why writing more jokes doesn’t automatically solve the problem. More material doesn’t necessarily produce more clarity. Sometimes it produces more confusion because a comedian ends up collecting jokes from five different versions of themselves. Instead of trying to manufacture an identity, I started paying attention to the patterns that already existed across my jokes, stories, frustrations, observations, and reactions.

Just last week I competed in a comedy competition where each comedian received critiques from a panel of judges. Overall, I thought the feedback was thoughtful, encouraging, and incredibly helpful. There were also a few suggestions I didn’t completely agree with. When I first started comedy, I probably would’ve become irrationally defensive or simply dismissed the comments by telling myself, “They just don’t get what I’m trying to do.”

In that moment, however, I was fine because I asked myself a completely different question: Does this feedback fit my persona? I didn’t ask: “Is this judge right?” or “Is this judge wrong?” I asked: Does this feedback fit my persona? That question kept me from becoming defensive because I no longer viewed criticism as a personal attack. It also kept me from becoming dismissive because I genuinely wanted to learn from experienced people. It allowed me to evaluate every suggestion by asking whether it reinforced my persona or pulled me away from it.

You see, my persona affects my creative decision-making. My persona becomes like a filter through which everything else passes. Every joke passes through it. Every booking, every trend, every opportunity, every piece of criticism, every social media idea, and every “You should try...” gets evaluated through the same question: Does this fit my persona? I call that The Persona Filter, and I honestly think it’s one of the most valuable tools a comedian can develop.

Above, I mentioned what I call The Persona Gap. That gap explains why I think so many comedians feel creatively scattered. The Persona Filter, however, offers insight on how to stop feeling that way. One diagnoses the problem (The Persona Gap), while the other gives you a practical way to make better decisions moving forward (The Persona Filter). Together, they’ve changed the way I think about comedy.

Now, about the new app I mentioned above. Well, these realizations are what eventually led me to build it. I call it the Comedian Persona Explorer. Essentially, I built a tool I wish I’d had when I started. I built a tool that can help comedians recognize the patterns they’re often too close to see for themselves. By combining a variety of psychological frameworks, psychographic questions, an analysis of your actual material, and more, the Explorer helps reveal the persona that’s already emerging instead of asking users to invent one from scratch.

It’s all about clarity. Once a comedian understands their persona, writing becomes more focused because they know which jokes sound like them. Editing becomes faster because the comedian immediately recognizes what belongs and what doesn’t. It also helps comedians stop chasing every opening that comes along. Ironically, finding your voice or rather, “voices,” becomes much easier once a comedian stops looking for a voice and starts understanding their persona.

Friend, if you’ve ever walked off stage thinking, “The audience laughed, but somehow that still didn’t feel like me,” you’re not alone. And that’s why I built this! Most comedians eventually become better performers. Far fewer become clearer performers, and those are not the same thing. So, if you’re ready to stop guessing and start understanding the comedian you’re actually becoming, I want to encourage you to check out the Comedian Persona Explorer. Whether you begin with a single report or continue using it as you grow, my hope is simple: I hope you’ll spend less time chasing someone else’s identity and more time becoming the comedian only you can be. Check out a video below but get linked up HERE.

Along the same lines, let me just say that, if reflections and tools like this are helpful to you, that’s also exactly why I wrote Comedy Mindhacks. My goal isn’t simply to help comedians write better jokes. It’s to help comedians understand the invisible thinking behind better comedy. Every mental model becomes another tool for building momentum, and over time those small shifts in thinking have a way of producing much bigger shifts on stage.

This entire book is built around helping comedians identify the mental obstacles, hurdle over them, and boost their momentum. If this article resonated with you, you’ll find a lot more like it inside the book. You can check out sample pages HERE. If you’re not yet a subscriber, use code MH10LIVE at checkout HERE for 10% off. Free subscribers automatically receive 15% off, and paid subscribers receive 35% off because I’m a big believer in rewarding people who invest in themselves. 👉 Click HERE to grab the book.

And if you’re ready to double down in a BIGGER way, consider joining my Comedy Vault. It’s my private collection of premium resources, trainings, workshops, and tools designed to help comedians continue growing long after the initial excitement fades. The first bet gets you into the game. Doubling down is what changes who you become.👉 Click HERE to unlock the Comedy Vault.