This week we were joined by Sarah Brown, Ph.D., coach, and entrepreneur. She talks with us about how she has made some tweaks to her coaching business that actually suit her needs better. She shares with us insights into how she helps individuals figure out their interests, strengths, and passions, and that in turn allows them to figure out what they want. She shares with us some really great nuggets the first being you don't need to change your circumstances to be happy and the second talking things through with someone who cares about you makes all the difference.
Podcast Guest: Sarah Brown
Sarah's Website: https://bookofyou.com/
Sarah's Online Course: https://knowthyselfacademy.com/
Transcription:
Kris Parsons00:02
Welcome to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do it too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.
Ray Loewe00:19
Everyone, this is Ray Lowe, host of Changing the Rules. Changing the Rules is a podcast. We're now in our 100 plus episode about how people change the rules to live better lives. And every week we try and host someone who we think is one of the luckiest people in the world on our show. The luckiest people in the world, by our definition, are those people who redesign their own lives personally, to meet their specs. Then they step into them and live them under their own terms. The luckiest people in the world have a number of mindsets that they have to have in order to to take control of their lives. We're going to talk about a couple of them today because we have a great guest, Sarah Brown. It's actually Dr. Sarah Brown. We'll get into that in a minute. Sarah and I met each other several years ago and Sarah actually was a speaker at one of the conferences that I ran. Her comments about her "Book of You" just resonated so well with our audience that we wanted to have a chance to get back with her and find out what's changed over the years. Sarah is an executive coach. She is an author. She is a Ph.D. She has some interesting studies in her background. I think her undergraduate degree is, and of all things, mathematics. Sarah, is that true?
Sarah Brown02:01
That is true.
Ray Loewe02:03
Take a minute and tell us about your Ph.D., because I have no idea what you're talking about when we get to this. It's just good, right?
Sarah Brown02:13
So my Ph.D. is in a field called psychoeducational processes, which is a combination of group psychology and adult learning. The practical application of that in business is in the field of organization development or change management. In other words, how do we help people change as technology and work changes. And that's what I did for that. Talent management is what I did for the last 30 years of my career.
Ray Loewe02:44
Okay, so now you have changed your life, right? You went out on your own, you design your own life. That's why we know you're one of the luckiest people in the world. I think you're living under your own terms and you're doing some really good stuff for other people in the process of doing it. So I want to go back about three or four years to this presentation you gave us on the "Book of You". Tell us a little bit about why you designed the "Book of You" and what it does for people. Then we're going to get into the evolution a little bit later. So let's go back a few years.
Sarah Brown03:22
Okay. Well, the genesis of the "Book of You" came from a problem I saw in the last five years of my corporate career, I was managing director with Accenture. I was observing a phenomenon. Among my clients are inside Accenture, and other big consulting firms, and generally in my community. It was the vast number of mid-career professional women who were unhappy in their jobs. They couldn't answer the question about what would make it better. What did they actually want. And if you don't know what you want, you're unlikely to get it. So the problem that I initially set out to tackle when I retired from Accenture was coming up with the tools and the techniques to help people get very clear about what it is they want. The "Book of You" is designed to do that. It is based off of a world-renowned assessment called the Burkman method. It helps an individual identify their interests, their passions, their behavioral strengths, and more importantly, their motivational needs. In other words, what kind of environment allows them to minimize stress so that they can contribute their interests and their strengths to the greater good? That's what the "Book of You" is all about. It plays back for an individual, what his or her interests, strengths, and needs are. Then it embodies that in a coaching process that he or she can go through to actually get clear about what to do. How can you be happier and more successful in life, if you take into account what your passions are, what your strengths are, and more importantly, what environment will keep you out of stress? So the "Book of You" is basically a coach and a book, customized to you with information all about your unique personality, and some tips on how you can be happy, successful, and better understood, vocationally or in life.
Ray Loewe05:30
Okay, so I certainly understand that knowing what you want is the key to this. If you have no clue as to what you want, you're going to end up somewhere else, right? Now you take people through the "Book of You". Let's assume that you're always successful because you always are right. All of the people that do this, all of a sudden wake up one day, and they say, "I know what I want". So now, what do you do about it?
Sarah Brown06:02
Well, knowing what you want is step one, taking action on it is step two. So what I have put in place is how you can begin to take action on it and some tools. So if, Ray, if you go back to what fundamentally needs to be in place for anybody to change, it's three steps: awareness, motivation, and functioning capability. So the awareness piece is who are you? And what do you want? The motivation piece is getting what you want. Then the functioning capability piece are the tools to actually take action on it. So that's what I'm focused on right now is really working on those tools to help people take action to get what they really want.
Ray Loewe06:57
Let's go back to knowing what you want first. I think I have known what I want 47 million times in my life, because I think we have to realize that things change over time. It would be great if we didn't have this thing called maintenance in life, where we actually have to maintain things. So in your coaching process, or your design process, or whatever it is, how do you stress to people that, yeah, this is great, you figured out what you want. And guess what the world is going to clobber you in ahead a couple times. Some things are going to need to be changed. How do you handle that?
Sarah Brown07:36
Well, you handle it two ways. One is you be open to evolution around how you can bring your interests and strengths to new goals. So each situation you encounter in life is going to give you feedback on are you on the right path or not. Part one is being flexible enough in your goals that you can shift them. But doing so in alignment with what your interests and strengths are. Because if you pick a goal that is totally out of the realm of what you care about, you're not likely to be happy going at it, you might be successful, but you won't be happy. For example, if you don't like numbers, you're probably not going to be happy as a financial planner, you might be successful at it if you really work hard, but you're unlikely to be happy. It is being flexible on your goals and making sure they're in alignment with who you really are. Step two is taking action on it and dealing with obstacles, and obstacles are going to come up. It's just a part of life. The interesting thing about obstacles is that we can't usually tackle them on our own. It's building the support structure around us so that when obstacles come up, we can work them out with another individual who knows and cares about us; and figure out is it giving us feedback on we need to change our goals? Is it giving us feedback on we need a new path towards our goals? Or do we just need encouragement and resolution to keep plowing through that obstacle? So that would be my answer to your question.
Ray Loewe09:26
I like this word accountability that you kind of stuck in there a little bit. I know in my life, it's so happy, because it's so important because nothing happens if I'm not accountable to somebody else. Let's talk for a minute about the need for others because I think you said that you can't do this by yourself.
Sarah Brown09:50
Correct. It's been my experience that individuals don't actually get clear, really clear, about what it is they want. And don't find ways around obstacles in a really effective manner. Unless they work it out and talk it out with somebody that they know. Somebody that knows and cares about them. That's one of the values of the coaching process, but you don't need a trained coach to perform that function. You just need somebody who knows and cares about you, and can help you clarify, is this really what you want? And how do you address this particular obstacle? What is the obstacle telling you? Is it helping you to refine your goal? Is it telling you need to find a new path? Or do you just need encouragement to get through it?
Ray Loewe10:42
Okay, let's go back three or four years, we had this thing called COVID. Everybody's favorite topic, right? We had a lot of people who were on a path before that. What have you noticed has happened to the people that you coach or the people who read your book? In terms of this rather momentous change that took place and how did it affect the way they think about the "Book of You"? The way they think about their lives and about where they're going?
Sarah Brown11:19
COVID was just an obstacle that got in the way. It has helped people to reevaluate what they want. It has gotten them to reevaluate the path to get what they want. It has presented obstacles that they got to plow through with the help of everybody else. So I'll give you a case in point from my own life. It has not caused me to change my goal of helping and empowering women, that's really where I am still focused. But what it did do was to say, I need to do it more virtually. That enabled me and allowed me and pushed me to develop more virtual offerings. So I have virtual public offerings right now. I am doing virtual corporate training right now and my coaching was always primarily virtual. So that has enabled me, that COVID actually was the impetus to pivot a little bit my path towards my goal. It's actually been beneficial in that it serves my needs as well. I'm not real wild about traveling, so it has enabled me to really cut back on travel, which has been good for me. Now, the third point, figuring all of this out, I had to work this out with another human being. In my case, the other human being is my accountability partner, who I was actually meeting with virtually any way. I have met with her at 9:30 every morning for three years. And so I balanced all of these ideas as I was thinking about them off her and actually refine them.
Ray Loewe13:17
We had a positive change here. Wherever you sit, you're saying, Wow, COVID disaster, people are dying from this. That's a shame. I mean, we don't want anybody to die from anything. It really did cause us to assess the way we do business, assess what we want. So here's the book, have you changed fundamentally at all because of what you've gone through?
Sarah Brown13:39
I am in the process. I actually have completely updated the "Book of You". It has become even more robust than it was before. It still contains the detailed information all about you, but it is even more detailed. It still contains a 30-day process to work this through with someone who knows and cares about you. So it retains all of that, but I have made it more robust.
Ray Loewe14:11
You made a comment about your travel and stuff like that. Let me bring in another example. I had a young lady, who was a filmmaker, on our podcast a while ago. She rolled out a film this year. It was a film about aging, and it was good enough that PBS picked it up. It all started with her grandmother and said I have to get her on film because nobody will believe that this 97-year-old works out every day. So she did. In rolling out the film, she said the amazing thing about this thing with COVID was that I got this film rolled out all over the world; all over places where I just never could have gotten because of the cost, because people wouldn't pay to fly me at all. Yet we did these virtual rollouts. So when we think about the changes that occur, I mean, what do you see happening? Are we virtual now for the rest of our lives?
Sarah Brown15:13
I don't think we'll ever be going back to the degree of face-to-face, at least face-to-face that required travel that we had before. I think that's probably a good thing for the planet, a good thing for people. Travel for work is hard. It's hard work. And the more we can substitute virtual interactions like this, the better off I think we're going to be from that perspective. That being said, there are some losses in virtual and I don't think it is going to ever completely replace human one-on-one contact. But I don't think we're going back.
Ray Loewe 16:04
Let me digress a little bit here because I want to address some of the things that we have a book coming out. I want to thank you for being a contributor to that book. Let me tell everybody, what the contribution that you made, because it's such a small part of what you do, but it's so so significant, that it's incredible. One of the quotes that I put in there about you is that "the luckiest people in the world learn how to use their internal power to be happy, regardless of their situation". Take a minute and tell everybody how you become happy every day. Then let's build on this in a different way.
Sarah Brown16:45
One of the points that I make is that you don't have to completely change your circumstances in order to be happy. In fact, when I'm coaching women, I don't want them to go change their jobs, just to be happy, I want them to get in touch with what makes them happy where they currently are. That comes from real self-awareness and self-knowledge. So you get a lot of that from reflecting. You get a lot of that from reflecting on what's going on in your life and how it impacted you. I do a lot of that. You also get a lot of it by just getting still and listening. I have a daily practice in the morning of journaling. I journal what's going on in my life, how I'm reacting to it to see what insights come out of that. Then I have a meditation practice where I just tried to get very quiet and listen.
Ray Loewe17:54
If you listen to what you're trying to do for people if you can make people redesign their lives so that they're generally happy people, they're going to be generally happy anyway, right? I mean, if you're living your own life, what's not to be happy about it, except that little things get in the way. You have to be able to change your attitude every day and make sure that you understand where you're heading and stuff like that. One of the things that you indicated you do is you do a lot of thinking and introspection about who you are and where you're going. Any comments for other people about how to do that or why it's so important?
Sarah Brown18:34
Well, I have two comments about this. The first is on I find journaling very helpful because it gets it out of me and it makes it more concrete. It's it is a way for me to express what's going on with me. But like I said, I don't think anybody gets really clear about this until they voice it to another human being. So journaling is a step along the way, but expressing it to another human being goes a significant way. I'll tell you a quick story, Ray, about this. When Abraham Lincoln was working on the Emancipation Proclamation, he called a friend of his by the name of Leonard Sweat to come from Springfield, Illinois, so that he could bounce ideas off of him. They went up one side and down the other for hours with this individual, around what to include how far to go, what should be, who should be the target territories, and all of this stuff. At the end of that process, he said to Leonard Sweat, thank you very much. I have my answer. Leonard sweat walked out of the cabinet room and said, I never said a word. So what was happening is Abraham Lincoln was voicing it to another human being and getting very clear about what was in him; what were his ideas, how he wanted to move forward. It was important that he do that with an individual who knew and cared about him. But it wasn't so much the other individual, it was us voicing what's important to us. I think that's really important. That's why I built people into the coaching process in my "Book of You".
Ray Loewe20:23
All right, well, there's our nugget for the rest of our lives right there, because I think it's so true. When when you get a chance to talk through with yourself in the presence of somebody who cares. That's what you're saying, right? We're getting near the end of our time. There are a couple things that I want to kind of get from you here. So you've changed a little bit of what you've done. You haven't changed your goals, you haven't changed the vision of where you've gone, but you've changed a little bit by making your book have more detail. You've changed the way you've presented because you're doing much more virtual kinds of things. Is there anything else that's coming out in the way that you're working with people to help them understand who they are?
Sarah Brown21:11
Yes, I've developed an online course, actually, that takes people through this process of getting clear about who they are, and how to translate that into goals. It's another example of going virtual, and it can be done with or without the "Book of You" and it's available at knowthyselfacademy.com That's another way that I've gone about adjusting to the change in our current situation and the opportunity that it presents to go more virtual.
Ray Loewe21:49
To keep it simple, theknowwhoyouare.com. Can we reach that through the "Book of You" if we go to bookofyou.com? Is that going to get us there?
Sarah Brown21:59
Eventually, it will get you there. knowthyselfacademy.com
Ray Loewe22:06
Certainly, people have noted that; we'll put that in our notes so that people can find you. Any other words of wisdom that you have for people?
Sarah Brown22:22
It's as simple as the jingle Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Let me decode that Row, Row Row Your Boat means you got to take some action on getting what you want. Gently down the stream is code for but it doesn't have to be hard work. If you're in line with your interests and your strengths and you're getting your needs met. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Happiness is your key to whether or not you're on the right path. Life is spot a dream, and all starts in the head.
Ray Loewe23:02
Okay, Sarah Brown, Ph.D., coach, woman of the world, accountability coach, among other things. There's nothing to say after Row, Row Row Your Boat. Let's leave people with that thought. Thank you so much for being a friend. And thank you so much for being one of the luckiest people in the world. Thanks so much for following up with us. We're gonna look forward to hearing from you periodically to find out where you're going, and how you're helping people. So, thanks for being here, Sarah.
Sarah Brown23:33
Thanks so much, Ray.
Ray Loewe23:35
Okay, Jim, can you sign us off? Thank you.
Kris Parsons23:39
Thank you for listening to changing the rules, a weekly podcast about people who are living their best life and how you can figure out how to do that too! Join us with your lively host, Ray Lowe, better known as the luckiest guy in the world.