Hey now, welcome to another edition of the Inside BS Show. I'm Dave Lorenzo, and we're gonna talk about two of my favorite things today, and we only need one person to talk about them, which is fantastic. My guest today is Sarah Finch, and she's a leadership consultant, but she also has an extensive background in improvisational theater, and I love that, and I can't wait to hear how that helps her deliver her message more effectively, more efficiently, and in a way that may even be more, it may make it more receptive to the audience.

We're gonna talk about all that. We're gonna talk about how you can leverage some of the skills that Sarah has leveraged over the years to teach people to lead more effectively, and we're gonna do it on this episode of the Inside BS Show. I gotta move that button closer.

It's just too much of a reach. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us. It is a pleasure to have you here today.

Yes, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. All right, so I wanna hear first about improv, all right, cause I, and you know, you're a part of, I think if I read correctly, you're still part of Second City, right? I'm not currently, but I spent seven years with Second City, yeah.

Oh my gosh, and that is like one of the premier improv troops in the country. So how did you get into that, and was your ambition in getting into that to be a performer or was it to help you with everything else you were doing? So it was kind of an interesting path. So I started life wanting to be an actor.

That was my goal. I went to college to do that, and after college I was performing and discovered that I really didn't like auditioning at all. So I thought there had to be something else I could do with my skills in theater, which I had been cultivating most of my life at that point.

So I ended up specifically saying, how can I use them in business? And I went and got a master's degree and started translating what I knew how to do in theater into corporate training, corporate development. And that's when I coincided with Second City. They have a separate part of the theater that goes out and works with businesses specifically, doing improv as performance, but also helping people use improv skills to get better in their jobs.

And I came in not to be a performer there at that point in my career, but to help cultivate what we could do with improv and really harness that power with all of our different clients and the actors and the facilitators. So I was driving a lot of that development work of how we could get better at that and still be funny and still be the core of Second City. So that's a lot of fun.

I love it. I love it. I had a similar, I wanna call it kind of an awakening years, years into my career after spending more than a decade speaking 50 to 70 times a year, I wanted something that would kind of give me my edge back.

And so I tried a whole host of things. I did improv for a year and then I found standup. And here's something that I found was really important and fed into what I was doing in the corporate world.

And I'm curious about your opinion on this, Sarah. Improv, it requires you as a performer or a participant to be far more generous than just about any other kind of performance art or anything else I can think of. Because if you don't give of yourself, if you're not making that connection with the people that you're working with, the whole thing is gonna come apart.

You have to be a really generous part of the process. And if your counterparts aren't generous, the same thing is true. So it falls on you to give as much as you can or the performance is gonna be horrible.

That I have not found that in any other activity, even in sports, if you're in baseball, if you're playing baseball and you make an error on the field, yeah, it could cost your team the game, but it's not gonna cost your team the season, right? But with improv, if you're not vulnerable and you don't give the whole time, the whole thing is gonna come crashing down. Has that been your experience as well? Yeah, you mentioned standup and it's interesting. One of the things that we often had to help people understand is that standup and improv are completely different.

The exact opposite. Standup is all about you and improv is not. It's about everyone else.

Yes, and in fact, one of the things that improv actors at Second City really focused on was their partner. So it was a skill that we often brought and tried to translate into helping teams get better, helping leaders get better, which is if you're on stage with your fellow improviser and you're only focused on being the funniest person in the room, you might be funny, but you're neglecting what you are really capable of creating with your fellow improviser. So it's more about making your scene partners look like rock stars and trusting that they're doing the same for you and that's how they create all those amazing, hilarious scenes.

And if you translate that then into the corporate world and the business world, you can use that same concept of I don't have to be the most successful or the smartest person in the room, but I need to help make sure that everybody I'm working with can be as successful as we possibly can be. And so it's a completely different point of view. Well, and the way I would leverage that if I were in a corporate environment and I were dealing with like an egomaniac CEO, for example, which there's hardly any of out there, right? If I was dealing with like an egomaniac CEO, what I would tell this person is I would say, listen, by you giving to everybody else and making everybody else successful, you win because everybody's gonna wanna work with you.

And if everybody wants to work with you, it raises the value of the organization as a whole. The same is true in improv. If you're the best scene partner, then you're gonna get the most work because everybody's gonna wanna be in a scene with you because they know you're gonna make them look fantastic.

Your brand will be that much more valuable and you'll be able to get that much more work. Absolutely, absolutely. And you're just gonna be more fun to work with.

There's nothing more painful than watching a brand new improviser on stage not know how to do that because the whole concept, and I'm sure you're familiar with it, of yes and, is really the core tenet of improv. And that's essentially what every improviser is using to be able to work together so seamlessly. And if you see a new improviser on stage who doesn't understand that, it's very hard to watch.

But that same concept, to your point, goes with leaders because a new manager or a new leader always feels like they have to own it. They often feel like they have to know everything. They have to have all the answers.

They have to be able to tell everybody what has to happen. And the reality is most leaders aren't going to have every bit of expertise out there, but if they know how to use yes and if they know how to build teams and bring all of the best from those teams, then that's what leads to success and also why people wanna work with them. Yeah, I love, there's three concepts that I hammer home with clients today that I picked up during my very brief time in mostly failing, doing improv.

And those three things are, the first is it's all about everybody else. It's not about you. And that's a great philosophy to go through life with.

It's a great philosophy to bring to the work environment. The second thing is what you mentioned, yes and, in sales every day, if you use the concept of yes and, you will be far more successful because I've seen brilliant people who had great careers ahead of them crash and burn because they felt they always had to be right. And the concept of yes and is the exact opposite of that.

It's about making the other person, including the other person in where you wanna go and what this could be for us together. And you'll learn so much more if you say yes and because the other person's gonna keep working and they're gonna keep talking and there's no telling what they're going to reveal in a business setting, right? And then the third concept, and I need to get your thoughts about this, is the concept of vulnerability. In improv, the more vulnerable I am, the more successful we're going to be, the more I'm willing to put myself out there and potentially fail, you can work off of that failure and make it something much bigger than the two of us.

That is a concept that I think people are scared to death of in business. I'm interested in how you view that concept and does it translate for you from improv into the work environment? Yeah, so one of the things we talked about a lot and what I think is one of the most impressive things that good improvisers learn is to normalize failure because there's no way you're going to be perfectly funny all the time. They will absolutely crash and burn in some scenes.

I've seen it happen with the best and it's okay because you gotta get back up and do the next scene and forget about it. And so that same concept, to your point, is something that I think in business people have really struggled with. There's this sense that everything has to be a success and you don't have time to fail.

But you waste so much more time with that attitude because when you do fail, which inevitably you will, you now have to backtrack in a way that is more painful, more frustrating, often brings up defensiveness and people trying to point fingers and blame. And if instead you normalize that failure is just part of the process, you're better able to navigate all of that, which is what improvisers do in the moment, in a second. And to your point about the vulnerability, you have to be able to then say, I'm gonna sometimes fail and that's okay.

As long as I learn from it and I pick up the pieces and we build from it, we yes and on it. In the improv world, we build the next scene better. In the business world, we hit the next problem better.

We find the better solution. We do the next project in a better way, whatever it is. But that requires you to be able to own that you failed in the first place.

Yeah, you know, one of the other parts of just going through the training that I found to be valuable was, even in improv, you're not flying by the seat of your pants. You have, you start a scene with some sort of design, right? There's a, you know, in improv it's called a game, right? But you don't know what you're gonna say. You don't know what direction it's gonna go in.

But you have kind of a loose framework for what you're gonna do. And when I teach people consultative sales techniques, they often say, so basically, David, it's just seat of my pants and I'm gonna wing it and I'm gonna ask questions. And I'm like, well, no, it's not.

You have to do research. You have to know going in what's important to the company as a whole. You have to have an idea for how you're going to explore where the company's pain may be, where you may be able to add value.

But it can't be so rigid that you can't quickly pivot from one set of questions to the other. And to me, that was, there's a direct relationship between how you prepare to go on and do an improv scene and how you prepare for a sales meeting or a consultative session. What do you think about that? Yeah, there's a cardinal sin in improv that you should never be pre-planning what you're gonna say in the scene.

But to your point, you have your framework. You have yes and, you have a suggestion from an audience member. Sometimes you do have certain ways that you're constructing a game or a scene that you're working within.

And as long as you can anchor with that and then add to the fact that you have to be able to listen to the people you're working with. And whether that's on stage as an improviser or in a sales conversation or in a meeting with your boss or a meeting with a key client, too often we don't take the time to actually listen. We're pre-planning what we're gonna say next.

And every time we do that, we're basically closing our ears off and we're not hearing at least a portion probably of what's being said. So that's one of the skills that I really lean on a lot now with the clients that I have because there's so much fast pace in business and it's just like being on stage in terms of the fast pace of a scene. But if you don't really focus and listen, you're gonna miss something that's really important.

And then when you do have to pivot, when you do have to be flexible and adjust, you're not going to have the information that you need because you might have not heard it. Or you might hear something you didn't expect and that's the thing that tells you exactly what to say next and you would have never known that if you hadn't been listening. So that's one of those key skills that improvisers really have to learn, which is 100% focus on whoever they're playing the scene with and it's no different in business.

You can't adjust quickly if you're not paying attention. Now, this is something that I think we need to, I really need to get from you because I was not at a level where I experienced it in improv. I experienced it every day in business.

But what happens when somebody says something that just totally shocks you? Surprises you, knocks you back on your heels? How does your improv training teach you to deal with that? Well, yes and, I'm gonna go back to yes and because that's the key. Yes and allows you to in the moment, even if it's the craziest thing that anybody ever said to you, to use some way to then validate it with the yes, without even saying that word, and then you build on it into something that you can work with somehow. The instinct we have in those moments when people say things we're not expecting is to shut down or to reject it.

And if you ever see that happen on stage, you'll get a cheap laugh probably, but the scene has nowhere to go and it just dies. So somebody says, hey, this is a great restaurant here on the moon and their scene partner says, no, this is not the moon. You're gonna get a few chuckles in the audience, but now what do they do together? So the key there is to say, okay, I didn't want to be in a restaurant on the moon.

That wasn't what I was expecting at all. But instead of rejecting it, I'll say, yes, and I was hoping we'd get to Jupiter today instead. And now we've got somewhere to go, even though it went a direction that I didn't plan.

The other thing I would just say, and this comes from years of training in front of audiences and whether you're an improviser or you're in business, you're in front of audiences all the time, is learning how to just be composed and be able to manage your own responses to things, even if inside you're going, ah, I can't believe that they said that. Externally, you're saying, okay, well, that was a really interesting idea. Let's talk more about that.

And that composure just takes time and it takes practice to know what are gonna be your triggers that are gonna make you kind of cringe and go into that place of no and how can you overcome those in the moment. You know, that is great insight. And I'll tell you, I came to that realization.

So my, and maybe, maybe, I guess maybe it was a midlife crisis or whatever, but I, when I did, so I did improv for like six months, seven months. And then in parallel, I was doing standup as well. And then I, because of the time commitment and I had small kids, I could only do one or the other.

So I focused on the standup, but the improv made me so much sharper in doing crowd work. It made me so much sharper in connecting with members of the audience. And I don't wanna say I became fearless, but it was so much easier if there was an occasional heckle.

Now, listen, everybody overthinks what's gonna come out of the audience. There's, you know, 10%, 5% of the time, you're gonna get somebody who's really a belligerent doofus. But most of the time, these people think they're helping, right? So the, you know, and they're not, they think they're helping, but they're not.

And that, you know, that being able to go, hmm, you know, I see what you're saying there. And then moving on to put down the heckle so people know, not okay. And then move on to the rest of your set, incredibly valuable, both in business, in professional speaking and in comedy.

If those of you who are listening or watching, if you want to see somebody do this, just in the most professional way, Jimmy Carr is a British comedian. He's incredibly dirty, so it's not safe for work. Don't watch it at work.

But he is, he welcomes heckles and just, with the nicest face and a very soft laugh, he'll laugh at the heckle. And while he's laughing, you know he's reloading because he's just gonna crush the person who heckled him. And he does it in a way where he goes, yes, you know, we could do that, or, and then he just slams the person.

You know, it's a good skill to have, and in business, what it's gonna do is it's gonna make you unflappable. You won't be able to, you won't be rattled when something like that happens because nobody in business is ever gonna hit you as hard as, you know, some drunk in an audience or something crazy that comes at you from an improv perspective. So Sarah, you also do some professional speaking.

How has your, you know, theatrical training, how has that helped you in your speaking career? Because there's a lot of people who watch the show, who listen to the show, who are also speakers. Well, I think first thing is reading the audience. You know, when you're used to being up in front of a group, you get much quicker at getting a sense is your audience with you, are they not with you? And there's always gonna be a few people that you can't read, but if as a whole, you can kind of gauge that, I think that for me is a comfort level that I gained from theater that a lot of people who just go into speaking or even are just doing it, you know, at a meeting, at work, you know, temporarily, not a professional speaker, that that is such a key skill to have because it allows you to adjust.

You know, do you need to change pace or volume? Do you need to shift topic? Do you need to engage them, ask a question, make them laugh, do something in the moment that maybe you didn't expect? Which would be, I think, the second thing that has helped me which is that ability to ad lib, right? The ability to know that you can go off script and you don't have to know every single word all the time and still be effective and still get your message across. And so I think for me, those are two of the things that I probably use the most, aside from just being able to memorize, which, you know, it's kind of a thing for me. A lot of speakers use teleprompters and they use notes.

I've never used a teleprompter. I don't like them at all. I do write out notes.

I'm very old school that way. I will write out outlines. I will rewrite my notes over and over again as I'm practicing something that I'm gonna go and present or if I'm running a training.

But when I'm in the moment, I am not checking my notes at all. And that's because I trust that I've put it into my brain. And that's something that I just gained that skill over years and years of memorizing scenes and lines and being up in front of a room.

Yeah, it's terrific. I appreciate that so much. I don't use a prompter either.

There are some organizations, I've only come across a few of them over the years, but there are some organizations that want like a draft of your speech in advance. And these tend to be sometimes quasi-governmental organizations or people who, you know, there's gonna be the leadership of the group in the room and they're concerned. They don't want, you know, they wanna make sure that you're gonna stay focused on what the original message is.

And I usually, and this is full disclosure, anybody who's thinking about hiring me, I'll submit a transcript and then my talk may not look anything like that. Because I don't, that's not, you know, the audience will sometimes take you in a certain direction or if you spend time at the conference before you go to speak, you may discover something that's even more valuable that you wanna put into your talk that wasn't in the transcript. So I appreciate that flexibility as well.

Now, you said you took notes and you wrote the notes. That's just part of your process for preparing, right? You don't, do you use that language verbatim or do you make adjustments as you go? Explain what your process is so folks can get an understanding. Yeah, so when I'm putting together a keynote speech for a conference or something along those lines, what I'll usually start with is an outline that's kind of high level of where I wanna start, where I wanna finish, key points.

And then I will flesh out my opening and I will typically flesh out something about my close so that I have a strong statement, a strong question or story, something that I know is really gonna grab the audience at the beginning and that I'm wrapping up with something that I want them to leave and walk away with. In between, I will create the material. So I might say, here's my key point number one and I wanna tell this story and I wanna make this point and here's a key element of it.

And so that part is gonna be less scripted. It's gonna be more I just know that that's where I'm gonna go. And those words might change a little bit every time to your point, but I generally have a sense of that flow.

So my notes when I make them are index cards. I feel very old talking about this, but I will literally take index cards and I will write kind of the key words, key phrases. Oh, I feel so much better, thank you.

I will write them down and then that's what I practice with. So I'm not practicing word for word, but as I'm practicing, okay, oh yeah, that was the key point there and then I move on to it. And that's what I kind of keep in mind in my head as I'm up in front of the audience.

The visual of those cards will help me stay anchored, but there's always, always something that I'll end up adding in because in the moment it just made sense and it flowed or not adding something in because I might've simply forgotten it, but it didn't matter because I had enough to give all the content. And then I just go over it and over it and over it. And the one other trick that I use goes back to when I was memorizing lines back in high school.

And I discovered as a teenager up late at night that I would work on the lines and then I would go to bed and somehow I knew them better in the morning. So I always will run it right before I go to bed because some part of your unconscious brain, I think is still practicing and then I wake up and I find out I know it better than I thought I did, so. Yeah, that's awesome.

It's funny, we're two sides of the same coin. I will, what I'll do is I'll do it before I get really sleepy, I'll do a whole run through of whatever I think the talk is gonna be recorded. And then I will take whatever the outline or the notes that I have and I'll put headphones on and just put it on a loop in bed, read through it.

And then as I'm falling asleep, set it aside. And then when the headphones hit the pillow, I take the headphones off and fall asleep. And that's what really cements it for me.

And I'll find that if I just stop trying to remember what was written down and just relax, that's when it really comes. It's just embedded in your subconscious, it's a great tip. I really, I think that's money in the bank.

Talk to me a little bit about, Sarah now, talk to me a little bit about the use of humor in a corporate environment, okay? And this is, I guess, my own personal baggage, but I'm sure there are other people out there who feel the same way. I find humor in everything. I literally can't walk into a building without seeing something that I think is funny, right? And over the years, I've found that when I relax and let that humor come out, nine times out of 10, it breaks the ice, it makes a human connection.

But that 10th time, it's a fricking disaster. So how do we, and I'm not, I don't, obviously I don't work blue in a corporate environment. I'm never gonna use, you know, inappropriate language.

Yeah, I'm never gonna use inappropriate language or anything. But what is your rule of thumb, if you have one, for how, when, and where to use humor in a corporate setting? So I think first off, something we used to say at Second City a lot, and I still use this, and I've had clients come back to me and say, hey, I still remember you told me that, and I remember it as well, is things are funny when they're true. And so I think in a corporate environment, when you're looking for humor, it's not about a funny joke or being the funniest person in the meeting.

It's about how do I express something that we're all gonna have that shared laughter over, either because maybe we're frustrated or we've just all had that experience or something that everybody can relate to. And those are the moments that I think humor works the best in the business environment, when you're using it to bring a group together around a shared moment, or sometimes it will break some tension or some stress to use humor, again, in that sense of, oh, wow, we're all in this together. Remember when we had that last meeting? Oh, yes, yes.

And then everybody kind of chuckles. So I think that's one of the key things. The other is, sorry, my headphone just popped out of my ear there.

It happens to me all the time. I got a wire that runs down my leg and I step on it and my head jerks back, it's awful. All right, I'm back in, I'm back in.

So I think the other piece is, and this is more just a rule of thumb in the business environment. If what you're saying is something that potentially could be misunderstood or could hurt somebody else, then probably keep that to yourself. It's not probably the right place for that type of humor.

And that just comes with some self-awareness that we all have to have about who our audience is, going back to reading our audience. There are some people you might work with who may find some things funny with you and other people not. So you have to keep that in mind all the time.

And one of the things that, I actually do some trainings for one of my clients on humor in the workplace. And one of the things that I talk about the most is the fact that it's not about laughing for the sake of laughing. It's about using laughter as an emotion that we all know how to feel.

And so if you think about it that way, it's less of, okay, I have to say something funny, but it's more, how can we laugh together in a way that helps us as a team or as a department or as an organization? Yeah, I think that's good advice. And self-deprecation is the way, that's the safest way to go. So I tell this story sometimes from the stage.

So I was called to do a presentation for, in consulting, we'd call it like a beauty show. I think there were two finalists or three finalists for this particular project. I'm running my own company.

It was like the first big pitch I had when I was running my own company. And I had a, starting probably three or four days before this pitch, I had a bad bout of vertigo. Like my son was a toddler and he burst into the room in the middle of the night and I was startled and I sat up in bed and whatever breaks loose that causes vertigo broke loose.

And like everything was spinning. So by the time I go to do this pitch, I'm like five days into this and it had gotten a little bit better. But I had my wife drive me to the meeting.

She drops me off and I walk into the lobby and it's Florida, beautiful office building. I got my briefcase with my computer in it, very nice leather briefcase offering no protection for the computer. And I'm walking through the lobby and I lose my balance and I misstep and I fall into a fountain on the way to the pitch.

And my first instinct is to fling the computer so it doesn't get wet. So I threw that thing, like it was an improvised explosive device all the way across the lobby, fall into the fountain, half of my body soaked. So I got 15 minutes before the pitch, I pick up the bag and I go into the men's room and I'm in the men's room standing with my hip up against the hand dryer, trying to dry the leg of my pants and in walks a guy, I don't even think about there's a guy walking in, I just kind of look over and he looks at me and kind of looks at me sideways.

I walk in the room, button my jacket, still soaked, okay? Not knowing if the computer is gonna work. I don't even try to plug it in because I'm not gonna plug it in and see if the pitch works. And I just, I stand up and go to give the pitch and I look across the table and who's on the other side of the table, but the guy who walked in the bathroom.

So it's obvious something happened to me. So I just, I opened up with, hey, listen, I got vertigo. I was walking up here and I went for a swim in the fountain and then Mr. Jones saw me trying to dry my pants leg in the hand dryer.

So now you know, I can pretty much handle anything. So if it's worth it for you to have that quality in somebody you wanna work with, fine. But I'm gonna go ahead and do the pitch anyway.

Everybody in the room broke up. I, the pitch became instead of 45 minutes, 15 minutes, I spent the next half hour taking questions. The people were open and they laughed with me.

I got the gig and I forever became known as the guy who fell in the fountain. But that was what got me. I would have never got that deal otherwise because I would have done some canned pitch.

It would have been terrible. It just was, it was a great way to break the ice. Now, look, I don't recommend falling in a fountain, throwing your computer across the lobby or drying your pants in a hand dryer in your client's office.

But if you can use self-deprecating humor, it can be a great advantage. Sarah, let's do this. Why don't you take a minute and think about a time when you can tell me how you used your theater experience, anything we talked about so far, to help a CEO make a better connection with his or her team.

Maybe give us a little, a mini case study, maybe give us a little guidance as to how people can use that. I'm gonna give you a minute to think about that because I need to remind folks that we're brought to you by Sandrowski Corporate Advisors. For over 35 years, Sandrowski has helped people with business valuations, with tax mitigation, with risk management.

And here's the thing about Sandrowski. They have all the resources of a big four accounting firm, but their expertise is in helping privately held businesses and families of wealth. And why do they focus here? They focus here because those people tend to rely on advisors more than your large publicly traded companies.

So if, for example, you have an acquisition that you wanna make to grow the size of your business, you can bring Sandrowski in. They can look at that other business's financials, do evaluation of that other business, and then break it down for you in a way that's easy to understand, run the pluses and the minuses for you, and you can make a better, well-informed decision. Business valuation is something they do all day long.

Now, if it's a contentious situation and you're suing someone and you say the value of the business is X and they say the value of the business is Y, you can bring Sandrowski in and they can testify to the valuation in a way that's so easy even a judge can understand it. And that's the key. You can't have the best CPA firm on the planet do these things and then deliver the presentation in a way that no one can understand.

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Sandrowski Corporate Advisors, they're a CPA firm with a different perspective. We're also brought to you by My Revenue Roadmap Guide. If you wanna build your professional portfolio and you wanna do it in a way that feels natural based on relationships, you need to download My Revenue Roadmap Guide and I'm gonna give it to you for free.

It's my way of saying thank you for listening and watching the show. Do this, go to revenueroadmapguide.com. That's a website, revenueroadmapguide.com. Enter your contact info. You can download the guide that I use with my clients.

You can customize it for your professional practice the way I customize it for my clients. Again, it's free, revenueroadmapguide.com. Enter your contact info today. We're talking with Sarah Finch.

She's a leadership consultant and she's sharing her stories about leveraging her background in the theater to help people lead more effectively, to help build teams. You can reach out to her at 773-799-4571. 773-799-4571.

Okay, Sarah, so tell us how you would work with a CEO in order to help them become more effective. You're gonna give us kind of a mini case study. Yeah, so I get to work with a lot of CEOs.

So I'm trying to combine a couple things, I think, that I know have helped a few different clients of mine. One of the things that I definitely find with CEOs is they're very busy, right? There's a lot going on, a lot on their plate, a lot on their shoulders. And they have a tendency to rush into meeting after meeting with their teams or one-on-ones with their directs or whoever it is that they're working with.

And going back to what we were talking about with improv, while you think improvisers are winging it, they always have some framework that they're working with, something that they're going to be using as their anchor. So one thing that I do with a lot of CEOs is I help them realize they need to give themselves some preparation time, slow down to speed up so that they go into these meetings, they go into these conversations having thought through how they want their impact to be, not just the content or the message they need to give, but how do they want their team to walk away feeling about that particular meeting? Or how do they want that client, that big client that maybe they've been brought into to win because they're the CEO, how do they want that client to walk away? Because they get so caught up in the message that they can speak to with their eyes closed that they forget about the other side of the outcome, which is the impression they want to make. So I definitely spend a lot of time helping CEOs learn how to give themselves a little space to identify that so that they can best shape the overall impact that they're having.

And I think the second piece is building on that, just like an improviser's funny joke can have huge impact on the audience, CEOs have very big impact on the people that they're interacting with in very small ways. And they don't always realize that simply walking down the hall without smiling might actually create a message for somebody in their company who's wondering why is the CEO not smiling? So thinking about their overall presence and how very small things that earlier in their career, maybe nobody would have even noticed from them is going to now send a whole message that they may not have even intended is another key thing that I work with them on. So sometimes that's physical presence, sometimes that's how does your face look? How does your voice look? And sometimes it's reading your audience and reading the space better.

And other times it's just awareness, awareness of what they're doing and how they're managing it. My role is not to help them become more experts at whatever their business is, because they're always gonna be a bigger expert than I ever will. But what I try to do is help them become the best leader of that business and recognize at the place that they sit in the organization, what is needed from them as a leader so that they can best deliver on that.

Well, that's great. I love that. Thank you for that.

That's terrific. How do you help with, and I don't know how to do this. So this would be, this is a true dilemma for me.

How do you help with somebody who has a terrible poker face, who wears their emotions on their sleeve and they become the CEO, right? And maybe they had a big fight with their kid when they were dropping them off on the way to school and now they're in the office and they're walking down the hall and they got kind of a terrible face on. The terrible face isn't about anything that's going on at work. It's because of what just happened, right? What counsel can you offer to those people? Yeah, so I think two things.

One, I do a lot of work with emotional intelligence as well. So bring that in and how that manifests. And I think that's, I mean, it's been a big kind of buzzword in business for a long time, but it really is eye-opening for a lot of my clients when they look at the skills that go into using their emotions and how they might get feedback on that.

Sometimes I'll do 360s with them as well. So they can actually get feedback that people are afraid to say to their face. And that's, I was working with one CEO and it wasn't a terrible 360, but there was enough feedback there that it stung a little bit for this person, but it was so helpful for them to get that because one of the things CEOs don't have is they do not usually have somebody who can really be that mirror for them.

Once you reach that point at the top, it can be a little bit lonely and you're not always getting the feedback that you need. People aren't always comfortable with it and you're not always asking for it. So all of that combined, what I really will try to do with someone who needs to create more awareness of those moments is to look at all those different types of input, find some people that they trust enough who they're able to be vulnerable with and say, hey, after this meeting, I just wanna check in with you.

I wanna get a little feedback about how you saw me show up in that meeting. And those are the kinds of things that help them then remember next time they go into the meeting. Oh, when I do this, that's maybe not helpful.

I had an experience when I was early in my career that really, I tell this story all the time to CEOs and I don't even, I might even be doing it on the spot. I have a little brow crease right here. When I'm thinking, it just happens.

My dad has it, it's a genetic thing on my face. There's nothing I can do about it. I don't even know sometimes when my brow is creasing.

But if I'm sitting in a meeting and I was thinking, I realized from feedback from coworkers that they thought I was really angry. And one person said to me, what was going on in that meeting? You just looked so upset. I said, no, I wasn't upset at all.

Well, your brow was really creased. And so I've had to recognize when I'm in those moments where I'm thinking or trying to puzzle something out that my face maybe doesn't look like I'm thinking. It looks like I'm bothered by something.

And so I have to intentionally try to create a nice smooth forehead up here. Or I will tell people, you know what? This is something my face does. And I just want you to know about it.

If you see it, trust me, I'll let you know if I'm actually angry or upset. And so if you can help a CEO start to identify some of those things and have a way to call it out, if it's just kind of a natural way that they're going to be and they can't always control it, or be able to have more awareness to shift it, that can make such a huge difference. All right, Sarah.

So describe for us then who your ideal client is, right? If we're out there now and we're coming across CEOs, who's the ideal person for you? Somebody who knows they don't know everything. I've worked with some CEOs who have said, yeah, I want to get better. I want to keep growing.

But the reality is they kind of are set in their ways and they don't actually want to change anything. I had a CEO say to me once, yeah, I know I'm hard to work with. I know that I can be a little difficult.

That's just who I am. I can't do anything with that. So I love to work with CEOs who come to me saying, I know I absolutely have so much I can keep learning.

I love working with CEOs that are newly promoted into the position because they're particularly aware that there are things that they have to change. I've been working with a client over the last couple of years who has moved into that role and the journey that that client has been on from, well, what was it like being a leader before CEO and now that I'm CEO? It's different. And so you have to be able to be open to reconsidering how you have worked and led in the past and letting go of some things.

So for me, clients who are open to that are always the best to work with because they may not always agree or like some of the things that we discover as we're working together, but they're at least willing to consider it or think about it or try it. I also love clients who enjoy laughing a bit as we're working together so that if there's things that are tough to talk about, we can find that shared moment to laugh through it together and that helps them relax a little bit, helps them be able to actually be willing to process some of the tough things that they might be working through. So I think those are the two big things, self-awareness, willingness to grow and willingness to laugh at yourself a little bit.

Yeah, that's terrific. That's great. Okay, so keep an eye out for that, folks.

You can reach out to Sarah. We'll put her contact information down in the show notes so that you can connect with her if you see that and you wanna bring somebody in who can really help them. Sarah, let's talk a little bit in the few minutes we have left, let's talk a little bit about speaking these days.

We're recording this in the spring of 2022 and it is a better time for speaking than it was say a year ago, but it's not like the heyday of speaking. So what are you doing these days to connect with people, to make sure that they know that you're open and available and what are you seeing out there? Well, it's definitely an interesting time, as you said. I think we went from a place where everything kind of disappeared for a little bit and then we've been up and down in terms of virtual or hybrid events or are we back in person? And it's all over the map, I will say in my experience right now.

I'm seeing more places willing to be in person than before, but I'm still doing an awful lot of virtual work and virtual speaking myself and we've all gotten a lot better at it. So I can say for myself, my skill set in virtual has definitely gone up though I was working virtually even pre-pandemic. Do you like it? Because I hate it.

I hate not being able to get the instant feedback. I don't know, like when I first was doing it and I'm turning down, to be honest with you, I turned down a lot of virtual stuff now just because I don't, it's just, it's so hard. I would bring somebody, when I first started doing it, I would bring one of my family members in the room with me just so I had somebody else and I felt like I was talking to a person.

It's just so hard because I thrive on the interaction with other people, even if it's just two people with other people in the room. As a performer, do you find it difficult? Yeah, I enjoy doing virtual when I'm coaching. I feel like one-on-one virtual coaching is far more comfortable, honestly, for a lot of people than sitting at a desk.

It starts to feel too much like a therapy session, I think, for people. So that part I'm good with. I've gotten a lot better.

I do a lot of work with executive teams as well. So the types of things you would do an offsite for a day away and you're working together virtually, I feel like that I've gotten a much bigger comfort level with in terms of how to facilitate that and use the tools. But when it comes to simply being able to read an audience and speak, it's just so much easier in the room.

And it's been such a joy in the last few months to finally get back in the room with people again because, like you said, you miss all these nuances and the energy that you just don't get through video. So I would say I have a bias to in-person. I always have in all of my career.

I've definitely become more willing and accustomed to working through virtual. And I think I've certainly done a solid job with it. And it seems from my client base, but if I can be in the room, I still think it's always going to be more impactful and far more enjoyable for me.

And I think too, from a business development perspective, so much of my speaking now is about business development. I never viewed speaking as a business. I viewed speaking as a form of media, right? I viewed speaking as a lead generation opportunity.

If somebody wanted to pay me to go there and generate leads, I would take the money. But I liked being in the room because I knew that if I made that connection with people, then business would come from it. So in a virtual environment, it's too easy for somebody to be doing something else while they pretend to look at me.

Like this, you and me now is great. This is where I think virtual really thrives. The other place where I think virtual thrives is if virtual is the introduction and then you walk into a room, I think that can really be a huge advantage because people already know you then and you're walking in.

And it's almost like you have some status when you walk in the room because they've seen you on a thing where they see people who have authority, meaning a screen, right? So otherwise, I'm just, I'm not a big fan. It's just, for me, it's very, very difficult. Like, I'll walk out of the office after doing a talk to a group of people and my wife will go, how did it go? And I go, I have no idea.

Like, it was great for me. I don't know if they got anything out of it. Like, I hope they did.

I did it based on what they told me to do. But it's just not, the feedback just isn't there. Sarah, are you finding it more competitive now, like fewer engagements and more speakers? Or has the, because I'm not in touch with the world of like professional speakers.

My speaking tends to be on the margins. It's, you know, very nuanced and nichey. So, you know, I'm not competing for, like a leadership gig is, I would imagine it's incredibly competitive.

Is it, are there fewer speakers? Like, did people go back to being realtors or whatever they were before they became speakers? Or are there just as many speakers out there now? I think, I don't know that there's fewer speakers. I'm sure there are some people that, I definitely know of people who in that early phase where everything shut down, lost pretty much all their business because all they did was speak, which fortunately is not the case for me. So I didn't have to deal with that.

But I'm sure there's some who have stepped away and made shifts. What I think has happened though, is that certainly speakers who had established names in their expertise area or on a certain, in a certain area of speaking, different types of conferences, things like that. I think they have probably weathered it better now.

People who are trying to come out as emerging speakers, I think it's a little bit harder for them to get foothold because if you don't have video, if you don't have cred to begin with, and now you've got this kind of mix of who's actually doing events and are they virtual, are they hybrid, are they in person? People are gonna go to the ones that they know are going to be the surefire hit. And so I do think there's probably some more, I don't say competition, but I feel like if you didn't already have an established base, you're probably struggling a lot more for that than people who do and did. Yeah, yeah.

But I would say every speaker that I am aware of has had to reinvent their business in some way over the last couple of years somehow. Sure. And are you getting calls from people that you did a company retreat for two years ago? Are people calling you saying, hey, Sarah, guess what? The retreat is on for July.

Are you, like, I guess I'm trolling for hope here. Are you getting those calls? Are people calling you going, hey, we're back. Can you come do this? A little bit.

I definitely am getting some clients who I kind of lost some connection with over the last couple of years, reaching back out, saying, hey, are you available? Can I work with you? In all the different areas of my business. So I think in general, people are at a point where they just have to start doing things again. And some things that they have been sitting on are coming back and they're going back to the people that they are used to working with in some cases, yeah.

Yeah, now in your business, which came first, speaking or consulting? Oh, goodness. Kind of simultaneously, because I honestly, I was doing everything that I do now, I was doing for the organizations I worked for. I was doing, you know, for Second City, I was doing, I worked for the YMCA National Office for four years.

I worked with a private equity company, Vista, for several years. And with all of those, I was speaking, I was consulting either with external clients or internal clients or internal portfolio companies or Ys, and doing the training and the coaching. So I kind of have been doing it all for a long time.

I, being totally honest, speaking is probably the thing I love the most. And so that's been the hardest of the last couple of years, because that's the one that definitely struggled. But I am fortunate that I have these other parts of my business and was able to continue to deliver that work for my clients and keep doing that.

So I'm kind of a, I don't know if I'm a triple threat, I don't know if you count that in leadership development. No, that's great. So if you were to give advice to yourself, say, I don't wanna date you, 15 years ago, right? 10 years ago, give advice to yourself 10, 15 years ago, what would you say to do more of and what would you say to do less of? Well, the first thing I would say is trust the work and the network that you're building.

I didn't trust that when I first decided to do my own business. I was like, okay, who's gonna hire me? You know, I've been working for all these other companies, but the reality is the bulk of my clients, especially to start, were people I'd worked with before. So, you know, I'd say my advice would have been, remember to keep building those relationships, which I think I did a decent job at, but anybody that you ever come encounter with, you don't know who they're gonna be down the road or what they're gonna need or want.

And if you just keep relationships alive and intact and you do a good work, I think that's always a big piece of it. I think the other thing for me is to continue to find ways to develop new skills as you go. So you can't ping your hat on, oh, I did this once and I'm really good at it and I'll just keep doing that.

Everything keeps evolving. There's new thought leadership out there. There's new ideas.

There's new ways of working with people. So I think for me, I had to kind of keep learning as I built my career and then as I've been out doing my own business that there's always something new to learn for me even on how I can serve people and to continue to push yourself to learn as you go, I think is really key. I think it's great advice.

Thank you. All right, so Sarah, now take away, take away, don't take away anything. Stay right where you are.

Take a minute and think about three things you want us to take away from our time together. Three things you want us to remember from our time together because I gotta remind people that we're brought to you by Sandrowski Corporate Advisors. They are a CPA firm.

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Call them at 866-717-1607, 866-717-1607, Sandrowski Corporate Advisors. They're a CPA firm with a different perspective. We're talking today with Sarah Finch.

She's a leadership consultant. You can reach out to her at 773-799-4571, 773-799-4571. She also does team building.

She does executive programs. She's a great speaker. She can speak to your corporate audience.

Give her a call today. Her contact information is all down in the show notes. Okay, Sarah, what are the three things you're hoping we can take away from our time together today? Absolutely.

So number one, whether you are a new leader or an experienced leader or your CEO, there is always something more you can learn about how to be a really good leader. And if you are able to get access to a coach or somebody who can help support you in that, that's one of the easiest ways to get that mirror so that you can learn what you don't know that you don't know. I'd say two, yes and.

We brought it up and I think that it is, it's kind of the thing that transcends all things. I know it seeds in improv, but if anybody can take yes and and apply it in how they work in business, how they work with their teams, how they communicate, they have already gotten a lot from this program if that's the only thing they walk away remembering. And then three, I think whether it's virtual or in person, there's no reason to stop doing leadership development.

If you have put a pause on that over the last few years for whatever reason, it's time to start to get back into it, whether it's providing programs for your employees or whether your executive team needs to sit down and really look at how do we get better working together. These are the things that help keep an organization strong and healthy and good leaders make sure that they're happening in their organization. Three great takeaways, folks.

You got them here from Sarah Finch. If you wanna reach out to her, call her at 773-799-4571. Sarah, thank you so much.

I really enjoyed our time together today. You've been a great guest. I appreciate you joining us on the Inside VS Show.

Thank you so much for having me. Alrighty, folks, that'll do it for another episode of the Inside VS Show. I'm Dave Lorenzo.

We're back here again tomorrow with another great interview, but how could it be as good as this one? I don't know. We'll see what I do tomorrow. Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.