Podcasts about just not sorry

Have you ever found yourself uttering the words 'I'm sorry' more than necessary?In this podcast episode, Laurie makes a confession about being a recovering over-apologizer. She also delves into the habit of over-apologizing which many women, including herself, often fall victim to. She share's how this trend can be traced back generations,  is also linked to societal conditioning, and how it came to my realization in a therapy session.Laurie offers solutions to those who over-apologize so you can break free from overusing the words, 'I'm sorry' through awareness, using alternative phrases, and practice which can lead to more assertive and confident communication styles.She also introduces a Gmail plug-in or extension called 'Just Not Sorry', that helps detect undermining language in your emails.  Click here to check it out. Pop those earbuds in and listen up so you can stop being an over-apologizer and start developing a more confident communication style within your personal relationships and at work.Click here to receive 8 Things You Should Stop Doing In Midlife to Find More Freedom.Sign up for my newsletter here to stay up to date on my upcoming offerings and podcast interviews!Click here to purchase my book: Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting GoConnect with me:Website www.laurieejames.comEmail: laurie@laurieejames.comInstagram: @laurie.jamesFB: laurie.jamesLinkedin: Laurie JamesIf you like this podcast, please follow, rate and review by telling others what you like about this show - your feedback really matters and helps other freebirds find me!***************************************************************************************DISCLAIMER: THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING LEGAL, MEDICAL OR PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LICENSED THERAPIST IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING SUICIDAL THOUGHTS. YOU SHOULD CONTACT AN ATTORNEY IN YOUR STATE TO OBTAIN LEGAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL WITH RESPECT TO ANY MEDICAL ISSUE OR PROBLEM.

Welcome to season 2, episode 45 of the Today is the Day Changemakers Podcast. This week my guest is Fran Hauser, best-selling author and angel investor. Fran is passionate about leveling the playing field for women. She does this through her investing, writing and speaking. Fran has invested in over 30 female-founded companies across consumer tech, CPG, media, publishing, and wellness.Fran is the best-selling author of The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person You Hate. The book has been translated into six languages and was named "Best Business Book of the Year 2018" by Audible. Fran's new book, Embrace the Work, Love Your Career is quickly becoming the go-to for women seeking more joy and fulfillment in their career. Fran is on a mission to help women build careers they love while staying true to themselves. Before becoming an angel investor and author, Fran worked 15 years in media, where she rose through the ranks at Time Inc. to President of Digital. People.com was a website that Fran and a few others built up to over 100 people working on. She worked with founders from organizations like Rent the Runway and many more. She talks about how her work at Time Inc. led her to being an angel investor. A friend of Fran's called her out on how many times she said "sorry". We tend to apologize for things we have no control over or as just as a way of making conversation. There is a special program that Fran used called "Just Not Sorry" created by a female engineer to see how many times she was saying "sorry" in her emails. This Google plug-in has been downloaded over half a million times.  Another message Fran shares is, before you say "yes" to something ask yourself if you are saying yes because you feel bad saying no. Is what you are saying yes to aligned with your priorities or does it bring you joy? Being very intentional is important. Take a moment to decide why you are saying "yes". Fran shares that our time and energy is our greatest resource. If you are going to say no, keep it short and sweet. Listen in to hear more of what Fran shares as her messaging about balance, career, how to become an author and more is enlightening. Also, take a listen to the footprint she is creating now that she wants to leave behind.Next week my guest is Jes Ruzic. Jes is a Certified Personal Stylist and Image Consultant. Her commitment to sustainability and passion for textile recycling has led her to partner with organizations such as Dress for Sucess, Soles 4 Souls, and H&M. She has styled Covergirl models at NYFW runway shows, dressed keynote speakers, revitalized wardrobes, and more.  Today Is the DayWebsite: https://todayisthedayliveit.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/todayistheday/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/todayisthedayThe Zzak G. Applaud Our Kids FoundationWebsite: www.applaudourkids.orgFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/applaudourkidsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/applaudourkidsSign-up for our mailing list, schedule a conversation with Jodi or ask a Changemaker a question: jodi@todayisthedayliveit.comHave a great week everyone!

On this show this week, April and Laura are chatting one-on-one about the latest news and trends impacting PR. Tune in as they discuss the role of alcohol in agency culture as Americans reduce their alcohol consumption. They also analyze the latest public backlash against Victoria's Secret as the brand faces accusations of performative tactics in their rebranding efforts. For this week's “Thing I Should Have Been Trained On,” our hosts discuss some best practices on how to deliver bad news to a client. This week's Anonymous PR Horror Story comes from a listener who faced an uncomfortable situation an an offsite client meeting—and decided to step back from the account as a result. Read the PR News of the Week here: Victoria's Secret: https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/victorias-secret-misses-the-mark-by-pursuing-inclusivity-as-a-tactic-not-a-culture/?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Adweek_Daily_220705054632&recip_id=1417196&lyt_id=1417196# Agencies & Alcohol: https://www.adweek.com/agencies/non-drinkers-are-struggling-in-an-agency-world-that-relies-on-alcohol/?utm_content=position_1&utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Agencies_Newsletter_220627153928&recip_id=1417196&lyt_id=1417196 Things I Should Have Been Trained On: How to deliver bad news to a client or how to keep executives from going rogue during a crisis. Sponsor Us! Just Not Sorry: https://justnotsorry.com/phrases.html Connect with Trust Relations: Have an anonymous PR horror story to share or questions you want to be answered on the show? Email us at contact@prwinedown.com. You can stream the show live at 2:00 pm ET every Saturday, on ElectroMagnetic Radio: https://www.em-radio.com/ You can also connect with Trust Relations on our website: https://www.trustrelations.agency/ or on social media: https://www.linkedin.com/company/trustrelations/ https://twitter.com/trustPRelations https://www.facebook.com/trustrelations https://www.instagram.com/trustrelations/ Sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com. Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/prwinedown/message --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/prwinedown/message

Episode transcript:PAUL SANTIAGO: Thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it, Renee.RENEE DALO: I'm so happy to be here. This is going to be great. PS: How long have we known each other? We've known each other--RD: For so long.PS: Yeah, but it's just from a distance all the time.RD: We're at the same networking events all the time.PS: Yeah, we just never get to chat, so this perfect for me.RD: Yeah, we never have a sit-down.PS: I've always wanted to talk to you, because you're always the most colorful person in the room.RD: Oh, you're so sweet.PS: And always catches my attention. RD: I love that, thank you.PS: So yeah, of course. And thank you for being here, really appreciate it. Before we start, I would love it if you tell the listeners and the viewers something about yourself that they would probably be surprised to know. RD: So I have been to every state in the contiguous US at least once, if not twice. Because when I was younger, I was a musical theater actor, and so I toured the country in a bunch of shows. So I've literally been everywhere except for Hawaii now. But I can't really tell you where anything is, because all I've ever seen is the inside of the tour van and the inside of the theater. So super well traveled, minimally.PS: Nice. But you've tried to hit the touristy spots of every--RD: Yeah. When we were in Memphis, we didn't have time to go to Graceland. I've driven by the sign that says "Grand Canyon" four times. This is just life on the road. You're always off to do another show and you're always off to do something else. So I always joke with my husband that eventually I'm going to make him get an RV and show me all the things I missed in my twenties. Even though I was right there, it's just we couldn't go.PS: We've always thought about renting an RV, but me and Stella, my wife, we're not really outdoorsy people.RD: Oh yeah, no, I'm not an RV person. I'm a Four Seasons person. I'm a room service, down comforter person for sure. Stella and I are the same, I think, in that, and you as well. But something about, I just feel like getting an RV and seeing the country is the way you do that particular thing.PS: Yeah, it's easier. And it's probably the most American thing you could ever do, going around the country, right?RD: Yeah, I agree, yeah.PS: And it always confuses me, because I always felt like the most American thing you could do is just hop on a plane and just fly and travel. But no, it's just getting into the nitty gritty, and do it like Walter White.RD: I don't think we're going to make any meth.PS: Okay, hopefully not.RD: That's next level, I'm not going to do that particular thing.PS: Okay, so I'm always curious about how people start out, and I really want to know what your origin story is. How you started, and what got you into this industry. And also, what you're up to right now.RD: Sure, so how did I go from being a musical theater actress to a wedding planner? So when you're an actor, especially in New York City, a lot of times you're working hospitality as a side job, and that was very true for me. I worked in a lot of fine dining restaurants in New York City. And then when I moved to LA, decided didn't really want to do musicals anymore, kind of didn't want to live out of a suitcase anymore. That life, really, it was great while it was, but then I was approaching 30 years old, and I thought, "I kind of want to lay down some roots somewhere." And I thought LA would be as good a place as any. So I got a job in hospitality. I opened a restaurant, which is one of the restaurants at The Grove, which is a big outdoor mall here. It was a big deal to open this place, they built it from scratch. And I was part of that opening crew. And in the time that I worked there, I went from hostess to waiter to bartender to banquet server, banquet captain, banquet manager. And so what ended up happening is that I was running the banquet rooms at this restaurant, they were six rooms, and I was one of the people that ran them. And I ended up doing a lot of weddings that way, because it wasn't a luxury venue by any stretch, but people would have weddings there, and they would always give them to me because, "Oh, Renee can do the weddings, she's good at that, she's good at the weddings." At the same time, that was in my season of life where all of my friends were getting married. So I planned a lot of weddings as a hobby right around that same time, because they were like, "Well, you're doing it at work, and you seem good at this. Can you help me?" So what ended up being-- I planned my best friend's wedding 12 years ago with $7000, like no money whatsoever, like nothing. What ended up happening is that people who were at that wedding, or people who knew my friend would say, "Oh." I would get random emails from people that were like, "Oh, can you help me plan my wedding? I was at this wedding," or, "I heard you do this." And so I created a business before I even realized what I was doing, because I was getting emails and referrals from people that I didn't know. I remember one time, I got an email from this girl who said, "Jeanette sent me to you." And I was like, "Who the hell's Jeanette? I don't know this person." So I realized that I liked it, and I was good at it, and people were coming to me for it, and so I probably should do it. And then it was a few years after that that I really started my business now, which is Moxie Bright Events. So it took me a few years to get really clear that it's a business that you could run and make a living. But I've been doing it for so long at that point, that it seemed silly that I wasn't doing it professionally. But that's what I did. After I got married, my own wedding planner, because I got married in Philadelphia, said to me, "I don't understand why you're not a wedding planner in Los Angeles." And I was like, "Well, there's so many." And she was like, "So who cares?" And it was that weird-- sometimes you just need that one person to say the one right thing to you. And it's so simple, but having Erin say to me, "Who cares? Just go do it. It doesn't matter if other people are doing it too." I was like, "Oh, you're right." So yeah, it sounds silly, but it kind of just happened.PS: Yeah, all you need is that one person to push you. And fortunately for us, it's someone close to us, so it's easier to be like, "Oh, okay, I'll give it a shot." Because they know you already.RD: Yeah. She said, "You needed me less than any client I've ever had. I don't know why you don't do this professionally." And I was like, "Oh, I don't know." But again, this brings me back to what we're talking about today, is I had a lot of limiting beliefs about myself and about this work, and I had to work through those in order to be able to do this at the level that I'm doing it now.PS: It's funny, because when you said your friend got married for $7000, which is pretty much nothing.RD: Nothing.PS: Stella and I got married, our budget was $6000.RD: I love that. Well, how long ago was it though?PS: I have to answer this correctly. It was 10 years ago.RD: Yeah, see? My friend was 12 years ago. So back then, you could make something of that a little bit, a little bit more than you can today.PS: Well, it was bare bones. We got married in a church, and our reception was at an Indian restaurant, an Indian buffet, which is $10 per person or something like that.RD: Oh yeah. This wedding that I did for $7000 was in a photography studio. The power went out, because I didn't know enough to check the power. So when we plugged in all the lights and the DJ plugged in, all the power went out. And the DJ came up to me during the ceremony and whispered in my ear, "Do you want to have lights, or do you want to have music?" And I was like, "What are you talking about?" And he's like, "We have a power outage." And I just started crying, because I was like, "I don't know." Now, I would check the power. But it was so bare bones, minimal, minimal everything. We had a craft services caterer do dinner, it was crafty. It's so funny.PS: Those things make you really, really stronger when it comes to accepting challenges as soon as you start out. How do you feel about that? When you start out your business, should you take more risks when you start up? Or should you take more risks when you're a little bit more confident?RD: I think we should always be taking risks. I think if you own a business, I believe that inherently, you are a risk taker. I just think entrepreneurs have to have that little bit of-- we have a little bit of crazy up in our brains where we think, "I'm going to try this." And I think that if you are someone who really loves safety, maybe owning a business is not for you, because there's not a lot of safety happening all the time. I think at the beginning, you've got to throw yourself into the fire. Honestly, at this point, I tell my clients or potential clients, there's nothing that rattles me. Your venue, God forbid, could burn down around us and I'm still not going to yell. Nothing gets to me, I've seen it. But the only reason I can say that is because I had a wedding where the power went out my very first wedding. So once you've lived through it and nothing bad happens, you figure it out, nothing can rattle you. But at the beginning, I think, just starting is a risk, right? So calculated risks, of course. Smart risks, hopefully. But you've got to take risks, there's no way around it, I think.PS: Yeah, because once you take risks, I guess your senses are sharper, you're more aware of what's happening around you. For us, when we started out, we had our first fist fight in a wedding on our third wedding, and it was the groom and his groomsman in the bathroom. RD: Of course it was.PS: Yeah. So after 10 years of doing this, after nine years of doing this, I'd be like, I know exactly what to do and how to handle a fist fight, or prevent someone from-- yeah.RD: Oh man. Courage is a muscle. Everyone thinks courage is some value that, oh, this person is courageous, they're brave. That's just a muscle. If you never exercise it, it's going to atrophy just like anything else. So jumping into that fist fight, or knowing enough to not jump into that fist fight, that's the things you learn on the job. There's no other way to learn this job, I think. PS: And I feel like for people who are starting out, well, at least for me, when I was starting out, I didn't really have anyone to ask, or have anyone to mentor me about these things, what to expect. So I feel like when you're starting out also, make sure that you approach the people who have been longer in the industry, just so they could give you tips. Because I feel like people want to see other people succeed, at least the good business owners, right?RD: Oh yeah. And I think too, the climate is so different now. When I was starting, yes, I did have support, I did have a mentor, I had some really good friends. But there wasn't all the podcasts and the blogs and the education, the online education. There's so many other ways to get knowledge nowadays. Yeah, find a mentor, and then really listen to them. Intern with someone and follow them around, soak it up, don't just take it for granted. Because sometimes the best business people aren't necessarily the best educators, but they still have a lot to share. But you just have to be the person that's super aware of them and what they're doing and how they are presenting themselves in the world.PS: I love that, I love that, because that's actually my main problem right now. I know a lot about business, but I guess I don't know how to say it or how to ask people online. If I'm in a Facebook group, I ask them about something, and they react differently, and then I reread it, I'm like, "Oh crap, I said it wrong," or something like that. Now my question is since we're already talking about this, and you've been saying that you tell your clients, "Nothing can faze me, the building would be burning down." So the way you say stuff, I feel like it's really important, right? So our topic for today is the power of language in your business. So why does the language really matter in our business? RD: I think it's two things. So one, obviously we're using language all day long. I used to call this the power of words in your business, because I think words gets it down to the base level, right? Because we're communicating all day long, we're communicating when we talk to each other, but especially via email, and especially on our websites, there's words everywhere, right? So we have to choose them carefully. And what I know about modern life, because I know, and I do it myself, is that I try to be super casual and approachable and friendly. But oftentimes, what that means, especially for women listening, it means that we sometimes use a lot of unintentional subconscious limiting language, right? And what I mean by that is if you're ever talking to someone, just about anything in life, and you say something that's kind of a bummer, or you say something not great, and they go, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry." And it's a weird phrase, right? That we use. We use "I'm sorry" a lot for things that we have no control over, nothing to do with, no jurisdiction over. We just say "oh, I'm sorry" as a way to express empathy, right? But it's a weird phrase, because you're taking responsibility for something that isn't yours. And it's just one of the many ways. If you ever answer a client email, how many times, just off the top of your head, have you answered a client email with, "Oh, so sorry, sorry for getting back to you so late."PS: We don't say sorry, we say "apology". We apologize. RD: Yeah, which is great. When I first started talking about this, I went through my Gmail, my business account is a Gmail for business account. In there, you can search your mail, and I searched the word "sorry" just to see what would come up. And it was hundreds of emails, hundreds of times I had said. And in most of the time, it was like, "Sorry for not getting back to you within an hour." I was apologizing for something that was ridiculous. "So sorry it took me a minute to research this." What? No, that's my job. So the language we use matters, because we are subconsciously giving our clients and other vendors and everyone we talk to, we're letting them see who we are through the words we use. And if we're starting with "sorry, I'm so sorry", it already puts you in a position subconsciously, their trust is eroding in you, right? They're thinking, "Oh, this person, they didn't get back to me? Oh, they think they were late getting back to me?" It's these little things, it's super micro, but it's the reason I always want to talk about it, because I think so many of these little tiny things that we do, when you add them up, end up really coloring how someone else looks at you, how they view you. And if we can make these tiny changes, then over time, it's going to have the most impact, because it'll start just becoming the way you talk. Like you said, we don't use "sorry", we say "apologies". That is a different thing, those two words mean very different things when you're taking them in as the person who they're being said to.PS: So it's so funny, because I use "I'm sorry" a lot when I email, right? And I know this person who's a grammar Nazi. Stella, my wife. RD: I'm a grammar Nazi, too. PS: So she's like, "Never say you're sorry. Always say apologize, apologies." My goal is, since English is our second language, I want people to know that we know how to speak proper English. No offense to the Californians, but California English, there's California English. Water is "waa-d'r" here. So there's a thing. And it took me three years to adapt to the California English, because I wanted to make sure that, at least in my head, it's a little bit more flawless, and eliminate my accent just so I could blend in a little bit more. But just heading towards the proper English, which is British English, I don't know, without the accent, just the correct pronunciation.RD: Right. I'm from New York City, so my actual accent is ridiculous, you would laugh. The accent I was born with is crazy. And I do the same thing, I work very hard on not sounding like I'm from any particular place.PS: So I think me too, my Filipino accent is wow, once you hear it, you're like, "Oh, wow." So that's the thing. I feel like heading towards the proper English would benefit your business as well, you as a person. Because now, more than ever, social media has evolved into this thing where people spend a little bit of their time with, now it's just everywhere. People, when they're not doing anything, once they're on their phone, you know they're on social media.RD: Oh, for sure.PS: And the way they talk reflects their personality now. RD: Have you ever gotten an email from a vendor or from a client where they're using text talk? Where it's like, "C-Y-A," and you're like, "C-Y-A? Cya. See ya. Okay, got it." Honestly, me, Renee, when I get language like that, I always think, oh, this person must not be very smart. That is just where I go to. And so consider, if you're listening, and you're someone who emails in text speak, maybe that's how you're being perceived, right? We all have these predispositions to how we think of someone when we hear them talk or when we read what they write. So I love that you said you're really trying to go with the correct English, because you want people to take you seriously. You want people to know that you're smart and you're capable, and so therefore that translates to you in proper English. For me, what I want to communicate with my emails and my language in general is that I'm capable and that I'm in charge, right? Because I'm a wedding planner. So for me, my emails can't be too soft, because otherwise I don't think I'm sending the right message. One of my clients left me a review last week. Can I cuss?PS: Sure, yeah.RD: She said in the review, "Renee is a badass." And I honestly walked around all proud all day that I was like, "I'm a badass." Because as a wedding planner, I am the captain of the ship, right? So my emails have to come from a place of authority. So if I'm sending emails that are like, "I just wanted you to read this timeline. I don't know, I think that they think that maybe we should do it this way, but I don't know, what do you think?" And just like, "Let me know when you get it," and then like, "Just no big deal, whenever you have a sec." If I sent emails in that tone, no one would ever respect me or take me seriously or listen to me. So my emails, my communication, has to be pretty clear and direct, and dare I say, almost masculine. And I don't use a lot of phrases like "I think". At least I try not to. I know I say that more when I'm speaking, I say, "Oh, I think da da da." But I hardly ever say "actually, I think", because that also makes it sound like I'm surprised by my own thoughts. "Oh, I had a thought, actually. Get ready, I had a thought, guys." I try not to say the phrase "does that make sense?" Because what I have found with "does that make sense" is, especially when it's a client email, right? So a client will email me 12 questions in a row, right? Which is pretty typical for me. And I'll answer every single question. And if at the end, I say "does that make sense", and I read this in a book and it stuck with me, so "does that make sense", it's saying two things. It's saying to the person you're communicating to, "Are you smart enough to understand what I've just said?" Which is insulting, right? Or, "Am I so crazy nuts that I can't communicate properly what I'm trying to get across to you?" So I have now really tried to get rid of "does that make sense". Instead, what I say is, "Look forward your thoughts on this." Or simply, "Thoughts?" Question mark. What are your thoughts on the things I just explained? Right? Because we have to be really clear on what we want people to take away from the interactions that they're having with us, right? I know that I in the past had tended to overexplain something, feel weird about it, and then say, "Oh, that was too much of an explanation, I know, but hopefully it made sense." Well, if you don't think you're making sense, rewrite the email. Just rewrite the email. We don't need all of the fancy rigmarole. But I do think with social media, like you said, I think we're moving toward a place with our language, just as a culture, where we're super getting super casual. PS: Super casual.RD: And I don't know that I hate it, I definitely don't hate it. But I also wonder, I don't know, on some people's Instagrams, like Jenna Kutcher for example. Do you follow Jenna?PS: Yes.RD: Jenna writes these really beautiful captions to her Instagram pictures. And they're frequently paragraphs, right? And they're like a little mini blog post, and she's always really expressive. And I think that is her authentic voice, I don't think someone else is writing that for her. I think that's how she feels, what she wants to communicate that day. But I also can sense that some other accounts who follow, and the reason I mention her is because she's a huge account. Some other accounts that I also follow who are smaller, who are looking to others maybe for guidance, are using that same sort of authentic speak as, quote, unquote, air quotes "authentic speak", and I wonder if it is authentic to them. Because I think we all have our own voice. I know when I write something that sounds like me, it gets better responses from people, people can hear it in my voice. I think if we're all moving toward this casual social media authentic-y speak, that it's all going to sound like the same voice.PS: So before we move forward, let me go back to when you said "does that make sense", that phrase. Is there a deeper impact when you email it, as opposed to saying it to someone's face? Or is it--? Okay.RD: Yeah, I think so. I think the words that we write have a lot more weight than we give it credit for. Because 99% of the time, my communication with my clients is email. And that's the way I run my business. So I'm not dying to jump on the phone with people. Which is funny, because I'm a podcaster, and you would think that I love talking. And I do, but something about getting my workday interrupted with a phone call is really off-putting to me, I just want to get my work done. So more often than not, I'm emailing. I feel like if you say it in person, if you say "does that make sense" in person, that you're possibly reacting off a visual cue, right? If someone's looking at you like I'm looking at you now, obviously it doesn't make sense. They're telling you with their face, "I am confused." So it's easy to say, "Does that make sense? What part should I go back over?" But if your emailing "does that make sense", you have no visual cue. What you're hoping is they've read the email and you haven't confused them, but you don't need to say it in that way. "Does that make sense" is a really triggering thing for me. When I read that a while ago, I was like, "Oh my God, I do that." The other one is the word "just". "I'm just a wedding planner." How many times have you heard someone say that, when you say, "What do you do?" "Oh, I'm just a DJ. I'm just a..."PS: Yeah.RD: It's so damaging.PS: It is. It's very like you're not really proud of what you're doing. Some people, when they say that, they actually mean it. So that's okay, right? Whenever he says, "I'm just a doctor." No?RD: Can you imagine? "I'm just a doctor?" Have you ever? I believe this is a systematic problem with the wedding industry, because I know for a fact within the world of events, weddings are sort of looked down upon as not as serious, not as lucrative, not as whatever. Which I think is a bunch of BS. but I know that in the wedding indistry, because I talk to so many other vendors, I think we all suffer from a little bit of impostor syndrome. And I think that's where that comes out, right? When you're talking to someone, and they say, "Oh, I'm just a blah blah blah," I'm always the idiot in the group who is like, "You are not just anything. You are amazing."PS: Oh, good for you.RD: I've been calling it out, right? To be like, "How dare you say that about yourself?" But I think when we feel self-conscious, when we feel not enough, when we have the impostor syndrome, it comes out in these little ways. PS: So here's my struggle going back to "does that make sense". Because the first time I heard that, I'm like, "Is this person mocking me? Do they think that I'm an idiot?"RD: Exactly.PS: And then I realize that everyone is using it, because I'm trying to mold my California English. And I've been using it for quite a while. And so I was actually talking to one of my guys, we were at a shoot, and I was trying to explain it to him, what we're going to do. Instead of me saying, "Does that make sense?" I asked him, "Okay, do you understand what I said?" Is there a difference? Because with "do you understand what I said", I actually wanted to make sure that he understands, because we're parting ways, and he's going to reception, I'm going to the-- is there a difference?RD: I would probably, in the future, say, "Do you have any questions for me?" Because it's more open-ended and it gives them more agency to participate, right? Because "does that make sense" is yes or no. "Do you understand what I said" is yes or no.PS: And then he never understood.RD: He didn't. See? "Do you have any questions?"PS: Okay.RD: And oftentimes, especially when I'm dealing with my assistants and stuff, if it is something that is different, unusual, anything out of the normal, I will say, "Repeat it back to me." Because I'd rather have them take ownership of it, even if it's wrong, right? Even if what they're repeating back to me isn't right. And then I can go, "No, that part's not right," and sort of help them and educate them in that moment. Because I think we can be asking better questions, I know we can all be asking better questions of people. But I think "does that make sense" needs to be fully retired, just get it right out of there.PS: Yeah, there's a lot of words, phrases that shouldn't be used, coming from me observing.RD: What else do you think? What else shouldn't be used?PS: Man, right off the top of my head. I'll think of something. But there's a bunch of words that irritate me when someone says it, then I'm like, "You're not using it right." Because we came here 2008, so I was 28 years old when we came here.RD: Oh, I did not know that.PS: Yeah, so that's why I spent three years talking to people on Yelp, the telemarketers, I would just talk to them on the phone. Stella said, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "I'm trying to practice my English."RD: Oh, I love that.PS: So I was just trying to convince them that I'm from here. So, okay.RD: That makes me so happy, I love that. PS: So now here's another struggle of mine. My authentic language, the way I talk to people, is different from my business language. Because we came from Filipino to English to California English, and now California English, we kind of need to dial it down a little bit more, because we're trying to cater to, I guess the higher end market, who doesn't talk like that. So my question is what's the difference between using authentic language, as opposed to speaking or writing off the cuff?RD: I love this. So oftentimes on social media, I will see fellow wedding vendors who I know wrote a caption off the top of their head. And the reason I always know it is because they frequently assume that the reader understands where they're coming from, understands the wavelength that they're already on. So sometimes the off-the-cuff ones sort of tend to start in the middle of a thought, or I'll read it and go, what are they talking about? I remember, this is a a while ago, someone posted a photo, it was a candid photo of a fire pit, right? But the caption said, "This place would be great for a rehearsal dinner." But it was a fire pit. And I stared at it for a few minutes and I was like, what is happening? It was geotagged with a location, so in theory the person posting wanted to communicate that this location would be great for a rehearsal dinner because of this cozy fire pit. But what we needed as the reader was the whole thought. We needed you to start us at A and end at Z. "One of the things my clients always ask me for is a cozy spot for their rehearsal dinner where people can really gather around and talk. And this restaurant, with this cozy fire pit, has that for you," right? So that's the way, you have to sort of connect all the dots for people. When we write something off the cuff, especially Instagram captions, I think sometimes people think, "Oh, when I see this image, it makes me think of the following thing that I'm going to put in this off-the-cuff caption." And then you read it and you're like, "I have no idea what they're talking about." Because we're not in your brain. You have to draw the full picture for people, you have to connect all of it together. But you still have to do it in your authentic voice in a way that doesn't seem so business-y. Because I'm sure you follow those more business-minded accounts that are like very stilted language and everything sounds like business, and you're like, "Well, that's no fun," right? So on social media, what the people want to see is the person behind the brand, so they want to hear from you and Stella. They don't want the voice of "Boffo Video does good video." So it's a really specific new skill set that we all have to have because it's part of our businesses now.PS: I've tried so hard to stop saying "I can't". Those things, it's so hard, because you see it on social media. And I have to be honest, if I were to just speak my authentic language, I probably wouldn't even post anything, because I'm too lazy. But I have to. So whenever I'm on social media, the first five posts I scroll through, I absorb the way they speak, and that's what I just type.RD: One of the things I think we can all be doing for our businesses is really drill down how your business sounds, right? How your business, what your business cares about. So for Moxie Bright, which is my wedding planning business, we really care about hospitality, we really care about taking care of guests, we really care about those moments at a wedding that you can't even predict that are going to happen, that are going to be awesome. So a lot of times when I post something on my Instagram, I'm calling out those moments, right? I'm calling out that moment of amazing service or I'm calling out this moment of friendship between the bride and her bridal tribe. I am specifically angling because it's coming from my head, my viewpoint, what's important to me, right? So I'm always putting it through that lens. I feel like if someone else were to look at the same images on my Instagram, they'd probably come up with a million different captions, because of what's happening in their brain, what's important to them, and what goes through their lens. When I'm doing posts for my education brand, for my online courses and stuff, that's a completely different language, because I'm talking to different people, I'm talking to other wedding planners, I'm talking to them about making more money, about being better at their jobs. It's a completely different audience, and it has to be a completely different language. Now for me, right now those are on the same account, right? So you can literally look through my Instagram and think, "Oh, here she's talking to clients, here she's talking to other wedding pros." But for instance, I call my students rockstars. So if you're a student in one of my classes, I'm going to address you as, "Hey, rockstar," no matter what. I don't know how it started, it felt right and I went with it, and now it's a thing. And I think to that, you have to honor that too, what feels right? I'm definitely not someone who's hashtag blessed, right? You're not going to see that on my account, it's just not my thing. You're more likely to see an F-bomb on my account with a (makes explosion sound) emoji.PS: Yeah, that's the thing. I guess it's just so hard to come up with an original idea, I mean an original text, in such a short span of time. Because I feel like people who post on social media, at least the ones who are really good at it, schedule everything.RD: Oh yeah.PS: And I suck at it, because you know what I'm really good at scheduling? Podcasts. Everything else, I suck at.RD: See? There you go. Scheduling is much easier, because then you're not having to come up with a caption on the fly. I use Planoly, and I schedule at least two weeks out if I can. I took a social media break this year, I didn't post at all for the month of June. I just wasn't feeling it. And I was like, "I'm not going to force myself. The world's not going to end if I don't put up a square every day." And I didn't do it. And then I got back to it when it was time. And then I was able to be like, "Okay, let's write some fresh captions." For me, I don't stress so much about the caption. It could be because my background, I have a background as a writer as well. But I look at the picture and I go, "What is this? Oh, okay." Sometimes it's so simple. I think my post today was a wedding bouquet from two years ago, and I think I wrote, "Never tired of this gorgeous bouquet from Shindig Chic." That's it, because it doesn't always have to change the world. Sometimes it's just appreciation for this beautiful thing. And that's okay, too. You don't have to write the mini blog posts that Jenna Kutcher is writing. By the way, Jenna Kutcher is writing those from a sales language perspective. She's writing those to convert. She's selling things. Even if you don't think she's selling anything on that post, girl's still selling something, because she's got an entire empire full of things to sell. So if what you're doing as a service provider is wanting to get people to contact you, right? Wanting someone to like you enough to reach out. Then all you really have to worry about is talking to the right people, being your true self, and hopefully the right people will be attracted to you. Because you're not trying to sell a course or preset filter. She's got a ton of products.PS: Oh yeah. And she's really good at posting something and asking, "How's your day going?" And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, she's talking to me."RD: And at the end, you're like, "I think I need her podcast course." And you don't know what happened. You don't know how it happened. She's very persuasive.PS: She's really good at that.RD: That's a whole other language. We don't need that. If that's not your goal, that's not what you need. You just need to be putting things out there that are authentically you. I post a lot of photos of food on my Moxie Bright account, because I love food, my clients love food. And I've had people say to me, "You post a lot of food." I'm like, "Uh huh, okay, thanks for noticing." What, am I not supposed to post the things I like? I'm going to post what I like.PS: Yeah, it speaks to your followers, it speaks to your tribe.RD: Yeah, but I also like it. If my followers decided suddenly they liked, I don't know, what's something I don't like? Country music. I don't really love country music. But if they were super into it, I still wouldn't be posting it. Because I'm just like, "Not my thing," right? I can't talk about something I don't know anything about. I feel bad now that I said I don't like country music. I like some country music, you guys.PS: To be honest, when I started editing wedding videos here, and some of the clients, it was like, "Oh, we want Brad Paisley." Before the whole copyright thing, I fell in love with country music.RD: Did you?PS: Yes, but I'm not deep into it. I'm kind of like you. I appreciate country music.RD: I like all the girl singers. So if there's a girl singer, like Martina McBride, I'm into her, love her. Faith Hill, love her. Any girl who can sing, I'm in. But no, the guys, I don't know anything about.PS: Okay. I'm the reverse. Well, you know what? I know Shania Twain. Because I'm Filipino, so we sing a lot. So now my question for you now is, since we were talking about "I can't" or "slay, girl" or whatever. Because for me, on Instagram, it's me who's talking. Stella, she sucks at social media, she doesn't want to do that, because she hates being on social media, so I do all of the captions and stuff. So when there's, "Oh, wow" or something like that that's weird, it's never going to be her, it's just always me.RD: I love it.PS: My question is how can we stop using limiting language in our business and life? How do I get to stop?RD: Well, I think first, you have to have the awareness that you're even doing it. So a lot of times after I talk about this topic, I've presented this at conferences and stuff, I'll get emails months later from someone who's like, "I was at your talk, and I went through my email, and oh my God, I've been saying 'sorry' and 'just', and I've been doing it all." And I'm like, "Yeah girl, you got to figure it out." You have to first understand that it's happening, right? There are some, especially when you're writing, there are some tools. So if you use Google Chrome, which you should all be using, because I love it, there is a plugin. The name of the plugin is called Just Not Sorry, which is great. And it literally will underline for you in your emails if you're using any word that is a limiting language word. But the other thing that's fun too is that sometimes you actually are apologizing for something, and sometimes you're like, "Oh, so sorry, this email got missed" or whatever, it'll still underline it. It doesn't necessarily understand the context. But it will tell you, "Hey, are you sure you want to use the word 'just' here?" "Just" is a big one. "Just" is the one that people go, "I don't use that," and then weeks later they say, "Oh my God, yes I do, it's everywhere." Of course it's everywhere. Because it's our culture, right? It's in our vernacular to use these words that make us sound soft and approachable and agreeable and easygoing like everyone wants to be, especially in California, super chill all the time. And I get it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has a place in your business. Because you have to understand, you have to determine and figure out for yourself how you want to be perceived, right? Because a lot of times, I'll talk to, especially groups of women, and I hate to keep saying that, but as a woman, it's a big deal for me. And they'll say, "Well, I don't really have control over how I'm perceived." Absolutely false. You 100% have control over how you're perceived. You can script that for yourself. You can make that happen for yourself. But first you have to have the awareness of it. So one, awareness. Two, tools like Google Chrome plugin. Three, start noticing it in other people, too. And it might make you less liked for a minute to be like, "You just said," call out your friend, be like, "I thought we weren't doing that anymore." Because it's pervasive, it's everywhere, and so it isn't just a quick fix, it is an ongoing thing. The other thing that I did for my assistant and for anyone who's in my inbox is I have a little, small document of "these are words we don't use". This is language Moxie Bright does not use, right? And even in my interactions with my clients on their wedding day, in my employee handbook, there is a list of things we don't say. So if someone were to come up to one of my assistants, a guest on the day of the wedding, and ask them a question, and if they don't know the answer, they're not allowed to say, "I don't know." What they're supposed to say is, "Let me find out." And that's the biggest example I can always give. It's taking that negative "I don't know" and turning it into something open and curious and positive, which was, "Let me find out. I'll go find out for you," right? So that person is then taking ownership of whatever the situation is. They are coming to someone else who might know more, finding out the answer. Saying "I don't know" is closing a door. That's like what you said, we don't want to say "I can't", right? I can't. Well, maybe you can't right now because you don't have the right information, right? So what do you say instead of "I can't"? Are you retraining yourself to think a new thing?PS: Well, the "I can't" that I'm talking about is the RuPaul Drag Race "I can't".RD: Oh.PS: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. But if we're talking about the "I can't" that you're talking about, I usually say, "I'll see what I can do."RD: Yeah, I'll see what I can do, exactly. Perfect, it's perfect.PS: "I can't." RD: I need to watch RuPaul's, I haven't watched RuPaul's Drag Race yet. But it's come up a lot lately, and so I feel like the universe is telling me to watch it.PS: Oh, they have a really, really extensive vocabulary of all the really fun phrases that people use.RD: Someone referenced a death drop to me the other day, and I was like, "I don't know what a death drop is." And then I Googled it, it was like, "Oh, that looks painful."PS: Yeah. I've seen comments that say "typing from heaven because I'm dead right now" or something like that, because the thing is so beautiful. So now I really want to ask you about this, because that kind of language attracts a certain kind of tribe, a certain kind of group, right?RD: Totally.PS: If I want to charge more and target the more luxurious market, should I continue saying that? If I were someone who does that.RD: I think if it's authentic, you should.PS: Okay.RD: I think in our industry, we have a really effed up thing about luxury, I believe. Every luxury client I've ever had has not come to me from social media. They have come from 100% personal referral from someone who's a friend of theirs. There's a little tight-knit Beverly Hills group that I work with all the time. Some clients, I've done all of their events, and then they refer me to their best friends, and that's how it works. Those people never read my reviews. They don't care. They want a personal referral, and they want you to show up and be professional. I think this marketing to luxury market doesn't really work. I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but I think be your authentic self. Listen, if you are-- let's just say I start watching RuPaul's Drag Race, and I feel compelled to post about it, I'm probably going to use that language because it's fun, right? It doesn't mean that that's who I am as a human every day of the year, and I have to say "slay" on all my posts, right? But I think it's fun to let people in to see who you are a little more. I'm a huge fan of the Canadian sitcom Schitt's Creek, which everyone, have to watch it immediately if you have not watched it. So lately, all of my Insta stories have had GIFs of the character David Rose making faces, and I've never explained it, I've never said, "I'm a huge fan, and so this speaks to me now." I'm just doing it. And I've got people message me on Instagram, "Oh my God, you watch that show, too?" I'm like, "Yeah, of course I do." But it's a way to let people in authentically without having to have a big deal about it. I'm sure the moment will pass in a few months, I'll be moved on to some other show, it's fine. But it's like you have to be able to play. And if you want to use "slay" one day, then you slay. But as far as a luxury market, I don't think they're looking for anything specific. I think they're looking for people who are really good at their job, who their friends have already worked with.PS: Okay. I was thinking about that.RD: I don't know how to tell you to break in. Everyone's like, "How did you get that first Beverly Hills client?" I'm like, "Through her yoga teacher." Through her private fancy yoga teacher. So you just don't know.PS: So let me know what you think, too. Because I feel like as long as you're authentic, social media caters to, especially if you want to target higher paying clients, right? Social media caters to the people around you. And if the vendors who know these luxury market clients like your personality, then it's an easier sell, right?RD: Absolutely.PS: Instead of targeting the luxury people.RD: Yeah. Think of it this way. It's like dating, right? If you want to impress someone, you put your best foot forward. So this is a different example, but I'll use it anyway. My friend who is the private yoga teacher, she works with very high-end clients. Russell Crowe used to be a client of hers. She used to go to his home and teach him yoga. And one day he was looking for a masseuse. And she texted me and said, "Who do we know who'd be good for Russell to get a massage?" Right? Because it has to be the right person. At that level, when you're talking about that person, that level of celebrity, that level of luxury, it can't just be the person we saw on Instagram who we think might be cool. It has to be the right person. When we went through a list of people that we knew, and she was like, "No, that girl drives a-- no, that girl's bad, she'll talk too much," or, "Oh no, that guy has a weird energy," right? There's nothing you can do at that point. You just have to be who you are, and you'll be right for someone. And it's the same with your language. You just have to talk the way you talk authentically in full complete thoughts ideally on social, and the right people will be attracted to you. And you know what? The other cool thing is you'll repel the wrong people. I think we spend a lot of time worrying about who we're attracting, but sometimes I'm like, "Who am I unattracting? Who am I sending away?" Good for that too, right? Because just in using not only limiting language, but inclusive language, right? If you're only posting the same kind of couple all the time, right? Perhaps you're sending a message that you're not open to working with everyone. Same thing with your language. If you're only ever talking about brides and grooms, brides and grooms, brides and grooms, you're leaving out a whole other section of people who are getting married.PS: So it's pretty much just curating. When it comes to business, you just make sure you curate. Be yourself, but you curate.RD: Yeah. Curate inasmuch as you feel comfortable curating. I'm certainly not someone who wants, you see those Instagram accounts of "everything's pink and white". And you're like, "How are you doing that? That's so much effort." I'm not about that life, I don't have that kind of time. But definitely curating your words is so important to me, because I know that none of us are spending enough time thinking about it. We're all just going off the cuff and saying what we think, and saying what we feel, and writing what we feel. And in the end, we're ending up too much in our feelings, and too much in our apologies, and too much in our self-doubt, and not enough standing in our power with our words, and really, intentionally communicating clearly and effectively and efficiently and with authority, what we mean.PS: Okay. I like that, because I feel like social media has changed the way. Before, when we started out, the "about us" page is the only page that tells about you. Now, social media. In the "about us" page, you're like, "I like riding horses and eating hamburgers." Now everything is out there.RD: It's true.PS: People are addicted that they can't stop just shooting out information about themselves, that I feel like when it comes to curating, when we talk about curating, at least for me, I feel like curating is cleaning up. You invite someone to go to your house, and the first thing, once they open the door and see your living room, you're like, "Shit, there's so much stuff on the floor and I need to clean up." So curating is kind of like that. Just make sure that when people Google you, they see a really nice-looking-- doesn't have to be perfect, but just clean. RD: Yeah. I love that you said, too, about the curating. I feel like when we say the word "curating", people are automatically like, "Ew, I don't want to." But what I hear in what you're saying, obviously correct me if this is incorrect, is that you feel like there is a fine line between sharing who you authentically are and who you want to work with, and the kind of work you want to put out there. And then there's people who really overshare, right? And they're telling you, or the people who go on Insta story and Insta story their entire day every day, they're living in some weird reality show that they've made for themselves, where this is their breakfast, and then they're walking the dog, and then they're answering emails, and then they're getting a haircut. And it's like whoa, hold on. What I like to think of for these things, because I'm certainly not someone who wants to Insta story my entire life. I was an actor, I got that amount of attention back in the day, I'm good. I always think if I want to share something that seems kind of tricky or seems kind of maybe challenging, or I don't know. I just always think, is this thing that I'm sharing, is it something that is a wound, an open wound, or is it a scar? Have I learned something from it, right? If it's like a client cancelled their wedding, and we're in the thick of cancelling it, and emotions are high, I'm certainly not going to go on Insta story and be like, "Here's how to cancel your wedding." No, there is a time and a place, right? You have to talk about that once the moment has passed, when it is a scar. The people who overshare, the people who do that thing where you're like, "That is aggressively TMI, I don't need to know all that," I think they're operating from a different place where they're not. And that's what I think we mean by curating. Come at it from a place of what is it that I want to share and teach and educate, or just simply communicate about, and not from a place of, "This just happened, and I'm gonna sound off on it," right? PS: Yeah. So I was talking to a social media expert, I was talking to someone, and we were talking about-- because when I post something on social media, especially the stories, because I always believe that Instagram feed has to be clean, that's about your company. And your stories is where you get dirty. And by dirty, I don't mean sending--RD: Yeah, you can play a little fast and loose with the stories.PS: Yeah, but then when I post something on stories, I just go about my day, right? I take photos of a tree or, "Oh, I'm going to this restaurant." But I never post until the next day. Because I want it to be purposeful. "Oh my gosh, that experience at the restaurant is the highlight of my day," and that's the only thing I'm going to post. So I feel like people need to learn to step back, because the pressure of posting something right now is just tremendous that it's not really healthy anymore.RD: I agree.PS: And I feel like I should have one episode, podcast episode about mental health, because it's just so draining. Especially for me, because I'm not really a very public kind of guy. If I had a choice, I'd probably not post anything. But the pressure of trying to put something out there, yeah.RD: Yeah, I agree with you. Posting while you're in the moment of something takes you out of the moment. You're no longer in the moment, you're now looking at it from a distance, going, "How are people going to react? Oh, what should I say about this moment?" Just be in the moment, man, just post later. I tend not to post when I'm at networking events like the ones you and I have gone to for so many years together, because I don't want people know where I am. There is a weird part of me that is like, "If someone were to follow me around, they could, if I were posting in real time." And I know that sounds very paranoid, but that's just how we are, that's how I am today.PS: I actually saw and read an article, oh, I think it was online, a forum, and I started implementing it. When we go on vacation, I wait two days before I post something. Because we're on our way back, and we just started our vacation online, just so no one's going to know that oh, their house is empty, no one's in the house, stuff like that. It's me being paranoid.RD: But then again, these are all things we have to think about when we're talking about our businesses and our social media. It's such a different world now than when we started.PS: Yeah. So now my question for you is, if I want to change my copy, my language, how do I go about that for my business?RD: So first, I think you have to drill down what your core values are as a business. Mine are online, you can look at my core values on Moxie Bright, on the website, on the "about me" page. But I think once you have those core values, even if you don't publish them, even if you just write them down for yourself, right? Then make sure that all your language points to that. For me, I always want my language to be really uplifting, outgoing. I don't like passive voice. So if you don't know that means, not you, but if your listeners don't know what that means, active voice is like, "I am eating a sandwich." Passive voice is "I am going to eat a sandwich", right? I always want to be in the active voice. I want all my copy, all my Instagram captions, even if I'm talking about something that happened in the past, I still want my reaction to it, my comment on the image, to be in active voice, because it's important to me. It's one of the things, one of my pet peeves. Even when I listen to podcasts, when people say, "We're going to talk about blah blah blah." Just talk about it. You're already here, we're in it, just do it, right? That's just my impatient New Yorker, I think, coming out. But so that's something that's important to me. It's important to me to not use limiting language. It's important to me to communicate in a voice that allows people to easily feel comfortable with me being in charge. Because again, that speaks to what I'm doing for a living. If I were someone in a more creative primarily field, maybe if I were an interior designer, or maybe if I were a photographer, maybe my language would be a little more creative, a little more flowery, because you want to communicate that I have that sort of creative spirit. I'm not so concerned with that for what I'm doing currently. I more just want to be seen as an authority. Because it helps my clients trust me, and then it automatically takes out so many problems in the long run, because they're like, "Oh, Renee's got this," right? Because all of my language and my demeanor speaks to that. So that's what important to me. It doesn't have to be important to other people. But that's one of the reasons that I'm so passionate about this topic, is that I find it so prevalent in our industry. I've been at so many networking events standing next to someone, and someone says, "What do you do?" And they go, "I'm just a wedding planner." And it makes all my skin crawl right off, right? I'm like, "You're not just anything. You're a business person, you're a CEO, you're the president of your company, you're the founder, you're the creative force behind your company." We're so much more than the titles we give ourselves. Because everyone wants to be modest and humble. And I get it, you don't want to be a jerk. But also, you have to own your shit, you have to own your own expertise. Because as a business owner, nobody's going to give that to you, right? No outside force is going to come in and say, "Paul, you're the CEO now." And you're going to go, "Oh my God, am I? I made it." It's like, "No, we're making it ourselves," right? So it might sound arrogant sometimes, and you don't have to say it all the time, but you have to believe it. You have to believe that you are the CEO, whatever inflated title you think is too much, you have to behave as though that's true. PS: I love that, because for us, we've been doing this for nine years, our business has been existing for nine years. And we've never seen ourselves as the owners, right? So for the nine years, we've been just slaving away, making sure that we have work for everyone and blah blah blah. But then, just one moment, we were talking to our friends, and they're like, "You're the CEO, you have to do CEO shit. You can't just do secretary stuff, just hire a secretary. Do owner stuff." And the way that you say that to yourself, it makes you feel more empowered. People who say that they're just wedding planners, and they go to conventions, you're not just the wedding planner, you're already at a convention, that means you're serious. This is a real, real business. So yeah, people have to own up to--RD: Yeah.PS: Yeah. I love that.RD: You have to change your mindset, and you have to learn. It's going to sound so woo-woo, and I can't believe I'm saying this, but I believe it. You have to vibrate at a higher frequency for stuff like that. You just have to let yourself be up here unapologetically. And because, listen, at the end of the day, our businesses are our babies, and we are solely in charge of them. So if something in your business isn't working, it's our responsibility to fix it. And sometimes, it literally just is-- the mindset is off. Your mindset isn't working in your favor, right? And but again, this mindset is pervasive, it comes out in our language. So when I hear someone say, "I'm just a wedding planner," I'm thinking, oh, what's going on with them, right? Do they not have a supportive spouse, maybe? Maybe their spouse is saying, "Well, this little thing you're doing is just for now." Maybe they are not natural leaders. Maybe they have to work on their leadership for their team. Maybe they just have to change their mindset around money, right? We didn't even get around the topic of language around money, but it's the same deal. It's learning to control the language that you have around all of these things. Because once you start acknowledging it and changing it, then it becomes second nature, and you don't have to say to yourself, "Oh, I said 'just' again." Right? Now, when I say "just", I think, oh, did I say it? As opposed to I'm always saying it, and I'm training myself out of it.PS: Yeah, I love that. So my last questions, it's plural because-- it's actually just one question.RD: Okay.PS: So it's basically what language should you use for rejection when you feel like the couple doesn't really fit with you? For example, I saw last night, I saw online, someone asked, "So what do I tell the couple if I see a lot of red flags?" Before they sign, how do I talk to them and say "eh"? RD: I, in the past, have said-- well, first of all, I don't give anyone any sort of pricing or any information until I've spoken to them. And I firmly believe that that is the way everyone should be doing this, because what we do is so personal that it's really hard. It'd be hard for me to send out a price sheet and have someone be like, "I choose you." You'll be like, "Wait a minute, who are you? What is even your deal? I don't know if I want to work with you." So first, we have a conversation. And if I see a lot of red flags, oftentimes I won't send them a proposal. What I'll send instead is an email that I think I have in my canned email that's letting them down easy. And I just say, "It's been really lovely speaking with you and getting to know you. Based on what you told me in our conversation, I don't think that I'm the right fit for you." And I don't necessarily give them reasons, right? Because it doesn't matter, because they're not going to change. Or more accurately, nothing that they can say at that point will change my mind that I don't want to work with them, right? So I had a client, or not a client, but a potential client, many years ago, describe herself as a bridezilla six times during the consult. And she would say it and then laugh, like haha, like it was the funniest thing. I never laughed, I was just taking notes. And she didn't have her fiance on the call. She never even told me his name. She never referenced him, like "my fiance Joe". She just said "my fiance" as if that were his name. By the end, I said, "I'm sorry, you never gave me his name." And she goes, "I didn't?" And I said, "No." She was, "That's funny," and then went into something else. And I was like, it just was clearly not for me. So I wrote her an email and I said, "It was really lovely getting to know you. Based on our conversation, I don't think I'm the right fit for you. Here's who I'd recommend for you." And I always send at least two referrals to people that I really genuinely think could handle that situation, right? That I think they'd be a better fit for. And I don't necessarily feel the need to overly explain myself. In that particular case, she did write back and asked why. And I said, "One of the things I love as a wedding planner is working equally with both halves of the couple, no matter what that couple looks like. And because your fiance wasn't on the call and didn't seem very present in the proceedings, I just know that it's ultimately not going to be a good fit for me." And I never heard from her again. So I think when you're strong in your convictions and you know your core values, and you know the people you want to work with, it's much easier to say no to the ones you don't. But I also don't think we need to be writing diary entries about how much we don't want to work with them. I think that's when it pays to be super almost masculine in your responses, just like it's a hard line, right? Because the other thing you can say is like, "I don't think we'd be a good fit because you said something about being a bridezilla." And then she'd be like, "Well, I was just kidding," and blah blah blah.PS: That's it.RD: Then you're opening it up for more drama. It's a no.PS: Okay.RD: It's hard though, hard to do that.PS: It's super hard. I feel like the person who posted that online, he was just afraid to piss him off or break their heart.RD: Yeah, of course, you don't want to be a bad person. And also, not all of us are in a position to say no to the money. But then again, once you have a bad client that you've taken for money, you always realize that's bad money. You don't want that money anyway.PS: I think it's good that people have us, people like us to tell them that it's money now, but it's going to be a headache in a few months.RD: I feel like everyone has to do it once, and then they go, "Oh yeah, that was bad." Yeah, that was bad.PS: Okay, so the last one, the very last one, because I said language for rejection, right?RD: Yes.PS: What language-- how do you say-- how do you deal with a really livid couple when you did something wrong? Or you didn't do anything wrong, and they're super mad, how do you talk to them?RD: So I always try to figure out where they're coming from. Oftentimes, it is not about us, and the hardest thing as a business owner is to not take things personally. Weddings are emotional, right? A lot of times, we are getting the brunt of something that happened with someone else. And I know as a wedding planner especially, so many times I'll get an email that's like, "We're behind and da da da da, and this and that." And I have to read it and go okay, this person feels panicked, because they think something's not happening that should. I always deal with the facts first. I take the emotion right out of it. In fact, sometimes I actually ignore the emotion, right? Especially if they're coming at me hot, I'm just like, "Okay, what are the facts here? The facts are this person feels scared, this person thinks that A, B and C was not done. That is incorrect, A, B and C is done, here's the proof of when it was done. What else can I help you with?" I always try to move it forward, especially because my clients, or some other brides or grooms or whomever, tend to get a little worked up. Sometimes I always tend to just go okay, don't take it emotionally. Sometimes you got to close the email, walk around the house a little bit, walk around your office, burn it off, come back and be like, okay, what are they really saying, right? Because it's hard when someone's like, "You didn't do something." If they're pointing fingers, "You're bad at your job." And they might not have said that, but that's the tone, right? It's hard to divorce yourself from that and be like, "Okay, well, that's their opinion. Let's deal with the facts." And listen, if you didn't do something that needed to get done, or there was a misstep, of course apologize, absolutely apologize. And oftentimes, what I try to do is I make it right and then apologize. Fix it before you even-- fix it, just whatever it is, fix it. And then go back and say, "You know what? You're right, that did not get done, but it is done now, and here is the outcome." Because basically, all those emails are, all those communications are, is them throwing up a flare going, "Oh my God, something's really bad, we have to fix it." And so your job is to just fix it. Just fix it, fix it first. The other thing with communication, and you didn't ask this, but I'll just say it now. So many times, our clients are frustrated with us because they don't know what we're doing. And oftentimes it's eas

Tami Reiss has her dream job; She is the SVP of Product at ProdUXLabs focusing on the Insight Partners portfolio as their CPO in Residence. In 2016, Tami launched Just Not Sorry, a Gmail plug-in used by half a million people around the globe to write more confident emails. In this episode, she walks us through her sinuous professional journey; from physiology to Google Chrome extensions to product strategy, Tami delineates how a career path is a system with many interconnected causes and effects that lead you to where you want to be.

“The more you keep being authentically yourself, the more there is a probability that the right door will open.” Tami Reiss has her dream job; She is the SVP of Product at ProdUXLabs focusing on the Insight Partners portfolio as their CPO in Residence. In 2016, Tami launched Just Not Sorry, a Gmail plug-in used by half a million people around the globe to write more confident emails. In this episode, she walks us through her sinuous professional journey; from physiology to Google Chrome extensions to product strategy, Tami delineates how a career path is a system with many interconnected causes and effects that lead you to where you want to be.

As women we have the tendency to over apologize. In this episode, we get into how to replace “I’m sorry” and only use it when necessary to be stronger communicators. Links in this episode: * The Cut: How Do I Make Plans Without ‘Getting a Drink’? (https://www.thecut.com/2019/11/11-ways-to-make-friends-without-drinking-alcohol.html) * Career Contessa: How to Stop Apologizing at Work (+ What to Say Instead) (https://www.careercontessa.com/advice/stop-apologizing/) * Just Not Sorry — the Gmail Plug-in (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-not-sorry-the-gmail/fmegmibednnlgojepmidhlhpjbppmlci)

And that’s a wrap on Season 2! What better way to head into a summer break than with Nicole Sanchez, one of the smartest, sharpest, most trusted voices on building diverse and inclusive workplaces? We talk with the founder of Vaya Consulting and lecturer at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business about what has and hasn’t changed in tech culture, how companies try to shortcut diversity efforts, and why well-intentioned white people often screw up. > We’re taking on 500 years of colonial America when we talk about race. And nobody can be expected to do that in a training… We’ve hit this mainstream complacency with, “Great. You hit 4% black people in your company. Wonderful. Oh. You have 6% Latinx. Wow! You’re really doing well.” Like that’s kind of where the conversation is stuck. It’s a Benetton ad. > —Nicole Sanchez, founder of Vaya Consulting We’re taking a few weeks off, but don’t worry: Nicole’s going to leave you fired up all summer. And look for new episodes of NYG in August! Links on links on links: Nicole’s company, Vaya Consulting (and their new management training courses) “Diversity in tech and what we’ve already lost,” Nicole’s moving essay about her father and STEM Ijeoma Oluo’s stellar read, So You Want to Talk About Race Starbucks, anti-blackness, and why unconscious bias training isn’t enough Also in this episode We, like, talk about our word choice on the show and off—from “I think” to “I don’t know”—and debate the benefits and drawbacks of changing how we speak. Just Not Sorry, an app that “warns you when you write emails using words which undermine your message” (we’re skeptical) “From Upspeak To Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?” Turns out, men use filler words more than women Have a bitchin’ summer, everyone! Stay sweet and we’ll see you in August! Sponsors This episode of NYG is brought to you by: Shopify, a leading global commerce platform that’s building a world-class team to define the future of entrepreneurship. Visit shopify.com/careers to see what they’re talking about. WordPress—the place to build your personal blog, business site, or anything else you want on the web. WordPress helps others find you, remember you, and connect with you.   Harvest, makers of awesome software to help you track your time, manage your projects, and get paid. Try it free, then use code NOYOUGO to get 50% off your first paid month. Transcript Jenn Lukas [Ad spot] Today’s episode is supported by Shopify. Shopify makes great software that helps anyone with a great idea build a successful business—and they’re growing. Join the more than 3,000 diverse, passionate problem-solvers around the world who already call Shopify their professional home. Visit shopify.com/careers for all the info, including office locations, open positions, and more about what makes them so great [music fades in, plays for ten seconds, fades out]. Welcome to No, You Go, the show about being ambitious—and sticking together. I’m Jenn Lukas. Katel LeDû I’m Katel LeDû. Sara Wachter-Boettcher And I’m Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and welcome to our Season 2 Finale! JL Woo! SWB We can’t believe we’re already at 20 episodes, plus a bonus-ode, and five editions of our biweekly newsletter. P.S. Are you getting our newsletter yet? It’s called I Love That, and you will love it. Sign up at noyougoshow.com/ilovethat, because Edition 6 is going to come out this Friday, June 29th. To round off the season we will be digging deep into the world of diversity and inclusion with none other than Nicole Sanchez, founder of Vaya Consulting and one of the smartest, loudest, most trusted voices in workplace inclusion. But before we do, let’s talk about something that I think we’ve all noticed this season and that is the way we speak. Like… you know… word choice? KL So my friend Allison Crimmins, who we had on the show in Season 1, wrote to me and said that she noticed that we say “I think” a lot. She noticed in one episode that we said it, like… a lot [chuckles]. Which made her think about how many times she writes it in emails and speaks it out loud when she’s not really even meaning to, along with other words or phrases like “I just,” “perhaps,” “maybe,” and starting sentences with “I’m sorry.” Ugh! I do that too. I do it all the time. And there was a period of time where I looked at my emails and would scrub them out. I would scrub them out of the beginning of emails and was like, “What am I doing?” So basically all of those things that we say, qualifying statements that make us sound like we’re basically apologizing for [chuckles], you know, existing or, you know, taking up space. I came across this article and this app called Just Not Sorry that you can install and it will alert you to when you use “I’m sorry,” “I think,” “I just,” “maybe,” and let you do that more easily when you send emails. So I thought that was really interesting. JL Part of me when I hear things like this, or I hear other people critique people’s language, I sort of want to be like, “You know what? Like, who cares? Eff those people, because that’s not really what like the main meat of a conversation is,” and part of it really frustrates me. And then part of me thinks realistically in life there’s a lot of things that people do that really frustrate me and they’re going to judge me for it. So I have two options: either, like, eff it and don’t, or think about how that affects my life and career and consider whether or not I want to make a change. [3:10] SWB I think in this whole conversation it’s really useful to kind of parse out, when are these kinds of softening words being used in ways that are helpful and beneficial to conversation and that show that you are listening and sort of in a conversational moment with somebody, you’re not just like talking at them, and when are we using this kind of language to kind of hedge what we actually think, or to even obscure what we actually think, or to, you know, make it easier for people to walk all over us? And I guess something I think a lot about is how often is that sort of like your default state—“sorry for existing” and “sorry for saying anything”—versus when is an “I’m sorry” an appropriate kind of interjection in a conversation? And so I guess I think a lot of that gets flattened in this conversation, right? Because so much of the advice that you read out there, you can find like—if you Google this, you can find a hundred articles about this in about a minute that’ll just be like, “Just remove ‘justs’ from your emails, get rid of every single time you say ‘maybe’ or ‘I think’,” and the reality is that, what if the problem isn’t that women say those things too often? What if the problem is that men aren’t socialized to say those things enough? And I think that that is part of the problem, too. JL Yeah I know we’ve talked about this in the past before is like hey, you know, really being careful about, you know, as an engineer who gives feedback to people, how we give that feedback. And me saying something like, “I think you could rework this by adding an attribute here,” is better than, “Add an attribute here.” It just like—especially because you’re communicating online and not face-to-face with someone that you’re not necessarily knowing the inflection that I have. So, “I think we should go get ice cream,” versus, “We should get ice cream!” SWB Wait! Hold on. Hold on. We should get ice cream. KL I mean that should be a statement always [laughs]. A lot of times when I start speaking with someone, especially if I’m trying to have a conversation that’s a little bit more difficult, I find myself softening things and I think, you know, in that case that’s really valuable and I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose touch of that. But I do—I think it is good to just keep an eye out on like instances where I could be a little bit more assertive or, like I said, concise and clear. JL Yeah for me when I communicate, especially at work, I want people to know that I’m confident in the things that I’m recommending. KL Right. JL And I think a lot of this is making sure that you do sound more confident. SWB My sense is that focusing on clarity and making sure that we are hitting specific points in the way we want to and feeling confident about the things we are saying, that’s really valuable, right? Like, we are sending this information out to the world and we want as many people as possible to hear it and have it resonate with them, and I think that when we are focused and when we can cut out sort of too much extraneous stuff, that’s really helpful. On the other hand, people use filler words. That’s a human thing to do. The kinds of—_kind of, sort of, um, uh, you know_. Everybody has different filler words that they rely on, but the reality is that people use filler words. And in fact they’re have been a lot of studies that men use them just as much as women, but women tend to be criticized for them. And a huge piece of this is just the way that we end up policing women’s language as being somehow not up to par with men’s language when the reality is, it tends to be a little bit different and it also just tends to be more, like, hyper-watched, right? Like you feel like people are paying so much more attention to it. I mean that’s one of the reasons I know women radio hosts get so much mail about their voice. I am just waiting for us to get some angry email about vocal fry because I feel like that’s a rite of passage [Katel laughs]. I’m not actually waiting for that email. Please don’t send it. [7:17] KL Yeah we’re really not trying to will that into the universe. But at the end of the day I do think that I would rather sound more human than just completely cold and assertive and confident. And I know that that might be the ideal in a lot of people’s minds, but, I don’t know… I’m going to strive for not apologizing when I know what I’m saying, but also making sure I make my point as clearly as possible. JL I definitely find that I try to be more careful with this in written communication. And I try not to hyper-focus on editing myself when I’m speaking. I’ve done, as a public speaker, you know, I’ve watched recordings of myself, which is painful, but you do learn a lot. But that doesn’t mean I’ve watched every recording of myself. And it doesn’t mean that I do it at a regular basis. You know every once in awhile I go, “Oh. Maybe that’s something I want to think about,” but I definitely don’t harp on it, because again that balance of, like, where I feel more comfortable. Now I know I just said ‘like’ in that last sentence, but you know what? I’m ok. SWB So I’m the person who listens to all the raw recordings and goes through— KL [Laughs] God bless you. SWB—everything that we produce and then provides notes to our producer about, you know, where I think the good bits are and what we can probably cut out. And I will say that one of the things that I’ve really noticed is that we talk like people actually talk. We talk like friends talk over drinks. That is part of the show. Like that is part of the point. And removing that is, I think, not the goal. At least not my goal. However, I think that there are also things that I find all of us end up over-relying on, and I think actually in terms of this conversation something that I wish we all said less of… it’s not “like”—I could give a fuck about “like”—it’s “I don’t know.” And I think that one’s really easy when we don’t want to assume that the other two of us agree with us and so we’ll make a point and then we’ll kind of say, “I don’t know,” as if we’re not certain that we actually believe the thing that we just said. That’s one that I want to be more cautious of. But some of this other stuff, I just look at it as like when people have conversations, they speak naturally. Natural language has filler words, filler words are fine, and we edit out and clean out some of the stuff that doesn’t go anywhere, but we’re not going to edit out every example of that, because that would make it feel stilted and weird, and it wouldn’t give it that sense of, like, you’re sitting around the table with us having snacks. [9:50] KL And I just want to say that, you know, I want to thank Allison for bringing this up because it is clearly so complex, and I’m sure that we will talk about this a little bit more. So, I don’t know, I’m glad that it came up [laughs]. God fucking damn it! I said “I don’t know.” [Music fades in, plays for three seconds, fades out]. Sponsors KL Hey, everyone, taking a quick break to talk about some of our favorite people, our sponsors. And not just because they support the show but because we actually use their services like WordPress, the people behind almost one in three websites—including ours. If you need a website that’s reliable, looks good, and is super-easy to customize to your needs, then you need to check out WordPress. They’ve got it all: awesome designs, custom domain names, tons of integrations with other services you use, and maybe best of all, incredible customer support 24/7. We know because we’ve used it. And all this starts at just $4 a month. Four bucks! So start building your website today. Go to wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off any new plan purchase. That’s wordpress.com/noyougo for 15 percent off your brand-new website. SWB [Ad spot] We’d also like to thank Harvest for their support once again. Harvest helps teams keep track of the time they spend working on different projects and clients, and it’s one of my favorite tools. Use their simple software to assign tasks, set deadlines, manage projections, and so much more. You can even use it to run business reports and find out how healthy your projects really are. Personally I love using Harvest for invoicing. In fact I just looked today, and I have sent 355 invoices using their system so far. JL 355?!? SWB That’s totally real. JL That’s a lot of invoices. SWB If you are a freelancer, consultant like me, or an agency, you should check out Harvest. Visit getharvest.com to try it for free and get 15 percent off your first paid month with the code noyougo. That’s getharvest.com, offer code noyougo [music fades in, plays alone for three seconds, fades out]. [11:45] Interview: Nicole Sanchez SWB Today’s guest is someone I have personally admired for a long time now, and that is Nicole Sanchez. She is the founder of Vaya Consulting, a firm that’s pioneering solutions to tech’s culture problems. Problems like lack of diversity, pay inequity, and biased hiring practices. She also earned an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and now teaches a workplace diversity course there. Nicole, I have about a hundred things I want to talk with you about [laughter] and thank you so much for being on the show today! Nicole Sanchez Oh no, thank you. I am such a fan of your book. I love it so much. I have given to many people, Technically Wrong is just such a good read. So thank you for that. SWB Uh, thank you! But we did not bring you on here to plug my book— NS [Laughs] Ok. SWB Because we gotta talk about what you are up to. There’s so much here. So first off: can you tell our listeners a little bit more about Vaya, like what your work looks like, and sort of what made you found this company? NS Sure. So I’ve been working on workplace diversity and inclusion for 24 years, and my first job doing it in tech was actually in 1999. And what I started learning there and continued to learn is that people are very interesting in groups, and they do interesting things, but they don’t generally do new things. They keep doing the same things over and over, which means some of the same ways of success, but also some of the same mistakes. And where it gets really interesting to me and why I ultimately started my firm is that when we look at groups behave and we purposefully try to make them diverse—in a lot of ways, but specifically in terms of race and ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic background—really fascinating things happen. And it’s not… my work isn’t so much about rectifying the past, even though that is definitely some of what my inspiration and what my motivation. It is more about, we build better things in diverse teams that are working well. We as humans, we as people in the United States, we in tech, when we have a diverse group of people who are behaving inside an inclusive structure— meaning everybody has a voice, everybody has a shot, everybody has an equitable stake in what’s going on in the outcome—the kinds of things that are produced are unparalleled, when you compare them to some of the more traditional ways, especially the way tech has been built by more homogenous groups of people who share the same class background or the same education. People mostly have their heads wrapped around, “Ok diversity is good and we need more of it,” but they don’t know how to get it and they certainly often don’t know what to do with it once they have it. So we’ve really rolled up our sleeves and get into the tactical work of revamping a hiring system, for example, or doing executive coaching for the executive who just isn’t fluent in this conversation yet but really needs to be. And so in any of our dozen clients, there are different points in their trajectory, but always pointed towards building a culture of inclusion with a diverse group of people running and working inside it. [14:47] SWB And so I know that this issue is near and dear to you because of your own experience in the world, but you also wrote before that this was something that was important because of your father’s story. And you wrote this really moving article about it and I would love to talk a little bit about that and how that story has driven or affected, you know, the work that you do now. NS Ah thanks. We just passed the third anniversary of my father’s passing. I wrote it for him, really, about six months after he passed and it’s called “Diversity and Tech and What We’ve Already Lost.” And my dad grew up the youngest of 11 kids in East LA, and then later in Montebello, for anybody who is from Southern California and for whom that matters, and he met my mother at Montebello High. And my dad was a fantastic student, specifically in math and science, and his dream was to go to UC Berkeley. And his parents couldn’t afford it, so he had to figure out first of all how to get in, which he did. And then how to get himself up to Berkeley, which is where I live now, and how to pay for school, and where to live, and—and everything. This was 1962. The fall of 1962. There was no affirmative action. Very little financial aid to be had. And so he was really scraping it together. And over the course of his first two years he really met head-on the ugly twins: poverty and racism! Poverty and racism are an evil pair, and he really just clearly fell victim to both of those things, and ended up having to drop out, go back down to Los Angeles, he and my mom—they ended up getting married, they lived together in [chuckling] relative happiness for over 50 years, they have four children, all of us girls, and he didn’t get to finish at UC Berkeley. He didn’t get to finish his degree, which was absolutely his dream. And when I go back and think about his story, and now that so much of the history is online and searchable, I look at who some of his classmates were in his math classes and in very early computer classes. Because UC Berkeley was one of the only—well, was one of the first universities to make computers accessible to students—and he was learning how to program them and playing on them. And his classmates were people who went on to be pioneers in tech. And my dad ended up spending 35 years working at a fast food restaurant, which he ultimately owned. My dad did get a degree later on at Cal State East Bay, which was great, but his health was failing at that point and he didn’t ever get to actually be the inventor, teacher, computer scientist, mathematician that we knew he always wanted to be. And it had nothing to do with his potential, had nothing to do with how hard he worked—because he worked harder than anybody I’ve ever known. It had everything to do with being born in a certain package compared to a different one. And that is how we lose talent in tech. It isn’t always as obvious as the racism my dad faced, but there are so many barriers to people like him today with accessing the field of technology and certainly being entrepreneurs or having ownership stakes in valuable companies, or inventing really cool things that are going to go to Mars. There are so many barriers being born the youngest of 11 in East LA and actually achieving that dream. And we, you know, we’ve done a decent job at removing some of those barriers, but they’re not all gone, and I worry daily about the talent that we’ve lost in our sector as a result. [18:06] SWB That story is so moving and, I mean, first off: it’s just such a moving tribute to your dad. And we’ll link to it in the show notes, of course, so everybody can read it. And the other thing that really struck me about it is that it was such a perfect encapsulation of the problems that we face when we start trying to talk about things like meritocracy or we talk about the way that the tech industry almost acts like there is no past. Like that everything is new, and so everything is a fresh start all the time, and I think it kind of creates this culture where we’re not thinking about the way that people are being shut out before they can have any chance to make anything at all. NS Yeah. That’s right. And our system here in Silicon Valley and in tech overall, although I think it’s probably most present here in the Bay Area, is that somehow on the one hand, we want to talk about how fair and meritocratic everything is, and if you just work hard and grind, if you hustle and do all the things, then you will achieve success. And then on the other hand, the same system is creating the barriers to entry, creating the barriers to resource access, creating the barriers that continue to allow the “winners,” quote/unquote, the “winners” to keep “winning” and those of us who are trying to come in, you can’t get a foothold. The system is so really rigged against that, you know, you just think about somebody who has a great idea that could be the next billion-dollar company, or $10 billion company, and if you come in from a background where you don’t have any financial security of your own, you don’t have the network to talk to the people who can help you get the capital, you don’t know what the right events to be at are, you are—you stick out like a sore thumb for whatever reason, whatever the package you’re in causes you to stick out as not according to the pattern of the rest of Silicon Valley. It is very difficult literally, like logistically, as well as psychologically, to make those breakthroughs. And I don’t see many people who have access to the resources that maybe, you know, VCs do or CEOs of companies, I don’t see them going out of their way to very effectively remove those barriers to new talent. And it is intellectually dishonest when we say, “We want the best,” but we’re also going to simultaneously create barriers to some of the best getting inside the system. SWB Yes! All of this talk about, “We want to get the best,” I’m like, “Y’all don’t even know what the best means!” [Nicole laughs] Like, “How would you even know what that is if all you’ve ever seen is this one very narrow slice? How do you even know you have the best? Like you actually don’t.” NS [Chuckles] Well I had one client, just to give you an example of that, who had hired me to identify bias in their hiring system. They brought my consulting firm in and I was sitting in a candidate review process where they were going over their docket of candidates for jobs, technical and non-technical. And my job was to raise my hand and say, “Hey, I think bias has crept up into the system.” And the first candidate that I witnessed be evaluated by this group, the candidate wasn’t there, they had already gone through the whole system. The candidate docket, somebody puts it down on the table and says, “Well, this guy went to Harvard and worked at Facebook, so obviously we’re hiring him.” And so I hadn’t been sitting down but for 30 seconds [chuckling] and raised my hand and say, “If that’s what you think the best is, why did you spend tens of thousands of dollars to interview him? When you could’ve found that out from LinkedIn, if you looked—or his resume?” You say, “Yup. Harvard: check. Facebook: check. Great: you’re hired.” If that’s ultimately what you’re using to make your decision then don’t—don’t waste your time meeting the person. Just go look for people who worked at Facebook and went to Harvard. And we see this over and over again. This lazy shortcut for validation. People, for example, wanting to use GitHub commit graphs as an indication of how strong of an engineer you are. That doesn’t—that’s not how that works, because that’s a subset of the talent you want to be pulling from. So it is very lazy to say, “Ok, anybody who’s in open source, anybody who has the time to dabble in these public projects, great: you have a leg up.” You’ve now advantaged the already advantaged in that hiring process. And we just see this happen over and over, and it’s not as simple as somebody sitting there saying, “I don’t think women are smart enough to work at my company.” Like those are easy. Those are easy to spot and extract. It is much harder to get into the systems that have petrified around those beliefs. [22:43] SWB So this completely brings us to the next thing I wanted to talk about which is like, ok, you have been doing this work for more than a couple of decades. Two full decades in the tech industry! [Nicole laughing] And so I saw that you recently gave this talk, a keynote that was called “Diversity and Inclusion Hit the Mainstream, Now What?” And I think that that’s—that’s kind of my question. Well, so now what? Like we—we’re talking about this stuff. Companies are increasingly willing to hire people like you to help them fix it. But where have we started making progress? And where are we still stuck? And how do we move beyond lip service in this conversation? NS I think we understand diversity on some level, even though we can’t all agree on it, what it really means when you get to the granular look at it. We know it means bringing lots of different kinds of people together and that something good’s supposed to happen, but along the way one of the stops we’ve taken in this conversation is enumerating transgressions, which is very important because people deserve to be heard when they’ve been wronged. And we have invested a lot in individual stories of individual people who have suffered inside a system. And, like I said, that’s really important, and it’s not to invalidate their experience, but we haven’t done a good job of indicting the system that allowed that to happen, because you cannot pick out every bad actor one by one, first of all. And second of all, the system is much more strained than any individual. I meet with clients all the time and I’m just going to—I’m just going to tell it [chuckles] kind of like it is, which is what I said in my talk. I meet a lot of well-meaning white people in particular. I meet a lot of white women specifically who say, “I can’t figure out why in my HR system I still can’t convince a black woman to come work here.” Right? And it’s just tons of good intentions that still don’t add up to progress, and so we’re stalled on this. We say, “I’m not—” You know, people say, “I’m not racist. Ok. I’m not racist. I’m not sexist. I’m not homophobic.” Great. Why are we still seeing the yield that we’re seeing? And the answer is that we’re not digging into understanding the systems. One of the systems that has yet to be indicted is, for example, the system of how equity is distributed in a company in Silicon Valley. That in my opinion and from my experience has a much greater potential for impact on the people we want to benefit from our diversity and inclusion initiatives the most, and to move the needle most significantly. If we can actually indict the system of how VCs in particular set up equity distribution, we’re going to make a much bigger impact than, “Let’s hear another story about another person who transgressed or had something bad happen to them.” Again, people deserve to tell their stories, but it is not the thing that’s going to get us to the next level as a sector. And so that’s where my talk was really about like, “Ok. We get it. It’s bad. It hurts. So then what? Let’s talk about equity distribution, let’s talk about executive compensation, let’s talk about your hiring practices, let’s talk about recruitment practices, let’s talk about promotion and evaluation inside the company,” the real nitty gritty that actually makes up the results that you’re seeking to impact. People think, “Well, yay, we’re talking about it, and therefore it must be better.” And that’s not true. It’s actually driven some conversations further underground. It’s stalled other efforts. And I think people would find it surprising to know that I don’t love the way that we report our data, our diversity data as a sector right now. I don’t. I think it actually paused some efforts and slowed them down in ways that where I would’ve wanted to have seen much more traction by now. [26:44] SWB Can you tell me more about what you mean by that? So, what don’t you love about the way that diversity is being reported? And for those who aren’t familiar with it, like can you just describe a little bit about how you see it being reported, and maybe what you’d like to see different? NS Sure! So it’s still voluntary. Companies are not compelled by anything other than social pressure to release their diversity data. And what companies who do it generally do is they say, “Here’s how many men, here’s how many woman,” and there isn’t a lot of reporting off of the binary. “Here are the men in our company, here are the women in our women in our company; here’s technical versus non-technical,” and we know that inside a company that’s very [sighs] that’s very company specific. You know you may be inside one company where the support team is highly technical and another one where they’re not. So it’s very difficult to know what we’re actually measuring there. And then they say, you know, “Leadership/non-leadership,” and then they say, “Here’s race and ethnicity.” And that’s basically it. And so what companies have done is they’ve been able put their best foot forward because it’s simply a snapshot. It’s a snapshot that counts heads. How many people are here today on this day that we recorded? And it doesn’t tell you any story. So every company now knows that as long as you’re on a cadence where you feel good about your hiring, and let’s say you start cohorts in September, and you particularly start new hires in September, and you’ve made great efforts to diversify your new hires. If you report your data in September, your snapshot looks really good. But we’re not reporting six months later where we learn people of color start to fall out of the system and start to go, “You know what? Turns out this culture isn’t actually that welcoming for people like me.” And so within the first six to 12 months you may lose all those people you reported in September. But you got another, you know, amount of time to make up for it again, by the time you have to report again. So it is in some ways very easy to mislead people into thinking, “This is who’s always working at our company.” [28:44] NS [Continued] One example that a client gave me was saying that, “We report every June, and in July of last year we lost 30 women. Out of a company of 500, we lost 30 women within two months because of something that happened. But we know we have 10 months to hire 30 women back and show no blip at all in our reporting,” which actually tells a story of what’s going on inside the company. If that makes sense. And so that to me is where it set us back. It didn’t help people on the culture part, it got the diversity part but it didn’t get the inclusion part or the equity part or the belonging part. SWB Yeah, that’s so telling, too. It’s managing to the metric, right. So now there’s a scorecard out there and you’re like me in a class I didn’t like in high school being like, “Ok. What’s the minimum I can do and still get an A because this is not going to touch my GPA?” Right? Like that’s— NS That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. And also because we’re so opaque as an industry. You can lose 30 women and then deceptively hire 30 new women without them knowing potentially that this is a terrible place for women to work. And so you haven’t fixed anything but—but your public face looks great. SWB So—and this brings me back to something that I know was tweeted from that talk, which was that the money shows us where people’s priorities really are. And so, what would it look like for a company to really invest in the kind of shift that you’re talking about? NS So yeah the adage that I like using is, “Don’t tell me what your priorities are, show me your budget and I’ll tell you your priorities.” And priorities in Silicon Valley in particular and in tech overall—and I guess in business overall, I mean let’s just be honest—whose upside looks like what is going to tell you what is actually valued. So if you can say—and the reason I think that it’s—that it’s remained a secret is that people know that the disparity is actually shameful. There is no way that you can say, “Oh yes that single engineer who did so much for our work once we went public made $200,000 on our big exit. I, however, as CEO, who was really a pain in the ass to deal with, just walked away with a billion.” Like that’s the scale that we’re actually talking about. And then that doesn’t even bring it into account the custodial staff, the food service staff, the security staff, you know, working at your front door. Those people have been erased from the equation. And so until Silicon Valley is really ready to—until companies say, “All right, we’re going to tell you our percentages of distribution and we can actually report it publically and we want everybody to know because we stand by our method.” Until a company can do that, including their board and investors: “Here’s who owns what part of the company.” And it’s generally that about ten percent own 90 percent of the company and then vice versa. Right? [31:35] SWB Mm hmm. NS And so once people start to get wise to that and demand that as a metric of reporting, I think we will start to see some stuff happening. I have yet to meet a company that has said, “We’re very transparent with this. I know what I own and I know what our CEO owns and I’m ok with it.” That just doesn’t happen, and until we hit that level of transparency with our resources, I think there’s a lot of shell games that can be played with diversity and inclusion. But follow the money, like Robert Reich always says, former labor secretary, “Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money, it’ll give you all your answers.” The same goes for tech. So I—I unfortunately get asked quite often, “Tell me a company that has got this figured out.” And the answer is there isn’t one. And I don’t mean that to be really depressing, because I think there are companies that actually are moving forward and trending well but no, there isn’t a company that has modelled this in the way that it needs to—that it needs to actually look in order for this to be successful in the next generation. SWB Yeah, you know, so much of this reminds me of just like how easy it is anytime there’s change to be made, anytime there’s like big organizational shift to be made, to want to go to those shortcuts and to go like, “Ok. How do we get the benefits or whatever this thing is but without actually doing the painful part of having to [Nicole chuckles] operate differently? And commit to operating differently?” Like, you know, there’s no—there’s no shortcut to this and then the reality is that this is having a dramatic effect on, you know, the most marginalized groups. NS That’s right, and I also think that some people have figured out that you can make money doing this. I mean I definitely am making a living working on diversity and inclusion and I stand by my methods and, you know, I’ve been at this for a very long time. We are seeing the market start to be flooded with people who offer advice, who offer consulting services, and we know, for example, there’s no race lens on what they do. Or they’re not pushing on—on the question of resources and equity. The rise of mediocre D&I advice [chuckles] that actually isn’t going to move the needle, but placates lots of people. And they go, “Well, see that wasn’t so scary, that wasn’t so hard.” Like, this work is hard, and we’re taking on 500 years of colonial America when we talk about race. And nobody can be expected to do that in a training. And you can’t—you literally, scientifically cannot undo unconscious bias with a training. And we’re still sort of messing around on the edges going, “Gosh. That was fascinating. Ok. Going back to my job, which is now operating same way it did yesterday.” If that’s how we’re going to do it and that’s what’s being sold, and that’s what people buy, I’m very nervous that we’re going to just hit this—this is the second part of the talk I gave—we’ve hit this mainstream complacency with, “Great. You hit four percent black people in your company. Wonderful. Oh. You have six percent Latinx. Wow! You’re really doing well.” Like that’s kind of where the conversation is stuck. It’s a Benetton ad. You know? A Benetton ad [Sara laughs] if you can—if you can make your website of your company feature a black employee, you’re good. Like that’s where we are now [chuckles]. That’s the bar. “Don’t—don’t look too hard at our board of directors [chuckles] because yeah. But we’ve got our Latina. We’ve got our black man. We’ve got our, you know, gender-ambiguous person. And we’ve got like your standard white guy representing our company.” And you know that’s not representative of their company, but they were smart enough to say, “Ok this is a marketing effort. Let’s show different people.” Great. [35:19] SWB So I’d love to ask about something that I think this really kind of connects to, which is that whole unconscious bias training thing you mentioned. So just recently we had, back I guess in May, Starbucks did its company-wide unconscious bias training day. And I was really interested in something you wrote about that, where you talked about the problems with unconscious bias training, as well as the problems with sort of like, positioning what happened at Starbucks—which if anybody doesn’t remember, is a Starbucks here in Philadelphia. Two young black men came in, sat down, didn’t order anything, they were waiting for somebody to show up who they were having a meeting with, and the police ended up being called on them. And so in the uproar over this, Starbucks decided it would do unconscious bias training for all employees. So one of the things you mentioned was also that this is not just like a quote/unquote “diversity” issue, this is about anti-blackness and anti-black behaviors, and that it was important to talk about that. So I’d love to kind of dig into that. Like, why it’s important specifically to name what’s going on, and what the limitations are of doing something like unconscious bias training, which I think a lot of people think of as generally good. NS Ooh! So, I’ll start with the unconscious bias piece. Certainly when I’m teaching my class at Haas, I talk about unconscious bias. It is a fascinating and very real phenomenon that most people don’t know is going on, and it basically runs in the background of your mind. We’ve all been primed by images and messages over the course of our life about good, bad, pretty, ugly, you know, worthy, unworthy, safe, dangerous. And whether we like it or not, and we can’t control it, those things get triggered, especially under pressure. And we do and say stupid things and we treat people differently according to how these biases are running in our background. And so it has been really well documented around things like juries, right? Even if you factor—because anybody can do it to anybody. It’s—I as a Latina can do it to another Latina. It’s not—it’s not as conscious as, “I’m Latina and I know that stereotypes are not real, therefore I’m not going to treat another Latina that way.” That’s not how it actually works. But it runs so deep and far in the background of our minds that we can’t access it through introspection. You have to access it by putting it under pressure and then you see it come out. So it’s a fascinating concept. What I have seen happen in this conversation is that it allows people to forget about the nuances of different kinds of racism or sexism or any phobia. Pick your [chuckles] favorite phobia. It lets people off the hook and thinks that all things are treated equally. “Well I didn’t know that I had a bias against Asian people, therefore I’m—but now I’m working on it, therefore that must automatically extend to black people, too, because I’m learning how to not be racist.” And that’s just not how it works, because context is everything. And who is on the receiving end of your bias is really what’s critical here, because your bias will not be the same for a light-skinned Latina like myself as it might be for a dark-skinned black man like in the Starbucks in Philadelphia. And so what folks aren’t talking about is that anti-blackness as a subset of racism is its own thing. And racism is both enacted by individuals, we know, but racism on a much larger level is a system where people who are in the majority and in power control the system to the detriment of people who do not share that same racial—those same racial identifiers. [39:04] NS [Continued] In this case, what happened in that Starbucks was anti-black racism. There were presumably other people of color in the room and who had come in and out during the day and had, you know, not ordered anything, had used the bathroom, lots of different people of color. But it was two black men who were—who received the bias. And I don’t even think it’s unconscious bias. This was an overt bias of having the police called on them in a Starbucks. Talking about anti-blackness in America is not the same thing as talking about racism in America, and if I could get one thing across to people who are working on issues of identity and the isms and the phobias is that context is everything, and that once you’ve solved one type of -ism, you have not solved them all. And so this is a constant drumbeat for me, is like, when you say that there’s an event for women in tech—and I wrote a piece called “Which Women in Tech?”—if you just bill it as just “women in tech,” who you’re going to get is white, and maybe some Asian, women coming to that event. That is what “women” as the overall banner means. And so you don’t get into the nuance of, what are black women in tech facing specifically? And what a white woman who is much more enfranchised and towards the center of an equation, of a system, experiences in her sexism is very, very different than what a black woman living closer to the edges of a system experiences. You’ve got intersectionality. You’ve got anti-black racism, anti-blackness, that she has to navigate. And so women as an umbrella term for “Let’s decrease sexism in tech. So c’mon women, let’s all get together.” Women of color, for the most part, do not hear it as an inclusive term. And so when people say “racism” it’s much easier to say racism as the umbrella term than it is to say, “That was some anti-blackness. That was some violence enacted on black bodies by calling the police,” and that is a kind of—that is a way that racism and bias shows up. But implicit bias or unconscious bias as a solution to one of your baristas calling the cops—they’re not related to each other all that much. What would have been much more effective for Starbucks is to clarify the policies that the company has for when the police get called into a cafe. That would’ve been a much more direct response to what actually happened which is, “Everybody is allowed to sit here and not order anything. Everybody is allowed to use our bathroom. The police only get called if somebody believes they’re in imminent danger. If you call the police simply because you thought somebody looked suspicious, you will be penalized or fired.” Right? That’s a much stronger statement in direct response to what happened, but what Starbucks did is they’re like, “Let’s take on all of racism. Let’s take on all of unconscious bias.” And now you’re—you’re just on a different—it’s just a different conversation. And unconscious bias trainings themselves have actually shown to potentially be counterproductive because they enact—they start to trigger biases that people weren’t previously aware of and create very awkward situations in the future. [42:20] SWB You know just today I was having a conversation with somebody where we were talking about why it’s important to—to name things and it kind of hit me that, you know, as a white woman, something that I realized is that I think that the way that we—we meaning like white people like me [chuckles]—like the way that we tend to avoid the specificity of language around saying something like “anti-black” and want to call it something like “bias” or even, if we have to do, maybe we’ll use the ‘r’ word. Right? Like maybe we’ll call it racism, if we have to. But one of the reasons I think that happens is that it’s a way to protect white feelings, like it’s a way to make it more comfortable and more palatable for me, because it is—it is uncomfortable when you get into the specificity of saying “violence against black bodies,” right? Like that is—that is more painful and— NS That’s radical [laughs] right. Right. SWB And so—and so it’s like, oh. It’s—even if well intentioned, it’s like the effect is that it allows me to stay emotionally distant from the harm. And when I’m emotionally distant from the harm and I’m also not experiencing the harm because I’m a white person, I am much less of capable of doing anything about it or interested in doing anything about it. And that that is like—the way that that functions, it ends up being, even if it’s well intentioned, it—it ends up reinforcing all of the things about white supremacy that we say we want to change, because we’re unable to call it what it is. NS Yeah! I mean it’s a very important thing for all of us to realize that we need to talk about hard stuff better. We need a better framework for doing that. And when companies ask me my advice and they say, “Where should we start?” One of my first bits of advice is, “Normalize a conversation around race.” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone into a company and even when I say “black” and you can see people—like, I have one client, I’m done with them right now, but I had one client, and the CEO of this company, who was white, could not bring themself to say “black,” to describe somebody as black. Because it had been so ingrained in this person that recognizing race was somehow rude, and was somehow racist in and of itself, rather than just being a descriptor. But that’s about the value of the word that you’ve been taught, not about the value of the actual fact that I am brown. And if someone says, “Oh I didn’t even recognize that you were Latina!” I’m like, “That’s not true. Don’t say that.” [Sara laughs] Like, you know, like oh nobody—you just can’t be like, “Oh describe Serena Williams.” “Oh well she’s a tennis player, she’s a very strong woman, she’s tall, she’s very, very muscular, she’s very—” I’m like, “Yeah Serena Williams is black!” Like, you have to be able to say it because there’s no—there’s nothing wrong with that word. And so we have to work on there being nothing wrong with that. And what I’ve noticed a lot in working with white folks is that they need permission and coaching on how to start saying the precise words. They know them. You know them. You know that somebody is black. But you may say, “Gosh, am I supposed to say ‘African American’ or ‘black’?” And so that by the time it comes out of your mouth, it sounds unnatural because you’ve overthought and now you, whoever, the white person in the equation, has made race an issue by tipping their hand to the other person and going, “Oh ok. I see.” You don’t even know how to start this conversation. So I talk to companies about normalizing a conversation on race, because if you can do that, there’s nothing harder. 81 percent of millennials do not want to talk about race in mixed company because it just goes off the rails so fast. You need strong facilitation. You need a framework. You need good reading material like Ijeoma Oluo’s So You want to Talk About Race, which is mandatory reading if you care about this at this point. And in so doing, anything else that comes up to people who have—to a diverse group of people who have wrestled with a conversation on race—nothing is scarier than that in the United States. No conversation is scarier than talking about racial backgrounds and in mixed company. [46:32] NS [Continued] And for people of color the anxiety comes from like, “Ugh! Who’s going to—who am I going to have to decide I can’t trust anymore?” [Chuckling] Right? Like, “I don’t really want to know that you’re secretly struggling with these things, because I really like you and it’s just easy to go out to lunch with you,” and that’s the calculus that a person of color might be doing on the—on the light end. On the heavy end it’s like, “Am I safe here?” And a white person may be going to the calculus of, “I don’t want to inadvertently offend somebody. I don’t want to hurt any feelings. I don’t want to sound like a fool. I don’t want to make a mistake.” And that’s generally the calculus that’s going on in the room. So if you can actually help people get good vocabulary and use precise language, like I think—“I think this company is racist.” “Ok. You think this company is racist. Tell me how you saw that show up. Is it showing up across all—all groups? Are you seeing it specifically targeted at groups? Is it showing up on—you know, socially? Is it showing up in compensation? Tell me why you think this company is racist,” and helping people get to many levels below that so that we can actually unearth—like to keep talking about digging up, I just imagine digging stuff up and like tossing it out. Once you’ve dug deep enough to find it and you can toss it out because it doesn’t serve you anymore, we have to have language be our guide on that. And we have to teach people how to mess up. And how to rebound from that. And be ok with the fact that this is hard and uncomfortable and you’re all going to be ok when we’re done with this conversation. Provided you have good facilitation. Otherwise the same people who always get hurt are the same people who get hurt in that situation. SWB I love this so much. I—[NS laughs]—you know I mean it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to talk to people about is like, if we don’t do it, we will—whatever it is. If you don’t do it, you will stay bad at it. You cannot get better at something if you keep not doing it [chuckles] right? If you keep avoiding it, you will never get better at it, and this always be a conversation that you’re bad at having. And so you’re going to have to figure out a way to practice having these conversations. So but not everybody has realized that there are people like you who can maybe help their companies have these conversations. So what are the kinds of things you’re working on right now that some of our listeners’ companies might be interested in? [48:46] NS Oh thank you for asking! So we’re for hire: Vaya Consulting, vayaconsulting.com. One of the things that we’re launching in the fall is management training because rather than saying, “Ok we’re going to take on diversity and inclusion and let us train your managers about diversity and inclusion.” That’s not as helpful as saying, “Here’s how to be a good manager through the lens of inclusion.” And—and so we’re launching on that um in the fall and so anybody who’s interested, you can go to vayaconsulting.com/inclusive-management-training. If you just have a question you can write to inquiry@vayaconsulting.com as well. SWB And for all of you out there who don’t have like a company you run, but you’re interested in this topic, which I think is a lot of you, definitely check out Nicole on Twitter and on Medium, because I learn a lot by following her those places. Nicole, it has been so great to have you on the show today. NS Thank you! Thank you! It’s been really nice to be here [music fades in, plays for three seconds, fades out]. Fuck Yeah of the Season SWB Hey, ladies, do you know what season it is? KL What season? SWB It’s fuckin’ summertime! KL Yes!! SWB I’m so hyped for summertime, even though I’m a little bit sad, because this is the last episode of Season 2, and we are going on a little bit of a summer vacation. But I’m also extremely hyped because we’re taking a summer vacation! KL Yay! Before we put our flip flops on and walk into the sunset, can we just reminisce a little bit about maybe some of our favorite moments or favorite Fuck Yeahs? JL Fuck yeah we can. You know what I really loved this season? Way back in Season 2, Episode 1, we interviewed Neha Gandhi and she said, “It’s Monday today, and what’s the one thing that I need to do in order to feel like I’ve really accomplished something meaningful by Friday?” And I loved that! I just think it’s so neat to set up your goals for the week. I’ve become really into using Evernote and planning out what I’m going to do this week. I stole this from my coworker, Matt, who’s like a really hardcore Evernote user, and it’s just like a really nice way to set up your week to be like, “What do I need to focus on now?” So I really, I really liked when she talked about that. [51:00] KL It’s nice because it’s also like you can deal with a week at a time. [Chuckles] It feels very doable. SWB I mean I have a lot of to-do lists, but I’m not that great about being like, “What do I need to accomplish to feel good on Friday?” So have you been feeling like you feel more of a fuck yeah! on Fridays now? JL It’s like my whole week, I feel like I have a general really nice roundabout view of and so I—sometimes I have to switch it. It’s not the same on Monday as it is on Friday. But by Friday I feel good going into the weekend, and I know I’ll be ready to set myself up. I set up a “What’s going to happen on Monday” also. So I feel ready, and it like really cuts that anxiety of Sunday of like, “Oh! What’s coming up next?” So. SWB I do that week planning, too, but I think I what I need to add to it is something that is more on that like satisfaction end. Not just like, “Here is what my week is going to look like.” But, “Here’s how I’m going to feel when these things are done at the end of the week,” and use that as a little bit of that North Star throughout the week. JL It’s definitely a prioritizing tool for me, figuring out, like, “What’s really the most important thing that I need to get done at this point?” SWB Something I really loved that I think about a lot is this quote from Saron Yitbarek, where she was mentioning advice that she received from somebody else, who said, “I don’t believe in stepping stones,” and when I heard that, I was sitting in my office all by myself and I swear to God I fistpumped in the air [laughter]. KL That was very cool. SWB It was very good to hear it and it felt so natural coming from Saron. And I think one of the reasons it really stuck with me—it’s not to say that sometimes stepping stones aren’t helpful or that everybody should think that way—but it was so refreshing and exciting for me to hear somebody just owning that they want to do big things and they’re not sitting around waiting. That they are not trying to take baby steps, that they are going to get out and makes things happen for themselves. And they were saying it in such a way—like the way that she said it was not aggressive, not like crushing it! It was just so confident and in control and I just loved it. KL I mean I’m biased, but I loved having my therapist on the show. That was really cool and I know we’ve talked about it a bunch, but it was also really surprising to me that I had kind of a realization as we were talking to her, and that was really cool. It was when she was talking about how, you know, when you get sort of further along in therapy and you start to actually look at the relationship between you yourself and the therapist and use that as a tool for evolution of the therapy itself. I was kind of like, “Oh my god! My head is like exploding!” And it was really cool to have that happen on the show. [53:50] SWB I don’t think that it is selfish for you to talk about that episode, because that episode was really, really great for me, too! I thought it was so valuable and so wonderful to both kind of like take the veil off of the therapy experience, and also just to kind of like see you open up to the world and say, “Yup! I’m in therapy, my therapist is awesome! Here she is! And it’s the most normal thing in the world!” KL Yeah. Yeah. It’s taken a long time but I totally believe that. JL I also really loved that we heard about mentoring a lot this season from Sarah Drasner and from Lilly Chin, and just like different ways you can get into mentoring and how important that is [KL yeah] and that it doesn’t have to be something that’s like a lot of roadblocks to get into. You can mentor people and different ways to get into that. SWB Something else I want to give a big fuck yeah to is not something that happened on the show, but it’s something that we started getting in our inbox. So, over the course of this season, we received a whole bunch of emails from people who wanted to suggest themselves as guests on the show. And apologies if we have not gotten back to you about that. We are definitely looking at topics and themes and what we really want to dig into over the next few months but we love you, and we really want to be able to say like, “Look: it is fucking rad to put yourself out there and to send an email that is like even suggesting yourself as a guest.” That is awesome and I definitely want to hear from anybody who thinks they’d be a rad guest on the show, whether we end up having a space for them or not. JL Yeah I love these ideas of ways to put yourself out there because you don’t know until you try and so I just think it’s really cool. Plus I get to like learn more about what other people are doing, and what awesome things you all are doing. KL So, one last thing I will just throw out there is that I’ve had a couple of friends separately say to me that when they listen it feels like there not just keeping up with me but they’re hanging out with me and hanging out with us, and that is so fucking cool. I just never dreamt that that would be an outcome of the show, and that has just been such a cool thing to hear. And I think about that every time we record now. SWB I mean, I think that’s awesome, and I think it totally speaks to why we can have natural like fucking language like, you know? [Laughter] And it is—it is like hanging out with people, and so we are not going to lose that in this whole conversation. [56:17] JL I can’t wait till one day we have a No, You Go hang session with all of our listeners. KL Oh my gosh! A No, You Go meetup! JL Aaaah! Awesome. SWB You know what I’m really waiting for? This will be my sign that we’ve made it: No, You Go fan fiction [Katel laughs]. Please and thank you. KL Maybe like some fan art. SWB Yes! KL That would be cool. SWB We are definitely. We are always waiting for fan art. KL [Laughs] On that note, fuck yeah to Season 2! Fuck yeah to you both. And fuck yeah to all y’all who have been listening. It’s been so rad. We’re so excited to be here. SWB And we’re taking a little break, but don’t worry: we will be back very soon. So look for new episodes from us in August. JL And that’s it for this season of No, You Go, the show about ambitious—and sticking together. No, You Go is recorded in our home city of Philadelphia, still the Super Bowl champions, and produced by Steph Colbourn. Our theme music is by The Diaphone. Thanks to Nicole Sanchez for being our guest today. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please make sure to subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to our show. Your support helps us spread the word. We’ll be back in August [music fades in, plays for 32 seconds, fades out to end].

The buzz: Crytal ball for 2018! If your #1 business wish this holiday is to know what 2018 holds for your company, your industry and the world, we've got the next best thing: predictions from 75 thought leaders about the technologies, strategies, and trends that can help you grow and compete in 2018 and beyond. Pour a cup of Joe, Earl, or Dom, and join us for Game-Changers Radio 2018 Predictions–Part 1 live. And mark your calendar for Dec. 13, Jan. 3, 10 and 17. Guests: John Santagate, IDC; Andrew Mack, AMGlobal Consulting; Prof. Rajeev Srinivasan, Indian Institute of Management; Nance L. Schick, Esq., The Law Studio of Nance L. Schick; Brian Kilcourse, Retail Systems Research; Prithvi Sen Sharma, Prakshep; Dr. Sara Diamond, OCAD University; Sherryanne Meyer, ASUG; Otto Schell, Opel.com; Tami Reiss, Just Not Sorry; Elizabeth Milne, SAP; Dirk Lonser, DXC Technology; Gary Adams, Vistex; Thorsten Leiduck, SAP; Barbara Giamanco, Social Centered Selling. Happy holidays from Game-Changers!

The buzz: Crytal ball for 2018! If your #1 business wish this holiday is to know what 2018 holds for your company, your industry and the world, we've got the next best thing: predictions from 75 thought leaders about the technologies, strategies, and trends that can help you grow and compete in 2018 and beyond. Pour a cup of Joe, Earl, or Dom, and join us for Game-Changers Radio 2018 Predictions–Part 1 live. And mark your calendar for Dec. 13, Jan. 3, 10 and 17. Guests: John Santagate, IDC; Andrew Mack, AMGlobal Consulting; Prof. Rajeev Srinivasan, Indian Institute of Management; Nance L. Schick, Esq., The Law Studio of Nance L. Schick; Brian Kilcourse, Retail Systems Research; Prithvi Sen Sharma, Prakshep; Dr. Sara Diamond, OCAD University; Sherryanne Meyer, ASUG; Otto Schell, Opel.com; Tami Reiss, Just Not Sorry; Elizabeth Milne, SAP; Dirk Lonser, DXC Technology; Gary Adams, Vistex; Thorsten Leiduck, SAP; Barbara Giamanco, Social Centered Selling. Happy holidays from Game-Changers!

A couple of years ago, while working at Quintain, a plugin for Gmail called Just Not Sorry started making the rounds. The stated goal of the app was to help women specifically use fewer "undermining words" in their emails -- like "I think," "just," and "sorry."  So, whenever you type an email, the undermining words would be underlined, as if you misspelled something. At the time, this seemed very helpful to me, since I tend to apologize, even when I haven’t done anything wrong. Or, I sometimes I act as if what I’m asking for is a bother, when I’m all I'm trying to get my work done, like everyone else. Flash forward to today, and while I still apply some of the principles I learned through the usage of Just Not Sorry, I haven't reinstalled Just Not Sorry in my IMPACT email.  However, I noticed last week that I was getting stuck trying to reword emails to be less apologetic. There was one email in particular, where I felt incredibly awkward. Not because I was being overly-apologetic, but rather everything I tried to say sounded completely unnatural, given the context, when I tried to avoid undermining myself verbally. I was frustrated and, ultimately, spent close to 30 minutes, tripping over myself not trying to say words that were now considered "bad." Which got me thinking about this whole debate all over again. Are these "undermining words" really a bad thing? Should we be trying to fix them? Is there some truth to women in the workplace feeling like they need to apologize more, or is this a case of women’s behavior coming under undue scrutiny?

Just Not Sorry is an international sensation used by people in over 200 countries. Its creator, Tami Reiss, attributes the company’s incredible growth to the Lean principles they employed when building the Gmail plug-in. Learn how they validated their idea, defined their MVP, and iterated their way to success during development and after launch in everything from the name and functionality to the tweets and landing page messaging.

Join Jay Stansell in an interview with Tami Reiss, Lean + Agile Product Management Leader.We discuss some top product management tips from Tami's 10 years in product management, learn about how she founded "Just Not Sorry", how to manage executives in enterprise through a lean agile and experimentation approach.You can learn more about Tami at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamireiss and Jay at https://au.linkedin.com/in/jaystansellSupport the show (https://platform.productcoalition.com)

There is a lot of talk about how using words, such as “sorry” “just” “I think” can hurt our communication. Tami Reiss wants to change that. Tami is the CEO of Cyrus Innovation and the Founder of Just Not Sorry, a Google Chrome plugin that underlines trigger words in your emails that may undermine your communication. In this episode, Tami shares insights of her career in tech, how she came up with the idea for Just Not Sorry, and how she brought it to life.  

There is a lot of talk about how using words, such as “sorry” “just” “I think” can hurt our communication. Tami Reiss wants to change that. Tami is the CEO of Cyrus Innovation and the Founder of Just Not Sorry, a Google Chrome plugin that underlines trigger words in your emails that may undermine your communication. In this episode, Tami shares insights of her career in tech, how she came up with the idea for Just Not Sorry, and how she brought it to life.  

Our Friday Coffee Talk episodes are a time for Danielle and me to chat about anything and everything. We are so happy this community enjoys hearing us talk about things that often get discussed at a coffee shop, the things you tell your girlfriends. Today we are sipping coffee and talking about the impulse to apologize.  This has been a topic we've wanted to discuss since we first started this podcast.  Once the plug-in Just Not Sorry came out we knew we needed to chat about why we feel the need to apologize for things that aren't our fault. I also reference this ELLE article.

Kris and Kole talk about incarceration, harbingers of failure, and venture capitalism. ALSO: Sneeze jags. Christmas Hangover. Quiz: Prison or Porn. Just Not Sorry. The Harbingers of Failure. Bark Tank. The Sun Diet.