#181 Silence Kept Her Safe… Until It Didn’t

Today, I interview Dori Eversmann who grew up in a family where speaking up could lead to disconnection, learning as a young girl to stay silent, watch people’s faces, and only speak when it felt safe.

That pattern followed her into school and adulthood, where she became the quiet, compliant, invisible one, often freezing when asked to speak and doubting her own voice. For decades, she lived this way, until in her 40s she felt invisible, disposable, and replaceable, reaching a breaking point that pushed her to seek help and begin healing.

A major shift came later after building and selling a business, when a COVID experience made her realize, “This is not what I am on this earth to do,” leading her to finally pursue something more meaningful.

She began taking small, courageous steps, training as a coach, practicing speaking, and learning to connect from the heart. Today, she helps others move out of silence and fear and into authentic, heart-centered communication in their work and relationships.

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Dori Eversmann is the owner of Resilient Relationships and a speaker, facilitator, and coach specializing in communication skills and leadership presence. She works with leaders and managers to build cultures of healthy communication and create high-trust teams where people actually want to stay and grow.

Her career spans both business and nonprofit leadership. Along the way, she discovered one truth that shows up everywhere: effective communication is the key to success at work and in life.

While she teaches these skills, she also lives them imperfectly. She openly shares that communication can still be a challenge, especially with her husband of 33 years.

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Find Dori here:
https://www.instagram.com/dorieversmann/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/deversmann/

https://www.facebook.com/dori.eversmann

https://www.youtube.com/@RiseUpWithDori

Transcript

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #181 Dori Eversmann

"Silence Kept Her Safe… Until It Didn’t"

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, and I'm welcoming you to the Find Your Voice Change Your Life podcast today. I'm excited to introduce you to somebody I'm just meeting for the first time also, although I've been following her because she has had a journey to find her voice, and it's been more recent too. Today it's Dori Everman. Hello, Dori.

(00:30) Dori Eversmann: Hi. I'm happy to be here. This is joyful.

(00:35) Doreen Downing: I feel it too. I'm going to read the bio that I created and some of what you gave me. Dori Everman is the owner of Resilient Relationships. Dori is a speaker, facilitator, and coach who specializes in communication skills and leadership presence. She works with leaders and managers to build cultures of healthy communication and high trust, the kind of environments where people actually want to stay and grow.

Her career spans both business and nonprofit leadership. Through all of that experience, she discovered a powerful truth. Effective communication is not a “nice to have.” It is essential to success at work and in life. What makes Dori's work especially meaningful is that it comes from lived experience.

For over 50 years, speaking up and being visible felt deeply unsafe for her, shaped by a family culture of silence and reinforced by painful experiences in school, which we'll be listening to today and hearing more about.

Now Dori speaks with presence, clarity, and this is the most important part for me and the podcast that I do, with heart. Dori speaks with presence, clarity, and heart, and she no longer freezes, goes blank, or feels overwhelmed by fear. Instead, she connects, makes eye contact, and speaks from a place of authenticity and trust.

Her journey is a powerful reminder that finding your voice is possible at any stage of life, and that healing and leadership often grow side by side. I like that last line, that we can grow and heal at the same time.

(02:45) Dori Eversmann: Wow. Yes. I love hearing that reflected back like a summary of my journey.

(02:51) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(02:52) Dori Eversmann: Almost like I could feel it just resonating as I listen, so I'm so excited to share. Hopefully this message will be hope for someone listening.

(03:01) Doreen Downing: Yes. That's my intention, is to open this space up so that my listeners get to get into the inside of you, not just, hello, here, let me share what I know how to do. It's more like the journey.

I often like to start with early childhood, and I know you mentioned something about that. What after some of the stories you have to tell us about anything that you feel contributed to you not feeling really fully confident as a little girl?

What happened, and then what was the journey? We'll go into that. What are you doing now today with your heart, as it turns out, around communication?

That's pretty much how I've designed this conversation. Let's start with early childhood. Anything that you can reflect back to us, because that's what people go, oh yes, that's true for me. That happened to me too. Just whatever you can do, as raw as you can get.

(04:16) Dori Eversmann: Yes. So many different threads I could pull from, but I'll start with just describing my small family. There were four of us, my mom, dad, and my sister, who is 7 years younger than me. The dynamic and the beliefs about myself and about communication and whether I could speak up or not were set even before my sister came along.

My parents were both only children, so I have no aunts, uncles, or cousins. My grandparents, one side was not involved in my life, and the other side was just a once-a-year visit. I lived with a very small family of origin.

What was unique about ours, at least in my perspective, is that my dad was silent and shut down. He had been in Vietnam and had been shot there and repaired and sent back home to his new wife and new little baby. He came back, according to my mom, different.

Then he just numbed out with alcohol, and he was an alcoholic for all of my upbringing. So for him, his numbing out was silence and a heavy presence in our home.

My mom, both of them have passed away now, she did a great job. She loved well. She functioned well. She overfunctioned to compensate for the heavy numbness that my dad was in the house.

There was a lot of intensity for her, and she was going to raise these kids well to the best of her ability. In doing so, she was controlling, and her fear was managed by me, and then later my sister, showing up exactly the way she wanted.

The way she dealt with her fear, if I said something she didn't like in those early, early years, picture a 3, 4, 5-year-old—

(06:37) Doreen Downing: I can.

(06:38) Dori Eversmann: She would break eye contact and not talk to me.

(06:43) Doreen Downing: Oh.

(06:44) Dori Eversmann: It could go for days. I learned as a little kid that fear of, “Oh, I need to observe very carefully, and I need to adjust what I say,” and if I say anything, to make sure that her face is pleasant.

Because as soon as she went flat and pulled back, and what was another piece of it is, there was never resolution. She never came back to talk to me about it. Time would go by, and then she'd start looking at me again, and she'd start talking to me again.

There was no communication around here's what didn't work and what I need. What I did was silence and watch, and no voice unless I know for sure by your facial expression that I'm safe to speak. That stayed with me and controlled me into my 50s.

(07:46) Doreen Downing: Yes. I really am appreciative of you spelling it out so clearly. I mean, I could see it like a movie. I see the little girl and the moment that the mom does that thing, abandoning her so quickly, like a snap of a finger, and how that then trains you to have these tuning forks always out there to test.

I know that in the conversations I've had, those kinds of experiences that trained you to be silent also trained you to be very listening. You learn to listen early so that there's eventually some kind of positive outcome, which we could talk about later. I just wanted to realize, because I know that's part of my story as a psychologist, is the learning to listen to the environment so that you are safe.

(08:55) Dori Eversmann: Yes, that succinctly states how I functioned and lived. A lot of listening and very little speaking up, and it was so imprinted on me to do that. By the time I got to school as a 5 and 6-year-old, I was the quiet one. I was very quiet, very compliant, did pretty good grades-wise, was the good kid, but the invisible kid.

Another piece of it is that my mom wanted us to have a better life, and she saw that as succeeding in the education system. For her, her insecurity around, is my daughter going to succeed, let me make sure. Starting in fifth grade is the first I remember of it. She started doing my homework for me.

(09:58) Doreen Downing: Oh my.

(09:59) Dori Eversmann: Because she needed me to excel, and it was little things at first. Then by the time I got to junior high, she started writing my papers, English papers and history papers. That set me up for experiences where I was called on to speak, but I didn't produce the work.

(10:25) Doreen Downing: Right.

(10:26) Dori Eversmann: My mom produced it. One very vivid experience was because of my mom's paper, I won National History Day in my small town of Georgia and went to the state competition with my paper. Then I needed to stand in front of the judges and present.

I literally blacked out. I don't have any memories. I have memories before and after, feeling terrified and terrible, but I don't have memories in that room. I don't even know what came out of my mouth. It was sheer panic.

(11:04) Dori Eversmann: Of course I didn't win that, but it just continued. She wrote all my high school papers. She wrote a college entrance exam.

What that did for me was this identity and this strategy of life is, I cannot speak or write. If I do with my original ideas, it will be embarrassing, humiliating, and it will make us, the family unit, look really bad. That, until my early 50s, silence.

(11:47) Doreen Downing: I've never heard a story like that. Never in all the years I've done my podcasting and people talk about their histories where a parent stepped in and really took over. Because actually writing is also a way of finding your voice, right? Connecting with what you know or believe or what's true and expressing it. It's a form of expression. You were double-whammied.

(12:15) Dori Eversmann: Yes. My healing journey is in layers, which when we get to the more recent time period, I'll speak more to that.

What happened in college was because my mom had done my applications to get into college, and she got me into, in my opinion at the time, my mom got me into college, I really shouldn't be here.

(12:37) Doreen Downing: Oh, that's another.

(12:38) Dori Eversmann: Now what happens when I'm called on in class to speak, or I land myself in a class that's more of a Socratic method professor?

I just freeze. I say something that would end up being oddly communicated. Then the teacher and the students, I have memories of them laughing at me.

(13:05) Dori Eversmann: The shame, the redness, the embarrassment, the sweat, the shame. I would try so hard not to speak in my college classes. What's amazing is I made almost all Bs. I wasn't an A student.

Even with all of that fear, and I did produce the papers, my strategy was I would wait till the pressure was so high. Usually I would stay up all night, because the pressure had to be really high to force me to actually write the paper and turn it in.

I would never reread it. I would write it, and the humiliation would be so terrorizing in my brain that I would just write the paper and turn it in. I would make Bs in that strategy with no edits. I look back and I think that's actually pretty amazing, but at the moment, I felt like I was the stupidest person on that campus.

(14:05) Doreen Downing: What campus was it, by the way?

(14:07) Dori Eversmann: I went to Georgia Institute of Technology, so it goes by Georgia Tech, which is an engineering school, and I was in the business program there.

(14:16) Doreen Downing: What was your, maybe your mom's plan, but what was the plan in getting that kind of degree?

(14:23) Dori Eversmann: That's such a great question, because that ties into adulthood, part of my story. My mom wanted me to be an accountant. When I went to college, she had looked through the course program and handwritten all 4 years of the classes I would take to become an accountant.

That is so not me. But she knew that, in her mind, that would make money for me and I would be able to support myself. So I went as an accountant.

I ended up, and I can tell that story if you want, it might be too long. I went on and found out about 2 years into the accounting program that it was not a fit for me. That was one of my biggest courageous moments with my mom, was to call her up and say, I'm dropping out of the accounting program.

That was one of the biggest steps of me becoming an adult. By that time I was almost 20.

(15:23) Doreen Downing: I love that you called it your first courageous moment.

(15:27) Dori Eversmann: Yes.

(15:27) Doreen Downing: That it's so clear for you to mark it like that.

I was just going to say for our listeners that that phrase, courageous moment, is really important that people could take that today. Like where, listeners, where in your life have you, when you look back like this, had a courageous moment? Because that's where some of your power already naturally was. You just finally tapped it, for whatever reason.

Also the other kind of power, the kind of push that you talked about before when you wrote your papers, what's inside of you, that internal I'm going to do it kind of thing, is also what I'm getting from you. That probably shows up in your life later on, not necessarily leaving something to the last minute, but that drive.

(16:27) Dori Eversmann: Yes. That drive, even then, there was something in me that knew I can. I really can. I didn't completely give up, even in the scary moments.

(16:47) Doreen Downing: Beautiful. Before we go into the next phase, talking about what were some more of those courageous moments and the wake-up moments, my father, in fact, I just got back from a trip to Italy, and I went to where he landed in the army in Anzio, Italy. He was Italian, so they picked the soldiers who spoke Italian to do that first invasion.

He came back and was also an alcoholic. Growing up with an alcoholic father, you are saying your father kind of numbed out and got silent and wasn't expressive. What, I mean, obviously you didn't know him before, but there's something about you that I feel like comes from him that's positive.

(17:44) Dori Eversmann: I wonder. To me, my dad was a roommate in our home.

Maybe in subtle ways that I haven't considered. He had leadership presence. He went to military school. His family was, I would say, quite non-relational. He was raised by nurses. He was sent off to boarding school at 13. His parents lived internationally, so he wasn't parented after 13.

He grew up in military boarding school and then went on to be a leader in the military and in Vietnam before he was shot, and then they discharged him. He was going to have a military career.

That just tailspun his life.

(18:36) Doreen Downing: It's just a sense I got. Sometimes I, speaking of listening and tuning in, I guess I tuned into something about him. Maybe it's just me projecting onto my father, who had a heart in there somewhere, even though he was alcoholic.

Anything else about what you've said so far that comes up that you think you want to fill in, any of the gaps or stories?

(19:07) Dori Eversmann: I don't think so. I think that pretty much covers my upbringing. Just that strategy of silence, observe, and only speak if I'm sure that the facial expression of the person I'm talking to is happy.

That got me through. If you're not looking at me happy, then I go and I scan and I look for someone that can give me that facial expression, and that's who I choose to interact with.

(19:35) Doreen Downing: I think it's also a skill to be able to be silent when you choose it, and then be able to notice the person in front of you. I think that's a skill.

(19:49) Dori Eversmann: I think so too.

(19:50) Doreen Downing: Instead of veering off, staying with, and I think that's partly what you've learned to do, knowing the process I know that you've done, is how to stay with somebody even if they aren't with you, and stay with them in such a way that they come around and are with you.

You've paid attention to them in such a way that they change their ability to connect with you.

(20:17) Dori Eversmann: Yes. That is a skill that I have developed, particularly in recent years. Yes.

(20:24) Doreen Downing: Great. Okay. It stems from some of the other stuff. I think people who listen to my podcasts, I try to weave in what happened that was not so good, you might say, and how it was already a way of empowering you to be more of who you are, like leadership presence.

Let me pause because I need to take a break, and we'll be right back. Then we'll be talking about what the journey was, the other courageous moments, the breakthroughs, what happened that she said, this is not working. I want to have a different way of communicating, living. We'll be right back.

Hi, we're back with Dori Everman. Already, the eloquent conversation. I feel, Dori, that you've been able to articulate for us some ways in which silence, the one parent who was silent and one parent who was overcontrolling, affected you.

You developed a pattern early on to stay silent and be afraid to express yourself. That even went into college. The first moment you said, courageous moment, wasn't college. What are some of those other courageous moments that you remember that you started to break out of this pattern, this silent and scared to speak?

(22:24) Dori Eversmann: I wish that my story was such that after that first courageous moment, there were many more soon after, but no. I had decades of silence yet in my story.

I met someone, and we're still married. We've been married 33 years now. I met him in college and started having kids right away. I was in grad school, and that was a nice, easy path for me. Find a partner that was very directive and a personality that says, here's what we're going to do, and just follow along.

That was what felt very comfortable for me, and I began that life of motherhood and wife in my silent strategy. Then I gravitated toward a religious system that gave me direction and told me what to think and told me what to say.

I went deep into this rigid religious system for a few decades, and I kept my strategy. Silence, observe, and only speak what I know you want to hear.

A couple decades of that, and my soul was dying.

In my 40s, I remember starting to write. I've been a journaler since middle school. I would just write invisible, disposable, replaceable. I would tell people I feel invisible, disposable, replaceable. I would tell my husband that, and he'd be like, that's ridiculous. You're not. You're not.

But I couldn't fix that.

(24:14) Dori Eversmann: I felt it. I got to the very depths of thinking that my life needed to end in my early 40s. It's that silence. That silence that people couldn't penetrate. I couldn't get through. That put me in that really dark place.

(24:37) Dori Eversmann: In my 40s, thankfully, that something in me that still fights, like it rose up in college, it rose up again. I did take some brave action, got some counseling help, got some process group help, did some other healing modalities.

I got through that crisis. I'm very thankful for that season of life. Still, I was very pleasant to be around and very quiet and only speaking until I, in my, I exited that rigid religious group in around 2018.

Let me first tell you what I did in the business world, because this is so interesting. I kept that same strategy. In 2018, I left the religious world and all the volunteering and nonprofit leadership that I was doing there, and I was like, this isn't working for me. I'm going to reinvent my life over here in the business world, and maybe that will feel satisfying.

But I took my strategy of silence, observing, and only speaking into that. I created a company with my husband's help. I did a bookkeeping and accounting services company. I built it up in 2018, started bringing in more and more clients and hiring people, and I created something sellable that I sold in 2021, all with the same strategy of silence.

(26:10) Dori Eversmann: People would say, wow, you've done a thing that's amazing. I'd be like, yeah. Because I would say, well, my husband did it for me.

(26:18) Dori Eversmann: I would negate it, like my mom got me in college. My husband gave me this company. Yes, I led it and grew it, and then I sold it.

Here's where a major turning point is. It was COVID. The shutdown happened, the world happened. In December of 2020, I've got this company, I've got 33 clients, I have multiple employees working for me, we're doing great, and I get COVID before the vaccinations and all the things.

I did not have to go to the hospital, but I was so sick, sicker than I'd ever been in my whole life. It actually took me 6 months to feel back to normal again. I turned 50. COVID happened, and I said, this is not what I am on this earth to do, to lead an accounting services company.

There is something that I exist for, and this is not it. I better go after it because I could die any moment.

(27:32) Dori Eversmann: That was when I decided I'm selling this company this year in 2021, and I'm going to move into what I can try to figure out. I don't know yet, but something where I'm to make a difference in the world.

That was a big turning point for me, and that leads into me finding my voice.

(27:50) Doreen Downing: Yes. Those who are listening to Dori, I think you can hear the excitement and thrill. I just watched it. If you're watching, you can go back and see how she lit up when she said that.

It was one of those breakthrough moments that people remember. I felt it. I felt the determination you had to listen to your destiny and take steps towards it.

What are these steps that you've taken?

(28:27) Dori Eversmann: The steps are, first in 2020, I wanted to shift into coaching. I had done a year of master's work to become a counselor, and it was clear that that path did not feel in alignment to me.

In 2020, I chose to do training to be a coach, leadership and life coach, and I started meeting with clients in 2021. That was really joyful and it felt very safe.

Now I'm starting to use my listening skill, yes, but also speak and add value and find that I do have something to offer. I'm seeing how it's helping to set other people free when I share from my journey and myself and what I've learned. So 2021 was around that and coaching.

Then this pivotal experience, many of your listeners may have heard of the Landmark weekends and conferences. I went to one that was similar, a 3-day, 4-day immersive.

In that process, there's this ability to see how you show up and how other people receive you. Up until that experience, I thought by being silent and by listening and being very agreeable and pleasant, why wouldn't everybody like me, trust me?

In that experiential weekend, I learned that my silence actually blocked trust. People couldn't get to know me when I didn't communicate from my heart and have the ability to communicate who I really was, and then share on an equal basis.

Not just listen and listen and listen and wait for somebody to invite me to share, which a lot of talkers don't. A lot of my relationships were one-sided.

(30:29) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(30:29) Dori Eversmann: That happened in 2022, and I thought, I need to take courageous action to offer myself, even when I'm not invited to, even when nobody asks me.

One-on-one, I could have great conversations often, but in groups, the dynamic, at least in groups I hang out with, there are talkers that talk. If you don't jump in and offer, you could just leave without having spoken once. That's how most of my life was.

In 2022, I started practicing in safe groups, just how to be one of those people that would offer something. That was one of my first steps.

At the end of 2022, I had this recurring vivid dream of me on a stage with spotlights on me, and there were thousands of people in this huge venue.

This dream of me speaking and feeling joy and this connection with the audience. I had the dream so vividly, and I would wake up. I finally said, I don't know what, I don't plan to speak. I have no idea what I would speak about, but the dream won't go away. So I'll go learn how. I'll join Toastmasters.

(31:55) Dori Eversmann: That began, and that tumbled into someone inviting me to the National Speakers Association. I was like, I'm not a speaker. They were like, just come. What a welcoming, encouraging group that has been for me and part of my healing.

Someone in that group recommended speaking circles to me. That was really interesting because Toastmasters gave me mechanical practice.

(32:21) Dori Eversmann: Toastmasters gave me practice to get up and speak to a bunch of people whose faces look like this.

(32:27) Doreen Downing: That you can't read them.

(32:31) Dori Eversmann: That was a fear I needed to overcome.

(32:35) Dori Eversmann: Toastmasters was really important for me. I prepared very, very neat and tidy speeches.

(32:43) Doreen Downing: They were yours.

(32:43) Dori Eversmann: They were totally mine, but they were very neat and tidy. I would not volunteer to do the impromptu speaking because if I hadn't prepared, my mind would go blank and I would freeze.

I was sharing about that with someone in NSA, and they said, there's this group, speaking circles, where you don't prepare. You just show up and you absorb connection through the eyes and presence, and you just speak what comes up.

I was like, that sounds awful, but I did it. I signed up. I did three of them in that year of 2023, and I was a wreck.

(33:31) Dori Eversmann: An emotional wreck. I was not ready for the intensity of the connection, even though they were virtual speaking circles. The connection, the way they're set up, is really relational. I would cry while speaking. I would end the call and I would cry, all this pent-up terror just up and out. I thought, I'm not ready for this.

I kept on my other journey and practiced in other ways. 2025 was all around getting on stages. I set a goal to speak, just my journey, little by little. Speak here. Speak here for free. Speak here for free and learn.

People are actually pretty nice. It actually feels fun and good and it's not terrifying.

Then I went back to speaking circles last year. One reason was to see if I could stay present with it and not be overwhelmed. Another one was to prove to myself, is it easier for me than it was 2 years ago?

What a joy. I did a full 10 sessions last year.

(34:42) Dori Eversmann: I can do it. I can do what you said. I can stay with people who have a flat look or an open look or an angry look now. What I learned in speaking circles I can do in person now.

I can just be, and I can be myself, and I can wait for words to come. If they don't, it's fine. If they do, it's fine. I'm not constantly analyzing and assessing. Here I am now, I do professional speaking.

(35:13) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(35:14) Dori Eversmann: Who would have guessed?

(35:15) Doreen Downing: Who would have guessed. It's been more recent too. For those of you who are listening and feel like you're way down in your life journey and you don't want to step into a big change like this, it's possible.

There are groups out there. Dori talked about Toastmasters and speaking circles. I'm training director for speaking circles, so I invite people to go to that website and check it out.

It is what Dori's talking about, a way to be a more present, embodied presence. We call it relational presence, to be present with, but also be in relationship with a listener or a whole audience. It's always one person at a time.

That seems to be one of the gifts that you bring now, is you help people feel like you're really with them when you speak. It's not just a blanket message out there. It's really more about what we talked about in the very beginning in the bio, there’s a connection there.

That's what's important to you because when we go back to the beginning, there wasn't a connection. Dori did not understand or know how to connect with another human being. That's what parents help us learn.

She hid herself out for many years, but her power is out there now.

Dori, how do people get in touch with you? What do you offer?

(37:01) Dori Eversmann: My message, my mission, my passion is to help people find freedom. If they're stuck in their head and in fear and in blankness or just wondering, there's something more.

A lot of times, if people are communicating only from their head, the heart is missing. That heart piece that you talked about earlier, that is so important for me.

(37:33) Dori Eversmann: I wasn't using my heart to communicate. Many people are not, whether they're silent or they're over talkers or tend to dominate talking-wise. A lot of times that missing piece is the heart.

My mission is twofold. I do professional speaking in the business world. My niche is communication skills and feedback skills within customer service departments and call centers in particular. I have experienced a couple of years working in a call center, and it makes such a difference in any organization.

When managers communicate more with heart, yes, you need to do the head work and keep things going and do all of the processes well for a company's success, but don't neglect the heart because you're working with people on your team and you're working with customers.

That heart connection that can happen in business is so good for the bottom line, but even more important, what people experience in their work, they take home to their partners and to their kids and to their friends.

(38:42) Dori Eversmann: That's the second part of my mission. Yes, I do speak on communication skills and feedback skills to make work less miserable and to help build high trust teams that connect with the heart to some level.

What I really want to do is go into the family units so that if there are people in stuck family units like mine, silence, or maybe a family with lots of words but they're just clanging words, they're not heartfelt, connective, relational words, that maybe something I say either from a stage or virtually or in Facebook or in coaching can make a difference.

I do a little bit of coaching only if people come to me. I don't seek out coaching clients. I send my energy out, and occasionally coaching clients come to me. I have a handful at any one time.

Where do you follow me? It's on LinkedIn right now.

(39:48) Doreen Downing: Okay. Listeners, you heard what Dori just said. Perhaps there's something that you listened to, something you heard her say today. What might that be? What little nugget or big nugget did you go, oh yes, I could do that?

That's partly why I'm doing these podcasts, to inspire listeners to believe that there's more for them. Today especially, because that's my work too, is around the heart.

Listening from the heart helps people drop down. If you're listening to somebody from your heart, there's an energy, and they go down into their heart too.

I think if we put probes on people, we would be able to discover that how we are in a relationship, if we're more present, more heartful, is going to bring that out in others.

There's this quote, wherever you go, there you are. That seems to be also what you just said about your message and your mission, is being able to have people show up anywhere in life and be more of who they can be, connected and speaking from the heart.

(41:19) Dori Eversmann: Well said. I couldn't agree more. I feel a heart connection with you. Thank you for this shared space together. We'll see where this goes out. I hope it leads to hope and freedom, freeing people's voices.

(41:35) Doreen Downing: Freeing people's voices. Thank you so much, Dori.

Before we end, I just want to make sure that people know that they can find you on LinkedIn. My work, the 7-Step Guide to Fearless Speaking, I've just updated it. Whoever is listening now, if you've seen it before, check it out.

Doreen7Steps.com. Thank you. Thank you, Dori.

(42:05) Dori Eversmann: Thank you.