Ep #11: How To Share Your Story Without Oversharing: The Three Stories Female Founders In their 30s, 40s and 50s have to Resolve & Evolve Before Sharing

Understanding Visibility: Stories, Barriers, and Female Founders

In this special podcast episode, Radhika Lucas discusses key insights into the complex layers of visibility, especially for female founders in their thirties, forties, and fifties. Drawing from personal experiences and working with women across various industries, Radhika emphasizes the critical importance of feeling safe to share one's message, managing reputation, and balancing professional and personal branding. The episode explores three dominant stories that hold women back: loss aversion, self-imposed narratives, and the reframing of failures. With an invitation to join a comprehensive workshop, the host offers solutions and support for women looking to navigate their visibility journey effectively.

00:00 Introduction and Purpose of the Podcast
00:38 The Complexity of Visibility
01:16 Personal Branding Challenges
01:44 The 5,000-Year-Old Penny Drop Story
04:46 Experience and Risk Aversion
07:03 Three Big Barriers to Success
11:30 Reframing Failure
14:11 Season of Love Workshop
15:56 Conclusion and Next Steps

Hey there, and welcome to the Visibility for Female Founders Podcast. I'm your host, Ika Lucas, and this podcast is for you if you're an impact driven, founder, coach, or consultant who wants to find your own voice to speak, present, and amplify your message Online. 

We explore how to get past the visibility roadblocks and grow your capacity to be seen so you can attract then chase your perfect audience, while staying connected to the most important things by building a business th

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Transcript

0:30

Hey there, and welcome to this special podcast episode, which I have felt really drawn to share and which is why I wanted to come on and talk to you about something that I have noticed in the last few weeks, and that is after working with women from over a dozen industries. And working within the specificity of stories and the stories that we share and visibility and putting ourselves out there and all of the things that go with being visible that very few people talk about in any great detail. Visibility it's very multi-layered. It's not, as simple as just showing up on video. I think it's a very one dimensional way of looking at visibility. It's, it's about whether you feel safe in which to share your message. It's whether you feel like as though you are. Outwardly showing a reputation that is going to be valued by people around you. And so therefore give you that additional reputation, give you that additional status that you need in order to, for example, if you're competing against, bigger companies as an example. And if you really wanna make a mark and, uh, position yourself differently, you really are swinging between being professional versus being personal, and what does that personal brand look like and how that shows up in the way in which you might actually hold yourself back from. Fully expressing yourself because of this constant variation and swings between how you wanna show up as a business and how you wanna show up and as, as a personality. So, I shared recently a story about how a 5,000 year old penny drop revealed the reason why many women or many female founders in their thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond. More at risk of not really making it in business because of three distinct stories that are unique to us that have to be resolved in order for the real story can, that can be shared. And so, um, the reason this came to being is. Mainly, and predominantly because I have seen the same themes or the same kind of conversations come up over and over again. What I have noticed is that the very thing that actually gives us an edge, you know, we all have the expertise. We are looking at people who are, you might have heard this, you know, in the wilds of the internet, that the, the people who have less experience than you are killing it, even though you might have more experience than them and all of that kind of stuff. And I think that's a real reality for a lot of women in their thirties, forties, and fifties, is that yes, we have that real world. Experience. Yet somehow we feel held back on account of many different issues. And I'm not saying this from,, sitting on top of a pedestal by any means. I have felt all of this and more myself, and as part of the reason why I feel compelled to share is because half the time, I find that the visibility advice given by people who didn't have a fear of visibility in the first place. So they really only can talk about it at a surface level. And as female founders in our thirties, forties, and fifties, we have more to lose. And it's that reputation, it's the. It is how we wanna position ourselves. The, it's how we wanna showcase ourself to the world. And all of those factors that come in, play a really big part in then how we show up. And then not only that, but there is conflicting advice. There is, half truths, there is. Endless amount of layers of marketing material and people's energies and advice that you are constantly bombarded with time and time again. But really the idea being that, there are essentially three stories that people have to get over. But before I go further, I wanted to just share that in my twenties I was able to,, jump off a cliff straight into a raging river and. My swimming skills are average at best. I really didn't think about the consequences of those actions when I dived straight into the river from, going off a cliff. I had no idea whether they were going to be boulders at the bottom that were gonna hit me, whether I'd. Taken further down downstream, and I just dived in feet first and, obviously the rest is history. If I was asked to do that today. I would hesitate and I would not do that without there being a certain degree of safety in place. And so the reason I mentioned that is because as we get older what experience does is it actually teaches us many different things. And the, the experience of having learned not to do things actually gets more hardwired into us than the experience of doing things. And you'll notice that as people get older and older, especially into their seventies, eighties, and beyond, that their risk aversion starts getting, more hardwired. And it's because of. All of the multiplicities of stories that they have got hardwired in themselves to stop them from taking action. Because firstly, the lifespan that's available to correct those actions has shortened, which means that in your twenties you might be more invincible, your ligaments might be more flexible, your. Ability to recover from physical injuries might be higher versus, say, if you are in your forties where you are injuring yourself, you are pro more prone to injury, even through something as trivial as exercise at home. If not done the right way. And so these little things actually stop us from taking the right steps that are needed whilst in the build phase, especially with marketing our business online. And so what happens in. A, putting ourselves out there context is that there is a certain degree of reputational damage that we have. To be able to endure or face the risk of, and that risk or loss aversion is actually greater than the gain. That we are likely to experience. And so that is something that I have thought about a lot and I've actually mentioned that in my latest newsletter that has just gone out and I've mentioned about the 5,000 year old penny drop that actually revealed the reason why you know about what is real and what we perceive as being real. Now, if you'd like to get and insight into that then sent me, one word on either one of my social media platforms with the word newsletter, and I'll put you on my newsletter for anything that comes out, later on. And I can also forward you that specific newsletter for you to get an idea of the concept. So I have seen that there are three big barriers standing in the way. One is. About the story of what we think is real. So the stories that are based off of any kind of loss aversion, whether that is the fear of visibility, whether that's fear of what is real, um, and fear of what is real, is really quantified by the value that society thinks is valuable. So if we don't think that what society feels is valuable. Or we might know what is valuable to society, but the issue is that society may not see what we have as being valuable unless it is packaged up in a way that meets people where they are and which is why the penny drop story is so important in the context of this. So if you are curious about getting that, then do subscribe to my newsletter by just sending me. The one word newsletter on any one of my social media platforms as you're listening to this. So, speaking of value, the loss aversion that I mentioned, which is one of the stories that needs to be resolved and is one of the ways in which it will hold female founders back. Now the second story that gets, mentioned is actually the stories that we tell ourselves, which is all of the ways in which we're observing the world around us, and the stories that we are making up about why we may not, and the rules that we might put in place for why. We can show up versus why we can't show up. Now, one of those rules could be in the case of someone who I, will be interviewing soon is the story of. Whether this person actually had a story to share. Now, this person did not feel that they had a story to share, and so some of the ways in which it came up wasn't so much through questions, but it was more through statements. Statements such as, I don't really even know that I need this. I don't know that I have a story to share. So if you look a little bit deeper into the statements that are, I don't really need this without the context of understanding. How the person wants to show up with what, what they stand for and the reasons why they want to do what they wanna do. It would be easy to assume that this statement is actually a truth. And that then brings up that whole question of, well, what is real? So this person at the time didn't feel that they needed something, that they didn't need this particular offering the fact that there was actually a mismatch or a values mismatch. Between the way in which they wanted to show up and ultimately the plan that they had, which is what they ultimately wanted, and that would lead them down the pathway of a strategy based visibility plan alone, which wasn't going to be helpful because if there is an identity mismatch between. The ultimate vision of what you actually want versus the loss aversion that you are likely to have to undergo to then meet that plan. That is where the work of the resolving actually happens, because unless story is resolved, unless that statement is resolved, and understanding the story behind that statement. It would be easy to assume that this is actually a direct reflection on say, your offering, for instance, if someone was to say that to you, which then ends up becoming about more about a sales conversation. So it's important for us female founders in our thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond to understand the. The things, the stories that we are telling ourselves, which is the second story, which I've just mentioned here, which is the story that we tell ourselves. And then the third story that I wanted to mention is about how we can look at the stories that we glean out of failure. Um, and this is especially important because I was listening to a podcast. It was by Mark Rober. And Mark Rober is, is a mechanical engineer and my son used to watch Mark Rober videos since he was about eight or nine. And, he created these incredible videos only once, one video. Every single month on YouTube and now ends up it has about 72 million followers, which is apparently he won every four Americans technically, um, subscribed to his channel. And what he had to say about failure was that treat failure as though an engineer would look at failure, which is to test iterate, and then. Go again, which is something that I see happening around me in my working environment as well is the, the testing of our hypothesis and then seeing how that hypothesis works out. And then almost looking at it as that, as an experiment and then going again. However, I feel like as though a lot of women put a lot of store on getting things right, getting things perfect, and I see this time and time and time again is that they're so held back by getting everything perfect. And the main reason for that is that there has been a big study put out by Oxford University personally, I mentioned that in one of my other podcasts, is that there is additional pressure that is put on women to get everything right. So it creates this culture of hypervigilance, which is actually detrimental to the way in which we show up. So. You can, on the one hand you can have my, have the likes of Mark Robus saying, use an engineer's mindset. But on the other hand, you have inequities as a female founder that you are actively working against in this whole, arena of visibility. And so the third one really is about reframing failures by gleaning them. As insights based upon the work that you're doing, whether it is activating your marketing plan, whether it is putting yourself out there, whether it is creating a post, whether it is anything, whether it's checking conversions on your landing page. And we can go, I can go into the depths of a lot of marketing speak, but I feel like it's really important at this point of the year to really take stock of the stories that we tell ourselves. And so, firstly, there's the story of loss aversion. Secondly, there's the story of how we reframe, reframe failure. And thirdly, it's the stories that we are telling ourselves that we want to share and that we would like to share, but without oversharing. And so what I would like to do is to offer you. A chance to come and work with me in what I'm calling the season of love. So if you're listening to this, then right now at as of the time of this recording, I'm creating the how to share your story. Without oversharing comprehensive guide, that's going to be as included as a bonus with the current workshop that I am running right now. And in this workshop, you get not only the things that you have to do, so you get to uncover. Your story, the way in which you wanna show up, what you stand for, and the reason why you wanna do what, what you wanna do, and then mapping those to the outcomes that you want based on the marketing plan that you may have, in your mind. So it's really about mapping, the plan that you have along with the identity shift that you need to make. And the best part about this is you don't have to figure this out on your own, because in this. Amazing guide that I'm gonna be putting together. You get to work with me in a bonus setting, which is part of this special workshop offering where you get to work with the stories that you have for each of those stories that I've outlined in this episode and work with me to resolve so that you can then evolve and share your message without oversharing. So if you would like to know more about this, then simply message me with the word love. And I would love to be able to send you details about how to fall back in love with your business by reframing the stories that you're telling yourself. So if you'd like to know about this, then simply message me with the word love, and I would love to be able to send you details of all of that, what entails in this workshop that is coming about very soon. So that is all for this particular shorty episode for today, and I'll see you in the next episode.