Transcript

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 unceeded 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.

For many years, I used to hide the fact that I didn’t have formal training in marketing, sales, business, economics, or anything related, despite the fact that I was teaching marketing, sales, and business development.

This insecurity persisted even after I had been a guest lecturer at Swinburne University, Australian Catholic University, various TAFEs, and vocational colleges across Australia, and even after I was flown internationally by a Malaysian business college to teach marketing.

Yes, you heard it here first.

So what if your insecurities—the bits of yourself that you’re a little embarrassed or perhaps even ashamed for other people to find out about—could become your secret weapon in business?

Because God knows everyone has insecurities. Yes, everyone. Every person. I don’t care how confident they appear. I don’t care how much swagger they’ve got.

In fact, those with the most swagger, those who are the loudest, tend to be the ones who are oftentimes hiding the biggest insecurities.

And of course, why are we scared of this in business?

Well, for very real, legitimate reasons.

We’re scared that other people will use our insecurities against us.

When we free ourselves from the shackles of this fear, when we stop letting our insecurities control what we do and what we don’t do, what we say and what we don’t say, we’re freeing up an enormous amount of capacity—and hence, power.

Because you may or may not be aware, I have a Bachelor of Religious Studies.

Yes, you heard that.

A Bachelor of Religious Studies.

I studied philosophy. I studied medieval history. I studied Buddhism and pilgrimage in the great traditions.

I had a very good time doing religious studies.

Some of my competitors have marketing degrees. They might even have business degrees. Maybe they’re qualified accountants. There’s certainly a lot of accountants becoming business coaches at the moment.

A lot of my competitors have these formal qualifications.

So it would be easy for me to look at that and get intimidated.

But I don’t give a flying toss that you know I have a Bachelor of Religious Studies.

You can draw whatever conclusions you want from that information.

But I’ll tell you what.

I will never talk marketing-speak to you.

I will never drone on about customer journeys or marketing funnels or any of that stuff.

In fact, what I’ve seen over and over again is that a lot of people with formal qualifications in sales, business, or marketing often find themselves very stymied when it comes to execution and taking action.

Because they’re stuck in the theoretical detail.

Business is a verb.

It’s not a noun.

We do business.

We don’t have a business.

We don’t read about business, or think about business, or learn about business.

We do business.

It’s a verb.

So how do we actually do this?

If you’ve got insecurities—and if you’re human, I dare say you have many—what do you do to turn those insecurities into strengths? To turn perceived liabilities into strengths?

That’s what we’re going to talk about now.

The first idea is really simple, but it has profound and extensive effects.

The idea is this:

Change your context.

You don’t need to change.

You, in all of your fabulous glory, are perfectly, wonderfully awesome exactly as you are.

Yes, maybe there’s a few rough edges.

Yes, there’s definitely some potential you could lean into.

There’s more fun to be had.

There’s more money to be made.

Sure.

But you don’t need to fundamentally change yourself.

You just need to figure out what fast-moving room to get into where your special something is recognised as such.

Because oftentimes what I see, over and over again, is that the business owner is simply in the wrong room talking to the wrong people.

They’re in a stagnant puddle that is going nowhere quickly.

They’re having their insecurities provoked because they’re hanging around the wrong people.

They’re hanging around people who will never value their strengths, who will never see their brilliance, who will never appreciate their sense of humour, their style, or their unique and special way of talking about what they do.

A quick and easy example of this is social media marketing.

When social media marketing first exploded onto the scene, I was right there riding the wave, and it was a great place to be.

But it became really obvious that there were a lot of sceptics.

I wasted a lot of time talking to the wrong people about social media marketing and attempting to convince them.

I’m like, I’m not Zuckerberg’s mouthpiece.

If you want to bury your head in the sand and decide social media is just a passing fad, well, best of luck to you.

I want to be teaching social media marketing to the people who already know its power, who can already see its power, who are fast adopters, who aren’t overanalysing and getting stuck in the existential crisis of social media.

So change your environment.

Another group of people who aren’t my people are people who work in corporate marketing.

They’re not my people.

People who are obsessed with credentials?

Again, not my people.

People who love those bits of paper from the University of Self-Worth?

Not my people.

People who don’t need or want diversity of thinking or new ideas?

Not my people.

If you change your context, if you change the room you’re in—and I’m not talking about physical rooms, I’m talking about virtual rooms and more abstract spaces—then you don’t need to change yourself.

You can stop banging your head against the wall.

You can stop trying to fit yourself into a room where you were never welcome in the first place.

The second point in turning liabilities into strengths, and insecurities into your secret weapon, is to understand the power dynamics at play.

When you’re getting on the internet, when you’re sitting down to do your marketing, when you’re starting a sales conversation, speaking on stage, recording a podcast, or doing anything in the public arena, who is squatting in your head?

Who is holding you back from showing your entire, true, unhinged self?

Now, I appreciate that a lot of communication is performative.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s not a bad thing to be aware of your audience.

In fact, it’s a good thing.

If you flip that around and think about someone who doesn’t give a flying stuff, someone who’s deeply narcissistic, self-involved, and self-obsessed, they’re terrible communicators.

They’re so self-centred and so uninterested in the person opposite them.

That’s not who I aspire to be.

So a little performance in communication is a fine thing indeed because it shows you know your audience and respect your audience.

But when you’re holding yourself back all the time, when you’re afraid of being found out, when you’re trying to fit in, conform, or appear “professional”—and whenever I hear people say that now, I just think, *Ah, censorship.*

You’re censoring yourself.

How much are you stopping yourself?

Because the flip side is that you stop letting your insecurities drive the car.

You stop letting your insecurities create weird power dynamics.

You just let it all hang out—while still being respectful of your audience and using performance thoughtfully in your communication.

How much more effective would that be?

The third thing is transparency and authenticity.

When I was about seventeen, I had a friend.

He was a big thinker and a big talker.

We used to have big, deep and meaningful conversations.

Very popular in the nineties—DNMs.

He was a bit neurotic, with the benefit of hindsight.

A bit of an overthinker.

At the time, I broke up with a mutual friend.

It was a platonic friendship, by the way.

I was heartbroken.

I was sad.

I guess I was a bit more vulnerable and open with this friend of mine.

I remember him saying it like it was yesterday because it really struck me.

He said, “Look, I always liked you, Brooke. I really valued our friendship. But it wasn’t until you broke up with this guy that I realised you were actually human.

“Before that, you felt a bit bright and shiny and confident.

“Now that I’ve seen your lack of confidence, I feel more affection towards you.”

It’s kind of sad.

I think there’s a little bit of tall poppy syndrome in that.

There’s a little bit of, *I don’t like somebody until I can see they’re hurt.*

But it’s also very human.

We want to see the authentic person.

We want to see you bleed, to know that you’re real.

There’s nothing more bonding in a friendship than sharing your insecurities with somebody.

You’re not always happy, fabulous, and high-vibe all the time.

Let’s not forget that strengths can tip into liabilities.

This is called the strengths paradox.

It’s when your normally positive attributes are applied too frequently, you’re too dependent on them, or you use them in the wrong context.

For example, confidence or charisma.

You’d think that would always be a strength.

But when it tips into a liability, it becomes manipulation.

It becomes arrogance.

It becomes recklessness.

It becomes over-promising, hype, hot air, and under-delivering.

Or being detail-oriented.

That’s a great strength.

It’s certainly a strength in increasingly short supply.

I’d definitely pay extra for somebody who’s detail-oriented.

But when that tips into a liability, it becomes rigidity.

It becomes perfectionism.

It becomes failure to launch.

Kindness and empathy are wonderful strengths.

But when overused, they become tolerating poor behaviour.

They become failing to uphold standards of what’s acceptable and reasonable.

So what I want you to take away from this is to free yourself.

I want this to be a clarion call.

A sermon on the mount.

A shout into the ocean.

Stop letting your insecurities become a hindrance.

Instead, let them become a strength.

Lead with your insecurities.

Own the narrative.

Expose yourself rather than living in constant fear that others will expose you.

And then realise you’ll live to tell the tale.

The worst-case scenario is almost always the one in your head.

Your imagination can do a much better job creating a worst-case scenario than reality is likely to do.

When you tell a new story about yourself, you show yourself.

There’s something very attractive about that.

If it doesn’t come out fully buffed, polished, and wonderful—if people can see your pretensions—well, that’s good too.

I find other people’s pretensions very attractive.

In the right measures.

I’m not talking about cruelty.

I’m talking about pretensions.

When I can see somebody’s pretensions, they often go from being someone I find a bit irritating—someone who gets under my skin—to someone I understand.

There’s an incongruence that suddenly makes sense.

When I can see their insecurities and vulnerabilities, it bonds me to that person.

The other thing somebody’s pretensions show is what they value.

What they hold in high regard.

There’s something quite beautiful about that.

When we can look at other people’s pretensions, when we can see their insecurities—and that’s really what a pretension is, the shield between an insecurity, a hurt, or a vulnerability and what they’re showing to the world—then we can see the beauty in other people’s hurts, insecurities, vulnerabilities, and pretensions.

And then we can apply that same softness, compassion, and affection to ourselves.

So that’s your challenge this week.

Take your insecurities and turn them into your secret weapons.

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 favour 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 find this show—which is a fantastic gift to me.