Episode Transcript

Julia Landauer 0:00 Music, hello everybody, and welcome to the season three finale of if I'm honest with Julia Landauer. I'm going to do my very, very best to not sound too nasally. And I thank you for your patience as you listen to the sick voice. I put off recording this episode as long as possible after a very nasty bout of sickness, which I'm clearly not fully recovered from. But alas, the show must go on, and we are rounding out our third season the show and this podcast started in May of 2023, and it was an opportunity for me to connect with you guys in a different way. It stemmed from my keynote speaking, actually, and people wanting more content and more stories and more perspectives, which was so cool and reassuring that the messaging that I was delivering was was valuable, and so that was really, really cool. It's been a fun journey. It is exceptionally difficult to maintain a podcast, especially once you start working full time. So I have total appreciation and admiration for the folks who work full time and continue doing podcasting full time. I've done it for about a year now, and things are just ramping up, and my focuses are changing, and, you know, it's been a really fun journey. I'm not quite sure what the future of this podcast is, but for for now, at this point, we're probably going to take a little break, not retired entirely. Clearly, I am not a fan of fully stepping away from anything. I like to leave that leave the door open. But right now, I think we're, we're going to to take a pause. And this is the 59th episode. I can't tell you how much my OCD is killing me that I wasn't happy with one of my episodes a few weeks back, and so couldn't have a nice round 60 for my three seasons. But you know what? There are bigger problems in the world, so we're going to move on from that. And when I was thinking about how I wanted to close out this incredible, therapeutic, interesting, educational podcast for me and hopefully for you guys too, I decided I wanted to keep it simple and share five lessons that I've learned throughout 2024 a lot of these are going to be rooted in my corporate experience and at work, but they're relevant for everyone, regardless of what you're doing. The first big lesson that I learned this year is that good communication is really hard. And I knew this. I knew this conceptually. You hear people talking about it all the time, but there was a big shift in going from freelancing and how I was having to communicate before starting a full time job versus afterwards. The main ways that I communicated before working in corporate were with my family and friends, which is very intentional and practiced, and we we ask for feedback, and we try to communicate in a way that is effective for all of us. There's a lot of active work that goes into making that communication, because it happens all the time, right? Another big form of communication had been in keynotes, which are very planned and thought out and practiced and had feedback, and very little of that is spur of the moment communication. And then there was a lot of communication with my racing teams with that they were the same people for a year. So I was able to pay really close attention and learn their styles and experiment and have, you know, different chances to continue communication. And we were all clearly working towards that common goal of trying to do the best we could on track. And so when you have that very clear unifying goal, I think it helps with communication, because you know, where you're all trying to get in corporate, everyone's got different agendas. Everyone has different levels of involvement with other people. You might need favors from someone. You might have regular communication with someone. You might not know someone well enough to know what their style is. And it's really, really challenging to bop around quickly figure out how people communicate and to get out of your own mindset. It's also interesting, because you're interacting with so many different types of people in a corporate setting, and so everyone naturally has different strengths and weaknesses, and if you're not privy to them, or if you're not interfacing in person, or if you don't see the nuances of how anyone else is, you might be less inclined to be able to communicate most effectively, and so you have to somewhat develop a one size fits all method for communicating to be able to be most effective with the most number of people. And I feel like in corporate, you're able to see how bad communication transpires as well. And there. People who run people the wrong way, and I can hear it specifically because of tone used, or because of word choice, or kind of not putting themselves in other people's shoes. And so the big, the big takeaways that I've had in this, you know, year or so in corporate when it comes to communication, are that tone really matters, and I think it's pretty easy to come across as passive, aggressive or condescending, and that has an impact on people. And there are ways to get the same message across in a different tone that I think will be more empowering and encouraging than being negative and having a negative tone with people. The second big thing that I've learned with communication that is something I should have thought about a lot more early on, but that context matters, and the reality is that no one has the lens with which you are about to communicate. So if you're about to send an email, if you're about to start a phone call, you know you've just been thinking about whatever it is that you're going to communicate, the other person hasn't. And I have found myself getting called out by people I work with in a neutral way, but being called out because I'll ask them a question that, in my mind, makes total sense, like, I'll send them a note on teams chat, and I'll get called out. I remember this one guy called me out because he was like, I'm not sure I know what you're talking about. And I realized that I had not provided any context as to which project that we had been working on I was referring to. And it was kind of the kick in the butt that I needed to realize, like, okay, no one knows where I'm coming from, and someone might receive my email when they're in the middle of something else entirely. And so again, I think that's a kind of a bubble that you live in with freelance a little bit. And I don't know, maybe I'm maybe that's just me, but I've been much more careful now about providing context when I reach out to people, so that it's as quick for them to understand where I'm coming from, and they're most likely to get it not get frustrated with me for not being explicit and clear, and overall, it helps communication. So I still have a long way to go with communicating, and I'm continuing to learn so much, and I'm kind of surprised that I still had so much to learn with communication, but it really is different in corporate it's pretty exciting. It's also cool to learn how other people communicate, and kind of pick the things that I really like from other people. I do feel like I've become a better listener, and I pause a lot more before responding or before contributing. I let other people talk more, and it's it's incredible how that changes the dynamic, and it's really exciting. The second lesson that I feel I have gotten more examples of and more explicit examples of this past year is that everyone is learning on the fly. I had done advising, I had done consulting, I had done freelance work, content creation, keynote speaking, you know, business development, I've done all this stuff, but not in the corporate setting. And there were so many things that I had to learn everything from, you know, I had relationships with people at NASCAR prior, and how does my camaraderie with them, or how do my interactions with them change a little bit or shift a little bit to fit the the atmosphere of an office setting? Or I had to learn, you know, proper amount of time to follow up with someone. I had to learn what the flow was of NASCAR. And from a season perspective, when are people really busy? When are people in a slower period? How do, how do interactions with leadership work, all of that stuff? And I just felt like I was clearly playing catch up for people, from people who were there for a while or had other jobs. And so I clearly remember there was one time, probably back in August, where I was doing something completely new to me, completely out of my depth, and was learning a lot, asking a lot of questions of my colleagues and my teammates. And I remember I was on a one on one call with someone, and I vocalized I appreciated their patience, because I

haven't done this before and I'm learning. And this person immediately said, Oh, that was the same with me when I started. I had never done this, even though I had all these jobs before. And it made me feel a lot better, and it made me realize that we're all learning. And I think it's easy to have imposter syndrome if you're new to a situation, but there was something about hearing from multiple people that they also had to learn for the first time, or had to learn other things for the first time, that made me feel a lot less alone, and made me feel confident that I would figure it out like I had figured out a lot of new things before in my in my life, and so being able to learn on the fly is important. It's something everyone's doing. Um, I've also learned that I don't have to tell people that I don't know what I'm doing, and I like to be transparent. And I found that on racing teams, it was really important to be clear about what I was learning for the first time or what was new. And I guess in some ways, it helps justify if you make mistakes, but I'm gaining confidence in my ability to just quietly figure it out on my own and not let people know, and if they call me out for it, fine, but otherwise, everyone's kind of in the same boat of figuring it out as they go, and it's okay to just own that privately. That leads me to my third lesson, which is something that I have really grown into this year, which I'm so happy about, which is that we need to cherish our own unique perspective. And I say this from the context of I've realized that throughout my life, I try to do things the quote, unquote right way, which is typically the status quo, but trying to do things as the status quo diminishes the special things that I bring to the table. And this was really clear in terms of corporate because, again, I'm not a traditional candidate, but I have so many unique experiences, particularly as a competitor in NASCAR now working on the corporate side so many perspectives that other people might not have, and the reason I was brought in was to leverage those perspectives and to leverage those very niche experiences that so few people have to be able to help the business. And that's a really, really empowering thing. And I think that all of us can really lean into the fact that we were hired, or we were brought into something, or we were nominated for something, or we are here and we are at this point in life, because of all of our unique experiences and our own ways that we look at the world, to be able to help whatever we're Working on each of our unique set of experiences are at least partially why we are where we are, and we don't want to abandon that. We want to lean into it. We want to really encourage and nourish the growth that we are bringing for ourselves and the way that we are empowering ourselves and gaining confidence in ourselves and knowing that our experiences are part of why we are contributing members of whatever our communities are, and that was really empowering to see firsthand and to remember, especially when there was an element of imposter syndrome because of my lack of other More traditional experiences. The fourth lesson is that AI is a very useful tool. Now, truth be told, the episode that I wasn't happy with was an AI focused episode, because I have been really leaning into it a lot, personally, professionally, and I wanted to tackle it because it's really cool. It's also really scary. It's so vast, there's a lot of unknowns, and I just couldn't quite encapsulate it in an episode the way I wanted to. But I am a full convert to chatGPT. I think it's really powerful. I think it's really helpful. I try to not be pretentious about good use cases for AI, because there are some people who will be proactively building and doing really cool stuff, and then there will be other people who are being much more efficient because of some of the simpler ways that chatgpt can be used, myself included. Like I know that I have a very conversational written tone, and it's helpful to be able to make it sound more professional sometimes. But AI is really powerful, and so we can get into a whole existential discussion at another time, but in terms of tools that we can use in our day to day, it really helps with communication. It really helps with ideas. And there's so much that we don't know and there's so much out there that we can have really precise prompts that help us come up with ideas, whether it's for gifts or vacations or projects you just never know and and there are a lot of cool things there. I've also learned that there are a lot of really cool tools when it comes to the content creation. You know, when I have an hour long podcast episode with a guest, it can sometimes be really time consuming to sift through that that recording, try to find the clips. So I use something called Opus Pro, which uses AI to identify what the engaging clips will be from that full hour long video. And it saves me so much time, and I have to edit it right? It's not perfect. Some of it gets a little cut off or is not the main point that I want, but it saves me a ton of time to be able to then go, go, you know, focus on the promotion of the podcast and other things that I have to do so AI is really useful. I know that it's scary. I know that it who knows where it's going to go, but I do encourage everyone to at least become knowledgeable about it so that you can. I. The very least, react if it becomes relevant, but then also use it as a way to help your own life and to help your own productivity and creativity. And yeah, and a PSA to remember that large language models, and whether it's grok or chatgpt or Bard, they do use the data that you put in there to train their models, so do not upload sensitive information to any of these public AI models. The last lesson that I want to share, that I felt in my bones this year is that parents are superheroes. We have a bunch of friends who have one or two kids under two and a half and oh my gosh, I think about how I feel tired. I feel like I don't have enough hours in the day. I feel like I get sick and I don't have any children. And I see my friends who are down on sleep, are down on personal time are, you know, having to deal with the financial implications of kids, and they're thriving, they're getting out there, they're hanging out, they're being more social than I am, and I'm just in complete awe, because I hadn't really interacted with babies very much before the last couple years, I didn't have babies in my life growing up, none of my friends from high school have kids, and it's wild to see the peak behind the curtain, because I was just so unaware. And I think it's paired with social media also showing the the real, real life, life with kids. But it's incredible I had, I had no idea just how how much your life changes, and how much you handle and how you embrace the chaos and how you have germs brought into your home. And I just want to give a shout out to all of the parents, because what you do is incredible. It is so superhuman to be able to not only keep these little, not self sufficient beings alive, but to engage with them and act with them and encourage their growth, and to be patient with them and to deal with the illogical reactions that they have to things, and then to love them and to be so cutesy with them. It is so impressive. It is so cool. And, yeah, I just wanted to give a special shout out to all the parents out there, regardless of how old your kids are, you are amazing. You are so impressive. You are tackling so much, and especially when I see my friends still having a good time and still enjoying being with people around them and still going out and they're living their lives. It's really cool to see, and a lot of things that I want to model my own potential future parenting after. It's It's really exciting. And you all should be so, so proud of yourselves. So yeah, that was, it was. It's been impressive this last year to see how people evolve as parents, and it's really, really cool. So those are my five lessons that I learned this year that I want to share with you. A recap, good communication is really hard. Everyone is learning on the fly. We need to cherish our unique perspective. AI is a very useful tool, and parents are superheroes.

As some closing thoughts, this has been a big year of growth for me, particularly in that transition from racer to next chapter. And I'm very happy to report that I am overall less sad about not pursuing racing anymore, and I'm actively more excited about this next phase of my life. I'm excited about the future personally, and I found myself wondering more frequently, if I were given six months to live, what would I want to do differently? And there are some small things, but I'll admit that I've gotten to the point where I'm living presently enough and intentionally enough, then I don't think there are massive things that I would change, and I feel very lucky that I'm in that position. But as we go into the holidays and we go into this time of reflection, I would encourage you to check in with yourself regularly. You know, if you didn't have unlimited time? Well, none of us have unlimited time, but if you were given a very short, finite amount of time, what would you want to do differently? And you might not be able to up and do exactly that right like if we know that we only have six months, we're going to live a little differently. But if there are big things that you feel like you haven't done or haven't pursued or haven't worked on with yourself, try to lean into that. I think it's really important to be as present as possible. You know, to focus on what you love, to focus on the people you love, which is a big thing for me. I think the people in my life who I care about and who are reciprocal in that caring are the most special, and I want to nurture those relationships as much as possible. Yeah. On the professional side, it's been really cool to grow in the corporate setting and learn so much and get to work with really cool people. I've evolved my keynote storytelling more, and I've done more this year and more tweaks this year than I have in years past. And so experimenting with the narrative arc and adding my corporate experiences as some of the examples that I can talk about in new ways has been really cool. I continue to have my weekly face times with my siblings and Ben and I are doing great. And so overall, it's really cool to feel very happy with where things are, to still feel a lot of little joys in life, and to keep pushing and to not start cruising, not get comfy, but to keep pushing and growing and figuring out what else is out there in the world, because it is a very big world, and there's a lot of cool stuff in it. Everyone that is the end of our episode. If you like this show, I hope that you'll share past episodes with people that you have in your life. I hope that you will leave comments. I would love a review. Let me know any big lesson that you learned this year. I would love to know what everyone else is learning about. I hope you have a wonderful holiday, and as always, thank you for letting me be honest with you. You.