Radio presenter and podcaster Lisa Leong told the story of how she disrupted herself by changing career from an intellectual property lawyer to a radio announcer during an opening session at day two of Radiodays Asia.
From that experience she developed some life lessons which she now shares with businesses to help them improve their staff interaction and energise their teams.
An ‘Open Will, Open Mind and Open Heart’ are Lisa’s three key principles
When trying to get a job in radio, Lisa sent “hundreds of demo tapes and got dozens of rejection letters,” but one day she faced her fears and cold called the program director for Liberty Radio when he was on air one weekend.
“The risk of doing nothing was the bigger than the risk of doing something.” If Lisa wanted to achieve her goal she had to disrupt herself.
The PD answered the door and eventually put Lisa on the radio presenting 80s hits on the weekend. “That was 20 years ago, I now present a weekend show on ABC Radio Melbourne and a podcast called This Working Life,” she told delegates.
In these disrupted times, we need to disrupt ourselves to reset goals and move out of fear mode to a new level of success.
“If we go into fear mode, that won’t help in difficult times,” she said.
She identified three key areas for change to help teams move forward:
Fear of Failure:
Ask yourself, what can go wrong if I fail? In most circumstances the fear of failure causes people not to try, to go back into their shell, but if you can laugh at the failures, learn from them and understand that they are usually not as serious as you think they are then you will move past the fear of failure.
She did an exercise that generated laughter at failure, rather than fear. You can celebrate and learn from it, rather than fear failure when you feel psychologically safe, so help your teams to not be afraid of failing. It is up to team leaders to model this behaviour of not fearing failure so that staff will learn from what they do.
Open Mind:
Lisa used the metaphor of an ‘intellectual piranha’ who eats ideas and prevents them from being achieved. In an open mind exercise she took delegates from using blocking phrases such as ‘yes but…’ to open phrases such as ‘yes and…’ that can expand the ideas in a discussion rather than block them.
Lead with Love:
She urged teams to discover common ground, common hopes and dreams, and build empathy in the team. This is something that radio does well because it builds empathy.
“Empathy is the super power of radio, we use it every day to connect with our audience… Be empathetic to others you work with and also be empathetic for yourself,” she said.