S. 1 Ep. 17 – How To Master Your Mind To Increase Your Bottom Line

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of technically speaking. We are so excited for today’s guest, Dr. Tharaka, AKA, Dr. T. Dr. T has been a longtime friend of ours, we’ve had many conversations and Dr. T is a clinical psychiatrist, the mind guy, gone professional speaker, presenter, and high-performance life coach. With his unique background, he brings his understanding of how people think make decisions and take actions to the business world. He helps leaders better understand and navigate their own mind, the mind of their people and their clients in order to inform strategic behavioral change that drives greater progress. These speaks to wealth, health, and tech audiences on emotional intelligence, client cognitive biases, and memory training in order to help them improve their personal effectiveness, interpersonal trust and sales skills, leadership, innovation, focus, and concentration. He’s also a three-time TEDx speaker and has recently been featured on a brand-new TV show soon to air in the UK. He believes that when you manage the mind, you can manage your bottom line. Dr. T it is so good to have you on the show. Welcome.

Dr. Tharaka: Oh, Taylor, it’s so good to be with you. It’s a great to be with my friends that are speaker fluid. So good. Thank you.

Taylorr: Yeah, definitely. So, we always like to kick off these episodes with a very simple question. How did you get into the crazy world of speaking? What led you down this path and how did you get here? 

Dr. Tharaka: You know Taylor, it was kind of by accident if I’m honest. I remember 2016, it’s January, I’m sitting in my office cubicle at work, and I’m just raking through some of the global emails that are going around and there I see an invite for a TEDx conference and I don’t know, do you ever see things and you think, oh, that’s for me. That was the feeling I had and I felt very inspired by it, I applied, I had to compete to get in, I got a spot, they awarded me meet the closing spot at the conference. And so, I did that, but as you know, TEDx talks go on YouTube and once it was out businesses and organizations started getting touch and they said, hey Tharaka, can you come share your perspective with us? Because we really think it’s going to help us, or it’s going to help our team when it comes to shifting the way we think so we can change how make decisions, take actions, get results; and from that organic place, the Dr. T gig was born.

Taylorr: Wow. [cross-talk 02:47] how the best things happen really is just every time we ask, it’s funny, every time we ask that question, almost I think 95% of the time, it was like, yeah, I just stumbled into it and its kind of just happened. 

Dr. Tharaka: Yeah, for sure. That that’s how it rolled out. I didn’t for a minute think, oh, I’m going to go into business. I just pursued something that I was passionate about when the opportunity showed up. And truth be told, for all of 2016, I was just speaking for free at business breakfasts, at networking events at conferences and actually I was learning and I was growing and I was fighting battles in secret in inverted commas. It’s all the struggles that you have behind the scenes that you don’t see on stage, but I was learning. And then in 2017, a friend of mine said, I’d really like you to come speak to my clients, but we must reward you, he said. And I had no concept for this.

Taylorr: Wait, people get paid for this.

Dr. Tharaka: What? I know. And he said well, we must reward you, we must pay you for this. And it was from that moment in 2017 where I decided to make the Dr. T venture a very distinctly different thing to what I do in my clinical life and what I do in my spare time and so Dr. T took on that more business field.

Austin: Yeah, that is so cool.

Dr. Tharaka: Unplanned, yeah.

Austin: Really the best things in life are that way and it started with a need that you saw. That’s what I love. And that’s probably why you’re successful too, is that you didn’t get in this to make tons of money, you got into it because you had a message that you wanted to share. And the coolest part is people wanted to hear it. 

Dr. Tharaka: Austin you’re on the money. I just think that it requires a level of focus and consistent mental discipline to stay in lane and think about who you’re here to serve. I think that if that’s your mentality, it’s what is the need that that person has and how do I meet that need, then it’s much easier the case for everything else to fall in place. But as we all know, as entrepreneurs in the fast lane, that the temptation to also think about how do I make my ends meet and how do I meet my needs? I think that if that serves [inaudible 04:53], the need of the person you’re to serve gets kind of back to front, but you’re absolutely right. I agree with you. Do you think it’s a struggle? Do you think we have to balance that as entrepreneurs sometime?

Taylorr: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s…

Austin: Yeah, I would say so.

Taylorr: Sometimes daily, weekly, hourly in some cases type of rollercoaster that it can be. And I think it sometimes, and I think you talk about this a lot, but it really is about resilience. Like you said, if you’re kind of in the mindset of hey, how can I help somebody who needs something? And you are kind of always doing that. I think naturally you will be successful if you’re continuously thinking about the people that you’re serving. But as important as it is to assess the needs of other people, we also have the needs of ourselves as individuals, human beings that we have to cross check that with. I’m curious though, 2016, you’ve got the Ted Talk. Were you doing the free speaking prior to you getting that Ted Talk? Were you doing a little bit of that dabbling in it, or did you just jump feet first right into Ted?

Dr. Tharaka: I did jump feet first right into Ted, that was pretty much the beginning of Dr. Prior to that, I spent about a decade teaching medical students. My background is of course is medicine, I’ve been in that field for about 20 years now, I’ve been a practicing doctor for 15 years, and for the last 12 years perhaps, I’ve been teaching medical students’ month in, month out. And it’s kind of like going into the gym, isn’t it? It’s like where all the training happens and you start off small and you’re not on a big stage, but you’re there to serve people with needs and in my case, it was helping close the knowledge gap for medical students. But I always remembered how it was for me learning in medicine and how probably most of my lectures didn’t engage me. Literally, I find it hard to pay attention to lectures.

Austin: Oh yeah.

Dr. Tharaka: And there were times where I’d sit, I’d literally slapped myself across the face before the lecture starts. It’s as if I’m going to do 12 rounds in the ring and I’m like, Tharaka, you are going to pay attention. And so, I sit and then the lights dim, because of course that’s the best thing to do when you want to pay attention. Like crank it down, get a romanticized lighting condition in the room and then the lecturer begins. And for like the first 10 seconds I am in the zone and for the rest of the 59 minutes and 50 seconds, I am in a world of my own and I think I’m just going to study this when I go home and that just became more work for me. And I thought, you know, what? I would love to teach in a way that I would love to have been taught. 

And so that was kind of my stance. I always try to create low-hanging fruit for students and just be simple and break down really difficult to understand concepts like the brain and the body and all our organs and all that functional, that medical stuff in ways that they could understand. And that was my training. I did that for well, 12 years perhaps, and then I jumped feet first into TEDx.

Austin: Wow. And that was just the beginning really. That led to people wanting to bring you in that led to two more Ted Talks, If I’m to understand correctly. It led to potentially a TV show for those of you that were paying attention the bio. Can you sort of unpack where your career’s gone since that first Ted Talk? How did some of these other milestones come about in your career so far?

Dr. Tharaka: So, February 2016, Ted Talk number one, the following year another Ted talk. The opportunity shows up, you compete to get in, got a spot and that second Ted Talk I did on memory and that was a really fun and slightly different angle on what I usually bring on stage. But I really like wonderful talk for listeners because, I run them through a memory exercise in the talk and they end up surprising themselves with how much they can remember, which is just a wonderful metaphor about your potential being greater than you think. Anyway, a year goes by third Ted Talk pops up, and in a very similar way…

Austin: And this is 2019 now?

Dr. Tharaka: Yes.

Austin: Around that time frame?

Taylorr: 18.

Dr. Tharaka: 18.

Austin: Got it right. 

Dr. Tharaka: 2018. So, in 2018 we did the third Ted Talk and I wanted to do something different, so I went for a four-minute talk. You know those short, concise…

Taylorr: Wow.

Dr. Tharaka: TEDx talks. I really tried to craft an idea and distill it down into as little as I possibly could say, but create maximum impact. And that was on trust. That was on building a culture of trust. Those were the big three sort of Ted TEDx milestones And in between I was doing other conferences and those were slowly growing in size and stature in terms of the types of events that I was speaking at. But truth be told Austin, they were mainly local in Aberdeen, Scotland where I live, with one or two down in London. And those were big pieces of work as well. I think when you’re new to the table and you’re trying to find your way around, each event in some way kind of validates its feedback. It validates what how you’re serving people and you learn from that. And [inaudible 10:21] this is what I should keep going, this is what I should change, this is what I should drop, this is what I should start. So, doing that as it goes along. And then, yeah, as you just touched on the TV, for sure very, very, very blessed to have landed a role and a reality TV show that should air in the UK, perhaps the beginning of next year, sometime next year is what I’m led to believe might be the case. 

Taylorr: That is awesome. 

Dr. Tharaka: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah. It’s cool that you’ve had these big milestones in your career. You can see yourself continually progressing from that very first time that you got on stage outside of the training that you had done, and you’re a gifted speaker, so it doesn’t surprise me that that’s gone well for you, but I’m curious, and this sort of blends into a conversation we were having a minute ago, and the ups and the downs of the entrepreneurial experience. You’ve had these cool milestones, like the Ted talks. That’s a great way to say that people care about what I’m about hearing what I have to say rather As I think we’ve mentioned in previous episodes, and I think you know anything that happens in life, that’s meaningful, isn’t this direct path from where you are now to where you want to be. And although we have these highlights, like the Ted Talks or getting on a TV show or whatever else it may be, It seems that most of the entrepreneurial experience is about making the little decisions on the day to day that sometimes are not super fun or easy to make that lead to you hitting those future milestones. for example, you know, wants to become a speaker. The first thing isn’t okay, who can I go speak to? What stage am I going to go get on? It’s usually like, well, what do I want to speak on? 

That’s the first question that you have to answer. And for a lot of people that want to go on this journey, that’s where they drop off. We’re already losing people at just that first step of trying to decide what you want to actually speak about. And then you’ve got to make the decision, okay, who am I going to talk to? And a lot of people drop off at that point too. As you’ve gone and you’ve overcome these small hurdles along your way, do you find that that’s really the part of the business that you enjoy, I guess you would say is the, the little decisions that you have to make to get to where you want to go? Or do you feel like you feed off of those highlights where you get to the Ted talk and that makes it worth churning through the muck over the next few months to get to the next thing? That makes sense? That was a long drawn oy question but…

Dr. Tharaka: That’s a great question. We do feed off the highlights and man, honestly, if you had highlights every single day, then you could just feed off them completely. That hasn’t been my experience, I don’t think that’s probably most people’s experience. We’re speaking about those really wonderful positives and we should, and that’s good for us, but then you’re absolutely right. There are the struggles in between. There are the quiet moments, the slow moments, the oh my goodness, did I just go 10 steps back? And then there’s the moments where you think, or I think, why did I even get into this in the first place? How am I going to make it through the week? how am I even going to get out of bed this morning? we have those moments. And I’m super fascinated about cognitive biases and some of the automatic thinking patterns our brain has. One of them is called the loss aversion effect or loss, aversion bias, which in its simplest form just means that we hate losing more than we like winning.

Winning is great, but if we lost in the same measure that we had to just won, we hate it in way bigger measure than, than we won. It’s non-linear. It’s a non-linear relationship because we’re emotional beings. When we have those negative moments, our minds hook on them. Like say if you’re a high-performer in school and then you get a grade A and then another test, you get a grade A, and then you get another grade a and then you get a B plus, and then you get an A and an A, and an A where’s your mind going?

Taylorr: That B plus. 

Dr. Tharaka: Right.

Taylorr: No way. Can’t believe that just happen.

Dr. Tharaka: [Inaudible 14:30] Oh, it’s a B plus, I absolutely suck, I’m terrible, I’m a failure. That kid in the playground that told me I was a waste of space is absolutely right. See, this is confirmation that I shouldn’t even be on this planet. And our mind has a very interesting propensity to look out for danger and trouble and where things going wrong. Just simply by knowing that we use balance naturally just help regain that sense of balance. And so, for entrepreneurs, I think that we have resilient mindset is really important because it’s roller coaster. There’re highs and there’s lows, and lows really. But if you’re also able to zoom out, it’s a bit like the stock market, isn’t it? It’s rather than just looking at the granular changes that happened to moon. If we zoom out and look at the big picture, then we’re able to reframe the situation slightly differently, but yes, of course you’re absolutely right. Austin, the victories are really good food for the mind and at the same time, we have to be able to find joy in the journey, not just in the results.

Taylorr: For sure.

Austin: I like that. Just to wrap this up before we move on to this next topic. You’re a resilience expert, so if you were speaking to a speaker who was going through that right now and was having a hard time finding that motivation, what advice would you give them?

Dr. Tharaka: I think that there’s a real place for being aware of your value system. When you understand as a speaker, what your non-negotiable core values are, when you understand that what you stand for. Maybe it is innovation, maybe it’s creativity, maybe it’s relationship, maybe it’s the spreading of joy. When you become clearer on your set of values, when the world around you goes crazy, when there’s too much fog or there’s too much uncertainty, as long as when you get up in the morning, you do something that’s consistent with your values, you have a sense of, do you know what? I actually spent my time well, and in the right direction. And interestingly, biologically speaking, there’s something different that goes on in the brain when we are connected to our sense of values and to cut a long story short, you activate certain parts of the brain when you were very affirmed about your values and studies have demonstrated that our goal attainment probability increases. 

So, a quick weight loss study, for example, cohort, people were told to go, just do exercise. Another cohort of people were led to connect with their sense of value and their why, and then go off and do exercise. It was that second cohort that were connected to sense of value that got better results when it came to weight loss. So, going back full circle to your question, Austin, what about for speakers out there? I think that being clear on your values is a great place to start. Even before what do I want to go speak about, before looking out before externalizing, internalize. What is the goal that’s in my heart right now, because when you discover that that’s what you can share with the world? And so, I would say having a sense of your values and why is a really great place to start.

Taylorr: Oh, that’s awesome. 

Austin: Boom. I love that.

Taylorr: Awesome advice. 

Austin: Such a good answer.

Taylorr: And actionable too. You can just stay in line with your core values and you can see some results out of it. I’m curious, with resiliency as a topic, I find for myself at least that for me, I don’t know that there’s a way I can once and for all solve that doubt that could come up, would you lose occasionally? For example, if you just lose a big deal or you made a mistake, that still can impact me negatively, but I find like with proper exercise, like some of the ones you’re outlining that I might be able to rebound more quickly into a more positive mindset. Is there a way to once and for all solve that roller coaster of always looking at losses or more negative things in a more prominent fashion than things that are positive? Or is it an iterative process and we just get better at handling it? Is there a way to once and for all solve that issue where we’re really focused on the negative and less impacted by let’s say like the positive? Do you know what I mean by that? Is it iterative or is there a way to solve it once and for all?

Dr. Tharaka: No, it’s a great question. I would like in this scenario to doing a DIY project with say one tool in the toolbox versus all the tools in the toolbox. You wouldn’t just try and put a bed together with a hammer, it would be with a screwdriver and a saw and the spirit level and all that kind of bits and pieces and that’s what I would say for resilience. Because I think that there are lots of resilience tools that we can use and I think it’s a full 360 approach that we can take, the more tools we use, the better that that we stay strong and resilient and can spring back. Does that make sense?

Taylorr: Yeah.

Dr. Tharaka: Am I? Yeah? Okay. I think one of the tools is a positive reframing. And that’s that cognitive trick that we do whereby we look at the same situation, but from a different angle. So, it’s the difference between what we call the loss frame angle and the gain frame angle. The loss frame angle is I didn’t close that deal, the claim didn’t say yes. Oh, my goodness, I failed. Last frame. But the gain frame would be okay, the deal wasn’t closed, why was that? Could this actually be a good thing? Did I learn something? Did I sow a seed there? Is this a longevity deal? Are they going to come back to me in a couple of years? And so, gain frame loss frame. So cognitive reframing is all about, I’m not seeing a problem, I’m seeing a possibility. I’m not seeing an obstacle; I’m seeing an opportunity. The discoverer of Vitamin Szent-Györgyi, Nobel Prize winner said, this is how I define innovation. He said, I’m seeing what everyone else is seeing, but I’m thinking what no one else is thinking. 

Austin: That’s powerful. 

Taylorr: That is powerful. 

Dr. Tharaka: And when we start to build that emotional intelligence skill of being able to reframe in a healthy way, in a gain framing way that one tool in the toolbox that can help us a little bit. And I’m not saying for a minute, we’d be delusional. If you make a mistake, you’re going go well, do you know what that was probably good for the world. I think it’s important to be able to have a degree of self-awareness and take feedback and go, do you know what that was a mistake? How do we mop that up? And continue and, and prevent that from happening again. But yeah, positive reframing is really helpful. I think another one, and this is deeper, but it’s disconnecting your sense of identity from your results.

Austin: Can you say that again? 

Taylorr: Wow. 

Dr. Tharaka: Yeah. This is deeper guys. We’re on the couch now. [Cross-talk 21:28] It’s really important to disconnect your sense of identity from your results. What do I mean by that? Well, we live in a very metric oriented society. How many likes did I get on my feed? How many views? How many downloads? How much money I’m making? Are metrics bad? No, they tell us something it’s data. You guys know that of all people, right? Data is important, how we perform is important, what we do is important, but who we are is slightly different. So, I often say, you’re not a human doing, you’re a human being. So, what is your identity? Who are you like? What is your sense of purpose? And we’re going back to that deep stuff, because if you become really clear and confident than that, how you perform out there, whether this is a high day on the roller coaster, or a low day on the roller coaster doesn’t shift your sense of validity and should you be on the planet? Yes or no, that doesn’t change. 

Yes, I should. I’m a servant to serve many. I’ve got gold in my heart that want to share out and today performance was up, it was down, that’s fine, you can learn from it, but my sense of identity is untapped. The problem is however, it’s very addictive to see good metrics and then without knowing, we kind of feel good when we’re doing well, doing not being when we’re doing well, and we start to feel a little bit bad when we’re doing worse. And that becomes a much more painful journey on the rollercoaster. So, I would say if you can disconnect and see them separately, that can help as well. All right, that was deep lads, but [cross-talk 23:03].

Austin: No, that was so good. 

Taylorr: That’s a tool…

Austin: I agree.

Taylorr:  I can use now. Man, this is why I love these episodes is like you get to learn so much. That was a golden nugget right there.

Dr. Tharaka: When I’m doing coaching for CEOs, executives, speakers, whatever, when I’m doing live coaching with folks, one of the exercises that I often do not always, it’s only if it’s applicable, is that I ask them to write on a post-it the person that you are looking at is dot, dot, dot. Just write that phrase out. The person that you are looking at is dot, dot, dot, and go and stick that on your mirror, the mirror that you look in every morning and night, when you brush your teeth. Then go and grab five post-its and write down attributes, virtues, characteristics of who you are in your heart. Is it that you are loving? Is it that you’re generous? Is it that your servant hearted, is it that you’re innovative? Is it that you go beyond yourself and stick that on the mirror? So, when you brush your teeth every morning and night, you’re starting to reaffirm your sense of who you are, your identity, and what’s on that, on that mirror does not change depending on your bank balance, depending on the number of views you get the downloads, et cetera, et cetera. There you go. Identity and results. Two different things, both important, but separate.

Austin: Yeah, I I’m going to do that exercise today. I love that. It’s so easy to get caught up in it too. And numbers are a slippery slope because they should be a diagnostics tool. They should tell us what’s being successful and what we should duplicate, and they should tell us what’s going wrong and what we need to fix, but I know personally, there are many times where I look at the numbers and that either is my reason for being excited or my reason for not being excited and being sad. And it’s a trigger to feel one of those two things, but that doesn’t mean that we have to sit in those two emotions for too long, because really, we should actively pursue what that means to us and how we should react in order to either fix or replicate the success. It’s like a mental exercise that you have to constantly train yourself to do and I know I could be way better at that. I’m in my monkey brain probably more often than I should be and I should probably be in my executive brain because that’s where the good decisions are made. So anyways, I like that.

Dr. Tharaka: Make sense. And me too, it’s something that I want to get better, at something I want to practice and upskill in. But I kind of liken it to a bit of like a laser field I have around my mind, literally protect my mind from thinking things that aren’t necessarily fruitful for me are going to build me up, but deflate me, so yeah, I’m with you on that. Something to practice.

Austin: Definitely. 

Taylorr: We’ve been talking about this roller coaster and all the resiliency and the tools that we need and the journey that you’ve been on specifically from 2016 until now. And I heard you talk about the different topics that you had for Ted, and landing those gigs and what you talk on now. Did you know the moment that you started speaking, you knew exactly what your lane was, what your expertise was, who to serve, how to serve them, or was that too, an iterative process for you?

Dr. Tharaka: It was an iterative process. Truth be told, before I landed my consultant job as a psychiatrist, I really wanted to go into traditional ministry, church ministry and become a pastor. That’s really kind of where my alignment was. And through a turn of events, I landed up in the professional arena as my vocation as a doctor full time. But the why in my heart, my values didn’t change. I still wanted to serve other people in their life and their situation where they were at. And so, in a sense, I could still do the serving people thing in the professional realm a little bit akin to how I would do that in a traditional ministry set up. My big message that I carried within me was that could we shift the way we think to experience bigger and better things in our life? Could we break the ceiling of limiting beliefs and step into a better version of ourselves? So that’s kind of like the lesson that I went through myself for a number of years before I started speaking. 

And so that was the furnace in my heart that kind of fueled the messages. That came out through the lens of shifting your mindset, that came through the lens of coaching to unlock your potential, to go from great to a whole lot greater, it also brought the ethos of bringing people together, which was great for team. It was great for leaders who could bring people together and cohesion and being on the same page and now we’re talking about vision and direction and momentum, which works really, really well for organizations. I think the DNA was all about serving and growth. Going from strength to strength, upping your game and then I took that through the topics that I learned as a psychiatrist.

Taylorr: Wow. To bring it all full circle. It all has to do with those core values, you know, and then from there you try and just get more and more aligned with them as you continue to experiment.

Dr. Tharaka: Totally, And you’re right. It is iterative. I think for perfectionists and I have battled with that, iteration or messy action sounds like a really scary thing. You just want it perfect; you want it to be right and then you kind of get analysis paralysis and you don’t take action, but isn’t it true that in entrepreneurship, messy action is the order of the day? 

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah. 

Taylorr: One of my biggest struggles, honestly. Growing up, I was a thoroughbred perfectionist, all perfectionist and it wasn’t until I learned actually through my adventures in science that everything needs to be iterative, but even then, you have to cross check that. Sometimes I’m working on something in Speaker Flow and I want it to be absolutely perfect. I’m like, no, it’s okay. It’s good where it’s at, we can collect some data, learn from it, understand it’s good and then make it better as a result of it. So, personally speaking, I can relate to the perfectionism how that can lead to paralysis and analysis, and then what it takes to learn how to get out of that thought process. So, you can iterate on it.

Dr. Tharaka: How did you turn the corner Taylorr? Not everyone’s been able to break that [cross-talk 29:53].

Taylorr: Man, turn the corner, I think that’s a strong phrase. I think I give myself some credit, but [inaudible 30:02] It’s not that I’ve mastered this at all. It’s just that when I know that I’m trying to be a perfectionist, I recognize it, I honor it, I acknowledge it and then I try and fix it because I know in that mindset, I’m not being my best performer basically. And also, just from experience. I think the first time that, let’s say I was doing a project or something, I need to be absolutely perfect and then it took me a while to get out of that mindset, like, no, it doesn’t. Now it’s just a quicker process of getting out of that mindset. It’s not like it goes away entirely, it’s just that it’s quicker for me to recognize it, acknowledge it and then move past it.

But I think it was iteration. It was trying it once and then being like, wow, this didn’t kill me by it not being perfect, whatever it was, or like oh wow. By it not being perfect, it’s actually better than I ever envisioned it in the first place that I took this path of iteration, rather than trying to perfect it the first time around. And then you get validated that messy actions lead to better results and then over time you can correlate that success to the initial starting point of that messy action. So, it was very much iterative and it’s validation from previous experiences I think, but that first time having to get out of the perfectionist mindset and it wasn’t entirely easy.

Dr. Tharaka: Okay. What you’re saying I can really resonate with Taylorr, and I think it applies to lots of speakers. Because if you think about it, part of a speaker’s role is to appear perfect on stage. Unconsciously like what you have to deliver has to be quote unquote perfect, but the truth of the matter is that you can’t, you can’t get there without taking messy action. And I think that’s one of the paradoxical struggles for a speaker and it can be really exhausting. I know for myself; it was really exhausting and for us speakers, I don’t know if we talk about it enough, but we’ll go deliver on stage and everyone thinks, wow, that was great. But you know you forgot that one line that you have rehearsed, you’d mixed up a couple of your sections back to front. No one else in the room knew. 5,000 people in the room did not know, but you knew and you go home and you’re literally kicking yourself, literally shoving at yourself in the shower going, you’re such an idiot, why didn’t you do that? All that kind of stuff.

And this is one of those secret struggles that perfectionists have. But I resonate with what you were saying. You come to a point of going; do you know what this isn’t sustainable? Or is there an easier way? And interestingly perfectionism, isn’t really the pursuit of perfection. It’s actually often driven by the theater of imperfection. That’s often the root of a perfectionist is actually when I was a kid, I wasn’t trained what good enough was, and that can come from critical parents or critical systems, getting you into trouble. And then you have you have no sense of what’s a small mistake? What’s a big mistake? Every mistake is bad, it’s awful. And so actually, perfect is the only safe place I know and I’ll try and strive to that, but it’s exhausting, you can’t live like that as a speaker. So messy action. I love what you’re saying there, Taylorr makes a lot of sense. 

Taylorr: Yeah, definitely. And really rounded out this episode. Thank you so much for sharing all of your advice and your tools and talking about your core values and resilience and making sure this whole thing is iterative. I think that can give a lot of people confidence in being able to progress when times are tough. And I have new tools now as a result of this. So, thank you again for being able to come on the show and share with us your expertise. As you know, we’re all about creating value for our audience and you do a tremendous amount of great work out there. What are some of the things that our audience can benefit from that you’re working on?

Dr. Tharaka: Well, right. Yeah, sure. I have a free Facebook group currently. It’s called Dr. T’s Coaching Secrets and it’s a free community where you can dive in and I’ll be sharing top tips on high-performance life coaching or managing your team and all that kind of stuff, particularly in this time when there’s so much uncertainty. Dr. T’s Coaching Secrets Facebook group. 

Taylorr: Awesome. Well, we will make sure that is in the show notes so if you’re listening and you want to join the Facebook group, don’t forget to go to the show notes and click that link. And as always, if you want more awesome resources like this, don’t forget to subscribe to the show, rate it and go to speakerflow.com/resources to get all the free goodies that we have to offer. Thank you so much for chiming in. I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxbus. Auxbus is the all-in-one suite of tools you need to run your podcast and it’s actually what we run here at Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking. It makes planning podcasts simple; it makes recording podcasts simple; it even makes publishing podcasts to the masses simple and quite honestly, Technically Speaking wouldn’t be up as soon as it is without Auxbus. Thank you so much Auxbus. And if you are interested in checking Auxbus out, whether you’re starting a podcast or you have one currently get our special offer auxbus.com/speakerflow, or click the link below in our show notes.