Finding Your Essential Message

//What successes are you building on?  And why should that be a greater focus than fixing your failures?  Join Andrea today as she shares thoughts on how to make your work better and lighter by building on the momentum of what you’re already doing well.

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Transcript

Hey there!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  A couple of weeks ago, we had an interview with New York Times bestselling author Greg McKeown about Essentialism and his new book, Effortless.

And then last week, we had a little conversation, you and me, about how to release things, to make things more effortless so that it doesn’t feel like being essential – like going through life – has to be such a burden.  Maybe it doesn’t have to be such a burden, maybe we don’t have to hold on to things as much as we do.  Maybe we could release them and carry ourselves with more of a light burden instead of such a heavy burden that we often do.  And these are things that are related to my conversation with Greg McKeown.

Well, today, we’re going to talk a little bit about you and your message.  One of the questions that I had for him was, how do you hone your message so that it was essential.  And it was interesting, because I really appreciated him sharing his process.  He said that he starts out with the title.  And if you can get the title, then the rest comes.  So, what does this mean?  I think that he was essentially saying, essentially, of course, I have to say that.  I think that he was saying that when you can get down to the basic, the basic thing that you’re trying to communicate, which is the title, then the rest can follow.

So, I have a book called Unfrozen: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You, my title came as I was writing the book, because it was my story.  But after I chose the title, the book became more and more clear to me, what it was supposed to communicate, what I was actually trying to say.

I could have had many different messages, but, essentially, it came down to that I realized for myself that being burdened by expectation, being burdened by trying to tie my value to what other people think of me that those things were really getting in the way of me being me, of me being able to find myself to share my voice in a way that is going to make some sort of difference, because I was so worried about what other people were thinking or what they expected of me and that I might disappoint them, that I was torn inside.

And there are still times that I feel like this.  So, I don’t mean to say, just like Greg is saying, “I’m not always essential;  I’m not doing things that are essential constantly,” but it’s the same thing for me, sometimes I still feel frozen.  But those moments are much shorter now.

So, getting to that point of realizing that this is the message, this is what I really want to say with this book was really important.  And I’m encouraging you as I’m talking, hopefully, this is helping you to jog your thoughts a little bit.  I personally learn best or make associations and connections in my mind best when I’m sort of listening to something, but I’m actually thinking about myself and my own situation.  So, I’m kind of hopeful that that is what you’re experiencing.

So, the other day when I was actually finishing the book, Effortless, I thought, “What am I making hard right now, in my business in particular?”  “What am I making hard?”  Because it feels like it should be easier.  It feels like we have some really good stuff to share.  We have some great connections.  We have this beautiful podcast.  We have so many good things.  And yet, I’m always wanting more in terms of connections and being able to make a bigger difference and things like this.

And I don’t think that that desire for more in me right now is particularly bad.  It feels like it pulls me forward.  It pushes me on.  But the part that feels burdensome is trying to figure it out and get to the answer right away.  So, when he was talking about Effortless, and how to make things easy, I thought to myself, “Well, okay, so what if I’ll use the inverted question? What if this were easy? What if it were easy to figure out my next move or the way to tie everything together?”  Because that’s always my goal is to tie all of our offerings and everything together and make our message even more clear all the time.

And it occurred to me that, you know, when we first started the business, I started out by calling it “Impact by Design.”  And I did that because I had a friend and colleague who was like, “Oh, my gosh, this would be an amazing name, and it’s exactly what you do.  This is what you help people to do is figure out what their real impact should be.”  And the truth was, at the time, that’s exactly what I was doing.  I was in Facebook groups and courses that were online with Amy Porterfield and people like this.

And so, I would be in these Facebook groups and people would be confused or frustrated about their own personal brand, and I would have a conversation with them.  And I would help them figure it out, and I realized that I was doing this more and more.  And so, I created materials that would be helpful to people who are going through that process.  And we actually have a program now that does that, that helps a person to be able to identify their core values, their passion, what they’re really driven to do and why, and be able to identify that, and then connect that to the world.

And that was all important to me, and I still believe that there is a connection to what we’re doing today.  But we changed our name.  We changed it to Voice of Influence.  So, this morning, as I was thinking, I was like “Why, why did I do that?”  “What could maybe that indicate to me that this was a good name?  But probably the more essential name, or theme of what we’re trying to accomplish is Voice of Influence?”  Impact by design was more about the what, what is your message?  What is your offering?

Voice of Influence is more about the how.  It’s about, how do we take the message that is already here, refine it perhaps, but find its place in the world perhaps, find an expression of it that could be.  But the more important thing that we really can do that is different than what we’ve seen other people do, is how do you communicate that message in a way that is going to invite people to participate with you in that conversation. So, what we do now is so much more about the how.  

When I’m asked about customer service training, we do have a training, but it’s for service mindset.  It’s for a scalable option for how a big group of people, whether it be a whole organization, or a whole customer service team, that they can go through this program, the voice quality program, which really focuses in on personal responsibility, what I really care about, what I’m going to take responsibility for that I have choice and autonomy.

And then being able to find that center on a regular basis.  How do I center myself in vision, in my intent, in my offering, in my curiosity, in my empathy?  What does it look like to be centered in those things so that when I show up, I can show up with a service mindset that’s really going to make a difference for not only the customer, but also for my organization and for the team.

So, we don’t do a training that’s a customer service training.  We do a training that is not about the what, it’s about the how.  It’s about how I show up as a service representative.  It’s about how I show up as somebody who is here to support an operation.  It’s about how I show up as a leader.  So, that’s one of many examples that I was able to say that after reading that book that’s super helpful: “Oh my goodness, everything that we’re doing really is about the how, how are we getting it out there.”

So, if a company has their own internal training system, learning system, and they’ve done all kinds of things, or people have done a great job of getting their certificates, but the heart hasn’t changed, the service mindset doesn’t seem to be there like you want – that’s where we come in.  When you have a company that’s doing great, they’re doing good.  They’re making progress, but maybe there’s more friction.  There’s a little bit of resistance or resignation.  People aren’t giving their all.  And you’re not quite sure why because, you know, the mission is important.  They care about the mission.  Why aren’t they actually giving it all?  That’s where we come in, to be able to say that is super helpful.

When it comes to you, your message, the way that you communicate with others, what kind of culture you’re trying to cultivate on your team, in your family?  Are there any indicators, signs, perhaps, of things that you’ve already done – like choosing a name over another name – that can illuminate for you what is most important to you?  What is most important for how you want to interact the culture that you want to build the message that you want to share?  What decisions have you already made, that you actually aren’t questioning that you know were good decisions?

You don’t have to go back and rethink everything every time, but you’ve already made these decisions.  So, that doesn’t have to take up space in my mind anymore.  Another thing I want to mention is the idea of being okay with the rubbish draft, as Greg said.  I’ve heard “vomit draft” before, I’ve shared about that here before, but it’s been a while.  So, I’m going to go back to it.  Sometimes you just got to get something out there before you can really know that it’s okay, that it’s done, that it’s right.

So, putting yourself out there by starting something, by sharing some sort of message, it doesn’t have to be perfect.  I would really encourage you to consider the importance of having a learning culture, where you’re not grading each other on your innovation, on your ideas, on your leadership.  You’re not being graded, per se.  Because grades have this connotation with them that if I work from the bottom and I’m working my way up, but I only get so high, I made a lot of progress, maybe we’ve made a lot of progress, but we’re still only at a C.

People who grew up trying to reach for those A’s all the time are sitting there going, “It’s just not good enough.  What did we do wrong?”  “What do we need to do?  What do we need to fix?”  Instead, I’d encourage you to think of it in terms of what are you doing right, and how can you build on what is right, on where the energy is, on where the energy is already flowing?  A lot of times, we want to take what is right and say, “Great, you’re doing good.  So, I’m going to put you to the side, and now I’m going to go focus on the things that are wrong.”

But the problem with that is that we spend all of our energy on what is wrong, on trying to fix what is wrong, we start to neglect the things that are right.  And it’s a little bit like, you know, when we have the idea of having gratitude, which we also talked about last week on last week’s episode, that gratitude pushes out complaining.  What if positive growth, positive change, and focusing on the positive could push out the negative?  What if we didn’t have to point out all of the things that are not going right, and instead focus on the things that are going right?

It is quite the concept, especially for people who are perfectionists and achievers wanting to be able to do a great job at what we’re doing.  It’s easy to go back into that negative mindset but if you go for the positive, if you go for the success, then let’s say you do get a C, if you will.  We’re trying not to grade.  So, let’s say we’re not grading.  This one, we’re going to use chips as an example.  So, a chip of like, you know, when you’re playing poker, which I don’t actually play poker, but we’ll say poker chips.  So, you’ve got three poker chips, because it was worth this much.  That was worth this much to your team to do this.

Well, if you stack on top of that another win, and then you stack on top of that another one, pretty soon your poker chips become quite the little tower.  And it becomes more important to cultivate the successes because those start to drown out the failures.  Of course, there are going to be times when we still need to make course corrections.  And we encourage you to check out our Deep Impact method course on how to invite somebody to make course corrections, giving feedback to make course corrections in a way that is not going to feel like they’re being corrected.  But instead, like they’re really feeling called to do something that’s special. So, I’d invite you to check that out on our website, voiceofinfluence.net.  

But as you continue to stack those up, those successes up, something happens in our brain that really allows us to see that “Wow, we can be successful.”  “We’re doing a good job.  This is actually something to celebrate.”  And as we do that, and as we reinforce the positive, the negative starts to kind of not make as much of a difference.

Next week, I’m interviewing a dear, dear friend of mine and mentor, Marion Byrne, who is from Australia.  You’re going to love this woman’s accent.  Well, we’ve got accents, right on each other’s…we got Greg who has an English accent and then Marion who has an Australian accent.  That’s kind of fun.

But Marion talks about advocacy, and one of the things that she talks about is being the small rock that starts the avalanche.  That little things make a difference.  Being faithful with the little things, celebrating the little wins.  These all can make a huge impact on our state, and make things feel less hard.  In fact, maybe they even make them feel effortless.  So, I just want to thank you.  I want to thank you for being here, for taking time to be with us, for taking time to think for yourself what kind of impact would actually be essential?

Thank you for taking time to do the self-reflection and considering what is going to free me up to be able to be who I want to be in this world.  And live in that effortless state, present, engaged, encouraging, and influential.  I thank you for doing that work.  It is not always easy, but maybe it could be more effortless as we go along.  Thanks so much for being here.

Go to voiceofinfluence.net/podcast to find out more information about what we do, and to get the Deep Impact method course.  We encourage you to do that.  Bye for now!

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