Earlier this year, I had a fantastic conversation with a friend, and the intention was to have that conversation talking about voice and speaking up your convictions and your beliefs into the world when it feels dangerous. And the original plan was to do a joint launch the same week on both feeds, and a version of that is happening.
The plan that we actually had quietly died months ago, and it's not because anything went wrong. we're still friends. There's no beef. There's no big issue, and that's the interesting and unsettling part
[00:00:48] 2. Title Payoff
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This episode is about the fear of sharing your true voice and the things that can go wrong when you're not aware that fear exists. And it shows up in sharing something vulnerable and not acting on it with urgency. It shows up as trying to be reasonable, a good friend, and patience when really you're afraid of putting pressure on for a deadline.
And the plan that Diane and I had for this conversation didn't go quite as we had planned, but I think it's a really great learning of ... I think it's something we can all learn from as creators and be a little bit more proactive in saying the truth and our truth in our lives and collaborations and with ourselves. This is input output
[00:01:42] 3. SHOW INTRO — DO NOT RECORD (drop-in: io-intro-standard.mp3)
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If you've come from a previously successful career and now you are a year or three or five into your creative career and the breakthroughs are not showing up, this show is for you. Input/Output runs on one idea: You are the ultimate input into your creator system. Get yourself clear, and the output follows.
I'm Shawn Buttner, and let's get into it
[00:02:10] 4. INPUT — What This Fear Looks Like
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Earlier this year, I recorded a conversation with my friend Diana Ordonez, and she's been sitting on some things she'd wanted to say publicly. We talk outside of the podcast as coaching peers, and we're talking about hiding what we really feel in our hearts sometimes about the world when it gets messy.
So we schedule a Zoom call to have a conversation, and Diana shares some personal stuff she's been thinking about. We circle around some vulnerable beliefs she was having, just a classic fear of voice. And it was interesting to look at that conversation while I was editing it to see that, oh, there, there were still things we didn't quite say, but it was a step forward, and that's great.
We had also talked about, before that call, that I ha- was in the process of rebranding the show to Input Output, and I thought voice was going to be one of the core things that I talked about, and it is, and so that is this show right now. So but at that point, it wasn't completely clear, so this was a conversation aligned with the previous show that was going to inform the decision for my show.
And with that in mind, we thought it'd be cool to do a joint launch 'cause we wanted to try that out as two podcasters and two friends, and we thought it would take about three-ish weeks, give or take a week, and that was a very hopeful and attainable goal. So when the date kept slipping, I didn't push. I thought I was being patient and understanding for both her and for myself, and that's the insidious part of this fear.
I was trying to be cool and nice about something that actually was timely for both of us, and that caused the process to drag on for months. And then it began to feel like a game of chicken. the first person to call out that the deadline was switching was going to be the one who was the bad the person that was showing that this idea we had was dying.
And that quiet fear that was never spoken prevented this episode from coming out before I actually made steps to rebrand the show. I knew it needed to be said because that's how my last career worked when I was an engineer at Apple, and there when a date slipped, nobody got worried about it. You said why. Maybe you slipped because everything changed, right? And that happened a lot where design work on the system was still happening, and so the things that you were working on would just be obsolete or, punted to the future because the thing wasn't ready, right?
Or the thing was just not at the quality standard of everyone. So the focus was releasing the best thing possible, and so slipping was respected. now, if you slipped there because you didn't do the work, there was a different, very blunt, honest conversation, and that was, "Why did this slip?" And then you just get hammered,
And that structure of everyone caring about doing a great job and everyone bringing their A game and everyone wanting to deliver on time as, as much as possible enforced those types of deadlines that weren't really soft, right? You knew you would have to answer to something, uh, one way or the other. And you got a whole team that would deliver that feedback, right?
Nobody personally, one-to-one, had to deliver that news, maybe except for your manager. But in my case, then I left, and that accountability, did not leave with me. between two friends on a podcast, there is no institution or culture or expectation on how you hold a deadline. There's just, like, a friendship.
And the exact same conversations you might have between highly motivated peers that really want the best ti- possible product can almost feel like an accusation. And if you came out of a career into creating a, a show like this, listen, you didn't lose the ability to say the hard, true things. You lost the culture that allowed it.
And now every time you have to do it, it can feel personal. And that feeling of it being personal is fear, right? The fear of hurting a relationship that you care about. Again, not that I didn't care about my relationship with my coworkers, but there's a different expectation in that context
[00:07:12] 5. SIGNAL — Where the Updates Went Unsaid
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So what happened and how did this all break down even with the best intentions on both sides? This episode is the companion episode to that conversation I keep referencing, which is live on Diana's feed. And really It's interesting to see where this fear manifested
It's the last place you'd expect because Diana and I have a standing weekly call, and it exists to cheer each other on, to brainstorm, coordinate, and work through whatever is going on. It's a good meeting between peers, and ex- exactly the kind of structure every, productivity person tells you to build, an accountability buddy and someone that you can rely on to help you move forward.
And then on both sides of the Zoom, life ran it over, right? My dad needed to move earlier this year. He's w- elderly, and I had to leave town to go help him, which was a whole fiasco I won't share here. Uh, Diana had her own things going on, and I'll leave those to be hers to share and not mine. But some of the calls started with just us being friendly and talking about the stressors of the moment instead of the show or the episode, and this was a ritual.
She'd say, "Hey, I didn't get that thing edited." And I'd say, "No problem. Let's check in next week." Or I'd ask where we're at in here. I can't even think about it now. And it was totally reasonable, both of us just being good friends to each other week after week.
And then in my head, there were three things that were true, three things that I never said out loud. The first one was about the schedule. after a couple of weeks, I'm like, "If this isn't done in another week or two, we probably won't coordinate this launch," 'cause I knew it. I already ran the math. The second one underneath it was a bit more edgier, and if I'm honest about what I believed on those calls, it was this.
It's like, "I don't think this is ever gonna come out," on her side. And I never said that out loud, and I've never said anything nearly like it, and it's not that I didn't believe she was capable of. It just seemed like life kept getting in the way. The third thing was about me. Diana and I knew that I was thinking about rebranding the show.
We had talked about how this was going to be a test to, kind of prove out this new voice direction. And so we did this amazing conversation that I really do love, and you can, again, go over to her show and listen to what we talked about. And now that the idea has settled a bit more of what Input Output turned out to be, I was going through the transcript trying to think, "Okay, how much of this can we salvage for this launch?
Maybe we can actually do the coordinated launch thing." And it turned out that the idea of the show had moved on beyond what was going on. And so, and literally I had decided on like I'm just gonna soft launch everything 'cause I, it's preventing me from moving forward, and that was when Diana's like, "Okay, I'm gonna get this edited.
We're gonna launch it. I'm sick of, of waiting on it," which is amazing So Here's the other thing that I didn't do on my side. I didn't, tell her how close I was to shifting over the rebrand. And, you know, look at those three different things. There's a schedule, there's a belief, and then a change in me, and each one of these is true, and each one different weights.
And every single week, the meeting handed me a perfect place to update her or talk honestly, and every single week it either didn't come up at all or it was a, "Hey, no rush." And introspectively, why? It's because the joint idea was my ... or the joint launch was my idea, and saying any of those ideas meant killing it, that idea out loud to a friend that I had recruited into it.
And projects like this don't get killed, they get outlasted, and everyone stays reasonable and waits for the thing to die on its own so nobody has to be the one who says it. And again, I think this is fear, just that I didn't, feel it, but you know, it felt like patience and loyalty and being a good collaborator and being a good person.
And that's what I really want you to hear. The fear of your true voice doesn't announce itself. It's disguised. And there wasn't one bad moment or fight or falling out. It's just, you know, these little micro decisions or little things of awareness that don't get acted on especially as a solopreneur, one gracious week at a time until the project falls apart because it's over time, over-resourced, or the quality isn't quite right
[00:12:20] 6. MID CTA — Newsletter Issue #8
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Quick pause. If you're listening to this episode and thinking about your own overdue update or that fear of pushing a project along 'cause it's sharing a voice or something you want to say inside, then this week's issue of The Output is the practical version of this episode. How do you give that idea space without it sounding like a demand or accusation?
You can get it at shawnbuttner.com/joinus, which is in the show notes. Okay, back to it
[00:12:54] 7. OUTPUT — What the Fear Cost
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So what was the output or what does this all cost? I think it's three things. The first is the obvious one. It's a deadline. The joint launch is not happening in the way we intended. The second one is one that is a little bit heavier.
Diana's topic was timely. She was speaking at a political moment about things that she was feeling and happening around her right then, and opinions like that have a shelf life. They go bad. And that conversation was true when we recorded it, and I think the beliefs there are true. But if it could have shipped so much sooner, the moment it was built for would still be open, and it's closed now.
And truth said late isn't just late. It's sometimes, timing is part of the truth. And so we missed an opportunity to address something that we align on. . The third cost is one that nobody really talks about, and it's the reason this episode exists. Something did ship. You're listening to it right now. You can go to her feed and listen to the conversation we had. But notice what it is. This is not the conversation we were hoping to have. It's a reference to that conversation.
It's a story about it told by one half of the parties involved on one of the two shows. It didn't kill the work, but it shifted it in a meaningful way, and that's almost more dangerous than losing the thing outright because you still get to feel like something happened. And another layer on that is it would be easier to hear all this and think the fix is to just produce more.
You know, I was producing the whole time. My old show stayed live until a few weeks ago in kind of a maintenance mode, mostly for the, these interviews, putting things out because I felt compelled to keep producing.
In reality, I felt scared to stop doing anything. it's the same fear, kind of different costume. You wanna be prolific and hide at the same time, right? So sometimes producing lower quality things can hide your voice, and maybe that's what I was doing. but I felt a pressure to continue to produce something.
So the diagnostic isn't am I active? The diagnostic is where's my urgency point? Is it behind the truest thing that I have to say, or is it behind everything else? A couple of things that have been stuck. I've been working on assets for the new show, both musically, like I'm writing music for the intro and the different parts. I have some sound design stuff that I have in my head that I'm playing with that could have been done probably three months ago that I'm still working on.
And, you know, I'm also same thing with the branding and stuff, and finally have selected a designer to help me, with these types of graphics or their first 10 years of my career, I didn't really develop my opinions or my take on being a high performance coach. And that's 10 years of time I could have been finding people that could have benefited from the high performance process.
And so the way that I choose to serve people, the thing that I am really good at and can really help people with was not as exposed to the world because I didn't do the work, uh, of my voice and what I'm bringing to this category or this, topic of high performance. And so This isn't a story about needing to be braver, and it's not about Diana's pace or my pace or anything like that.
courage was never the missing piece because again, nobody I think felt afraid, and that's the whole point. We had did the hard thing about saying what was on our mind in a conversation among friends trying to, to push each other on, and that's the whole point. It's not a boldness thing.
[00:17:15] 8. CONCLUSION
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Here's what to take away from this week's episode. It feels risky to be vulnerable and say what's really on your mind, and Diane and I both did that in the conversation I keep referencing. It's also vulnerable to call out when expectation is shifting or broken and someone has to say what's really happening.
And it's not an ultimatum or confrontation or you're not bad for doing it, it's just sharing the real status. Everything else that follows that is what you need to do to get back on the track, the deadline talk, having a hard call, formulating a new plan, and you're just wasting time if you don't call it out.
Even if it feels like an imposition, or especially then, developing the skill to speak up as a solopreneur and in collaborations with people will serve you over time
[00:18:18] 9. CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK
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Here's your challenge of the week. Pick a project where you privately believe and what you've been saying out loud have drifted apart. I'm sure something comes to mind for you. That collab, the launch, the draft you keep politely deferring either to someone you were working with or to yourself. So one step, give it its overdue update.
Say the true status out loud this week to the person it involves. If it involves you, write it down somewhere where you can't avoid seeing it, and don't solve it in the same breath. Don't pitch a new plan. Just make the true thing that you know in your heart exist outside of your head. And whatever needs to happen, whatever needs to happen will follow from it.
Everything that was lost in this story came down to having conversations about what was really going on that nobody said. So don't donate your work to the drafts folder
[00:19:16] 10. WRAP-UP
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If this episode landed, please follow the show. That's how the next episode finds you. And if you got a few seconds, leave a rating.
That's what puts us in front of the next person who needs to hear it. I'm Shawn Buttner. This was Input Output, and I'll see you next time