Transforming Discomfort into Influence | Sean Barnes | 635

Can an introvert become a public speaker and a thought leader? Shawn Barnes, an executive coach, speaker, and host of the Way of the Wolf podcast. Well, he didn't start out comfortable in front of an audience, but through intentional practice and storytelling, he transformed his discomfort into influence. In today's conversation, we explore Sean's journey from tech executive to thought leadership advocate. We talk about how to make ideas more relatable and why commitment to growth is the key to amplifying impact. I'm Bill Sherman. You're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Sean.

Thank you, Bill. It is an absolute honor to be here. I am pumped for this conversation given our previous conversations Can't wait to see what unfolds.

So one of the things that I know is true, but a lot of people worry about, is you don't have to be an extrovert, comfortable in front of large groups, to practice thought leadership. How did you get to be a speaker? And we talked about this in your First story, can you talk about your first speaking experience?

Yeah, our must-see. So it was probably about 9 years or so ago. I had recently started my role as the director of IT for a big oil and gas company. We had our first executive strategy meeting where we came together and we were all presenting. There was about 40, 45 executives in the room., and I was asked to present on our tech stack, all the servers, the applications, the network infrastructure. And I had my PowerPoint up behind me. Thank God there was a podium because I was holding onto it and just like shaking to death. My voice was quivering and I was soft-spoken and it was just embarrassing beyond belief. And at that moment I realized, wow, I was really bad.

At that.

I need to do something about that.

Well, let's stay there for a moment, right? I could hear many people say, wow, I'm really bad at that and I should never do that ever, ever again. You said something different. What made you choose door B rather than, okay, that didn't work. I'm not doing that again.

Well, Bill, I have always been intrinsically driven to be better, and that stems to some stuff from my childhood and, and things like that that we probably won't get into. But I always had these aspirations of climbing that corporate ladder and just this relentless pursuit of excellence to be better. And so every time I would find myself in a situation where I was uncomfortable, I would think, okay, I'm uncomfortable. I was, that was horrible. And yes, I had those feelings initially of, I should never do that again. But usually after a few days, sometimes a few weeks, I would think, uh, I don't like not being good at something. I probably need to figure out how to be a little bit better at that, especially knowing that I had aspirations to continue growing as a leader. And so it was leaning into, oh, that was rough. Oh, I need to do it more so I can get better.

Right. And that's sort of a growth mindset, if you will. You uncovered a gap and you said, what am I going to do to close this gap? So I know today that you enjoy speaking, you enjoy podcasting. We're jumping to the end of the story for a quick moment. I want to ask the first question. You finished that presentation, you said, I need to get better. What did you do? How did you stout down that journey to closing that gap?

I started off small. At that point in time, I had a team of, I want to say, 5 IT professionals. And so I started off small by being more intentional about how I spoke up in team meetings, trying to guide the conversation, and then also soliciting feedback. Hey, how did I do on that? I know they, this, I was transparent and honest, like, hey, I'm trying to get better at this, talking to the people on my team. Can you provide some feedback? Now, at first, this was very confusing for the people on the team because it is very rare when a boss is going to ask for feedback on what they can do better. And so it breaks people's brains initially. They're like, oh God, I don't know if I want to give feedback.

I might say the wrong thing. You know, does this hurt against me?

Yeah, exactly. And so I had to get comfortable having that uncomfortable conversation and then also hearing, oh, you kind of butchered that. Maybe try it this way. Now, I had to also create this positive reinforcement loop for that feedback mechanism where I could say, hey, you know what?

You're right.

I cannot thank you enough for being transparent and honest with me and sharing how I can be better. All of a sudden, the trust dynamic between me and my senior manager of IT at the time started to grow and elevate, and he continued to be more comfortable providing me feedback. Now, also, I was coaching and guiding him on other areas where he needed to improve. But I started off small, just doing things in team meetings, and then that kind of escalated into going to Toastmasters, public speaking courses, working with a coach, things like that.

So there's an interesting point I want to tease out here. When you were standing behind the podium presenting the information on the tech stack, I'm assuming you had the facts and the information very well in hand. And it was the challenge of getting that message out to your audience, right?

Correct. Yeah.

Now let's turn— and I want to ask you this question. How does someone who initially was cautious and struggled in speaking, right, go from technical expertise in IT to practicing thought leadership, where not only do you need to be comfortable communicating a message, either written or verbal or one-on-one coaching, but you also need to shape that message in a way that others will receive it. So answer this question. How'd you stumble into thought leadership from Toastmasters? And it doesn't have to be Toastmasters in general, but you know, you could have said, hey, I'm much more comfortable speaking now. I'm just gonna focus on using that to advance my career.

I think one of the biggest tricks that I learned was how powerful sharing stories can be for a number of reasons, but one, first and foremost, The audience connects with a story far more than they do data, logic, numbers, and facts on a screen. If you can take all of those data, logic, numbers, and facts that are on the screen behind you and share a story or a wrap a narrative around why it's relevant, all of a sudden people are going to pay attention. All of a sudden they are going to remember what you shared. Bonus points if you can tie some sort of emotion into it, because people remember how you made them feel. One of the other things that I learned, whenever you are sharing a story, it's almost like you are offloading this. How can I say this? Whenever you are sharing a story, it's almost as if you were kind of offloading the focus from yourself to this story over here. And yes, the story's probably about you, but it's no longer like, oh my God, they're all paying attention to me. Instead, they're paying attention to the story that Shawn is—

that's a very clever rhetorical trick, right? It's not me. Maybe it's my shaping of the story that they're not responding to. Mm-hmm.

Exactly. And so it's almost like, okay, the pressure's off because it's not all eyes on me. It's all ears on Shawn's story. So that lowers the pressure or, and/or stressors in the room at the time and makes it a little bit easier for you to move through it.

So let's stay with story and codifying ideas. At some point you started a podcast. Tell me about how that went to begin with. And then I'll dig in with a few more questions.

So it's so funny. I was talking to a mentor and longtime friend in the gym one day, and he had actually started his own podcast years earlier. He left his job in corporate America to go start a coaching business. And I was talking to him and said, man, I've got all these ideas and these experiences. I want to start sharing more of these experiences with people. To kind of coach them and guide them and help them along. And he said, yeah, just start a YouTube channel. And immediately I just had this, oh, why would I do that? That is ridiculous. And he just looked at me and I looked at him, said, oh, okay. So I thought on it, spent about a week pondering and processing and thinking, oh God, can I do this? Why? Like, Is this the right decision? And finally, I saw him in the gym about a week later. I was like, all right, here's the deal. I'm gonna start a podcast. I'm gonna release an episode every 2 weeks. And he just looked at me, said, really? You're gonna change the world once every 2 weeks? Okay. So I committed to releasing an episode every single week, and I would create little clips and short-form content and kind of drip that out whenever I could.

Right, right. Yeah.

But that was a commitment that I made to myself and starting it, there were two primary reasons that I started it. One was I wanted to share the lessons that I had learned in terms of building high-performing teams. And two, I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone to force myself to level up and grow. Those are the two original reasons that I started the podcast. And when I started, Bill, it was brutal. I had my little, I'll say script or talking points. I had my camera set up, my webcam, and it was actually in my office. And I would just look, I wouldn't even look at the camera. I was just sitting here reading off of my script. And, you know, there was a reason I only had 3 or 4 views and half of those were from my family for the first year, because I couldn't even bring myself to look at the camera. It was just brutal. Brutal. And then gradually I got to where I would have guests come on and that was a little bit less awkward, but still very awkward. And we just had cameras set off to the side and we would have a conversation, but still I would have my script with bullet points. They would answer the question. Okay. On to question 3. Okay. On to question 4. And it was just so mechanical. And again, I started soliciting feedback from friends that would listen.. And I had a few that were like, bro, you have got to stop just reading question after, just have a conversation.

Conversation.

Yeah. And so having those feedback loops and as with all things, I started to get better. I started to get better. I'm 4 years in now, every single week releasing an episode. Sometimes I'll drop 2 a week if I have the time and to, to be able to pull it all together. But it was a commitment that I made to myself and to all of my audience. Every single week you can count on Shawn to release an episode on leadership, on business, on becoming the best version of ourselves. And I have some Wolf shirts made up that say commitment to excellence, because when we are committed to excellence and becoming the best version of ourselves, we have to do the things that sometimes we don't want to do. It doesn't matter if you're sick. It doesn't matter if you're traveling, you made a commitment to yourself and you made a commitment to everybody that's watching. We cannot falter on that. And yes, you're gonna get sick, but just do the work. It's, there are times that I'm gonna have a 3-minute episode of me on a phone, sick as can be, can barely even articulate my thoughts, just sharing something because I made a commitment.

So I think from an outsider's point of view, at this point, as I hear you speaking with confidence, using story, relaxed, laughing, engaged, I would go, oh, Shawn, he's a natural extrovert. And I saw that eye roll that our audience can't see. Can you unpack that eye roll for the audience?

I absolutely can. As I've started doing more speaking engagements, which started off as panel discussions and little networking dinners, and then grew eventually into giving keynotes on stages. So the eye roll that you picked up on is when I present on stages, whenever I give keynotes and people come up and talk to me afterwards and have a conversation, they'll say, You always talk about being this introvert, but you are phenomenal. You, you just crushed it. You captivated the audience. You're so engaged and lively. Like, it doesn't compute. What do you mean you're an introvert? And so I have to share the story of being that extremely introverted IT guy and my decade-long journey of growth into becoming a public speaker and how incredibly stressful and frustrating and challenging that journey has become. And trust me when I say I view it as a compliment, but I also am transparent because I want people to understand, even if you are shy, quiet, and reserved, if you want to do it, you can do it. That doesn't mean it's gonna be easy, but it will be worth it.

So I see this response happen, and I think it's a natural human response in a number of different fields, right? Speaking being one of them, thought leadership being one of them, where we judge ourselves by those who are most visible and most successful, and we assume they were born to that success. Right? So we don't hear the stories of struggle or the musician that played in garage bands, dive bars, and everywhere before they got to, to Wembley. Right? And deconstructing that, the practice of thought leadership, much like anything, if you lace up your shoes and you go out running, you are a runner as much as any other marathoner, right? And there's a pay it forward that needs to happen here that becomes important. And it's not monolithic. This is work that can be done and whatever your expertise is needed to be heard, right? And I think we self-edit ourselves because we're afraid of each other.

We are, you know, I'm thinking about some, so this is an interesting topic that I've been thinking on and reflecting on recently because I like, look, Bill, for the majority of my life, I was inwardly focused on what can Shawn accomplish, what big salary, what car, what house, all the things, what can Shawn accomplish? And it wasn't until my mid-30s that I started to kind of shift my perspective into How can Sean help Jason grow? How can Sean lift Sally up? How can Sean help each member of the team? And whenever I shifted my focus into that, all ships started to rise with the tide.

Mm-hmm.

And the company that I was working for, they gave me the opportunity to start leading human resources and then safety and then transportation and then the PMO office and on and on and on. And so when I shifted my focus away from what can Shawn accomplish into how can Shawn help everyone else, the opportunities and the doors just started opening up almost faster than I could keep up. And that was one of the biggest shifts in my life is going from selfish to selfless and helping everyone else around me. And so now that is my focus. How can I help Bill be successful? How can I help Kristen be successful? And yes, there are going to be people that take advantage of you. Okay, mental note, invest my time and energy in helping somebody who actually appreciates it. But when you espouse that philosophy in life, like, good things happen.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So let's stay there and let's talk about a shift into thought leadership, right? Because thought leadership is shifting the focus from self to an idea, right? Where often you are the advocate for an idea, a set of principles, a way of thinking or acting. And I know you've been building out that framework. You've been talking to and even of here alluded to the body of work that you call The Way of the Wolf. Talk about that shift from the focus and the spotlight being on you as speaker to you being advocate for an idea. How does that feel?

It's very fulfilling. And I think there's a deep appreciation whenever I walk into any sort of an event And I don't talk about me. I don't talk about the things that I've accomplished. I will talk about my story and my journey.

Mm-hmm.

But the focus is how important strong leadership is, how important building your personal brand is, how important lifting others up is. And we have all been to events and conferences. Where the sales guy gets up on stage and just pitches their product and we all just roll our eyes. Oh God, you mean I paid to be here? I've experienced—

and you feel like a hostage during that. Yeah.

Yeah, you do. And I've experienced it more times than I can count. And so I'm keenly aware of how that is perceived by the audience. There are conferences that I go to and speak at, and they want all of my company information so that they can promote it and stuff, which I always appreciate. But I am open and transparent and say, you don't even have to put my company name. You don't even have to use my podcast logo. I am there for a thought leadership perspective. I want to talk about ideas, big ideas that can inspire and influence people. And yes, if they want to work with me afterwards, great. But I'm not there to sell my company. I am there to lift everyone up.

One of the things that I've seen over the years, the 20 that I've worked with people on thought leadership, is there's a tell when you find someone who is speaking about the work they care deeply about. You see a little bit of a smile emerge in the corner of their eyes. They get that sparkle and there's this energy, this life, this bubbling, this presence in the moment that is incredibly hard to fake. Now, from a keynote perspective, you can do sizzle on stage and be captivating. But if you look for the joy, are they in the moment? Will they sit down one-on-one to talk with someone about this topic? Those are tells.

And the right people are able to pick up on those tells and they are going to be drawn to you. And look, you know, I've been a full-time entrepreneur for just a little over a year now. I left my high-paying job in corporate America to go start my business and change the world. And Bill, I make a tiny, tiny fraction of what I did, but I am more happy and more fulfilled than at any other point in my life. The money doesn't matter to me anymore. It's changing people's lives. And yes, I mean, obviously we need money because that helps us achieve the things that we want to achieve. But when you are passionate about something and you lean into it, the right people are gonna come into your life. And I think that is what I appreciate most about certain speakers. You can tell when they love what they do. You can tell that energy that they just exude and it's like, Yes, I want to be around. I want to learn more. I want to be around that person. How do I do that?

You can tell the people who wake up putting their principles and thought leadership in practice for themselves and trying to figure out how they understand their topic better. And if you give them a moment, it's like putting a nickel in the jukebox. They will talk about it and friends and family will go, "Oh yeah." You should hear what family dinners are about. They're always on this, right? So you told me a story about a young man you spoke with recently. Can you share that story?

Yeah, it was an event that we sponsored last week., and I had invited one of our customers to join us. Unfortunately, he got sick at the last minute, and so he sent his son in his place. His son's a 22-year-old young man, really great kid. And at first he was a little bit reserved because I'd never met him before and we're at this big event. And then during one of the breaks, we were just kind of chatting and talking a little bit and, and I asked him how things were going and I could sense that there was I don't know, a little hesitation. I was like, you, you, you doing okay? And, and he started to open up and say, oh yeah, just kind of a few frustrations that I'm kind of dealing with. And I was like, you know, talk me through 'em. He's like, oh no, no. I was like, oh, come on. Like, what's the big issue that you're struggling with? And he finally started to open up to me. And when he did, I understood where his head was at. I understood the challenges that he was experiencing. And so I started asking him thought-provoking questions because I know how to solve the problem that he is currently facing. What I like to do is get people to think through it on their own so that they can think about how to solve the problem. They will have infinitely more context than I could ever possibly dream of having. And so when you ask the right questions, I could see the wheels start spinning in his head. Like, oh, well, yeah, I guess, I guess there's nothing stopping me from doing that. Oh, well, yeah, I could, I could do that. As I was asking him these questions, I wasn't giving him the answer to anything, but I was asking him these questions. His body language, his demeanor started to shift more into me. He was leaning in with curiosity. And I think that whenever it comes to the coaching space, that's a miss that some coaches might struggle with is like, oh, and they just tell you how to solve the problem. And okay, great. Yeah. Maybe you can help somebody get over that problem, but what's more important and valuable is teaching them how to think for themselves and how to solve the problem on their own.

Solve similar problems when you're not around.

And the best way to do that is just asking the right questions.

So on the note of questions, Sean, since I have the luxury of asking you some, you've stumbled into this world of thought leadership and you've also described, hey, I'm now an entrepreneur. I want to give you a magic wand. And I want you to look 4 or 5 years ahead. What does success look like and how are you measuring it in the practice of thought leadership?

My personal mission is to positively impact the generational legacy of everybody that I work with. And what's so interesting about this is I've come to realize how powerful it is if I can positively influence the lives of 5 people in my immediate sphere of influence and help move the needle with them so much that they are then able to positively influence 3 more lives of the people in their sphere of influence. On a long enough time horizon, there's this ripple effect of more and more people that you can have a positive impact on their lives. The challenge to part of the question that you asked is how do you quantify the impact? And I think that the impact is difficult to quantify. But everybody can feel it. They can experience it. It's just hard to put a number to that. Whenever you're impacting more and more lives and there's second and third and fourth degree effects that are positively being influenced by it, it's difficult to quantify that impact. And so I'm still kind of thinking through how to actually put a number to that, to measure it, to measure the, the impact that we are having. So that's something that is still a little bit of a work in progress for me, but I know I'm moving in the right direction. Now, the other part of your question, 4 to 5 years from now. Right now we have a small team. There's 4 of us that are W-2 employees on the team. My focus is all on the coaching side of the business. The other members of the team are more on the consulting side of the business. And building our brand. I want to get to a point to where our company is not just Shawn Barnes in front of the camera, that I want other members of the team that are leading coaching sessions, that are hosting workshops of their own, that have their own content that they are putting out. And that's just a function of time, because if we're able to build a team of 5 rockstar coaches that are all doing their own thing and positively impacting more people's lives, that ripple effect that I was just talking about is starting to take hold. I'm confident that we are moving in the right direction. We just need to do more of the same thing and we will eventually start to expand. And as we bring more members of the team, I don't want this to be the Shawn Barnes Show. I want this to be a team of leaders and people that are focused on helping everyone else around them.

I like that answer. And I'll add a few things. One is a piece that I can share from other people who have answered that. One would be in terms of how do you measure that? Pay attention to your inbox and do you receive email from people that you didn't touch directly but are second or third sort of ripples out there, right? You'll get mostly ripples from, hey, I heard you speak, or we encountered your work here. But the emails that say, a friend of mine said, dot, dot, dot, I should reach out. Those are signals the ripples are happening, right?

Absolutely. And I'm starting to pick up more and more of those, which is always very well received. For all of your audience that have started a business, they know how challenging and lonely it can be when you start a business. And there are times when you can kind of fall into this mindset of, am I even having the impact that I want to have? Does anybody—

Do I have the YouTube channel with 2 viewers? Right? Yeah, exactly.

And when you receive the messages like what you just cited, it's like you live on that high for weeks after.

And you put that in a folder that's separate so that on the dark days you've got some emails you can go back to, right?

Yeah. You know, I'm going to share a little bit of a story. I gave a keynote to a group of about 150, 160 entrepreneurs back in December. And that keynote was, uh, very special to me because it marked a turning point in my life, in my speaking career, because I actually opened up for the first time about why I am so driven, the stuff that happened in my childhood and how I kind of ascended through the ranks in corporate America and then starting my own business. And I kind of tied all of it together in terms of how the adversity that we experience in life is happening for us, not to us. And so that speech was a turning point for me. And then after the speech, I spent over an hour with people lined up, coming up to me, hugging me, crying, tearing up. One lady said, this is exactly what I needed to hear. I'm gonna go quit my job. And I was like, whoa, whoa. That wasn't the intent of my speech. I'm glad it had an impact on you. But after sleeping on it for a few days and processing, one of the realizations that I had was that I had slipped into this mindset just a little bit of, am I having the impact that I want to have in the world? And seeing all of those people show up, this was a record turnout for this venue. They get together every single month. It was a record turnout for them. And then all of these people sending me messages, coming up to me after the fact for days. It was a beautiful reminder of how far I have come in my journey and also that I need to keep going forward.

That's a beautiful way to frame it, Sean. I really like that. And you are carrying an idea rather than a personality, and that is the work of thought leadership. I want to thank you for joining us today, Sean. This has been a fantastic conversation.

It has been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you. Okay, you've made it to the end of the episode, and that means you're probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are 3 recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game in thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you're looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas, or even create new products and offerings. I'd love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.