You guys, I have been trying to record this podcast for many days now. I have recorded multiple versions. They all sound stiff. They all sound like I'm reading something. That's not what I want from this, and I'm sure that's not what you want from this. So I decided to just hit record and see what comes out. this is clearly my first podcast that I've ever put together, and, I really do have something that I want to put out there into the world. So we're just gonna do it in my own quirky, probably disorganized, not so podcast professional way. Here we go. I'm Laura. I am. An AI executive by day. I am a mother of two children, a wife, daughter, sister, in my free time when I don't have any responsibilities and no one's looking, I'm actually an artist. I love to paint. I love to write. I love to bake and sew Basically, anything I can make with my hands makes me happy. I love to garden. I feel like in my soul, I'm a wannabe herbal medicine healer and there are a million other things that I'm interested in that have nothing to do with how I usually spend my time. what I wanna do in this podcast and what I've been trying to do in my life is find the connection between the identity that I've built for myself in my work. And all the other parts of me, how do I combine all of that together into one whole person that I can present to the world without trying so hard? Because right now I've spent 20 years in this career building a persona that is successful and organized. And decisive and serious and palatable for whatever audience she's in front of. And She basically has nothing to do with the actual me that is inside of me. so every day when I'm at work, I'm exhausted. I'm thinking all day long, not just about the work that I'm supposed to be doing, but about how to think about something because I have to think about things in a different way than what comes naturally to me, or at least I've always thought I have. I feel like I'm surrounded by. People who seemingly know better than I do or have been doing this longer than I have, even though I've been doing this specific job at this specific company for almost 15 years. it all feels so gray. It feels like I am having to pick just the most specific parts of myself that have the least amount of color. And so I sit in these meetings and in these boardrooms with all of these other people who are lovely and very professional and so smart, but who are all talking in the same way. wearing the same professional clothes, it just, it just feels devoid of color. that is the metaphor that keeps popping into my head, and I feel like I have this rainbow of colors inside of me that I don't ever get to let out I'm playful and silly, and I'm a little bit, woowoo. I like to think about spirituality and I like to think about nature. Frankly, I make decisions based on how things feel. Even when I'm at work, even when I'm trying to be decisive, there's always this little antenna in my head that is interpreting things through the lens of does it feel? Right? But I can't say that in the boardroom it just didn't feel right. So. That's not the decision that I made. It's just not usually appropriate for me to say things like that. But that is a hundred percent of the time what's going on inside my head. I'm a daydreamer. I have a talent for daydreaming during the one most important sentence of any meeting. The sentence that all of the rest of the meeting will reference, but not repeat. So I spend a lot of the meeting. Trying to figure out what I missed and what everybody's talking about. I feel like I spent my entire childhood like that. Even in classes. Even in school. It's my secret talent. So here we are. how do I change myself from a life and gray to a life and color? And that's not to say there's no color in my life. Like I said, I'm a mother. I'm a wife. When I come home, I can be playful, I can be silly and express myself differently. But even then, there are sides of me that are hard to encourage. Even the artist in me, my family is very supportive of me being a painter. But when I want to paint, it's messy and I need some time. It's not really something I can fit in, 20 minutes here and there. so I tend to not do it unless I have a good chunk of time when I'm gonna be uninterrupted, which is never. So yeah, We have some work to do. We have some digging to do, some uncovering to do. Hopefully I'm not alone in this. well, hopefully I am alone in this. I hope all of you feel like your lives are full of color and you are able to express everything you want to all the time, and you are living fully, authentically. But for those of you who do not feel that way and who can relate to what I'm talking about, what I'm saying. I am here to try to explore different ways that we can start to let out more of our colorful selves so that the rest of the world gets to experience the magic that lies within each of us. so that we get to experience the full spectrum of what it's like to really be us with everybody, with deeper relationships, with more fulfilling days, with colorful identities. I wanna talk a little bit today about. What I mean when I say colors, we hide why we might be hiding them and the cost of that, not just to us, but to the whole world around us. When I say colors, what I mean are our quirks, our hobbies. Things we're curious about, contradictions inside of ourselves. We all contain multitudes, right? We all have things that don't make any sense. That in one scenario we might seem totally put together and organized and in another. We fall apart. That's part of being human. so these are the colors that I wanna talk about. There are reasons I've already talked about. When you're at work, for example, it's not appropriate to be silly all the time. They'll kick you outta the, they'll kick me outta the meeting. it's, contrary to productivity, which is the main goal when we're at work, unfortunately. So we don't show all of these colors out of fear for what it would do for our reputation or our jobs. But there are other scenarios where we hide. I know for me specifically when I became a mother, I gained a lot of new friends, a lot of other mother friends from daycare when the kids were little and from the bus stop, from sports, and I will be the first to tell you I am not my full self. With most of these people, these lovely, supportive, kindred spirit people I'm sure who are experiencing the world in the same way that I am, but I tend to hide the more colorful parts of myself. And sort of drip them out slowly and carefully for fear that they won't wanna be friends with me because I will be too much We tend to keep it pretty high level, right? We talk about small talkie things, which makes me anxious. I hate small talk. I can't stand it. it means that for the last 10 years since I started having kids. I've made all of these new friendships and I look around and none of them actually know me at all. And that breaks my heart a little bit. I think if I invited them over to my house and I threw the kind of party that would really fill my soul, which let's be honest, would be full of Broadway show tunes fancy cocktail dresses and I don't even know dancing, reading poetry out loud. I am not entirely sure they would all stay for the party and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't come back for the next one, but I think that's just my cruel inner voice talking and I'm probably selling them all short, and this is something that I think I'll try to explore in the next few months in the name of authenticity. So there are a lot of reasons that we hide parts of ourselves, perfectly reasonable reasons that result in us sort of wandering through life, feeling lost, feeling like we maybe don't fully belong, feeling exhausted and burned out. I think that this suppressing pieces of ourselves starts really young In some cases, maybe you grew up in a house where feeling really big feelings wasn't considered safe. I think we almost all of us grew up with parents who were not taught to tolerate, big anger, big frustration, big sadness. big excitement, big feelings were considered impolite or inconvenient, or really just triggered something in our parents that caused them to try to suppress them for us or just not have the tools to help us understand how to express them for ourselves. So it starts young, and I'm not saying our parents did that on purpose. No one can do anything that they don't know how to do. We can't expect that of anybody. And then I think we get older and we go to school where frankly, conformity is kind of the point, right? There are rules to follow, there's deadlines you need to hit. There are social norms that people try to fall into. I think for many of us, that creates a scenario where you're always thinking, okay, what do I need to do in this scenario to make sure that I fit in, in the way that I want to, that I'm presenting myself? In the way that I want to so that people will think this X, Y, Z, and will not think X, Y, z about me. And that follows us into adulthood. And that creates the perfect storm for burnout, anger, and grief. we as a society. We as a planet who are made up of individual people who determine the rules that guide society, I think a lot of the problems that we're having, even at a macro level, could be at least in some part, fixed by people feeling safe, expressing their full identities in their lives. People feeling safe, saying out loud that they are excited or sad or angry, laughing at things that they think are funny and yelling about things that they think are upsetting. if we could all allow things. To move through us and really fully express ourselves. Maybe we wouldn't have the mental health crisis we have in this country. Maybe the crime and violence levels would go down. Who knows? our tolerance for people who are different from us would go up. it's very hard to expect of people tolerance for others' differences when they were not given the same themselves, and it has created a very. Sad state of affairs in many places in this world where people are from multiple different backgrounds and cultures. And instead of welcoming that and seeing that as a potential strength and an opportunity for learning and diversity and beauty, people are afraid of it. when people are scared, they shut down and they try to avoid. The thing that they're scared of. So I feel like we've gotten a little bit, away from my original topic, but this is what we're gonna discuss on this podcast. I'm trying to create a world where people can just be free to be themselves, whatever that is. Because I want to live in that world so that I can be free to be myself, whatever that is on any given day. Let's talk about the cost of all of this. Sometimes I think about the greatest philosophers of our time or the greatest writers, or. Painters, artists, dancers, even scientists who followed their passion and their curiosity and changed the world. What if those people had not been allowed to follow their energy? What if instead they had been asked to conform and to just do what everybody else was doing and show productivity in their own way? I just think about how much we would've lost, how much we would be missing as a world, as a culture. All of these big contributions from people and what a tragedy that would be. And then I think about all of the people throughout history that could have been one of the greats that could have really materially contributed to the culture of our society. And couldn't, didn't because they weren't allowed to, because they were stuck behind a desk or in a factory or doing something that really dimmed their light and they didn't feel safe, or they didn't have time or they didn't have the resources. To be able to follow their passion and express themselves. What have we missed out on? Now I look around at this world of AI and automation and ugh, marketing. We have just absolutely perfected how we can market to a specific audience. And really control people's attention and people's opinions, and we're creating this level of sameness that I think in the short term feels like belonging, but in the long term is absolutely diluting the beautiful tapestry that we should have as a society. we're gonna end up with a bunch of people that look alike and think alike and talk alike and we will have lost so much in the process. it's more important now than ever that we all dig deep and listen to those signals from ourselves, that something is missing, we have more to give. We have more to say. We have thoughts and opinions and questions to ask. And we need to do that loudly and passionately so that we save our society from turning into something that is grayer and dull and boring. So I wanna talk a little bit about one other thing. I heard an interview a few months back with Ron. She, who's the former CEO of Panera Bread, and he talked about how on an annual basis he writes his own obituary and he does that because he wants to see what are his goals, what are the things he wants to accomplish by the end of his life, and what does he want people to say about him once he's gone. He does this every year. so I did it. I went home and I pulled out my journal and I wrote my obituary, which was terrifying and really emotional. at first it kind of feels like the audacity of me. To say I would accomplish all of these things, or that my loved ones would actually write these kind things about me or say these, amazing things about who I was and how much they loved me. But once I dug deep and I promised myself, I would never show it to anybody else. I really went for it. And do you know what was never mentioned at all in the entire thing? When I was done with it, there was nothing about the work that I do every day. I talked about writing children's books and paintings. And how generous I was with my time and my money and how I made people feel a certain way that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren appreciated how playful I was and creative that I always made everybody feel seen and welcome. And so if this is what I want my obituary to say. What am I doing? That was what I came away with. What am I doing? Why am I spending so many hours every day, not only focused on the work that does not fulfill me, but also then worrying about it later so concerned that I am doing it well and that I am. Maintaining my reputation and my relationships at work and all the things, why am I not spending my time in pursuit of these goals that obviously mean something to me? That is what I am promising myself to try to do in this next phase of my life. To soften, to listen, to slow down, and to really try to be in touch with my inner self and whatever it is that she wants to express I'm gonna talk about it on this podcast, I'm hoping that you will come along with me. Before I leave you, I wanna read you something that I wrote several years ago that I keep coming back to. I wrote this on a whim. I tend to do this in my notes app on my phone, probably sitting at a red light or waiting for somebody somewhere. I can't get it out of my head lately. Here it is. You are an incredible gardener capable of bringing to life colors that we have never dreamed of seeing. But you spend all your time tending the weeds that everyone else is giving life to stop tending their weed ridden garden and sow the seeds within you. Your garden will outshine the weeds in no time. You are cowering away from the brightness of your future. You can feel it. I can feel it. Your future is so bright, so full of enormous potential that walking towards it is almost too bright to bear. So instead you stay where you are only moving sideways in one direction or the other, never closer to the blinding light ahead of you. It is as if you have accepted this distance away as your place. Perhaps you even choose it just bright enough to feel like you've done something but not so bright that anyone can actually see you. And so you stay here and pretend that this behemoth isn't following you around, pretending that everyone who meets you isn't blinded by it as well. Brave the glare. You can handle it even if no one else will take that journey with you. You can do it. You must brave the glare so that you can bring back the gifts and show them to the world. I wanna leave you today with a couple of questions that I want you to ask yourself. Just for contemplation. Ask yourself, where are the areas? That you are feeling your light dimmed. And why is it that you're feeling the need to do that? What is making you feel like you need to dim your light or mute your colors? what would it look like if you were to let out just one new color this week? Where would you do it? What color would it be what would happen? How do you think the people around you would react? What would the consequences be? What sorts of amazing benefits might come of that? Give that some thought and drop me a line if you have the answers to it. Thank you so much for joining this. I'm so honored that you spent the time with me. I promise to get better at this whole podcast thing going forward. Just give me a chance and I hope you join us next time for the next episode of a Life in Color.