Dirty Chai - Ep 1 - Analysis Paralysis - Final

The speaker introduces their podcast, Dirty Thigh, named after their love for tea. They started by sharing career advice on Instagram and realized many people lack basic job application knowledge. They decided to share information to help others progress in their careers. As they grew, they realized it was about more than just job applications, but also personal growth, parenting, work-life balance, and self-advocacy. They eventually started the podcast after feeling overwhelmed and finding inspiration in Brené Brown's book, Atlas of the Heart. They learned to express and process their emotions to overcome the fear of failure and comparison to others. Their purpose is to collect and share information and have authentic conversations that go beyond small talk. They value the power of stories to connect and empower others. Hello, hi, welcome to the Dirty Thigh Podcast. A project a long time in the making, Dirty Thigh is named for tea, because I absolutely love tea. And for the fact that I love so many people who, for reasons I cannot fathom, love coffee. So I thought it would be the perfect name for a podcast in which I talk to people who are like me in so many ways, but one. And two, a passion project that allows me to do something that really makes my soul happy, which is finding and sharing information. And only tea makes my soul similarly warm and happy. So there's been nothing standing between me and this podcast except myself for the last few weeks. This project is the evolution of a hobby that I had on Instagram, which I called Career Tuesday. On Career Tuesday, I would share information that I believed would help people progress in their careers. This started after I worked for a few years as an HR executive for a large group of companies, and I realized just how many people do not know the basics of applying for a job. And this worried me because I thought for a long time that this was information that all of us had or information that all of us had access to. But then I realized that we take for granted the fact that people know. We take for granted the fact that people have access. We take for granted the fact that so many of us are struggling to reinvent a wheel that has already been invented. And so I started sharing information with the hope that I could make a little difference in somebody's life simply by making it so that they don't have to start from scratch where I started from scratch. That way, they can do a little bit better, go a little bit further in the same amount of time that I had. And I learned pretty quickly that a lot of people connected with that. And as I grew with the small production on Instagram, I started to learn that it's more than just the basics of applying for a job. It's how to grow in the job. It's how to grow within yourself because the job is a part of what you're doing. It's learning how to parent and being at work. It's learning how to balance it all, if at all. It's learning how to progress and to speak up for yourself and to ask for a raise. All of these things started to come together and I realized it's so much more than just the job application. And so I spoke about these things. And the more I spoke about them, the more people resonated with them. And eventually, I bowed to the pressure to start a podcast. And here I am. So like I said earlier, there's been nothing standing between me and this podcast for a couple of weeks. I got the equipment. I learned how to do it on YouTube. Isn't YouTube great? I learned how to use the software. I understood what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to do it. And yet, time and time again, I would come to the part where I need to script an episode, put together the information. And even if I knew what I was going to talk about, I couldn't bring myself to actually record it. I was so completely overwhelmed by the idea of starting the podcast. For some reason, starting a podcast suddenly became a different thing and a very big thing compared to me sitting down and simply speaking for 20 or 30 minutes on Instagram. In truth, when I think about it now, it's not that different, but somehow I processed it as dramatically different. And the more I tried to push against it violently, get on with recording it, do it, do it, do it, the more paralysis I felt. And what actually eventually worked for me was to stop and to remember Brene Brown's book, Atlas of the Heart. Atlas of the Heart is a special book in that I don't think it's an everyday read. I read a lot of books. I do this because this is my way of learning from the people who've already gone before me. Books are a treasure. What they do is they give you an express version of a mentor who you would otherwise not be able to access. Where would I access Brene Brown and her ability to teach me how to process emotions if not for her books? So after reading Daring Greatly, which I loved, and some of her other work, I picked up Atlas of the Heart. And Atlas of the Heart was slightly different in that it's not a book necessarily about Daring Greatly, but it's more an explanation of the fact that a lot of us do not know how to wrap words around what we're feeling. And if you cannot wrap words around what you're feeling or experiencing, it is difficult to process your way to a solution. So if you think about it, in Rumi's poem, which she quotes on the first page of her book, heart is sea, language is shore, whatever sea includes will hit the shore. But this is what's important. The poem has ended. This is what's important, or for me at least, or this is how I understood her. There is a vastness to what we feel and experience and how it affects our behavior that is far in excess of our ability to express it. And the more we apply ourselves to learning how to express ourselves as accurately as possible, how to describe our feelings as accurately as possible to ourselves and to others, the greater the chance we give ourselves to understand what we are feeling and therefore process it. And this came to mind because I stopped earlier today and I said, what is getting in the way of you recording this podcast? What is happening? Right? What is this feeling? And I stopped and I looked for a name for the feeling that would fit. And I landed on overwhelm. Overwhelm came specifically from Brené Brown's book, Atlas of the Heart. Before reading that book, and what that book does is it gives you 83 words to describe feelings other than happy, sad, angry, tearful, the ones that we use every day, which are wholly inadequate. It allows you to name all the other feelings that you sometimes feel so that you can at least give yourself a fighting chance at processing it. And this is what happened for me. Once I worked out that what I was feeling was overwhelmed, somehow I felt a huge relief, number one. Why am I overwhelmed was the next question. I'm overwhelmed because this feels like such a serious step. This feels like the next thing. This feels like something I can fail at. This feels like it's not a hobby anymore. This feels like somehow we are progressing on to a new stage where I will be exposed and possibly laughed at and mocked when progressing on to a stage where most people already, so many people are already there and thriving. Right? So I look at people like Jay Shetty and Oprah. Do I really want to launch a podcast when those are the people that are also doing the same thing? And I found that that paralyzed me. But once I understood that this was overwhelming, these are the things that I'm afraid of, I was able to go on to say, you have been sharing information for years and these things have never been frightening for you. Failure has never been frightening for you. What is your purpose? What is it that you're trying to achieve? You're not trying to be Oprah. You're not trying to be Jay Shetty. What is it that you're trying to achieve? You see, my purpose is collecting and sharing information. It's Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Tipping Point, that gave me the word to describe what I feel is my purpose and what I connect with the most and what I feel the most fulfilled doing. And what I feel the most fulfilled doing is collecting information about subjects, shaking the tree, understanding it, understanding the research underlying it, understanding how it is this person came to this conclusion. And when I am happy that I think this information is reliable, I share that information with other people for them to do with what they will. It's up to them to decide whether they want to be a maven, whether they want to be a connector, whether they want to be a salesperson, according to Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, or whether this is just interesting information that they would like to keep and do nothing with, or whether it's something they don't even care about. But where I get my fulfillment is from sharing the information. So somehow I had lost sight of that. And the fact that I had the words to navigate my way to this point is what actually freed me to then start the podcast. The second thing is I've always, always valued facilitating authentic conversations. I tend to say on my Instagram that I don't like small talk. I don't get it. I don't want to talk about the weather. It is what it is. It's either raining or it's sunshiny or it's in the middle. Where do you go from there? I honestly don't want to talk about the weather. I want to talk about what lights your soul on fire. I want to talk about what you're afraid of these days. I want to talk about what you're investing your money in. I want to talk about how you're connecting with your kids and whether you're happy. I want to hear how you are. You see, when I say how are you, I am not looking to hear I'm fine when you're not fine. I'm only looking to hear I'm fine if you are indeed fine. And if you are fine, tell me what's making life beautiful for you these days because maybe it will make me smile. You see, that rolls into embracing the power of stories because I've worked out so early in life that there is something about understanding the next person's story that, A, shows you that that person is human, too, and when the next person is human, you are allowed to be human, too. It is implicit permission for you to be human, too. I love that the stories that we share with each other that are true and authentic, right, are stories that allow us to not feel alone in the human experience. And when you don't feel alone in the human experience, contrary to feeling weaker, you feel more powerful. I was talking to our group chief human resources exec, and she is all-powerful, and she has made her success in the male-dominated industry, the gambling industry, and she is deadly afraid of cats. It's the fact that she can be in charge of 3,000 people and run this ship with apparent ease, even the most difficult situations, but she will be shattered if a cat walks past. If a cat is within 10 or 20 meters of her, she's not going to be able to function. And when I see that, what that tells me is I can have a fear of heights, but also conquer in other areas, that I can have a fear of dating, but also conquer in other areas. When people say to me, oh, you went through a divorce, so did I, and you know what, my life got better and I'm okay, that tells me that I can do it, too. That is the beauty of connection and genuine storytelling. And so I realized that maybe I was struggling to start this podcast because I was trying to be a podcaster. Maybe that's not what I am. What I am is a person who sits down with a microphone now, Brent, thanking you from Take a Lot. There's a person who sits down with a microphone and speaks from an authentic place and says to the next person, this is what I've experienced. This is what I've gone through. Take from it what you will, and maybe it will help you. Tell me what you have experienced. Tell me what you have gone through. I'll take from it what I can, and maybe it will help me. But while we sit next to each other, sharing these stories, for this moment, we're connected by our humanity. For this moment, we realize I am human and you are human, and we are together, although separate in this human experience. For me, it is the embodiment of Namaste. That is what it is. And for me, storytelling very quickly then becomes a divine duty. And so today, what I would like you to take away from this podcast is, it's okay to be afraid. Be afraid, right? But when you find yourself afraid, overwhelmed, unable to action something, when you find yourself in analysis paralysis, so common that it has actually been named, the idea that you think so hard about doing that you don't actually get to actioning. One of my recent reads is The 12-Week Year by Brian Moran, and it's remarkable that he identifies the greatest crisis as a lack of execution. And I had that thought at the back of my mind this morning, mainly because I'm struggling to execute on this, or I was struggling to execute on this podcast. And as if right on cue, because my phone shamelessly listens to me, and the algorithm complies. It played me a video of Obama being interviewed by somebody from LinkedIn or for LinkedIn, I can't be 100% sure. And being interviewed for LinkedIn, and he says this, what he looks for in identifying a person who would join his team is execution. It's not about the person with the best idea, or the person who is the most eloquent, or the person who is the greatest at distilling the issue into words, it's not that. He looks for people who can do, right? And I thought it was deeply profound, because it really aligns with the underlying research that the crisis of the modern age is doing. It's being consistent. It's producing a result from all the thinking and talking, right? And I thought, how remarkable that we have all this information at our fingertips, and perhaps the result of it, or perhaps we can see a little bit better now that we have access to this information, we can see just how many of us are paralyzed at the point of doing, and yet results only come after you do. Results can only be born from the doing. And so the steps here are identify what you're feeling, give yourself the ability to name it, identify what you fear, give yourself the ability to name it. Do not expect that the fear would go away before you are able to do what you would like to do. That's not going to happen. When you read, I think it's Adam Grant's Outliers, you learn that it's a myth that the people who are great, the people who have been identified as outliers, people like Martin Luther King, those people were afraid when they did the things that they did. When you look into the research around it, you realize it wasn't, they weren't distinguished by some superhuman force, some superhuman power, some superhuman extraordinary quality imbued in them after it fell from Krypton onto Earth. No, they were humans who are afraid and they thought, I am going to do this anyway. And that is the power of understanding the true story behind the headline. Once you understand that, that the greatest orator of time, of all time, possibly, that the person who wrote one of the greatest speeches that we've ever had, wrote it, was afraid, could barely sleep the night before, practiced and practiced and practiced before stepping onto that podium and saying, I have a dream. And that dream rang around the world for the day, for the month, for the year and for decades to come. Once you understand that, that says to you, you, ordinary person, you, CHEO, can be afraid. You can do the work. You can practice. You can practice. You can fail to sleep, it's okay. All you need to do is show up with your sweaty pit stains and say what you have practiced. Do what you have practiced. Do what you have said to yourself that you will do. And maybe it will be the speech that is heard around the world. But when you don't get out of the room, when you think yourself to paralysis, when you overthink yourself to paralysis, all you do is ensure that the speech is never, ever heard. Now imagine if he had never stepped out of that room. Imagine if he had said, I'm afraid, and so I won't do it, let someone else do it. It would have been fair because sometimes we have to realize that these things are a choice. You don't have to carry the burden of the entire race. But if you choose to do so, boy, what magic you can make, boy, what a difference you can make. Boy, what a chapter in history you can write. Just be afraid and do it anyway. Be afraid and acknowledge your feelings. Be afraid and wrap words around what you're feeling. Be afraid, stand up and go. And once you start, that fear is combated by the evidence that you begin to create. So it's a very interesting concept that the fear doesn't go away. You start with the fear in you. And once you start, you start to build up evidence that you can do this thing, and that is what combats the fear. So Mtetengati wrote a very interesting book called Betting on the Darkie. And that book, he had a book launch. And I went, I attended, I love a good book launch. And I attended, and someone asked him an interesting question. They said, you know, how can we change the narrative? You know, how can we change the way people like you are perceived? How do we deal with imposter syndrome? And he said something that I quite liked. He said you build a portfolio of evidence, a portfolio of evidence, a portfolio of excellence. What you do is you do things well, and you record that you are doing these things for yourself. You don't have to tell the entire world. And every time you add a little piece of evidence to a little portfolio of excellence, you realize or you convince yourself or you start to believe that you really are excellent because you can see the evidence of it. And then he spoke of it in the greater sense as well. You see, when you go out there looking like you do, whatever it is that you look like, and you do stuff repeatedly, that stuff is also building a portfolio out there for people that look like you to see and to identify with, right? For people who look like you to say, gosh, there is evidence that I could be like this too. There is evidence that I can also achieve that or this that I have set my mind to. That is what it's all about. That is what it's all about. You don't need a secret formula. I don't need a secret formula. That's what I learned today. I need only to wrap my words around my feelings, understand what I'm dealing with, take steps to give myself evidence to the contrary, and then do. And once you do, you become less afraid. And I'm finding as I approach the end of this first episode, this first episode, yes, of the podcast, I'm feeling so much lighter, so much less afraid, so much brighter because I have taken the first step and still can be done, damn it.