Vulnerability

[00:00:00] Paula: Welcome to “TesseLeads” with your host, “Tesse Akpeki, and co host, me, Paula Okonneh. “TesseLeads” is a safe, sensitive, and supportive place and space to share, hear, and tell all your stories and experiences, and we mean all. We get super curious about the dilemma that shape our future and the journeys that we are all on. Today’s topic is on vulnerability. And it’s called “vulnerability and my journey towards connecting with myself”. Our guest is David Taylor Klaus. And normally I would read his bio, but now today he’s going to introduce himself. So welcome to “TesseLeads” and floor is yours.

[00:00:52] David: Great to be here. Thank you. You know, I love chatting with you two.

[00:00:56] Paula: We love you too.

[00:00:57] David: Introduction. You know, I’m always fascinated by the opportunity to introduce myself because so often when I’m introduced, you get to hear the whole boring biography. And what I do professionally is fine, but that’s just a fraction of who I am. I spend a lot of my time in the world ranting against the lie that is work life balance and teaching people life rhythm instead. And I do that because I spend a really long time getting it wrong and being over calibrated and over performing and over exhausted. Yes, I’ve been an entrepreneur for 30 odd years, but the things I’m proudest of, the things that define me more, I’ve been married to a woman I’ve known since I was 11 for 32 years as of next week, we have three kids that we’re all active parts of each other’s lives. You know, the love is hard. I mean, love is easy. That’s the stuff that’s baked in like is hard. And we all like each other. And got a fabulous daughter in law and some adorable, significant others that are dating the ones that aren’t married. So they’re all part of our world. And I define myself by my impact wake with friends, with family, with community. And yeah, as a professional coach for entrepreneurs and executives, I’m really attentive to what my impact wake is there. That’s just a portion of my life, right? So who am I? At the core, I’m a leader and I have a lot of fun. So how’s that for capturing who I am, Paula?

[00:02:35] Paula: I absolutely love it. And I’m sure if I asked you to repeat that again, we’ll get a different version, but just as impactful.

[00:02:46] David: My wife, a bunch of years ago, went to New York to film some videos for a health care company. And they got the room all set up, all the production people, and at one point the director says, oh, that was great, but one of the lights was messed up, can you do that again? And Elaine said, No, you asked me a question. I answered it. I couldn’t possibly answer it the same way again. And what she and I talked about after that is that, you know, when she’s completely present in the moment, she’s able to answer it and bring everything that’s part of who she is to that. But she’s not conscious of what she’s saying as she’s saying it because she’s totally present to the moment and worked a really long time to be able to do that. To be so present to the moment and so clear about what my message is and what my purpose is. When I come from there, that’s when, in fact, I believe it’s the only time when I have the impact I want to have. So, thank you for that opportunity.

[00:03:44] Tesse: That’s so powerful, David. It’s really, really powerful. You know, when I, when Paula and I talked about what we’ll ask you today, connecting with yourself. You don’t know I’m going to ask that question, but I said to Paula that from the first moment I met you virtually, you seem to me like somebody who is connected with yourself, warts and all. And I was so curious about that level of connection to yourself. And that curiosity is leading me to say a bit more about that. What footsteps have helped you to be in this place of present in the moment, present to others?

[00:04:22] David: So probably an answer you’re not expecting, but 40 years of navigating depression has been critical to that. You know, so much of what happens when you have depression is perseverating over the past or freaking out about the future. You cannot imagine the futures I’ve invented and imagined that never happened, right? And sitting with depression, you learn to be present to the moment, to what’s real and what’s there. And it’s also a brilliant way to see what your impact is on others. Because you can’t help but see what your impact is in the moment when you’re present to the moment. As opposed to, oh my God, what were they thinking? What are they thinking now? All the things that we do when we recast what’s happened. There’s a fabulous author who recently passed away, whose name now I can’t remember. But the quote is, “you’ll, you’ll find you worry less about what other people think about you when you realize how seldom they do”. We’re all so wrapped up living our own lives and figuring out our own stuff that we’re very rarely thinking about other people as much as other people think they’re being thought about. And so as a way to engage with other people, let’s look at it in terms of a marriage. You can’t engage with your partner who they used to be and be in service of the relationship. You can’t be in relationship with the person you hope they’ll become and be in service of the relationship. Because the only time the relationship is happening is right now. And when we’re interacting with the person that we’re in relationship with, as anybody other than who I am in the moment, who they are in the moment, you’re not in relationship, you’re in a tug of war. And no, I’m not a relationship coach, and yet, when you look at how you are being in the world, wow, isn’t that the ultimate form of leadership? Being aware of how you’re being in the world and how you want to be? So I think that has a lot to do with my connection with myself. And by the way, being connected with myself, warts and all, the warts aren’t hard to be in connection with. I mean, I think a lot of us are really clear on the warts about ourselves. The work is getting clear about the shiny bits, right? The positive elements and really owning everything in between. That’s what’s important about being connected to yourself is the full range.

[00:06:38] Tesse: I love it. The shiny bits, the bits in between. I really, really love it. You know, you talk about, and no, I’m not surprised about the depression piece. I’m not surprised about that. Because whenever we connect with you, there’s something about your understanding that comes across and it’s like it bridges things, it’s a bridging thing, and that comes from somewhere very deep, that is healing, that is uncovering. You can’t actually make that up. You can’t really make that up. You know, that is something that exists in you. So along that journey, were there some things that were laid bare for you that you kind of, as you began to do the shiny bits in between till now, were there some kind of high, you know, I wouldn’t say, I want to say highlights. But it’s things that accord for you that you said, yeah, aha, for you in that journey.

[00:07:35] David: Yeah, my physical presence and the impact of it. I’m not a large human being. I think before I started the inevitable age gifted shrinking. I was about five, just shy of five foot 11. Sorry, I don’t know to translate that. And. I never realized how imposing that can be for people that are smaller, or if I get too close. And I tend to be very energetic and effusive, and in person my energy can be very large, much larger than I am. And it was a very hard lesson for me to learn that sometimes my excitement and enthusiasm can come across threatening. And whenever the gap between one’s intended impact and one’s actual impact is drawn into stark reveal, wow, that can suck. It’s way past painful. It’s a rude awakening. And learning to be attentive about my unintended impact and even the unspoken impact that’s that changed my leadership a lot. And it wasn’t about recoiling, it was about paying attention to my leadership wake. And for me that language has always been important. You know, whether you’ve ever been in a boat or not, the important thing is as a boat or any, or any airship moves through space, it has a wake that trails behind it, a wake of impact. The air and the water are disturbed and it impacts other things around it. And leaders are just like that, right? As you move through a space, I had a client where one of the partners lived several hours away, seven hours away. And he would drive in for, you know, late morning meetings on Monday and go back home Thursday evening. And oh my God, if he had a bad drive on that Monday, oh my, as he walked to the office, his energy, that irritation and agitation was permeating. It was setting the weather. And as he walked through, you could watch people in the office shrink. And he wondered why Mondays were hell in the office. Right. He was totally oblivious to his impact, because he would stomp through there, get into his office, collect himself, and then come back out, and everybody’s shattered waiting for the explosion. And he’s all happy, now he’s at his cup of coffee. He’s ready to be human and nobody wants to be near him. And he starts to cave in because he feels excluded. Doesn’t feel like he belongs. And he’s complaining to me and my own company. I’ve been here 25 years. I’m one of the founders and I don’t feel like I belong. So I think as people become aware of their impact wake, personally, professionally, you name it. I think that’s a critical piece to learning how to have the impact in the world you want to have in the world by unpacking the impact you are having.

[00:10:32] Tesse: Wow. Impact wake. Consciousness.

[00:10:36] Paula: That’s the word that’s jumping out for me,” Impact Wake”. Yeah. David, you have a lot of gifts. Every time I speak with you, I leave, I’ve learned. I tell myself, let me go back track. I tell myself every day when I wake up, I have to learn something new. But every time that we do have a conversation with you, I learned some things, not just something new. And Impact wake makes me think of, you got a lot of gifts. What would you say your greatest gift is? You’re not boasting. You know, just now you talked about when you discovered that you had an impact, sometimes that wasn’t positive. You said you didn’t recoil, you just became more aware of it. So this is kind of like the opposite. What would you say your greatest gift is? You’re not boasting, but you’re just aware of it.

[00:11:22] David: Yeah. And thanks for asking. I think it has to do with my ability to read energy and connect. And by the way, yes, some of it’s instinct, some of it was necessary as a mechanism for navigating the world that I came through, and some of it is hard earned and practiced. But it’s the ability to read the energy of the space and respond to it. Even if it’s not at this point, conscious, because it makes a difference. I’ve walked into room as the, I don’t know what number presenter I was, but the last person had just spent 90 minutes in the room talking with people about their experiences with sexual assault. And I walk into the room and oh my God, you know, my conversation that I was going to be having in the room was going to be in a totally different direction and very energetic. And I walk into the room and I just felt the weight. If I’d come in and talked about what I had planned to talk about, it would have been not just tone deaf, it would have been emotionally an assault. And so I had to change everything about the way I approached the room. How I moved onto the stage. How I greeted people. How I started the conversation. What we talked about, it changed everything. And so my 90 minutes was nothing that had been written and prepared and practiced. And I think it’s important to be able to read the room, the space, the relationship. Now trust me, I am not a hundred percent and I am reminded of that by my children and my spouse every day. When I misread what’s there, and you know, we’ve had conversations about, you make a mess, you clean it up, you know, you don’t sweep it under the rug. Yeah, it’s learning how to read what’s there. It’s something that I do exceptionally well, and I think it’s one of the reasons I have been as successful as I’ve been as a coach.

[00:13:05] Paula: I agree. That is a great gift. Tesse?

[00:13:07] Tesse: Yeah. I mean, you know, it’s not often that I’m quiet, but it’s true. I’ve just kind of taken that in the greatest gift to read the room. You know, I’m thinking particularly of something that I heard this week, which was that when we are traumatized and sometimes we’re not even aware of the impact of the trauma, then we can miscue. We can mishear. We can miscue. We can misinterpret. We can go into a place of such negativity. Back to the example you’re giving that the world becomes a hard place for us and others because of the miscuing. And why I was silent was that I was listening to what you were saying, David, and how you read the room and adjust accordingly. And this question, in terms of your journey towards connecting with yourself, is how can others, any kind of tips you have for them being able to connect with, you know, themselves in a way that that misreading is not as impactful. I mean, I know for myself and Paula you know this, I could misread like anything and what I’m misreading, what I’m feeling, it’s real for me, but actually it’s not there the way that I think it is. And it’s a real getting better is being able to see and feel more of what really is there, rather than what is imagined because of the trauma you’ve been through, or I’ve been through. Does that make any sense? That question?

[00:14:37] David: And it does. It’s the responding to what’s really there is a sticky point. Because you and I have a conversation. There are three versions of that conversation. There’s what was actually said, there’s how I experienced it, and there’s how you experienced it. And it’s very rare that any pair of them align. And so I think it’s important that that, it’s almost like we all have our own personal sense of reality. So part of the connection piece is grace, and part of it is, I don’t think how to say it, because we can’t change or impact what happens to us. The only control we have is how we respond to it. And when we respond to what occurs by labeling it and having an emotional response to that and saying that that’s exactly what happened and only what happened and I am absolutely right, that’s what it is. Wow, you’re stuck, right? Because then there are no other ways to look at it. There are no other options to see it. In any experience, if we can say, oh, well, what else could that mean? What else could that mean? And what else in yourself like a five year old does? Ooh, what else? What else? Beyond reason, come up with as many different ways to see it as possible. It allows you to get curious about what’s the filter through which I’m seeing it? What’s the lens I’m seeing this through? And whether it’s something that comes from trauma or anything in the way we’ve been educated or socialized or acculturated, doesn’t matter that’s the lens you use to collect evidence. So the lenses I use to see the world color the evidence that I collect, and the evidence that I collect determines my experience. So if we change our lens, we change our lives. This is the chance to say, oh, how else can I see this? What if he just had a crappy drive and is storming through the office because that guy cut him off right before he got in the parking lot? What if this has nothing to do with me? What if it’s just like last week? Right? I wonder what’s going on with him. I wonder what’s really going on. I wonder what’s going on with me. Who did that remind me of? There’s so many things. It’s like put on that hat and become the fascinated anthropologist and say, ooh, what’s going on there? What else could it be? What else could it be? When you get out of the clutter of being sure and right about something you open up an amazing amount of possibility, and that’s where you can really meet yourself, right? It’s not the things that we know. It’s not the thing, what did Mark Twain say? It’s not the things that don’t, It’s not the things that we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s the things we know for sure that we know.

[00:17:10] Tesse: Wow.

[00:17:11] David: That’s where we get stuck.

[00:17:11] Tesse: I love it. I really do. And the question that is coming into my mind is what you, the David sitting, looking at Paula and I, you know, seeing you, what would you say to the younger David, you know, knowing what you know now.

[00:17:29] David: Lighten up. Stop taking everything to them. Seriously. I mean, seriously. And by the way, the younger David could be 30 or 15 or 10. Doesn’t matter. Maybe 40. We, I took everything so seriously. I continually get better at that. It’s, nothing is life and death except dying. Nothing. Yet we make up so much that is life and death, that is severe, that is the end of the world. No, it’s not. I mean, the planet’s going to survive us anyway, so none of us are going to see the end of the world. We just make up that it’s the end of our world. And it’s not. Every one of us, here in the room and watching, has experienced things that we never thought we’d get over. We’ve taken on things that we thought were impossible and achieved them. We’ve had things forced upon us that we never wanted to do and never thought we could. And guess what? We did. It happens all the time. We make stuff up. What if we made up the opposite? It’s delusional to think you can’t do things. It’s as delusional as it is to think you can. Well, why not pick the one that serves? If I believe everything I look at is impossible or insurmountable, or if it fails, it’s the end of the world, guess what? It is. But if I look at it is, oh, okay, I bombed that one, I learned one way not to do it, what if I try that? If you believe that you can, you have a much better chance of being able to. If you believe you can’t, oh, you’re right.

[00:18:59] Tesse: Yeah, heh heh.

[00:19:00] David: I had a client, It was just such a simple thing. A client was about to have to move and they said, this move is going to be hard and it’s going to suck. I said, yes, it will be because you just decided it will be. What if you started off with, what will this look like when it’s easy? What a different mindset, what a different way to look at it. What will this look like when it’s easy?

[00:19:19] Tesse: I love that question.

[00:19:20] David: I wish I’d done that when I was a lot younger.

[00:19:22] Tesse: I love that question. What would it look like if it’s easy? Paula, what do you think of that question?

[00:19:28] Paula: I think that’s like a key message. What would it look like if it’s easy? I mean, we hear it in different ways.

[00:19:35] Tesse: Or when? When it’s easy? Yeah.

[00:19:37] Paula: Yeah. What would it look like?

[00:19:38] David: It is because, you know, I heard Tim Ferriss say, what if it were easy? And what I don’t like about that is the if. It gets you out of envisioning a reality. What will this look like when it’s easy? Is it puts your brain into imagining. And everything that you see around you that you experienced in the world was created twice, once in here and once out there. If you give yourself the prompt to imagine, to envision, to picture, to feel into what will this look like when it’s easy, it changes, it makes things possible or possible, right? Invite possibility by envisioning.

[00:20:21] Tesse: I love it.

[00:20:21] David: But that’s the reason PTSD is so nightmarish and difficult to work with. Because your brain doesn’t differentiate between imagining it in the future, experiencing it and reliving it in the past, so your brain doesn’t differentiate. They did some cool research with professional pianists and, you know, put a little functional MRI in their head and have them play a piano and you see what part of the brain lights up and then take away the piano, put a piece of paper with a keyboard printed on it in front of them, and then have them play the keyboard, the printed keyboard. The exact same portions of the brain light up. They’re not hearing anything except the ticking of their finger. So what’s fascinating is our brain doesn’t differentiate. And yes, they’ve done it without anything in front of them, except playing the piano in the air. Same thing, brain lights up. Your brain doesn’t distinguish. So what will this look like when it’s easy invites you into creation?

[00:21:22] Paula: That’s so great because my last question to you was going to be what is your key message for our listeners, but you have said it. I think we’re going to end on that. What would it look like when it is easy? I think that’s something that we all need to think about because we wake up every day and we have the whole day ahead of us and we can say, oh gosh, it’s going to be the worst or, just what you said. David thank you for that. I love it. I love it. Wow. And again, to our listeners, we want to say, you see, your precious stories and your lives matter. We ask them to share it with us and others, just like David did. Because we believe in supporting, encouraging, and nurturing others, especially when they know that they’re not alone. And so, again, I say to my listeners, please head over to “Apple Podcasts”, “Spotify” and now that Google Podcasts is moving over to YouTube Music, please head over there, and please click subscribe. And if you find “TesseLeads” helpful, please let us know in your reviews. If you have any questions or topics you’d like us to cover, you can send us a note. And if you’d like to be a guest on our show, “TesseLeads”, head over to the website, which is “www.tesseleads. com” and apply. Again, I’m going to say that key message is the bomb. Thank you, David.