How we talk to ourselves about how we talk to others determines our destiny. When we focus on love not fear, intentionally in our own brain, it releases a completely different chemical response. When we don't acknowledge the thing that's happening in a room that we're all experiencing, we break trust with our audience. If you skip your warm up, the only person you're sabotaging is you and everybody you're talking to. It's a great opportunity to help a mission to speak in order to simply grow, to actually capitalize an opportunity to optimize every opportunity that we have for right now. Hello there, it's me, Steve Mellor, and welcome in to Growth Ready, the podcast that allows high performers to reveal the reality behind what it means to ready yourself for growth. The personal and professional challenges along the growth journey, while also allowing the high performance executive coach in me to satisfy his curiosity toward what drives optimal performance. We welcome in Samara, Bay to the show, and as a public speaking and leadership adviser, Samara wants us all to grant ourselves permission to simply speak. The different functions of speaking and communicating range based on what you want. Some of the audacious advice around giving ourselves permission to speak works in some context and not in others. Samara helps us appreciate the collaborative potential that our body and mind has to establish the power that is required for us to grow into our greatest selves and to ready those around us to do the same. Hey guys, as we get started here with the episode, I want to just take one minute of your time to make a request for you to subscribe and rate the show for our show to be easily discovered by other potential listeners. We need our current listeners that you to take the time to not only subscribe, but to also rate the show. Whether you're listening to us on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, whatever platform of choice, there are typically ways to be rating the show. So go ahead and click something like that fit star and be sure to take that additional time to leave a comment or two about why it is you enjoyed listening to the growth ready podcast. More efforts on this will allow our show to be more discoverable, which means we're going to find more listeners and continue to have that significant impact on the community of human performance and personal development that I know you are all benefiting from by being listeners to this show. Please go ahead, take the time, subscribe, rate the show today. Hey, and while you're at it, why don't you share it with a few people as well. I appreciate you guys. Let's get to the interview. Hello there and welcome into the most recent installment of the growth ready podcast. I am delighted to be welcoming in Samarabay to the show. And Samara, we are going to be really going down this path of communication. I have no doubt with the work that you do. But before I start anticipating where we're going to go, how, how, how wrong with me to do so before actually asking, asking the question that I have to ask everybody before we get started to have you answer Samarabay, what does it mean to you to be growth ready? I am delighted by this question because I think it's like intrinsically a paradox. Here's what I mean. I think readiness is a different thing in our body than it is in our mind. And when we're mind ready, which is by the way, like nearly an impossible state, it triggers all of our perfectionism, dare I say, and we're not actually in a position of growth. So readiness is a body thing. If I follow this logic, I'm kind of teasing out in real time. And then the question is, how do we be ready in our body to grow? And I think the answer is sort of a lifelong experiment for each of us because turns out we each have different bodies with different histories and different, you know, tight spots and different traumas, you know, all of the things. And readiness has to do with perhaps. I'm offering this because I end up offering this to all my clients and it feels like a heavy lift up top and then an obvious thing thereafter. Something like a warm up and we might call it a ritual or we might call it, you know, pre-gaming. Yeah. Something like a warm up that makes our spine twist a bit and come alive, that makes our gut feel like it comes online. So we actually can sense what we might like and not like and feel like is in alignment with our values and out of alignment that gets our our body generally feeling like it's I like to use the word wiggly, a little wiggle, a little playfulness. And all of these things which obviously our brain, our head is part of our body but it is not, you know, the over indexed part that we sometimes accidentally do, makes us ready. And ready for the, ready for the unknown which really is where growth comes from. That's right. That's right. I think if you just answered that, if I'd asked that question you just said wiggly, I would have been like what a fantastic answer to the question. I just said, what does it mean to be growth ready wiggly? You know, I have a, I love that. I have a, I have a dear friend who's one of those, you know, sort of entrepreneur colleagues you find along the way and you, you know, keep them close because we're not building the business together but we're sort of co-building our separate businesses. And she's the one who's like, you know, you always use the word wiggle. Yeah. I love it. Oh, and then I just did my first ever TEDx and I had to, I had to just like, you know, little easter egg for myself, throw in the word wiggle at some point even though one might, one might not expect that from a TEDx talk. I love it. I love it. So I love the, I love the paradox as you put it in this idea that from a readiness standpoint and you went to readiness first, which is always fun for me. It's like we, we get drawn by the first word so often a growth and you went to the readiness in a circle, it back around to the growth and I love this idea of how do we start to consider both the physical, the bodies role in readiness and the mind and how the two coexist, complement one another, hurt each other, get in the way of one another, all this kind of thing which immediately brings me to the sheer art form that you are an expert in, which is that of communication. I can't help but want to go there because for me, so much of what you're alluding to here, Samara, is that of how do we communicate with ourselves? Our body is, what you're saying is our body's talking to us in those moments. Our body is talking to us, our mind is talking to us and we're having to process in real time. Okay, what does this tell me about the level of readiness that I have? And so in your world, tell us a little bit about, firstly, let's get a little bit more context. Tell us a little bit more about the world that you operate in and then I really want to explore this idea of maybe how we communicate with ourselves before we start getting too far down this rabbit hole of how we make communicate with others. Absolutely. I love that question. It's something that I think about all day every day. Yes. Yes. In 2018, which is now quite a while ago, I had this real crossroads of a summer that totally changed the trajectory of my life and led to, I think, the sort of context question that you're asking about led to a real aha. I was a dialect coach in Hollywood for many years. I have an MFA in acting. I got swept up in the New York theater scene with dialect coaching with these two incredible mentors who dialect coach all of the Broadway shows. And there's not that many of us in the world who do this dialect thing. You may never have heard one speak before now, right? But I was really recognized by these two incredible mentors and they started throwing me clients before I felt ready. And lo and behold, I really had an aptitude towards it because it's not just sounds. Although there is a real sort of nerdy science to it, there's an international phonetic alphabet which you can think a little bit of like reading music where there's sort of music theory to know. And then at the other side of it is this art form that is music. So there's some of the science, but the main part of dialect coaching is here you are with another human in front of you working on something different with how they show up in the world. And how do you create a safe enough space and a creative enough space and a juicy enough environment for them to play, find something new show up as a different person. In this case with, you know, once I got to Hollywood, a camera, inches from their face, judging how authentically they show up. So dialect coaching had the sort of, you know, sounds and the really profound research on, you know, sort of subcultures of the world that we wanted to get right. And also this other thing which is how humans do fresh new things in a way that feels integrated in their body. And so in a way I was more prepared than I thought I was, but summer of 2018 I was coaching Galgato on Wonder Woman 2. It was a summer in DC. And I got this call, one of those organizations that helps candidates for office had gotten my name and wonder if I'd be willing totally pro bono to just jump in and coach all these first time.
I'm candidates for the 2018 midterms. And I was so intrigued and I'd never really done this, but I thought, you know, I thought, well, if they spend an hour with me over Zoom, I'm not gonna make them worse. So I don't mean it did it. Right? We'll say that again. - That's it, it's one way to look at it. I love it. - I mean, right, this is how we talked to ourselves. And coaching those candidates changed my life. I realized that although each one of them was totally unique and there was so much diversity from around the country and age and gender and race, you know, nonetheless, they were extremely consistent universal themes that were coming up when they were confronting as I put it going public for the first time, switching from being, you know, a citizen to being the person up on the stage that everybody is judging, having opinions about deciding, literally deciding whether or not to trust and vote for. And I realized from that era, it was that summer of 2018 into the fall that how we talked to ourselves about how we talked to others. I mean, that'd be over dramatic, but determines our destiny. - Yeah. I mean, before that you go any further, like the comment of going public immediately, my mom was just like, aren't we all doing that? - Yeah. - Aren't we all going public in our own way, in our own world? - Well, and more now than ever before, right? - Sure. - You know, there's this, like as we speak, there's this meme going around of everybody like feeling nostalgic towards the 90s. And I saw this incredible note that was like, isn't so interesting how we're all here on social media, feeling nostalgic about the 90s, the time before social media. - Right. (laughing) - But indeed, I mean, one of the benefits and drawbacks of social media is that we all have a public platform where we want to take advantage of it. And then the question is, and that can be a personal branding conversation that we have around entrepreneurship and business, but can also if we just strip it back and just go for the human side for a second, it's also just how do we go from being a private person to a public person? What is that distinction between private and public, even mean anymore? For all of us who, as you and I are right now, having a conversation from our homes, which is nonetheless a public conversation, right? This is what we all sort of got thrown into during the pandemic, if not before. - Yeah. - So I'm so curious about what this is to sort of scale up ourselves and all of the inner voices and then what we do, what we lovingly do when we hear those voices. - So I think the moment that you phrase it is scaling up ourselves, it helps, it helps our listeners immediately reframe the sheer task of learning how to speak to oneself. 'Cause in the world that I do as an executive coach, one of my easiest ways to explain what I do, I'm an executive coach. So what exactly do you do? Simply put, I help people get out of the runway. Pretty much write tell people. And I'm like, oh yeah, I need help with that. It's like everyone does. Everyone does, everyone does. But that's not how this works. That's not how this works. But the point is, when you say we're trying to scale ourselves up, suddenly now there's this purpose to the exploration of self-talk, of how we communicate with ourselves as opposed to, yeah, I need to talk to myself better. It's like, yeah, put to result in what? Like what do we want the result to be of this enhanced improved version of how we communicate with ourselves? I get to speak from my own experience of that, whether it be through my therapy, whether it be through my profession and my transition changes over the years, whether it be on a relational level with my own wife. Like these are the things that I have said because I want to level up, let's say, how I communicate as a husband, it puts that little extra weight on the work itself. And I would love just to get from your perspective. Like are we putting enough weight on this work? 'Cause I can't help but feel like maybe we're not. And I don't want to speak for you, but the way I look at it, I feel as though is maybe it puts me in the minority, but I'd love for you to help me better understand what that might be. - I'm just playing here 'cause I love everything. Let's find out the-- - Yeah, it's perfect. - My feeling when you say that is that actually, I do think that many of us, and certainly your listeners, hello, hello listeners, are thinking about legacy, are thinking about impact. But maybe, maybe, per what you just said, there is a little bit of a missing link that sometimes we consider this inner work, how we talk to ourselves, what kind of a readiness or ritual we might have so that we really show up in the moments we show up. We think of it as a little side gig. It's a nice to have not a must have. - Yes. - And if we link it better, you and I, and those of us who are in a position to help folks with this kind of scaling, if we link it better to, that's actually how we, that's how we steward our legacy. That that legacy that we wanna leave behind when we die, the impact we wanna have in the world, the dent we wanna have on the universe, right? These really lofty, profound, ambitious goals we have to do justice to our ideas and turn them into things. All of this that we can really connect to, it is done in the daily work of how we talk to ourselves and how we move our bodies. And it's almost so, you know, simple that it feels like that, surely that's not it. I'm gonna look for a magic bullet over here. And the work I'm often doing with clients is on some level. Right, so the daily behavior of legacy building looks small, looks almost silly if we're taking into account the idea of a wiggle. They'd be not even almost truly silly. And what if that's how we build a life? - Yeah. I think you nailed it with, it's the simple, not easy cut part of this. There's the simplicity here to how, like in my world, one might get out of that way in your world, how we may start to learn to communicate more effectively with ourselves, but we can't possibly scale something we don't put value in. And that's what I just heard there. It's like that, that's it. Like if we value it. - I feel like we'll quite move, as you say this, and a bit sort of heartbroken because yes, I think one of the ways we, all the big we get in our way is that we see a doable, slightly mischievous, tiny move we could make on a daily basis and we think that's not enough. - Yeah, that's, I think that's what we're doing with the show. (laughing) I think that's what we're doing with the show. But for me, when I think about where we started with this, of this idea of how we may talk to ourselves, how about we take a stab at putting a value on this that people may have never put a value on before. So what I mean by that is, help our listeners maybe understand some of the really teeny tiny, so subtle you wouldn't notice it, but really in the grand scheme of things, this thing is actually the reason why sort of thing. Sort of reason is to why. Let me give you one because I have some science behind it. I bring this up in my TED Talk that I just delivered a few weeks ago that isn't even online yet. But so it's really front of mind and it was one of those moments where I discovered the science after my intuition already told me and then I was like, oh, how delightful, (laughing) how delightful that it's true. In a nutshell, let's all take ourselves to the moment when we're about to step on a stage or about to press go on that record button. We're about to be on a podcast. And our body has that reaction that bodies have had for millennia where we get some version of a fight or flight response because of what psychologists would call a social evaluative threat. - Mm-hmm. - Right, so this is no longer a bear is coming at us, but it is the tribe might see me as wrong, as different, as not worthy, and they will kick me out. And in the ancient times, and we really still have those same bodies, were we to be kicked out? We'd be quite far away from the fire source, the love, we would die. The social evaluative threat feels like the bear because of course on some level it is a survival response. So what happens when we feel that survival response? Well, we can all fill this in, right? If you're about to go on a stage, you feel the butterflies suddenly turn into the, you know, the heart beating fast, the shallow breathing, the dry mouth, the sweaty palms, and jumping into the brain science, our blood routed away from our prefrontal cortex to deal with all of the fight or flight. And I argue most of us who are quite savvy have figured out ways to sort of hide this inconvenient body response from our audience. We're still having it, but we're hiding it. And look at us, pat on the back, you know, we can sort of mask. I feel really confident right now, and nothing is weird going on with me. However, the effort it takes to do,
do that masking does something else. It hides us in other ways. So we're not just hiding this inconvenient body response. We're also hiding the nuanced weirdness, let's say, of us. And so an audience might receive, instead, a slightly flattened version of us. We see this every time we go to a conference, the conference organizer who knows that it's his or her job not to sort of steal the spotlight, but they nonetheless have to come up on the stage at the beginning and do housekeeping, which is code for, I am undervaluing like the spiritual benefit of welcoming a room. And they come out and they say, welcome everybody. It's so great to see you all this morning. Hope you got coffee. And they're there, but they're not quite there. And we don't know how to say what it is. And we use the word authentic or inauthentic, but we also are like, whoop, but what? But what? And it's just somebody who's having a big body response and covering it, but not quite showing up human as a result. This is what happens in the brain, right? The amygdala is freaking out. And all of our, you know, rest of our resources are heading towards that big freak out. Here's my aha. When you tell yourself right before you go on stage, instead of, I hope I don't mess up, I hope I don't mess up, which is a fear response or a fear mental model, I should say. If instead we think, I can't wait to talk about my favorite thing. I can't wait to love on them. I can't wait to see my friends in the audience. I'm going to focus on what I love about what I'm talking about. I'm going to focus on what I love about this conference. I'm going to focus on that pastry I just had out front and all, you know, ask them if they had that. When we focus on love, not fear, intentionally in our own brain, it releases a completely different chemical response. And an MRI machine will show to you. Yeah. Instead of the amygdala freaking out and everything, all the resources heading towards it, oxytocin, kicks in, the love hormone, the cuddle hormone. And it literally, there's not supposed to be an easy way for it to get for because of the like blood brain barrier, blah, blah, blah. It's not supposed to be able to get like, if you just look at the science originally before people like, you know, sort of went deeper on this, it's not supposed to be able to get in straight to the amygdala, but it can, but it can. The brain was obviously evolved in order for oxytocin, just slide right into the amygdala, warm it all up in a bath of love and the amygdala chills the fuck out. The difference between, I hope I don't fuck up. And I want to love on these folks. And it doesn't even have to be love. It can be, I want to care about them. I want to, I want to be as generous as possible, right? These pro pro social thoughts change the conditions inside of our body. Thank you for, thank you for helping people understand the modern day version of fight or flight. I've heard fight or flight my entire life because I was in sport, studied it. No one ever wanted to bring it into the here and now. And I love your version of the bear that the bear is the social value. In this social value, we, we are putting such a weight on that. My gosh, we're putting so much gravity around that to where how can we possibly think from a self-centred, for lack of a better term? How can we think from a self-centred perspective when we put in so much weight on everything that is outside of us? You know, and I think for me, listening to you, I go, I literally spoke to a room exactly 24 hours ago as we are recording this. And as we started, the mic was horrendous. The screen that I was using was blinking all the time. And within two minutes of me starting and doing my opening, three people were about five yards away trying to fix all this, which was a huge distraction. And my body was like a thousand degrees underneath it felt. And I'm like, there's no way that this room cannot see probably how red my entire body must feel right now. Now lo and behold, you talk about the mask after I was done, couple of friends of mine who were in the audience were like, man, you, I don't, I mean, you deal with that. You dealt with that so well. I was like, I did. Like, because in here, I didn't, not at all. I'm so glad that it came through that I did. But that little encounter that I had yesterday professionally, we, we were all experiencing that daily in some capacity. We're in a conversation at a coffee shop and three people are talking about something and we don't feel as connected to the topic, but we try to feel as connected to the topic as we can. So we start to shift and manipulate ourselves to satisfying whatever it might be. And we do the same professionally. We're in a meeting and we've tried to play it off. Like we know better than we actually do. And suddenly now we've gone down this rabbit hole of a topic and a conversation before long where we're saying yes to something that we don't even know what we're saying yes to. All because we're trying to meet that social value that we've decided to put on ourselves or to put to to make a priority for ourselves. Steve, will you tell us yesterday when this was all happening? Did you acknowledge what was happening over there? Twice. I did. I had to. I had to like for me. I think it's a little bit of my Britishness kicking into like sometimes when you grow up in England and sometimes like a spade is a spade and you just you say it like you got to say the thing. What is happening right there? It's like I'm not going to pretend that that's not happening right now. I was just like well, this is a huge lesson though. I mean, I love that that was your answer because there is a certain, I mean, I could put this in two different ways. One is there's a certain power in acknowledging the true thing. But the other, which is a little bit of a meaner way to put it, but just I think this is actually kind of what's at stake when we don't acknowledge the thing that's happening in a room that we're all experiencing. We break trust with our audience because we're pretending we live in a different reality than they do. Yeah. We want and this and this can extend to also, you know us having a hard day, us having a stutter, us write anything that's anything that's more personal than just like there's a weird amount of sound going on in the room. But people worry, you know, do I acknowledge the thing? And no one is required to acknowledge anything self-disclosure is super personal. And I'm not here to, you know, shame anybody. And there is a surprising power move in naming the thing instead of not naming the thing. Yeah. 100%. And it's I love the point. It balladates a heck of a lot of the work that we actually did in that room. I was blown away by the participation, by the involvement in who knew who knew maybe at that point. I was actually creating a level of trust in the room just through that acknowledgement. And at least now that I know that's what I'll do in future. That's for sure. But I think strongly, strongly recommend. Yes. No, it's almost like you've granted those guys there. Exactly. I'll do it from now on. I'll just take those three people. I'll ask three people like, could you really mess up my opening? Yeah. If we can make the audio terrible, it really helps me. Like it just really helps people to trust with the audience. But I mean, we're joking and we're not because look, a huge amount of real life and especially high stakes life is a reframe. Is this sort of game? The game of fighting of a reframe. Life is not going exactly as we want. The geopolitical moment we're in is not going exactly as I'd like, how can we reframe this? Not because we're idiots and not because we're, you know, polyanas, but because this is the world we're in. What is a reframe that would reignite a sense of play that would reignite a sense of creativity that would reignite a wiggle that would make me come back online as a person with all of my weirdness. Because that's who people want to connect with for the most part. Yeah. I agree. I agree. And it's why I immediately gravitated to even a word like wiggly. I think I think I think when you when you I've no doubt you've done this in rooms like when you say, hey, what does wiggly mean to you? Like how do you what how do you know that you're in a wiggly state or whatever it might be? I love it, you know, because for me, I think we are so much more playful than we're ever willing to admit and acknowledge. And I think it's in our most playful state that we're actually in our most authentic state. And when we talk about communication to bring it back to that for a moment, like can we get people to that state where they feel as though the communication that they're not only having with the person across from them, the communication they're having with themselves, they can just lower the stakes a little bit, step into more of a playful mindset knowing that. And I'm going to come up with the segue of all segues because it's right there on your shoulder permission to speak. It's going to give them permission to speak. And you know, and so here you what you are someone who's written a book called permission to speak, what we are speaking to right now, it is exactly that. It's how can how can you know deep down? Well, how can you build that level of trust with yourself deep down to know that when you need to speak and whatever it is you need to say, you can give yourself the permission to do that. Because when I think about what what it means to be growth ready around the way you responded, that for me is an outcome that comes with the approach that you alluded to around understanding this internal battle, if you will, that we have between the body and the mind. Because I would argue one way to define that little internal battle that we deal with.
is our body's way of saying, I'm trying to decide what I'm giving myself permission to do here. So I want you to help us better understand. Some of this science, well, you've already done that, but I want you to now help us better understand how someone can get to that point where they say, I feel ready to give myself that permission to speak. - I'm gonna quote Simon Sinek, start with why? - Right, the different functions of speaking and communicating range based on what you want. Some of the most audacious advice around giving ourselves permission to speak works in some context and not in other. So a good starting place is considering for each of you, listening and for us who are obviously still very much in the, shall we say, looking for growth opportunities, the ways of our life, continuing to up level and challenge ourselves, is this question of what is this moment, what's possible in this moment? So if it's, say, giving a TED Talk or giving a speech on a stage at a conference where people are gonna be kind of dressed down and sort of unconference vibes, you know what I mean? Like there's a sort of a creative spirit, like disruptive energy. Often if we don't know what we're gonna talk about, let's say a few weeks in advance and we have 10 minutes say, a great way to start is to wonder about three questions. One, why do I think that audience really needs, like really needs, like in the language of business, the pain point, what's really keeping them up at night and maybe it's a too broad of an audience to know. But maybe you can do a little more research slash imagination and work, maybe there's a little bit of a mini listening tour you can do, I always ask as I speak, I speak it so many different industry conferences from healthcare to beauty to hospitality to real estate agents. I mean, it's like hilarious to me because of course, what we're really saying is turns out everybody talks. (laughing) So I'm invited into all these different industries that are not mine. And that I have a working understanding of real tea, we did that house buying thing that one time. But so then I asked who are some folks that are gonna be in the audience that I could maybe do a little mini interview with. And I just ask questions and just try to understand the real keeping them up thing, the real in this moment for their industry, for them, for growth, what would be really, really meaningful for them. So thing number one is, what is my audience need? Thing number two, what do I have the most fun talking about? I think it is a real fucking business practice to center our own delight and to do it as a strategy, not as a sidekick. What lights me up when I talk about it? What's my favorite thing? What's my thing I've been on a real kick about lately? What's my, you know, unpopular opinion? What's my right, like I teach a course at USC and in Berksville for communication and journalism that I built based on my book and one of the assignments that I give them is an obsession list, like 25 things you're obsessed with. They can be, you know, season four of Bridge or 10 or they can be cardigan sweaters, which no one really appreciates or they can be, you know, a specific kind of dog or it can be something, you know, sort of much more massive and identity defining. But list the things you're obsessed with that either everyone is also obsessed with or you're pretty sure you're a real fucking weirdo that you're obsessed with. I'm sorry I keep swearing now that I've started. - You're good. - It's part of my brand. And it's an exercise in really claiming the ways that we care about things, even if it's small scope to big and that light us up when we talk about them. So thing number one, what is our audience need? Thing number two, what do we love to talk about? And thing number three is what is the biggest swing? What would be the most dangerous thing I could talk about in this space? And we don't have to do it. But the exercise figuring that out tends to be revealing. And I bring all this up to say, your question was, you know, how do we get better communicating, how do we focus on communicating? What is the thing? And the answer is partly what is the context, right? I wanna be really, really honest and rigorous and loving about the fact that what I just suggested are for when you have a quite an open context. And then we have the margin of error inside our own company, which you know better than I, those of you, you know, who are listening. And you can tell yourself better than I would ever understand what the norms are of that space and how much wiggle room wiggle room. There is outside of those norms. And maybe there's a lot. And maybe you're not taking advantage of it. And what if you just showed up for that next, you know, sort of semi-boring topic presentation you've been assigned with a little more sense of play and a little more storytelling. And no one quite knows why, but somehow it just seems much more alive than everyone really enjoyed it. - Gosh, I wish I could just get people to understand the importance of context more in my world. Like it's frightening how much we can hurt ourselves as humans when we don't put enough weight on context around how we both receive things and then decide to, you know, put it back out into the world because there's no doubt, I've no doubt that you're experiencing this. I know you work with leaders in how they are maybe putting way too low a value on context, overlooking it and just going straight to the emotional response. The very words that they heard as opposed to what was around those words that how they received them, et cetera, or advice first, like what words do I need to consider sharing based on, as you've said here, the audience, and what is it? The other two parts of this around, you know, what is fun for us and what might be the biggest thing that we can share, it's almost like, well, contextually, it's like, if you don't have that context, you really can't answer those first, those second two questions, sorry, they, they, you can't figure out what the biggest, most scariest, most daring thing is you could possibly say without context, otherwise it's just a comment. It could be in your mind, it could just be the greatest, biggest thing ever, but contextually, it may have zero relevance to whatever it is that you're addressing in that moment. - Yeah, well, I would say actually all three of them, because I was, I was, you know, going into the weeds on how we figure out what our people need, but if we don't do that work, all three of those are somewhat opaque. And so, yes, I guess part of me is also putting in a, you know, bid for doing that kind of research/imagination work in advance of any time we get a chance to speak. And the reason I say research/imagination is that those are two different and both valuable ways of putting ourselves into that room before we're in that room, right? And one way research is a reminder that whether we use, you know, AI or whether we, I don't know, open a book, I don't know, or talk to people that, we're not supposed to know everything, we're allowed to not know everything, what we must do is have some curiosity. That is what we must do. I'm putting must to the capital M there, right? So if we're curious, how would we get answers? And then get some, until, until, until we keep going until we have some sense of clarity. And the other is imagination, where we really do, you know how no one rests, and we all know ourselves or ask, one of my favorite things to do is to sit out in my hammock in my backyard and not bring my phone out and look up at the trees and think about an issue and just sort of wonder in what we would call in acting school soft brain, soft brain wonder, which is I think just a permission term for don't have to have the answer right away, you know? And if I'm wondering, you know, this audience that I'm about to speak to, I did a little research, I understand that they're worried about XYZ. What would that feel like? Why wonder how that actually is manifesting? I wonder what kind of support they currently have. And maybe that results in a little bit further research and I can get some answers, but maybe it doesn't. Maybe it stays in the realm of imagination. And you know, Steve, you brought this up, we all have so much more resources in our body in our big imaginative brains, the same resources we had when we were three. And we're just not always encouraged to use those or name those as resources, right? You know, but often that kind of, one of my favorite quotes is Toni Morrison said, "As you enter positions of trust and power, which let's just assume we're all in, as you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think." - I love that. Right, like we can all interpret it differently and we'll have a billion different interpretations. But for me, it's a real reminder. And it's like a central part of my work and what I try to impart to my clients when I'm in an advisory ship capacity with them. Dream a little before you think, I think thinking here is a stand-in for telling ourselves all the old stories, the cultural stories, the personal stories that just continues to perpetuate the problems we're in. And dreaming is what would be a better story.
But also in terms of building a speech or in terms of thinking through, you know, this sort of practical stuff, dream a little before you think is a reminder that sitting around and wondering, daydreaming, what if we consider that the real work? Hmm. And that's, that, you talk about a reframe. I mean, that's a complete reframe. You know, it's getting, 'cause you don't have to sell me on this system. Like, I'm with you. Like, if anything, I probably need to dial it back a little bit on this. I don't know. See you in my videos. I mean, obviously this is part of, I mean, if we were to gather a bunch of sort of, you know, quote unquote thought leaders, people who really take seriously trying to move a field forward with fresh thoughts, where do the fresh thoughts come from? I mean, this is sort of rhetorical and sort of like a legit question. But I think they come from like that open space of surprise. And we must protect those open spaces of surprise. And too few people, I think, tell us that. So I'd, you know, I liked to offer it. And I've never, just listened to you here. Like, I've never thought of permission this way, but my mind immediately just started to go to the level of comfortability that we need to have around whether it be speaking, whether it be imagination. Like, for me, comfortability, comfortability comes before the permission. We give ourselves permission for what it is we feel comfortable doing. And the work, therefore, is in the finding the comfort with it. Because so much to what you're saying is that it, it goes against how we've been raised in so many ways to be creative, imaginative when we're supposed to rely on resources and quote, are, you know, quote, the, the, the people we reference and all this kind of thing. And it's just like, that's how you're supposed to make your point. And it's like, well, no, you're saying that there's a world where imagination can rain. In fact, imagination can be the catalyst for more relevant, more legitimate research, for instance. And you can even, like per per would my, my, you know, sort of anecdote earlier, my intuition said X. The science, it turns out also says X. Like that was convenient for me. But in a way, not it all surprising. No, because I've seen it with my own eyes. And that's what I love about. I love that you said that. Because for me, that is huge in this is, and this is where we now get to bring this all the way back to our bodies and how our bodies speak to us. It's something I've said it to clients until I'm, you know, blue in the face. And I've said it to, on the show a few times, it's, our bodies, our bodies are our greatest voice. If we're willing to listen to them, like, if we don't listen to them, then at certain point of bodies, you know, I'm not going to bother. I'm not going to bother. I'm just going to start. I'm going to check out, you know, and we don't want that to happen. That is such a beautiful line. Our body is the greatest. Yeah. I mean, it really is. And, and, but that comforts ability in listening to one's body is where the intuition is born. And suddenly now, we start to give ourselves that permission is so much to what we're speaking to here. Let me also introduce another concept that I think we're talking about without saying, which is power. And this embodied feeling of power, which is not the same as, you know, sort of knowing your place in a hierarchical system, but agency, where this now used so much to talk about. But are, are the body agency, the, the feeling of I have powered to. And in a way, I think permission and power are almost interchangeable. I didn't think about this when I first named the book. But the more I work with clients and the more that my work has inevitably taken me to leadership and then to these larger sort of abstract questions of what is leadership? What would what what should a leadership feel like in a better world? You know, these sort of like a leader is not just a person, but it's an it's an energy that walks into a space and wants to do to that space literally and also, you know, metaphorically in terms of decision making. And then I inevitably over the years, you know, we were talking right before we press record about our books, both being three years old. Three years is enough time for a lot of evolution. Right? My ideas have evolved partly through actually working with, you know, real people with real groups, so many different industries as we've discussed. You're telling me you would like to rewrite half of your book too? No, I actually love it. I actually love it. I think it's a real. I would like to rewrite part of it. That's so funny. I actually got to do a reprint of the book this last December. And they asked me my penguin random house asked me, you know, they're like, you can't change the page count. So good luck. But would you like to make any internal changes? And I, you know, I thought about it. I did a little hammock thinking and I was like, you know what? Actually, I'm okay. There's a whole new chapter. I would write, you know, but if I don't, I thought that's not where we're doing. I actually stand by it. But I my thought my thinking has evolved. And one of the one of the questions I asked myself this year was why public speaking? I asked myself this when I sold my book before I wrote it as well, by the way. So it's not like it's the first time I've asked, but I think the question, you know, asking the question again leads us to notice the ways in which the answer is evolved. And why? Why? Why public speaking? A phrase that kind of turns everybody's body off. But why do I care about a person talking in front of other people? And I think that one of the answers, there's a really, really practical one, which is just like I want more, you know, more, more people who have really an idea is to get them out there, right? That's just like, that's, we just need to be the ones who build the world. But the other, the other even bigger part of it, I think, is that I think public speaking is a tell about how we hold power. When we approach our public speaking opportunities from a place of love instead of fear, for example, which is practice, it's a practice, it's a practice. We are actually saying, I'm choosing to turn this moment that I have on a stage, metaphorical or literal, into an opportunity to flex my power. What kind of power do I want to hold in the world? What do I want it to do? How do I want it to make people feel? How do I want it to build the world a little differently? Look, speaking is the tell in the same way that you just set our bodies in a way out of the tell, right? When people talk, we hear them. We hear how much they're hiding. We hear how much they're showing up. We don't always know how to, you know, sort of talk about it. But that's why this term authentic gets thrown around so much. We can feel when someone's really showing the fuck up and we can feel when they're not. We don't always know why they're not. I'm so intrigued by that. And especially in this AI era, what are the things that are so deeply human that AI won't be taking it from us anytime soon? And it is how our bodies and our faces and our voices and our ideas show up in front of other people. And then what happens next? And do those ideas spread or do they get stuck? It's funny. You actually just answered, really, I had one question left. And it was pertaining to a lot of the work that I do and to kind of plug in so much of what you're talking to through this lens. Because a lot of what I'm always speaking to with clients and audiences is how do we go from what we know and building ownership around it. So it's no longer simply something we know, but something we actually own. And you really just answered that question through that last bit because for me, I think we all know to an extent what you just informed us. But the ownership piece comes down to asking better questions such as what kind, and I wrote it down. That's why I'm looking down here. That is a transitional question to go from knowing you have something to say to owning that you have something to say. And once someone owns it, the value is where it needs to be. And I 99 times out of 100, someone's going to do something about that. They're going to follow through. And let me make it even more practical because right, I so with you and sometimes this can feel big, I ask folks all the time and not even my leaders. Like when I do, I do stuff with high schoolers and call it right, like obviously sort of at every level. And particularly I'm very interested in the Gen Z years because of course they are the ones who are looking at this world going what would I like to do better? And how do I do it with less bullshit? And what a delightful place to plug into their lives. And then the question is what kind of leaders do you like in the world right now? Let's define leaders really broadly right? They can be artists. They can be people holding power in some way in the in our cultural power. What kind of leadership really lights you up? What kind of leadership do you wish there was more of in the world? And how do you beat that? And then we have to think through what do I like? What are the traits of the leaders I like? And then we actually get back in a, you know, sort of fun way for me to some of the really, really basics of voice. Do they, do they swear? Do they say amen ah? Well then in that case maybe that's fine. Do they have a sense of humor when they talk? Do they stay all on one note so that everything that they say sounds like they are a bit of a robot? Or is there a real range? And they go up and they go down and do we now think up and down might be okay and not sort of clownish? Like what you know, let's actually interrogate our assumptions about what a powerful person is supposed to sound like, which is a
story all of us have received from all kinds of sources are entire lives. The story of what power is supposed to sound like or has traditionally sounded like. And then we get to go, is that working? What about those other leaders that we really enjoy listening to? Are they following those rules? If not, is that a standard from a different time that we have outgrown? Are we holding ourselves to that standard? How much is professionalism, quote unquote, as defined "orally"? Not just, you know, sort of like what clothes to wear and how to stand, but how to speak. How much of this idea of professionalism ties into an old model of how leadership is supposed to sound that matches leaders I don't like. Okay. What about the alternative? If we make a list of people who really light us up when we listen to them speak, it can be podcasters, right? It can be TED talkers, it can be artists, it can be a ward show, you know, recipient who speeches just just clearly steal the night. It can be political, it can be activists or, you know, movement folks. It can be what, what am I leaving out athletes? I mean, that entire Olympic experience that we all just lived through, the press conferences got a lot of attention for people really showing up and really saying true things. When we start to notice who we really like, how they show up. A completely different model for the sound of power emerges. And then, you know, as we discussed earlier context matters, what elements of that could you possibly bring into your own world? And also knowing your audience, you know, as I don't, but also as I'm using my imagination, y'all are in a position to change what power sounds like right where you are. Yeah. And who are you modeling for? Right? I said start with why? Also start with who? The other major part of our speaking engagements that make us light up and come alive and seem exciting and charismatic and that afterwards everyone, you know, jumps to their feet is when we just remember who I am showing up this way for that person in the back of the audience who's just hoping to see something really true today. I'm showing up for me 10 years ago who dreamed of this moment. I'm showing up for my kid. I'm showing up for my mentor who always told me I could take the stage like this and hold power like that. Right? Like who the who the who is the kind of mental mental, you know, choices we get to make that invite us to show up differently and that is what permission feels like in the body. When we show up differently and we show up like we deserve to be there and the version of us that's weird deserves to be there. You know, then we change the world. And then we change the world. Yeah, little just dropped that little mic. I dropped there at the end. Which we're all about. I mean, my book is called Shock the World. So let's just change the world while we're at it. But the the or what you've what you've got me thinking about and I want to make sure that the listeners think about this too is that where we started today, I asked you what it means to be growth ready. So much of what you spoke to you alluded to it is like a warm up as a pregame. And what you're talking to here and what you help does understand is that for us to go public with who we are at our best, these warm ups. This work that is a warm up in so many ways is what will determine the longevity and the lasting effect that we can have. So if we see it as necessary work to preemptively set us up to then go on and do what it is we are capable of doing. Communication how we talk to ourselves internally before we enter that room before we even engage with another person before we potentially consider that new client before we go into that important board meeting before we go on to that stage, whatever it might be. We are stopping for just a moment. We're doing some of that work that has become habitual routine because we respect and we appreciate the work so much and we're seeing the results of the work so much. So why would we ever, ever step past our warm up before going into whatever performance, whatever world it is we operate in? I like to say that's the work. I like to say if you skip your warm up, the only person you're sabotaging is you and everybody you're talking to. Right. That's it. Everyone loses. Everyone loses. Everyone's left with less. Let's put it that way. I'm not going to put it in. No, that's absolutely it. You're never going to get optimal. We're all about optimal in the show. And so for me, if we're not, if we're not respecting the importance of the warm up optimal, really is never going to be an option. So for us to look at it that way. And one of I think might, the most heartbreaking feelings because it's less extreme than the ones that we can label easily. One of the most heartbreaking feelings is missed opportunity. Right. And that's I think what you, when you leave everybody with just a little less and your ideas just don't quite drown and you go to bed that night and you're like, yeah. So we're not giving ourselves, we're not giving ourselves permission to speak in order to simply grow, but to actually capitalize an opportunity to optimize every opportunity that we have put right in front of us. But this has been a delight. The value of insight is off the charts because I think this is, this is a topic we've never really touched on in this, in this way before. And I think the way you've brought it to our listeners, you've given them so much food but thought and even a couple of exercises they can take away too, which I always appreciate is little bonus points. But before I let you go, where can we learn more about you and also any ideas on when this TEDx dog's coming out? You don't want to check it out? Thank you. I know same. It's in the, it's in the hands of, as I've been calling it, uppercase, T-E-D. There you go. But I will say this, just go to permissionink.co. It's my website and it's the second that it's up. It'll, you know, be posted there. If you go there now and scroll to the bottom right, you can get on my newsletter. I call them permissionaries. The people with my newsletter. And I think the TED is going to be powerful. I'm putting this out there into the world. I think it's going to be powerful. I really dared myself to answer those three questions. What do they need? What would be the most fun for me and what's the biggest, most dangerous swing? And I really tried to do that and do it in 12 minutes and 30 seconds. And delightful tour to fours experience for a public speaking coach. I love it. I love it. Well, I can't wait to see that and make sure you go check out all the information that we're going to make available on the show notes as well. But some of our. Yeah. I mean, of course, also folks can find me on LinkedIn on Instagram, right? I would love to connect. 100%. Some of our other spin-off delight. I'm so, so appreciative at the time. You are welcome back anytime. And this was such a pleasure and just best of luck with the TEDx and everything that's coming out this year and beyond. So thank you again. Thank you for tuning in to Growth Ready. If you liked what you heard and are feeling ready to grow, be sure to leave a five-star rating, subscribe to the show and share the episode with someone you know is ready to fuel their growth journey today. We love our community, so don't hesitate to reach out to us at
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