Brian Sellers Lightning talk on his biggest fear, how he faces it daily, and how you can face your own fears.
You can learn more about Brian by following him on Twitter and YouTube
Twitter: @BrianRSellers
YouTube: https://t.co/NOGAMZJXyW?amp=1
Notes:
The opening quote:
“The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is.” - August Wilson
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Thank you to Adil Constantine for the podcast music http://adilconstantine.com
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Hello, you're listening to the Creators Offline podcast. A podcast for creators of all kinds. I'm Genki Hagata and before we get started.
I just wanted to say that I'm super excited to welcome TubeBuddy as the first sponsor of this podcast. TubeBuddy, if you're not familiar, is a tool for YouTube creators to help you optimize your channel. There's all kinds of tools for analytics, doing deep dives into seeing what your audience likes, what they don't like doing keyword research, tagged research. See where you can rank and all those types of things. Watch your growth. I use it on my channel. I use it to help other people look into their channel. And if you haven't heard of them or you're not using Tubebuddy for your YouTube channel, make sure to check them out again. Super thankful to welcome to Buddy as the sponsor for this podcast. In this episode, we're going to take it all the way back to the first ever Creators Offline events and hear the lightning talk from Brian Sellers. Brian, among being a great trader himself runs a nationwide Stutterers Helping Stutterers program called the McGuire program. And through that, he has tons of experience and lots of value to offer us. And I'm excited, as usual, to be able to show this talk with you. As you might be able to tell by the runtime of this episode, it's pretty quick. But I assure you that the runtime is not a direct measure of value of this talk. And that reminds me of a quote that I wanted to share with you from the two time Pulitzer Prize winning play writer Austin Wilson.
"The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is." So let's get into it.
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Imagine if every time you opened your mouth to say something, you weren't sure if anything was going to come you because that's what it's like. To Live your life as a person who stutters.
Brian Sellers is my name and I've stuttered ever since I was six years old. And I got to tell you. Contrary to what you've probably heard, stuttering is not this amazing, awesome ball of fun that everybody always makes it out to be. I mean. It's not.
What's good about having me spend my whole life stuttering is it's made me challenge my fears every single day of my life. And that really helps everybody in this room, because my session with now is all about conquering our fears and how all of us can conquer our fears.
So what do you think the scariest thing is for a person who stutters maybe, speaking?
Yeah, sure. Public Speaking that's a good one. Giving a presentation in the hallowed halls of 368, it's a great challenge. That's for sure. But to me, honestly, the scariest thing in the world is not speaking. It's silence. because my whole life I mean speaking. And then we would encounter silence. Usually something bad is about to happen. And so I'm going to do something right now. That absolutely terrifies me. I'm going to stand here for 30 seconds in silence.
…
And 30. [applause]
That was really uncomfortable for me. It may have been uncomfortable for you. But I'm really glad that I did that because honestly, I knew what I was getting myself into. I planned this out, but that was really, really scary for me. I have to tell you, I feel amazing right now.
I feel incredible.
And I want all of us in here to feel incredible and have this thing, that same feeling of .. So I'm going to give you three steps that you can do in your own lives. To Conquer whatever fear you have to help us with that. I want you to think about what it is in your Creative journey that scares you. Maybe it's walking down the street holding a Huge camera with mondo fuzzy microphone pointed at your face. Because that's weird at all. Or maybe it's as as Levi was saying earlier. "What's my family going to think about this?" Or is this fear of rejection like Swoop was talking about or whatever it is just just that in your head and try to keep that there over the next couple minutes. I said three steps and Roberto used an ABC monitor and SWOOP was talking about Glengarry Glen Ross, which is a fantastic movie. It just so happens that my step process goes A, B, C as well. I know we did this step a in conquering your fears, acknowledge that you have that that seems obvious, but that it's not always easy to be honest with yourself and to be honest with other people. That you do have that fear?
For those who don't know me, I also run a nationwide stutters helping scholars program called the McGuire Program. And back in August or September, it occurred to me that my speech was having a bit more when we call turbulence. I didn't have the same kind of control over my speech that I generally do. And as the leader of the program, I had a fear that I wasn't leading things appropriately. If my speech was shaky and honestly, it took me a couple. It took me a couple of months to admit that to myself. But what I did and I admitted it to other people also. All of a sudden we had all this power, all this all this agency to actually begin to do something about it. And that's a good thing, because step B is to begin to do something about it. Oftentimes. And SWOOP, you said this very, very nicely earlier that fear can paralyze us and make us just try to hide from that thing and do anything except that thing like do laundry, wash the dog. Wash your friend's dog. I mean, whatever it is, just to not have to do that one thing.
So what we can do is the fear. We don't have to fear. Fear. We don't have to fear, fear. We can. We can use fear as motivated and as an inspiration to actually take action. The easiest way of doing that is to create a goal and then to figure out what's the smallest, teeniest tiniest, smallest step that we can take to start working toward that goal.
It doesn't have to be a big step. We're just trying to create some kind of momentum at this point. So as I said in September and October, I was not happy with my speech. And so I resolved to in the month of November and was going to speak to fifteen hundred random people who I didn't need to speak to except to complete this challenge. And that was a big goal. And I was like, Oh, "I don't know, how am I going even going to do this?" But I figured out that the first smallest teeniest, tiniest step, was to call 50 people on November 1st. I live in Virginia. I call 50 Starbuck's in Los Angeles and just ask them very basic questions. What time do you open? Where are you located? Do you have any blueberry scones? I really like blueberry scones and I'm happy to tell you that it's on November 1st, 2018. Almost every Starbucks in Los Angeles. Had blueberry scones. Now here's something that you didn't know when you came in so, it's all very valuable for you.
But after I did that, even though it wasn't a very hard, I felt so empowered because I was just I was just hiding and is not admitting that I should do more. I taking just the first step. I had momentum. I had the ability now to continue to to effect that change and that's good because steps step C is to continue taking those steps and continue to to step outside your comfort zones, to challenge yourself to go further than they did in the previous day. And it'll feel uncomfortable. But that's OK. That's the point, is to have it feel uncomfortable. then you'll have you'll have successes which feel awesome. And you'll have failures which don't feel as great.
That's the thing about failure, is that failure is really, truly not just things. Is really just a springboard to a future success. That just hasn't happened yet.
So do in doing this over the next month, I would speak to people on the phone who would talk to people in real life. I would talk to groups of people. I would even walk up to groups of people in a shopping mall and stop them and say, "Hi, I stutter. And I've set this challenge to speak to 1500 people in the month of November. You're number 883 and thank you very much." They thought it was awesome. He thought I was so cool. So I'm at 10:00 a.m. and by the 30th.I I completed my 1505th. Conversation with someone. And I felt amazing.
[Applause.]
I felt Amazing because because I had changed my perceptions and changed my beliefs about that fear. I truly conquered that fear, had a huge amount of confidence. My speech was very much back on on track, but even better than that.
I changed my perceptions and my beliefs about myself also. And that's what actually allowed me to come here today, because it was shortly after that, that Genki started talking about this for the 368 thing. And as they dude, I got to be there, like, I want to. I want to tell people about this, because all of us, as YouTubers, as creators, we fight fear all the time. And you have to fight it in order to make a change. But if you do with all of us, in here can, every single person, if you follow, there's A. acknowledged B Begin, C, Continue, plan, it's not very complicated, but you just have have to do it.
And if you do and you do change your entire life, see every day in the McGuire program, I know that every one of you has that capability also.
So I'm going to continue my journey tomorrow. Actually, I head down to Austin, Texas, to lead a a three day Stutters Helping Stutterers at the McGuire Program course for 25 people. I'm very excited about it, but that's what I'm doing.
Starting tomorrow to continue against my fear. So the only question is where will you challenge your fear, I'm Brain Sellers.
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Thank you so much for listening. Thank you, Brian, for that incredible talk. I hope you all are as inspired as I am. I couldn't imagine what it's like for Brian to have to face this fear of silence every single day. And I'm super proud of him for this talk. I'm thrilled I could share it with you.
And I'm happy to call Brian, my friend. If you enjoyed the talk, please make sure to subscribe to hear more talks like this. You may have caught Brian referring to Levi's Swoop and Roberto. And I'm looking forward to sharing all of their talks with you in the future. If you have a moment, please rate this podcast that'll help other creative people like yourself find it and help spread the inspiration. We already have our first five star review, which I'm super thankful for. Shout out to Lucky Braxton. Thank you so much for that review. It really helps us out. You can find us, Creators Offline if you're not already following us on Instagram and YouTube. We're CreatorsOffline and on Twitter, quite confusingly, we're at @OfflineTalks. If you're already following us by this point, you may have just caught wind of our next event announcement. And I'm super excited to bring Creators Offline, to Austin, Texas. Make sure to follow us somewhere to hear the speaker announcements and those come out and to know when and how to sign up and all those other kinds of details. And lastly, if you can afford it and you'd like to help out. Head over to Patreon.com/creatorsOffline to become a patron.
Where you'll get access to our Discord server where we're chatting every single day. And Brian Sellers is there, so you can chat with him too–link in the show notes. That's all for this one. Until next time, keep creating.