The long journey to podcasting

Looking back on my circle of friends, I have always preferred one-on-one relationships. I wasn’t a big group person. A lot of that had to do with my self-confidence. Speaking to a group, rather than an individual, was frightening. It made me uneasy and so I didn’t foster that. We tend to avoid what makes us uncomfortable. At the same time, I became all too aware of how limiting it was: socially, academically, and career-wise. After years in my own therapy, I knew I wanted to shift that discomfort into comfort. To do so is similar to learning a foreign language, in this case, the language of communication: making eye contact, listening well, including everyone, and speaking with assuredness. I made headway in feeling my voice had value, and so as my friend group developed, I also took on more administrative/authoritative roles at work, and I began to speak up in my classes while obtaining my masters and doctoral degrees. However, public speaking – I mean public speaking with a “large” audience - was still torture for me. And after learning that public speaking is the #1 fear in America, I felt validated, and so never thought much about doing anything about it. This was far from my comfort zone and the anticipatory anxiety of being in front of an audience squashed any desire to move to the next level. Yet, there is something inside of me that always pushes me to try “what’s next”. And so, after having been a therapist for quite a while I branched out into providing supervision to other therapists. Feeling I had something to intellectually offer someone else was a big step for me. The more therapists I supervised, the greater my confidence grew. So, what’s next? I decided to move from an audience of one to a larger audience: I would try out teaching as an adjunct professor. I was terrified! All those faces looking up at me with expectation. I panicked. I gathered myself outside of the classroom after a reassuring phone call to my partner. Get back in there. 

After the first few classes getting through my anxiety and pre-performance tears, I found myself excited and enjoying the experience. I felt HEARD and VALUED. I felt I had commanded the stage. I have since turned this experience into a career and have now been teaching full-time for the past 12 years. It’s the happiest I’ve been in my career. The relationship with my students fuels me and is incredibly rewarding. I love to see their “A-HA” moments and watch their significant growth from the very first class to the end of the semester. I went from being very insecure to being told I was intimidating. I had a hard time with that. I certainly don’t want anyone to fear me. But the more feedback I received, the more I understood where that feeling came from. At first, I had to learn what I was doing that led students to experience me that way. It turns out that my knowledge and mastery of clinical issues was threatening to their sense of beginner-ness and their own feelings of inadequacy. I found that hard to own. How could I be intimidating? They had no idea what I was struggling with internally. On the other hand, I also learned that the walls I had built to protect myself from criticism kept my students at a distance and was experienced by them as intimidating. My own insecurities were playing out. 

I have not heard anyone refer to me as intimidating in years. What changed? My confidence. These experiences of pushing myself to the next level, built my self-assurance. And now, when I try to normalize and validate student fears of public speaking/making a class presentation by sharing my empathy based on my own early experience, they literally say they don’t believe me I could ever have been anxious to speak. We laugh about this. To me, it means that I have found that balance between being relatable (they can express their disbelief to me) and ownership of my value (I am someone who has earned respect for my intellect).
And so, when a student in class told me that she wished she could pull me out of her back pocket at any time during her field internship to get my clinical guidance, a concept for a podcast was born. I want to reach a large audience. I have a voice worth hearing. I am reminded of my first large audience engagement. About 200 people. I looked out and saw the whole room grooving along with me: mesmerized with my content and laughing in the right spots. One participant had her arms crossed and looked very unhappy. I zoned in on her and my confidence shook. Years later I can dismiss that 1% and focus on the good; the audience who remains with me. Not everyone is going to love my podcast, and I’m ok with that. I am so excited to be sharing my experiences and helping my guests navigate their professional development. I always thought it was a luxury to be given a window into the personal emotional lives of my clients and now I find it an honor to have my guests share with me their vulnerabilities and be able to offer them what I received: confidence, insight, and enlightenment while helping others. What’s next?

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