166: John Bucher - On Telling Your Story With Passion

Hey everybody, and welcome to This Moved Me, a podcast about creating talks that move the world. With me, your host, Sally Koering Zimney. Together with some fabulous guests, we will have a casual conversation about the art of public speaking, because a good talk can move the world and it'll be fun. Yeah, I would think making alien cows meaningful. That's not a small task. I love your giggle.

Wow.

Oh my gosh, just waiting for everybody to figure out the alphabet. Hey everybody, it's Sally Koering Zimney from This Moved Me. I'm so excited to share with you another Awesome. I think it's gonna be awesome interview episode with you, with the amazing John Booker. And I don't even know how to describe John Booker to you. I met him at the Story Gathering this past year, and within a matter of minutes, I was like, oh, this person is just a gem of a human being. He offered himself up for me to do some live coaching with him at my workshop at Story, and he didn't know me. He didn't have to do that, but he did. Because that is who he is. He's just an incredibly generous spirit, and he is a speaker who travels all over the world talking about huge life ideas like why are we here and why do we think what we think, because, um, he's super smart. The thing I love about John is, yes, he's incredibly smart, he's brilliant, but he's also like this down-to-earth, sweet-hearted, passionate person, and that is the thing that comes across. He doesn't get bogged down in the hugeness of these things. He's really all about connection. That's his superpower. So I was really excited, wanted to share him with you and also dive in with him a little bit deeper on what we talked about when he and I worked together at Story and also his work and how he has brought his voice to life in a bigger way. So I'm really thrilled to share him with you. Here he is, Mr. John Booker.

I love it.

So cool. You've got such a good voice.

You're so kind.

It's true. It's like John Booker. It's John Booker here, ready to rock your world. That's kind of what you do. Check out all your books.

Yeah, you know, I tell you, doing a PhD is a good way to form a massive library of books. So I am, I am, you know, we'll see how many of these I keep when the PhD is done in a few months. But I'll keep a lot of them because so many of them, you know, I've had to read them all.

So yeah. And they have shaped your view on the world.

Oh, hugely, hugely.

So I was like, that could be an overstatement I'm making for you.

No, no, no, no, it's, it's 100% accurate. It really is.

So what is your PhD in?

My PhD is in mythology and depth psychology.

Whoa.

It is, it has been a life-changing experience for me to dive into the stories behind why human beings have done what they've done for the last several thousand years.

It's just— right now I'm like, what? Depth psychology?

Yeah, so it's basically looking at, um, you know, everything from the, the Greek mythological traditions all the way through the, um, religious traditions today. So we study Judaism and Hinduism and Christianity, and, um, we look at them through a mythological perspective of what is it within human beings that we have these psychological needs to address so many of the same issues and cultures around the world through our mythological traditions and religions. So we're looking at what are these things inside of us that, uh, that, that scream out for answers about certain issues that seem to be universal.

Wow.

This is very PhD-y. It is.

It is.

Whoa. It's not just mythology. We're just like digging in like 3 more layers under there just to really blow our minds. That's awesome. Oh, well, it's so fun to chat with you and to see your face again.

So good to see yours. It's fun watching you on social media. You're just out there changing the world and making the world a better place.

Aw, trying.

Well, giving incredible TED Talks.

Did you see it?

Of course I did.

Of course.

It was so cool. Thanks.

Thanks, it was really fun to do.

And you killed it, as per usual. You killed it.

Well, thank you, thank you. You know, when you're a speaking coach and you give a talk about speaking, it feels like the bar might be just like a little bit higher than for some pressure, a normal human. But I also like, yeah, I, I'm like, I can't buy into that mindset too much just, it's, it's gonna get in the way of me just showing up and letting go.

I totally get it.

Letting it happen, you know?

Totally get it.

I know you get it. I know you get it. Well, I'm so excited to be chatting with you officially, finally. Sorry, we took us a while.

You know what, it was, the timing was meant to be for today. I just have a feeling there's a reason why It was meant to be today.

Oh gosh, that's so mythologically profound, right? It's like coming from the depths. There's something, something is at work. It's so true. Oh my gosh, cool. Well, I thought it'd be fun to just dive in and I know you and I have connected a little bit. I got to obviously see you speak at Story, and I loved, I loved your talk, even though then I asked you to come to my workshop so I could coach you, which you so generously did. I mean, this is why I will always be a John Booker fan, aside from the fact that I, I love what you do and I think you're amazing. But the fact that I walked backstage at Story, and it was the morning, it was the morning of, we hadn't even started, you hadn't even given your talk yet, and I said I, I'm looking, I'm, I'm, you know, you were, yeah, I think you asked me, what are you doing? You know, what's, what's your role here? And I was like, well, I'm doing a workshop tomorrow. I'm a presentation coach. And you're like, cool.

Wow.

I said, yeah, I need somebody to, to, to coach, do some live coaching with. And you were like, we'd literally just met. And you said, I'll do it. I was like, great. Thanks. You don't know me. I could be mean and brutal. And, oh, but—

You know, one of the very first things I ever figured out about public speaking was if I was going to do my best work and really connect with people, I have to get my ego out of the way because it's that ego that is worshiping fear and is more concerned about fear and what people are thinking. And it becomes a distraction, you know, from making a real personal connection with who I'm talking to. So for me, you know, when I heard you saying, "I need someone," my immediate thought was, "Wow, this is a chance for a real pro to give me input on, you know, something I'm passionate about doing. And when am I going to get this opportunity to have someone really speak into my work like this? Man, I really hope she would be open to me being the person." So for me, that, you know, if, if you can set ego aside, you can step into these tremendous opportunities. And you, your coaching, just in the few minutes we spent together in your session, was so tremendously helpful to me. And I have been employing the techniques you gave me every time I've spoken since that moment. So it was just really helpful.

I'm so glad to hear that. Well, I just, I know we're just like lifting each other up right now. But, but, but your spirit— I mean, that's the thing is coaching only works as well as the person allows it to. Truly, it's, it's about who the person is and how they show up in the moment in terms of the relationship. I mean, the coach has a lot to do with that too, but, but your spirit and openness and generosity to, to stand up there and you'd already given the talk to the big audience. And so, you know, like our workshop audience was much smaller, but it's intimate and in some ways much higher risk because I'm about to make some suggestions to you. Yes.

Yes.

Oh, so I just was like, I love John Booker forever because he just jumped in, was like, I don't know you, but I'll do that. And then you're just openness and warmth as you walked into that moment.

I was like, thank you.

Well, yeah, so I want to talk about your, your approach, like how you got to this place where you were talking about these really big, important, universal life-changing ideas. Like, you're an academic, you're a PhD guy, but, but you're also out front. You're doing podcasts, you're doing a lot of speaking. Like, how did these worlds come together?

Yeah, I, I would, I would tell you it all, all for me boils down to a single word, and that is curiosity. I was, was born with an intense curiosity. About the world, and I wanted to explore the world and discover the adventures therein. I saw a movie when I was a little boy called Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I saw this character Indiana Jones going around the world solving mysteries, finding objects. And there was, there was such a curiosity about who he was that he had studied all these ancient things, and he had understood all these objects and rituals. And that held such appeal to me because I shared that sort of curiosity. And I'll be honest, curiosity is, is one of the most sustaining forces in my work, because when I become curious about something, I dive deep, I go deep, and I just want to understand everything about it. And when I began to recognize that speaking was a platform I could connect with people on, I also began to become very curious about what made some of the greatest speakers in the world effective. You know, why do we still go back and watch footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a speech today? Still resonates today with the millions of speeches that have been given since. There was something so infectious about the way that he delivered words and ideas that we still go back and look at it. And so I became really interested in what are those things that help us to connect with people. Now, I had this academic curiosity, as you mentioned, about ideas and about the way that the world worked from a a philosophical and psychological perspective, but it seems very useless to me unless I could talk about it with the average person on the bus. I don't really have a great deal of interest in my work just being something that lives on a shelf somewhere that very few people in the world ever examine. I'm much more interested in having conversations with people on levels that they can understand. So one of the big focuses of my work has been taking complex ideas and simplifying them in ways that most people can engage. There's something about a lot of academics— you've probably run into this yourself— where a lot of academics sort of feel a great deal of pride in making an idea so complex that only they can understand it. And that's an ego thing. You know, that is, that is about someone's insecurity. And if you're going to do public work, you've really got to become in touch with your own insecurities and keep an eye on them. It's not that they go away, but I feel like when it comes to You know, identifying your own insecurities, you've got to at least be aware of what your insecurities are and be aware of when they may be most active in your life and what triggers those moments. And so for me, you know, in doing public work, I really do try and be aware of of my own, I guess we could say my own problematic characteristics, the things that I know I lean into when I feel insecure, when I feel afraid. And much of this led to how I began to do public speaking, because what would happen, I would maybe once every year or once every 2 years might have an opportunity to speak in front of a group of people. And I would get so excited. I would, I would, you know, we're talking usually groups of 15 people, maybe 10, 15 people. But I would get so excited and I would have all these ideas and all these things I wanted to talk about. And then I would get up in front of people and my mind sort of goes numb and my mouth just would run for 30 minutes. And I had at the end of the session, I had no idea what I actually said. If it had anything to do with what I had prepared. Because my, my, you know, my limbic system just sort of took over and just, just began to run the show. And so I knew that I really enjoyed public speaking. I enjoyed connecting with an audience. But I also knew I was not good at it. I was not being effective in what I was trying to do. But the one thing I had going for me was passion. I had a lot of passion. And so many times people would tell me, oh, that was really great what you talked about. They weren't talking about the content. They just enjoyed my performance, my passionate performance.

It goes a long way.

It goes a long way. And to be honest with you, that has been something I've been careful not to lose. Yeah, that was a core strength from the beginning for me, was the passion that I was able to pour into what I was talking about. Now, in the beginning, I had a lot of passion and really nothing to say. But over time, I recognized that if I could hold on to that passion but actually develop ideas and develop things that would be of help and of interest to people, it would sort of be like the one-two punch, you know, with an audience that I could deliver it effectively, but then also leave them with something that they thought about for a long time afterwards.

Yeah.

This eventually led to me becoming a teacher in higher education where at colleges I would come in and teach courses, and I still do some of that as well. And that's the, the last thing I'll say about sort of how I began to do speaking and communicating on much more of a regular basis was in the classroom, in a college classroom, having to speak so often, you either will figure out how to do that well, or you will drive yourself crazy and quit that job.

You won't stick around.

Yeah, you won't stay around, you just won't. So I, you know, in being thrown in the deep end of the pool, I became very, very comfortable, you know, with doing that because I was doing it so often. But when you do it so often, you also begin to examine, okay, how can I get better at this? What can I do? And so that was sort of some of the preparatory things that led me to going in. And I'll be honest with you, in less than 48 hours, I'm getting on an airplane headed to Malta, off the coast of Greece, the island of Malta. And I'm speaking at a giant art museum over in Malta. And then I'm going over to Italy and to Greece. And so I'm getting ready to go speak over in Europe about things I'm passionate about. And had you told me I'd be doing that when I was giving those, you know, talks once a year to 10 people, I never would have believed you. But, you know, if you really do look at communicating with people as a craft, it will make room for you and it will open up opportunities for you.

And I mean, I am sure that part of the reason why your career in speaking has snowballed is because of your openness and willingness to say, great, tell me, how can I be better? What are you seeing? Wonderful. And the egolessness of that. I mean, it's a funny little dance, ego and speaking, because we need enough ego to say, I'm going to put myself out there. I want to talk about this. I have something to say. Yes. And I belong up here. So make room for me. Yeah. And also enough egolessness to be like, I don't know, it's just a talk and it's just one talk and it's just me and I might screw up and what can I learn from you? And I mean, it's, it's a really hard dance.

It is, you know, psychologically, because I study psychology, we, we think of it in terms of the metaphor of having two hands. And I can hold two completely opposing things at the same time. I can hold an ice cube and I can hold a cigarette lighter and I can, you know, fire and water. I can hold at the same time. And psychologically, we can do that as well. In one hand, I can hold, I have important things to say. You should listen to me. I deserve to be up on the stage. I've prepared for this. And then in the other hand, I can hold all of that egolessness and say, "You know what? In 90 minutes, this will all be over. Whatever happens, you know, will happen. And if they don't like me, they won't like me." And I can hold all of those things and still be a whole person in the midst of that. It's when you put one hand behind your back and say, "I will only hold one of those things," that I think it begins to become problematic.

Yeah, and I do think audiences feel the one-handed people in either way.

Yes.

You know, people who are getting in their own way and have not fully owned their capacity and power and can step on that stage, know that they have something worthwhile to offer. And I think audiences can feel The people who are not there to love up on the audience, but that it is a, feels like such a one-way route. And that's exactly it.

That's exactly it. Audiences are so intuitive. They just get things that are even never said or directly communicated on the stage. They feel, um, you know, there's some sort of magical force field between a communicator and an audience. And if, you know, we give it different names; we call it reading a room, or we call it, you know, the ability to just effectively engage an audience. There's a lot of different names we give it. But that, that invisible force field between the communicator and the audience is something that over time, you have to be able to develop lenses to see it. And it's not that you even will ever have complete control over it. But you can, you can— it's almost like surfing. You're not going to control the waves of the ocean, but you can learn as different waves come in to, to kind of glide on this wave or see, you know what, I need to not get up on the board as this wave is coming. You know, and I think that's— I think it's a very accurate metaphor. You're not going to control it. But you can learn how to artistically craft your communication in a way that you're surfing on those scary and dangerous waves in a beautiful way.

Have you read Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic?

Love that book. Love Elizabeth Gilbert.

Oh my gosh. And her TEDx talk, obviously, or it was a TED, it might have been TEDx. I don't remember any, whatever, it doesn't matter. She was on stage talking about the creative genius and how finicky, right? And that creativity is, it's kind of like what you're talking about though, the metaphor of the waves of the ocean. Sometimes the magic, the genius is in the room and magical things happen and other times the genius is not not in the room, and you just show up with your surfboard and take the wave that comes and ride it and see what happens.

Like, that's it.

That's our job, is we just show up. You know, as you— on your European tour, John, you're just gonna go, and whatever. Like, you might be giving the same talk each time, and it's gonna be different Every time. Because yeah, the magic.

One thing that has sort of helped me in trying to put a lens on that magic that happens is I, a couple of years ago, I was really getting frustrated when people would often, in asking about my work, ask me to narrow down what I do to a very simple job description. Are you a writer? Are you a speaker? Are you a consultant? You know, what is it exactly you do? Yeah. And it's like, well, I do all these things. And it's like, yeah, but what is it? What is it that pays your bills? You know, people often are trying to narrow down that. I'll tell you, when I began to reject that idea of a singular job description and embrace my work as an ecosystem, my life changed. Because I began to look at my work as this living, breathing organism, an ecosystem that I needed new rivers that would come into the ecosystem. And when stagnant lakes would begin to develop, I needed to figure out ways to drain those and get those out of there. Sometimes I go up on the mountains of my ecosystem and I just write and I'm alone and by myself and I'm processing ideas. Other times I go to the beautiful fields and a group of people gather and listen to me talk in those beautiful fields. Other times I go alone and I go swimming in the deep waters of thought, but I have all these elements in the ecosystem that are all part of my work. And when I began to embrace that, as opposed to trying to be narrowed down into, well, this is what I am and this is what I do, and there's value to asking yourself those questions, but I think there's also value to looking at your life holistically, you know, as part of your work and not being forced into a box that's going to make you your lesser self, you know, because I know when you get up to speak, so much of what you get up to talk about, you can only talk about because you, for the last 6 months, have been living out this principle. And that's as much a part of your work and your talk as when you get up to deliver it. It's all part of that ecosystem.

Totally. Oh my gosh. That was like some really big, beautiful— what a beautiful metaphor just for all of us to think about. I think it would be a really cool idea for everybody to find a metaphor like that. And I know you love metaphors. You're a mythology person. There's so much power in metaphors and how we find ourselves in it and find meaning. And I love thinking about your work as an ecosystem. I could see all of that as you were talking about it, John. You're, you're going out into the field and, and, oh, there's a stagnant lake, it needs fresh water. It's like, so cool. I'm just like getting meta for a second hearing you talk. I want to Right? This is, that's what you do. We, you get all meta.

I want to invite people into that place where, as I'm talking about my experience, you know, of the years it took me to craft this idea of my work being in the ecosystem, my hope is that that then allows people to reflect as they hear that and look at their own lives and say, OK, what, what is my meadow? Before. And maybe it is an ecosystem or maybe it's something completely different. But my hope with my work and the things that I talk about when I speak is that I hope people can begin to examine themselves in ways to say, how will my life be better as a result of what I'm hearing him talk about? So in a sense, I want people almost partially paying attention to what I'm saying. So they're giving me half their attention, but they're also focusing half their attention at the same time on what, how does this work in my life? Because I think at the end of the day, there's a wonderful book called You, Inc. and it's about sort of self-branding and it's a great book. And in this book they said something that's very powerful, and that is, you know, when you're a communicator engaging an audience, your audience doesn't care about how great you are, but they care about how great they could be.

Mm.

And I think there's so much truth to that. I would much rather have people leave my talk, and instead of them saying, wow, that John Booker is such a great speaker, I would much rather have them leave my talk saying, Wow, I think I may be capable of much more wonder in my life than I've ever experienced. That's a bigger win for me than people walking away talking about how great I was.

Right?

Wow.

That, I think, is a really profound, powerful difference in terms of the mindset that we bring in to us in any moment. That we are up in front of people is that it's that egolessness. Yeah. Um, this, you know, it's about serving and loving the people in the room. It really is. And, and I will just say, I feel that with you. And that's why, you know, in the, the story video that they created, like, you're practically narrating it.

I was very honored.

I've got a lot of statements You do, because you are talking about the profound, and it comes from this, uh, this place of wanting us as the audience to also experience the profound on a, on a daily basis. The wonder of like, what is this all about? What is the meaning? What is, what is my purpose? What am I— these are huge life things. Yes, that's your M.O. Like, that's what you do, John. Like, even after having only known you a little bit, I'm like, yeah, that's, that's what you do. And I heard you talking earlier that you know your strength, like, it is, it's passion. It— and, and that's why I think was like, we have to use his words. They are so powerful.

Yeah.

And, but I also heard you talking about, right, how you, as a speaker, you have to overcome your problematic characteristics.

Yes. Oh man, I've got a big one too that I've got to tell you about.

Tell me about it. I'm just curious what you're working on and how you're, how you're working on it because I love your spirit of working on things. Yeah.

I haven't, I tell you, here's, here's the biggest biggest problem that I have as a communicator and as a speaker. I know that I can, and this goes back to the very first time I got up to speak in front of people. I know that I have this passion. I know that I can get up and sort of improv really well. But I also know I'm most effective when I've written out a talk and when I've really prepared it well.

Yeah.

My biggest challenge is finding that middle ground between a talk that is really written out and well-articulated and a talk that is completely just from my heart and from my passions. And finding that middle ground is, is the most difficult challenge that I face. It's so hard because I tend to want to just lean in towards, let me just speak. From my heart. And there's a time for that. And that can be beautiful and wonderful. And I don't want to lose that in what I'm doing. But I also know that when I take the time to really process and organize my thoughts, the talk comes out so much stronger and the content is so much more effective. And in some sense, I am capable on my worst days of just creating spectacle with my talk and not really creating a moment of change or a moment of movement in someone's life. And spectacle lasts just a moment. It's like fireworks. It goes up in the sky and it blasts and it's beautiful to look at for a moment. Yeah. But you know what? It doesn't, it's not effective in change. It's not effective in, you know, making lasting impact. And so I'm more interested in starting a fire that stays, you know, sort of an eternal flame that is lit in someone's heart than I am fireworks. But I'll tell you, that's my challenge because I'm capable of fireworks. And I know when I get nervous on stage, when I get nervous in front of an audience, my tendency is, well, if I'm not able to light the fire, let me just blow up some fireworks.

Yeah, yeah.

And that is, is, that's my challenge. And that's what I'm working on. So I have made a deal with myself that even if I don't use it, I will write out every talk I'm going to give. And Now, what happens is most of the time I do end up using it because I've worked so much on it, right? But I've at least forced myself into the discipline of writing out each talk I'm going to give because it forces me to articulate it in my own head before I stand up in front of a group.

Yep. And it isn't for everybody because for some people, the act of writing it out, they, they become a writer rather than a speaker, and so we lose so much in that translation. But for me, like you, I have to write my stuff out. I write like I talk. And so it's an incredibly helpful process to make editing decisions, most importantly, right? To have a sense of flow and to really— it's the, the process of writing is how I figure out what it is I want to say. And some people— everybody kind of goes about it differently, but I am, I'm happy to hear that you found that as a process. You, even if you end up taking what you've written and turn it into an outline, that gives you more freedom to be in the moment and do your fireworks, you know. But that you have done that already. You've already done a revision of making choices because it's all about discipline. There's so much discipline involved in this craft, and we don't talk about it in that way very often because you want it— you know, the best ones look effortless and look as they in the moment. Um, and it was funny, I was just Before you and I hopped on this call, I was talking with Jillian, Jillian Farabee, and we were talking about finding those authentic moments that are unplanned that we really only allow ourselves when we feel like, for most people, when we feel like we've done our due diligence so that you can let go of what you planned.

Yes.

And it's a really hard thing to do, to be so planned and feel confident that you can let it go and be in the moment. Yeah. Because we end up putting in a ton and ton of work to get to that point.

Yeah.

It's not just wing it.

Yeah. You know, we just, it's, Well, the talk that you heard that I gave at Story, I literally worked a year on that talk.

Yeah.

And I rewrote that talk a number of different times. And I had— it was the first time I actually tried to memorize a 20-minute talk. And I found out I am not good at memorizing words, but I'm very good at memorizing ideas and emotions.

Say more about that. What does that look like?

Well, I had so much difficulty. I'm a writer as well as, you know, a verbal communicator. And so I would often write this really beautiful prose that I wanted to say, and I had such a difficult time remembering the order of the words and how I articulated it. But I would very easily remember the emotional flow and journey of the talk. And the basic ideas, I could remember that fairly easily. So what I ended up doing in the last month before I gave the talk, I said, you know, I've got enough of the words that I'm really, you know, the things I, the phrases I really feel strongly about saying, I'll embrace those phrases, but now I'm going to just put all those words aside and I'm going to to just lean into this emotional memory and this memory of ideas and just let it organically flow. I know this content. I know this stuff. I'm not going to draw a blank when I get up there.

Totally.

But I'm not going to—

And you know how to put sentences together.

That's right. That's right.

And so we have to trust ourselves. In that moment that I know this, I have something to say, and I know what I'm going for. Like, if you, if you know where, what you're moving towards and what you're going for, then you, you getting that perfect word that you wrote, right? You don't know. And it takes up really precious brain space for us when we're searching for that word rather than just just focusing on the, the point of what we're trying to say and letting that just happen. But it is one of those, right, that's that marriage of preparation and discipline and writing and editing so that you can scrap it to some extent because you needed all that to know it well enough that you can say, I know what I'm going for here. And it's going to come out a little bit differently every time. And that's okay because they don't know.

Yeah. No.

It matters.

It's the going for connection rather than perfection.

You know, one thing I did that was just a practical thing that helped me with that talk, I'd never tried this before. Yeah. But I recorded myself giving the talk, just reading the paper and still putting passion into it.

Yeah.

But reading the exact words. And I would listen to it multiple times every day. Absolutely. And it was amazing how after a while there were certain parts that I, I would say, you know, those words I worked so hard to craft, you know, they're not, they're not impacting me listening to this the way that I thought they were. And it was just a very easy way to determine after some time what was really the sticky stuff in the talk. And what was, what were the things that, you know, became important to me as an artist, but that weren't really going to be anything that impacted the audience.

Yeah. It's so hard to see ourselves and to hear ourselves in an objective, helpful way. We're often overly critical and these are our darlings. What's important to us may not be the thing that's important to the people who we're giving it to. I mean, it's, it's, it's hard to figure it out. So, okay, Jon, this is— we are at the time. We're going to do a This Moved Me moment, something that has moved you recently. And I can't wait because I know it's, it's a Jon Booker This Moved Me moment. No pressure.

Well, I tell you what.

Blow my mind, blow my mind, John, blow my mind.

I'm going to recommend a talk that you go and watch because this talk really, really moved me. When I tell you what the title of the talk is, you are going to say, "There is no way that that talk would be interesting to me. I'm not interested in that stuff." But I challenge you, if you're under the sound of my voice, go watch this talk because I feel like I feel like it's a great example of how you can impact an audience even if they're not that interested in maybe the subject you've been asked to talk about.

Oh, yeah.

So you can find it on YouTube. It's given by a man named Chris Milk, M-I-L-K, and the name of the talk, it's a TED Talk, and it's called The Birth of Virtual Reality as an Art Form. I don't want to even set it up too much because I don't want to tell you some of the methods he uses, but he does some things in this talk that I have been deeply inspired to say, okay, how can I— just in what I hope to do in my talks, he did that to me. He made me half listen to him and half say, how can I take these things he's talking about and actually apply them in my work.

Okay, cool.

So I, I was deeply impacted by this.

All right, I'm gonna go check it out. Virtual reality so far kind of freaks me out.

So even if you don't care a thing in the world about virtual reality, I would, would suggest to you that you will be deeply impacted by Chris's talk.

Okay, all right, okay, I'm gonna check it out. All right, so my This Moved Me moment has been a podcast that I've been listening to a lot lately called Heavyweight. It is a Gimlet Media podcast. So if you've heard any of the other Gimlet shows.

Yes.

Oh my gosh. It is this wonderful combination of story, right? So they kind of deep dive in somebody's life and they go back and they essentially do some conflict resolution.

Wow.

Now, that doesn't sound like fun, but the host is this really delightfully self-deprecating person who is just so funny. And the way that they edit this show together is brilliantly done. And he starts every show by calling up his best friend, and she hates hearing from him. She hates that he puts her on the show every time. So she's always like, what? Jonathan, I do not have time to talk right now. And he's like, wait, wait, there's a thing. Uh, you know, it's just, it's so funny. And it turns because it's this combination of these difficult things in our past and in our lives. And, and bringing them back to life and people facing them and figuring it out mixed with this quirky, delightful human who is just walking with people as they figure this stuff out. It— the combination is really moving to me. Anytime somebody can make me laugh and make me feel something emotional. I'm like, that is good stuff. That's beautiful artistry. And I want to know this person so bad. Can we be friends? Jonathan, where are you? I want to know you. Or maybe not. I don't know. He also sounds a little bit like a pain in the butt. But it's so funny. He's great. So great. So Heavyweight, you find it. And I think he's had 2 seasons.

Okay.

So there's lots of good shows to listen to.

Yes.

It's so good. Okay. Well, this is really fun, John. Thank you for joining me and for sharing your spirit and your goodness and your passion and your, like, mind-blowing truth bombs.

It's such an honor and pleasure to be with you, and I just want to thank you again for the help that you've given me in moving my abilities and skills as a communicator forward. Thank you again. It's been a tremendous help.

I'm so glad to be connected with you. Hey, what do you think the next thing is? I don't know. Hey, Movers! Oh my gosh, I hope that you enjoyed that episode with Mr.

Jon Booker. I obviously really enjoy Jon.

I think he's such a—

just a good human being, and I, you know, I do some gushing.

I'm a gusher.

What can I tell you? So excited to have him on the show, and I hope that you got some good meaty stuff out of this. In my mind, he was really living out what he talks about, really bringing these meaty ideas about life, these big, big ideas, and then making them meaningful for us. So I got a ton out of it, and I hope that you did too. Coming down the pipeline next week, I've got a mini Moved Me all about audience. How do How do we really prepare for our audiences? And we all know it's important. We all know we want to personalize our content so that it resonates and connects, but how do we do that? So I'm going to share with you some of the key questions that I ask myself and think about and do some research on around audience. So hopefully there's some great tactical stuff for you, uh, coming down the line next week. And looking into the future, my next interview is with a woman named Amy Kay, and she is She's just a rock star, and she was a connection to me from another one of my rock star guests, Miss Jenny Evans. So if you know her and you remember her from way back, I think in my first year I interviewed Jenny. She's awesome. So I took her recommendation. I'm so glad I did. Amy Kay's fantastic. So that's coming down the line too. On a different note, like a non-my-podcast note. I was interviewed this week on a podcast called The Social Entrepreneur with Tony Lloyd, and Tony and I spoke together at Ignite a few years ago and had a great connection there. And he hosts this podcast for entrepreneurs, especially in the social sector, people who are out trying to make the world a better place with their ideas and their work. And so We had a great talk about how we can create talks that really push our ideas and our movements forward. So I loved the conversation. I really enjoyed it. I'm not often on that side of the table, so it was fun. And I would love for you to find it. Check out the Social Entrepreneur Podcast with Tony Lloyd and you will find it, and I'd love for you to listen in.

That'd be really cool.

Also, guys, go check out my website. I'm working on it, and by the time this comes out, who knows, there might be something new up there. And maybe not. No promises, but keep an eye on it. You can be on the website watch and see if you can, you know, be the one to let me know, "I saw it, Sally! You have a new website!" But maybe not.

All right, that's it for me. You guys, this moved me today, and I hope that it moved you too.

Check you later.