 Hi, Lisa. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Thanks, George. I'm so happy to be here. Great. So let me just share with the audience what your bio is and we're going to get into it. So first of all, hello, everybody. Today we're going to be talking about a great topic that I think a lot of you are going to benefit from, which is how do we show up, like for example, on video, even though we might be fearful of it. Even though we might be shy about showing ourselves and being present in public speaking, but also on video. So this is what we're going to talk about today. It's going to be really helpful. So let me first share with you Lisa's bio and then we're going to get into the conversation. So Liesl Teversham helps sensitive souls and introverts who don't like the spotlight yet need to be more visible, to feel safe to be seen. She helps them to work through the blocks and fears that stop them and find and embrace their true authentic strengths. Two of her favorite tools are EFT tapping, which probably a lot of you have heard of, and another one called Clifton Strengths. And these provide a very strong foundation for any introvert who wants to make a difference in the world in their unique and quiet way. I love your bio, Liesl, because it just, it's very extremely clear and I bet a lot of those watching this are, you know, raising their hand. Maybe she can shyly say, yes, I do want to be more visible, but I've been fearful about it. I've been blocked. I don't want to get criticized. I mean, you've heard it all. And also as an introvert, you have experienced it all and you've obviously done a lot of work to overcome it. I mean, so you're here. You also do videos, you do webinars, etc. So let's get into it by first talking about where this visibility fear comes from. Yeah, George, thanks so much for that lovely intro and I exactly that. That's exactly why I understand it so well because it was my own journey and I want to start off with empathy for anybody who is still battling with this. So I'm just going to show you my screen. I've got a little, a few slides that will help us to just keep track visible. Can you see it all well? Yes. Okay, perfect. So that little cat is just so I think how many introverts feels like I'm willing to show this board, but not the rest of me and it starts feeling too scary to show up. And so I want to just help us to understand a little bit of the background. If we think of how children learn to survive in life and they, for instance, come across a red hot stove plate and they try it out. Children have to learn by trying things out before they even know language. They try things out so they may put their finger on a very hot stove plate and it's going to burn. And it's that painful learning that teaches the nervous system. Don't go near a stove plate again. It isn't good for you. It's going to hurt. So it gets written in a part of the brain called the limbic system. And that's why I've got that little brain picture there. I don't know if you'll be able to see my mouse, but there's a little part called the amygdala right there. It's part of the limbic system. And it's in the amygdala that we store emotions, particularly anger and fear. And those two are the emotions that help us to fight. Anger helps us to fight a bear. If we're going to be the dinner of the bear, we want to fight or we're going to run away. And that's the fear that helps us to do that. So a child learns in life that don't do certain things. It's going to hurt and it gets written in the amygdala. So when they see a stove plate again, there has to be no conscious thinking about it. That's too late. It's the instant response of that part of the brain that sends the signals to the nervous system to say, stop, don't even try. Children don't one day wake up or let's say teenagers or adults don't one day just randomly wake them to go, I'm afraid of the spotlight now. There are things that happened in their lives that's similar to these painful learnings that we have as children that taught the nervous system it's not safe for you to be seen or to show up. So that's the kind of just, you know, comparing it to how we learn as children. We keep learning this way as adults too. The learning doesn't stop for us. So there are many of these type of events that happen to us as children that either teach us it's okay to be seen. I can be seen and I'll still be safe or don't even try again because it was painful. Something painful happened in an event in our childhood. So I just want to go through a few things around this survival learning because, you know, we know, for instance, George, you teach courses and when somebody is in a happy state, they learn the best. So how come we learn through this painful way as well is this painful way of learning usually teaches our nervous system to survive. It's not optimal learning. I'm talking about learning for survival on earth, you know, in our human body. So when these, for instance, something happens to us in childhood, there's no threat. We have neutral feelings about it. There's virtually no learning. You know, there's hundreds of millions of things that happened to us as a child that we can't remember because it didn't have a particular strong emotional signature to it. Memory gets stored together with emotion. So the ones that have a big emotion, we can easily recall. When there's a threat that happens in an event, a threat to our survival, we have strong feelings about it like fear, anger, humiliation, embarrassment, shame, guilt, those kind of things. We use those learnings to survive. Our nervous system knows now when something is like that. Don't do that again. It's uncomfortable. So try and avoid it. I just want to say a few words about trauma. People talk a lot about trauma these days. It's much more raised in our awareness. So what is a trauma? It's when this little word eudon, it's just a short, what it like a abbreviation. Yes. Yes. For these four words, it stands for a trauma is when there's an unexpected event that is dramatic, like big emotion where we feel, where we feel isolated. That's the eye. And when there is no strategies for survival, we don't know how to, what to do with that thing. So like a child touching a stove may not be that dramatic because his parent may be there. You know, he has a strategy. You can pull his finger away. So trauma is when we feel helpless in that situation. And we talk about the difference between a big tea trauma and a small tea trauma. And the big tea traumas is when there's a real threat to our life. For instance, when we've had a serious car accident or we actually, you know, we have a serious illness or there's a crime that is committed and we're receiving inner that crime. That is a big tea trauma where our life was actually threatened. Those are almost in a way with my tools, sort of easier to clear than the small tea traumas. That's very interesting. The small tea traumas and when there's no real threat, but there's a perceived threat to our safety in the world. And it's these things that I most often work with George. It's the things that can happen over and over and over. For instance, a dad that used to be just very irritable, angry because he hated his work, came home, you know, and then sort of almost took it out on the family. So those are the kind of things that it's not a real threat. You know, you're not going to die, but the nervous system interprets it as unsafe perhaps to show up. You know, I need to avoid this dad because whenever I see him, it's not safe. I'm going to be shouted at or angry words. So an example of that is also just, for instance, when you stand up in clothes and you need to do a speech and you forget your words. That's a small tea trauma. But now many of the introverts I've worked with have something like that happen. And that extreme embarrassment and emulation makes a little score in that in McDellar that says, you know, don't show up, look at what happened last time, it's not going to be safe. So it's just all about survival, this kind of learning. And we instantly and unconsciously give that event meaning when it has this huge emotional response in our body. Inside of our brain, something happens that says that thing is not safe, that type of situation is not safe. Or we give it a meaning like, that means I'm not good enough. Or, you know, in other words, we give it a, there is a belief that gets born in that moment of big emotion. That's where what we call limiting beliefs come from. Now, beliefs don't have to be limiting. I mean, if a child touches a stove and he learns from that a stove is not safe or a red hot plate is not safe. That's an absolutely serving belief, right? That's a good belief to have. It's not limiting. But if he made the internal event mean don't ever go in a kitchen again. That's not going to be a belief that's going to serve him for the rest of his life. So we want to work with these traumatic events and clear them that gave us beliefs that are not serving us. For instance, I can't be visible at all. I must hide at all costs. So that's how beliefs start. And I just want to give a little personal example, George, of when I was 14. So what's this emotion do you think on this little picture? What is this guy's feeling? Well, it looks like embarrassment, right? Blushing. Exactly, George. So I'm just going to stop sharing my screen for a moment and just share a little story that happened to me at age 14. So there I was standing in front of the class and we had to do a little speech and I was so confident that I could do the speech without my notes. That I practiced and practiced and practiced the previous day and it was like two minutes and I could say it word for word the previous day. I felt really good. So I didn't take my notes with me the next day. Got up in front of the class and went confidently to the front, standing there looking at 30 eyes, expectantly waiting for me to start and I forgot everything. And because it was a learned speech, if I didn't know the start of it, I couldn't continue. So I couldn't get up somewhere in the middle. It was not a talk, it was a speech. So standing there in front of that class was 30 eyes looking at me, waiting for me to say something was mortifying. I can remember the red, it's like red is a lobster. And like a two minute silence where a pin could drop and eventually the teacher said to me, go and sit down and let's give it another go tomorrow. So of course the next day I went with my notes. But that kind of event gets written in the subconscious mind, the amygdala that says it's not safe to be seen. It's really a terrible thing. So just stay away from that kind of thing. So for years and years and it sometimes all happens, I go blood red when suddenly I feel all these eyes on me. And that's how we're not aware of most of the people I work with. When we find these events, they just not aware what has caused it. So how can you deal with it if you don't know where it comes from. So that's just a really personal example that I hope illustrates how something like this can happen. Thank you for sharing that because probably many of us have had that experience. Certainly I probably have blocked it out because I've had so many experiences. When I was a kid I learned classical piano and one of the things that we do in that kind of situation is we have recitals, music recitals, where, you know, talk about learning your speech. Well, it's like classical, like you got to learn this, you know, you know, Rachmaninoff, you know, whatever. It's like you have to learn every single note has to be exactly right. Not like you're just playing for fun and you're like, you know, playing something from the radio. No, you have to play this. And so I have had so many traumatic music recital experiences in my life. It's like everybody came to watch a concert performance with all of us. And then I'm up there and I'm like making mistakes and the teacher came up to like, you know, like angrily correct me. And it's like, that was horrifying. That was horrifying. So I, and I've also had public speaking disaster experiences to just so, so thank you for sharing yours because I bet a lot of us can imagine that. Yeah, exactly, George. I had that same experience because I had music as my first career and so many. And so what happens is kind of these events build on each other to make it more and more unsafe. Every time you have another one of these experiences, your nervous system goes, well, I told you last time, don't even try. And it makes it more and more, you know, the heart beats, adrenaline, the cortisol, all of those things in your, and your voice starts quivering and your fingers can't possibly work when you've got all the, they tremble. So you're going to make more mistakes. So just the snowball of lovely events that people then wonder why can't I just show up, you know, and be myself when everybody is looking at me. Well, these things really big contribution. So I'm going to go back to my slides just to get to the next point. It's a very good thing to think about is like why are some people more fearful than others. Because not everybody has the same level of fear about visibility, right. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about each of them. So there's three main points that I want to mention is the one of them is we call them ACEs is how adverse childhood experiences. They found that people with adverse childhood experiences are more prone to develop PTSD later in life. Not everybody who was in a war or in a car accident or in something traumatic develops PTSD. Why is that? So they did the research and found that people with a certain number of ACEs are more prone to develop PTSD later because your nervous system as a child was already set up to feel unsafe in the world. So ACEs are not only things like childhood abuse, like, you know, sexual abuse or emotional abuse or physical abuse. They are also things where a child feels unsafe because, for instance, a parent is very depressed or one of their family members was very sick. So everything revolves around that person. And this little child may just not have had the optimum environment to grow a resilient nervous system to put it that way. So the more ACE, you know, adverse childhood experiences you had, the more likely it is that these other small T traumas will influence you and give you more fears than other people would have. More anxiety, more concern, more fear. So that's one factor. Another factor is there's a lot of talk about it these days and maybe your listeners have heard about being an HSB highly sensitive person. And around, they found that around 25% of the population in any country globally have a sensitive nervous system that is more sensitive to things that come from the environment. You know, they feel the cold more, they feel the heat more, they feel they taste, you know, they have. And also noise. Right there. Yes. Right. Actually, you know, I'll say my wife, now that you're describing these things, it's a very like, yeah, it's an HSPs. What's the difference between HSPs and introverts? Yeah, that's a really great question. And there is a lot of overlap. So an introvert recharges in silence or solitude. That's what they need. They don't necessarily have this high sensitivity to things that come from the environment. You know, they can recharge quickly. But an HSB for instance, just like their ears can hurt if there's a loud noise. Other things are, they might be more affected by things if they see abuse or they see an animal that's hurt or they just feel everything so much more sensitive. They can feel pain, they can feel pain more than other people. They're more sensitive to pain. They are more, one thing flashed in front of my mind that I forgot now, but there's a variety of things. There's a great website where people can go and do a little quiz to find out if they are. So there's some definite overlaps, but not every introvert is an HSB and not every HSB is an introvert. So 25% of the population have this more sensitive nervous system. Now you can think for yourself that if you're an HSB and you experience the small T trauma as a child, it is going to affect you more than somebody with kind of a more resilient nervous system that doesn't take things so very, that doesn't feel things so strongly. So there's nothing wrong. It's not a mistake that 25% have a more sensitive nervous system. It's actually they've done research to find that it's also in the animal kingdom. It's also true and in the plant kingdom. And that those sensitive nervous systems help the species to survive because of everybody was more risk prone. They would be less, you know, there's less learning. So, less of the survival learning that we were talking about in the beginning. So these sensitive people like, oh, very quickly they go, not safe. You know, so, and that gets carried over in the next genes and the next genes to help the species to survive. So there's nothing wrong with you for an HSB. And I just want to show people this great book if they haven't come across it by Elaine Aron, the highly sensitive person with a lot of information in that book if they want to go and read up. And so that's the second factor. And then the third one was around. And I do think I need to look at my notes. The strengths. So as we grow older and develop, we each have strengths and we talked about the Clifton strengths a little bit. As we grow, we develop them stronger and stronger and stronger and some strengths are more risk prone and some strengths are more risk averse. So we need to just, it's very, very good for us to know whether or we can function better in a risk prone or a risk averse environment. And then it just like all of these things can start making sense and help us to understand ourselves instead of the judgment. So I think my next point is I just want to go through a few of the reasons that I've heard from many sensitive introverts about why do they feel so shy or reluctant to show up in the spotlight. And here is a little cute picture. There are sometimes as many reasons as there are people because we are all unique individuals and I absolutely go from that standpoint is we're not. If we're not the same, everybody's not the same. We didn't have the same background. We didn't have the same events. So we have many different reasons and for some people these combinations of these reasons and for others these like one or two that really stand out. And so some of the reasons are like the eyes on them. Like in my event, 30 pairs of eyes suddenly makes a brain freeze. It's that immaculate that is not safe and then all the blood flow goes away from the thinking brain to let's survive. I'm going to run or hide. Another one is introverts are pretty private. Usually they don't want to be visible and splash their lives all over the internet. So that can stop them from being more visible. Some are very, very afraid of judgment, humiliation, criticism, being called out. And you know, there can be really mean people sometimes who say really mean things on our posts and they're afraid of that because of both experiences. They can be afraid of arguments or very aggressive people because usually HSPs have a nervous system that feel that aggression coming to their space and they don't know what to do with that. So just that near aggression of people arguing with them or trying to prove them wrong can be really scary. Then there's comparisonitis where the extroverts do really, really great in this arena. They love the spotlight. They can do it easily and introverts compare themselves to that and shrink back even more. Like why can I not? So they judge and label themselves. And then the last one is introverts love their quiet recharge time. It's an accessory for them. In fact, it's not a luxury. And so when they become more visible, the theories is going to be more outside expectations to show up to help more people to just be out there all the time. So they fear that they're going to lose all of that precious time that they need in order to be their best selves. And on that one point I want to mention introverts probably have this fantasy because they don't understand marketing that it actually takes a lot more marketing to have that many inquiries that many comments and interest. Usually we show up and like nobody says anything, you know, especially when it comes to, you know, online types things. So introverts and sensitive folks just know that you have to do a lot more than you think. But which means actually I think it's a blessing in disguise because it allows us to practice. It's like, I think back to when I had a very small audience and my God, I got a lot of practice talking and writing and all these things. Before now, of course, now I show up, you know, there's a great quote by Seth Godin. It's like, now he can make, he now makes much bigger mistakes than he used to because he makes a mistake. Now it's in front of millions of people, whereas in use to only making mistakes in front of, you know, his 100 followers. You know what I mean? So it's like, it's like, you know, you think, thank goodness, we get practice. And then as we get more practice, our audience grows gradually. And it just kind of meets our skill level as we grow. So thanks for bringing that up. It's a fantastic point, George. I love that you did that because just before I wrote my first book, I had that same fear like, oh, you know, all this fame. I won't be able to handle it well. I'm still waiting. It's like, God, that were a problem. That'd be great. Exactly. That would be a magnificent problem. And you have more than enough money to pay for all the counseling you want. All the trauma relief. Exactly. So yes, I love that. It's like parents have a chance to get used to the idea of a baby because there's nine months of waiting and growth. It's the same for us. It's not going to happen overnight. Yes, we can get used to it and sort of grow our visibility muscles a little bit stronger with practice, with consistent practice. So the next piece that I just want to mention is how EFT helps. So why do I think EFT is actually a great tool to help us? Just going back to that amygdala there, and then we're going to talk about something called the tabletop. The thing is about these beliefs that I talked about in the beginning that can get formed in a traumatic or emotional event. The part of your brain that it is in does not respond to logic, reason, or logical language. Like saying to a person, George, I know that you know this as well, but saying to a person, calm down, or you're going to do fine. I know that you're petrified, but you're going to be so great that does not do one single thing for the nerves. It does just not help because the logical, reasonable part of us that can see that this is not really threatening. We're not going to die. The words doesn't go, it doesn't talk to that part of the brain, so it doesn't understand it. It's like you can talk, it's like talking Chinese to a French person. So what we need is a tool to calm down that amygdala, that part of your brain that says run or hide. And EFT is a great tool to do that. They found actually through research studies and there's a lot of research being done and peer reviewed studies. So EFT is being more and more sort of proven as a tool that when we think about a past event, it brings up all those same feelings, right? Now when we can do that and we do the tapping on these specific points, stress relief points, we actually sending calming signals to the amygdala at the same time so that that emotion calms down. And now we can think about the event and go, yeah, my goodness, it did happen. But because we've taken the sting out of that event, the charge, our brain doesn't have the same response to it anymore and that meaning starts disappearing. The meaning is the negative thing that we made it mean about myself or about life. So just a few words about that table that I had there. I want to explain it like it's a table. The table is or the table top is our belief. Say my belief is it's not safe to be visible or I get flack from people all the time. I can't voice my opinions in public. For instance, that's the table top. The legs that are keeping the table up are those particular events that happened in our life that contributed to that feeling like every time somebody did criticize me in public. Every time that I did forget my words. Every time that I sat there and played my piano piece and it didn't work out well and somebody had a smirk on their face and, you know, I just felt terrible. All of those events. What we do with EFT is we go in, clear out the emotional charge around that event. And as each table leg sort of falls, the table top can no longer stay in place. So that's how we work with EFT. And people also ask me, so why do we tap on the negative? You know, why don't you just tap on the positive? It's because the belief is there because of a negative, you know, it's not a negative event. It's just an event, but we gave it a negative meaning. So we have to bring up the charge in our body while we think about the difficult thing that happened to us so that we can clear it as we go with EFT. And it's not the words in EFT that does the work for us. It's the tapping. So if you tuned into the event on an emotional level and you do the tapping, you can do it wordlessly. And I just need to say the words, but the words are there to help us remind or to remind us of what we went through so that we can bring up those feelings and then clear it out with EFT. Does it make sense? Does it sound? Yes, yes, definitely. It's very helpful. Yeah, I think the table top thing is helpful because it's kind of like that, that negative behavior or that negative reaction is there. And then if we just remove the right, remove the supporting, then it's like, okay, the negative is actually it's an illusion. And it's kind of we resolve that. So thank you for helping us to see how that works. Yeah, George, thank you. And so I think the last thing that I just want to wrap up with is to say that the reason why we want to take care of those events just so that we have different options of acting in life and so it's not a knee jerk reaction, but we have more choice and more options to choose what we want to do with our days and not go with others have to hide. Yeah, beautiful. So those of you who are watching this, if you find found this fascinating and would like to do more with Lisa, Lisa, maybe share with us. You've got a program coming up, which I'm excited about. And many people in our master heart group is excited about Lisa as a member of our master heart group. So it's called safe to be seen. Is that right? That's right, George. Thank you so much. He is safe to be seen. And for a start, I'm going to offer it as a private consultations. And we will go and find those things that contributed to your feeling unsafe, reluctant to show up, not being wanting to be heard or seen in all those events and we clear them out. And the result of that is that you start feeling more safe and you can take different actions. So it's very exciting for me to be able to offer this in a program with a beautiful name that one of our other master heart members helped us to help me to come up with. Yeah, and you've been doing EFT tapping and coaching introverts and how do you sense the people for for years. I mean, so you have a lot of experience. We barely even mentioned the Clifton strengths, which is one of your other tools that I've experienced and found very helpful is to like Clifton strengths comes from Gallup research of, you know, the huge sample of people who they discovered, you know, the presence of strengths, but everybody only has certain top ones. And it's like once you once you understand what your top strengths are and maybe what your weaknesses are, you can really hone in on top strengths. That's another thing that we didn't get to talk about this interview, but I think we might have talked about in the previous interview, but anyway, it's it's one of your great tools as well. So how should people reach out to you. Thank you, George, they can go to my website savvy self growth dot com, or my email address is Liesl at savvy self growth dot com L I E S E L at savvy self growth dot com L I E S E L at savvy self growth dot com and that's the website savvy self growth dot com I'll be putting the link to that as well as the link to your Facebook page where you where you are generous with your content there and anything else you want any encouraging a note you want to say before we complete this interview. Yeah, I want to say that it is absolutely possible to keep us that fear. And it's a journey doesn't need to happen in a day like George said it can we can grow into it practice our muscles and I just want to give you that hope that absolutely a few years ago as petrified shy didn't want to show up on video and I'm still scared but I can do it. Yeah, you do very well. Thank you so much Liesl for your work and for this conversation. Thank you very much George. Thanks.