Dorie Clark: Consultant and Keynote Speaker

In this episode, guest host Charlotte Saulny interviews Dorie Clark, a distinguished consultant and keynote speaker recognized globally for her strategic insights into long-term thinking. 

Clark, a best-selling author celebrated by Thinkers 50, delves into her latest work, "The Long Game," highlighting the essentiality of strategic, long-term planning amidst our fast-paced, short-term focused world. 

The conversation addresses the common challenges individuals face in allocating time for deep, strategic thought due to their hectic schedules. Clark proposes that even a modest reduction in busyness can significantly enhance one's ability to engage in meaningful, long-term contemplation. 

Through engaging storytelling and expert analysis, this episode offers valuable guidance on navigating modern professional life with strategic foresight and intentionality. 

Clark emphasizes the transformative potential of occasionally stepping back from day-to-day urgencies to foster reflective thinking and make impactful decisions. 

The discussion not only explores strategies for achieving this balance but also underscores the importance of recognizing and acting upon the right opportunities for long-term success. 

This episode is a compelling exploration of how individuals can navigate the complexities of their careers and personal growth by prioritizing strategic, long-term planning and thinking.

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Dorie: For somebody like that, who is racing, racing, racing, and doesn’t get a break, even an hour, even two hours in a week can actually be truly transformative for them. It’s sort of the difference between not being able to do something and being able to have just enough space to ask some really important questions, like, “Hey, all the stuff that I filled my entire week with or that I have the next week filled to the brim with, is that the right thing to be doing?”

(intro)

Charlotte: Hi, I’m Charlotte Saulny, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. I am taking over from Alex Pascal for the next few weeks and I am delighted to be your guest host. My guest today is a consultant and keynote speaker. She has been named three times as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinker’s 50 and recognized as the number one communication coach in the world by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards. She’s a bestselling author and her most recent book is The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. Please welcome Dorie Clark.

(Interview)

Charlotte: So welcome, Dorie. I’m so pleased to see you. 

Dorie: Hey, Charlotte, thank you. Great to be reunited.

Charlotte: Reunited, that’s right, absolutely. And as we kick off all of our podcasts, I just want to check in with you because, of course, coaches drinking coffee over Zoom always kicks off with a beverage discussion and so do share what drink do you have that you’re sipping on right now? 

Dorie: So I am sipping on my metaphorical drink because I am afraid to drink caffeine this late in the day, although I did have a latte this morning that I made but mostly I wanted to take the opportunity to show off my cat mug. These are my actual cats, Philip and Heath, and this “You Are My Sunshine” cat mug was made for me by one of the great members of my Recognized Expert community so I was so touched and now I’ve got this cool cat mug. 

Charlotte: I love it. It’s always good to have a cool cat mug. 

Dorie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thank you, Padma. This was great. What are you drinking? 

Charlotte: Oh, well, actually, I’m drinking — so a friend of mine came over last night and made this tea. She had sticks of cinnamon, she chopped up apples, she boiled it on the stovetop. I know, it was a full thing. 

Dorie: Wow, is she like a survivalist or something? How does she know how to do this? This is incredible. 

Charlotte: I don’t know but there’s a reason I picked her as a friend. 

Dorie: Yeah. 

Charlotte: And so I’m drinking this hot cinnamon apple tea that’s super sweet and delicious and I sort of feel like I’m being healthy but having a treat at the same time. 

Dorie: I mean, I love it.

Charlotte: It works. 

Dorie: It’s calculated decadence. That sounds like the new trend for the 20 teens.

Charlotte: Oh, I love it. Calculated decadence. I love that. Yeah, it’s great. So it’s a good way to sort of have our conversation. So, welcome. I’m so happy you’re here. I have like a million questions I want to ask you. In spirit of transparency, as I was prepping for this podcast, I got out your books that I am a huge fan of and I just — in my mind, your work is sort of a foundational cornerstone piece of content that I think every coach should read because, of course, as a coach, really helping people understand where they stand out what their unique competitive advantage is and leveraging that for the greater good, that’s a big deal. So, for me —

Dorie: It comes up a lot, that is true. 

Charlotte: No, it comes up a lot so I was so happy, I dug this out and I went back through it this morning. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is so good. So many good distinctions,” and so this is great. And, of course, you have a new book out. Is it new new out? I mean, when did it come out, Dorie? 

Dorie: It’s not new like this minute but it is my newest book. It is The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. Look at that. The cool kids match. I like it, Charlotte.

Charlotte: Cool kids match. Well, I’m super excited to dive into this. But before we do that, let’s just get started with this. What is going on in your world right now that you are just really excited about that you want to share with our community?

Dorie: Oh, yeah. Well, the thing that I have been doing, actually, over the past several days, I guess, and it does get very immersive, is I’m getting ready to do a new launch, like a new cohort of my Recognized Expert program, and in doing that, one of the key parts, I think it’s important, at least for me, people have different views about this, but for me, in order to maintain the kind of quality and the cohesion of the community, I’m not just like marketing it everywhere. I market it specifically to people who are already on my email list because I want people who are immersed in the shared worldview that we have, and for everybody to understand, this is kind of like a joint journey that we go on and so I’ve been writing the email sequence to introduce people into the new launch. And, today, I wrote a 1700-word email, like it’s actually just like this really — it’s a narrative arc that you take people on to really help them understand what is this and why is it useful and how might it be useful for you and how do you know if it’s not useful for you, and as somebody who enjoys writing and enjoys literature, for me, understanding that kind of world building and storytelling arc is a really important part of, air quotes, the “sales process,” because the real art of getting people to sign up, whether it’s to work with you as a coach or for programs or workshops or courses that you do is to make it not feel like sales at all, it’s to make it feel like something that they’re so drawn to, that they’re raising their hands and saying, “No, can I do this?” And so that’s what I’m working on creating now, which is a pretty fun process. 

Charlotte: Oh, yeah, I can imagine that would be a really fun process. And if you were to sort of share in a sentence what the Recognized Expert program is, does, etc., etc., what is it?

Dorie: Basically, the Recognized Expert program is intended for talented, generous professional service providers, so lots of coaches, lots of consultants, people who are helping others, and it is a program to help them become better recognized for their expertise. We all know that there is a difference between being good at what you do, which your listeners absolutely are, they’re very good coaches, there’s a difference between that and being recognized by others for being good at what you do. And we want to help people with the latter part of that equation. Even if they are not really comfortable with marketing, even if it’s not something that they’ve really done before or felt comfortable with before, we want to help them figure out how to do that in a way that feels in integrity and in alignment with them and their values. 

Charlotte: I love that. And, actually, knowing the people that I know in the coaching community, I do think sometimes coaches really struggle with that, being able to do it in a way which feels authentic. So being good at what you do versus being known for what you do and how you sort of are able to do those two things simultaneously. I love that, that’s so great. Okay, so, I have to do it, I have to dive into the book, I just do. So —

Dorie: Let’s do it. Let’s go there. 

Charlotte: The Long Game, tell me how did this whole thing start? What made you write the book?

Dorie: So The Long Game, for me, is a book that started germinating a number of years ago, and part of what the, I guess you could say the precipitating incident was, was that I would find myself talking to friends, talking to colleagues, and I would say to them, I’m like, “Hey, how’s it going?” and I kept hearing back a variation of, “Oh, it’s really good. It’s really good. I just wish I had time to think,” or, “I just wish I had a moment to breathe,” and the really interesting thing was that most of these people were self-employed. Most of them were coaches or they were consultants and I’m like, but, wait a minute, who’s doing that to you? And the answer, of course, is that you’re doing that to you. And I wanted to understand what was going on. Why is it that we were driving ourselves to distraction with so much busyness and just systematically not doing the things that we claim are so important? That we want to have the moment to breathe, we want to have the time for long-term strategic thinking and yet we kept not doing it and I wanted to try to explore what gets in the way and how can we actually fight back against that so that we can be more strategic and be more like the people we say we want to be. Because I think most of us recognize, if we put in a little time with strategy upfront, that usually pays pretty good dividends because it makes it more likely we will be on the road we want to be on. So, my book is an exploration of how we got off track and how we can get back on. 

Charlotte: I love it. So if you were to share how you went about writing this book, how did you embark on this journey of discovery around what gets in the way of people actually taking that time upfront to think?

Dorie: It was a very interesting time for me to be writing the book because it was — I actually tell this story in the book, kind of meta, I got the acceptance letter from my editor on February 28th, 2020 and then literally the next morning, March 1st, 2020, was the day that the first COVID case was discovered in New York City, which is where I was living at the time and, basically, within a week, everything was like completely clamped down, like all of a sudden, okay, everything’s different, we’re all screwed, and here I am with this book contract writing about long-term thinking and everybody, of course, like immediately jumped on Zoom calls, these kind of like panicky Zoom calls. And I remember I was in this kind of group discussion in early March of 2020 and I was like, “Hey, guys, I just signed a book contract,” and this guy, this kind of little provocateur guy comes on, he’s like, “What’s your book about?” and I say, “Well, it’s a bit long-term thinking,” and he just starts laughing at me. He’s like, “Who needs that anymore?” I’m like, oh, come on, come on, it’ll come back. So it was an interesting time but I do think it was an important time because, obviously, right? We don’t want to make short-term thinking the whipping boy. Short-term thinking is valuable. When there’s a crisis, yeah, it’s a really good thing to move fast, to adapt, to respond. But the problem is that for so many of us, we have gotten trapped in crisis mode. All we know how to do anymore is just react, react, react, respond, respond, respond. And I mean, that’s nice when you need to do it but as I think most coaches recognize, as we’ve studied physiology and things like that, if your cortisol levels are elevated all the time, that is not a good place to be. That is not when we’re able to be creative, that’s not when we’re able to be thoughtful and judicious and reflective the way we want to be, and, certainly, it’s not the place where we can do long-term thinking. We have to have both. We have to be able to master short-term thinking when it’s necessary but long-term thinking when we’re out of the crisis mode so that we can actually make good decisions. The metaphor that I use is it’s like being a jellyfish. If you’re a jellyfish and floating in the ocean, you’re totally reactive. You’re like, “Hey, where’s the ocean taking me?” It doesn’t really matter if you’re a jellyfish, right? A jellyfish is like, “Okay, wherever.” But the problem is that we are not jellyfish, we actually do have preferences, we actually do have things we want to accomplish. It’s not just like, “Oh, any beach will be fine,” you have places you want to go in your life and your career and so we need to be more like a speedboat than a jellyfish. We need to have drive and propulsion and actually say, “You know what, here’s where I wanna go,” and, yeah, there might be storms, yeah, I might get knocked off course sometimes, but I’m going to be going in this direction, and by and large, it is more likely than not that I will end up somewhere near that direction because I have put the forethought and the effort into it. That’s what we’re after. 

Charlotte: So it sounds a little bit around a choice of where you spend your time, in many respects. It’s like there’s time — time is going to be spent on one thing or the other and you can either be very intentional around where you invest your time in terms of thinking about where you want to go or you may be spending time on the back end. What surprised you when you did your research around what gets in the way of people really taking that time to think and create time for long-term thinking? I mean, to your point, you get people that have a lot of flexibility in their schedule, they have a lot of choice, so what prevents them?

Dorie: Yeah, yeah, it’s an interesting question and, in fact, I ended up doing kind of a deep dive on a section of the book and I turned it into a TEDx talk that managed to kind of resonate, got picked up on the TED.com channel, and more than 2 million people have watched it now. If folks are interested, you can go to dorieclark.com/ted to check it out. But basic idea, I call the talk The Real Reason You Feel So Busy and What to Do About It, and what I discovered is that everybody is aware of a piece of the problem but it’s kind of the tip of the iceberg. It’s like, “Oh, we have too many meetings,” and, “Oh, we have too many emails,” and that is all true. Those are not wrong answers. We all have those things. But I think the more interesting question is kind of what’s below the surface on the iceberg, which is, well, how do we keep getting ourselves into that? What’s behind it? And it turns out there’s some interesting dynamics going on. One piece of it is that Silvia Bellezza, who is a professor at Columbia Business School, along with some of her colleagues, did some really interesting research about busyness as a form of social status. And it turns out that in many cultures, especially American culture, busyness is essentially the kind of modern-day version of something you can brag about. It’s kind of a coded way and socially acceptable way of saying, “Oh my gosh, I’m so in demand. Oh, so many people want me, they just can’t live without me,” and that’s what it kind of telegraphs when we’re saying, “Oh, I’m so busy.” And when we don’t have that, we often create those conditions in our own life because we feel a little bit empty or a little bit unsure of our own status if we don’t have it so we keep recreating it. That’s a piece of it. And, of course, something that I also talked about in that TEDx Talk is my own experience, which I think a lot of people unfortunately have, which is that we often use work and busyness as a kind of societally acceptable version of numbing out or just not addressing other problems. And so, in my case, my cat, who I was super close to, died in 2013 and we were super, super close, I had had him for 17 years, and I was so depressed. I lived alone with him and the house just felt incredibly empty and so for basically two years, I embarked upon this world tour where I mostly didn’t stop because I just didn’t want to be in the house, I was racing around, I was looking for ways to not think about things or not feel things. And I think for a lot of people, whether it’s like their marriage is not what they want it to be or maybe they’ve lost someone or maybe there’s just something in their life they don’t really fully want to deal with, this is not exactly healthy, let’s be honest, but it also is better comparatively than drinking yourself into oblivion or doing drugs or something so a lot of reasonably productive people are like, “Well, okay, I guess I’ll do the work thing.”

Charlotte: Absolutely. 

Dorie: So there’s a lot going on behind all this. 

Charlotte: There is a lot going on and it’s interesting when I hear you share that because I think that — I wonder and I’m curious to hear your feedback on this, is when people think of productivity, whether they associate that with doing more so than thinking or being and whether there’s something about that movement that they associate with being productive? And I think people strive to feel productive. What are your thoughts on that? 

Dorie: Yeah. I mean, your point is very astute. Charlotte, absolutely. The visible is always kind of easier for people than the invisible. And, certainly there’s jokes, we all know this, when we’re advising our coaching clients, for instance, for people who are employees and they work inside corporations, we’re always mindful of the boss that’s wanting to see people perform at the office or put in their face time or what have you and it’s like, “Oh, okay,” but the truth is, even when we’re doing things for ourselves, ironically, we do sort of have a performativity bias about it feels better, it feels like we’re doing more when you have an output that’s clearly defined as compared to, “Well, I was thinking for three hours and I had this amazing insight that maybe it’s gonna earn the company a million dollars over the next year,” but it doesn’t feel as productive because it’s like, well, you were just “thinking,” quote-unquote, and I think now that we are so, so solidly in the era of knowledge work and the information economy, you would think we’d be further along in understanding and sort of changing the way that we think about this and measure it. By and large, we still have that bias. I mean, I do it myself. I mean, I know this, I see this, I have this aura ring, which is now my taskmaster of my life, and it’ll tell me, “Oh,” like I’ll be in the red zone for recovery and, basically, it’s like, “Oh, lay off it, Dorie,” and I’ll be like, “No, it can’t mean that. Really, what I should do is go lift weights again.” It’s like, “Oh, maybe it’s telling me that’s what I need. Just do more.” What I’ve learned is that, actually, sometimes it’s basically shaking me, it’s like, “Lay the eff off,” but it’s very hard to do. 

Charlotte: It’s so hard to do. There was a quote someone shared with me the other day which sort of hit me in a different way. I think it’s sort of relevant to our conversation and the quote was, “Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is rest.”

Dorie: Absolutely. Yeah. 

Charlotte: And I was like, oh, that — I mean, it sort of throws you because it’s not something you associate — productivity and rest are not something you would say in the same sentence, but being mindful and disciplined enough to create time to be able to rest or time to be able to think, I think is really important. What sort of advice or strategies do you have for people out there in the world who recognize they may be caught in this cycle but want to get out of it? How could you start small to sort of start removing that arrow so you are creating more space for the thinking time? 

Dorie: An important point to make up front is that you need time to think, of course, but the interesting and important thing is you don’t need a ton of time. This is not saying like, “Oh, come on, people, you need to somehow create an extra 10 hours a week.” It’s like, okay, I mean, nobody has that, nobody can do that, and, fortunately, you don’t need to do that. That is not the point. But the point is that if you are so dramatically overscheduled that you are just literally racing from one meeting to another, if you barely have time to write down your to-dos from one meeting, much less execute on them, before you’re thrown into the next context where you have to kind of context switch and like, “Wait, who am I talking to? What am I doing now?” you’re clearly not going to get long-term thinking done under those circumstances, it’s just structurally not possible. So if that is how your life is currently, you do need to take some steps back. And also the great news is that even small things can make a pretty big difference in that process. For somebody like that who is racing, racing, racing and doesn’t get a break, even an hour, even two hours in a week can actually be truly transformative for them. It’s sort of the difference between not being able to do something and being able to have just enough space to ask some really important questions like, “Hey, all the stuff that I filled my entire week with or that I have the next week filled to the brim with, is that the right thing to be doing?” Because you might, in asking that question, discover, “Oh, wait, actually, a lot of that I could get rid of or a lot of that I really need to reconfigure because it’s not probably going to get me to the place that I’m actually seeking to go.” So, how do you free up that hour or two? In The Long Game, I actually have literally a whole chapter on strategies around saying no. It’s not super pleasant, we don’t like to let people down and things like that, but there’s a lot of kind of easy, low-hanging fruit that I think we can do. One thing, just by way of example and I’d be curious, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, Charlotte, but one thing that I like to do is to make people go through a few hoops, which sounds kind of Machiavellian, but it actually I think is good for them and good for us. And what I mean by that, it’s frankly, especially with email, it’s just so easy for people to ask for things. There’s a personality type that’s like, “Oh, I’ll just see,” and they’re just asking, asking, asking, even random, really inappropriate things, and I used to not really understand this and I would take calls, somebody would say, “Oh, hey, Dorie, can I hop on the call with you for 20 minutes? I’ve got something to talk to you about,” like some super mysterious thing, and I’m like, “Oh, it must be important. Oh, maybe they — they’re not telling me for a reason, it must be important,” and then it would be some dumb, ridiculous thing. Or even worse, oh, they want to sell me a life insurance or something. And so now I’ve learned, at a minimum, when somebody does that, when it’s too vague, I always, always, always say, “Great, Charlotte, I’d love to connect. What do you want to talk about?” Just by asking that question, it forces them to tell me, “Hey, I wanna sell you life insurance,” in which case you can say, “I don’t actually need life insurance,” or there’s the, “Oh, well, Dorie, I wanna ask your opinion about your experience self-publishing,” and then I can be like but I haven’t self-published any books, like, “No, actually, sorry, I did it with a commercial publisher. I’m not the right person to ask about that. You should talk to somebody else,” so we’ve now saved both of our time. So asking is number one. The second thing is, sometimes — again, it’s different if it’s a client, it’s different if it’s a friend, but if it’s someone you don’t really know very well, you can often just push it off a little bit and say, “Hey, Charlotte, I’m super busy the next three weeks but I would be happy to help you. If you can email me back in three weeks and ask me, I’m happy to do it then,” and then it becomes a little bit of a test. How serious is Charlotte about this? Is she going to remember? Is she still going to care in three weeks? If she does, all right, that’s showing me, yeah, that Charlotte’s kind of organized, that Charlotte knows what she wants, I am happy to take a call with her, but if she’s off to the next thing and she doesn’t even remember, if it’s not even important enough for her to follow up once, then it’s certainly not important enough for me to give time to it. So finding a few little ways like that can be valuable. I’m curious, what do you do? I mean, you’re a busy person, you’re besieged with requests, how do you think about the role of no in your life? 

Charlotte: Oh, I dream about the world of no in my life. Well, I think — well, thank you for asking that question. My experience has been that, you’re right, people do find it difficult to say no. I find it difficult to say no sometimes. But I recognize that in the smarter I am at saying no to the wrong things, the more free I am to say yes to the right things where I believe I can make a greater contribution and a greater impact. So, for me, the no is less about not helping someone or not being involved with something I don’t like but more about freeing up my time to be able to make the greatest impact I can. And when I think of it in those terms, it helps me to set that boundary. Yeah, it helps me to feel okay about saying, “You know what, no, that that really isn’t going to work.” The other thing that I’ve learned about saying no is no doesn’t mean, “No, I never ever wanna do that,” it can mean, “No, not right now.” 

Dorie: Sure, yeah.

Charlotte: So, I have a wonderful friend who always taught me about boundaries, that if someone asks you to do something and you don’t want to do it or you’re unable to do it, you can say, “You know, that doesn’t work for me, but here’s what I could do.” So if someone sort of asks, “Can I pick your brain for an hour about something?” you can come back and you say, “You know what, that wouldn’t work for me, but what I could do…” and suggest an alternative that works for me and may work for them. So that was a very helpful strategy that I think I’ve embraced. And the one thing I’ll say about it is my experience is that because people feel uncomfortable saying no, because people feel uncomfortable setting boundaries, when they try to do it, it ends up feeling more like barriers. So it ends up feeling more rigid and more sort of dismissive than it needs to. And so I think sort of, I’ve really worked on setting boundaries in a way that feels loving and empathetic and supportive versus setting boundaries or what I would call barriers in a way which just feels rigid, uncomfortable. So, for me, I’m very clear about the things that I absolutely say no to but I think, Dorie, you make such a good point, it’s almost like sort of practicing how you say it and getting comfortable with the language you use so it doesn’t feel uncomfortable and feeling okay. I love your strategy of, hey, if someone is not bothered enough to follow up with you, why in God’s name would you ever take the time for them? It’s sort of like “I can’t help you if you can’t help yourself” sort of thing. 

Dorie: Yeah, absolutely.

Charlotte: It’s a great strategy. So those are some of my thoughts on that. I will say one more thing and I’m curious to hear your feedback on this one. I was having dinner with an executive the other — sort of an executive at Google the other day, and he was sharing with me that he’s often asked to come to these meetings and now, before he goes to a meeting, he’ll always ask who’s attending the meeting and if there’s someone on the call from his team that he feels is entirely and perfectly capable and competent enough to manage the call, he will not be on the call. And he calls it JOMO — Joy of Missing Out. And he’s like if you can start building this sort of instead of having a fear of missing out, which I think some people do, to your point a little earlier around sort of creating the busyness in your life, if you can shift your perspective from having a fear of missing out to sort of the joy of missing out, I think that’s another cool strategy. 

Dorie: Yeah, that’s well put, I love that. 

Charlotte: Isn’t that great? It’s so much fun. So one of the things in your book, in this most recent book that you talk about is focus where it counts, which is a little bit — we’ve touched on that a little bit, but how would people out there be able to start really discerning what counts for them and where they should focus?

Dorie: Yeah. So this is a question that a lot of folks have is, especially if you’re thinking about, okay, the long term, it can pretty quickly feel overwhelming, people who are like, “Well, but I don’t know where I wanna be in 20 years,” or, “Maybe I have some idea but I don’t have any idea how to actually get there,” so it just feels a little bit more like a whiff or vague or something like that. And so, as a result, of course, being human, what often happens is we do nothing because we don’t — we’re paralyzed, we don’t know what to do. And I want to reframe that a little bit because the actually profoundly liberating thing about true long-term plans is that you don’t have to know. You don’t have to know how you’ll get there. I mean, if you have a plan where it’s like, “Oh, okay, I’m gonna do this in a week,” you better know how you’re going to get there because, tick tock, in five days, the thing needs to happen. You need to be extraordinarily precise. But if I tell you, and this is actually a legitimate goal of mine, I have no idea, but like in 20 years, I would like to become an ambassador, I’d like to be a US ambassador to like some cool country. I’ve got nothing for you because I don’t know who’s going to be president in 20 years. I mean, the president’s going to have to appoint me. There’s literally no way I can predict that. I don’t know exactly what that path is going to be but it seems intriguing and interesting to me. I mean, presumably, the steps would be things like get to know people who have been ambassadors or get more involved with interesting political campaigns or things like that, but I don’t have to be incredibly precise. You just need to know what is the intention and then what is one thing that you can do to sort of start in that direction. As they say, you can drive 1,000 miles in the fog, you just drive three feet at a time. And I think that’s the key for really long-term goals. So often, we try not even to have the dream or we don’t pursue the dream at all because we say, “Oh, well, it feels impossible or I don’t know,” but you don’t really have to know, that’s the great thing. 

Charlotte: It’s such a great reminder because people, I think you’re so right, will just not even sort of countenance something because they can’t figure out what the plan is. And if you can recognize that having a plan is not necessary right now and there’s just three things you might be able to do to get closer to that, it’s a huge one. And a huge one also when you’re coaching, as a coach and you’re working with clients, to be able to convey that I think is massively important. Is there anything else that you’re working on right now that is exciting you that you want to share with our listeners today?

Dorie: Oh, I love it. Well, I would say the other piece that I’m working on that’s a lot of fun and I know a lot of coaches do aspects of this or they’re interested in something similar. I mean, there’s always the question above and beyond one-on-one work, how can you sort of reach people in a more scaled way? And sometimes that’s through online courses, like the Recognized Expert program that I do. Another thing that I’ve been doing for about six years now is running mastermind groups and so that’s been a lot of fun. That’s a group that I run, I actually am doing two different groups this year for the first time, but it’s eight to twelve people that are all interesting, successful professionals, we meet twice a year in person and throughout on Zoom and as part of it, they get a little bit of private coaching with me as well and it’s just a really fantastic way to sort of explore different modalities because you’re learning together, you’re also thinking hard about how to create a sense of community and cohesion. And so being able to flex your muscles and reach people and impact people in different ways, what’s the way that’s going to be most impactful to them or what they need at that time is kind of a cool thing. 

Charlotte: That’s a very cool thing. And if you were to share what sort of differentiates your mastermind group, Dorie’s mastermind group, from the different mastermind groups out there in the world, what would you say?

Dorie: Yeah, specifically, so the mastermind that I run, it’s called the Trajectory Mastermind so the use case, it is for pretty experienced folks, are people who have already found product market fit, they are coaches or consultants who are making mid six figures in their work and are looking to scale up to a million dollars and beyond. And, in particular, they’re looking to really grow their platform. For a lot of them, their goal might be that they want to publish a book or break into high-profile publications. Maybe they’ve already done those things. We have folks in the group who are published authors, who regularly write for high-profile places, they want to build a speaking practice. And so I would say it’s kind of a lot of the similar ideas of the Recognized Expert community but it’s just dialed up to 11, you could say.

Charlotte: Dialed up to 11. And I have one last question. I mean, I could talk to you all day but I have one last question for you, which is this: As we shared or discussed a little earlier, I do think coaches struggle a little bit with their own platform and bringing their own voice to the world and building visibility around themselves, what is one sort of unexpected thing that someone could do if I were a coach and I just wanted to be known a little bit more for what I do or the gift that I offer the world? What is one sort of unexpected thing that I could do that might help me in that path?

Dorie: So, I will tell you one thing, although it sort of branches. One of the things that I’ve spent a lot of time really thinking about is this question: How do you become recognized for your expertise? And what I’ve come to discover, I call it the Recognized Expert Formula, there’s three key pieces. There’s content creation, so that people understand what your ideas are and are attracted to you because of your ideas; there’s your network, because you need to be in conversation with others and have other people amplifying your ideas; and then the third piece is social proof. And I would say if you were starting from zero, basically, this is the place that I would focus. And what I mean by social proof is how do people know you’re credible? What are the quick external signs that you have credibility? And the good news is there’s a lot of different categories. There’s like subcategories of this. It could be that you have a number of name brand clients people have heard of. It could be that you’ve spoken or guest lectured at universities. It could be that you have been quoted in or perhaps written for high-profile publications. It could be that you’ve published a book. It could be that you’ve spoken at some prominent industry conferences or you’ve given a TEDx talk or something like that. There’s a lot of different ways that you can do this. But what I would say is, if you were just sort of starting from nothing, one of the most important things you can do is, as quickly as possible, try to amass multiple, I will call it three pieces of social proof, because that gives people, in a very noisy world, it gives them a reason to listen to you. It’s a lot easier if someone’s never heard of you to be like, “Ugh, next,” like they don’t want to expend a lot of cognitive energy on this. But if we say, “Oh, but you need to, you need to listen to Charlotte because, oh, you saw she was quoted here and she published an op-ed there and she guest lectured at this university,” or whatever, things like that, which, on their own, they might sound hard but you can tackle each one of those individually. It’s very worth it early on to invest in obtaining the pieces of social proof, even if they’re unpaid. I mean, you’re not going to get paid to guest lecture at Harvard, but you do it because it is a great thing to have in your resume. And the good news also is that once you have it in your resume, it is yours forever. You don’t have to continue doing stuff for free because it’s not like you have to keep getting the social proof. You have the social proof and then you can move on from there. So that’s what I would suggest.

Charlotte: That’s great feedback. And it sounds, when you share that, that so much of that social proof and getting that social proof requires you to have some sort of content or opinion or perspective that you’re sharing with the world.

Dorie: Yeah, yeah, it’s true. And I mean, of course, it’s hard for any of us to kind of figure that out but this is where conversations with friends can be so valuable. Just have them interview you or have conversations and just ask, “Hey, what do you think I’m really good at?” or, “Is there is there anything that I’ve said to you where you feel like, oh, that’s especially smart?” Just find someone you trust and try to get mirrored back with this. But I’ll just mention, Charlotte, for folks who are interested, I actually developed a tool which is literally a scored self-assessment so that you can take, takes about 10 or 15 minutes, and it helps you understand where you’re strong and where you’re weak in terms of the categories of content creation, network, and social proof. Folks can download it for free at dorieclark.com/toolkit 

Charlotte: Oh, that’s awesome. Oh, gosh, that’s so helpful, just to sort of know where to get started to have a tool like that. Dorie, thank you. Thank you for your time, your energy, your wisdom. This has been delightful connecting with you and I’m so excited to read the book and dive in and figure out how I make more time for myself to do some strategic thinking. So, thank you. 

Dorie: I love it. Thank you so much, Charlotte.