Welcome to Meaningful Work, Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal people here in Sydney, Australia.
In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.
This is a call to the audacious, the curious and the brave. To those people who know that they have been hiding in plain sight, censoring themselves, suppressing their greatness and settling for good enough.
Your desire to be liked is killing your impact because your desire to be liked is blending out your messaging. It is dulling down your marketing. And it means that you are playing it safe and you know it because of course, the enduring effect of overthinking and censoring ourselves. Don’t just go into marketing that goes way beyond marketing, right? That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
So in today’s episode, I’ve got a big remit. We’re talking about generosity, AI and self-censorship. I’m going to attempt to shoehorn so much into the next 20 or so minutes. It is ambitious, but I am nothing if not delusionally optimistic. I’m also going to be talking about my upcoming Ignite Visibility Accelerator and my intention in this space with Ignite is to guide you into a place where you are no longer censoring the vision that you hold for your life and your work and your purpose.
I’m creating a space to break free from the fear of judgment, rejection, and getting it wrong because I am sick to death of watching people who I know are brilliant, and when we are face to face together, they say the most amazing things. They really are hand-on-heart geniuses. They are brilliant at what they do. And yet there is no evidence of this, no evidence. And when it comes to talking online, when it comes to putting themselves out there on the internet, they are playing it safe. And they know that they do. They really do know that because we can only deny and delude ourselves for so long, right?
So we’re going to talk about how are we going to dig deep and challenge ourselves to create an uncensored vision for the future. Because if we legit want to be known as experts and leaders in our field, this is undeniable. This is non-negotiable. We need to understand where our messaging meets leadership. And this is what Ignite is all about.
There are a lot of business owners hiding from the internet, hiding from other people, suffering from website shame or branding shame. And it makes sense, right? Because their branding or their website, their marketing is not accurately representing themselves. So it’s understandable, right? Because you’ve outgrown your own branding. And hopefully this is something that you do, you outgrow your former vision, things that you thought were great in the past upon reflection as you become better and better and better. We realise actually our tastes are better, our tastes are more refined. We’ve evolved our thinking, we’ve evolved our vision and our mission and our brand.
We’ve outgrown our ideal client group. People that we used to adore are now hiring and you know, not a great fit for us anymore. We realised that what we thought was good was actually pretty average. And so of course we’re going to change and evolve. It’s normal to change and evolve. Website shame and branding shame makes sense, right?
So riddle me this, why then do some business owners, and I’m thinking about one business owner in particular, you know, done a brilliant job investing good money into getting a brand new brand happening. Beautiful photographs, perhaps they’ve invested in some really gorgeous outfits as well to show off their best selves. And they’re looking pretty damn fine. Thank you very much. But they’re failing to actually promote this new look or new brand or new image.
I see this happening all the time as well. And it doesn’t really make a lot of logical sense, right? At first glance, it’s a bit confusing. Why are we doing this? We’ve just, we’ve just invested for a good reason. It makes no sense to be, you know, embarrassed to then promote our new image. And this is what I mean when I say Ignite is where leadership meets messaging because for the person, for the owner who has a new amazing branding but is still hiding, still self-conscious, highly self-conscious, overthinking everything, obsessed what other people are thinking of them. Or perhaps the owner is in this liminal space in growth. They’re not this, they’re not that, they’re in-betwixt and in-between. They’re in that pause before they progress forward.
That is the point of Ignite. Ignite resolves this weird dissonance and shortens this liminal space because what we’re doing here is we’re embodying our message so that our words, our thoughts, our beliefs, our actions all stack up. There’s no weird dissonance. There’s no weird energy. And also on behalf of the audience, right?
Because the audience, people can tell. If you’re not really walking your talk, we can see that we can smell it on you. People are smarter than we give them credit for, especially with digital marketing. So I want to share a quote from John Cleese. Apologies to John. I’m going to massacre this quote. I’m sorry about that. Hopefully, you know, the legend that is John Cleese already, but he said in relation to high creativity, he said that high creativity is the ability to play.
And that there’s no such thing as making a mistake when you’re creative, right? Because if you’re playing, there’s no such thing as making mistakes in play. You’re 100 % in the moment. There’s no disconnect between you, the thinker and you, the actor. There’s just pure reaction and response due to being in the moment.
Now, again, apologies to John Cleese. He probably didn’t word it quite like that. But that is what I remember that is the effect of what he was saying. Apologies if I misrepresented him. You can check out his book on creativity, which is called a short and cheerful guide. Should be cheerful, right? Because how can we be creative if we’re not cheerful? So then the problem of course becomes that humans are excellent at overthinking things. We love over-complicating. We’re fantastic at bringing our ego far too much into our lives.
We’re excellent at choosing self absorption and overthinking over mindfulness. So what does it mean then to be highly creative in our, not just our messaging and our marketing, but also in our use of AI and in our leadership as well. How do we use AI effectively without outsourcing and losing the best pieces of ourself. How do we evolve our psychology in the age of AI without losing our human beauty and strengths? And what are the skills needed in the age of AI and what can we embrace? What should we avoid?
So I want to tell a story to illustrate this point.
Two years ago, thereabouts, I was working with a client and they had invested a lot of time and energy and money working with AI consultants to train up an AI tool to basically do their job for them and be able to remove themselves from the equation so that they could focus more on client relations and business development sales, professional development, and less time on the tools on the keyboard doing the heavy lifting.
Now this is a really smart move, right? Because this person is a consultant, they’re a knowledge worker. You know, they’re not creating leverage through building a team. They’re creating leverage through creating assets and leveraging their ideas. So they were training up this AI tool to do it for them. But the problem became that they got to the point where it was all looking great and they were ready to remove themselves from the equation, except that this is where they had to hand it over to their assistant to manage. And they were really struggling. All of a sudden the project came to a grinding halt.
Now you can hear the frustration of this, right? You can see the glance that it makes no sense. And yet it does make sense from a human perspective, because you put all this time and investment into building a tool to do your job for you and yet you’ve still got the same human psychology. You’re still operating with the same system that tells you, hey, I’m going to be ripped off. The person’s going to take my tool and use it from under me. They’re going to steal my clients. They’re going to steal market share, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So this is where we need to develop our psychology, develop our skills, develop our leadership because these are the exact same concerns. Like, yes, there’s AI involved in this story. But these are the exact same concerns that we might have when we hire people. And a lot of business owners still have, you know, there are business owners I work with who are long established. They’ve got team, they’ve long had team and they don’t trust them. They, they display poor leadership because they’re hiring people who aren’t better than them. They’re hiring people that are less than them. People who are dependent on them, people who are a little bit broken, people who can do the grunt work, but not the strategic thinking or the creative thinking. So in effect, they’re outsourcing to other people when they could be automating and streamlining and reducing this role entirely, or of course, developing their leadership.
So that is a big topic for today. And you know, a lot of questions I’m asking, you know, on a lot of kind of things. And I’m attempting to keep this under 20 minutes. So wish me luck. It’s a huge remit for a 20 minute episode. So in our last episode, we talked about selfish marketing and I talked about how self-censorship is a silent struggle and it’s holding so many business owners back. And I should preface this by saying it is something that is definitely prevalent among my ideal client group, which are socially minded, highly conscientious values based for purpose, justice-oriented people. People who hold their values close to them. Sometimes they’re social enterprises or they call themselves something slightly different, but they’re guided by their integrity. They do not want to compromise their values in the pursuit of profit. And these are the people again, who’s voices I want to hear a hell of a lot more of, because this is the danger when our psychology is not keeping up with the technology, our leadership is not keeping up with our business growth.
This is the danger when we’re overthinking everything, when we’re censoring ourselves, when we’re letting cancel culture just squat in our brains and take up way too much real estate.
The number one question that I had from business owners when I used to teach around Australia, many years ago, I flew myself from Brisbane to Perth to Sydney to Melbourne to Byron to Adelaide and back again. And the question and conundrum that I kept coming up against was how much is too much? How can I, how do I give it all away and how do I give it all away and people are still going to come back and buy?
I also saw this a lot when people were panicking in March, 2020. Everybody would, was kind of assuming in March, 2020 that the internet had just been invented. That YouTube was brand new, you know, that, that we hadn’t had access to information, to free information for as long as we had.
So we’re talking through the lens of AI today, but this is very similar. This is not a new thing. This is an old thing, and we’ve got a few more factors now. We have, as I said, cancel culture where we censor ourselves now even more than we otherwise would. And this affects highly principled people more. And what happens then, riddle me this, is that people with low integrity get louder while those with high integrity get quieter until they’re almost mute.
Now, your desire to be liked is very, very human are pack animals. We belong in groups. We have always operated in groups. It is terribly, terribly human, deeply human. It is commendable and it is lovely, but it is killing your ability to take your work bigger, broader, deeper, and to have it impact more people’s lives.
It’s stopping you from changing the lives of thousands because being the town’s best kept secret is not helping anyone. And so how do we do this? If I, can’t help myself. have to get a little bit practical. So let’s take it into tactics for a moment. There are a lot of business owners and leaders who are still obsessed with the final results. And what this looks like is when they go to create a piece of content and maybe it’s a keynote speech or maybe it’s a white paper or maybe it’s a good chunky article. Perhaps, you know, they’ve been invited to write in media, in mainstream media, and they approach it as like the definitive PhD on the topic. And they’re obsessed about showcasing the final result, the shiny testimonial, the glowing client case studies. And that’s not it because it’s not finished until you’re six foot under.
We are all a work in progress and more and more the strategy and the tactic is that we need to show the thinking behind the work. And this is only going to become more important because as AI continues to erode our trust and let’s be honest, we’re already starting on the back foot when we’re talking about digital marketing and online business.
When we’re talking about the online environment, we’re talking about a low trust environment where we need to work harder to earn people’s trust. Technically, it’s not difficult to post on the internet. Technically, there has been, you know, a very low barrier to entry for, you know, more than a decade. 17 years, 18 years, it’s been easy to post on the internet, but that doesn’t mean we’re all stupendously successful, right?
We’re all swimming in cash and perfect fit clients that have come through Google and AI and you know, all the other places that people find us. Riddle me this, why do we have AI free in 2025 and still we’re not putting our best foot forward online. We’re not producing enough marketing and we’re not producing enough quality marketing decause we’re still operating with that out-of-date operating system of our psychology, right? Our psychology is still catching up to the technology.
So if we consider this, if we consider riddle me this, this is my favourite thing to say at the moment. You may have noticed riddle me this. If AI is going to continue to erode our trust, if we don’t have those many and varied nonverbal cues, and we have to work doubly hard to build people’s trust – we’re going to have to work doubly hard to show ourselves, to show our human selves, because it’s possible that in future, at some point, we’re going to have a lifelike avatar that can take our place, that’s been trained to sound like us and look like us and give the same advice that we’d give.
So authenticity then, your humanness is going to become even more important. And if you are constantly second guessing yourself, censoring what you say out of fear that you’ll be misunderstood, this isn’t helping anyone because it’s going to become even more apparent. And it’s already true that in the age of information, we’re not buying information. We can get that for free from the university of YouTube. Yeah.
People are buying our perspectives. Why are marketers still employed? Why are writers still employed? Why are business coaches still employed in the age of AI? Because people are buying our perspectives. They’re buying our thinking and they’re buying the thinking behind the thinking. They’re buying the reason why we do certain things and the lens through which we create our work.
So what does that mean exactly? Again, let’s get practical. What does that mean? It means that we need to share more of our background. We need to share what has informed us. We need to share our perspective. We need to share our bias. And if you don’t think you have bias, can I suggest that you are deluded? The technology has bias. AI has bias.
Absolutely. My God, that’s a cesspool.
So we need to help people to see and understand what informs our thinking and our approach, what informs our conclusions and our advice. If you want to get paid for your ideas, if you want to get paid for how you think, you need to share that thinking and you need to share what informs that thinking. You need to showcase not just your opinions, and not with like, okay, well here are my footnotes and here are my credentials and you know, here are all the things that make me worthy of you, my audience, my client, because God knows that thought leaders are great at buying other people’s frameworks, right?
We’re really good at spending money on other people’s frameworks and another person’s framework and another person’s framework, which is just, you know, a lot of times another way of saying the same thing. Here we go again. Same thing. Apologies. My cynicism is showing same thing, different language. I’ve seen this over and over and over again in business.
Business has fashion. If we actually want to step outside that and stop emulating others, but develop our own expert frameworks, our own proprietary processes truly become thought leaders. We have to stop hiding in plain sight. We have to start showcasing ourselves and our thinking and what makes us tick because everything in life is seen through a lens. There is no objective reality.
We have to get comfortable declaring our own bias because there is no one without bias. There is a reason why you think what you think, why you believe what you believe. There’s a reason why you hold the opinions that you hold. And a thought leader with character is actually someone who changes their mind because new information comes to light, which means we come to different conclusions, different things are appropriate for different situations for different times. It’s really useful. Like I love history and I love, you know, even the history of the last 10 years, used, I used to teach social media marketing with a history lesson.
No wonder I didn’t stay around doing that. I’m not still teaching digital marketing. I used to talk about social media marketing through the lens of the Reformation and the letter being nailed to the door of the church in 1500 and something. Because this is relevant, right? We’re not born in a vacuum. People do not arise in a vacuum. So as new information comes to light, our ideas, our opinion should evolve and as a thought leader with character, we will evolve as well.
Do not confuse character with obstinance. We have to evolve our thinking. We want to contradict ourselves. You know, if we’re contradicting ourselves, it’s progress over the years, not contradicting ourselves moment to moment, but over the span of 10 years, I would hope that you contradict yourself. So when we can, when we can shrug off the shackles of overthinking, of self-censorship, of constantly being absorbed in ourselves and our feelings and emotions and instead operate in this state of high creativity, as John Cleese says, we’re reacting and responding in the moment.
We’re not constantly analysing ourselves, constantly standing outside of ourselves. Then it’s way easier. to have courage and conviction to be bolder in what we say and how we say it, because we’re not overthinking everything. When we can free up our energy and our time and our effort in overthinking, we allow ourselves to become crazy brave because there’s no dissonance anymore between what we think, how we feel, how we act, what we say in the world.
And this is the leadership, actual, aligned, authentic, resilient leadership, leadership for the future. This is what we’re talking about inside of my Ignite Visibility Accelerator, because words make meaning. And as leaders, we are sense makers, which means that we need to get better with words. We need to shorten the distance between what we think and feel and what we say and do. And not just say something worth listening to, but also to do something worth talking about where there’s an alignment between all of this.
You’re not hiding behind pretty words, hiding behind a pretty brand, hiding behind your sexy new photos and your kick-ass outfit, but you’re actually afraid and overthinking everything. In Ignite, we’re also exploring the energetics behind the strategy and the tactics that we’re discussing and using together.
So you know what you’re doing. You know why you’re doing it. And most importantly, there is no dissonance. There is no disconnect. You are 100 % authentic and in the moment and people can feel it. They can sense it. Because if you want to call in those next level premium clients for the next era of your business, you’ve got to assume intelligence on behalf of your audience.
And I’m not saying to overthink everything, go back to university, get yet another credential. Please don’t misunderstand me. There has to be deep self trust in what you’re saying, deep self trust in your message. And so I strongly recommend you do not outsource your creative thinking to chat GPT or anyone else.
You need to develop your own thinking, and when we can use AI smartly and we can use smart systems, methodologies, and free up our time, then we’re able to more easily carve out time for deep thinking, for conversation. There’s no more dissonance because right now the world desperately needs bolder, more courageous leaders and leadership. And if you’re going to rally a crowd, you do that with words.
So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Click on the link in the show notes, check out Ignite. We have an early bird discount for a very, very short time. The early bird is about to fly. And the next time I run Ignite, the price is going up. This is one of my favourite programs to run right now. Such a pleasure, such a privilege going deep with leaders and experts and giving detailed feedback on their words, sharpening their meaning. Till next time.
Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me, and it helps other values-based business owners, just like you, to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.
