Meet Victoria Lautman

We recently connected with Victoria Lautman and have shared our conversation below.

Victoria , so great to have you with us and we want to jump right into a really important question. In recent years, it’s become so clear that we’re living through a time where so many folks are lacking self-confidence and self-esteem. So, we’d love to hear about your journey and how you developed your self-confidence and self-esteem.

I’m going to be very honest here, turn that question around, and admit instead that I struggle daily with issues of confidence and self-esteem, it’s an ongoing battle within myself starting from an early age – and I’m now in my 6th decade! But people around me always consider me as extremely confident and full of self-esteem, and I wonder about that chasm between truth and perception; what I’m projecting vs what I actual feel internally.

I built a career that was centered around pubic speaking – regular radio and TV appearances plus lectures and interviews. People assume that self-esteem and confidence are required for this, for being in front of the public regularly…but in fact I think it’s the opposite: that one’s own lack of confidence and self-esteem can create the desire to have these public careers. Many of us realize that actors/actresses are insecure and vulnerable despite their fame and recognition. Being a public-facing journalist isn’t far from that…it’s just that I learned how to project myself in a particular way and it convinces people that I’m very confident! Smoke and mirrors…

I still grapple with feelings of self-deprecation and lack of esteem after years of therapy – I understand it much better now and wish I’d had these insights as a young woman and teenager. Luckily, because I learned to understand how and why I didn’t have these “tools” for positive living, I was able to raise a son who is well-equipped with the confidence and esteem I didn’t have growing up…and THAT has become my biggest source of positive reassurance in my whole life!

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

This is sort of a 2-parter, the “inspirational” part that led me to now, and the now itself, which unfortunately I don’t think is very inspirational at the moment!

Nutshell version: I never had a clear idea what I wanted to do professionally – went to college first in Archeology (because I liked the idea of digging up treasure. Seriously. Even though that’s not what archeology is, but I’d read an article about finding an ancient treasure and I was impressionable…) and then graduate school in Art History (because I vaguely liked looking at art but mainly because I had no idea what to do with myself).

*Note: if I’d realized I could’ve gone to Design School for product design and such, that’s what I’d have chosen. But I was floundering and my parents didn’t help guide me – they didn’t know how to. They’d have supported that choice but none of us thought of it!

I wound up working for the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum after grad school and that led me to doing public lectures and tours and I really enjoyed that. So my next step was to just barge into radio and writing about art, architecture and design – I loved presenting these ideas to a public that often had no way to access them, no-one to explain these topics. That felt like my calling.

I wound up doing public radio in Chicago for 25 years – interviewing hundreds of people in arts and culture and also writing for dozens of international newspapers and magazines. The writing was a real surprise since I was TERRIBLE at it, in grad school my first paper came back with “Is English your second language?” scrawled across it, no lie! But all the public speaking and tours I did helped me understand how to convey my thoughts…I turned out to be a good, solid writer and was in demand as someone who was actually educated in the field, not just someone who liked art.

But it also turns out that I am a restless, curious, adventurous person who tires of the same old thing – and even though I went into journalism with NO background or classes in writing or radio (or TV, I did that too…) I got sick of it all eventually.

I’d been a compulsive traveller during this period, it’s what I really wanted to do full-time, see the world and explore, and one place I spent time was India. I began to go as a tourist around age 30 and couldn’t shake my obsession with the place, returning maybe 6 more times over the years for a couple weeks. But 12 years ago, when my son headed to college, I decided to quit everything and spend 3 months embedded in India, writing about things I discovered there. I needed a new adventure and a change of surroundings.

It was a huge leap of faith, very exciting, a little crazy, jumping into the unknown alone and in my 50’s. I’d studied Hindi for a year and was just so energized by the whole idea, researched some topics to follow when I was there. I needed to push the envelope beyond my comfort zone.

That first 3-month visit led to me going back to India every winter for another 8 years as I pursued one particular topic, India’s ancient “stepwells” about which very little was known. I’d seen one on my first trip to India over 30 years earlier and then became obsessed with them. Each year I traveled around with a driver and my stupid little point-and-shoot camera, snapping photos and slapping up posts on Facebook.

Again, in a nutshell I wound up finding a book publisher interested in the topic and “The Vanishing Stepwells of India” came out late in 2017, from Merrill Publishers, in London, using my photos, cleaned up and impressive-looking. Several exhibitions and many lectures ensued – I was in heaven, for a while. A paperback version came out a few years later.

By then I’d moved to LA, had decided I wanted an entirely new place to live and another adventure. I moved here just before Covid, as a single woman in her 60’s, at the tail end of a formerly big career. Then Covid hit us all and the momentum I’d felt vanished overnight.

I’ve been in LA for 6 years, none of them simple or progressing the way I anticipated. This is a tougher place to live than expected, hard to get established with friend groups or professional ones. In Chicago I was a well-regarded journalist while here I’m a complete unknown. I was astonishingly naive to assume this move would be easy.

But last year out of the blue I was asked to produce and host a monthly interview series with a live audience on subjects relating to architect/design/art…it goes back to my radio roots (though it’s not on radio) and I enjoy it: “VISUAL WORLD with Victoria Lautman” is sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians here, a fantastic organization, and it’s open to anyone to attend, if not in person, then through Zoom. $5 – cheap! It’s been enjoyable and also injecting me into the fabric of LA. I’m grateful I was asked to do this.

My career path has so many twists and turns and I don’t have the raw ambition of my youth but have maintained the deep-seated curiosity that propels me, along with the desire for travel and new adventures. I try to keep that flame alive, it’s my core for some reason and as long as I’m able I’ll be wandering the world, exploring, and then telling folks about it!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1) Being curious about people and places – asking questions, being interested in things beyond oneself: this seems to be a diminishing quality these days but if it weren’t for my innate curiosity I’d have gotten nowhere. It’s easy to skim across the surface of everything but looking beneath the surface, even if it takes an effort, is way more rewarding.

2) Consider trying things outside your comfort zone – this is somewhat akin to, or at least an extension – of curiosity. It’s so easy to be comfortable doing the same routines, seeing the same things – whatever. Pushing yourself beyond the accepted or comfortable limit, once you’ve done it, it’s like exercising a muscle, you get better at it each time and then might even crave it. We really are here such a short time and there’s so much to see and experience.

3) Compassion/Generosity/Give back! Wow, we live in such a tough world and most of us are SO much better off than so many other people, even if we think we’re at the bottom of the pile. We’re not – there is ALWAYS someone so much worse off, wherever you are in your life. Volunteering, giving money or time, whatever you can part with in your life…this is one thing that for some reason I was born with and I come back to over and over: I may feel terrible, sad, and lonely, but so long as I’m helping others in some way, the edges aren’t so sharp for me. Currently I volunteer two days a week and serve on the board of the Hollywood Food Coalition after searching for 2 years in LA for a place to dig in and get involved. In Chicago it was the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center…but whatever your interests or wherever your sympathies lie, try and build in generosity around it by giving back somehow. Brownie points, karma, good luck…whatever you believe, it can only help.

If you knew you only had a decade of life left, how would you spend that decade?

Yikes, horrible to admit but it really is AGEISM!

I’m 68, single, youthful, smart and educated with a wealth of experience, and yet I am essentially invisible and generally deemed irrelevant by society, and this goes for all the other women I know that are my age, unless they’re in some vaunted, important position of employment, which is rare.

It was less true in Chicago where it seems aging women have more visibility and acceptance. But here in Los Angeles, we’re like road-kill after age 40 or so, something you just have to swerve to avoid. If our entire world is now youth-obsessed, LA is Ground Zero.

It’s a vibe and I know my friends agree: being assigned to the irrelevant pile is terrible, especially for someone with issues of self-esteem. So yes, that’s the particular challenge I’m facing and I know it’ll get worse before it gets better. Sigh.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.victorialautman.com
• Instagram: VictoriaLautman
• Facebook: VictoriaLautman

Image Credits

copyright Victoria Lautman