Heidi K. Brown - lawyer, academic, and professional speaker on authentic confidence

Transcript

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (00:01)

We have Heidi Brown for this episode, and this is such a privilege to hear from you today. You have done so much. to understand, would you like to explain what exactly you do and what your journey has been?

Heidi K. Brown (00:17)

Sure. So I started off my adult career, my life career, as a lawyer. And I live in the United States. I grew up in the state of Virginia. So I was a minister's daughter. I lived this really kind of sheltered life. And I went to law school. And so I started off my career as a lawyer. But I really struggled with the performance aspects of being an attorney. ⁓ But I did that for 15 years until I transitioned to becoming

becoming a law professor. And when I started teaching law, I realized that my students were struggling with the same issues that I was about well-being and performance. And I was an introvert all through school and through my litigation career. So I was very out of my depth in terms of being a tough litigator.

But I kept doing it. I kept listening to all this well-meaning advice like, fake it till you make it. But when I saw my students struggling with the same issues, I decided I was going to start writing about these issues. So I wrote a book called The Introverted Lawyer. I wrote one about fear. And I wrote one about flourishing. So now I'm a law professor. But I also write books. I just wrote my very first travel memoir because my whole platform is to kind of help people.

stop feeling like they have to fake it, but again, be their authentic selves and feel empowered and emboldened to do all the things that they really want to do in life. So that's me in a nutshell.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (01:45)

That's amazing. And people from so many professions can learn from that. I'm so glad we are talking about this. Firstly, I want to start with the industries where people feel the need to toughen up. For those who are trying to do something good within those spaces, what can they do if they don't feel like the tough types?

Heidi K. Brown (02:07)

Oh my gosh. Okay. So that was me entirely. was actually, when I practiced law, I was in the construction industry. So here I was this quiet, introverted person in this construction industry representing people fighting all the time. And I did not have that tough exterior. So what I would recommend is give yourself permission to not fake it, not try to fake this tough exterior, but instead really tap into your authentic strengths.

I realized as an introvert, my strength was writing, but I always felt like I had to be able to speak at a moment's notice or argue without any preparation. But then I realized, okay, no, I have to go back and look at what my actual strengths are. And my strengths are being quiet, listening to other people, really paying attention to where the conflict exists. And then...

teaching myself how to step into the performance arena with a little bit more strength. I needed to put myself in boxing lessons to do that because as an introvert and a person who struggled with extreme public speaking anxiety, I didn't know how to control my breathing. And also I have a very robust blushing response. I turn really red when I get nervous around the center of attention. So I decided put myself in boxing lessons, understand somatic intelligence, like how

how our physical bodies drive our performance and our cognition and our emotional intelligence, and just become much more self-aware. So now I have a lot of routines and rituals. So when I need to speak or I need to stand up for someone else or I need to advocate on behalf of the people who can't advocate for themselves, I'm more prepared physically, mentally, and emotionally. So I've done that kind of through learning about myself somatically through the boxing lessons, which is kind of wild.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (03:59)

the boxing. How did boxing teach you to breathe?

Heidi K. Brown (04:03)

So I realized through all my struggles with public speaking and really the first 15, almost 20 years of my career, was a lawyer for 15 years full time before I became a law professor. And every time I would have to step up to the podium or to the microphone, I was nervous and I had this overwhelming anxiety. And so the boxing, I trained one-on-one with a boxing trainer.

And I wrap my hands and I put on the glove. The gear is the best part. And he notices, he says, you're either over breathing or holding your breath. There's no middle ground. And so what I've had to do is realize when that's happening. It happens naturally. It's not that I can't prevent that from happening. I can't prevent myself from blushing when I'm on stage or I'm teaching. But I can realize it in the moment and then recalibrate and just take, you

five to 10 seconds to recalibrate myself physically, remind myself of all the mental, the good mental soundtrack. You know, we've done the work, we deserve to be there, let's step into the arena, we know what we're doing, it doesn't have to go perfectly, kind of letting go of that perfectionism mindset and doing the best we can because we care about the message that we're trying to portray.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (05:21)

I agree with all of that and even knowing that you can step into the arena, the arena and do people need to really remember that as well that it's, it about overcoming imposter syndrome?

Heidi K. Brown (05:38)

Yes, yes. And also giving ourselves permission to sort of reject all the cliche messages about feeling like an imposter. I mean, as I mentioned, the fake it till you make it mantra. I was told that my entire life. Just fake it, just pretend. But I feel like that made me more of an imposter because I was pretending to be a personality. I'm an introvert. I was pretending to be an extrovert. I'm a person that doesn't like to fight in a mean way, but I was pretending to be

a really tough litigation attorney. And it felt very inauthentic to me. So yes, it's about overcoming our imposter syndrome, but using more kind of holistic and healthy mechanisms for doing that instead of just pretending that we're not afraid. That never worked for me. That works for some people, but it definitely did not work for me. I had to untangle the fear and the imposter syndrome to understand what was driving it at its root so that I could rebuild

kind of the persona that I wanted to project. And that's what I try to help my students. Because like I said, I'm a law professor, so I teach future lawyers, ⁓ but also women and anybody really who is grappling with these types of issues.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (06:51)

Absolutely. I am relating to what you're saying so much because the fake it till you make it, I think we might come from similar public speaking backgrounds, perhaps. And... Oh, okay.

Heidi K. Brown (07:02)

I did some research to get to understand.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (07:08)

So that's yes. And so you would know there's a sort of robotic style. Everybody wears the same suit. And I think that all worked for a point in history, but we're now in an era of Ted talks and people opening up a little bit more, or even just not having to look so masculine when we're doing our work. And I've had to connect with

very bureaucratic industries like education, health, even just personally. And I hope that you might've seen people from those spaces or any others where if you are doing that fake it till you make it and doing that style that we're taught, then I'm wondering if it's easier to really connect with the audience and have them receive the message more when there's more authenticity.

Heidi K. Brown (08:03)

I totally agree with that. More authenticity creates connection with the audience. grew up kind of, it sounds similar to you. Like I worked in the legal industry and we were taught this very robotic way of approaching the bench or approaching the podium and what to wear. And you had to not use your hands very much. And you certainly couldn't look too feminine or they wouldn't take you seriously, et cetera. I mean, this was 30 years ago. But what I teach my students now is,

make eye contact, smile, be yourself, speak in your own voice. People can tell when you're faking it, when you're faking a different persona. And I totally agree with you that we should be, we can be professional, but be authentic at the same time. And it might take practice. It took me a long time to be able to, it's ironic, because I wrote this book called The Interverted Lawyer, and then suddenly law firms and bar associations and...

law schools were asking me to come talk about my book. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. But then I realized, oh no, that's how I'm going to reach readers. That's how I'm going to meet the people who need to know they're not alone. And I was scared and I didn't know how to do it. But I've learned, like your modeling, I learned that being myself, wearing what I wanted to wear, even if it's like wearing

a bracelet with a cool message on it that only I can see. I that made me feel much more authentic when I stepped into that arena and was talking about stuff that I love. Way better than when I used to have to dress up in a suit and have my hair a certain length and wear pantyhose and high heels, like, ⁓

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (09:46)

Totally, totally, we don't need to have heels on just to be heard. Why should we?

Heidi K. Brown (09:51)

We do not.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (09:54)

No, we do not. Was the book, was the book, the point in life that led you to Raphania speaking?

Heidi K. Brown (10:02)

100%. I mean, even when I started teaching law, felt like if I made one mistake, my students would think I was a fraud and they would want their tuition dollars back. But when I started talking about the book and going out there and really, because my books are very vulnerable. I share a lot of personal struggles with the anxiety, with public speaking, with fear. ⁓ I went through a lot of relationship trauma that I talk about very openly in my law books and also a recent travel memoir.

had just launched like two months ago, which is incredibly vulnerable. But when I started talking about my books, and I would see people nodding, I realized, oh, wait, no, they want to hear from the real me, not the fake me that pretends like she has it all together. And then that changed the way I teach law, too, because I realized if my students ask me a really difficult question about the law or some complicated societal issue,

I stopped trying to fake my way through the answer. Instead, I said, I don't know. I have to think about that. Or let's research that together. And that vulnerability made me closer to my students. And then that experience made me double down on that when I would do public speaking with strangers. So it's all this learning that we really do need to be ourselves in a professional way, of course, but authentic.

vulnerable to the degree that it's relevant to what we're talking about, admit mistakes, admit fear. It's just changed, completely changed the way I approach public speaking entirely.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (11:39)

Interesting. Did you pretty much create entirely your own style and formula perhaps beyond just completely separate from what you learned before?

Heidi K. Brown (11:48)

Yes, yes. I have a, first of all, I had to completely create a ritual or a set of rituals that I do before every single public speaking, because I still get nervous sometimes. And I also can't control whether I'm going to turn red. So I read this great book by a woman named Erica Hilliard, and it's called Living with Shyness and Social Anxiety. And she said that a blush is life coursing through you. So when I used to get really stressed about the fact that I was turning red on stage, now,

I'm like, ⁓ I'm alive, yay me. And then I just keep going. But before I get on the stage, I do a series of ritual. I try to exercise in the morning. I don't usually take a boxing lesson or my face will be red for like 12 hours, but I'll exercise. And then I do like a power pose from that great Ted talk by Professor Amy Cuddy. I'll do a power pose, usually minus the starfish pose. And then I play two songs that get me in the zone.

And then when I step into the arena, I keep saying, or step up to the podium or grab the microphone, I always try to, again, recalibrate physically and make sure I'm breathing. And then I connect with one or two people in the audience that are already making eye contact with me or nodding. And I'm like, okay, those are my people. I'm going to speak to them. And I've learned how to be funny and tell.

authentic jokes about myself or my own relationship with the content and that calms me down really quickly and I've gotten much better at using creative slides or prompts on the screen where I don't have to use notes as much anymore. I still have notes because again, I'm an introvert so when I get nervous my brain sort of...

goes internal again and I need to be able to be external. So it's a lot of these tricks, not really tricks, but just habits and positive habits and routines that I've taught myself to be able to deliver content in a fun, uplifting way.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (13:53)

Do you find that people are going to remember all sorts of information, even the very technical, legal ideas when you are making it a bit more fun?

Heidi K. Brown (14:03)

my gosh, yes, it has to be fun. I my classes, I think my students think I'm a little wacky at times because I'm constantly talking about like U2 concerts and Oasis, like I just saw Oasis in Dublin and I'm like, somehow I weaved that into the conversation.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (14:20)

I'm dying

to know, I'm so keen, how did you weave it in?

Heidi K. Brown (14:23)

Well, I said ⁓ we were actually, so I teach legal writing and legal communication and I am teaching this really fun, I think it's fun, new class about how to be ethical and responsible legal writers but also understand generative AI, right? So my students need to know how to write but they also are gonna be expected to deal with these tools in.

in the legal profession when they graduate. So I'm trying to blend the two, but in an ethical, responsible, and fun way. So we wanted to test out this technique of prompting an AI tool to create a debate among three individuals. And I asked my students to give me a topic for the debate. it's only the second day of class. We just started a new academic year. And they're all nervous. They don't know me yet.

And they think that I want them to say something fancy and sophisticated about the law. But I'm like, okay, well, if you're not gonna give me a topic, the topic's gonna be who's the best rock band in the world? And so then I said, you need to give me the three names of the three people that are gonna debate this issue. And again, they were kind of reluctant. But then one of them said, okay, Liam Gallagher. Because I said I had just gone to the Oasis concert in Dublin. And so one of the students said, okay, Liam Gallagher can be one of the.

the debaters. And so then I just used the music as a ⁓ vehicle to get them using this tool in a non-legal way, or ⁓ not an illegal way, but a non-law related way. So then we could do the same task in a more complex, lawyerly way. So I think infusing fun into anything kind of breaks the ice and gets people realizing, okay, we're just people, we all have different interests.

Let's use our interests to connect and then we can level up to the more sophisticated intellectual topics.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (16:21)

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm hoping you might have seen how powerful that is when you're talking to your other audiences for your books and so on, because I find that when people remember that we are all human beings, it takes the pressure off. Have you seen that?

Heidi K. Brown (16:37)

have absolutely, and especially when I mentioned the blushing, it's really funny because, you know, I, when I now when I do a lot of public speaking, people know me from my books or other, other professional roles that I've had. And then I walk in, they expect me to just be kind of buttoned up and, and serious and talk about, you know, well being in the legal profession or these these big topics or generative AI or whatever I'm being asked to talk about. And then I get up there, and I, and I

make a joke about blushing or I'll put up. Sometimes lately I've been when I'm talking about my travel book, I've shown a picture of myself from 30 from 25 years ago when I look miserable in my law firm office. And it's a really unflattering photo of me. But it's so hilarious because it sums up my life at the age of 31 compare. And then I flash a photo of me on a trip at a rock concert.

because I keep using that in my speeches lately. And the contrast, like it's very vulnerable because one of the photos is very unflattering, but it's also kind of jarring and interesting and funny. And it kind of snaps people off. know, some people are playing around on their phone. Suddenly they're paying attention to me. So using humor, using visuals, not being afraid to make fun of yourself. I mean, that's been huge for me, honestly.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (18:05)

feel so comforted by what you are saying. And I normally hope that if something resonates with me, it will resonate with the audiences that picture you had of being miserable in your legal office. I can tell you even about a year ago, I was putting on the jacket and putting on the whole, you know, the routine and someone took a photo of me with all the best intentions and

Heidi K. Brown (18:08)

you

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (18:34)

I think I looked like a flight attendant.

I did not look like me. It was like a cross between that and some sort of doll. I looked so plastic. It's not, it doesn't feel as real and it can end up not even looking like you. So do you feel like you are more of yourself now?

Heidi K. Brown (18:55)

Yes, a million times over. I mean, it's so funny because people expect even my head shots to be very lawyerly. And at my law school where I teach, they brought in a photographer to do head shots. I was like, I am not using any of those because I have the same experience. While I think many flight attendants look incredibly sophisticated and gorgeous and glamorous, the

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (19:17)

All day off.

Heidi K. Brown (19:17)

The picture of me, like, that the law school photographer, he's a nice guy to his credit, but my gosh, I would never use those for my picture. I have a whole bunch of kind of funny and fun headshots that look professional, but that capture really the essence of me so much more. I mean, I'm either, you know, moving around or I'm laughing or I'm, you know, standing in a power pose that doesn't look corporate.

So I think even exploring the way we project ourselves through images is not in a fake way, not like the Instagram curated way, which of course we all want to look our best. But even the way we present ourselves professionally in our headshots and things can be more fun and interesting rather than the typical cross our arms and look super serious.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (20:13)

Absolutely.

It feels like part of what you do is more than teaching public speaking and law, but you're teaching personal branding essentially.

Heidi K. Brown (20:23)

Yes, yes. I've had to learn that for myself on my own. I I've done when I when I wrote my introversion book, I had I have a publisher, but I realized, you I love my publisher, but they don't do a ton of promotion for my book. So I had to learn without any training how to brand myself. And and really every morning I do this ritual. Have you read the book ⁓ The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron? She advocates

that if you want to kind of tap into your creative soul, you do three pages of longhand journaling in the morning. And if three pages sounds like a lot, just buy the tiniest journal you can find. But every morning I think about my brand. Like, am I doing for my brand? I do other things in the journaling too, but I always get to, okay, what am I doing for my brand today? Like, what do want my brand to accomplish? What do I want it to mean? And it's been fun to decide what I want.

my brand to be? What are my personal values? Who do I want to reach? Who do I want to help? How do I want to appear? And it might be different for the different platforms we're all on. LinkedIn is more my law-focused world, but I'm still funny over there. Instagram is more of my travel world, but I still post about my law stuff there too. it's deciding.

who we want to reach and how we want to reach them, but being authentic and not having to worry about someone seeing us being silly and chipping away at our brand. mean, me, silliness is part of my brand, and not in a goofy way, but in a smart way, I think.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (22:11)

It's in a relaxed way. It means that you're going to be less nervous and less tense if you are just loosening up with bit of silliness.

Heidi K. Brown (22:21)

I agree and it makes it okay to make a mistake. all through lawyering my life as a lawyer, I felt like you made one mistake and everybody was just ready to tear you down. But what I wish I had known then and what I tell my students now is it's okay to stumble over your words in a presentation because that's real life and that's normal. Obviously we wanna try to speak as eloquently as we can, but don't let the whole thing derail if you make one mistake, it's okay.

Sometimes I'll even joke, I misspoke a minute ago. I meant to say blah, blah. And here's why my brain leapt to that other issue. So being more authentic, giving ourselves grace when we make mistakes, it doesn't have to go perfectly. my gosh, another thing I'm sure you've dealt with is tech problems. I used to stress so much about the tech and I realized it's beyond my control a lot of the times.

So I can prepare as well as I can. I can be all ready and set to go. And now I've had to train myself to roll with tech glitches more. And even showing that you're able to do that, your audience loves that because they've been in that situation. So if you don't freak out about a tech glitch, your audience is going to give you grace when it takes an extra four minutes for the microphone to work or something like that. I've had to learn that the hard way.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (23:48)

Yes, audiences know that tech will do what it does. They know that. Everybody has been in that situation, whether it's on stage or somewhere else at a desk, wherever something marks up eventually.

Heidi K. Brown (23:53)

Yes.

Definitely. You just made me think of, so I had to do it. I got invited to do a talk for a bar association in the state of Utah, which, so I flew there. I was really excited. I was so prepared. I did all my rituals and then I got to the stage and I couldn't breathe. And I was like, wait, I gotta do my boxing, know, breathing. But I felt like I was having a heart attack and then somebody, but it didn't feel like my normal nerves.

And then somebody before I was about to go on said, how are doing with the altitude here? And I didn't realize for some reason that Salt Lake City was at altitude. So I was having altitude issues. So I'm about to go on stage and I realized, my gosh, what if I have faint? So I just gently pulled a chair up behind me just to make sure that if I felt like I needed to sit, I could. And then somehow I just powered up and it went fine.

But even, again, having backup plans and having backup plans to backup plans, and when you're starting out in public speaking and then realizing you're OK. You've gotten through a situation like that before. You're going to get through the next situation because you've built this track record of success ⁓ of it maybe not going perfectly, but still people told you that they were really happy to hear what you had to say or that what you said really meant a lot to them or that they felt heard.

or seeing. To me, that's what feels like a success.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (25:35)

Yes, there's so much self care in that. And I've seen that you're talking about this self care of public speaking so much more than what we would have heard about decades ago, probably because that topic comes up in society in general more now. But I think this is crucial because to be real with you, I don't remember when I was really young, hearing that much about how to look after yourself when you're about to talk to a group.

And that's what everybody wants to know about. It doesn't matter if it's a director of an entity. It doesn't matter if it's the, the assistant that's trying to fill everybody in on someone in a little meeting or someone who's doing a keynote, whoever it is. Normally it's starting off with things like the breast, but the other self care I'm learning so much from your tricks, like get a chair and don't be shy about doing that. And it's just so true.

My number one fear is actually just tripping over equipment.

Heidi K. Brown (26:39)

Yes. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's something that we I love that you're tying this to self care because I really haven't framed it that way for myself. But you're so right. Like even what I wear. I do sometimes wear the heels, but the heel has to be something that I'm like, okay, I got to be able to step over those wires or I don't want to wobble when I'm going up three steps onto a platform. For instance, ⁓ you know, I want to wear something

Even talking about clothes makes it sound superficial, but it's not because for me, the self-care is I don't want to get too hot, but I want to look professional. What can I wear that's going to make me... Because I run hot and I sweat and I'm turning red all the time. I'm like, okay, my outfit has to be designed to make me feel comfortable and look professional at the same time. Even that's self-care. To your point about how years ago, nobody would talk about this, still, I feel like

in the law school arena, students in America have to give an oral argument in their first year. And there's all this pressure to do it. You can't really opt out. But there's no real training. There's substantive training on how to organize your argument points. There is no training, except workshops that I've tried to start, about how to hold yourself, how to handle it.

If you have, like if your hands shake, what do you do with your hands? If your knees feel weak, what do you do? If you, like me, have blushing thing or if your mouth goes dry, there's no training around that. And that to me, my students who have all the intellectual stuff nailed down, like they have a great argument, they need help with how do I stand there and not shake? How do I?

What do I do the 10 seconds before? What do I do the 30 minutes before? What do I do the morning of? I used to always over prepare and practice, practice. I now have a ritual where the night before after 5 PM, I don't think about it again. And I might check my notes the next day, but there is no practicing. There's no reciting in front of a mirror. In law, they say, well, want us to moot your performance? Nope. I don't want anybody. Nope. Stay away from me.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (29:02)

I'm so glad I

found you. This is totally speaking my language. And I think although we probably both learned a whole lot of talking on the spot, to pick my words carefully, there is an expectation for a longer talk in any context, in any group, to have it really practiced and precise. But once you get in front of the people, you know what you're talking about. You know...

You're a specialty and your expertise and you don't need to stress yourself out that much.

Heidi K. Brown (29:39)

Now, that's another thing I think I needed to learn and what everybody sort of needs to learn is what can you walk into that experience with that will help you retrieve that information quickly? So I used to write everything out, like have everything out, even when I was teaching every single word. And obviously that doesn't work in the moment because you can't, what if you lose your spot, right? So now I'll have...

I usually do have some sort of visual cues, but then I'll have a notepad that if I get nervous, I'll have like giant bullet points of the things that the kind of the anchors that I want to come back to if I if someone interrupts me or I get a little bit derailed by a noise or something like that. Like I'll just bring myself back. But that takes practice to.

⁓ But yeah, just learning what individually we all need to stay in the moment and keep doing our thing. And it takes practice and kind of adjusting your tools as you go to figure it out.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (30:47)

can sense that you are a little bit of a free spirit like I am. So I think we are blessed to some extent because sometimes the mind just flows. And when you said that you put just a few dot points on a page, it was just totally aligning with what I understand as well, because I just put maybe three words with a pen on a simple page.

What would you suggest to people who are starting at the other extreme and need to relax a bit? Maybe they write five drafts and highlight things and refine it. What do you say to those people to just chill?

Heidi K. Brown (31:31)

Yes, I I used to do all that too. I used to write five drafts, I would rewrite. Sometimes if I'm talking about a new topic, I will still do that in my prep. So I'll write everything out and then...

One thing that stresses me out is time limits, because I'm just such a rule follower that if someone's like, you have 12.2 minutes, I'm like, I got to make sure. So sometimes in the prep, I'll still do a couple iterations of things. But again, all as part of my leading up to the day of, the more we can get away from relinquish control over the content at that point and just pare it down.

Because by that point, you do know it. If you've done the longer draft and then paired that down to a shorter draft, they say if you're handwriting that stuff to, it implants the ideas in your brain much deeper than if you're typing it. So I've found that I'm able to retrieve that information if I have done the prep work of writing everything out, then rewriting it as a bullet point. Eventually, I'll type it up, obviously, and print it out. So I would say for people who are newer at this is

Experiment, of course, but when you're getting closer to the day of the performance, really give yourself a cutoff time of prep because you will realize your brain needs time to rest and then start percolating about the information again. And if you're constantly cramming the information into your brain, it's not going to be able to access it that readily in the moment on the day up. So start experimenting with giving yourself a cutoff time and then

adopting rituals the day of and the half an hour before and two minutes before so you're really able to access that information when you're ready for your audience to hear it from you. You've done the work, you know what you're talking about. Let it flow.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (33:26)

Stay mindful. Apparently the big controversial change that I've been exploring, that's what it is, a controversial change, is to be even considering wellness after having a background with speaking. But that's just bizarre to me because if you're not feeling okay, then how can you give your best performance?

Heidi K. Brown (33:28)

Yes.

I mean, it's pure science. I did a whole study of fear. Because when my introversion book came out, like I said, I was doing some talks. And people would come up to me afterwards and say, I'm not an introvert. I'm an extrovert. But I'm scared. I'm scared to go speak in front of the entire partnership of the law firm, or I'm scared to go to court for the first time. And I had all those fears, too. So when I studied the science of fear, it's literal science that

you know, our brains go into fight, flight, freeze or fawn response, and we are not able to access our cognitive functions as well when we're in fear mode. So we have to do these, we have to set ourselves up from a wellbeing perspective to understand when the fear is starting to kick in. Like I know when I'm, I was nervous coming on with you today, cause you know, yeah. So at the beginning I'm like, my gosh, I don't even know how to give my own bio. But.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (34:42)

Don't worry about that. can tell you that before every episode, I ask AI to write a two page dot point bio about the guest and I see the main points and I knew about you in five minutes.

Heidi K. Brown (34:50)

Perfect.

Perfect, that's awesome. ⁓ But what I realized is, I was realizing in the moment, okay, this person is cool and nice and we love the same thing. So just relax, it's gonna be fine. And I did the recalibration.

Like you can't see it on the screen, but what I had to do is like put my shoulders back, put both feet on the floor. I'm in my home. this is my favorite place. ⁓ I mean, there's a couple other favorite places in the world, but I'm in my happy place in New York. I'm surrounded by all my favorite things. And I just had to briefly for two seconds recalibrate and then I could function again. So it's very normal that we feel that fight, flight or freeze, but unless we're conscious.

and have trained ourselves how to recalibrate in like a public speaking moment, we're not gonna be able to access all that amazing content. So I think a lot of the pre-training that we can do on ourselves is to understand, when are we feeling that fear kick in? What does it feel like physically? What are we telling ourselves mentally? What emotions are we feeling? And then how we can reset all that very quickly when people are looking at you.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (36:13)

This is such a revelation. I never imagined that you would have felt nervous coming into this. And I applaud your honesty about that. I felt a slight pressure in some way because I was going to talk to a legal expert who has written multiple books and we put people on a pedestal and we can appreciate what people have done. But, you know, for some reason I did.

I don't know why, but I felt the nervousness for this one, just a tiny bit or the awe. I think it was awe. even just recently I had a guest on who has had an Emmy. I can tell you, I've been talking to all sorts of people, but then, so you never know when that nervousness or pedestal will kick in. But I think what you're saying there is so crucial for everybody that even knowing that an expert like you can still feel nervous.

People ask how can I overcome nervousness, overcome anxiety and how often do you hear that or I want you to not feel nervous but it's about doing things anyway even when you do feel scared, think so?

Heidi K. Brown (37:25)

It is. So again, with the messages, so my whole life I was told, just face your fears, just do something every day that scares you. And I'm like, well, I am and nothing's changing. So for me, it wasn't about.

flipping a light switch and suddenly I've overcome my fears. So I decided to change the verb and I made it untangling my fears because that to me gave me, again, permission to be like, okay, hold on a second. I'm not just gonna do something every day that scares me. It's like that, ⁓ is it the Einstein quote? If you keep doing the same thing every day, you do things the same way over and over again without changing anything, that's the definition of insanity. So we have to, we can't just keep forcing ourselves

to do things that are scary and expecting to feel unscared, to me it's about untangling what we're really afraid of. And so when I sat down to do that, when it came to my public speaking, it wasn't really that I was afraid of that particular judge when I was practicing law, or I was afraid of that particular law firm partner. I was afraid of being thought of as less intelligent than they are, or being thought of as unprepared, or

weird because of my blushing thing. And when I peeled that back, I was really afraid of being kicked out of the club or rejected or ⁓ fired from my job. And it really takes us back to almost being a teenager when you're afraid of not being included. So once I realized that, that it really wasn't about the person in front of me or the task in front of me. It was just like this old, outdated fear that

had been reinforced by maybe well-meaning but not so helpful coaches or teachers or even family members to be honest with you because I've dealt with a lot of criticism in my family, cetera. So once I understood where my fear was coming from, that gave me something to work with. But just forcing myself to do scary things. I mean, when I travel, I do scary things all the time on purpose. But it's not.

It's not because I'm just expecting an instant change. It's because I know I'm going to learn something from it. So I'm much more conscious about doing the scary thing. So that's what I would advise people. Of course, we all want to overcome our fears and not feel the anxiety. But as I share with you, I still, even with all this work that I've done, I've written three well-being books. I've written a whole travel memoir about this very topic. I still feel the fear. But instead of

the mantra of feel the fear and do it anyway. I feel the fear and pause for a second. Understand what I'm feeling in my body. Understand that it's an old outdated message about my abilities. Understand that it's old emotions and that now right now today in 2025, life is awesome. Like I can do this. I'm doing this.

And then it is really helpful. again, it doesn't have to go perfectly, but it sets that fear aside. And my body and brain and emotions and heart and soul are able to deliver the content way better than I used to when I was faking it.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (40:42)

Absolutely. Everybody needs to hear this message from you because the personal branding is so crucial in this day and age. And we are living in an era where, and this will tie in with AI, wanted to explore that with you because you have looked at it. In this era where a robot could do all sorts of things, our point of difference is our humanity and our uniqueness. Are you seeing that it's even more important for us to relax, take the pressure off and

Show the world our real selves now.

Heidi K. Brown (41:14)

100%. I mean,

the AI is useful for certain things, but as a writing teacher, I really want my students to develop their own writer identity and their writer voice. And maybe AI can help them do that if they're feeling blocked. Same thing with public speaking. I think if we're feeling afraid of doing a particular performance, there's ways to get the AI to practice with you.

Like, so maybe we use it for good and not as a substitute for our skills and not as a substitute for the thinking that makes us learn, but as a way, you know, in healthy doses to upskill us or to level up the things that we want to be really great at. The humanity piece is just huge, though. I mean, as you said at the beginning, we were trained to be, in certain contexts, to be very robotic and not real and just...

deliver content that maybe really wasn't that exciting. But I have a feeling you and I could take Zemo's boring topic and make it exciting because we care about people and we care about who we're talking to and we care about, all of our time is so precious that if we're given the opportunity to speak in front of somebody for five minutes at a board meeting or a workload meeting or like for me sometimes my talks are like 60 minutes.

I better make it worth it for them. And ⁓ we do that by reaching their brains, reaching their hearts, reaching their emotions, making them feel like, making them feel something. Even if it's something very corporate or work related or law related in my context or whatever, there's ways of making it interesting, fascinating, fun, engaging, emotionally stimulating, et cetera.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (43:07)

Absolutely. I completely agree with the AI. So you're encouraging people to use their own voice beyond AI. So if people are still wanting to use AI for something because it's here, they are curious about it. Do you see it mainly as a tool for efficiency, kind of like what I did with the research or do you see other uses for it? So you mentioned using it for rehearsing.

Heidi K. Brown (43:35)

Yeah, yeah, I I love writing, so I don't want it to do my writing for me, but I find that it helps me be creative, or it helps me work through, it helps me stay in flow in my writing. So I'll be writing something and then I'll get stuck on a word, or like I'm thinking of a word, but I really want it to be a more dramatic verb, or I want a phrase to be much more.

something hilarious or something more dramatic, cetera. And instead of using a typical thesaurus, I can explain in more words to the AI tool what kind of vibe I'm going for and say, give me 10 alternatives to this. And I can't do that with a regular thesaurus. And I'll reject eight of them. But for me, I feel, and I'm a really creative person. Creativity is one of my signature strengths. If you've ever done the

the Via Character Strengths Assessment, the Values in Action Institute on Character. Creativity is one of my top strengths. But I think that AI can make me more creative sometimes because I have fun with it. And I'll use it to just play and come up with the wackiest ideas. And I'm not afraid to do that in the middle of my classroom when I have literally no idea what these tools are going to generate. That, I think, from the public speaking, is just

I'm confident enough now that I'm able to handle things that don't always go according to plan in the classroom. ⁓ I think I forgot what your actual question was, but it was.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (45:09)

How do you use AI without

losing your unique creativity?

Heidi K. Brown (45:14)

Yes, I mean, the weird thing about AI, at least the tool that I use, is it mirrors my voice a bit, which can be a little freaky. So sometimes I have to tell it to stop acting like me. ⁓ So I feel like it's, because I'm a sort of queen of the exclamation points when I write, it writes back to me in exclamation points. It jokes around. ⁓

And I like it for that. Like I'm a person who I like feeling uplifted by the tool. I don't feel manipulated by it because I shut it down when I need to do my work. But I do think that people can experiment with their creativity, not as a substitute for us doing the actual writing or music creation or video creation, but as a tool to help us create things we maybe couldn't have done.

before it existed, for instance. I find that it's a lot better at helping me create images for my PowerPoints, for my teaching, and for my presentations too. I mean, it doesn't get it perfectly. Some of the hands in my PowerPoints have way more fingers than a human hand would have. So there's glitches in it. But I have found that I've been able to stay the course and using it for good.

I and I do not feel like it's chipped away at my humanity. Obviously, I've been teaching all the risks and pitfalls and ethical problems around it and environmental issues related to it. So we do need to be mindful users of it. But I think when it comes to this discussion, experiment with it, try it out, see if it can help you. Especially for people who are nervous, like I said, you can... ⁓

I forget the actual tool now, but my students are using it to practice their oral arguments because in oral arguments, the judges interrupt you with questions. So that's how they're using the AI to generate the questions that people could ask that might make us nervous if we're doing a public talk for the first time. I, as an introvert, I don't think great on the spot. So I like to kind of anticipate what the questions might fly at me.

and have some answers. Again, I'm not going to read my answers in the moment, but I think the AI tools could be a good resource for gaming out all types of different questions that could come at a person who's doing a speech for the first time.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (47:45)

It can help with the prompts. Great idea. I want to flick to a very human question after that very robot based one, because you mentioned how criticism can happen and that you needed to overcome that fear and the, and the feelings around a background of being criticized. And when we do put ourselves out there with a personal brand, with any sort of work,

people will have opinions and we can give our best possible result and anyone will say anything. And it can dig even more deeply if it is friends, family, communities, or even people at work we want to impress. What can you say to the people who are facing criticism and doing their best and wanting to step up and maybe perform better moving forward?

Heidi K. Brown (48:41)

Yeah, that's a great question.

I think it depends on the context, but I'll just kind of use myself as an example here. I write a lot, so the criticism that comes toward me is about stuff that I write. And then in the law school context, the criticism that I got at a prior institution where I worked was anytime I would get up and do a presentation about change.

It was a very change resistant place. I got a lot of criticism and I took it all personally. I thought that I had failed by, and I had to completely change that mentality because I knew I was reaching my audience. I had to finally say those people aren't actually my audience. Like the critics, there's a great quote by Paulo Coelho, the author who says critics or haters are just confused admirers.

I love that. I love that quote. There's more to that quote, but I like that part of it. Haters are just confused admirers. So I had to start telling myself, OK, I've had some loud critics in my day, like in the law firm world, in legal academia, and also with some of my writing. When I first started going out there and writing about well-being and lawyering, I was getting typewritten letters by older people in the profession, mostly men who disagreed with

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (50:03)

Why?

Heidi K. Brown (50:05)

points I was making or telling me what to write about next. I was like, I'm the writer. I get to decide what I'm going to write about. But instead, I mean, I did take it personally at first, but then I finally started telling myself, I don't think those guys are my audience. they're not, I don't get out of bed in the morning and think, I'm going to write to this grouchy, you know, man in a different state who I don't even know. That's not my audience. My audience, I know my audience.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (50:31)

Yeah.

Heidi K. Brown (50:34)

It's people who went through similar stuff that I did and feel like they've searched for answers and either those books don't exist or those articles don't exist. Like that's who I'm writing for. I'm writing for like a younger me. ⁓ So when I, first of all, I also try really not to read comments. It's been really hard. So my travel book came out in June.

and it's starting to get reviews on Amazon and it's been good so far, but I'm so scared to look at it. But I realized as a self-care measure, I don't need to look at it. know, again, my book that I'm very proud of, it's called The Map I Draw, it's about like finding ourselves through travel and healing trauma through travel. It's gonna reach the people like me who went through relational trauma and are seeking to connect with somebody who,

survived. so I really don't care that much what somebody who it doesn't doesn't resonate with what they think because I didn't write it for that person. ⁓ And nothing, you know, nothing obviously against the people that don't like my reading or the like the way that I talk about well-being in law or the way I talk about travel, but I'm sure they resonate. There's other people's stuff will resonate with them. So I think a way for us to

set aside the anxiety or fear about putting ourselves out there is to realize it's gonna happen. I mean, it's going, we're going to get people that don't like us, but we already have friends. Like we have friends. We don't need everyone to like us. It's okay.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (52:17)

This is so freeing,

find your people. There are so many people on the planet. We don't have to reach all of them, just the right people. And the way your story unfolded with these old men from the legal world typing something up, I feel so much freedom hearing that story. And I want you to keep sharing that sort of story because honestly, I felt so nervous.

starting to do things independently. I felt so scared of the opinions of people who might not even care or if they are saying something they are just bored for a moment. I mean they could be doing something else with their time. That says plenty but you know we get so scared of what anyone is going to think but you can't control what anyone thinks but then other people you know you found people like me I am so ready to read your book. Definitely.

Heidi K. Brown (53:14)

Thank you.

Well, you made me think of one more thing that I think will be helpful. When I started out as a public speaker on the book realm, I used to think, especially if someone was paying me to talk, I used to think I have to reach every person in this room or I have failed and they're going to want their money back and I'm a big, giant, colossal mess. But then I realized, no. First of all, half the people are just

thinking of something else, so who cares? Second, I've now decided if I reach one person in the room, if I literally help in the slightest way one person in the room, I've done my job. And sometimes if it's a really tough crowd, that one person can be me. So I'll realize, oh my gosh, okay, that was such a tough crowd. They were not my audience. It didn't vibe, whatever, it's okay. What did I learn?

from that experience. Maybe I never need to do that again, you know? Or I feel like, okay, when I started feeling nervous, I realized I uncrossed my legs and that made my energy flow better, made my breathing better. Okay, I'm gonna remember that next time. So I really think we need to give ourselves permission. Obviously we wanna reach as many people as possible, especially if it's a paid situation. We wanna serve, we wanna deliver. But also, sometimes we just...

There's just one person that really needs to hear our voice that day. One person, a total stranger. And that's why we were there in the room. And that's cool.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (54:46)

Yes.

You can reach one person, anyone. You are teaching the next generation. I'm so glad I found you. Thank you. We can, officially. I'll have to curate my Facebook friends for you to get on that one, but in any other sense, are, yes, absolutely. I just made a new friend. Look, this has been the best conversation. Thank you so much.

Heidi K. Brown (54:58)

We need to be friends.

Thank you, thank you for making me feel so welcome. When I definitely was nervous when I got on and now I don't feel nervous. I feel happy and I feel like fulfilled and I'm so, so glad we did this. So thank you very much for making time and giving me this opportunity. I really appreciate it.

Melanie Suzanne Wilson (55:36)

Anytime, Heidi, anytime.

Heidi K. Brown (55:38)

you