Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Learning to be Gutsy with Natalie Franke

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Today on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon welcomes back author and friend, Natalie Franke. Natalie’s new book, “Gutsy” is all about how we develop the courage in our own lives to do what we need to do. When we treat failure as the scapegoat, we often ignore the fact that fear is truly the culprit for why we get stuck, or postpone handling even simple tasks. Learn what it means to live with bold, brave, and boundless courage. Special thanks to our guest, Natalie Franke, for joining us today. You can preorder a copy of Gutsy here. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: Natalie Franke Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Interior Chinatown is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown. Streaming November 19th only on Disney+. What do Ontario dairy farmers bring to the table? A million little things. But most of all, the passion and care that goes into producing the local, high-quality milk we all love and enjoy every day. With 3,200 dairy farming families across Ontario sharing our love for milk, there's love in every glass.

Dairy Farmers of Ontario. From our families to your table. Everybody milk. Visit milk.org to learn more. Hello, friends. Welcome. Always delighted to have you with me. Today, I am joined by my friend and author, Natalie Frank, who has a book out that I think so many of you are going to benefit from. It is called gutsy. And this is all about how we develop the courage in our own lives to do exactly what we're meant to do. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

I'm really excited to be chatting with my friend Natalie Frank again. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me back. I'm so excited. I just read your new book, Gutsy, and I loved it. And I know that so many people who are listening to this are going to be like, I really needed to hear what she said. I needed that. And I can really tell from this book that you were writing directly to somebody who needed to hear this message. So let's, first of all, talk about the general premise of your new book, Gutsy. Who is this for? What is it about? So Gutsy is all about learning to live with bold, brave, and boundless courage, which is the fancy marketing way of saying that in all of my work, especially on the entrepreneurial

side, I work with small businesses for folks who aren't familiar with my background. And I'm talking about tens of thousands of small businesses. Over and over and over again, I'm confronted with the fact that we treat failure like the scapegoat, that it isn't. We act as though failure is the reason people aren't achieving their goals and their dreams, that failure is the thing that keeps the best ideas from reaching the world. But in reality, I found that it is more often than not fear. And when I double clicked into fear and working with business owners, working with

everybody, moms, friends, colleagues, whether it was a big goal or something they just wanted to do in their lives, they wanted to achieve in their lives, it often came back to, but what are other people going to think? What if I do this thing? What if I really try and I fail? And people think, well, she was never going to make it. I told her so. I told her not to leave that job and start that business. Who did she think she was, you know, doing X, Y, Z? This concern over the opinions of others rules our lives in ways that very rarely do we confront head on. And it's sexier to talk about fear of failure.

I get it. I get that, like, that has been the poster child for what keeps us stuck. But in reality, when you really sit down at a table full of people and they're talking about their goals and their dreams, it often roots back into, well, I'm stuck because. And when you dig a little deeper, it has a heck of a lot to do with the opinions of others. So I wrote a book about what does that mean? How do we overcome it? How do we do it scared while acknowledging that that fear isn't necessarily going anywhere?

We just have to have the courage to take action anyway. It's such a great point that you bring up because I know having been an entrepreneur, talking to tens of thousands of women, as you do as well, women and men, of course, that people are bombarded with the message of you need to overcome your fears. You need to overcome whatever your fear is to start whatever it is, to go back to law school, to start a business, to do a public speaking event, to write a book. You just need to overcome it. Push through it. You need to overcome it. And so I think so many people are sitting around waiting for the fear to dissipate. They're waiting to not feel afraid anymore. They're waiting for the

moment where they stop caring about what other people think. And I love what you have to say, that we're actually hardwired to care about what other people think. Caring about what other people think is actually an important thing in human societies. It's why we just don't run over each other's cats. And why we, you know what I mean? Why we're not actively out there harming our neighbors on a daily basis, because we actually need to care about what other people think. And for our businesses or our lives, our school journeys, our book writing, whatever it is, we actually have to care about what other people think to an extent to be successful at those things. So there is this notion, a false notion that we need to wait until we stop caring about what other people think. And you turn that on its head. Can you

talk more about why caring about what other people think is important? Yeah. There's some spicy hot takes in this book. One of them being that I believe it's, it might even be chapter one. I open a chapter by saying, you know, just stop caring about what other people think is terrible advice because you can't. And I connect it metaphorically to sneezing. Like imagine saying to somebody, just never sneeze again. Don't ever sneeze. And you kind of look at them and go, but wait, that's an involuntary process. I have no say over that. It's just hardwired in. It's a feature, not a bug. And what I mean by that, it's not by accident that we care about the opinions of others. You are absolutely right. When you look anthropologically

back throughout human history, you see the importance of the human being a social animal, a social creature with a community, with people around you that support you. That has been the core tenet of our society forever. I mean, truly forever. To be alone, to be ostracized, to be kicked out of the group, very often in human history has meant certain death. And so our brain is wired to prevent that from happening at all costs. Our brain wants us to survive. We are set up for survival. And what that means is let's avoid any potential risk that an action we take or something we say or a behavior that we exhibit could push us towards being ostracized, could force us to lose some sort of social status

or power or whatever it is that we're talking about in that context and in that lens. And so throughout history, that's served our ancestors very well. You take that same neural hardware that hasn't changed a whole heck of a lot in the last thousand, 2,000, 3,000 years, and you apply it to 2023 with a brand new set, right, of software, you know, running on top of it because our society looks nothing like the society of thousands of years ago. And what it means is that we're faced with this hardware operating as it was wired to to keep us alive from being, you know, shunned from the group in a set of circumstances

that are new and that we aren't perhaps even equipped to handle. I talk about in the book, yes, we are always going to care about the opinions of others because that is how we're wired. However, there is a difference between a tiger and a man in a tiger suit. There's a difference between a threat that is real, that our brain will send those alarm bells off and we become truly afraid and unable to move versus a perceived version of something that triggers maybe that response of fear in our brain. Ooh, tiger. But then we need to have the ability to say, it's not actually a tiger. It's Uncle Ted. He's in the tiger costume for the football game. It's all going to be okay. And when it comes to opinions of others, that's kind of the era that we're living in,

where we're confronted with more opinions than ever before. You see it every single day. If you're a governor, you see it every single day. Opinions, opinions, opinions, they're everywhere. And we have to have this ability to then take that, bring it to our conscious awareness, right, and make action steps forward, even with it kind of bubbling beneath the surface. I love that. There's a difference between a tiger and a man in a tiger suit. And our brains sometimes have difficulty allowing us to see the difference, but we can learn the difference. It is a skill that we can learn and a skill that we can practice and improve. We can learn to recognize the signs of a tiger suit, like there's a seam at the neck. Yeah, that's the beauty of neuroplasticity. It is powerful. Screens for eyes.

It only walks on two legs. We can learn to distinguish between those two things. Have you seen that meme? It's something like, you know, how do I convince my brain that answering an email is not the same as, you know, being chased by a woolly mammoth? Because your brain is like, this is a thing that is so scary. It's so scary.

You can't possibly open that email and respond immediately. Maybe you should open it, read it, mark it on red, think about it, ruminate on it, come back to it later, type a spicy response, wonder if you should send it. This is not actually serving us in today's society. Perhaps it did 3,000 years ago, but it is not today. Right. And I talk about too in the book, like all of what you just described with the email, how relatable is that? I mean, and the worst part is a lot of us will get to the point where we've waited so long out of fear and procrastination that by the time we're even ready to send the

darn thing, we're embarrassed. So we don't. Like the length of time surpasses. And in the book, you know, I referenced the behavioral inhibition system of the brain to get a little nerdy for a second. And ultimately, you know, one of the studies as I was doing research for gutsy that I just found to be affirming in a way, because it made me feel like, wait, this isn't just my fault. Like there's something happening here, you know, on a neurological level where when we are wrapped up in that soundtrack, that repeated narrative of, well, what will other people think? What if I, what if I, what if I, and it fails. That fear kind of lapping over and over again in our mind, it can actually cause our behavioral inhibition system to go into overdrive such that we're

unable to even take action. And therein lies the getting stuck. That's why we can't send the darn email. That's why we're sitting there typing the sentence and then asking ChatGPT to type the sentence and hating everything AI has ever done. And we go through this process and we never end up actually being able to send the email. And so if that resonates with you, I just want you to know you're not alone. That is your brain in a way going, I'm running 50 billion computations of what could possibly go wrong. And I'm not able to just take the action, the decisive action that's needed in order to move forward. And so much advice in the self-help space, in the business space is about like, you just have to take action. You just have to do it. You just have to move forward. And I have even said this

before myself, and I believe it, that making any decision is better than making no decision. Because even if you start walking in the wrong direction, maybe you'll be like, well, this is the wrong direction. And you can go in a different direction that's valuable information. But when you tell people this, that is absolutely what I hear all the time of like, but I can't even choose one of the paths before me. Yeah, hear what you're saying, Sharon, that like pick any old direction and it'll be valuable information. But this is the disconnect is that people are then afraid of the reactions that others will have when they begin down the wrong path and have to turn around

and go back. When everybody sees them like, oh, I knew that path wasn't going to work out. Why did you choose that one to begin with? You're stupid. That is what they're afraid of. They're afraid of other people watching them fail. Right. Even some of the most, if you search, what are the biggest fears that people have? You'll see things like fear of public speaking, the fear of getting in front of a room of people and sharing your opinion. You have no problem speaking. We do it every day, but it's because there's an audience present. It's that other people aspect of the fear, I think, that exacerbates it because of that hardwiring. And so you're absolutely right, Sherrod. Absolutely spot on. It's not the failure itself. It's the fear of other people watching you fail. Because if you were alone in the woods and it's just you and the trees and you

start down the wrong path, it doesn't have the same fear feeling as it does when you feel like other people are there watching you make the wrong decision. Correct. Yes. So knowing that we're hardwired to care about what other people think, that caring about what other people think is actually an important social construct. It's not going away. Our brains want us to care about what other people think.

And frankly, there are many instances in which we should care about what other people think. We should not be running over each other's cats and just dumping our trash in our next door neighbor's yard. We should care about what our- Please don't do that. No. Please don't. We should care about what our neighbors think of our behavior to an extent. To an extent. Yes. To an extent. How do we then distinguish between a real tiger and a man in a tiger suit? So this is where the fun work takes place. And by fun, I'm saying that loosely. I mean, truly, to be honest with you, anyone who's ever struggled with this, and as someone

that wrote the book, I'm not coming to you as the expert that has it figured out. This is very much more like a recipe book that was built by trial and error. And I no longer burn my food so badly as to set off the fire alarm. We're at that stage of leadership in this arena. And so it's much more of a come alongside me, let's do this thing together than it is a here's how to fix it. But in the research that I've done, in order to even get to a place where I can adequately say to you, there is another side of this. Like there is a path you can begin to walk down and truly emerge as a gutsier, more courageous version of you.

It starts by doing inner work. So it starts by kind of taking a moment first to evaluate what is your opinion of yourself and what are the values from which you build all future decisions. And I credit, I love therapy, big fan of therapy, but I credit my therapist actually with really challenging me on this one. I started down the path of trying to unpack some struggles I was going through in my own life when I was doing IVF to have my daughter. And she said to me, well, you know, you're struggling with,

what are you going to share with other people about this journey? You're struggling with, you know, how other people are going to feel about your decision to continue with infertility treatment, even though it hasn't worked over and over and over again this time around. You're struggling with all of these things, but you haven't told me yet how you really are basing your decision to even move forward in the first place. What are the values from which you are deciding? And I said to her, what do you mean, what are my values? I have good values. She goes, I didn't say whether they were good or bad. I asked you what they were. And so I entered into recognizing that one of the exercises, I feel like they should walk us through in adulthood, but it's like all the other things between taxes and that we are never actually

taught how to do in school. But we can square dance. Square dancing. I can do trigonometry. But I say all that to say a values exercise, actually taking the time to sit down and identify what your values truly are. It sounds so simple. And when I say it at first, you might go, well, I know what my values are, but I mean a genuine exercise where I would say to you,

what are your top five values ranked by priority? And taking the time to work on them as a foundation from which you build your own opinion of yourself. Because again, if we don't have that, then the voices around us will always be louder than the voice within us. We have to understand what it really is that we believe and are standing for and values are a central part of that. And so the book, I even give you a huge list of them to start with. It's not all encompassing, obviously, but you can do this really easily on your own. Get a list of values and just start by going down, circling the ones that stand out to you, cross out the ones that right away you're like, that's

actually not a value at all. It's the opposite of what I value. Work on refining and refining and refining and get to five. And what I'll tell you is something really powerful happens when you start to identify these are the things in my life that I want to value. And therefore, how do those decisions that I'm making, the decisions that maybe I feel stuck, that I feel like I can't move forward in, that I do wonder, what is somebody going to think of me if I insert here? You measure that not against these potential outcomes in a negative lens, but you measure them against the foundation of your values. Am I living into the values that

I set for myself in making a decision one way or another? When things get hard, can I lean on those values? And that's truly a first place to start and not to keep rambling, but then the second place to go once you've started to work, and there's other exercises, but work on that opinion of self, is then, and only then, to look to the opinions of others, right? To start to look at that inner circle of opinions that surround you, auditing it if necessary, and really taking those difficult but critical steps to evaluate whose opinions are you receiving as truth in your life? Whose opinions are you receiving as truth in your life? We don't want to just dismiss all opinions and say, we're not going to listen to what anyone else has to say. No, no, no. There is value in bringing wise counsel to the table. There is value in cultivating an inner circle of diverse opinions.

I feel like you'll appreciate this, but we go through the world oftentimes not just looking for truth, but actually looking for validation that what we already suspected is true to be the truth. And so that's another area where in auditing this inner circle, you have to do that hard work of saying, am I just surrounding myself with yes people? Am I even creating an inner circle that's going to challenge me and refine me? Or am I cultivating an echo chamber? And those people, those wise counsel that you are bringing to the table to guide you when you are faced with difficulty or you're trying to make a difficult decision, in our minds, I think we immediately go to my family, my spouse, my parents, my siblings, the people that I love and trust the most. And the people who are offering you wise counsel in one area of your life

may not be the people to offer you wise counsel in another area of your life. Like if your entire family, they're all nurses, and you are thinking about starting a consulting company in the tech sector, well, perhaps your family might be a wonderful, wise counsel when you're talking about relationships. They've known you your whole life, and they know what kind of person you might marry. That might work for one area of your life, but it may not be your sister who works in an operating room all day that is going to offer you the wisest counsel starting a tech consulting business. And so we might have different groups of people whose opinions we value about different things. Absolutely. And I even say, you know, make sure to also look out for some of the areas where we can get caught. Like proximity is a big one where we tend

to put more emphasis and importance on someone's opinion if they're in proximity with us. Then maybe sometimes we should. If you see somebody every day, you might truly like just add more weight to what they have to say simply because they're near you. That's a big one. But one of the questions that I specifically list out that we need to ask before we receive any opinion into kind of our conscious space is, does someone have expertise in this arena? Yes or no? Does somebody who's giving you this opinion or advice truly have your best interest at heart? That's also important. You would hope with family that's an immediate yes, but sometimes, especially in professional fields, you have to remember that competition can come into play. And there might be people that are

giving you advice not because they actually want what's best for you, but because they are looking out for themselves. I think it's also important to ask, does this person understand not only who I am, but also the person that I'm becoming? When we talk about the values exercise, I think this all loops in where we have values that we hope we're living into every single day. But for the most part, a lot of those values do have an undertone of aspiration. It's who we want to live in to be. It's how we want, you know, five, 10 years from now to look back on our life and say, I really did put people first. I really did live out a value of compassion or empathy or courage, you know, whatever that value is. And the last thing I'll say here in regards to that inner circle is, and I love what you said, Sharon, about you can have

different kind of folks that you go to in different situations and seasons of life. It's just a final note of encouragement on this. I think it can be very easy to get discouraged when we're trying to make a big decision or we do take a bold, brave leap forward in our lives. And some of the people that we would have assumed would have been the first to cheer for us would have been the one saying, you go, you do the thing. I know you're going to succeed. They are either the first to potentially bring fear to the table. Are you sure you want to do that? The hesitation comes into play or they are completely silent. And I bring this up as to say, first of all, that's a very normal situation that we face. And I say this as to say, you also have to remember that your inner circle are human beings too. And oftentimes when you go about making decisions that are either risks where

they love you enough that they don't want to see you fail, and there is fear that becomes projected upon you, not from a bad place, but from a place of, Sharon, I love you so much that if you're going to go do this brave, bold thing, the sheer fact that it could fail terrifies me. And rather than saying that, they question your decision, right? Rather than saying that, they bring that to bear. And or, this is the challenging one, the very act of taking a road less traveled or carving out a new path or veering from what others expect of you can sometimes challenge the worldview of those that are around you. And what I mean by that is if you have someone in your life that, you know, let's say has told themselves every single day, if I work the nine to five job, I get up, I do the hours and I come home, that will mean success

for me. I cannot veer from that path. That is what I must do. And you then make a different decision for yourself. You then either start a side hustle or create a social media account, start sharing opinions that veer from what is expected, whatever it is. Now, suddenly that person who has built that worldview brick by brick by brick has to go, well, wait, I already decided that was not a possibility. Now they are out there doing it. What does that mean for me? And if I was wrong about that, what else could I be wrong about? If I was wrong about the fact that maybe starting a small business could have led to a different definition of success, then what other decisions have I made? The simple fact that you could potentially challenge a worldview that someone has built, even one brick of that worldview, is very terrifying for us. It is very, very, very scary. And so sometimes we'll see that happen too, right? Where we take these bold moves, we move forward in courage in any area of our lives. and we take these bold moves, we move forward in courage in any area of our lives. And it's really hard for folks around us to get on board, not because they don't love us, not because they don't think we're capable, but either because they're afraid and that love drives them to not

want to see us fail and or because it challenges decisions they've made and it's painful for them to confront that head on. And they may not even be aware that that is the subconscious process that is happening, but your brain actively seeks to reaffirm what it already believes. It looks for information, like the roving eye of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. It's out there scanning for information to be like, that agrees with what I believe. That agrees with what I believe. And so when you know that that is the default setting of your brain to help you feel safe by finding information that confirms

what you already believe, or when it encounters information that is antithetical to what you already believe, it automatically looks for ways to reject it. That is the default setting of your brain. You know, like John Haidt, who's a psychologist, talks about this in one of his books, that the two questions we are forever confronted with is, can I believe it? Which is, you are always looking for ways to confirm what you want to believe. Like, can I believe this? I really want to. And so you just find anything to grasp onto where you're like, yeah, I want to believe that.

Or we're asking ourselves, must I believe it? Where you're like, I do not want to believe that. And so that those subconscious questions that we're constantly wrestling with, subconscious questions that we're constantly wrestling with. When other people in your life are perhaps throwing cold water on your gutsy decisions, they may not be aware that their brain is actively working to keep them safe in that moment. They may not even be aware of it because very often we're not aware of it. But that's the truth of what is driving their behavior. It's usually their own fears for your safety of like, oh, I just don't want to see you lose everything. I just don't want to see you be embarrassed. I want to make sure you and the kids are good. It's either their fear for you or their fear for themselves.

And they probably don't even know that either one of those things are happening. It's absolutely so true and so spot on. dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack. Dyson OnTrack headphones offer best-in-class noise cancellation and an enhanced sound range, making them perfect for enjoying music and podcasts. Get up to 55 hours of listening with active noise cancelling enabled, soft microfibre cushions engineered for comfort,

and a range of colours and finishes. Dyson OnTrack. Headphones remastered. Buy from DysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. You talk about in your book too, I loved this, about confronting negative thinking patterns. And this is a skill that you can learn. Some people are naturally very good at it. And some of us have a default setting

of more negative self-talk, but either way, this is a skill you can practice and improve on. And I truly do believe that it makes a massive difference in our daily lives. I'm not talking about even just like, oh, should I apply to the PhD program? I'm talking about your daily life. This is, I think, a really crucial point. So can you talk more about these kinds of negative thinking patterns? Well, it was funny as you were talking about the negativity. I was like, well, hold on. I feel personally attacked. I'm not negative. I'm a realist. I'm not a pessimist. It's just reality, you know, but you are so spot on. And yes, yes, yes. There are very few woo bones in this body. I am a, for better or worse, very much science rooted gal.

Anything that I even come across where I'm like, well, that sounds good, but do we have any, you know, statistical analysis on the probability of, and so I say all of that to say that, yes, you're spot on. I mean, look, our brains are the most powerful thing at our disposal. And there's so much of what we encounter on a daily basis that is beyond our control. But the thing that we do have control over is the way in which we speak to ourselves when those instances happen. And you're the longest friend you're ever going to have. I say this in the book. I'm like, the relationship you have with yourself outside of the spiritual, that is literally the relationship you will have forever. Until the last moment you close your eyes,

it is with you. You have to get right with you. You cannot speak to yourself in a harmful way. You can't constantly be your loudest critic. You can't be the one that beats yourself up before you've even had a chance, right, to get into the ring. You have to become a champion for yourself. And that all begins with the narratives that you are allowing to take up space in your mind. And as woo as that might sound, like you can attack this in such a practical and simple way. It's something I've had to work on and learn myself. And what works best for me isn't even the mantra, the affirmation style of doing this. It's a little bit more nerdy. And I walk folks through this in the book, actually taking the moment to pause when you catch yourself in a negative thought pattern. I'll give a little bit of a vulnerable example.

I'm now a year and a half postpartum after having my daughter. And anyone who's gone through either giving birth or a chronic illness where your body, your body goes through the ringer. If you've been through an experience where your body goes through the ringer, I've dealt with both of those scenarios, your body changes. It's different. And I've caught myself, and this has been a big turning point for me, but caught myself looking in the mirror and ripping myself apart, critiquing every stretch mark. You know, my little mom flap, as we call it, the loss of hair, all that postpartum hair that,

you know, I'm sorry, why does it always end up in the shower? Why don't we remember to throw it away? I don't know. Sorry to all of our partners. All of the negative things that I'm putting on myself, this, that, this, that, over and over again. The ability to then reframe and recontrol that narrative

has been transformative. It is as simple as saying, write down that negative thing that you're saying to yourself. Physically, I dare you, write it down on a piece of paper. Start there. Because first and foremost, when you actually write down the negative thought, it becomes very clear how untrue it likely is. It becomes very clear how not in favor of your success it truly is. And when you write it down, it allows it to be real in a way that yes, is difficult and yes, is confronting, but also gives you the space to rewrite your story. It gives you the opportunity to rewrite it as what I call truth. And so, and again, truth meaning not like the truth, the truth,

truth meaning more like the first thing is definitely a lie. So let's get like one step closer to a statement that's going to guide us where we want to go. And so in doing that, you know, my lie might be, well, I don't love my body anymore. I don't look the way I want to look. I'm not happy with all these changes. I feel foreign in my own skin. A different statement might be, I wear a warrior's body. I have overcome things I never could have fathomed in my lifetime. And although I look different, I am proud of what I've been able to do in this skin. I've gone through brain surgery. I've recovered. I've been through infertility treatment. I've gotten pregnant and given birth to two miracle human beings. And I have the scars to prove it, right? Those stretch marks are not something I am ashamed of.

They are something I am proud to have because it is evidence of a life that I have today I never thought I would have the honor of having, a title that I never thought I would get the chance to have, mom. And the moment I rewrite that narrative, now I am proud. I may still pull on Spanx from time to time, yes, and I may still look in the mirror and catch myself in the unconscious kind of thought pattern that is very much inherent to this part in the season of my life, but no longer will it control me. I will write it down. I will shine a light on the lie and I will embrace a new truth. And that's the challenge with negative thought patterns. You have to be willing to truly pull it out from that sort of smoky ether in the back of your head

that just operates on repeat. Claim it as this is what I am thinking and then rewrite it and challenge yourself to that new narrative. If that means, for example, if any of what I just shared is something you've even partially experienced in your own way, when you do write that new truth that you're going to hold to, that you're going to kind of speak over yourself, it might be a little woo, but tape it to your mirror. If it's something that you're challenged by when you get on a Zoom call that you start to psych yourself out and feel worried or nervous about that public speaking aspect of your job, you put it as a post-it note behind where you sit with your laptop, right? You take a moment to actually bring that new thought into the proximity

of your space such that you are confronted with it in a more visible way until you build up that new neural pathway of speaking to yourself in a different manner. And yes, I get that that might seem kind of fluffy, but I can also tell you that it is deeply transformative. And when done over time and done in action, the more important part, the greatest impact of this isn't even the impact that it has on us. It is the impact that it also has because it has an impact on us, on those all around us. On my daughter, who now I hope never walks in front of a mirror and thinks any of the things that I have thought of myself in my darkest moments. We're breaking some of these thought patterns that perhaps we didn't even realize we had inherited. And we are passing on a different narrative.

So when we step forward to do this work on ourselves, when we change the way we speak to ourselves, when we challenge ourselves to be more gutsy, yes, it changes our lives. But it also changes the lives of those who watch us every single day. And that is also powerful. It really is. It changes the lives of the people in your inner circle, but it also impacts people that you barely know. I bet you have had people come to you and be like, I know you don't know me, but I've been following you online, or I know you from that group, or I know you at church or whatever it is. I know you don't know

me, but I just want to say that watching you do X, watching you navigate brain surgery, IVF, writing books, starting a podcast, opening a business, whatever it is, watching you do that has made a difference for me. We don't even know the full impact of our own decisions to make a difference in our own lives. We don't even know the full impact that that has on our families and the people around us. Often we downplay it, don't we? So often we'll say, it doesn't really matter. Nobody's really paying attention. And we almost kind of diminish the significance of that bravery and that courage that you do in the day-to-day. And I love, you know, you're listing out some of those big career accomplishments of mine,

but I can tell you, I think, frankly, very often the things that we make our greatest impact doing are the things that are seen by the fewest people. My mom's a single mom, by the way. And as you were talking too, I'm going back and just thinking about the example that she was for me. She never gave up. She fought. She sacrificed. She worked the night shift at the hospital as a nurse growing up so that she could make a little extra money and support my sister and I. And in doing all those things, those brave, bold decisions to be a single mom and to fight tooth and nail to give us a better life, I realized the power of a woman. I realized how capable I could be. I realized that in spite of everything, she never quit.

She never gave up. And there weren't 75,000 people watching her and applauding those actions. There were two daughters, two daughters who watched every single day that she got up and went to work and did the hard thing. And then because of that, now there are 75,000 people watching some of the things I do, but yet I still believe it's those two little toddlers in the house across the street from where we're chatting right now that are going to be impacted by the gutsiest things I do in my life. And it's often the things very few people see that make the greatest impact. And I say that out of encouragement.

You know, remember that in the book, we get to this, but if the bravest thing you do from reading this book, from listening to this podcast, from following Sharon every single day and all the amazing things she puts out into the world is having the ability right now to look in the mirror and to see yourself in a different light, to have the courage to be bold enough and brave enough to do this work on yourself, whether that is the self-help work that we're talking about, whether that's challenging your political beliefs and being open to the ideas of others. That type of courage demands the same applause as many of the other courages that the world likes to put on a pedestal and say, well, that person's brave.

Because we can't compare one person's bravery to another. The same amount of bravery it might take for you to look in that mirror and say, I love myself today. I really do. I have a friend who has told me this multiple times, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it, because her phrase is trying to discourage you from being courageous, but as a just like kind of tongue in cheek. Like when you ask for something, the opportunity to practice that is going to show up in your lives for whatever reason. So

I would love to know in what ways are you being gutsy in this season of your life? Well, we talked about this before we hopped on the podcast. And so I'll share a little glimmer of like behind the curtain with Nat and Sharon. Asking for help, that is not something that I'm good at. I've always really struggled with asking for help and allowing myself to be open to the vulnerability of getting a no. And in this season of life, heck, promoting a book in particular, I'm casting out a lot of like, hey, I did this thing and I need help. I need help sharing it. I'm grateful when friends say yes, but also open when friends say no and love and move forward anyway, like having that little bit of gutsiness. I'd also say embracing my own insecurities around motherhood in particular

is something I am working on and being more gutsy around. Meaning when I set out to live my life, I never could have fathomed how difficult, I really didn't. I thought, I mean, it's so easy when you're on the outside looking in at parenthood and you're like, when I'm a parent, I will do all these. It's hard. It's hard. It's messy. And I definitely don't have it figured out. But I am working fiercely on giving myself grace, on allowing myself to be an imperfect mom that apologizes to my kids when I screw up. Those sorts of things that to some, and again, we talk about this in the book, to some people,

they're like, that doesn't take courage. What are you talking about? But to others, they know what I'm talking about. The last thing I will say, being gutsy enough to do things I suck at and do them anyway, I spent the majority of my life believing if I'm not good at something, I can't do it. And it really took me until my 30s to realize it's okay if you write a book that no one reads. It's okay if you knit a sweater that is so ugly your own mother won't wear it. It's still okay. It's okay if you sing a song off tune in church, but you are worshiping your butt off. Like, it's okay to do things that bring you joy,

even if you suck at them. It's okay to show up and look like a fool because you have no idea what you're doing, but to still be brave enough to show up, right? And to recap it kind of in closing here, oftentimes when you do those very things and you show up even when you aren't the best at them, you unknowingly give permission to other people to do the same. And living in that sort of freedom is the type of world that I would want for all of us, where we can really go out and pursue things that bring us joy and chase down big goals, even failing at them publicly and doing it without that shame that so often accompanies this fear that we've been discussing this whole time.

But instead to go, you know what? It's okay if I show up and I do the thing and it doesn't work out. That is what I'm trying to be gutsy at at this very moment. And only time will tell whether I can pull it off, but nonetheless, I'm going to try. I love that. I had a college professor who used to say people always have this phrase of like, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And he always pushed back on that and said, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing. And the whole like, it has to be done done well speaks exactly to what you were just saying. It's okay to do it because you enjoy it. It's okay to do it if you're bad at it.

It's okay to sing bad karaoke, even though you know you're not Carrie Underwood. It's okay to try something new, even if you think other people will laugh at you if you fail at it. other people will laugh at you if you fail at it. And in doing that, you not only give yourself permission to explore something new that maybe you never realized that you were really good at, or maybe you give somebody else permission to try something and fail because they watched you fail at it and they saw that you didn't melt, that you were not, in fact, the Wicked Witch of the West with a bucket of water tossed on her, that you actually lived and made something beautiful out of the pieces that you picked up.

That is also something that you can inspire people with. So I love that. I love that you are showing up for your life in huge gutsy ways and in gutsy ways that might seem mundane to an outsider, like with parenting, but are absolutely not mundane in your life. And sometimes both of those things, those huge, brave, like I'm the next secretary of the United Nations,

like that requires a lot of courage, but so does saying sorry to your five-year-old sometimes when you lost it on them because they left Play-Doh in the DVD player. Does anyone have a DVD player anymore? Do you even have a DVD player? No. I don't either. I don't have a DVD player. I mean, I do have plenty of Play-Doh everywhere, all over my house in every crevice of our old floors, but no DVD player. I mean, I do have plenty of Play-Doh everywhere, all over my house, in every crevice of our old floors. But no DVD player to speak of. No.

No. But you know what I'm saying. My point is, it requires courage to apologize to anybody. It really does. I really loved reading Gutsy. Thanks for having the guts to write it. Thanks for showing up here today. Thanks for showing up for your online community and for all of the independent business owners out there who really benefit from your

wisdom and from your leadership. And I'm just really grateful to know you. Thank you so much for reading the book. I am so glad that you loved it. And just thank you too, Sharon, for being someone that lives out these values every single day. Your courage has inspired so many people and we're all better for it. So thank you. Thank you. Gutsy comes out on August 15th. So if you would like to pre-order a signed copy, you can go to Natalie's website, which is nataliefrank.com, Frank with an E at the end, nataliefrank.com, and then click on the link on the homepage that says gutsy. And you can pre-order a signed copy there through independent bookstores, or you can pre-order wherever you buy your books. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson.

Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon.