059: Onlyness with Nilofer Merchant

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Super quick favor if you are listening in Spotify, I would be very grateful if you could go rate the show. There's no qualitative reviews yet, but throw up a number of stars. Whatever your honest review. If you're not even listening on Spotify but you want to go the extra mile and open it up, search for FreeTime with Jenny Blake. This is new that you can even rate shows over there, so please give Freetime a rating if you don't mind. This conversation is a condensed version of one that was pretty popular that ran on the Pivot Podcast with Nilfer Merchant. She is the author of a fantastic book called the Power of Make youe Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World. The excerpts that I'm playing for you here today are particularly powerful in terms of defining onlyness, thinking of yourself as a light bulb of when you enter the room. How does the quality of the room change even if you can't always see it surrounding yourself by friends and people who can reflect that light back to you, not absorb it and take from you. And at the end she talks about the one question that changes how she leads her teams, which I find so powerful and inspiring and I included it in one of the later chapters of Free Time. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Nella for Merchant. Thanks so much for listening everybody. Dillifer I'm so excited to finally have you here because your book has been speaking to me from the shelves from the title alone and the handwritten font on the COVID in the bright colors. So welcome to the show.

Oh I'm glad to be here Jenny.

I am thrilled to have you. And we're here now several Years after the Power of Onlyness came out. How has your conception of onlyness, Maybe you could give listeners a quick primer and just. I'm just wondering how it has evolved in the time since the book has been living and breathing out in the world.

Right? It just changed. You understand it so much better after you've published a book, you understand your own ideas so much better. Like a couple years later, and you almost want to go back and be like, can I rewrite that section? Yeah.

Or like, what little I knew. Because the audiences interact and ask questions and share challenges. Like, the book is only the door opening into that topic really well.

And it's a chance for. So let me back up and say I first coined this word onlyness, back in 2011, 2012, and I was trying to get to this one particular thing, which was, how do each of us standing in that spot in the world, only one stand in, right? How do we actually get valued for that? Because most of us are ignored or silenced in rooms, right? That it turns out, in fact, in the research I did, between 50 and 70% of ideas are lost not because they're considered and deemed unworthy, but because the person bringing the idea is deemed unworthy of being heard. And so I coined this term because I was like, oh, we're centering the room. That means, right? We're centering the space where a whole bunch of us are seen as other, whether it's by gender or by age or by race or by whatever. Whatever way in which you're seen as other. And if we could center correctly on that source of ideas, you're going to tap something beautiful. And so that was 2011, 2012. I ended up thinking, well, gosh, you know, that can't be so hard to write about. And I'm shrugging my shoulders. You can probably hear it in my voice, because I was like, I'll just find 20 stories and write down 20 stories and talk about how we do that. It turns out that all the pioneers of people who are using networks to affect change, because now connected people can do what once only large organizations could. They didn't know. Like, I would sit there and go, well, what are you doing? Right? You know, And I'm almost like thinking about myself a little bit as a stenographer. Like, let me write it down and. And share it with other people. It turned out not one party knew what they were doing, right? And so I ended up spending the better part of several years researching 300 examples to get to 20. And the big insight, Jenny Back to your question was this. Even when I started the process, I thought, oh, it's how do you overcome the barriers? How do you organize people? How do you. And I thought about it as the singular you, not the plural of you. And the plural of you is what matters here. So it's not. The reason most of us are not affecting change is not because we're psychologically not confident enough. It is because the context of the rooms we're in says actually we're not going to listen to a word you say. And so this book and then my resulting work has been how do we understand that? Yes, the agency part is not just how you conceive of the world and yourself. It's how you put yourself in the right rooms.

I love that and thank you for making the connection to otherness and those who feel othered in different rooms and contexts. And I also love how in the book when you define onlyness, there are these crucial footnotes that you say you, you contemplated using words like talent or uniqueness, but that those weren't going to cut it. Can you explain a little bit why this transcends talent or even uniqueness?

Uniqueness, if you just think about it for a minute, unique compared to what? Unique is always a relative word. If you look at usage and so you'll say, I'm unique. And like, I remember one time I was in a board, corporate boardroom, a publicly traded company board, and somebody turned to me and I'd been trying to get the floor for something that was like, you know, a while and finally somebody else was like, nilfer's been trying to get our attention. Why don't we let her speak since she's a woman in the room. And I just remember having to bite my tongue so hard. And here was all the backstory to what was going on in that room. I was, I'm an expert in go to market stuff, in figuring out how to solve. How do we, you know, take our product and match it to the marketplace. That's my, you know, 20 plus years of tech experience. The conversation in the room at that moment was about that. And the guy says to me, let's listen to Nilfer, because she's a woman. And I want so badly to say something like, did you know that 52% of the people in the world are women? And by the way, the reason that I actually have commentary that's actually relevant to this room that will save this company has nothing to do with the 52%, but down to the singular person who has launched over a hundred products. And therefore I have a perspective. Very few people, by the way, have launched a hundred products. Right? That is an incredibly rare person. And so when I saw him using the word and he actually used the word unique, I was like, oh, my God, that is such a strange word. Because he's not actually centering on me. He's centering on the room. And he's saying, Gosh, there's 11 men in this room and one woman. So what makes her unique is this thing that, by the way, is 52% of the population. I'm like, that's the least interesting thing about me. So that was the uniqueness piece is just realizing how relative it is and it can be related to other people, then seeing you as different instead of celebrating your distinction. That word. And then talent, I noticed. So I. When I first coined the term onlyness, I was trying to figure out, how do you center correctly on that spot in the world? Only one stands, right? So I was trying to use difference from only one to onlyness. And I was going, how would I define that? And I realized talent was one very small element of what someone has, right? So talents in the original sort of definition would apply. But most ways we use talent is we think about it as the way you were educated, Jenny, or, you know, if I could certify you as an artist, then you have that particular talent. And I was trying to say, what is that place, that history and lived experience that you bring? But also, what is that hope or experience you bring? So something maybe you see that no one else sees as even possible? How do you claim that for yourself in your onlyness? And so I was trying to find a way to capture something that was invisible to anyone, unprovable to anyone, but true to you.

Oh, I love that piece of invisible to anyone. True for you. You must get this question all the time. I bet it's one of the number one questions, which is people struggling to see their onlyness or know what it is. And I wonder, how do you help somebody tap into their only ness when they feel discouraged?

Somebody wrote me and said, you know, I realized something because I wrote this piece from the weekend on on my column, and I do an advice column, and somebody had asked me about they were going and running for political life, and they were asking. They said something like, I know for whom I do this work, and I want to know how to find the people that I want to talk to, blah, blah, blah. And I made this shift in language for whom or with whom, and. And I got a bunch of private comments. So I find this very interesting as an advice column is how many people will say things in public and how many people will say things in private, especially if it hits too close to home. And I got this comment that said, I want to claim space, but I don't know how. And I said, well, until you center yourself, like, you know, look at the gravitational pull of, like, if you're drawing circles, how many of us don't even count that inner circle of self? And go, first I gotta get in integrity with myself. Like, who is this? It's like a light bulb that's over your head and when you're in the room, the whole room changes to that color because by the way, you're there.

That's so true.

Right? And so she said, I love that metaphor. It really makes sense to me. And so one of the reflections we can ask is, hey, when I'm in the room, what's the brim like? Because I'm there so that someone else can describe if it's, you know, cobalt blue or mandarin orange or whatever the beautiful shade is that is so true to you. So that you can start to get your own signal ratio back of like, ah, this is what I care about. So asking people to be in those conversations with you helps you to name it. And I think the other part that I've learned in this many years is our eyes look out, right? We don't look in. So, and that's a beauty of the world. We can actually witness each other into being. But we have a hard time doing that for ourselves. And so we need to really be intentional about who we put in our circle, especially our inner circle. And do they know how to reflect us back to us to ask that question and say, hey, what does that mean for you? Or if you were going to be successful, what would that look like? Or what are your values in this situation? Right. Whatever those questions are that might get us to name something for ourselves, those are ways in which our inner circle can essentially. Context, Right. Can help us hear ourselves more fully.

You know, I picture the light bulb you described of everybody has a. This light bulb that we walk into a room with, and it sometimes, no matter what you're doing, you walk into a room and the other people, it's just, they just, they're like light absorbers, you know, like the room could be wearing white and bouncing the light off, or the room could be wearing black and the light has nowhere to go. It's just.

Yeah, right, exactly. So how do we. So when I was running a business, one of the things I was really good at was making sure my team was taken care of and making sure that, you know, I know that a lot of your listeners are that business owner. And we're sitting there thinking, how do I live out my values? And so I demonstrate with my team, I demonstrate with my clients, etc. I noticed I never demonstrated it back to me. So I would say, you know, you gotta take care of your life. And then I would be the one doing a 2am final slide deck for a client because everyone ran late, right? And then I was like, what am I doing? I'm not actually modeling the behavior because then other people basically know that I'm a liar if I say work life stuff matters and then I don't live it. I have just finished teaching them that I lie and that's not my set of values. And so figuring out how do you really just draw those circles? How do you live in integrity first with yourself? So what is it you value and how do you live it? And I mean, like even on the fitness front, for example, yesterday I was mentioning to a really dear friend, different conversation and saying, you know, I haven't been able to run. I just haven't felt motivated and I keep gaining weight and I'm not taking good care of myself. And the thing is, it's perpetuating, like I can't run, so I'm feeling bad about myself, so I eat more, like it's going in this weird vicious cycle. And she said, okay, so by the way, before we get off the call, I want to hear in the next 30 days how you're going to be able to do something. So all you have to do is put together a plan. It could be I'm going to run for five minutes every day. It could be I'm going to get to a mile by the end of the month, whatever it is. And she says, you owe me a plan. And I thought it was the most beautiful gift because it means I have an accountability partner who says, I heard you. I heard you say you're in pain. And now I want to sit here and hold that space for you so that you can solve this for yourself.

It is such a gift that people who do that, like, I have to give a shout out to Michael Bunge, Stan, your mbs, he did that for me with, with my next book. I just couldn't write, wasn't doing it. And he said, send me a thousand words twice a week. And when I failed at that he said, Send me 100 words tomorrow. And he. I just love how he stayed with it. You know, I could have just. In my head, I had my gremlin saying, oh, well, I failed my accountability.

You know, Michael's wonderful for that. He's such a gift. And the thing is that I love him. So I definitely shout out to Michael.

Yes, shout out mbs.

And I want us to recognize that this is a. You've helped enable that relationship.

Well, I really appreciate that.

Right. So the joy is, okay, you get to do that with Michael. And it's not just Michael. Michael gets to do it for other people. We can all start doing this for each other. So think about just, you know, just think about, like, how do you do this for other people? And then how do you ask for it in your life? How many of us don't even, like, signal correctly that, gosh, I would like other people to care for me too? We can't claim our own space. If we don't claim our own space, it just becomes the modeling behavior. And so that's where I am showing up more present, hopefully to myself, more real to myself even. Just. But I'll tell you, it's not. It's not like the easiest thing. And that's why I'm saying it out loud, Jenny, is I feel like this is the one thing that if I'd understood this 20 years ago as a business leader, I would have changed how I ran everything.

What would you have done? Any. Any specific things come to mind?

Oh, you know, I think the biggest thing I did was when people said they needed me, I felt like, oh, they must really need me. They must really, like, need me to pick up this work or whatever? And what I never asked was, are you just doing this because you think it'll make me feel good? Like you're making me feel more valuable or something? Or like. And so just being able to say, do you really need me? What do you need?

And.

And because I think what happened was work flowed more. My, like, more the impetus for the creative work and strategy flowed my direction. And I actually always felt like I'd hired really, really smart strategists. So I was like, what the heck is going on? And I look back and I'm sometimes like, did I just feel like I needed to feel, like, the most strategic air quotes needed? And what. Why didn't I just sit, push back and. No, like, have you taken as far as you can take it? Which would have given them more room to run harder on their own field and it would have lowered my burden. And so I probably learned this lesson. Like, I don't know, towards the end of my consulting life, I had this one sentence and I. And I told them I was going to say it to. It didn't sound as callous as it's going to make it sound. They would come to me and say, I'm done. I need your review. And I'd say, have you done everything you need to do? Have you taken as far as you need to go? And they would always, like, look at me really sheepishly and then pull the thing off my desk and go work on it some more and get it to a much higher level before they turned it into me. And it sounded so like. I remember the first couple times I said it, I was like, what the hell? I sound like such a bitch. And yet what was really interesting was how much they were not carrying the ball as far as they wanted to go because they thought somehow I needed to do like a check in.

I have a big smile listening to that story, just imagining them. Let me take that back. Yeah.

And so if that's the only thing, by the way, that the listeners get from this conversation, it's like, how much do we take on because we're not letting other people own their part.

Oh, my gosh. Over functioning in every area of life. I just finished reading the One Minute Manager meets the Monkey.

Oh, I've never even read that one. Okay, tell me more.

Well, it's William Onkin, because this kind of ties into the book I'm working on. He wrote one of the most, all time, most popular articles for HBR about the man, the monkey, and that people come into their manager's office with a monkey on their back.

On their back.

And when they leave, they leave the monkey on the manager's desk. So the manager is managing a whole zoo of monkeys, meanwhile everyone else. And it's basically just a metaphor for people kind of dump the problem or the project onto their manager's desk because it's. It's safer that way. It's more comfortable. So everyone was coming to you saying, here's my monkey. And Oliver, you know. Right. You were thinking, I'm a good monkey wrangler. Yeah, I'll take him.

Right.

And I love, I love this shift you've just described, which is. Oh, what a great question. I mean, that is such a gift of this whole conversation. Is that question for anybody who's working with others is because I love the way you framed it. Have you taken this as far as you Want to yet as far as you can not, is this good enough? It's like getting people to dig deep. And it reminds me of what a good personal trainer would do to say, I know you have 10% more in you, or I know you have 20% more in you. And it feels good when somebody can see that and call that out.

Right. And it gives confidence and capability to the people and reduces how much energy you're putting into everything, which, by the way, there's only so much energy to go around. You got to manage that. And most of us are so exhausted. I remember one of my favorite professors in grad school taught me this 5% rule, and so I'll pass it along in case it's useful. The 5% rule is if you're running at 105%, there is no amount of creativity you are bringing to anything because you're just so all out. And every one of us as leaders thinks we need to be running at 105. And he said, now think about just the opposite of that same 5%. If you're running at 95%. Right. And he was actually like doing the metaphor of running and he goes, think about how different you feel, the difference of just being able to like, coast it in a little and like, you can breathe, your breathing is working, you can notice your surroundings, all these different things. You're actually enjoying the run at 95%. He said, that's the difference of 5%.

That's so powerful.

Right? And, and, and he's pointed out that basically none of us can innovate if we're doing that all out, because we're just trying to figure out how to keep going at that all out phase. But if you change that one thing, you can kind of look around and go, huh, I could do this better. Or I could tap that other person's capabilities or whatever it is. Right.

Well, it's like, okay, if we stick with the double Dutch metaphor.

Yeah.

One person is like furiously trying to turn the ropes and the other one's barely getting to getting a chance and they're sweating and they're burdened by this. Like, how fun is this game when one person is working so hard and then in martyr mode because of how hard they're working. And then also, what's so important about this is like, if we're at 105, 110, 115%, there's no margin, there is no room for any life or work surprise, which we know there will always be. Right? There's. And by the way.

No creativity shows up at that 105, 110%. I'm sorry. Even if you think you're being creative, you're running on fumes at that moment. And so just really, you know, in fact, I. I do a silent retreat. In fact, I'm about to go on one in a few days, and I do a silent retreat probably like, once a quarter if I'm lucky. And then sometimes I push that off. So maybe it's once every six months. But I always come back, like, just all filled with ideas, Just filled. And I'm always like, boy, that was only a couple days of reading and quilting and running and quiet. Right? But I basically created the internal space to reprocess, process everything that's going on and kind of get a fresh perspective on it all and just take, like, a little timeout, you know, it's almost like someone, like, not having to do the double Dutch thing. So, like, to. Oh, they get to play. They get to watch for a little bit, maybe, and just reprocess it all. And then I come back and I. Literally, everything for the next, like, week or two is just, like, done things that might have taken me a month done. And I'm always like, gosh, you think I'd learned this?

I know. I was just gonna say, you would think, because even 95% is almost more than I. I even want to do right now. Like, I found. I found after 2020, coming into 21, my life personally just having more complication than it did, let's say, 10 years ago. It's like, I just want to. I just want to be at a cool 60 where I'm super creative and spacious and I have buffer and I'm not overly stressed, and I know there's plenty of margins and find a way that that doesn't mean that it's actually more creative, more successful, more, quote, productive. But this in the US Especially, we have such an obsession with, like, pushing ourselves to 95 or 100, and there's no evidence that it produces better work. Like these Churn and Burn, you know, Nilfer, you've been in them as well and consulted with so many, like, tech companies. They're not bad companies, but the culture is so intense that it's very hard for anybody to sustain that for any amount of time.

Yeah, And I used to love it. I used to feel like my value add was being able to do that, you know, like, I can tough it out with everything. And now, of course, I'm like, okay, toughing it out is not a strategy. It's. I mean, it's a strategy. It's not the strategy, I believe.

Right. And it doesn't have to mean that you're lazy if you're not at 95.

It's not the opposite.

Right.

Yeah.

Because I love the silent retreat for me, too. I was. Oh, my God, I felt this. So just like a fish dropped back into the ocean. I was like, this is the most blissful experience. I just. Oh, my gosh.

Well, and the spaciousness. Right. So I often have this thing where, like, I'll be reading along and be like, oh, is it evening yet? And I'll lob. I'll find a. You know, watch and be like, oh, like 30 minutes had passed, you know, some. And I literally thought, like, oh, I'd gone from, like, sort of lunchtime to dinner time or something. Like, oh, how much time has gone by? But it's the. It's without distraction. Like, there's a spaciousness to it. And the spaciousness is actually an interior spaciousness. I will now give my. Myself the room to actually just be. Not do, but to be. And from that state of being, I can create. I love that.

And that. That strikes me as so much of how you define onlyness as well. And the real gift you bring to this conversation is that it's so much less about creating some perfect personal brand that you present to the world. It's. It's being yourself that we are born with. Our onlyness. It exists within us. We have this light bulb period. It's. That's what I love what you're saying. It's like, we all have it. It's not this thing we need to go manufacture.

Yeah. And, you know, I. The. Can I. Can I tell you one more story? I know tight on time. When I first coined the word, I was modeling it off of how my name is structured. So nilfer.

Translates directly to, like, a water lily, a lotus flower. And my grandfather had named me. He named all of his grandchildren, but he apparently, like, did astrology and did all these different things, like name his children and try to find, like, the perfect name. And one time he. He told me why my name was what it was. And so every now and then, I kind of returned to it. And he said, you know, you grow so in mud. Every. Every lotus flower grows in mud and thinks that that darkness will stay forever, but then you will interact with the water and see yourself seeking your own light. And all of a sudden, that light is not just one light. It is just Wherever your light grows you and you will go from this thing of darkness to this absolute bloom. And it's not because, you know, something made you bloom because, but because that's who you are. And so when I modeled onlyness and I said to you, I said it was your history and experience as well as your visions and hopes, even if someone else can't see it, I was modeling that rootedness of where you've come from, but also the light of where you grow too. And I was trying to get both sides to be reflected in the definition because I think sometimes we limit ourselves to who we've been. Right? Like it's an archeology dig or something. Like, oh, here's where we've been. So here's who I am. And I'm like, no, you get to claim for yourself the light.

I love that in the dimension, like lotus flowers have. I don't even know how many hundreds of petals I've always loved. What a beautiful gift from your grandfather and I, I. The lotus flower has particularly resonated with me, too, that they grow in mud and just how much good we can find and the way you've just described it and how it ties in with onlyness. It's so beautiful. Thank you so much. Nilafur. This has been so fun to chat with you. Where would you like to send people if they want to learn more and keep in touch?

Yeah. So my new project that I'm really enjoying is I've got a column, it's called At Work. It's really about. We shortened it when we first started it because we couldn't figure out if we should say fully alive at work because it seems so long. And yet that's what the project is. How to be fully alive@work.substack.com and so. And I'm on, you know, all the. I'm everywhere, just in terms of, you know, just my first name. N I L O F E R.

I wanted to ask you, do you have another book project in the works?

I have a feeling this column is a project. And I don't see anyone else really, you know, deconstructing what it means to be fully alive at work. I don't think we. We understand what's getting in our way, what the interior work is, but also what the contextual work is. So I have a feeling that's what this is. But I, you know, it's. You know this, Jenny, better than anyone who's written, you know, multiple things. It comes. When it comes to. And it becomes clear what the Christmas is, but I have a feeling that's what this work is because certainly it's my calling and I'm noticing so many other people really finding value in it.

Wow. How exciting. I know. Well, I can't wait to read it. Thank you for read the column and it's so true. It's like sometimes you write your way into whatever it is and it sounds like there's the seeds of it are definitely emerging. Thank you so much Nilafar. I really appreciate this. I'll put all the links in the show notes and just what a joy to get to chat today. Thank you for all the work that you're doing.

Thank you.

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