Permission to Kick Ass

The lonely side of business (and what to do about it) with Unni Turrettini

September 11, 2024 • Angie Colee • Episode 186

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Strange question, but hear me out: ever feel lonely on this entrepreneurial journey? I think you're going to love today's episode with human connection expert, Unni Turrettini. She's got some surprising and insightful takes one why this whole biz-building thing can be so freaking hard. If you feel like you're floundering and can't share your struggles for fear of looking weak... this one's for you.

Can't-miss moments:

  • "Nobody wants to talk about loneliness..." the blunt (and frankly wrong) feedback Unni got from the first few events she spoke at, and what kept her motivated to keep speaking...

  • Angie rant alert: kicking off the show inside the first ten minutes with a rant about comparing pain and telling people they don't get to complain (my take might actually surprise you)

  • Let's set this unspoken fear on fire: "If I'm feeling lonely and I'm struggling, then it means I failed." Unni has a powerful message that will help you reframe your relationship with loneliness, power, and business...

  • Unni's badass advice on how to shut down that inner critic telling you 'who do you think you are?' - a must-hear for anyone wanting to stop playing small...

  • STOP STEALING OTHER PEOPLE'S JOY (you have to listen to get it - and start asking for help, too!)

Unni's bio:

Norwegian-born Unni Turrettini helps leaders, executives, and high achievers become better humans. Unni works with organizations to create a culture of connection and belonging so they can retain talent, reduce sick leave, improve morale and productivity, and inspire innovation.

Unni is the award-winning and best-selling author of The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer (about the make-up of mass shooters, lack of belonging, and loneliness) and Betraying the Nobel, which focuses on restoring trust in the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize and other institutions globally. She worked in law and finance for almost a decade before becoming a full time speaker and trainer. Unni has law degrees from Norway, France, and the United States, and is a member of the New York Bar.

She also works 1:1 with people who want to reconnect with themselves and the world around them, so they can own their achievements, prepare for the next phase, and leave a legacy with their work and contributions.

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Angie Colee:

Welcome to Permission to Kick Ass, the show that gives you a virtual seat at the bar for the real conversations that happen between entrepreneurs. I'm interviewing all kinds of business owners, from those just a few years into freelancing to CEOs helming nine-figure companies. If you've ever worried that everyone else just seems to get it and you're missing something or messing things up, this show is for you. I'm your host, Angie Coley, and let's get to it. Hey, welcome back to Permission to Kick Ass.

Unni Turrettini:

With me today is my friend, Unni Turrettini Say hi, hi, angie, thank you so much for having me.

Angie Colee:

Oh, I'm so glad and I'm so glad to have you on the show. I really just enjoy being around your energy and I can already anticipate this one's going to be a good one. I'm not jinxing it, I promise.

Unni Turrettini:

Oh, likewise I like being around you too, so this is going to be like a really fun conversation.

Angie Colee:

Awesome. Well, I love what you do, and I think that this is going to be fascinating for people, because how many human connection experts do you know? I know one, and it's Ooni. So please tell us a little bit more about what you do.

Unni Turrettini:

Ooh yeah, you know it's. And that is actually the reason why I came to you, Like, how do I talk about what I do in a way that people get it right on my website, on my social media, everywhere? And, by the way, you're a rock star, you helped me so much with that, so thank you. And, by the way, you're a rock star, you helped me so much with that, so thank you. And so this is. I kind of created that title because I started studying loneliness and human connection back in 2012. After this incident we had in Norway, where this young man, 32 year old, anders Breivik, killed 77 people in one day, and I just had to understand how that could happen. So I studied him, I followed his trial. He survived, so he's in jail today and he so I studied other similar, hundreds of other similar mass killers around the world and what I realized is that really the one thing that stood out?

Unni Turrettini:

I mean, there were several signs, if you will, or common characteristics that they had, no matter where in the world they came from, but they were all lonely. They never, they never felt like they belonged in our society. And that just hit me so hard, angie, because that's how I felt a lot of the time growing up and even when I was working in law and finance, in these big firms small firms didn't matter I often didn't feel like I was part of the group and that I belonged and that I fit in. And so or correction, I actually did fit in, I just didn't feel like I belonged. And so that led me when I was researching and writing that book, that my first book, the Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killers I started researching loneliness, human connection, what makes us lonely? Us lonely, what? What kind of connection are we looking? And and really back then nobody was talking about loneliness.

Unni Turrettini:

And as I was out speaking, also to promote my book when it came out, I want I talk loneliness. And nobody wanted to hear it, although I knew from the audience. Because people came up to me and, would you know, come up to me after my talk and say, oh my God, like you were speaking right to me about your loneliness, about this disconnection, about feeling that you're not part and not belonging. But the organizer of the events often didn't want me to talk about loneliness. I said nobody wants to talk about loneliness. I said nobody wants to talk about loneliness, so please don't do that. Well, now, we know that a lot of people want to talk about loneliness, because we I mean the US search general has declared that it is, you know, the fastest growing epidemic in the United States, and I would even go as far as to say that it is our current pandemic, because it's not only in the United States, it's everywhere.

Unni Turrettini:

So that's what I do I work with, I speak, I write. Now I'm writing a book about, specifically about loneliness and human connection, and I am, I help individuals, leaders, often high achievers, because that's what I like. I'm a high achiever, so I work well with high achievers. And I also work with companies, helping them create a better work culture, transforming the workplace into a place of community so that we can have more engaged, happier employees and also, for the companies, right Increased productivity. That's what they care about. So that's what I do.

Angie Colee:

That is awesome. In short, yeah, I know and I thought that was fascinating I had written down about no one wanted to hear that, but then you answered. The question that I had was, like no one wants to hear it and yet everybody is saying, oh my gosh, this is amazing. You're speaking directly to me and, like, I have the pleasure of knowing a little bit more about what you do in your background, cause we've talked about this extensively. But tell me a little bit more about your own connection with being a high achiever and being that lonely person.

Angie Colee:

And then, of course, like I want to preemptively say this, so many people, when they hear a story like this, go oh, boo hoo. You like really don't know real suffering. And also, on the permission to kick ass, show your problems are real, your struggles are real. This is not a freaking competition. It's okay to be hurting. You have to acknowledge what you're actually feeling in order to get it to pass through you so that we can move on to the next thing. So none of that don't come from me in the comments. It's my freaking show. There we go. Anyway, tell us a little bit more about your own past and your experience with this loneliness. Well, first of, all.

Unni Turrettini:

I love what you just said and I think because I do think we all have our traumas and pain and things that we go through in life, and to start comparing pain and comparing traumas, that doesn't make any sense to me. So I think it's all about, you know, trying to, and that's what I talk about too. Connecting is about getting over ourselves enough so that we can actually see other people understand them, listen to what they're going through and finding the things that we actually have in common, because we have more things in common that we don't, and we tend to forget that in our very polarized world. So so thank you for for pointing that out and, yes, I think part of the problem for people like me and for high achievers, people who seemingly have it all, who seemingly have perfect lives with great careers, you know, worked hard, you hard, have the titles, like I have three law degrees and it's not to brag, being a high achiever and being a perfectionist. It was my way of constantly proving to the world, and mostly to myself, that I was worthy of love and connection. That's why I have been striving for all these things collecting degrees, collecting status, collecting titles, and and and people and things and all these things, and I think that's very typical of high achievers and successful people. And because we feel that we have nothing to complain about. We do not talk about our disconnection, we do not talk about our loneliness, but it is as real for us as for anyone else.

Unni Turrettini:

And there was a recent study, angie, here in Norway, where they spoke with CEOs, top leadership, and they asked them what are your top three struggles? And one of the one of those were loneliness, was loneliness, and and we were, you know, people were so shocked how can you be a CEO and be lonely? Well, because it's lonely at the top and you feel like you have no one to talk to because no one, no one gets you, no one gets that You're not allowed to have problems when you are in positions of power. I would say, but we, we all know we're just people, we're all just people and we have struggles. And I think, and also, loneliness doesn't discriminate. Loneliness hits people on, you know on, on all the ranges of social, you know social, wherever you are on the social ladder, wherever you are in the world, whatever color of skin, it really doesn't matter. Loneliness affects all of us and we know that in the United States it's one out of two. So it's, you know, more than 160 million people dealing with loneliness in the United States right now. So so I think this is the time to really come out and talk about it and to share and not to and and.

Unni Turrettini:

For me, that took a long time because I felt so ashamed. I felt like if I, with all these people around me, can feel that I'm lonely, it must mean that I have failed at social connection, because I'm not isolated. I'm not like you know. I'm not. I have all these people around me, and loneliness today rarely has anything to do with social isolation. It's an emotional isolation, it's feeling that you're not part of it's. It's that sense that, even though you have colleagues, you have family, you have friends and all of these people may be great people, but the quality of the connection, the quality of the interaction, is not fulfilling.

Angie Colee:

Oh, I hear you so much on that. But in fact this is so timely, like not just because we've been talking about this, but I was actually on a mastermind call yesterday, and once a month we do a mindset call with a mindset coach. Shout out to Brian, shout out to Ron and yesterday we were kind of talking about this idea of worthiness and helped me identify. We're going to go deep here, deep into Angie's psyche, right? So I have a brother who is 15 years younger than me, so in my teens I was basically like helping raise the kids, get them to school and stuff like that.

Angie Colee:

I have been a caregiver for as long as I can remember and I can see that manifesting in my own business, in this show, even in the daily activities, in like, if I'm not actively caring and doing for others, I don't feel a lot of worthiness. And then if shame gets added to the equation and we're not talking about this, like I actually brought up on the call, I am afraid to say this in front of my professional colleagues because I worry about the things that they'll say, the things that they'll think about me. But I decided I need to say this because it's what's on my heart. It's what's on my mind. I don't care if they think that I'm crazy. If they think that I'm crazy or if they're judging me for thinking and feeling this way, okay, fair enough.

Angie Colee:

We've all got our own issues to deal with. Not everybody can like everybody all the time, it's okay. But if I am refusing to own what is happening in my life and the thoughts that are going through my head and with the caveat of I've done a lot of work to separate thoughts and feelings and understand that feelings are fleeting and they are not the truth, but they are indicators of stuff that we need to look at and work on and care for, right. But if I can't share that stuff, especially with people that I have these relationships with, for fear that I'm going to be judged, oh my gosh, the pain that you're in suffering in silence and alone, for fear of that judgment just breaks my heart, amen.

Unni Turrettini:

And you know that is a huge part of our loneliness pandemic is that we, in order to feel connected, we actually have to risk rejection. We have to show up, being seen for who we truly are, even if people judge us, even if people will reject us. Because if we don't, if we just change ourselves to fit in, like I did for so many years, then we will never feel seen, heard and valued. Because how can people see us when we're not showing them who we are? And then we do that enough and repeat that enough for over years. We don't even know who we are anymore, and that's when we have really disconnected from ourselves and lost ourselves. And then you know, then that's a long journey back, like it was for me. So yeah, that's a good point.

Angie Colee:

That was something that I found fascinating in our work together, right, because we talked a lot about disconnection and on the surface level, I totally understood it. Like we're. We're disconnected from each other, especially in this age of like hyper connection almost we're online, we're on our phones 24 seven. We always know what somebody else is doing, even if we haven't talked in like six months, because they're posting the highlight reel online, right, the highlight reel. They're not posting the daily dirty stuff. But but I think the thing that shocked me the most when we were talking about this was you said that's actually disconnection from yourself. I can't even remember what I brought up when I said what about this topic? But you said that's actually disconnection from yourself and I went wait, what Like that makes sense and that doesn't make sense, and I'm curious to know more. So can you speak a little bit more about disconnection from yourself?

Unni Turrettini:

Yeah, and especially in this world with hybrid connection and social media and media and this fear mongering and spreading of fear, that we live in this kind of society. Most people are in fight or flight mode 70% of the time. I would say a lot of people are in fight or flight mode a hundred percent of the time, right, but even when we're sleeping and that's why we wake up in the morning and this happens to me all the time I wake up and I'm and I'm like, and I'm tense, I'm tense, I'm stressed and I don't even feel rested because that limbic part of the brain has been working and constantly vigilant for danger, scouting for danger, even when I'm sleeping. And so when we're in that state, what happens in fight or flight and this is also social media also can exaggerate that, because when we look at other people in their seemingly perfect lives and we don't feel that we have what they have, that makes us feel like we're alone. It makes us feel lonely. And what happens in our brain, our prehistoric brain, is that when we feel isolated, when we feel lonely, our brain believes that we are in danger, so it puts us into fight or flight.

Unni Turrettini:

And what happens is that the frontal lobe part of the brain is disconnected. Big parts of our brain are actually disconnected, and only the parts of the brain and the functions of our body that are absolutely necessary for our survival Should we need to run away from an energy, fight it or freeze. Those are the only functions that really that are, um, that are, are, are functioning, and so our, our body is flooded with these stress chemicals and you know, and when we don't use them because we're actually in fight or flight over something that is not an external threat and we're in that state where we're not. We were never meant to be in that state Most of the day. We were never meant to sustain those chemicals over time, so they start to tear us down from the inside. So then we get sick, we get autoimmune issues, we get heart failures, we get all sorts of issues with our health, and also because we have lost and this is something that a lot of people, and especially these leaders and high achievers that I work with, but of course it happens to everyone in fight or flight over time, is that because you've lost contact with the frontal lobe part of your brain, which is, by the way, the CEO of your life.

Unni Turrettini:

This is the part that is the thinker, this is the one that can like oh, let's look at the bigger perspective here. Let's look at the 10-year plan vision. You know, let's see the big thing here. Let's look at the 10 year plan vision. You know, let's see the big thing here. That's not accessible to us.

Unni Turrettini:

So that's why we experience brain fog. We think that we can't, we can't reflect where, like, we feel tired, we feel exhausted because of these hormones in our body, but also we can't think straight, and so we focus even harder and we work even harder to make it, to try and figure out, to make decisions, but we can't really make decisions in that state, and so we struggle and we suffer and we and we make ourselves sick and depressed and and that is disconnection. So a lot of you know we think we're maybe, you know, disconnected from ourselves. But what does it really mean? Well, first of all, it means being in survival mode, and so the very first thing we need to learn how to do is and this is for everyone deactivate survival mode as a daily practice and multiple times per day, because the smallest thing can trigger us right back in fight or flight, because what happens and we're when we're so used to being in fight or flight and scanning for dangers and and getting suspicious of other people, because that's what happens is that the, the threat that you are, that you are being the danger out there can be your mother in law, can be your spouse, can be your coworker, can be your boss, can be anyone, right, yep, anything like that that.

Unni Turrettini:

You know, anyone disagreeing with with our opinion can put us right there in fight or flight, and so we need to learn how to deactivate it, and that can be hard in the beginning, but it is a practice and for me now it only takes me a couple of minutes, and for me, I love just taking some deep breaths, you know, making sure that I'm grounded with both feet in the ground. I usually take off my shoes. I love like being barefoot and even just going for a walk in the forest or being by water, just taking myself and telling myself. Also, you know, there's the ways. You can just look at yourself in the mirror and place one hand on your heart and just repeat to yourself I'm safe, I'm okay, I'm good. You know, I'm right now, in this moment, I'm okay, yeah.

Angie Colee:

I love that you made that distinction, because that one was that one was a hard one for me to wrap my head around and I can't remember when exactly it clicked, but I know that the when it came into focus for me, it revolved around okay, I'm feeling a lot of anxiety. I'm stuck in that fight or flight mode. I'm usually either living in the future or the past, not right now. I'm worried about next month's revenue and whether I'm going to be able to make payroll or I'm going to have to let somebody go. I'm worrying about this thing that I said in a meeting last month and whether or not that impacted my prospects for this month. Like, those are both instances of me being somewhere else, not being right here right now, in this moment. And that's the power of like, no matter how dire your situation is. And, trust me, I've been in some dire situations. I have lived out of my car. I have lived out of the nastiest no-tell motel in existence. That's a story for another day, but I promise it's a good one Again. It's not a competition. We've all been to really low, really terrible places. That's just part of the human condition, and some of us have been there more often than others and that just it breaks my heart.

Angie Colee:

But in this moment, if you are not actively running from somebody who is chasing you, if you are not actively like dying, you are presumably sitting somewhere where you are reasonably safe. So, like, take a moment, tap into your senses. What do you see and smell and taste and hear? Can you remind yourself? It's not the future and it's not the past, it's right now, and right now I'm safe. What can I do right now? Or what can I do right now could just be, can I just be here right now? I'm fascinated with that balance between human being, which is what we are. We are human beings, but especially in this capitalist society, we are called to do so much, so I have to. I feel like I meditate on that a lot. You're a human being, not a human doing. Your worth is not tied up in what you do for others. It's just who you are.

Unni Turrettini:

That's right, that's right. And this and this, what you're saying there, this human doing, and you talked about being, you know, worrying about the future or running a program from the past. Right, because that's what we tend to do. We think that our future depends on what we have done and what we have accomplished in the past. So we just take that old program and we place it on our future and we just repeat and we're never really present.

Unni Turrettini:

And even, I would say, even for someone who is in a dire situation, because a lot of people are, you know, with with financial distress right now, interest rates, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a hard, you know, it's really hard right now for a lot of people. And so these trouble, these issues are real, these problems are real and, of course, it puts it puts you in a place of fight or flight, and I, and and I would even encourage, even if you have all the reasons in the world to be in fight or flight, to practice taking yourself out of it, because what happens is what we know this from, from from scientists, from science, and and albert einstein he said it, I don't know if he was the first one to say it, but he said that we are energetic beings, so we are mostly energy. If you look at the atoms, atoms in our body, if you just observe our body, you would see that most of our body, 99.999% of our body, is empty space. So we think that we're dense entities, but we focus on because that's what happens we focus on our immediate, our body, our physical body, in immediate environment, to scan for danger and to be able to keep ourselves safe, and so then we are actually focusing on the 0.00001% of reality, and that is a very, very limited reality.

Unni Turrettini:

So if we can take ourselves out of fight or flight, even for just a moment, and access all that other thing, that 99.9999% of reality, that is where possibilities lie, that is where opportunities appear, that is where the things that happens that we cannot control. It is the unknown, and that is a scary place, I agree, but it's actually not as scary as taking your past and repeating it in your future. For the you know, for the non you know unforeseeable future. That is a much scarier for me anyway scenario than actually trying to create something new and something better and the beautiful part of being in that, in that present moment and in that state of anything is possible. I have unlimited resources. When we know that we are in that place, that's when magic happens and that's when things sort themselves out right. So it's just that we don't believe in it because we can't see it.

Angie Colee:

Yes, it hasn't been our experience. Yeah exactly.

Unni Turrettini:

It hasn't been our experience yet. So that is what what so many people and myself, including, practice every morning in meditation, for example. A great way to do that is meditation, and someone who's really good at explaining this and teaching this is Dr Joe Dispenza, and he has multiple free videos online. Just Google it on YouTube, Joe Dispenza, and there's so many meditations. They're free meditations for people to use, and I would encourage everyone to just do like a 10, 15 meditation every morning to get yourself in a space where you are not in fight or flight.

Angie Colee:

Yes, I love that too, cause I think that that's double duty right. That's bringing you back to the present and also, if there's anything that I've learned over this self-improvement journey, that is entrepreneurship. It's what you focus on, you find right, and so if you focus on I'm struggling with money, you're going to find more money struggles. If you focus on you know money comes to me fairly easily and best when I'm having fun, that's going to be your reality. If you focus on most clients are jerks and they're trying to take advantage and get free work, you're going to be unconsciously ignoring everybody that's a good client and going after the people that fit your reality. You are training your brain with your beliefs and the interesting thing about this to me you know as somebody who's done a lot of work to move from a more negative outset to a more positive one is that you can't shame your way into this new way of thinking. Like shame is not a superpower, it's a, it's kryptonite. It will cripple you, it will prevent you from getting where you want to go. It'll keep you playing small. You're playing not to like I've talked about this before but like this concept of playing not to lose versus playing to win, playing not to lose is very defensive. It's I've got these very this little small set of assets and I'm going to protect it with all my might, whereas playing to win is like I'm going to take this risk and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to go for everything. Right, you can't do both at the same time, and this is where, like to me, it's interesting. Another thing that came up when you were talking about was like I had a viral story that went out not too long ago and it was really interesting to me how much like attempting shaming there was in the comments. How much like attempting shaming there was in the comments. So a brief overview of the story was that I had a breakup in 2020. And in the aftermath, I chose to travel and get to know more about myself and more about the country.

Angie Colee:

Right, but in the first, it was a four part video series for Huffington Post. In the first one, I had to set up the fact that, like everything had been going well and he and I had been talking about our plans and we were in the process of buying a house, and then he bought it behind my back and told me he didn't love me. So I have to set up this context as to like why I made such a drastic life change. And oh man, does the Internet have opinions when you put a less than minute long video out there telling people your story? And I just thought that was. I don't know necessarily where I was going with that, but I feel like it's.

Angie Colee:

We've become such an outrage culture, such a polarized culture, and we somehow think that we're pointing out something that people don't know when we attempt to shame them into something. And it's like do you think I haven't beaten myself up a thousand times over this? I'm over it, I'm done with that. I'm not. That's why I'm sharing the story publicly and you can have whatever the hell opinion you want to about me. I don't care. This is for specific people who are going to see some sort of hope and joy and that the fact that you can be devastated by something that you didn't expect and then turn it around and take control again, instead of letting that ruin or wreck your life.

Unni Turrettini:

No, I. What comes to me when you say that and this is this is so important. What you're bringing up is that we are trying to change our behavior by shaming ourselves, and that we know that and, as you said, it doesn't work. So when we are, when we want to change to a more positive mindset and we want to, you know, look at what loneliness is. Loneliness is the, the, the belief that I'm not worthy of love and connection. That's what loneliness is and that's why, actually, what we're, what we're seeing in our world today, is not a loneliness pandemic, it's a unworthiness pandemic. So we need to build our self-worth and the way to start that is when it comes to connection and belonging and loneliness is to change really anything that you want, to change a belief. It's not enough to change the words, you actually have to feel it. So what I do in my morning practice is that I decide who do I want to be today, and then I actually write it down before my meditation. I do a little prep before my meditation. I write down. Sometimes I write if it helps me. I write how am I feeling? Like what is the icky, yucky feeling that I'm actually feeling? And I write that down and then I write how do I want to feel, for example, when it comes to belonging is one of the things that I've changed for myself is to and I and I repeat this to myself and I feel it is that I decide every morning that every single room I'm walking into today, I belong in that room, right and when, and I, as I enter a room, and, and and this is I think this is something everyone should do because we walk into rooms and then we feel insecure and we think people are judging us and maybe, maybe they are, and most probably they're not, because everyone is so concerned about themselves that they're really not thinking about you. So if you walk into a room knowing that you belong there, how do you feel when you know you belong in a room? You feel really good, right, you feel confident, you have a certain energy around you, you're magnetic, you come in there. People want to be around you because it feels really good to be around you, because not a lot of people are magnetic, so we want to be around those people who feel good to be around. So when you know that you belong, you know that you are worthy of love and connection and you can just see yourself, and you can visualize it, walking into a room and everyone turns their head and people come up to you. They want to talk to you, they want to get to know you, they want you to oh, come sit here. There's a free spot here. You can sit right here. Come sit with us.

Unni Turrettini:

Just when you feel that feeling, just talking about it, I can feel it. That's how we change a belief, that's how we change our state. We change it by feeling that way. It's not enough to say it, so you feel it and then you say it, and then I meditate on it and in my meditation I amplify that feeling.

Unni Turrettini:

And then, whenever during my day, I forget and I feel I walk into, like for like I, I, I speak on stages, right, I, I, or I work at a company, and then I, sometimes I get insecure and especially before, I used to get really like scared and think that, oh, these people are so smart and they're so accomplished, like, who am I to talk to these people, right? And then when I can feel, and I prep myself to feel that I belong in that room and that I actually have something to bring to the table, and I see these people are actually being interested. They lean in. Why? Because I share a story, maybe that they can relate to. You know something that creates connection, right, but anyway, I feel that feeling that I belong and I know it and I prep myself for it. That's when everything changes and that's just one example. You can use this for anything, but that's really big when it comes to belonging.

Angie Colee:

I love that and it ties into, I think, some recent discussions that I've had in such a beautiful way. One like it circles back to what we talked about earlier. You focus, what you focus on, you find right. You are focused on finding the belonging, finding that power right, Finding that connection, and that's exactly what happens. We've seen studies about or I can't remember, but I know I've read about this multiple times with top athletes who visualize themselves making the game winning, shot in the final seconds, when the pressure's on and the crowd is like insane. Right, If they imagine themselves choking in the final seconds, what do you think is going to happen? Right? And then, like this energy we talked about the energy and the connection. What if?

Angie Colee:

Even if you don't feel your most best, most confident, you're exactly where you need to be, because you don't actually have to be perfect to impress people, to connect with people, to share a message, to change someone's life.

Angie Colee:

You could be living your perfectly imperfect life, making all of the mistakes, and inspire somebody who will never, ever tell you what you did for them, and so I feel like that's a constant reminder that I have to have for myself.

Angie Colee:

Right, Because I do want to build a million dollar business and I want to travel the world and I've got all these lofty, ambitious goals and it's really easy to get caught up in all the ways that I'm falling short of what I want to be, especially on down days. Or, like you know, I actually had one month where everybody, every single client I worked with, had a payment emergency that month and it was like whoo panic time, Right, Um, but I don't. You've you've got to remember that perfection is an image. It's not accurate. You don't know what's going on in somebody's inner worlds. I've been privy to more conversations than you know where somebody was up on stage giving the polished, perfect, perfect speech, impressing the hell out of everybody in the audience and their life was falling apart behind the scenes with like lawsuits and divorces and all kinds of painful stuff, so Absolutely.

Unni Turrettini:

And back to what you said about you know getting, you know hateful comments and these trolls, and I think for us, for entrepreneurs, for business owners, for anyone, anyone, when you put yourself out there, try you know, because that's the opposite of fitting in. That's you putting yourself out there in order to connect with an audience, with a person, with a group, whatever, and it's there is that risk that you're gonna get rejected. There is that risk that somebody's not gonna like you, but we have to do it anyway. We have to put ourselves out there anyway and I think that's really beautiful that you did. That was a vulnerable story that you shared and, look, it went viral. You did so well. You got so many people resonating with that story and, yeah, some people didn't.

Unni Turrettini:

Some people who were in, by the way, in survival mode, disconnected from their own selves, you know, poured their hatred onto you. By the way, it has nothing to do with you, it's all about them, right, but it's it's. I think we have to. Just, it's our job not to react to that but to keep putting ourselves out there anyway, because we're not supposed to be friends and good friends with everybody on this planet. We, the way that we, we, we find our tribe when we put ourselves out there and there will be people who seek you out because you shared that and they want to be in your inner circle, they want to be friends with you, they want to work with you. So we have to keep doing it.

Angie Colee:

Yeah, and you said I think the word choice was perfect. There we're talking about fitting in versus belonging. Those are two drastically different things. Fitting in requires you to shrink yourself, put yourself into a box made of somebody else's expectations, change everything about you and who you are innately. That makes you special and wonderful and unique. I've said it before on the show. But if you zoom out, if we forget ourselves for a second and think about everything over the last several billion years that had to line up just perfectly for Uni and I to be talking right now, anything could have changed. The introduction that we had to talk together could not have happened. I could not have been introduced to her. There's a million things that could have prevented this thing from happening. And yet here we are having, in my opinion, quite a miraculous conversation.

Angie Colee:

So why would you shrink that? Why would you hide that? Why would you allow somebody else to make you feel small? And I get that if you haven't built up that resilience muscle right, that inner faith muscle, that it's hard to stand up and believe that there's something special about you. But I promise it's there. You're different from every other human being on the earth, even though you have a lot of similarities and a lot of commonalities. Right Contrast that with belonging where you get to be. I get to be that headbanging nerd with the bright hair and the piercings who shows up at a business event and has something to contribute, even though I'm not wearing a suit. I belong but I definitely don't fit in, and that's fine by me. I don't care about that.

Unni Turrettini:

That's right. And I think there's another aspect of this, this, this giving of your, giving of yourself. Really, that's what it is. When you, when you show up as you, authentically, you give of yourself, you contribute, because your voice matters and is important, even if we think it's not, even if we are made to believe that, oh, I don't matter. You know, who do you think you are? That little voice I have, I have that voice telling me who do you think you are? A lot, and I had just have to shove it. I just have to tell it. Listen, I hear you, but you're not driving this car. I'm putting you in the backseat and I'm driving Right and um, because it's there always and it's never, probably never, going to go away, and that's fine, I have accepted it. But I'm not letting it run the show and I'm going to show up anyway because that's my commitment to myself and that is also a really effective way out of loneliness, is contributing, is giving of yourself, and this can happen in so many ways, right?

Unni Turrettini:

But even at a business meeting, speaking up at your team meeting, if you're someone that you're shy and you're afraid to speak up, they need your opinion, they need you. Everybody needs, like the world is desperate for what you have to offer. So we need to speak up more. That's how you contribute. If you want to write a book, write that book. If you want to publish that article on Medium or wherever hit publish, like you know, hit return. And because that's when we give of ourselves, when we contribute, it makes us feel like we matter, it makes us feel valuable and that is part of that whole feeling connected piece of the puzzle as well.

Unni Turrettini:

And a great way to help people contribute more and to contribute ourselves is to ask for help. Help people contribute more and to contribute ourselves is to ask for help, and a lot of us in our society we're told that we need to be so independent oh, I can do it on my own, I don't need anyone, right? But? And so we don't ask people for help. But I like to remind people that when you ask someone for help, you're actually giving them a gift, because you're giving them the gift of feeling seen, heard and valued. So we need to turn that around. It's not shameful to ask for help. It's actually a really, really beautiful thing to do.

Angie Colee:

That was, oh God, that was such an eye opener for me because I'm from the Southern United States. I'm from the Southern United States. I have what I jokingly like to call Southern Woman Syndrome. Like you know, you have a place and you're being too loud and you're standing out too much and you definitely don't ask for help. That would be no, not acceptable. But I remember once recognizing the disconnect.

Angie Colee:

I love helping people. I love giving people gifts and seeing them light up people. I love giving people gifts and seeing them light up. What am I doing to somebody like me when I deny them? Like, oh, I don't need that help. I know that you offered, I don't need that. Oh, I know Well, don't go out of your way and give me that gift. I don't want to. I just like dimmed the light and the shine in that person who wanted so badly to give me something because I had too much pride to accept, like a little bit too much ego or or the lack of worthiness and I didn't think I was worthy of that gift, right? Like talk about vulnerability and opening yourself up to help, opening yourself up to a gift and allowing another person, exactly like you said, to be seen, heard and understood, and allowing yourself to be seen, heard and understood, and allowing yourself to be seen, heard and understood Beautiful.

Unni Turrettini:

Yeah, yeah. And we forget that, right In our world, that we're supposed to, we're supposed to be so independent and so strong and make it on our own. You know, we're not, we're not meant to, we're not supposed to.

Angie Colee:

We're absolutely not. One of my friends put it a beautiful way and I don't have the drawing, but maybe I'll try and show it with my hands. I can't remember if I've talked about it on the show before, but a lot of times when we're struggling, this is the size of our problems, right, my little fist that I'm holding up, and this is the size of our life. So our problems are up almost the entirety of our life, right, and most people think I'm going to shrink this problem somehow so that I can survive. Notice, I can't shrink this. It's not going anywhere, right? But what I can do is increase my life so that these problems aren't as big in comparison to what else I've got going on in my life. And that's, you know, I like to give.

Angie Colee:

When I'm feeling like I'm the center of the universe and my problems are the most desperate problems that we all go through, that, right, and they sometimes they're legit. I've been in abusive situation that I had to get out of. I've been in in life-threatening situations I've had to get out of. So these are definitely not minimizing it. But when I'm not in a dangerous situation and I feel like my problems are bigger than the entire world. I remind myself, oh okay, I've become the center of the universe. Maybe it's time to go out. And then I'll volunteer or I'll call somebody and ask them out for a coffee date and like remind myself that the world is bigger than me and my problems.

Unni Turrettini:

I love that. That's a beautiful thing that you showed there with the, with the, how we can expand our life Right and and back to in survival mode. There's no expansion. We actually have to get ourselves out of survival mode so that we can connect with who we truly are and and you know this this something bigger, because there is something bigger than us, and I believe that we are supported and we are one.

Unni Turrettini:

I believe that, and the more and and and just even for the sake of of how that makes me feel when I think that I believe it, because that makes me feel more expansive and that makes me feel more connected to other people and that makes me feel that that, what little me, what I do, matters, it absolutely does. And I think that we forget how powerful we are. We just forget, we think that our lives are just like oh, it's the government is deciding leadership, whatever my boss, you know everyone else is deciding for me. I'm helpless, I can't do anything about it, but there's so much we can do. We are powerful and let's not forget that leadership, our leadership, they're only there because we put them there. If we gather together and we come together as a people, we can remove them and have someone else elected.

Angie Colee:

Oh, yes, we can do that this reminds me of I don't know if you've ever read this story Man's Search for Meaning.

Unni Turrettini:

Yeah.

Angie Colee:

Oh, that's such a beautiful story. If you've never read it, I highly encourage it. It's a quick read, it's a very short book, but it's so powerful and impactful. What it is is a story from a Holocaust survivor, and the main takeaway that I get from this is that nobody can force you to do anything, even when you feel totally powerless. I mean, this is a person that was arguably subjected to some of the worst mistreatment on earth and still found moments of joy, moments of connection, moments of hope Right, and so I'm like. I often tell people that I work with a gun to the head. Nobody can tell you that you don't get to have joy, that you don't get to have meaning, that you don't get to have something, or that you must do something. You can always decide.

Unni Turrettini:

I'm not going to do that always, and Victor Frankl, the author of that book. What's one of the biggest takeaways that I have from from that book and from um also, I? I I'm a follower, or also also of of of Dr Ben Benjamin Hardy, hardy Ben Hardy, sorry and he talks about this in connection with Viktor Frankl and that the way that you know he talks about hope right In the in that book having hope for a better future, meaning that what you're actually doing and this is this is valid for for all of us too is that we can have a hope of a better future for ourselves and we can actually decide. And that's what. That's what I meant when I said that we are so much more powerful than we think we are because we can actually decide. I can sit in my journal in the morning and I can write down a more beautiful story for myself and my kids in the, you know, 10 years from now, five years from now, two years from now, and and when I connect with that goal, when I connect with that and I operate from that goal, meaning I become that person, I become my future self, because my future self has resources and a strategy that my present self doesn't know about yet Yep. So that is also the way that we start feeling like her, under these dire, dire, tragic circumstances where there was really no hope.

Unni Turrettini:

And he said that in the book he wrote that that all his friends and the people around him that lost hope, they all died, but the ones that kept hope, that knew deep, deep in their heart. There is an end to this and there is a more beautiful story for me in my life. And what am I going to do when, five years from now, when I'm in that other situation, he was planning on the next book he was going to write. He was planning all these things like the book, promotion of it? You know, he was planning all these things while he was in prison and I think that's such a beautiful thing.

Unni Turrettini:

And similarly, with Nelson Mandela in prison on I believe it was Robben Island, right outside of Cape Town in South Africa, when you know also the most inhumane circumstances you know torture for two decades almost he was in there. And when he I read that when he, when he was put in prison, he was a young man, you know, a political activist, and he was arrogant, he was smart, he thought he was smarter than anyone. He was arrogant, and prison shaped him into being becoming the leader that he became, where he forgave everyone that hurt him, and, and, and all these other people. And so you can, you can, we can, we can. Let our challenges and our difficult situations shape us and decide who we become, or we can allow them to as an opportunity to become who we want to become.

Angie Colee:

I feel like that's the perfect note to end on, because I want to ask like 20 more questions and make this a five hour show, but I know that we're coming up on time. So thank you so much for being on the show. You have been a fantastic guest. Please tell us more where we can learn about you and your work.

Unni Turrettini:

First of all, thank you so much for having me, angie. I could talk for hours with you. You know that. So I am on all social media LinkedIn, instagram, facebook. I'm not so active on Twitter, so mainly Instagram, facebook and LinkedIn. And if you google my name, uni Turatini, that's U-N-N-I and then T-U-R-R-E-T-T-I-N-I. You find me because I'm the only one with my name, and I also have some free downloads if you struggle with connecting with yourselves. So I have that. I have also another download to help connecting with other people and for companies, I have a download as well to help to create more coherent teams. I'd love to connect.

Angie Colee:

Awesome. Thank you so much. I'll make sure that there are clickable links in the show notes. And man, I appreciate you. Thank you for sharing this with us today.

Unni Turrettini:

Thank you, Angie.

Angie Colee:

That's all for now. If you want to keep that kick-ass energy high, please take a minute to share this episode with someone that might need a high-octane dose of you Can Do it. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Permission to Kick Ass podcast on Apple Podcasts, spotify and wherever you stream your podcasts. I'm your host, angie Coley, and I'm here rooting for you. Thanks for listening and let's go kick some ass.