Marketing in the Era of Authenticity

Foreign.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

If you're a regular listener, you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we bring on somebody with that why so we can see how their why has played out in their life. Now, today we're going to be talking about the why of Make Sense To Make Sense of the Complex and Challenging if this is your why, you are driven to solve problems and resolve challenging or complex situations. You have an uncanny ability to take in lots of data and information, observe situations and circumstances around you, and sort through them to create order. You consider factors, problems and concepts and organize them into solutions that are sensible and easy to implement. It is not even that you enjoy problem solving necessarily. You simply can't help yourself. It is the lens through which you view the world. Interestingly, it is not necessary for you to share your solution on a continuous basis. It is sufficient that you yourself have solved the problem or resolved the complexity of the situation. Often you are viewed as an expert because of your unique ability to find solutions quickly. You also have the gift for articulating a solution and summarizing it in clearly understandable language for your own benefit and for the benefit of others. You believe that many people are stuck and if they could make sense out of their situation, they could find a simple solution and move forward. You help them understand and see their way through. Now, today I've got a great guest for you. Her name is Gina Ballerin. She isn't just an inspirational TEDx and keynote speaker, storyteller and B2B marketing leader. She is an MCIM Chartered Marketer with a Master's of Education and Management Communication and a member of the Professional Speaking Association. She's the Author of the Secret Leadership, Marketing and the Power of People among numerous other texts. Gina's goal is to magnify the impact of her clients influence through her expert guided hand, visionary consultancy and authenticity storytelling prowess. Gina, welcome to the podcast.

It is a delight to be here, Gary.

So tell everybody, first of all, where are you right now and what time is it?

I am in Sydney, Australia and it.

Is a very sociable ten minutes past nine in the morning.

And so you guys are not having typical weather, is that right?

Well, you know, Sydney is a place which is renowned for its beaches and.

Its sunshine, but it's also renowned for its fires. And as we know this time lasts year.

We were going through an incredibly dry period. Being here in Sydney was like being in a post apocalyptic world. There were days where the sky was actually red and black in the middle of the day. It was nothing short of eerie. So when I say to you today.

That is gray and miserable, it seems.

A bit ungrateful, right? Because I've lived in South Africa and I now live in Australia where rain is a blessing. And I appreciate rain. Don't get me wrong, I love lying in bed and hearing the sound of rain falling on the roof.

Unfortunately, it has been raining consistently for the last month and I've got to a point where I am heartily sick of rain and I'm really looking forward to seeing the sun again.

Well, help us get to know you, Gina. Tell us now, where did you grow up? Take us on your journey. How did you get into coaching? How did you get into speaking? How did you get into storytelling?

So my story begins in South Africa and then went to university, met my husband there and we immigrated to the UK and we lived in the UK for 13 years. So when I say gray and miserable.

Trust me, I am very familiar with weather patterns in the UK and even.

The phenomenon known as sad, which is seasonal affective disorder, which a lot of people get because of the lack of vitamin D in their systems because they're just not getting enough sunshine. And then from the uk, we decided it was time to move. It was time to embrace another continent. And we actually applied for immigration in both Canada and Australia. We got into both, we had to choose.

I think it was probably the lure of the sunshine that drove me down to down under. And it's nice to be back in a hemisphere where for me the stars are the right way up again. Because having grown up in South Africa.

You look up and you can see the Southern Cross. Look, to be fair, the traditional constellations.

Like Orion are upside down from the rest of the world. But it's great to be back in.

A place where you can see the stars and there's kind of that comfort of being in a context that feels more like where you grew up. So I'm in Australia now. And the journey career wise also ended up being part of that evolution. How do you summarize this into a very short sentence so as not to bore your listeners? I've been in marketing my whole life. I went into marketing having studied a communications degree. So I got a master's in management communication, but only while I was working full time. But I'd studied an honors degree in linguistics. Linguistics, the study of English language, not necessarily linguistics as Russian and French, although.

We did actually learn a little bit.

Of the structure of Japanese to try and understand how language works. And marketing was this weird concept that I didn't even know I was doing until I immigrated to the UK and realized that the stuff I'd been doing for the institute, which I set up, was actually all marketing. You know, getting a database together, building a website, creating emails, sending out brochures, organizing events. All of these are part of marketing. I had no idea at the time. I didn't even know what marketing was because I had this perception that marketing was equal to to advertising. And this has been a frustration across my career that marketing, when done right, is not synonymous with advertising. Because if you're selling B2B business to business rather than business to consumer, the way that you actually get sales is by connecting emotionally with the person who is buying the product or the solution, or in my case, the consultancy that you sell. You have to build that relationship. You can't just advertise to people because first of all, that's not strong enough or long enough to build a relationship with them. And secondly, it's not actually going to be perceived with the same depth and the same credibility as having a conversation with someone. So many years later, having gone up through the ranks of marketing, having worked as a marketing director, I found myself working for myself. And this was interesting because I hadn't realized that this was actually a compulsion. But what I had realized, and this brings us nicely back to the sense of why I didn't know that I needed to make sense of the journey that I was going through as part of that process. But all I realized was the organizations I was working for didn't get it and I didn't feel comfortable within the context of that organization. I would work there for a year, maybe a year and a half, in one case, it was a fantastic group of people. I worked there for three years before I was headhunted. That was the longest I ever had as a career trajectory. And I think in hindsight, looking at now, knowing that, my sense of why, to make sense of the world, to discover, to figure things out, actually was both a blessing and a curse. It was a curse in that it meant that I couldn't.

Force people to get to the next level because I was too junior in the organization. And I could see things that they couldn't. And it frustrated me. But what had happened is I would see these things and assume that there was somehow something wrong with me or that I was deficient because, well, if I'm the only person who sees this, then, well, I must be wrong.

Yep.

Problem.

You'd already solved it, and they were way behind you.

Yeah. And more importantly, I could see routes to solving the problem that no one was interested in taking up, or I didn't have the confidence to be able to put forward to the right people in the organization, or I had no idea that there was even the possibility of making change. So I would happily bumble along, learning and figuring out everything that I need to figure out, and then go, well, that's a problem. That's a problem. Here's a problem. Okay, we fixed it. Now I'm bored.

I need to move on to the next thing. I've solved these problems already.

So you started in marketing. You worked for different companies for short periods of time. They brought you in, kind of like the problem solver. Hey, get us up to speed, get us working. And then you were on to the next one until finally you decided to start your own consultant firm.

Yes, that's exactly it. It was a little bit less intentional than you describe.

I think I am relatively.

Junior in that I've just turned 40. So I was fortunate enough to discover the art of consultancy in my 30s. And actually to go, I don't want to be part of this corporate Borg anymore, because I don't fit into the mold of a corporate organization. And it hadn't occurred to me why I wouldn't until, ironically, I discovered my why. And it wasn't the discovering my why that was kind of the end of the journey. It was almost as if I had discovered my why without realizing what it was throughout the COVID period. Ironically. And this was actually a gift that Covid gave me. The Australian government has been incredibly generous to people who are permanent residents or citizens of the country, and they've helped them out through Covid and so what ended up happening with me as a consultant is that because I have a proper business, they said, well, if you're struggling, here's some cash that we can help you with just to keep you going. And that cash actually gave me the confidence to mentally explore and know that I had a little bit of a safety net preparing me for what happened next. And during that journey, I was able to explore what does it mean to be a marketer? And actually to unpack the.

Why that I'm experiencing, which is actually, hang on, is this real? Is this genuine? How do I feel about being this marketer now? I did a TEDx talk a few years ago about confessions of a marketer marketing in the area of authenticity. And I talked about how this marketing gig is synonymous with advertising in most people's minds. But it doesn't have to be the whole emotional journey.

But I hadn't realized until earlier this.

Year, when I applied to be a board member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, that I wasn't comfortable in myself being a marketer. And you and I spoke earlier today about what it means to do a job that defines you and yet to find yourself compelled and drawn to something else that you don't know why it's. But you have to go this path. And I found that I was compelled to tell people stories to help them make sense of what's happening in their businesses and in their personal lives. But in being compelled to tell those stories, what I was actually doing is helping them make sense of their world. And so for me, the ability to make sense of my own world and to realize how to stop hiding my light under a bushel allowed me to then be confident enough to bring that gift to the world.

While we take a moment to give our guest a quick break, I hope you're hearing how important it is to know your why. If you're ready to put an end to your frustration and unlock the code to your personal and business success, then after the show, make sure to head to whyinstitute.com and discover your why. Today, it only takes about five minutes. Let's get back to the show.

So what was it like for you, Gina, when you. When you did discover your why? Why? Were you interested in discovering your why? Then you did, and then what was that like for you?

So discovering my why was like finding that a section of my brain had lit up because it was always there. I just didn't know what it was. And suddenly there was this framework that wasn't just like, oh, that's interesting was.

Actually like, oh, my God, I can't believe I didn't know that already. And I could look back at things and go, oh, that's why I do that. And then I found myself very annoyingly saying, that makes sense almost every five minutes in conversation. It drove me nuts for a week. Every time I said that, I was compelled to explain to people, you know.

I've just done this great thing about.

Finding out what my why is, and.

My why is to make sense of.

The world and blah, blah, blah. And then of course, I would explain it to them because I'm like, but this is so good. You've got to discover it for yourself.

And what I'm interested now in is exploring where other people's whys fit in that world and in that context. And because, of course, my why is to make sense. I want to make sense of their roles and the interactions between the different groups of people. Because you can look at a lot of these diagrams and illustrations. You can look at the disc profile, for example, which refers to people in four quadrants as dominant, influential, aesthetic, relate, or someone who is compliant and understand generically that those kind of interactions show challenges between certain personality types. For example, if you're on opposite ends of the spectrum, if you're a D, you're a dominant characteristics, you're one of those kind of people who's a little bit bullish. You're going to be in opposition with someone who's a steady relator whose purpose is to get along with others and to make peace. But I'm trying to figure out now how the compulsion that people have, how their whys fit into that as well, because it adds this whole depth of nuance and understanding of not just what people's behaviors demonstrate, but also what drives them. And I think the important thing about knowing your why is when you understand and this light comes on in your brain, it gives you calm, it gives you peace, and it actually makes you go, oh, right. Not only am I like this, but now I can feel that it's okay to be like this, that there are other people who are like me. And yes, I might feel like I've always sat in a different bucket to everyone else, but actually.

I can sit in this bucket now quite comfortably. There is a wonderful phrase by Marianne Williamson which is often attributed to Nelson Mandela, and she talks about, it is our light, not our darkness, that most scares us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brave, brilliant, wonderful. And the answer is, who are you not to be? Because as we shine our own light. We automatically give others permission to do the same. And I think that discovering your why gives you permission in a way that possibly new years of coaching and counseling and training and thinking haven't been able to. It's almost like I've gone through this journey and now I can go, yes, I'm putting my stamp on this thing and going, all right, I'm going to own that.

I love that. One of the things that we. To your point about some of the other assessments that are out there, because there's a lot of great assessments like you mentioned, disc and Myers Briggs and Colby and strength finders, and some of those, they're all really, really good, but those are how you take action. Those are your personality and the way you do things and what are your strengths and that kind of thing. But they're not why you take action. Right. And so when you start with those, you're, like, too far down the path. It's like a gps. How do you use a GPS if you don't know where you are right now? How do you know where you're going to go? So knowing discovering your why is like finding that home button of where you are in that moment, and then the rest will make a lot more sense to you.

I love the fact that you say make sense. I'm curious whether that is one of your attributes as well.

But you have a point about the gps.

I lived in London for a while, and I would use a gps. And the problem was, because I'm directionally challenged, I would see this little red dot on the map, Right. But I got confused between the little red dot, whether it was where I.

Was going, or whether it was where I was coming from.

That can be a problem. You'll always end up in the same.

Place it has happened.

So you did a TED Talk. What was the topic of your TED Talk?

It was Confessions of a Liar. Marketing in the Era of Authenticity. Now, originally, it was going to be why marketing is the why now is the best time in history to be in marketing. And that's what I got permission from.

The organizers to talk about.

And then as I was about to go on stage, it was my husband who was there who said to me, gina, I've had an idea. I actually think you should change your topic. Can you do this? I'm like, well, maybe I can. And I asked the organizer if I could, and he's like, yeah, that's okay. We can give us a go. And that became the driving force behind it, because that's really what it was about, I wanted to say to marketers. Yes, be proud of what you've done if you are in marketing deliberately, because let's face it, not everyone falls into career. Not everyone chooses the career they go into. Some people fall into that career by accident. A lot of people fall into marketing because they want to be writers or in today's day and age, they want to be search engine optimization experts, or they want to be data analysts, or they want to be graphic designers. Right. They don't think of marketing necessarily as the predominant attribute around it. And I think marketing is very, very misunderstood. Part of the reason that marketing is misunderstood is because it is actually not just a career and not just a discipline. It's almost a way of seeing the world. And the challenge is that a lot of people who fall into marketing aren't able to see the world from a bigger perspective. But one of the things I noticed from your notes about what happens when you identify that your why is to make sense of the world. You start collaborating and collecting more and more people whose why is also to make sense of the world. And I have discovered that there are.

So many marketers out there who have.

The same compulsion as I do. And their desire to be able to join the dots and put things together is partly what makes them great marketers. Yes, because a marketing campaign isn't just, well, here's a blog I've written and I'm going to give you this blog post. A marketing campaign is actually about the depth and breadth of what you're going to say, who you're going to say it to, when you're going to say it, what channel you're going to use to say it, how much money you're going to spend on each of those channels and what you expect the results to be. Right. That is one campaign. So let's say I want to.

Sell a book. I can just put the book on the shelf. But if I want to market that book well, I need to understand who's going to buy it, what's going to happen, drive them to buy that, why would they buy it? How are they going to be able to get access to it? How will they even find that information? And so it makes sense to me that a lot of marketers actually do need to make sense of the world around them in order to fit all of these jigsaw pieces of the puzzle together so that they know, well, if I move this jigsaw piece from this perspective to that perspective, well, it'll change the whole puzzle. And if you think about it, it's not just a flat puzzle that, you know, once you've done that jigsaw puzzle, that's it, you're done, right? You can break it up and put it back in the box.

It's like a constantly moving, evolving jigsaw.

Puzzle because humans are by their very nature changeable. And so marketing has to change in order to adjust the messages that it's giving to its market and in order to help people understand. And the more noisy the world gets out there and the more complexity and competitors there are for your product or.

Service, the harder it is to find.

The right pieces in that ever moving 3D jigsaw puzzle. Marketers have to be far smarter than people traditionally give them credit for.

How do you define marketing?

Oh, that's a lovely question.

The textbook definitions of marketing would refer to a person in a place doing a promotion for a certain price. That's traditionally known as the 4Pmodel of marketing. For me, marketing is about connecting emotionally and authentically with the people who want what you have to give them in a way that builds a relationship between you.

Connecting emotionally and. What did you say with people who.

Want what you have to be? Sell them in a way that allows them to buy from you.

Yeah, that's a really good way to look at it. It's not so much selling them, it's connecting with them. They already want what you have.

They just don't know you're there.

And that's when marketing is done. Right. That's what it should be. The challenge is that a lot of people try to sell a lot of things to a lot of people, and then what ends up happening is, let's look at this mathematically. When you've got one option for one person and one route to market, that's only three variables you've got. But as soon as you double that, you're not just multiplying your forces, you're actually amplifying those forces. So you're thinking about an exponential relationship. So if you've now got two products you'd want to sell to two different groups, that's four. But if you want those two products to sell to two different groups in two different companies, that's not. Not two times four times two. Well, actually it is because it's exponential. But the point is that you're multiplying these variables until they become enormously out of control. And so one of the arts of what marketing is doing these days in a lot of small businesses is actually helping people to find their Niche. And I was speaking with Dan Tyre of HubSpot. He proudly says he was the sixth employee at HubSpot, the marketing automation. And they do marketing, they do sales and they do survey as well. And Dan was saying the riches are in the niches. I'm like, well, yes, they are, but how do you define what your niche is? So one of the arts of marketing is actually to be able to say no. And that is quite ironic because it is by saying no, I don't have this product or service that can help you. Sorry, but here's someone who can. Or by saying no, it doesn't do this, but here's what it does do. Or by saying, no, I am not the right person for you or my organization is not the right organization for you and it's okay for us not to be right for each other. Unfortunately, if marketers don't truly deeply understand their Persona, the person who at the end of the day is actually going to buy their stuff, what ends up happening is that they try to be all things to all people and they end up becoming more of the noise rather than more of the solution.

And what also happens is that there is a lack of empathy in the marketing communications that they share with the rest of the world and as a consequence they can produce oodles and oodles of content. You will have read yourself, I'm sure, dozens, hundreds, thousands of blog posts that promise this amazing solution because they've really got their search engine optimization going really.

Well and they know what is going.

To happen, give you a bait click.

Headline, they know that you're going to.

Read that you're like, oh, I must find out the answer. But you get halfway through that content and you're disappointed because they know how to lure you in, but they don't actually know how to fulfill the depth of that relationship.

So what are the steps to. If I'm listening to this and I'm thinking I've got something that I really need to help marketing, what are the steps that you take somebody through to developing a good marketing strategy?

That's an interesting question because I'm rather anti traditional in the sense of developing a marketing strategy. If you look at a traditional marketing strategy, you will identify what are you selling, who are you selling it to, where do you want to sell it, how much are you going to charge for it? And then a little bit about why they should care. Right? As in the traditional Simon Sinek start with why.

Reimagination of that. If you start with your why, that then allows you to do different things. So my target audience is not small businesses traditionally who need help figuring out all of this stuff. My target audiences are people who have been in the business for a long time, and they've been doing all the right things, and they've been figuring out all the right parts, and they've been selling to all the right customers. But they feel that something's missing in their lives. They either feel like they've got to a point where they just can't do it anymore because they've lost their passion or their joy for what they did in the first place, or their teams feel the same, or they're starting to realize that the tactics that they're doing are not working. They're not able to reach the goal that they want to get to. And so when we look at that strategy perspective, we have to kind of unpick it. And that means actually asking why a lot. But it also means identifying what people are not saying, identifying what they're not doing, and asking really uncomfortable questions.

So one of the things I'll do mostly for friends and family is actually try and help them figure out through what I call marketing coaching or marketing counseling, what is it that's preventing them from getting to the goals, to where they. Where they want to go. Now, it ends up creating a strategy, but not in the traditional sense, because what we do is we go, right, you want to do A or B. And often they don't even know what they want, right. How can you solve a problem if.

You don't know what you want to.

Do in the first place? And so what ends up happening is we take a narrative journey to figure out where they are, how they got there, and what they like about what they are doing and what they don't like about what they're doing. And through that process, now that I know, it's because my why is to make sense of the world. What I do is I'm able to make sense of what they're not saying, stuff that's in their head that they're not aware of. And then to actually be able to diagram that and to put that into a framework and go, well, what I heard you say, because of abc, is this what you can do in order to solve that problem is xyz. Here you go. That's the map. It's up to you. You choose which path you want to take. But it requires a certain openness of mindset and a certain type of character to be willing to observe the things that they have often hidden from Themselves for. So.

Give us an example of that. Take us through maybe a company you've done that with so we can kind of experience that.

I'll give you an example of a colleague who I used to work with who decided to go out on his own. And he and I were great collaborators, but I could observe that his behavior was disconnected. You could see that he was one type of person when he was in a corporate work environment. And as soon as you got him outside of the office, you had a cup of coffee with him, or you went down to the pub and had a drink with him, he was a different person. He was wise and witty and gregarious and there was this hidden depth. And so after he left the organization, and so did I, he came to me and he said, gina, please help me with my website. I said, okay, I'll help you with your website on one condition. That I get to show off you, the real you, not the you that you like to plaster in front of everyone. The you that's obsessed with metrics. And don't get me wrong, in marketing, it's great to be obsessed with metrics, but we have to. I want to showcase you. I want to share you with the world. I want to unpin and unpack the delight that you actually have in marketing and share that. And so we worked together extensively over a period of about six or eight weeks. And I kept getting more and more frustrated with him because he wasn't sharing the information that I'd asked for. And the more I asked, the more reticent he was to give it to me. Until eventually I realized that the problem was he didn't want to share that information with me. He had built a Persona that was so data driven and so results oriented that there was a fundamental aspect missing, and that was actually how to get people to buy into the change that he was making.

And I could see that. And when I figured that out, I knew I had two routes to solve this problem. Option one was to say to him, dude, you're never going to succeed unless you can put humans at the center of the change you want to take place. But he had actually said, look, I don't care. I work all of this out and then it's up to people to make that change. It's not up to me.

Wow, how can you think that?

How can you be a change maker who doesn't want to engage people in change?

This doesn't make any logical sense to me.

But what I did is, as per promised, he'd asked for A website from me. And so I produced and wrote content to help him create his website. In my heart of hearts, I knew that this wasn't the work that I wanted to do. It wasn't the work that showcased his brilliance. Because what had happened is that his personal, gregarious view of the world was so at odds with his work personality that he wasn't okay with me sharing his personal life in a work context.

Wow. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, something you said earlier.

Reconfirmed for me that your why is make sense. And you probably have no idea. You said it.

Go on.

It was when you said, at the last minute, I decided to change my title of my TED Talk. Who else would do that? Nobody else, except for the why of makes sense, would have the guts to change it at the last second and be able to pull that off, because that would freak out most people who've been practicing and practicing and practicing and practicing. I'm not really down to the word. And you're flying by the seat of your pants.

So is flying by the seat of your pants an element of the make sense personality as well?

Well, it's their ability to do that. Like, you can take. You can take stuff. Like, I can throw almost anything at you, and you'll just kind of smile and go along with it and, okay, we got this, let's go. Whereas other people, it just throws them off their game. You can, like, that's why you're good on stage. Because something's gonna happen and you're. You can handle it. You can handle any of that stuff. You can handle problems coming at you. And that's a big part of makes sense because of your ability to solve the problem instantly.

That actually makes a lot of sense. You see what I'm saying now that, you know, it's just there all the time. And you keep saying it, you're like, damn it, I can't get away from this descriptor of my world.

But I agree with you. And I wish I'd known this years and years and years ago. So one of the other things that marketers do a lot of is they organize a lot of events. I found organizing events incredibly stressful because while I am able to adapt to changes on the fly, as you said, I've been in a context where I organized an event that lasted three weeks and we had three and a half thousand children and all of their teachers performing at an iced Steadfod, which is like a performance event where they, you know, they get to play their Recorder or put their artwork on display, or share their creative writing, or appear on stage and recite a poem. And it was phenomenally, incredibly stressful. We had children from all over the state coming together with their teachers. We had a computer program that in those days, it was actually in its.

Infancy to create a program to do nothing but organize what data went where.

And which days and times people were coming on. And the sheer stress of organizing that actually made me a little bit burned, realizing that there are too many variables and I couldn't actually make sense of all the individual variables. It was. It was just overwhelming for me. And many years later, I ended up working with some extraordinary event organizers who brought together some C level executives, customers of a company in a way that just worked together so beautifully and so seamlessly. It made me realize that I do this naturally. But actually, the thing that frustrated me was that I couldn't organize it all in my own head. I had to rely on external people, I had to rely on external forces. I had to rely on computer programs to be able to make sense of the world for me. And having seen how other people then did it. Well, first of all, it wasn't just me organizing this massive event in a different country at a different time for dozens of people. They actually had an entire team that had a massive infrastructure behind them. They'd done it for many years. So when things go wrong, and let's face it, if you run an event, you know that things will always go wrong. It's inevitable.

Yes.

No matter how many times you've run the same event in the same context, there will always be something that isn't the same as it was. Refer to our previous conversation about humans. Humans are by their very nature changeable and variable. Which means if you put them in exactly the same context, even at exactly the same time, they're still going to.

Behave in a slightly different way.

But this also makes me think that a lot of marketers, even if they're events marketers, are also make sense people because they also need to be able to adjust and adapt on the fly to be able to say, right, I have problem A and I don't see a solution B, but I'm going to dig through all of these other options and come up with a solution. I wonder if MacGyver was a make sense person as well.

You remember MacGyver in the 80s with his pen knife, and he could solve almost any problem just by looking at.

All of the different variables.

He was either that or mastery, one of the two. Ah, yes, so let me switch gears a little bit. Often people with the why of makes sense had to grow up really fast. They were put in situations when they were very young where they almost had to be the adult.

Maybe there was a parent or somebody that put them under a lot of stress where they had to grow up and be the decision maker and figure things out.

Was that part of your childhood?

Yes.

It's interesting how often that happens because, I mean, are you comfortable talking about that?

I'm not sure that I am comfortable talking about it because it's one of.

Those things that it wasn't massively traumatic. I've had a loving set of parents who are still around, and they're wonderful human beings, but I haven't got to a point where the exploration that I've done on this journey I have shared with them yet.

Okay.

So I'd rather not go down this path. I hadn't even realized that a lot.

Of y people had that. But actually, again, it makes sense because the more people I connect with now with the make sense perspective of the world have something in them that drove them to figure things out way ahead of their time. And it's almost like I sense a kindred spirit in the people who've had to do this. And I wonder if possibly one of the extensions of making sense as an adult is that you actually have to be comfortable and to make friends with the activities that forced you to become that way. And only once you're able to say, you know what? This is what happened to me. It made me grow up faster than maybe other kids did, but I'm okay with that. And to let go of that, that then allows you to actually be someone who is comfortable with making sense of the world, who is comfortable with saying, hey, oh, I see you. You make sense of the world too, and then go, oh, right. I wonder what it is that made you grow up too fast.

Yeah.

And that in and of itself, I hadn't realized this.

Yes.

But it does. Yeah. I think this is going to open some interesting eyes to why I connect with these people.

Yeah, It's. It's something you'll have in common with them that you know, and you'll be able to share your stories as you know this. In one of the podcasts that I did with a gentleman that's a green beret, he calls it the generosity of scars. Because you get. Yeah, you get to share these things that shaped you and formed you and made you who you are, and they created your gift for you. Whatever happened was your Gift. It was something that at the time was traumatic, but in retrospect becomes this thing that propelled you to what you are today. And if you look at it in that way, it'll change the way you see that event.

Yeah, I completely agree.

So it'll be great for you, now that you're more aware of that, to be able to have those conversations with people. You know, you can say just kind of what I said right there. Oftentimes we found that in the. In their past, they had some challenges when they were younger where they had to grow up really fast and had to make decisions, had to figure out what was coming their way and then have to do something about it. And that led to our ability to solve problems fast for other people.

What I will say off the back of this realization is that I have almost lived two existences. One existence where I was at absolutely terrified of the rest of the world and felt like I was doing the wrong thing and being the wrong person all of the time, and then a subsequent existence which allowed me to be who I wanted to be, without fear and without compromise to say, you know what? I am who I am, and you're not always going to like that, and that's okay. And what happened in the journey. But the difference between the two was when I was required to make a lot of decisions really quickly. And I think what had happened is I kind of plastered over the cracks of I had to learn a lot, I had to be independent and had lived in an existence where I would solve these problems, but I didn't trust myself to put those solutions out there into the world. I didn't feel like I was in a context where I was given permission to do that. But in retrospect, it wasn't about the context, it was about me. Like, I hadn't given myself permission to actually take control, to take that action, to be the person that had learned from the school of hard knocks really early in. In their life and who could make sense of the world. And then I stepped into a job that scared the living daylights out of me. I mentioned earlier that I was headhunted for a role, and that's the only reason I left an organization, which is the first time I'd found my work home and I stepped into a job that wasn't just one level above me, it was actually two levels above me. And they actually wanted to promote me into a third level above me. And. And for the first time in my working career, people were relying on me to make really quick decisions with Very little information, very little time to familiarize myself with the organization. Some very challenging people in an enormously challenging work environment. And what ended up is that the embryonic make sense of the world person that I had hidden for many years was able to crack through the eggshell and kind of emerge tweeting like a new little fluffy bird who hasn't really.

Broken in her wings yet.

And to crack through that eggshell. And the very nature of cracking through that shell allowed me to form my muscles and my beak and my wings properly. And in that context, I had to make quick decisions. I had to lead an organization. I had to bring people together. I had to drive change. And a part of an organ.

They said they wanted change, but they weren't able to make that change happen consistently across the whole organization. And as a bird grows and becomes stronger by cracking out of that shell, so did I grow and become stronger by effectively doing what I always could have done. I just prevented myself from doing that because I didn't think that it was even possible.

Yeah, it's interesting how we can play small in order to keep our gift hidden. You know, it's very much the analogy I use quite often is the one of Superman, you know, because you think of Clark Kent, and Clark Kent is mild mannered and meek, and he's got his coat and tie on, and he's hidden, right. You don't know who he is, but when he stands up and he takes off that jacket and takes off his shirt and you see that S on his chest, you know it's the man of Steel. And you know, he's got all these amazing gifts. And that's how it is, you know, for you. You can stay hidden as Clark Kent. You were forced out of your. You were forced by this company to become Superwoman, and you did. And you can do that now anywhere you are Superwoman. And people with a why of make sense are amazing. Anywhere they can just go into this situation, figure things out for people. They're way ahead of the rest of us. You almost have to dumb yourself down for us to catch up to you. And then finally we catch up. And you've already been there, so it's awesome. So what's next for you, Gina? What do you want to do next?

Well, Gary, before I move on to that question, I want to say thank you for that insight, because it literally made the hairs on my arms stand up. As you said that, I think that the Y Institute and the initiative that you have here has the potential to change lives in enormous Ways. And just the fact that twice in our conversation, literally, my hairs have stood on edge. That is how deep this level of knowledge and epiphany is. And that's why I will keep promoting people to say, go figure out your why. It makes a big difference in your life. Now, the challenge, of course, is when people are ready to see their why. And I wonder whether seeing your why is sometimes going to be a little bit uncomfortable. But, hey, that's growth, right?

If you.

If you're not.

My dad always used to say we went skiing at a very young age in a part of the world that is not traditionally known for skiing.

In Southern Africa, there's a mountain, mountainous country called Lesotho. It's actually landlocked by South Africa, one of the few countries in the world.

That actually is completely surrounded by another country. And we would go in this, go to Lesotho and go skiing.

In the days before they even had a ski lift, the ski lift was.

Literally two generator with a big rope tied around, and you'd cling on to the rope as you'd be dragged up the hill over the tussocks grass.

And dad said to me, gina, don't be afraid. I wasn't even skiing down a hill with him. I was sitting in a backpack on his back as he went skiing down the hill. That's how young I was. He said, don't be afraid, because if you don't fall, you don't learn. Yes.

Love it.

So your question was, what's next? And one of the things I was doing during this Covid safe period, because.

For me, actually, Covid was a gift.

It was a gift to be able to expand my brain, to look deep inside, draw connections in a way that meant I wasn't being distracted by all of the people and all of the activity. I could actually really focus. And what I discovered is that my what if future was now a new driving force in my life. So a what if future is actually something that I learned from a thought leadership course I did on LinkedIn. What if the world could be like this? And my what if was, what if we could eliminate human suffering at work? Like, that's a big ask, right? But there is a lot of elements that you don't have to fundamentally change, you can tweak to in order to help people. And one of the things that I think is making a big difference there is people's awareness that it's okay not to be okay, and also their confidence to take themselves out of their comfort zone. Being at an organization where they just don't like what they do. And so the what if we could eliminate human suffering at work? I'm not talking about people who have been necessarily forced into labor. That's not the angle that I want to take, although it could encompass that. You know, who knows? Maybe I'll bump into someone who is actually an advocate for modern slavery or.

An advocate for ending modern slavery.

I don't know. That's not part of the journey yet. But at this stage, all I want to do is to be able to say, if you are doing a job and you're not happy, yes, we need to talk. Because part of my vision of eliminating human suffering at work means let's figure out why, let's figure out whether it's the organization, let's figure out what you can change in that organization. Let's figure out what you have control over that you might not necessarily have realized you have control over, and let's make that happen. Now, I often Refer to Max McEwen, who's the author of a book called the Strategy Book. And he and I had a conversation probably about eight months ago where I asked him, max, how do people do strategy? It's such a. A complex concept. A lot of people think of strategy as, well, my strategic choices. I'm going to wear the pink tie with a blue shirt. And that's not a strategic decision. That's just a decision. And he said to me, gina, you're absolutely right. People often make strategic choices that they don't call strategy, or they make choices that they think are strategic but aren't. But he said, effectively, if you want to open up the world of strategy, then effectively, it's about looking at more choices and more options and seeing things that you didn't think were available to you. And to go back to the analogy of what do I want to do next with the world, how do I want to eliminate human suffering at work? It is to help people who are sitting in an organization or a context where they can't see other options.

Got it.

And to give them that freedom of choice to know that they don't have to sit in the same cubicle doing the same thing for the rest of their lives because they don't see any other choices. Like, if my why is to make sense of the world, and I automatically see these dozens, hundreds, thousands of different choices available to people, why can't I give them the gift to say, you don't have to choose all of these thousands options? They're going to overwhelm you? But here's one or two or three. And you never thought you had that choice before. Here I am giving you the gift of choice.

So who would you like? Well, if people are listening to this and they say, you know what, I'd really like to talk to Gina. What she said just resonated with me. How should people get ahold of you?

Look me up on LinkedIn. I love talking to people on LinkedIn. It's the best way to start getting a connection with you. Gina Ballerin. G I N a B A L A R I n. You can also look up my company, which is verbalistics. Which is verbal plus ballistics means making.

Your words go mental.

But most importantly, if you want someone who can write for you, because I do ghost writing. I do writing for anything from writing the book the Secret army to writing blog posts or white papers. If you want someone who can inspire you to speak to your audience, to tell the stories at your business or just to have a conversation with or you want someone who can coach you to help you find those different options in your world. World. That's why you should have a conversation with me.

Let's connect on LinkedIn.

Let's chat.

Awesome. Gina, thank you so much for being here today and have a great morning there in Australia and I look forward to staying in touch.

Absolutely, Gary, thank you. And may I say congratulations on being the Y that you are and on making wise available to people in the rest of the world. I think you are adding a noble service to humanity.

Thank you very much, Gina. Have a great day.

You too.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest, you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to whyinstitute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself self, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.