019 - How to Find Your Real Voice Again with Cathey Armillas

What happens if we dare to tear off the mask of professionalism and actually risk showing up for real? I'm your host, Myriam Hadnes, and this is Unprofessionalism.

When I started my own business, Myriam, I was like, no, I'm gonna be me. I wanna attract the clients that will be good with me. And so I've been a sneakerhead my whole life and have all these collection of like really funky, interesting, wild sneakers. And so I just started doing this thing called speaker sneakers and I was like, just made it part of my business. If you wanna hire me to speak or do some kind of training, you get to pick my shoes.

Hi, Kathy. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Myriam. Thank you. I'm so excited.

Oh, me too. Me too. I, um, already we met in person in Amsterdam. We did. Yes.

By chance.

Yes, by chance. Serendipity and the right networks.

Yes.

Yeah. And I'm curious what will come out. Anyway, I always start with the same invitation. I wouldn't even call it a question. Whether you can share an anecdote with us of a time when you did something that could have been considered unprofessional and it was still maybe a great move, maybe only in retrospect, but still.

Yes. I love that. When you told me when we met in Amsterdam about your Unprofessionalism podcast, I was like, I love you, first of all, because I feel like everything I've done in my career has been quote unquote unprofessional. So I'll tell you a story where things could have went completely sideways from a business perspective. I had this idea. I had been doing storytelling training for a long time, and I love to teach storytelling. I love the psychology behind it. I love the way that I teach it, very interactive, but I didn't like the setting, Myriam. I'm like, ugh, to go into like a conference room, a boardroom, it's so blah. And I decided that what if I actually take my love for storytelling and my maybe out-of-control love for waterfalls? I have a spreadsheet with waterfalls all over the world that I have either visited or want to visit. And I was like, what if I married the two? So I created this. I worked really hard, by the way. I had no proof of concept. Like, will this work? I created this product called the Storytelling Adventure Experience, and I just started testing it. And the problem was I was testing it with friends and family at first. And so of course everybody's like, this is awesome. Like, you know, this is amazing. You go out to waterfalls and, and learn about storytelling. But I really didn't have any proof that big companies would buy it. Who am I supposed to sell it to? Corporate.

Yeah, right?

Like, would my mom buy it? Myriam, you're probably like, yeah, I would do it. Right? And so I didn't, I didn't have that. I didn't really have that, but I spent all the time building it out and I really, I got it down to a system and I, and then I thought in my mind, To save a little grace, I thought, well, if it doesn't work, I'll just put it on my website and it could help be a lead attractor. It could be, they could go, oh, that sounds amazing, but we still wanna have it in our boring boardroom.

I love waterfalls too.

Right? Logistically, they might be like, we don't want to bring people where they could break their ankles or whatever, you know? And, um, but I was wrong and I Started getting clients from all over. Actually, it blew up to something bigger than I thought because client would call me and say— I had one client that sent me to Miami Beach 3 times and said, called me up the first time and said, can you do it at Miami Beach? We'll fly everybody in there. And I was like, yeah, let me just go there a day before. And I have to like, I have to chart out a 2-mile route and do the whole, you know, I had all this stuff in my head. And then I had clients here in Portland. that one of 'em wanted to do it across the bridges. It's like a famous ice cream company. And she's like, I'm flying everybody into town. It'd be cool to hit the Portland bridges. I was like, okay, let me like chart out, you know, chart this out. I had, I won't name any of the companies in particular, but some huge companies outta Portland that everybody's familiar with globally have run it on the beach. They just, so it seems like it worked, but not in maybe the exact fashion. So how many people have been to the actual one that I charted out? 2 companies. Everybody else did it in other places, but they gave me the location and then I charted it out. So it turns out that that idea worked, just not the way that I thought it would.

I love it so much for, for the reason that you followed basically, or you did something to follow your passion and to do, why can't I just combine some 2 things that I'm passionate about? And to create something new out of it. And I think trusting that if we are passionate about it, we'll maybe speak about it in a different way so that others will also feel inspired. And what I hear from that is sometimes you just need a spark of something different, and then the recipient, the companies will, yes, and this idea.

Hmm.

Just because you give them the opportunity to see something else. Oh, we can actually, we have permission to do it differently. We can bring it outside. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. Right. And then it sparked their creativity on where they could do it and they were in control of that. So, yeah.

What do you think changed about the impact of the workshop or maybe even the experience? By just changing the context.

Myriam, you are so incredibly brilliant. I knew that from the minute I met you. That was another really surprising thing. I have been doing this work for so long, and I know the psychology on how to get people to learn. But what I wasn't really expecting was when I got people outside of the bubble in which they call work or their employment place, and And I'm talking about, I'm even thinking in particular of one company where the top 6 executives, the CEO and the 5 executive VPs, who work together constantly, do offsites together, do fun things together, they know each other really well. If you pair the location in with the activities and prompt questions that I asked, it ripped a new layer of vulnerability open. They were saying at the end, whoo, I didn't even know that about you. And so they were sharing things at, I think, a much deeper level than they normally share. And so when they humanized each other even more, later one of the executive VPs came back and she told me, she goes, oh my gosh, our work has been really different in the storytelling space. We're more open, we're more connected. So that was something that I didn't, and I've seen it happen over and over since, but that was a big insight.

Nice. What have you learned for yourself from daring this move?

Just do you. Like there's, you know, another story about me working. I was working with 2 Korean brothers in my early 20s and I was doing these trade shows all over the world. And at that time, of course, in my early 20s, I just wanted to have a good career. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm already on this weird big stage. I'm going to Düsseldorf. and doing this huge international show, and I have to be professional, right? So I'm showing up with these like skirt suits and high heels, and at the end of the day, I'm like, I'm dying. I literally remember begging my boss. I was like, can we please put like better carpet padding underneath the carpet in the trade show booth? And he's like, but it's really expensive. And I'm like, I know, but I'm gonna die.

And My high heels are my ex.

I mean, just like, you know, if you're a woman and you're listening and you've had to wear high heels or anybody wearing heels, right? You know, it's so bad for your feet. And one thing when I started my own business, Myriam, that I was like, no, I'm gonna be me. I wanna attract the clients that will be good with me. And so I've been a sneakerhead my whole life. So I started and have all these collection of like really funky, interesting, wild, you know, sneakers. And so I just started doing this thing called Speaker Sneakers and I was like, just made it part of my business. If you want to hire me to speak or do some kind of training, you get to pick my shoes.

That is hilarious. So you send them a picture of the collection?

I do. I send them a picture of the current collection because it's always changing and they get a picture and they get to choose.

This is brilliant because you give them a little bit of a choice, so that makes them part of the preparation of the thing. It's fun. They learn something about you. And here you combined another 2 passions together, your passion for sneakers and your passion for speaking on the stage.

Yeah. And so that goes back around to what you asked, which was, what have I learned from that? And it was that There are people that appreciate exactly who I am, exactly my teaching style, exactly my methodology, exactly the way that I do it and show up in the world. And those are the people that I really wanna work with or partner with. And I'm not worried anymore at all. In fact, I don't want, I will not accept work if it's not, if I have to be somebody different.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you remember the moment when you realized that you could actually do that?

Yeah, I do actually. So I come from a family of engineers. My sister is a patent examiner for the US Patent Office and computer science, electrical engineering, mostly electric circuitry. Like really, you know, I'm trying to give you this picture of like, we couldn't be more different. My dad, old school, like hospital equipment, computer programmer kind of thing. And growing up, I always thought, ooh, I'm the dumb one of the family, right? I always thought that really seriously. I grew up and I was like, I don't get math the way they get math. And I had this moment when I was in high school and I took a Psychology 101 class and I I loved it, Miriam. I was like, whoa, what is this witchcraft stuff that people think that they're doing, but actually psychology says that we do it differently? And it was especially the social psychology stuff I was very interested in, and it would be the thing that led me into getting into marketing. And when I ended up writing my marketing book, first book I ever wrote, that was kind of the moment. That was the moment that I said, oh, I'm not dumb. I'm different than my family, and this is how— this is what I know and can talk to with expertise and depth and knowledge and understanding. And so I think it was from that point on that I let everything else go, and I was like, I'm gonna be 100% Kathy. Kathy with an E, by the way, which is not common. I'm gonna be me.

I love that. I love that. And that it came so early by differentiating you from the family, because there's always this tension between authenticity and belonging.

Yeah, for sure.

And very often we think it's either or. Mm-hmm. And then I wonder whether, if you learned that you can be authentic and belong by having this with your family. It might also strengthen your confidence to do it outside the family for your business, clients.

You know what my sister told my husband the other day? So this is after we had this big, we flew everybody into town. We had this big creative experience. My sister told my husband, she goes, yeah, Kathy's definitely the empath of the family. And I thought that was really funny because it's, if you know my family, you know, you're like, oh, of course. Right. But I do think that now that we're all older and we're adults, the lanes have been defined very clearly, and yet we can all belong and connect because we're all aware of how we are and how we show up.

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds very mature.

She's very mature. I don't know if I am, but she definitely is.

How did you get from marketing to speakers coaching and speaking?

Yeah, the jump was interesting at the time. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense. I wrote a marketing book. I started speaking on the marketing book because it won an award early on. And one of my clients got asked to give a TED Talk. Around the marketing work I was helping him with. And he was like, I'm a video producer. I like to be on the other side of the camera. And he asked me to help him with this TED Talk. And when I did, the executive producer of that TED event said, oh my gosh, you coached him so well. And then he asked me to be part of the team and we officially started a coaching, we had a coaching team coaching the speakers from that moment on. Before that, it was unofficial. I looked back, Myriam, in hindsight and said, 'cause all of a sudden I was really fascinated with this 'cause I was like, ah, I don't really like helping people market their crap. It doesn't really fulfill my soul that much, but I'm good at it 'cause I know the psychology of it.

Mm-hmm.

And then I really got into this and I looked backwards and it was much later. I wish the connection was immediate, but I looked back and I go, all a TED Talk is, is a marketing campaign for an idea. And once I made that switch, my soul felt connected to, I really wanna help people with ideas that I don't know anything about that I feel like can make a big impact on the world. But I can help them tell that better and express their idea a little bit better. So that's, that's where I got into that. And now that's all I'm doing. And that friend, by the way, his name's John Waller. He was the first person I ever coached to give a TED Talk. He recently passed away from colon cancer. Um, but I had, along his journey, I coached him for 3 TED Talks.

Wow.

And the 3rd and final TED Talk that he gave, he actually was dying of cancer at the time, and it was about mortality. And right before he passed, I told him, you're responsible for this. And he laughed. I said, you're the reason I'm doing what I'm doing and that I found this. So thank you. What a gift. And he was like, I am so happy. Like, it was a moment that we shared. And I feel incredibly grateful for finding it.

Beautiful. Yeah, someone seeing something in you. Yeah. And you again marrying 2 passions of yours.

You're starting to see a trend that I didn't even, I wasn't even like, oh yeah, there's this other marriage.

It's interesting and consistent.

I am pretty consistent.

And what makes me curious through the lens of unprofessionalism, What did you do back then as basically a not professional speaker's coach?

Yeah, in the speaking coach world? Yeah, well, you know, one thing I learned early on, you know, because I ended up writing this marketing book really based on a viral video campaign that I started for an industrial shredder company. I was like, hey, we could tell the story of what we're doing, how we're building shredders for recycling purposes by shredding torpedoes and putting them online and it went viral and it took a life of its own. And then I ended up writing the book and it was kind of really based around that experience. When you take all of that and you pull it into the speaker coaching experience, you also have in this mix that I'm a competitive, hugely competitive athlete. I was an Olympic-level softball pitcher from the time that I was like preteen. And I had been coached my whole life, so I understood not only the psychology, but the coaching aspect. And I was thinking, you don't really get better at anything in life when you're doing the actual thing. If I'm playing tennis, I'm not gonna get better at my backhand in the middle of a game. If I'm a pianist, I'm not gonna get better the day that I'm performing. I'm gonna get better through what I call ugly practice.

Hmm.

Through the practice and the reps and building the skills that you need to do to have that muscle memory to do it in time. So I teach a whole method. I started doing a whole methodology around how I coach people. The first thing I did when I coached TED speakers, I'm like, I do an unscript method. We're not scripting anything. I'm gonna have you internalize, not memorize. I want you to be free to talk about your idea, but that doesn't mean that it's not prepared. It just means the journey looks You don't write something out and then repeat it over and over 100 times. That's not human at all. Right? Good.

Yeah.

No, go ahead. Oh, in the professional world, that's not how they would do it. Everybody that I start off with is like, that's how I've been taught to do it. And I'm like, that's not an effective way unless you're a very skilled actor or actress.

Yeah. And I wonder now with your experience, and I think we spoke about that when we met in Amsterdam and I was fascinated about the effect it has when we do try to memorize and therefore to perform. Because what I'm hearing in your story is, and correct me if I'm wrong, that if we memorize something, We are basically putting on a performance like an actor. Most of us, especially if we're air quotes only there to present, to sell our idea, to market our idea, we're not professional actors. So if we are memorizing it and performing, then we stop being ourselves and everyone will hear it. Yeah.

And they don't like it, it turns out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So How, and when we met, you called that voice masking. Yeah.

Yep.

I would love you to share with me a little bit more what that is and how we can, why is it maybe also from a psychology perspective that we do feel it immediately? And it doesn't have to be a stage. It can be giving a presentation in a team meeting or even speaking in a team meeting. It can be one-on-one over coffee that suddenly we Voice mask. Voice mask.

No, it's the spray. Yeah. I mean, the psychology, it's so fascinating, right? We totally geeked out when we met in Amsterdam. It was so fun. It was such a magical night to meet you and have that concentrated love for all things speaking, training, understanding how the world works and how we show up and communicate. The voice masking part is simply, in psychology terms, it's really It's a very specific form of code switching. When you show up in a different place and you feel like you have to code switch, you have to switch into this other persona to fit. And sometimes in the psychology of code switching, you're able to switch to who you actually authentically are. And some of the examples you'll see online about that will be where somebody code switches and they're around people that they're more comfortable with, and you see them act very different than the buttoned up, tightened, you know, person that they have to be, or the persona that they have to be in their professional realm for whatever reason. And you're like, oh, that's a code switch. They code switch. So voice masking is, like I said, it's where you actually will change your voice. Like if you recorded yourself and said, oh, this is how— like if you just like followed yourself around and said, oh, this is how— this is how I talk to my family. This is how I talk when I'm at a coffee shop.

Yeah.

This is how I sound when I'm giving a presentation at work. And even worse, Myriam. So we were watching a video of a lady that gave a TED Talk. We're just doing like sometimes for fun, we'll like debrief them, we'll look at them. And there was a lady that gave such great content and all of my friends that were watching this with me that aren't speaker coaches, the first thing that they said was, bleh, she was so like, She was so polished. And they were looking at a video so they could even see the polished movements. They said she was so polished, I couldn't hear half of what she was saying. It was so icky. It just didn't— it felt contrived. And then it made me think— we started debriefing and then they were like, yeah, it kind of made me feel like it might not even be real. Like, was it her work really? Or, you know, I don't think people understand how thin that veil is when you voice mask. That we can read through it, even if we don't know you.

Yeah.

I can tell when I met you, I was like, oh, you're super genuine. You're in your genuine, authentic mode right now. And I've met other people where I'm like, ooh, I wonder what mask this is.

Interesting. And I, it is so important and fascinating to hear that 2 things. One, when we recognize that even unconsciously, we cannot even listen to the content. Because our, I assume that our brain is, can I trust this person? And if I cannot trust that person, am I safe? So the content is irrelevant.

Right, right. Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, it is.

And it's so micro.

It is totally unconscious.

Yeah, exactly. You just get a gut, gut feeling.

Yeah. And now, while you just shared what happened when we were meeting in Amsterdam, and I think again now, I think it has also something to do with the atmosphere that you create. And I wonder what, maybe you're conscious about that. What are you doing with your voice and with your way of being and arriving in a space that makes those around you comfortable?

Yeah, that's interesting. You're making me dig into my brain really quick for me, right? There's something I practice. Me and my friend Mark, who's my co-founder at Speaker Skills Academy, we always have concepts for everything. We love that. It's part of a good TED Talk, it's part of framework, having great frameworks to teach people. We have this framework that we talk about called unthink, and it's really the unconscious things that you do when you're speaking. You can speak in an unthink mode because you don't have to think about it. And I will consciously think about unthink. I know I'm using think and unthink too much. I will consciously go, what mode am I in right now? And it happens to me over an array of things. Sometimes when I'm playing sports, I'm highly competitive in a bunch of sports right now, and I'll go, oof, have I dropped down or am I trying to be on that conscious level where it's another form of sports masking where you're trying to be on the conscious level and you're trying to perform on things you know to be true instead of allowing the true, genuine, authentic, practiced, seasoned, skill-building person that you've become. And when I talk now, I will consciously tell myself to drop into my Kathy mode. Just be me.

Mm-hmm.

And be me. There's things that people will be either repelled Or attracted to. I'm super adventurous. I know that I'm very creative. I love to have fun. I love to mix my business with my clients. I play pickleball tournaments with my clients. Like I do, I take people to waterfalls and I just don't allow that to be masked anymore.

Hmm.

And I've found that when I can just be in my regular Kathy unthink mode, the best people are attracted to me. Like the people that I wanna be around, the friends I wanna have, the clients I wanna have, And I catch myself sometimes going into a mode where I, I'm talking to somebody for the first time and I have to consciously say, nope, be Kathy.

Yeah. Is there, thank you for sharing that. I'm so relieved to hear that even you catch yourself after, but this means that there's hope.

There's hope for everybody.

And that it's also human to Get into the, to be nervous and then have a kind of weird body posture.

Totally. Like my awkward me. I would call it my awkward me, right?

Yeah. When you put your speaker's coach hat on, and maybe even when you teach storytelling, I can imagine that every leader actually, or manager needs to know that. How do you get into unthink mode? How do you, and can you fake it until you make it? The confidence?

I have, I have a lot of deep thoughts on that one, by the way, just the fake it till you make it. Yes and no is the answer to that, but I won't go too deep into that. I do believe that you have to show up the way that you want to show up before you are what you want to show up as. So you have to, you have to even practice it while you're quote unquote performing it until you can. So I believe there's a— but it's a hybrid and it's not a full, like you're faking it. And I think it's because I get stuck on the word fake. It's not a fake. It's like a try-on. It's like I'm testing it. It's like I'm, you know, I'm not really faking. I'm just, I'm testing it. It's not really what I'm comfortable with now, but I want to grow to that. So can I test it and expand it? On the other note, I'm going to go back to ugly practice for a minute. The only way that I've gotten better and the only way that science and psychology says that we can really get into unthink mode is if we do this ugly practice, whatever it could, the whole array, we can talk about any specific thing. I'll use speaking because you asked on that one. It was the whole reason I started Speaker Skills Academy with my co-founder and friend Mark. We're both coaching people. He's a world champion of public speaking, finalist 3 times worldwide. We both do things a little bit differently, but one thing that we agreed on almost violently, we violently agreed, just a term, is that the only way you get better at speaking is by drilling, not by doing. You don't get better at speaking by speaking. And so to be in unthink mode, you have to repetitively practice things that you would need. Can you practice, for instance, He did a session the other day called Precision Speak. And so we were practicing the repetition and the art of how do you say something more precisely? How do you get to a word that would say the whole thing more precisely? Then how do you get to a phrase? You can't come up with that on your own in the middle of a TED Talk. You cannot come up with that on your own if you're in the middle of a meeting presenting to the executive committee. That's not going to happen. You have to get, you have to do the ugly practice. Now, if you're somebody that does start practicing, what you'll find out is the ugly practice actually isn't ugly. I crave it now. Like, I love to practice.

It's very interesting. I realized that, yeah, there's some flaws. For instance, I work a lot with facilitators and what happens if we are under time pressure and trainers, and if we're under time pressure, We tend to speak faster, then we don't control our precision anymore, and then we start to ramble, and then we forget about the full stop. So we connect sentences after sentences without leaving any space to breathe or to think or to connect the different concepts. And then we wonder why the person actually disengages, right?

Yep.

So the practice of being more concise And noticing when we need what. I love that. And then we also gain confidence with it.

Right. And he got it down to the level of a precision word. Check this one out, right? He said, he goes, there's many different ways you could say you needed help, but internationally known is a word and it's called mayday. And if you hear mayday, you know that there's a problem. And I was like, ooh, that's a good example of how to precisely get something down to a word, right? And so even the art of that and what you just explained, I was just thinking about the psychology of the audience for a second. I was like, that's just the trainer side. The audience, when we see somebody speed up, we start— our, our hearts actually beat faster. We start getting a little anxious ourselves because you're portraying some anxious traits. We can tell, we get worried for you.

Mm-hmm.

All subconsciously, we get worried for you. We're like, oh, what's going on? If we start to see you flip through slides faster, we worry how many are left and how much time, right? Like, you transfer that to us. And so I think even as facilitators, you know, thinking about, we'll run a session on how to do an emergency landing.

Yeah.

And I work with all of my TED clients on that. I'm like, if you're on the stage and you start getting laughter and Your talk is stretching out further than you thought it was. We need to have an emergency landing for the ending. We can cut from here to here and you can keep the same pace and not have to speed up and launch or go way over time. But again, Myriam, that wouldn't happen on accident on a stage. It's something that you practiced and did the skills.

Prior. Yeah. Yeah. Like that. And now I wonder whether we can, so the link that I'm making now is by the way how we speak, how we are comfortable in our expression, maybe in our body, because this will also reflect, um, our speech. We will create also confidence and interest in, uh, from the audience. So can we actually have more slack in what we say and relax a little bit about our words, maybe be a little bit more casual, more unprofessional if we know how to articulate, how to breathe, and how to speak? If we don't mask, can we then be more unprofessional?

Oh, yeah.

Because we can get away with it.

100,000% in my, in my book. I always have this analogy. When I'm just starting to work with a TED speaker and they're a little worried with my method, they're like, oh my gosh, am I not gonna be prepared if I don't memorize it? I feel like the only way I've ever done something like this is to memorize it. And I said, let me give you a little example. If I were to ask you right now, how do you get to the airport from here? Could you get me there? And my speaker this year was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I could get you there. I'm like, but could you get me there With precise and exact directions. Could you tell me I need to go 0.26 miles and then turn right here? Could you get me there precisely? He's like, oh God, no, no, no way. And I'm like, that's exactly what internalizing your talk looks like. You know that you're going from here to there. You know all of the landmarks along the way to take us there. The word that actually comes out in the moment isn't— It will come out in different ways. So do you know what this— I'm gonna tell you a hilarious story. So this particular guy that I coached this year for TEDxPartners, his name's Sean. We were working on part of his talk is he's telling a story about how him and his partner got the norovirus really bad. And he kept telling the story. He had told it a million times during practice. And he said, yeah, we both got it. First she went down, boom, and then I went down, boom. And it was always some variation of that. He said it a little different. On stage, because of the energy that was flowing with the audience, he said, first my partner Jane got norovirus and I was like, nasty! And everybody cracked up. And then he goes, and then boom, I got it. And he had never—

Never.

Said that. We never talked about it. And I asked him later and he goes, oh, it just like came outta me. And I go, see, that's the, that's the, how do you get to the airport from here without directions? In that moment, you were you, you were still telling the same story. You just added a very precise word to it.

That is so great. And it's a good thing to, that's a good analogy with the airport to memorize. And I can imagine that in the moment where he was on stage, he could basically feel the audience and find inspiration. I think I'm projecting because for me, when I host a workshop, depending on who is in front of me and their energy, I either get totally inspired and find the best analogies and the best examples, or I feel like a vegetable. Yeah.

You're not projecting though. I mean, from my experience, I usually will tell people that will happen. I want them to know that that will happen. And it does. You could give that same talk to another entire audience of the same size, even at the same venue, and it would be different. That energy exchange would be different. And you would either find yourself— so same guy, he's like, when I first met him, he's a scientist. He's the CEO of this big company. They work on very scientific things. And he was trying to talk about how you could use AI in the pharmaceutical world and they're working on the— like, it's totally technical, but we had to make it human. And he's like, yeah, I'm not really funny. And I was like, when I speak. And I'll go, oh, you can be very funny. And funny is not like writing a joke. It's being in tune with the audience. He was so funny that day, Myriam. He was very funny because he knew how to get to the airport. And so along the way, he doubled down another kind of— I have this thing that I teach people. It's like using emphasis or double down, doubling down or using commentary on something you just said. It can be very funny. And he did it a bunch and they were just laughing, laughing here and there. And I think he felt that energy. Like you said, you show up in a room, why are your Why are your analogies and your metaphors and your examples working? It's because you feel that energy and you're like, oh, you want that? I got more.

And I think for that, as you said, we cannot be in, we have to be open in ourselves. Otherwise we are not receptive. And what I also was thinking while you spoke is the practicing by heart is basically we're focusing on ourselves. Yes. And By internalizing, we are focusing on the audience.

Ooh, you said that so well. Oh, you said that so well. Yes, that's the psychology of it. I actually, that's actually what I tell people and what you and I both know what happens if somebody is running a script in their mind. If something in the audience happens that's unexpected and it always happens, they're gonna laugh in a spot you didn't expect them. They're gonna react in a way you didn't expect them. What happens to the person that's scripted?

Waiting for the laugh.

Or yeah, or the opposite of they're waiting for something that they expected. And so that's awkward, but usually it knocks them off the block. They're gonna go, they're gonna get in, they will lose where they're at for a minute because that's not part of what was ran in their head. The script was run in their head a certain way. And so the minute that happens, they will get knocked. They'll get knocked off and they will lose their place. And this is where people choke. And it happens at TED events more times than you know, 'cause many times when you see the video, you're seeing the edited video, but you're not actually seeing what happened on the stage. And so it happens over and over.

What is an unprofessional advice that you would still give others?

In addition to, of course, I feel like it's the cliché thing, right? Is to really be you. And I think we've had a great conversation about Being you. I would even take it a little further. I would say your stories, your experiences over systems every single time, right? Stories over systems every time. And stories, by stories, I mean who you are, how you show up. People are connected to your stories, to who you are exactly. And even if you're in, like, I coach people all the time that are just in front of, you know, inner, you know, they're doing meetings in the company internally. And I'm like, bring your story into it. I'm working with a doctor who's a cancer doctor. He's an oncologist doctor. And he has this heartbreaking story of this neighbor who he used to see on the street every day, and they were walking. And one day he saw him walking with a limp and he didn't think much of it. And then a few weeks later, he went over to see how he was doing. And the wife said that he passed away and it was from a cancer that he actually could have connected him into his world and got him the diagnosis and treatment and whatnot. And I was like, bring that story in. He's going to be doing this big— he's going to be doing the big opening in this gala. And I was like, bring that story in. That story feels so human that this is over the system because we always want to talk about the system. Oh, here's what we're doing at our organization and how we're furthering cancer research. And this is what we're doing. That's the system. But the story lands.

Yeah.

The story is human and it's not unprofessional. And people get stuck on that. We call it unprofessional, but it's not unprofessional to bring these. People wanna put a big thick wall in between their personal life and their professional life. And I encourage you to create a clear wall. If you're gonna have a wall, there's stuff that needs to stay on the other side. For sure. But make that wall clear so when you're on the professional side, you can look over it every once in a while and go, what can I actually bring to this side?

Mm-hmm. Yes. And I think from all the stories that you shared today, you're the perfect example of how to do this brilliantly, taking inspiration from the other side and bringing it To your work to create more value for your clients. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's so fun.

I can have this conversation with you forever. Yes.

We just scratched the surface. To be continued. I hope so. This was a conversation without the script. Now it's your turn. I'm Myriam Hadnes, and this has been Unprofessionalism.