1:59
Well, hey, friend, welcome back to another episode. We are into summertime here in Sager household. My home is filled with boxes as we have about a week, maybe a couple days more depending on when you’re listening to this when the moving trucks arrive and we make our way across the state. I’ve been talking about this for a couple months now, maybe you’re like other stuff talk about your random crap, although, I don’t think you’re thinking about if you listen to my show.

2:30
You actually are probably very, I don’t know, I’m very curious about other people’s like outside of business life, because you know this whole business building thing we’re doing is so that we can live. Okay, tangent 20 seconds into this episode. I think it’s really interesting how some people have brands online, they talk only about business and I’m always curious around, but what is life look like to like, create that business or like, how hard are you working slash I don’t know, is there more to that? I don’t know. I like having, I don’t need to know everything about everyone that I follow, like TMI is a very real thing but I do like knowing the context of solopreneurs. So what I mean by that, I like to know.

3:13
Alright, so you have this business here, the things that you teach, but like, what life is it creating? Is business the sole thing that you do or do you also do other things? I don’t know, maybe that’s just a weird random thing. I guess I don’t really, I don’t care about that with everyone but I do find it fascinating. When I find a mentor or someone that I’m really driving with online, I find that it’s typically beyond just business. So if that if that’s you, too, there’s my life update. We have not yet sold the house at the time of this recording. So that is creating a little bit of a stress for us that we’re moving across the state and the house is not yet sold but I am not overly worried. I am a huge abundant thinker, so I know it will sell. I’m not worried about everything is going to work out. Great.

4:02
So here we are, for today’s episode, context for this episode today. I’m going to answer, I mean, this quite frankly, I know people say one of the most common questions I get and it’s kind of a BS thing but this is legitimately the most talked about thing in every conversation that I have when I am guest speaking in groups, when I am randomly chatting with someone at a conference, anytime, anyone like essentially learns what I do as a speaking coach. They always bring up one of two words and it’s either talking about the challenge with rambling or the challenge with word vomiting. And it’s so funny because anytime anyone talks about this whole like Heather, I can’t stop rambling. I call it a case of the rambles where you’re just, I mean irony actually right now, as I say this, I’m just like literally rambling in this episode thus far. How funny is that?

5:04
Anyways, a lot of times people are like, Oh, I just I can’t stop talking. I’m just kind of rambling on and on and I don’t even know what my point is or I made my point like 10 minutes ago, but for some reason, I’m still talking and sometimes that might be in daily conversation but it also comes a lot of business conversations. So like in sales conversations, when you’re supposed to ask for the sale and be quiet. A lot of times people just keep over explaining and trying to prove their value so that the rambles or said in a more aggressive way, word vomiting, we all do it. It is a thing where we’re like thinking and speaking at the same time and there is this idea that for some reason, if you ramble or have word vomit, that that is a bad thing but then it’s just a normal thing. That is just part of normal human language. We all ramble and have like the word vomit situation.

6:00
What I think the the challenges for most people is they find themselves ramblings in moments that actually matter. So in the context of what I do, I’m a speaking coach for entrepreneurs, right? I help you leverage the time that you have onstage be most effective with it as possible so that you can have more time off stage, more freedom, more flexibility, more revenue. You essentially you have leverage by your stage time. You’re so damn good and so effective with your message, you do not have to hustle all the time when you’re off stage.

6:30
So inherently with what I teach, I have to help you with the skill of how to be more potent with your words when they matter. How do you not ramble in moments that matter? And what I realized as well, I answered this question all the time. I don’t have a dedicated podcast episode on this topic and when I realized that I’m like, no frickin way. Of course, I do and I reference rambling and word vomiting and quite a few different episodes. In fact, one of the most popular downloaded episodes from search on my blog is episode number 18. I can’t remember the exact title but essentially, as I teach you how to how to reduce your filler words. That is a big one.

By the way, if you haven’t listened to that one, we will link it into the show notes here. There’s an overlap between rambling and filler words, but you can ramble without having like a lot of filler words, not they could be separate things. But I want to have a place that you can come back to over and over again, when you need to sharpen your skills. Sorry, I’m getting notifications on my computer and I’m not going to go out and cut that, because I’m on a roll here and we have to help you be more concise and clear when you speak.

7:46
Now, before we dig into this, I don’t want you to have this delusional belief that all of a sudden overnight, you’re going to sound like straight and to the point, all the time. That would not be fun. That would not be exciting. And in fact, well, if I were straight into the point, this podcast would be so freakin boring. It would be so boring. People don’t want just the information. They want a little bit of the rambles and the side tangents. Hello Sager side note, it’s like a very real thing.

The side tangents those are sometimes where like the fun happens. That’s where the experience happens. That’s where people get to be like, alright, she’s a real person. Your audience wants that from you too. They don’t want just a straight information only to the point, keep it tight all the time, right? There’s a time and place for that but you don’t have to be so dialed in all the time. That’s not the goal.

8:45
It’s the same thing I talked about when it comes to filler words. The goal isn’t to completely eliminate them. The goal is just to make sure that they’re not a distraction and for you to sound more confident when you speak and nail down transitions and your intros or outros, your point of awkwardness when you talk about money or offers or anything like that. So what we want to do here, our goal here, you and me, is you want to sound authoritative, you want to sound confident, you want to sound clear, and yes, concise when you speak, but also do not try to be something that you’re not.

9:22
Here’s a great example. I am not someone of brevity, meaning, I am not a short winded person, like ever. I have thoughts and I share lots of thoughts and I like sharing context and stories and site tangents. That’s just the way that I communicate. So if I were to try to communicate in a super, super short way, there’s a little bit of a disconnect that I’m kind of awkward and clunky and I get all up in my head and it’s just really really hard for me and, well, sometimes I do need to do it, short form video on reels, which is like, I hate doing them. I would much rather like clip back a longer thing. It’s just not my wheelhouse. So for you, if you are a more long winded person, I want you to know that is not a bad thing. We need to know how to use it to your advantage.

10:17
Another example of this, my Business Coach James Wedmore, who’s been on the show a lot him and I actually joke about it. Every time I asked him like one question on a live or on the podcast, it’s like a 20 minute answer and then he starts laughing. He’s like, oh my gosh, that was so frickin long and I laugh and I say something in the line of, I expected it to be, like he is a long winded speaker. But the thing is, is I love listening to him speak. He has really great insights. He has really great cadence, he has really good power in his voice and various his tone and the context, context, no content, it’s so frickin good.

10:57
So the challenge that I think people have is when they think that people want brevity, which let me just do a little asterisk here. It is true. People do like brevity. I’m gonna go off a little side tangent here. Back when I was in corporate, one of the specific pieces of content that I taught was the DISC, D, I, S, C. It is a kind of like a personality slash communication profile. If there’s a Myers Briggs, there’s DISC.

There’s lots of different personality types. DISC was something specific and the reason why I love that tool so much as it was emphasized the way that we communicate with other people. And DISC, the red in DISC is called the driver and that high driver is somebody who speaks directly to the point and they want you to be directed to the point.

Drivers represent, I don’t know less than 20%. If I remember that correctly, please don’t quote me on that but it’s like less than 20% of the overall population. So there is a subsection of people who do want that. But for the most part, people who say I wish it was more to the point where I wish they would just get to the point already, the issue isn’t the length. The issue is the content. The reason why people get annoyed of someone rambling, it’s because what they’re sharing is not valuable to that person. I’ll say that again. The issue with length and lack of brevity is not the time, it’s the lack of relevant substance in the message.

12:32
So my friend, what I would really encourage you to think about is, it isn’t about rambling less, it isn’t about speaking more concisely. Well, those are things we should look at. What we need to focus on is ensuring that the content that you’re speaking about, and I don’t just mean business content. I mean, in everyday conversation whenever you communicate the substance of what you’re saying, making sure that it’s valuable to the person in front of you. That is the real challenge people have. And for the most part, when people ramble, it is often the first time they’re trying to put words or language to an idea or a thought and therefore they’re working through what they think about the thought as they share in real time and the person in front of them is not really interested in all of that. I don’t know backstory or they really just want to know the headline, like, what what are you trying to get out here?

13:37
So I’m gonna share a couple of things today, and let me just preface this with I did not write out today’s podcast episode as a formal training outline. I’m not here to go exactly step by step on what to do. Granted, I will give you some of that today but that’s not the goal of this episode. I don’t want you trying to follow some kind of step by step guide here to handle your case of the rambles, to handle you’re feeling more confident when you speak because if you try to make this a prescriptive thing you’re gonna get so tied up in the process, that you’re going to forget the most important piece here which is presence. And I’ll say that again to hammer down on it, I don’t want you to get caught up in the process and sacrifice presence.

14:25
What do I mean by presence? Well, when you’re in conversation with someone else, when you really present that conversation, you’re present not just to what you’re saying, but your presence to the how the other person is receiving that information. Are they head nodding? Are they confused? Are they interested? Are they looking around trying to escape the conversation? Are they in? Are they out? You can tell the difference between somebody who’s really invested and someone who’s just being polite. And when we get so focused on the process, being the right way to go about it and we forget about the presence factor, you actually sacrifice the presence factor so let’s talk through this.

15:09
So I don’t mean just the process and the process of how you structure communication. I’m going to refer to, there’s a process that you have to go through in order to build your communication skills to be more direct, more concise, more relevant to the person sitting in front of you. So let’s talk about what that looks like.

Now, when you okay, I want you to imagine this. I love a good simile or a metaphor here. So I want you to imagine right now that you are super fricking hungry, and you walk into your kitchen and realize that you forgot to go grocery shopping this last week, and you were down to the pantry staples that you have there. You don’t really, like really know why you bought it was like aspirational, maybe I’m gonna like cook dried beans, if I ever think about it well enough advanced but probably not going to happen. I’m gonna keep them there because it’s like, I feel like maybe I’ll be that kind of person one day, anyway, just me.

16:06
Anyways, you’re sitting there and you’re like, crap, I have to go the grocery store. You start, you don’t want to order GrubHub or you want to want to go out you want to cook a meal. So we’ve all had this moment where we’ve gone to the grocery store hungry and you and I both know that we don’t make the best life choices at the grocery store. When we are starving, we’re choosing things that probably are not the healthiest for us, the things that we wouldn’t even eat like our brains are just broken up at when we’re hangry.

So, just like in this idea that you don’t go to the grocery store when you’re hungry. You don’t want to go into an important conversation, important interview, important opportunity, when you’re gonna have a literal or metaphorical mic. You don’t want to go in hungry, meaning that you don’t want to go in not having a clear path around what you want to talk about. This is the takeaway I want you to have is when you show up to speak, if you’re in a low stakes environment, aka having casual coffee with a friend, you do not need to do a meditation exercise of going okay, how do I want Stacy to feel today? How do I want this conversation to go? Alright, let me put together a checklist. I’d like to compare summer vacation schedules for our families. I’d like to understand how is your grandmother doing and how about her uncle and go through a laundry list of contacts. You don’t go into the conversation with a checklist of things to talk about. All right, that’s just not, there’s not a thing. You’re there to connect, you’re there to catch up. Just let yourself be.

17:41
That kind of thing is different that if you’re going into let’s say, an interview on a podcast, or you’re going into a panel interview on a, like a summit, maybe you’re on a panel or you’re giving a talk, right, different stakes. So what I want you to think about is number one, how critical is the conversation. The more critical, the more preparation you want to have going into it. But let me say this thing about preparation, we think that it’s an either all or nothing thing. That either we are like, totally winging it, no prep, flying by the seat of our pants, or that we have to sit down and actually like write out everything that we want to say, lest we totally fail because we miss something.

18:26
Okay, you do not need to write out every motherfreakin thing that you’re going to say because that too takes away from your presence. We have to find a balance in it and we were, I’m going to link to some specific podcast episodes, where I talk about different levels of scripting. It was one of my most early episodes that I did. Actually, I think right before the filler word episode or after. We have that one there and then we talk about in another episode, I talk about why you shouldn’t use a teleprompter, which I know might not sound very relevant to this specific conversation but that’s solution that people come up with saying, I don’t want to be so rambley so I’m gonna use a teleprompter in my course videos, and I don’t think that is the solution either. Listen to that episode, I talked to you about this happy medium in the middle.
But what I want you remembering for yourself, it isn’t about being so strict to get everything down. What we have to do instead is we have to learn how to have competence in our own voice and how we approach that is we have to build the skill of thinking on our feet and trusting our voice.

19:35
Now remember last week’s episode where I talked a lot about my butt and my butt muscle. We are back to that metaphor here, thinking on your feet, being concise, not rambling, that is a muscle and if you want to be more, maybe have more brevity but more of like how do I get, how do I be more captivating? How do I ensure what I’m saying is relevant? How do I make sure people are sticking with me, even if it’s not the shortest thing ever? Case in point, me, in every frickin podcast episode. How do I do that? Well, my friend, we have to practice speaking out loud more and more and more. And what I find is, we can practice, one, by ourselves in private. I think that’s the best way to do it. But then two, you can treat like lower risk communications as your practice for those higher stakes conversations so let me just give an example of that.

20:33
You might practice by yourself in the car and I will give you a little method here. It’s not anything earth shattering but honestly, nothing is like you need the basics in order to build your skills. But I’ll give you that in a moment, my specific recipe that I follow to get better at the less rambling, more like on the nose. But you can do it like by yourself in the car, you can do it while you’re taking a walk, just pop in your air pods or something, right, so people think that you’re talking on the phone. That’s like the solution for all of that. Don’t do that when you’re driving though. I don’t think you’re allowed to drive with air pods and so even if they’re not on, you’ll just freak people out, but you know, you’re an adult, figure it out but you can do in private.

21:11
But what I mean by that low stakes versus high stakes situation, I don’t mean practice on your friend when you’re at lunch. Not that, don’t do that.

What I mean is, let’s say that you are going to do a guest presentation for one of your business peers, and their audience well, you could be very helpful with them, they’re not really your ideal client audience, so that would be great opportunity for you to practice your message, and of course, serve and love up on their audience. But it’s not high stakes, meaning it’s not your ideal, like perfect fit client. I do this all the time. I speak in a lot of my friends’ audiences, that have audiences that are just earlier in their business or maybe they’re not quite online yet and they’re highly sophisticated, intelligent women in these groups.

They’re don’t classically fit into my online entrepreneur, quote-unquote, ideal customer avatar. And what’s cool about that is, I get to go on those platforms and just serve the crap out of them, but really finesse and practice my message and sometimes clients come from it. Actually, a lot of times clients come from it. But on paper, they wouldn’t have been my quote-unquote, ideal client because they either weren’t in online business or for whatever reason, right? Please don’t get caught up in that specific detail here.

22:26
My point I want to take away is not every stage opportunity that you have, you don’t need to put in this big pressure on yourself to get everything dialed in, everything perfect. I actually treat every single one of my speaking opportunities as practice, which might sound weird, even my paid speaking opportunities, all of them are practice. It’s like, you know how like doctors, they have private practices. It’s called practicing medicine. It’s every time you do it, like you’re practicing.

And I think this idea of practicing means that for some reason that oh, it’s like, not professional, or that it’s not a legit real thing. We have to do all this quote unquote, practice in private but communication is something that you do all the all the time. Every time you show up, you are practicing becoming a better communicator. So adopting that mindset, adopting that belief that I’m always going to be better, that there is no pinnacle where you have you ever arrived at your communication skills, myself included, you’re always getting better. And what we want to focus on is how dialed in and tight you are with your language, it really is correlated to how significant the stage is.

23:35
Now I teach this, I have a little model that I lay out with my clients around how to really set the dial for how much you need to practice for a stage opportunity. There’s a, I hate saying this, because it’s going to sound a little weird, but there is a stage value matrix., ie, how critical is it that you’re super frickin dialed in or could you be a little more laid back? I’m not going to get into that in this episode. But the point is, you can use your, trust your judgment, right, around how critical it is. But I would imagine going back to the main thing of this episode is Heather, how do I start practicing being more clear, more concise, less rambly?

24:13
So let’s talk through the exact exercise that I use all the time and you’re gonna laugh and be like, this is so dumb, there’s no way. There is a way there’s a whole frickin way and I promise you, I frickin promise you that this will work. Okay, so what you’re going to do is I want you to think about a topic or a specific question. Now, I’m a big fan of using questions. Post a question to yourself because you can pretend like you’re interviewing yourself and it’s easier to like, start a ramble when you’re served up with a question, but you don’t have to do out. You can just pick a topic but I find this specific exercises easier when you have a question.

24:50
So for example, let me teach you how to make your topic a question. Let’s say I want to do a short five minute video or it’s just a short answer of some degree around helping people be less rambly when they speak. Okay, so that’s the topic. How do I turn it into a question? I would write, Heather, I ramble a lot. How do I be less rambly when I speak? You see how I did that so clear. How do I help people be less rambley when they speak. Turn into question, Heather, I ramble. How can I be less rambly when I speak? Okay, I’m gonna ask myself a question out loud and then I’m going to answer the question out loud. And as I mentioned, I do this in private by myself. I did it when I’m driving, when I used to have a commute. I would do this on my walks, I would do this in the shower, wherever, like, however you’re comfortable, figure it out. And if you’re like, ah, it’s so awkward. It’s kind of embarrassing. Yes. Yes, it is. It is so awkward and embarrassing to practice out loud, in front of just yourself which is hilarious and stupid, like, so stupid to think that we’re embarrassed of ourselves but it’s just, it’s new. It’s just new. And of course, this whole like fictitious thing is awkward. If you’ve never role played before, if you’ve never, I’m not talking like sexy roleplay if your head just went in the gutter, laughing your my people because my head was in the gutter as I said it. But what I mean by roleplay is like practice either scenario, like a business scenario, or like a script or something out loud.

26:24
Back when I taught sales, training people. They hated roleplay but it was the most important thing that we did to help people get over that awkwardness because here’s the thing you might think well, how they’re I sound so much better answering that question when somebody actually asks me and I would argue, if you’re listening to this episode because you’re having a problem with the rambles the chances that you effectively answer that question concisely is very, very low. So let’s just do like a, like a checkmate here, my friend, that if you think you are better live in the moment, that is a belief that is not going to serve you breaking through to your next level, is because that is your ego telling you that you are better in the moment, and that you’re better live, and that you’re better thinking on your feet and winging it, and I say that because I was that person but imagine how much better you would be if you were like good at thinking on your feet and you were also more effective at it.

27:23
That’s the takeaway here. So get over it awkward, talk about yourself. You’re gonna say, Heather, how do I get less rambly when I speak, and then you’re gonna be like, Oh, rambles are awkward, and you’re gonna ramble it out, and it will sound rambly and that’s okay. You’re just gonna say it out loud. And then after you’re done, you’re going to think back and say, what the hell did I just say? Did it even make sense? What sounded good? What didn’t sound good? And I don’t want you to jump right in that moment to be like, well, I should have recorded it and then I can listen to it back. The point wasn’t to get that ramble perfect. The point was to get the ramble out as you would normally ramble without trying to fix anything. Just get it out, the rambled needs to come out so just let it out.

28:10
So you’re gonna go through a new one time and then you’re gonna think back and be like, huh if I were to say it again, how can I say it better? Maybe you jot down a couple bullet points for yourself, that is totally optional, but then you’re going to say it again. Heather, how can I be less rambley when I speak? And then you’re going to jump to it and you’re going to answer the question, and that’s probably going to be shorter, and might be longer, who frickin knows and then you’re going to reflect back and say, does that feel better? Does that feel worse? Am I over the awkwardness of saying things out loud when I’m just kind of pretending.

28:40
All right, now, I want you to do a third time but the third time, I want you to actually record yourself and you can just do the audio. There are benefits of recording yourself on video too but let’s not go down that rabbit hole, just the audio. And by doing the audio, it’s going to put a little higher stakes on the table. You might even actually get a little bit more fumbly. You might be like little little blah, blah,a nd be weird about it and that’s fine. But what we’re doing here, my friend, is we are working the muscle, the muscle that is thinking and speaking under pressure. And you’re going to laugh because what’s the pressure to speak into yourself? Oh my gosh, why is that it’s so hard. It is so hard for us to like fictitiously speak out loud because we judge ourselves harsher than anyone else does. You need to learn to sit in the discomfort of practicing by yourself because if you can begin to learn how to have fun and practice and play at the art of communication, that’s when real magic starts happening. That’s when we take the high pressure stakes out of this need to get up like so perfect on stage. We’ve already had all this practice. We were already having fun with it, quote-unquote, off stage or backstage.

30:01
So I just ran you through a very simple exercise that you’re like, Heather, that was the exercise? Yep. And in the filler words episode, I actually walk you through like more specific steps and where you’re able to clarify something that I call golden fragments and that’s the process of where you listen it back and actually jot down notes at the little moments of brilliance that you said. So you can have those, file that away when it comes to rambles, my example. Rambles, here’s three little gold nuggets that I can talk about. You can have those on like a Google Doc or in a notebook or somewhere so the next time you want to talk about that topic, you know, what are the main points you want to hit on. But the point I want to make here is, friend, it’s less about you trying to take shortcuts about trying to get it perfect right now, if only I were just like the best speaker right now and if I could just, Heather, give me a fill in the blank around the hook, the teaser, the three things what to say, the how to do my CTA. That rhymed. Oh my gosh, I should probably make a real like making fun of that. But what I want you to do is that process that need for a template, that need for a script, is removing your critical thinking skills and your communication skill building.

31:21
What I want for you is not the quick hit of having a viral Instagram video because you were able to put together some kind of script that got a lot of attention. It’s not about the formula right now in this moment. If you have a problem with rambling, it’s because you have a communication problem and the only way that we’re going to make you a better communicator is intentional practice. So here’s what I want you to do. I didn’t say I was gonna make this very like skill building tactical, whackdecal, but here we go, my friend. What I want you to do is I want you to write down the top 10 questions and if you struggle with making these questions, start with the top 10 topics that you think are most important to your audience. Make them as specific as possible. What do they ask you about? What do they want to know about? What are like the things that you want to talk about? Make sure they’re relevant. But I want you to write down the top 10 things. Some of them might be general, some might be specific, do not worry about getting these right. I just want you to have 10 damn things on your list and then turn them into questions. And it could be something, if one thing you have on your list is like live video. Okay, let’s turn into question. Heather, why should I use live video my business? Or Heather what makes a great on live video? Heather, what are the biggest myths that people have around live video? You see how he just came up with like four questions? Four or three, I don’t remember but just on that one topic. Yeah.

32:49
So what I want you to do is from those topics you wrote down, could you branch out on each topic a few questions? And then okay, what am I going to ask you to do? I want you to tackle one question a day and this is what I call the daily ramble, said differently, the daily word vomit, but you can choose which version you want. But you have to get into the practice of intentionally rambling out to build your skills every single day. This is not one of those things that you can do like a half day, cram it in intensive and you’re gonna do it back to back to back to back to back and all sudden, you’re gonna be magical. That’ll make a little bit of progress, right? If you can dedicate a little bit more time out of the gate. But this is actually a habit to that we need to build. The habit isn’t necessarily the daily ramble. The habit is articulating out one specific thing every day in repetition. You’re gonna go through it, you’re gonna ask yourself the question, you’re gonna ramble it out, it’s gonna be garbage might have a little bit of gold in there but then you’re gonna pause and say, all right, let me do it again. You’re gonna take two, ramble it out. Take three, you’re gonna record it and then from there, you can listen to it back, find those golden fragments and then you can do it a final time but the point is, you’re going to spend five minutes. You don’t have to do more. I actually don’t recommend a ton more unless you’re preparing for something specifically. You can always ramble it out before a video, or a live, or an interview. Practice stuff out loud. If you’re thinking about what you’re going to say, that is not going to help you. It’s not going to build your skill the only way for you to become less rambly and more effective when you communicate, more charismatic, more captivating, compelling, what other fancy words can I use here?

34:40
The only way is for you to actually do it, and to expect that all the sudden you’re going to like absorb this in an episode, think about it and then all the sudden be like magnetic when you speak. My friend, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and a lot of frustration and a lot of self, a negative self talk because you’re gonna kick yourself in the ass after it doesn’t go as well as you had hoped. So do yourself a favor, and if you want to get better at rambling, start saying things out loud more. This can go beyond the daily ramble exercise. This can go into, say out loud when you reply to emails, read them out loud, write them out loud as you’re talking. It’ll actually make you a better or as you’re typing, it’ll actually make you a better email responder because when you say it like you write it like you say it. You’re going to sound more like a human. Whatever you can say out loud, do it out loud. If you can dictate notes to yourself and an audio app. If you could speak to a virtual assistant on Voxer or an audio app, obviously, use your processes to make sure you have some backup to written if that’s what’s needed. But the point is, how can you say more things out loud. That is the name of the game. That is how you’re going to start getting better at your communication skills. That is step number one. I hope that has given you a little fire under your ass if you’ve gotten kind of complacent with your vocality, with your voice. If you’ve gotten a little bit kind of rested in your laurels, as the expression goes, and you haven’t been doing a lot of practice, might I encourage you to not do that, maybe start saying some things out loud. Just five minutes a day. Gosh, I sound like an infomercial for like Jazzercise or like some kind of weird tool. Just five minutes a day, you too can be an excellent communicator but it’s true.

36:37
All right, I want to leave with this quote that I wrote down to myself over the weekend, and I just freaking love it. And it’s this, they say it’s cringe. I call it courage. And what I want to leave you with on this quote is we live in a world where so many of us are so fearful of looking like an idiot, sounding like an idiot. I’ve been made fun of and really I think what that stems from is sure. We are fearful of being hurt by the words of other people. But I really think that what we’re scared of is not truly being seen for who we are and the value we create in this world. And I think the reason why people are afraid of putting themselves out there, they’re afraid of, honestly, I think they’re afraid of putting so much practice and intention into their work is what if they put out their quote-unquote best work or the next version of their work and it gets made fun of, what if somebody calls it cringy. And my hope for you is you can focus less on what people will think and whether or not it’ll be cringy and I want you to applaud yourself for the courage to put it out there. Because I’ll tell you this, from my experience, I put out the cringy stuff, the cringe, I still do, like I’m laughing in this episode was about rambling and what I just do I just rambled on you for how long? But the point is, you have to get over this, like, what if it’s wrong? What if it’s bad? What if it’s cringy? And you just have to have the courage to put it out, anyways. That’s the one thing of probably many things, but the one thing I am the most proud of myself for is even when I’m like, oh my gosh, I don’t frickin know. I don’t know if they’re gonna like it. I don’t know if that was terrible. I have no forget glue, like what am I doing, but go anyways. Having the courage to click go, having the courage to click record, having the courage to raise your hand for being on a podcast or pitching yourself or telling your friend, yes, I would love to speak to your group, having the courage to stick your face and your name and your voice out there. Yeah, it’s probably going to be cringy especially when you start and you will be so damn proud because if you’re focused on the person who gets to listen to your message and the change that that will create for them, that’s why you’re doing it. When you’re focused on oh, it’s so cringy or you’re focused on oh, what will they think of me. Your whole orientation is focused on yourself. Stop thinking about you and start thinking about your audience. You have a duty to show up for them so let them call it cringe. We will call it courage. And my friend, I hope that this episode has helped you step into that courage a little bit more to start focusing on being less rambly. Start focusing on being more effective, more focused on the person that you’re serving so that you can just start getting more of your message out there.

39:50
I can’t wait to hear what you thought of this episode. Shoot me a DM as always on Instagram. I’m @theheathersager and friend, an I ask? It’s been a while since I’ve encouraged you. If you are a new listener of the show, or even if you’ve been around a while but you have never paused at this moment when I have said the best compliment that you could ever give me is to give a rating, ideally five stars on Apple podcasts and leave an actual review. Your words don’t only mean to me, the world to me and my team. We all read them and we celebrate them every single week when new reviews come in but it also is a huge indicator for other people of whether or not this is worth their time. So if you think that other entrepreneurs, other people who have big hearts that are ready to be also courageous and sharing their message. If you would be so kind, could you take just two minutes today and leave a review, it would mean the world. Alright, friend, I will see you again on next week’s episode.