The Power To Speak Naked: On Leadership And Public Speaking With Sean Tyler Foley
Feeling like your leadership style is more "suffocating sweater" than "power suit"? This episode rips off the mask with communication expert and author of the bestselling "The Power to Speak Naked," Sean Tyler Foley. Tyler dives deep with host Sean Olson on how his unique childhood with multiple father figures shaped his leadership approach, and why finding the right mentors is crucial. But what does "Speak Naked" even mean? Tyler breaks it down: it's about ditching the scripts, embracing vulnerability, and leading with authenticity. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to ditch the bad leadership habits they inherited, learn from great mentors, and unlock the power of public speaking. You'll walk away with actionable tips to inspire your team and become the leader you were always meant to be.
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The Power To Speak Naked: On Leadership And Public Speaking With Sean Tyler Foley
This is the show where you hear the real stories of normal people like you who have become extraordinary leaders. You’ll learn some valuable lessons from their lives, lessons you can apply to become the best leader that you were created to be. When you become an intentional leader, lives are changed. Thank you for joining us. It is my privilege to introduce our guest, Tyler Foley. Tyler is the Managing Director of Total Buy-in and is the author of the number one best-selling book, The Power to Speak Naked.
Tyler, welcome to the show. It’s great to see you.
It’s a pleasure as always to have our conversations. I’m looking forward to this one.
Getting To Know Tyler
As you’re aware of the show, we begin every episode with our guests telling their stories, their progression through their professional careers, and even more importantly, leadership lessons learned along the way. Tell us about you. Your full name is Sean Tyler Foley. It’s spelled the same as me, so we had that in common. That’s a great place to go. Tell us about your journey and what you’ve learned in leadership.
I have had a lot of leadership lessons in life, both from leadership roles and from roles of seeing incredible leaders in action. My father passed away when I was six years old. As tragic as that was, I had the privilege of then having a community come together to raise me. I didn’t have one father figure. I had several, at least a dozen, very thoughtful men, powerful men, smart men, and leaders within my community who came together to help raise me and be there for me. I’ve learned leadership lessons from a very early age from incredible human beings who stepped up to help guide me in my life.
When my father passed away, one of the things that I got involved with very quickly was professional acting, first on stage and then in film and television. I got to see leadership firsthand, good leadership and bad leadership, from the directors that I would work with and styles that really mattered. When you get into a business very early on in your life, you tend to retire early on in your life. I retired at 25 and went back to school. I have an engineering discipline under my belt.
When I started my first business, I started it with an incredible mentor and businesswoman. Unfortunately, she passed away very early on in that venture. We were only three years into it when she passed away. I then got to work with other great leaders who helped me pick up the pieces afterward. Some of the best leadership skills and leadership advice that I’ve learned are learned from people who are doing it at a higher level than you. Replicate the things that are working for them and work for you, and then innovate your own path for the things that they haven’t quite solved.
Speak Naked: Some of the best leadership skills and advice is to learn from people who are doing it at a higher level than you.
Best And Worst Leadership
A lot of our audience hear about actors, acting, and directors. We hear good, bad, and otherwise. You’ve been there, done that. On that front, give us quick stories of the best leadership you saw from a director as a kid and the worst leadership you saw from a director or the traits.
The best leadership that I ever saw was a director I’m still in contact with. I went to a fine arts high school. It was like Fame, only not in New York. It was in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada. Okay. The director, Jim, was very smart. In fact, he has a degree in Psychology. First of all, they talk about good leaders having a good emotional IQ and a high Emotional Intelligence. Jim’s EI was through the roof. He really had a pulse on where all of us were as performers, as students, and as human individuals. His ability to cast because of that was good because he understood interpersonal dynamics. Having a Psychology degree probably helped him a lot too. He had a Bachelor of Fine Arts and then a Psychology degree.
He challenged you and gave a really good technical direction. In theater, it’s called blocking where you have to move someplace. He would only tell somebody to move if it served a purpose. Otherwise, you had the freedom to explore. He also had a good ability to give very clear metrics and direction of the end goal. What was the purpose? Why were we together?
He created an amazing culture. It was almost cultish in its indoctrination. With good reason, cults get a bad name, but when you are building an organization, you need to have a little bit of the psychology of a cult behind it. You need people to buy into the culture that you are trying to put together. He did an incredible job of creating this community.
I am still in touch with at least 25 of the performers that I worked with in my teens. We’re talking 14, 15, 16, and 17 when I was in the main stage program. I am coming up on my 45th birthday. We had our 25-year reunion a few years ago from my graduating class, and it was an easy thing to do. It wasn’t awkward. It wasn’t weird. We knew everybody. We were like, “We’re getting together Tuesday, right?”
I’m still very close with a lot of the people that I went through, and that is a testament to the leadership that Jim put together. He led that program and led it for many years. When he left the school, the program collapsed. That is a testament to his leadership as well. It took them almost another fifteen years before they got somebody back in who led the program back to the quality that it was in the early and late ‘90s when I was involved with it.
Great lessons there about emotional intelligence and creating that culture where people not only are drawn in, but they’re drawn to one another. It carries on. Give us a horror story from a director.
No names?
No names.
I remember working on a very low-budget film, and it was chaotic. It was absolute chaos. Nobody knew what they were doing. The script was constantly being rewritten. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen, and the director didn’t have a good handle on it. The director had bitten off more than they could chew. They didn’t have a clear direction of what they wanted the film to be.
I remember showing up to set. We get a call sheet. It says, “These are the things that you’re going to film that day.” You would study your lines based on the sides or the little bit of script that was tacked to the back of it. I remember on the 4th or 5th day of shooting, realizing that memorizing my signs was pointless because not only was the script going to change, but the film order was going to change. They were going to shoot different scenes.
We would be getting freshly printed blue copy, yellow copy, orange copy, or a magenta copy. With every new revision, they changed the color of the copy. I have never ever before or since, because I keep everything in a binder to try to keep everything in order, had such a rainbow script. Every color of paper you could possibly imagine was shoved into this binder. It was chaotic.
One of the things that I learned from that was you need to have a clear vision and a clear direction because you need to be able to communicate that vision and direction to the people you are marshaling to get them on. If you don’t know where you’re going, forget the analogy of a rowboat and everybody rowing together. Do you know on the ponds where they have those swan boats with the pedals?
Yes.
I felt like we were 50 swan boats all tied together at the tail. We were all paddling frantically away from one another, trying to find our own mate. Whoever was paddling the hardest was the one who was going to guide the direction of the mass for that moment. It’s not even that day, but that moment. Somebody would tire and then somebody else would take over. It was chaotic. If you don’t have a clear vision and a clear direction and you can’t very succinctly, in 1 or 2 words even, communicate your vision, you will not succeed.
Have a clear vision and a clear direction. If you can't very succinctly, in one or two words communicate your vision, you will not succeed.
I love the picture of those boats though because it’s the opposite of alignment. You’ve seen that where there are arrows going everywhere versus that large arrow where we’re all going in the same direction. It plays in. You talked about when you got out of that, you opened up a business with a partner, and, unfortunately, she passed. What industry were you in there?
From Mapping To Safety
It was different than what I was doing before. My engineering background is in civil engineering, specifically in geomatics, which is earth study. I specialized in photogrammetry. For anybody who’s ever turned on satellite view on Google Maps, there is no 3D in those. It’s a 2D picture. It’s a very complex technical process to make it happen called photogrammetry. That was what we specialized in. We had aerial photography, and then we did digital elevation models that we pulled from that imagery. Eventually, we moved into lidar. At the very end, we were starting to get into mobile interior mapping.
In 2024, your realtor can probably call somebody, and for a couple hundred bucks, they will come in, scan the inside of your house, and do the really cool walkthroughs and everything. In 2004, that was a remarkably hard process to do. We were the 1st company in Canada and 1 of 3 in North America to do it. The cart alone to be able to go in, have these lasers come and scan the rooms, take the pictures at the same time, and be able to 3D positionally drop your house into Google so that it knew where you were was a lot.
Ours was $1.5 million. It had an IMU or Inertial Measurement Unit in it that was so precise that it was the same IMU that they used in the scud missiles so that a scud missile could find the bunker and go through it. The problem with that was because it was an IMU that was so precise and could be put into a scud missile and guided to a bunker, we had to get top-secret clearance to have this piece of equipment. We had to get it from both the US and Canada because I operate in Canada. I went through a lot to be able to do that. That was the business. We had a fleet of three planes. They would run and do the aerial photography, and then we got this cart. We would push it around on the inside of buildings and map it.
That comes to an abrupt end, unfortunately, because of tragedy. How did you pick up the pieces? Where’d you go next?
I’m lucky I surround myself with people who are very caring and always have. It takes a village to raise people. One of the things that people forget is that we’re constantly growing, so we’re constantly being raised. I’m always surrounding myself with people who I care for and care back for me. One of my friends, Matt, owns a business with his father who is another incredible leader. If I could give a shout-out to Eric McLean who is one of the best employers I’ve ever worked with.
One of the things that people forget is that we're constantly growing, so we're constantly being raised.
I’ve been very blessed. I’ve had very good employers when I have decided to be employed because I have been self-employed for three-quarters of my life. It’s 30 of my 40 working years. I’ve done it on my own. For the decade, cumulatively, where I have either worked with somebody or worked for somebody, I’ve had good leadership. Eric and Matt were two incredible people. Matt was my best man at my wedding.
My business collapsed overnight. My partner wasn’t feeling good on a Friday. She went into the hospital and then never came out of the hospital. She passed away on Sunday. We didn’t have the right director’s insurance in place. Planes and lasers are expensive, so I had no way of recouping it. Also, I had invested everything, my time, my money, my energy, and my life. My wife and I picked the condo that we were living in because it was two blocks away from the office and the airstrip. It really impacted my life. I wanted to crawl into a hole and die myself. Matt came along and was like, “I don’t know if you know this, but you have a couple of skills that would make you a really good safety officer.”
The business that I was running, the mapping firm, your primary clients when you’re doing that kind of work are the government and oil and gas, both of which will always insist that you have a safety program in place. I had to go and get the training to do this safety program. Matt came to me and was like, “You’ve got what they refer to as a COR, a Certificate of Recognition for your business, which means you have XYZ training. If you take these 3 or 4 extra classes, you will have your National Construction Safety Officer Designation. I will pay for that.
I need a safety manager for a project that I have up north in the oil sands. We’re building a large structure up there. We’ve been contracted to do the electrical work for it. I will pay for you to do these courses. You get your designation and I’ll give you a job. It’ll work,” and it worked out. He saw something in me that I didn’t see. He has a very smart business mind. He is somebody who knows the resources that are there. He can marshal people and give them direction in a kind and loving way too. It gave me a purpose and something to do. I fell into this career and I love it.
Although I don’t work for Matt and Eric anymore because it was only going to be a contract position while they were involved in that multi-billion-dollar project infrastructure, which was great for the resume, I have continued on with the safety, He was right. I did fall in love with it, and I’m good at it. I understood a lot of safety from the work that I was doing in film and television. Particularly when I got into my early twenties, I started moving into stunt work. A lot of what I have known from safety, I learned in stunt work before I realized that it was part of safety.
Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for being vulnerable with some difficult things. Part of what I love about that is you had good relationships with people. Matt already knew you and such. Most of us have all had those tragic events. It may not be the death of someone. It may be getting fired. It may be a divorce or whatever the case is. When tragedy hits and people try to come alongside us, so many of us reject it.
I think about your story where Matt comes alongside and is like, “I see something in you for this industry. I need you to take some courses and stuff.” It would’ve been as easy to say, “I’m not going there. I don’t want to learn something new.” Part of that story that I love is not only that Matt came alongside and said, “I see something and paved the way,” but you were humble enough to accept it. I see that a lot of people in their careers elevate because they’re open to other people having a part to play.
Lessons From Acting
Growth comes outside of your comfort zone, for sure. I’ve been in contraction modes. I know what it feels like. I knew how easily it would’ve been for me to slip into a depression, especially because one of the reasons why I had retired from acting was I had become complacent with it. The work was starting to slow down. If you ever go to and look at my IMDb page, Internet Movie Database, you can see I was really active from about 2001 to 2004.
The work started slowing down and I had lost satisfaction in it. It was great because, for a long time, it was play. It was fun. Find something that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s what I thought acting was going to be. Eventually, it became a job. There was the hustle and the grind of going to auditions. I was lucky because I was a working actor. I didn’t need to do anything else but perform. In fact, even when I went and got a real job after retiring from acting, I never earned as much as I did in acting for almost a decade. It was a long while. In fact, Matt’s job was the first one where I got a tax slip and omitted my taxes where I claimed that I made more money in a year than I did from acting.
It was a part of me where I knew what that depression felt like when I started to not work very regularly in performing, especially when a lot of your self-worth is tied to somebody else’s opinion of your performance. That was one of the greatest lessons that I learned too because I’ve worked on both sides of the camera. That was probably one of the smartest things that I ever did as an actor. It was to work as a reader, a casting assistant, and a director.
Your talent has nothing to do with you booking the job. It’s important for people who are doing anything, whether that is going on a job interview, looking for a promotion, or starting their own company and they’re looking for capital, the fact that you are in the room proves that you have the talent or the skillset to be there because you are in consideration.
Getting the job has 1,000 factors outside of your talent and your skill. That was a lesson that I had to learn a few times before it really stuck. Especially when you’re putting your all into these performances and you’re creating these characters and then somebody else gets it, you’re like, “Wasn’t I good enough?” It had nothing to do with it.
I remember being a reader for a project that was being cast. You get to read with all of these different performers. This actor had come in to read for the lead female role, and she was phenomenal. I’ve been reading with probably 100 different people and probably 15 or 20 for this role. She came in and it was, first of all, instant chemistry. That scene flowed. She knew her lines. I had been reading for so long that I knew all the lines. We performed the scene.
I remember at the end of it, I had goosebumps. I remember turning to the casting director and she was like, “Wow.” We looked over at the producer and he was like, “Wow.” We looked over at the director and he was marking on his thing. He goes, “Next.” We’re like, “That’s her, right?” He goes, “No, she reminds me of my ex,” and then scratches it off. She didn’t get the role. I know the actress who did get the role, and she’s good, but she wasn’t that good. She got the role because she was second best, but the best reminded the director of his ex and he didn’t want to work with her.
There are some great leadership lessons in that stuff though. I appreciate that story because when people are going for a promotion, applying for a new job, or whatever the case is, no devastates people. What we have to realize is oftentimes, we’re probably being saved from a difficult scenario. If you’re not ready for that position but you might think you’re ready, they don’t. Had they given it to you, you might have failed. That would’ve been worse than not getting the position. That role, maybe that wasn’t the right role for where she needed to go or where you needed to go. It is having that mindset that no doesn’t mean no or no means not this, or maybe even not this now.
You bring up a good point. The funny thing about that movie is that it was stalled in production. It was on hiatus for almost four and a half years. We did the casting thing and then it didn’t go anywhere, so that other actress was freed up to go and do some of the other work. Tony Robbins says it incredibly well. He says, “Life happens for you, not to you,” and, “Every no is a yes somewhere else.”
To some people, that’s a little froufrou, a little woo-woo, or a little out there, but I have seen time and time again that the opportunities that are supposed to come to you, will, and they will represent themselves if you’re not catching that lesson. I know that from both sides of it where I’ll try to pursue a thing and I’ll be running this way and I’ll keep getting knocked down. I’m like, “I want this,” and the universe is like, “That’s not for you. Stop it.” A[1] lot of times, I get knocked down straight into this door. I’m trying to go through this one and I keep getting smashed over to this one. You walk through that door, and all of a sudden, it’s a hallway to the best life that you’re ever going to lead.
Total Buy In
I want to hit some of your story so we can move past it because I want to get to your book. I know that you learned all the safety from Matt. You said the other guy’s name was Eric. You’re Managing Director of Total Buy-in which is what industry?
It’s a safety consulting industry. It’s a great gig. I love it. I’ve got a great team that I work with too. That’s the nice thing. I’ve been able to take all of these leadership skills that I’ve learned from incredible leaders over the years and try to replicate those things for my team. I’m very blessed that I’ve had a good core group that has stuck with me even through COVID.
That was probably one of the biggest challenges for me as a leader. It was making sure that my people were taken care of sometimes to my own detriment because there was a good 6 to 9 months there where I was paying other people and I wasn’t getting a paycheck at all. I don’t know that they knew that, and I don’t know that they need to know that. I needed to make sure that they were taken care of because if somebody’s going to invest 110% into me, I’m going to invest 110% into them. That’s the only way to have a good solid core within your organization.
The nice thing is I poke my head in. Most of the revenue that Tyler takes in comes from the speaking, the book, and some of the passive income streams that have been set up. My active input ones are public speaking and safety consulting. I have a really good team of auditors and program developers where I poke my head in once a quarter and I’m like, “How are we doing?” They’re like, “Good. Go away,” and I’m like, “Okay.” If I need to do any course correction, it’s a, “Can we try this?” They’re like, “Okay,” and then off we go.
That’s the definition of that old phrase that the best leaders work themselves out of a job. Congrats. You’ve done it.
Thank you.
The Power To Speak Naked
That’s there. Let’s dive in. You wrote this book, The Power to Speak Naked, which is a catchy title that’s going to get people’s attention. You speak a lot. I know for our readers, most people would list 1 of their top 10 fears in life as public speaking. What drove you to write the book? Dive into a little bit about the premise of it, your view about public speaking, and why people are afraid of it.
The Power to Speak Naked: How to Speak with Confidence, Communicate Effectively, and Win Your Audience
I wrote the book because, and the numbers vary depending on the poll and the study that’s done, on average, 70% of Americans, North Americans, or the world will claim that they have anxiety around public speaking. When they rank it, public speaking comes in above the fear of death. More people are afraid of public speaking than they are of dying. I kept reading that stat going, “That can’t be true.”
I wrote the book because it’s not. That is not the case. People are not afraid of public speaking. If we were afraid of public speaking, commerce as we know it would collapse. I can prove this by asking everyone in the audience to think of when was the last time you were at a restaurant. If you are able to order food in a restaurant, you are not afraid of public speaking. If you didn’t know your wait staff, you aren’t afraid of speaking to strangers either.
This notion that we’re afraid to speak in public or we’re afraid to speak to strangers, or we’re afraid to ask for what we want is null and void if you’ve ever been to a restaurant, ordered food, and got it delivered to your table. That’s because you were speaking in public, you were speaking to a stranger, and you asked for what you wanted and it came.
That makes sense.
I[2] can hear the objections over the internet. I can hear the wheels driving and the audience screaming, “Nobody’s looking at me when I’m in a restaurant.” If that is your rationale, then you need to acknowledge that you’re not afraid of public speaking. You have to quit saying that because it’s a false narrative. What you’re afraid of is public judgment.
My book is designed to help people get over the fear of public judgment, not the fear of public speaking. That’s why it’s called The Power to Speak Naked because our biggest fear is standing up completely nude or completely raw where people can see the true authentic us. If that’s genuinely what we’re afraid of, that’s an easy thing to solve.
The true, raw, real, and naked you is the best version of you. The stripped-down version of you is the one that the audience is going to identify the most with. The book is a straight deconstruction of why you don’t need to be afraid of public judgment, which is really what people are afraid of when they say they’re afraid of public speaking.
It’s an interesting fact when we watch people and marvel at what they’re thinking, what they’re saying, and their expertise, but we view, “If it was me up there, it’s the opposite.”
You made the greatest point too. If you are sitting in an audience and here I am watching Sean deliver a talk on leadership, I’m there willingly and I want to be informed, engaged, and entertained. I want your audience to think about it. Did they tune in thinking, “I hope this episode sucks. I really hope Sean bombs this interview. I hope the guest is atrocious, forgets everything he has to say, and makes no clear point. In fact, there are 1,000 other public speaker coaches out there. There’s no way this guy has anything new to say on the topic. I will take nothing away from this.” Nobody thinks that. Yet, that is the negative story that we tell ourselves that the audience is thinking when we get up on stage. It’s simply not the case. The audience is on your side.
If you have that platform, you are the expert. We don’t ask the second best to come on our shows, to come on our stages, or to stand up in the boardroom. If your boss has asked you to present Q3 sales statistics, it’s because nobody else can do it better than you. If people start to embrace that mindset that they are the expert, that they are the authority for that bit, and that the audience is on their side, it really starts to ease some of that.
The great thing is if you can master this one skillset, it’s ranked as one of the top soft skills for leadership. It has a direct influence on your earning potential and your potential for getting a promotion within your work. It’s a 10% boost in your ability to get a promotion and a 15% increase in your wage-earning potential if you can master the skillset of public speaking.
I don’t want to give up everything in the book because I want people to buy it and I want people to bring you in to speak to their organizations about this concept, but give us a teaser. Give us one of those key tips to overcoming the fear of public judgment.
We started to address some of them, and that is to really understand that the audience is on your side. One of the things that we go over in the book is a lot of the mental prep that goes into that. What does that specifically look like? I have an entire chapter dedicated to preparation and how to properly mentally prepare. I will tell your audience this. They’re probably preparing wrong.
Speak Naked: The audience is on your side. If you have that platform, you are the expert.
If you think the idea of prepping for a speech is to spend a week or two or a month memorizing word for word the thing that you’re going to say, you are doing everybody in this scenario a disservice. You’re doing yourself a disservice. You’re doing your audience a disservice. You’re doing the person who asked you to be there a disservice. We have to remember that those are the three bodies that are involved with that. We need to address all of their needs, your needs, the promoters’ needs, your boss’ needs, or whoever is giving you that platform, and the audience. All three need to be considered. I show them how to properly prepare. The biggest secret of the book is that it is not memorizing a script. If you’re memorizing a script, you are doing it wrong.
I’ve talked to a lot of people about this through our executive coaching because it comes up a lot, the concept of executive presence and presentation. I tell them, “You have to be prepared enough to wing it.” In addition to that, people are always like, “I always get butterflies,” which is probably that fear of public judgment, saying the wrong thing, and messing up. If you’re trying to recall what you memorized, you’ll mess up. It doesn’t work that way. I heard this from somebody. I don’t know who. I won’t take credit for it. You will always have butterflies when you speak publicly, but if you’re prepared, they fly in formation.
I love that analogy. It’s true. The nice thing is if you are prepared, you know your material. That’s the key critical difference. You need to know what you’re saying to the point where you can say it 1,000 times or 1,000 different ways and still have the same message come across. Brian Tracy says it best. He says, “You’re not an expert in something until you can use twenty words for each word that you’re going to use.” It’s an overcomplication of a simple concept.
You need to know what you're saying to the point where you can say it a thousand times in a thousand different ways and still have the same message come across.
I have three basic stories that I tell in all of my presentations. There’s the restaurant, and then when I remember the time that I got stage fright. Stage fright is real. The fear of public speaking is not real. It’s those butterflies getting out of control, turning to moss, and eating your insides versus being beautiful and flying in formation. I often tell the story of how I got to be public speaking. Usually, I’m talking about a stunt that went really well.
I’m going to tell those stories over and over again, but every time somebody comes and hears them, they hear them differently. I say them slightly differently. I’m informed by the audience in the conversation that we’re having. It’s important that people understand that the prep work, being able to tell your story your way is one of the key critical factors. I do mean your story because nobody knows your story better than you. You are the expert on your life. I always tell people, “No matter what you’re talking about, what if it is Q3 sales statistics? Tie it back to you. What is your reason why you care for this? If you can’t impress other people why you care about this, they won’t care about this.”
I love that. The preparation is necessary, but you can’t overdo it. That’s where people mess up a lot. Honestly, readers, to let you in on something here, we’re living this out. Tyler and I recorded an episode not long ago. Technically, it was garbage because of some glitches and things like that. This is our second pass at it. When we started, we both agreed, “Let’s not try to remember what we talked about. Let’s talk. If we try to remember what we talked about, it becomes mechanical, it becomes fake, and it doesn’t take us anywhere.”
I’m so glad you used the phrase, “Doesn’t take us anywhere,” because that’s how I like to give people the analogy of any presentation they’re giving. Your job is to take your audience on a journey. You need to take them from point A to point B. When we memorize a script, we are locking our audience into one mode of transportation taking one route. That’s all they get.
If there is a weather event[3] and the flight gets canceled, you forget your script. You do not take your audience from A to B. Do the proper prep work where you’re like, “This is the journey we need to get to. What are the possible ways we could get there? We could take the plane. We could take the car. We could take a trail ride on a horse. We could walk. We could hike. We could snowshoe. We could motorbike. What are the stops that we potentially could take? If we’re going to do a walk, we’re going to need to refuel regularly.”
I show people that I can do the same presentation in 60 seconds that I can do in 5 days. I know that because I have a five-day workshop where people come to really hone in and master public speaking. The material there is the same material that you and I have discussed right here. I can give people a snippet in a networking event in 60 seconds the power of overcoming the fear of public speaking. We can drop that.
It’s the same journey taking you from A to B. It is, one, I am putting us in the concord and we’re going there at rock speed, and the other one is a meandering trail where we get to stop, look at some of the nature along the way, and I can explain to you more in-depth. If I lock us into the ticket and we are on United Flight 225 from Calgary to LA, and the flight goes mechanical, we don’t go. That’s the problem with memorizing a script. It’s locking you into these train tracks, and if via rail gets tipped, you’re not going.
It doesn’t allow you to be audience-centric. As you were talking about that, one weird thought popped into my head. You talked about the 1-hour version versus the 5-day version. The audience knows what they’re there for too. They’re not expecting a 5-day depth in a 1-hour session. They’re expecting an overview. You’ve taken them on the journey, but they know they’re going to leave with questions because you only had an hour.
Lead More Effectively
If it’s five days, they should be leaving saying, “I get it 100%. I have no questions because we covered it.” Relax on that because the audience has their thoughts too. We could go all day. For the sake of time, we can’t. You are aware that at the end of every episode of the show, we ask the same question. We want that quick tip. Here’s the question. What is something our audience can do intentionally to lead more effectively?
The best leaders are the vulnerable leaders, the ones who recognize that they don’t know everything. At the same time, they’re the ones who know themselves the best. I would strongly encourage everyone who is reading that no matter where you are in your leadership journey, first of all, find the power in your own story. If you are afraid to tell people who the real you is, then you are holding yourself back as a leader. When you can find the courage to step forward and say, “This is who I am. This is what I believe in. These are my convictions and why,” that is when you’ll bring people onto your side.
Speak Naked: No matter where you are in your leadership journey, find the power in your own story. If you're afraid to tell people who the real you are, then you are holding yourself back as a leader.
You may not impress everybody. There are going to be people who are like, “I don’t agree with you.” That’s a powerful thing to have as a leader too because if that’s somebody that you need to bring onto your side, you can start to explore the rationale and the reasons why. You can have a dialogue. In my case, I find that that’s the quick way to separate out the people who you’re not trying to lead. That’s not who you need to have on your team. It’s really important that people find that story.
Here is a quick little example of that if you want to know it in the real world that we can all understand. I’ve realized for some of us, this is going to be a long time ago. This is when you were in school. Your teacher handed out the exam and everybody started working on it. There was this feeling in the room of unease. You can feel it. It’s palpable.
Finally, one person puts their hand up and says, “Teacher, question 16, I’ve done it 4 or 5 times. 2 plus 2 I’m pretty sure equals 4, but the options that we have here are 3, 5, 6, and 7. There is no four in my A, B, C, or D. I’m pretty sure 2 plus 2 is 4. Am I missing something? The teacher looks and says, “I’m sorry. When I was doing this, I made a mistake. On my answer key, the correct answer is going to be B. I recognize 5 is not the correct answer, so either write in 4 or mark B on your test. Either way, you’re going to be right even though I recognize that five is not the correct answer.” They say that, and then what happens to the whole rest of the room? Everybody goes, “I was worried about that. I was going to skip it. I didn’t know. I put down whatever.” You then have the one person who’s like, “4 plus 4 isn’t 5?”
Exactly. They’re like, “I thought that was.”
Either way, the whole class went, “Oh.” It was the person who had the bravery to say that they didn’t understand or they had the question, or they wanted to do it. It was the person who spoke up first that was the leader. Everybody turned to them and went, “Thank you.” They weren’t any smarter than anybody else in the room. They didn’t have any skillset better than anyone else in the room. The only thing that differentiated them was they had the bravery to speak up. If you want to be a leader, you’ve got to find the bravery to speak up and say who you are and embrace that. When you can do that, your leadership potential is exponential.
That’s a great challenge, readers. I hope you take him up on that. Tyler, I appreciate that. It’s great to have you on the show. It’s great to see you. Thanks for all you do. We will chat again sometime soon.
Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
