028 The Power of Story Telling Marketing with Brook McCarthy

This is The Emerge and Expand Podcast, a place for introverted and sensitive souls who are trying to cut through the noise online and create success in their own businesses on their own terms. I'm your host, Catherine Mackenzie Smith and I'm so glad that you're here. Hi and welcome to another episode of The Emergent. Expand podcast. I have another interview in the Do Business Different Friendly Interview series for you today, but before we get into it, I just wanted to remind you about my new Get Out of Your Head and Get Into Action seven day journey called One Step at a Time. It is completely free. You can download it@katherinemckenzismith.com journey and if you're listening to this, between the 6th and the 13 July, I'm running three free live stream sessions in my introvert, friendly business community. So if you'd like to come along to that, all of the details will be in the show notes or head to Catherineckenzismiths.com journey to get all of the details and first access to the guide when it's available.

Now, let me introduce you to the guest for today's Do Business Differently interview. It is my friend Brooke McCarthy, who I met when I was very early in my business back in Sydney at a B school meetup back in the day. And I just really appreciated Brooke's no BS approach to business and the stories that she tells, not just in her life, but also through her marketing messaging. So I'm really excited to share this conversation with you today as well. Brooke works with values based business owners who deliver professional services through business coaching, training courses and Masterminds to equip owners to earn consistent ten K months while magnifying their impact without burning out, getting overwhelmed or overspending on team tech or other fancy stuff. Hi Brooke, I'm so excited to reconnect with you today and have an amazing conversation with you.

Me too, me too. It's been six years, at least six.

Years since I was living in Sydney and was probably the last time that we got to see each other.

Indeed, long time ago.

I know. So great to reconnect and I know this conversation is just going to be so juicy today. I can already tell from the chat we had before we started recording how good it's going to be because there's so many things that we could talk about and I'm excited to see how that plays out.

Yeah, we're like, come on, we have to hit record. This is.

The good stuff. But just for anyone who is listening who isn't across your work, can you start by just telling us a little bit about what you do and who you support?

Yes, I'm a business coach. Please don't hold that against me. I'm also a business trainer and I work with soloists and business owners. They tend to come from the health sector as well as creative sector. So I do tend to attract a lot of writers and videographers and generally kind of creative people, even if they don't consider themselves creative, even if what their work isn't kind of obviously creative, they are still creatives and sensitive folk, critical thinkers and most often women. So I do have some men, mainly gay, but the majority of my clients are female, and a lot of them are over 40 as well. Now, you said, don't hold that against me.

So that actually brings me to a question that I really like to ask. What is it about the work that you do and when maybe you started your business that made you want to do business differently from how others in your industry do it?

How long have you got? So many things. And in fact, I find it personally really motivating to look at other people doing a shockingly shit job of something, and I think, oh, God, like, I almost feel a moral obligation. You know, I can think off the top of my head at least three instances. There was one time I was just about to quit social media marketing. I found it sorry, social media marketing training. I found it very hard work to deliver that. I found people got highly emotional, and I was like, I'm done with this. I'm too old to be teaching it anyway.

Let the young kids teach this. And then I went to a business event. There were about 300 people in the room. It was one of those events where you know you're going to get pitched because the ticket is free or the tickets cheap, and they pack people in, and they got the credit card machines out the back near the doors. I wasn't paying much attention when I booked it, but it was all about social media marketing. And the guy who shall remain nameless was standing on stage giving the worst, most unworkable advice to a room full of small business owners that I kind of felt morally obligated to keep going.

I have to say, when you just said that, I was like, I have definitely had periods like that.

Yes. And a compliment that I get a lot from clients is that I'm honest. And I find that that's, like a recurring compliment. I find that a really weird compliment. And it just makes me think, what the hell are you who are you interacting with that I stand out as an honest person anyway? Yeah.

You think that that should just be a standard, and the fact that that's something that stands out to people surely says a lot.

Absolutely. This should be like, the bare minimum. This should be the price of entry. Is that you're honest?

That's wild. Actually, I need to take a moment to just recover from that. Look, there are so many different directions that I know that we can go talking about this. And I know coaching is one that you and I both are in, but also have many, many opinions about. So I guess when we're talking about standing out and having this moral obligation to show up in that way, can you give us any examples of if you've got a slick marketing message? It can be really easy for people to get kind of caught up in that versus actually what people should be looking for when they're deciding who they want to work with as a business coach.

Yeah, I think that there are so many things to consider here and I'm just trying to pull out all the different threads in my mind while I sound articulate and hopefully funny. But I think that coaching at its best is unbelievable. It's amazing. It's the best job in the world. Both being a coach is amazing and receiving coaching is phenomenal. And I wish that everybody had access and that this was something really normal and not something that's in vogue or different or unusual. And then having said that, I think it potentially puts you in a position as a coach. It potentially puts you in a position of great power, which means that it is a position that you can abuse.

And I don't know if you remember, but I did a religious studies degree and I studied cults at university and I also accidentally joined a cult.

Good news.

They were very lovely, seventy s free love and mung beans kind of cult. So it was a lovely experience. Not a koolaid cult, not one of those weird cults. Apart from all of the meditation, full moon and all this stuff, it was a tantric Hindu cult for those who are interested. And the guru was from Calcutta. He died in about 1990. Anyway, point being is it made me kind of very sensitive to abuse of power. And with the benefit of hindsight, the wisdom of hindsight, I think I've been scared of my own power and scared of my own leadership.

And for many years, when I felt like clients and others were looking up to me or respecting me, it caused this weird reaction in me whereby I really didn't like it. I think it's always really useful not to put anyone on a pedestal because we are all normal slobs. We are all human. And being a coach doesn't make you some kind of Buddha. I think that's a popular misconception that because you're a coach, you somehow have all your shit together and you never feel jealous and you never get angry and you never say things you regret. And that is far from the truth. It is sometimes a bit of a minefield. And I have a big screening process.

Normally by the time I get on a sales call with somebody who wants one to one coaching, they've filled out two different forms. And then during that sales call, I'm vetting them, so to speak. It's not a very nice word, is it? I'm trying to find out. I'm trying to feel into. Are we a good fit personality wise, will you get an excellent return on investment? Are we the kind of personality that fits together like hot chips and Seagulls? Because I don't want to get into a situation where there's a weird dynamic and to learn from experience, sometimes hard experience, what personality types go well with my personality type and what personality types don't. Because how I approach business is I want my clients and myself to be a mutual admiration society of two equal consenting adults who are both bouncing off each other's ideas and energy and are both kind of benefiting. It's like a win win relationship. And so as a consequence, I'd probably turn down more people than I'd take on.

And the other thing too is that I think one to one business coaching is expensive and group business coaching is an excellent alternative that tends to be a hell of a lot more cost effective as well.

One thing that really I'd love to go a little bit more into is this idea of the power or the imbalance of that I think power dynamic or that dynamic that, like you said, can be as coaches, something we need to be cautious of. But I think also as clients, as consumers of content, as people who are usually when you go into business, interested and curious and learning new skills all the time. And one thing that I often say to my clients who are more introverted, more highly sensitive, that when you have an energy field that is affected by the energy of other people, being really mindful and grounded in our own sovereignty is so important because that boundary can get really word. And I say to people, I've said this to so many clients over the years, which I don't know if it's a bit harsh, stop trying to give me all your power. Because that's something that people do prey on, I think. And we see this in sales and marketing, messaging and tactics. But I think as well, we all need to take responsibility for our own boundaries as well and actually stop seeing people who maybe we think are making more money than us or who have more followers than we do, or are our coach or someone that we're learning from actually stop handing our power over to them and be really mindful of that too. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, I think you've hit the nail. The hammer the nail anyway, you've hit something. I think to bring in another metaphor, you bang on. There's so many things you said there and so I'm going to try and pull out the different threads because I think you said something about taking responsibility. I think you were also referring to the fact that there's a lot of charlatans and that beware that we need to do our due diligence. And you also talked about sensitivity and empathy. Let me try and address those amazing.

Sorting out my.

Self here because I'm like, Shit, there's so many things to say. I might start backwards with the sensitive thing because I want to confess something to you, Catherine. I was provoked by your marketing for quite a while. Oh, wow. Yeah, because you talked about highly sensitive people, and it took me to the age of about 38, 39 before I admitted to myself and then quietly to close friends and family that actually I was highly sensitive. And one of the reasons that would kind of provoke me is it triggered me. I kind of thought, highly sensitive people, why don't you just get on with it? Because when I was growing up as a kid, it was always like, brooke, stop being so sensitive all the time. I got that a lot.

So I always thought it was a liability rather than an attribute or a superpower. And I think you are correct in that. If you're in the company of someone, say, on a sales call or perhaps on an event, when you've got somebody charismatic standing on stage, going through testimonial after case study after testimonial and selling something as a highly sensitive person, as an empathetic person, we are highly vulnerable to getting caught up in that and going, yes. And I've made many weird and wonderful decisions over the years where, like, I think one of the strangest ones. More recently, I donated $100 to a woman whose pet rat had just died. Okay.

That's my favorite one I've heard so far. I think I've seen you right about your bleeding heart.

What was I like? I don't know. I was caught up in a whirl of emotion. There empathy. But I think it's really useful in that scenario to know yourself, to have the self insight to say, this is fun and it's exciting, but I never buy in those moments. I always walk away. I do my best to always walk away and consider things, do the background research, make sure the claims somebody's making while standing on stage are actually factual. And oftentimes a quick Google search will show that they're not. And also, to your point, we are responsible adults, and I think as an empathetic, highly sensitive person, we can be over responsible.

Our people pleasing tendency can make us over responsible. And that kind of can do helpful attitude of like, I'm going to help you, and I'm a good person, I'm going to help you, can bleed into this over responsibility. So I think part of the process is to recognize and take responsibility for your own decisions and also to forgive yourself for all the many and varied mistakes that as a human being, we all make and not let that kind of sully your enthusiasm.

Yeah, it's such an interesting line to walk, isn't it? Because when you said over responsibility, I felt that so deep because I know that that definitely has and does impact my business the way that I feel about living within a capitalist structure. I know that that impacts my business growth. I know that wanting to be ethical and take care of people and not buy into some of the tactics that I personally disagree with or feel icky to me, it's like constantly checking in with that. And I think it is. Sometimes it can be such a good thing. I think it's a high value of mine, but I think it can also be something that takes a little bit away and holds us back a little bit as business owners as well. From the other side.

Yeah. And I think one of your first questions was, why do I do what I do? And I immediately launched into the negative. But I think that one of the big motivators is that there are a lot of very conscientious, highly thoughtful, deep and meaningful thinkers and feelers people that have decades of experience. Most of the people I work with have been at their craft for at least ten years, if not more. And because of that, business is a hell of a lot harder than it needs to be. And we do get in our own way, and we do sabotage ourselves, and we do take too much responsibility sometimes for all of the best intentions we can have, the best and most pure of intentions to help people and save the world and all the rest of it. But what we're doing in the process is we're taking other people's agency away without realizing that we're taking other people's agency away. And so, like, a quick example was a mistake I made a lot in my first years in business, which is assuming somebody couldn't afford me.

I did this over and over and over and over again. And I think it's pretty true of a lot of business owners. A lot of us kind of make assumptions. We look at somebody and we make a snap judgment or we have a conversation, we make a snap judgment. But by assuming that somebody couldn't afford me, I was taking somebody's agency away. And it's, you know, with all the best of intentions. It's been proven to me over and over again ever since how wrong I was. People are buying your services or not buying your services for many and varied reasons that have nothing to do with how much money they have in their bank account.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for saying that. That conversation has happened maybe three times in the last couple of weeks in my emergent expand membership. And it's so nice to have somebody else say it in different way, because I hope that if something didn't make sense the way I was saying it, that what you've just said there really hits home for that, because you're absolutely right. At no point should we be doing anything but showing up in the best interest of the work, the business, the work that we're here to do and hold space for that client or those people that we're supporting in some way. And it is never our responsibility to put anything, project anything of ourselves or our own mindset onto anybody else.

This is one of the ways that we make business way harder than it needs to be. We spend so much time letting other people squat in our brains. We spend so much time with energy vampires who suck our life force from us and do so in very kind of subtle ways. I remember having a relationship. I was fairly young, I think I was only about 17. And I remember entering the relationship and feeling pretty good about myself. I was like, you know, I'm rocking at life. I was 17.

It was the best year of my life. And I exited the relationship 18 months later. And I had all these feelings and these perceptions of myself. And about a year passed, which I think is a normal period of grief, maybe getting a relationship. And I was like, you know what? These were introduced and they were introduced very subtly. They weren't introduced in an obvious way.

Yeah, that is a really great point. And that kind of makes me want to swing back around to the online space because I think not only is that who we're spending time with and who we're in community with in our businesses, which can be when you're a solopreneur, it can be something that is very lonely and you spend a lot of time on your own. And so finding places where you can connect with people who are kind of on a similar journey to you is so important. But finding people who are adding and contributing to your growth and your expansion versus those little leaks but then also the part that the online space and social media plays in that where it could just be following people who you don't even realize are creating that in yourself. Do you have any thoughts or tips on how to navigate that without a year and a half passing before you realize, like, oh, this person has been actually sending me in a different direction that I didn't even realize by following them and being influenced by their decisions has actually made me have a business that I don't really like anymore.

Yeah, look, I think we tolerate a hell of a lot more online than we would tolerate face to face. I think if we're in somebody's company, if we were to invite somebody into our house and they behaved the way that some people behave on social media, we wouldn't tolerate it and it would be easy to spot and we would hopefully politely ask them to leave. Having said that, there's also this weird human phenomena of watching a car wreck when you're driving past the car wreck and you want to watch it. So you see some social media influencer that's having a rant that you know is going to destroy their career. And there is something inherently watchable about that. We all kind of crowd around, but this stuff absolutely, definitely has an effect on your mood. And I think the thing that we need to appreciate well, there's kind of two points that I want to make and I think they sound a little bit contradictory, but I don't think they're contradictory. I think they're a bit of a paradox rather than a contradiction.

The first is that I think you can tell a lot about a business through social media. I think you can trust your intuition, you can trust your emotional intelligence, your interpersonal skills. I've just started following this business, which is rather big and successful, and within a couple of weeks I'm ready to unfollow because they're talking about they're the world's best. If you're going to tell me that you're the world's best, or that you're Sydney's only, or that you're Australia's favorite, forget about it. You're lazy. I'm not following you like, it's boring. Boring marketing, vacuous promises. So you can tell a lot through social media as to the personality, and you can trust that and could be a contradiction, but I don't think it is.

You're only, of course, getting some of it. You're only, of course, seeing what they want you to see. And that's what the insight is, right? Because you can tell the personality, because you can tell what they want you to see and you can tell how they want you to perceive themselves. And having said that, so much of it is impersonal. So much of it is impersonal. So I think about my family. I come from a long, rich history of cynics and skeptics. My father was he's one of the most cynical people I know and he's an old journalist.

So we'd watch news readers. If you're with my family, we're all very loud and we're opinionated and everybody's kind of talking over everybody and highly sensitive, which is a terrible combination. Very argumentative and constantly having your feelings hurt.

My dad and I, that's basically my relationship with my dad. Loud and sensitive and opinionated. Sometimes on the same side, sometimes on opposite sides. It's messy.

Well, I tell you what, you're watching television with my family and the news commenter, the news compare comes on and the news reader starts talking about whatever everybody will lay into the hair or the makeup or the clothing or whatever. They'll just be brutal. And does it mean anything? No, it means absolutely nothing at all. Now, that person on reading the news might be the best and most amazingly person ever. How would we know? We don't care. We're making a quick, snap judgment that has absolutely no weight behind it. So the point I'm trying to make is do not derive your self esteem from the internet. Do not use social media as your unpaid psychologist because it's only going to end in tears.

Yeah. The people that know you intimately are probably four or five people at the most. If somebody jumps on your social media and makes a hurtful remark, it's not meaningful. It doesn't need to have a story behind it.

Yeah, that's such a great point. Thank you so much for saying that, because it's something that really does hold people back from posting. And when we see that, especially I think instagram is probably one of the worst offenders of this, it really did become the platform of curating what your life looked like, and that becomes a way that you position yourself as an expert and the way that you position your lifestyle brand. Do you have any thoughts on how to just, I guess, protect yourself a little bit from that as a business owner, but also how to show up while you're navigating the human messiness and wanting to share your work and your message. Support people in how you do in your business, but in a way that is real without the airing or your dirty laundry.

I think Brene Brown says that we are all authentic. We are just either choosing to display that in the world or not. And I guess back to that honest compliment, I don't really see an alternative to being authentic. The story that you were referring to about the only kid wearing woolens at primary school, my mother sent me to my mother is a real personality and she's had a massive influence on me. And when I was a kid, she just never gave a shit about fitting in and she sent me to kindergarten in a woollen jumper. Everybody else has got, like, the pullovers and that was the least of it. There was so much other things. There was like, the apples.

Everybody had chips and Muslim bars. We weren't allowed chips and Muslim bars. And she always said to me over and over again my whole childhood, don't let them put you in a box, Brook. Don't let them pigeonhole you. Keep them guessing. Don't try and fit in. Like it's the worst thing you can do, is try and fit in. So I had that very positive influence and I never really tried.

And it's not always been roses. Sometimes I feel intensely lonely, but when I'm putting marketing out there onto the Internet, when I'm sharing stuff and especially stuff I feel nervous about, especially stuff where I'm like my hands kind of shaking and I'm like, how will people perceive this? How will they receive this? I always have a good response. I've always had a great response because the people that matter love it and they email me and they say, thank you. Thank you for putting this out there, because I thought I was the only weirdo that had this experience and I'm so glad and grateful to find out I'm not alone. And I've had a similar thing when I'm feeling like I'm the only weirdo that's going, why does everybody think this is good when it's clearly shit. And then one other person on the Internet gives me language or backs up my argument or gives me nuance or helps me understand my own thinking better. I'm so grateful for that. I'm so appreciative.

And when I go on Instagram, I don't feel bad. I feel smarter, I feel challenged, I feel excited. I'm surrounded by interesting company because I've gone out of my way to curate that and to find people, to follow threads, to follow people and see who they're interacting with and understand what their ideas are. And you said something in your question. You said, how do we show up and how do we show our work? And I think this is a big piece of it because we've been talking about the falseness of it all and the display and the performance. And I think we fall down where we think we have to have the lifestyle, and the lifestyle is the marketing. I just need to photograph myself in a coffee shop, or here's me in Paris, or here's me walking around. The amount of people, when you find the back stories, when you understand the actual details, people hire airbnbs.

They go to hotels to take photos, to post it on social media. That's weird. You don't have to sell your lifestyle. Your lifestyle is not on display. And if you think you do well, of course you think you do, because that's what everybody teaches you. That's what you see. That's the culture of Instagram is like the female empowerment lifestyle brand. Female lifestyle empowerment brand, which is what Kelly Deals calls it.

When you lead with your work, when you lead with your ideas, and when you I like to think of myself not as a marketer, but as a journalist. And the journalist says the thing that's unpopular, the journalist speaks truths to power. And, yeah, maybe my business. Absolutely. Definitely my business is not going to be as big. Absolutely. Definitely. I'm not going to make as much money.

I don't give a flying shit. I really don't. Because it's more important that I feel good about myself and that I feel like I'm excited by my work and excited by my ideas than making another 100 superficial friendships online. And I think that we have this weird idea. We look at other people and we go, all right, okay. So my life started when I started my business, and if the details of my background aren't relevant, I'm just going to edit them out and I'm going to make it palatable and easy to understand and really clean and consistent. That's not a human life.

How you use those stories to bring that around to a message about using stories to communicate your message, like, it's such a beautiful loop.

Yes, absolutely. And so I think if you're selling services, you're selling promises. If you're selling coaching or energetic healing or something that is kind of intangible, you can't pick. It up. It's not like a pencil where you can touch it and you can smell it and go, is this the kind of pencil I want? Is this the kind of price I want to pay for this concrete object? You've got to use words, and whether you use those words via podcast or video or blogging or whatever really doesn't matter. But you can't say, I've got this thing. It's great. You should buy it, because we get that all day long and no one's going to believe it's.

Easy to say, right? But you've got to do more than that. You've got to make something that's abstract, tangible. And how do you make it tangible? Well, one of the best and easiest, most accessible ways of doing it is to color in the details, to use the senses, to talk about the woolen jumper. And you could probably imagine now, okay, I'm a kid, I hated woolen. I hated the feeling of wool next to my skin. When I say that to you, you're probably recalling and remembering that in the.

Brisbane humidity, thinking about wool on my.

Skin right now, it makes me 100%. I use music. One of the benefits of being a business owner is I get to impose my musical tastes on other people, and I'll use music. I'll talk about songs because it brings that sense back. All of a sudden, I can hear the song, I can picture the year, I can picture the fashion, I can describe the food or the feeling in depth and detail and color. And then I can kind of help people kind of understand the transformation that I'm selling.

That's the difference, right? That's the depth and the texture that comes through painting a picture versus being like a color by numbers that looks kind of like everyone else.

Yeah.

And the difference is, you really yeah.

The difference is yeah, it's the ideas. It's the feelings that you're provoking. Nostalgia. I use nostalgia quite a lot in my marketing, in my storytelling, because it's a really easy entry to get people to feel something. Now, any Tom, Dick and Harry can post a photo on Instagram or update their LinkedIn, God forbid, or update Facebook. But to reach through screens and pluck the heartstrings of strangers and make them feel something. Make them feel something. And in that process, make them feel like they know you and they like you and they trust you.

And when I start working with clients, for years, people have been saying, you'd like that, wouldn't you, Brooke? You wouldn't like that, would you, Brooke? Because even though I've met them for the very first time, they know my opinions, they know my feelings, they know my experiences, they know my taste in music extensively. They do all this stuff, and it makes everything else a piece of pierce. It makes sales easier. It makes trust easier. You can shortcut the process of transformation because you're jumping straight over that know, like and trust part or not straight over, but you're moving through it quickly and getting to the good stuff quicker.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you do that as well, people know pretty quickly whether you're their person or not.

Yes.

And it's so funny that I learned this thing on TikTok. It was like a trend that went for a few weeks, and it really resonated with me that you either came from a snack family or you came from an ingredient family when you were growing up. And so if you came from an ingredient family, when you're hungry between meals, you might do things like a spoon of peanut, but spoonful of peanut butter or an apple or a piece like, my sister and I will live on toast. Like, that's our snack food. My partner comes from a snack family, and so when he feels peckish, he will literally go to the shop to buy Pringles or something. And straight away, it's one of those things that as soon as you started talking about the apple slices, I was like, Ingredient family? You're one of my people, right? The things that we share about ourselves, the little pieces that we share. This has come up a lot. He's always there, but only this week, I've had four different people mention grogu baby Yoda in my chair there behind me.

That's I mean, intent, not intentional, because this is my room. But also, it says pretty clearly, like, Star Wars nerd movie geek. Is that someone who's my person? And I think those things are that they add the depth that you can't really do in marketing and copywriting, like, sales copy and SEO. They're the things that make us know, is this someone that I want to know better? Is this someone that I trust? Because they're an ingredient person and they know what it's like to grow up in a house with no snacks, whipping.

Up a meal for lunch leftover. But, yeah, I think it's very human to want to find your humans. I think it's really normal to want to bond with other people. And one of the ways that we bond with people is knowing and sharing the details. And also a little bit of vulnerability in that I don't ever want anyone to look at me and think, oh, she's ever made any mistakes? And it's amazing how much she gets done in a day. I will tell everybody who listens that I've got a wife and he's an awesome cook. Great. He drops the kids to school, picks them up every day.

He goes grocery shopping. We're in bed last night, and I'm trying to be helpful and useful. Would you like me to cook dinner tomorrow night? He can't stand it. He's like, no, I know exactly what we are eating, and it's already organized. Yeah. And of course, if I have this partner, I can get shit done because he's taking away all this other stuff I don't have to think about or worry about. So to think that for somebody to look and say, oh, well, Brooke's prolific with all the marketing she does and the courses she delivers. Well, the reason that part of that is possible is because of this guy.

So why the hell wouldn't I share that?

Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it?

And I think that that's where you're.

Really starting to see this. I hope it becomes a bigger trend of de influencing that. It's like actually just being a real person and that being more inspiring permission to be also just a messy human than this aspirational influencer lifestyle that maybe of hopefully a previous era that we're moving into something that's just actually just like there's no power and balance here. We're just people coming together and sharing ideas. And maybe I have some strategies or some tools that you haven't learnt yet and I can share those with you if that's what you're looking for versus the kind of tactics that we have become just so tired of seeing in the online space.

Yeah, 100%. Because you're taking your power away when you try and fit in, like when you try and conform, when you swallow your opinion, not only are you taking your power away, but it leads to depression and anxiety. Like, I'm a firm believer that if you try and suppress a part of your personality and you're not living authentically now, that comes with some caveats. Ideally, I'd just be a digital nomad, I'd just be globe trotting around. But I have two children. I didn't quite think that through and makes it a little more complicated. But when we try and kind of cleave off parts of ourselves so that we can shove ourselves into somebody else's pigeonhole, it doesn't end well. It doesn't end well for our business because we look like everybody else.

We become a commodity. People don't choose us, they just choose us because we're the cheapest and the most convenient, which is not a race that you want to win. And we don't do ourselves any favors as well because we're denying our truth. We're denying what we think and feel and believe and we're suppressing that and then it manifests in depression or anxiety.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well, it also means that we don't then resonate with the people who are actually our people because we're trying. I mean, I used to notice this in Big Brother when I worked on that show back in the day. The people who came into the house with an agenda and putting on a certain persona were either the ones that didn't last the longest or they ended up just having an incredible breakdown at some point. And the people who usually lasted until the end and went on actually a huge journey of self discovery were the people who went in as 100% themselves. And that was like such an amazing thing to learn in my early 20s because I think it's really served me over the years as a content creator and an online business person.

And I guess it would have been particularly interesting for you because you would have seen the uncut stuff that nobody else sees, right?

You're seeing as it was happening.

Yeah. Wow, such a groovy job.

Look at 03:00 in the morning when you're watching people sleep. Not so much, but definitely taught me some life lessons, for sure. Oh, my goodness. I could literally talk to you forever and it has been so wonderful to connect with you. And I know that there are probably 60 other conversations we could have had today, but I genuinely have just loved every second of this. And thank you so much for giving so much of your time today. For anyone who would like to connect with you further, all of the links will be in the show notes, but can you also just maybe share what the easiest way or the quickest way for someone who wants to connect with you is?

Sure. And thank you so much for having me because it's been a lot of fun and I've enjoyed all these multilayered questions as well.

It's my coffee adult brain.

It's really fun kind of pulling back all the layers that you're somebody that likes to go deep, which is great because life's short. Probably the best way would be my website hustlenheart.com, dot, au or Instagram is my favorite. I'm trying to spend more time on TikTok and post on TikTok, but I'm feeling very old. Yeah.

Well, thank you again. I hope that we can connect again really soon as well.

Yes, let's.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Emergent Expand podcast. If you'd like to get the transcript from this episode as well as the show notes and links on how to connect with Brooke further, please head to Katherineckenzismith.com podcast. And if you'd like to join us for the live sessions for the get out of your head and get into Action seven Day journey, one step at a time. Those sessions are starting from the 6 July. Please head to Katherineckenziesmith.com journey. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you would leave it a rating and review on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Thank you again so much for listening and I will catch you in the next one.