3 Business (and Life) Lessons from doing a TEDx Talk

In this podcast episode, hosts Nicky and Ness share their experiences from an exceptionally busy week that included Nicky's TEDx talk at QUT and the launch of their book, 'Healthy Hustle.' 

They discuss the preparation and emotional journey behind Nicky's TEDx talk, the importance of balancing a healthy hustle, and the lessons learned along the way. 

Key takeaways include recognising the ongoing nature of maintaining a healthy hustle, trusting one's future self to handle upcoming challenges, and the importance of self-trust, even in moments of doubt.

 Check out Nicky’s TEDx Talk here - https://youtu.be/5YdOukYPeu4

Learn more about Nicky and Ness https://businesstogether.com.au

Buy a copy of Healthy Hustle: The New Blueprint to Thrive in Business & Life www.healthyhustle.com.au

Follow us on socials
Instagram - @b2businesstogether
Facebook - @B2BusinessTogether

Connect on LinkedIn
Nicky LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/connectwithnicky/
Ness LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessamedling/

Give us a call
Nicky Miklos-Woodley 0403 191 404
Vanessa (Ness) Medling 0400 226 875

Or send us an email hello@businesstogether.com.au

Music by Jules Miklos-Woodley

Chapters

• 0:04 The Art of Healthy Hustle
• 12:32 Trusting Your Future Self

Transcript

Nicky: 0:04

Welcome to the Smart Business Growth Podcast with Nicky and. Ness.

Ness: 0:11

We would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of country, the Turrbal and Bunurong people of Brisbane and Melbourne respectively, where Nicky and I both work and live, both work and live. As we hit record on today's podcast episode, we are coming off the back of an amazing week in our business. Sunday was Nikki doing her TEDx talk at QUT, which I flew up to Brisbane for, and then two nights later, we were celebrating the launch of our book Healthy Hustle. So by the time this drops into your ears, hopefully the TEDx talk that Nikki did will be available on the TEDx world and we will drop a link into today's show notes so that you can have a look at that. And if it's not, please just send us a DM and or an email and we'll make sure you get the link as soon as that comes available and I highly, highly, highly recommend that you watch it. It's how many minutes is it, Nikki? Is it 16 minutes About?

Nicky: 1:18

16. Yeah, but I mean it's amazing how many people have said that they just can't believe it was actually that long. Yeah, that's right, because it doesn't feel it.

Ness: 1:26

Goes in a blink of an eye, very, very powerful message.

Ness: 1:29

And I was equally proud and inspired and just in awe of you on the stage and how well you did.

Ness: 1:38

And it kind of got me thinking that, because I've been in the behind the scenes angle of it as well, watching just how much preparation, how many hours upon hours go into refining the script, into memorizing the script it's just like phenomenal the amount of work that you and every other presenter on a TEDx stage do to get there that I just felt like there could be some gold in this.

Ness: 2:04

And I reflect back to going to a TEDx talk in Cecil Street in Melbourne back in March and coming away from that texting you saying oh my God, nikki, you need to be on stage sharing this message of healthy hustle, because it is a dream of yours, a passion of yours, to do the public speaking, probably more so than mine as well. I mean, I do love speaking really, but I know that that's something that you're wanting to get into more of. So to have the stage, to have the presence, it's just amazing. So in saying all of that, I think today let's unpack maybe your top three lessons that you've learned, in whatever way you want to describe them from doing the TEDx talk and I'll throw it open to you to do some reflection as we go through that.

Nicky: 2:55

I love this. Thank you, ness. And it is a dream come true. And some people will have heard me say that 10 years ago I bought a book called how to Do a TED Talk and I was like, oh, I'm going to put it on out there as a goal. And then I was like, nah, that's too scary, I'll just put that to the side. And here we are. It has absolutely been a journey and you have seen the behind the scenes. You've been the champion, the picker-upper-offer, the floor person when I've had my meltdowns, the you know, joining me in the celebrations.

Nicky: 3:23

There is so much that goes on behind the scenes to get ready for an event like this, because you kind of can get up and wing it but you kind of can't. You've got a script. It's approved by TED. There's speaker coaches you're working with and shout out to Montana, who's the co-director for TEDxQT. She has tough conversations with you, encouraging you to dig deeper, share more of your personal story. Everyone has their own sort of experience through this, but it is really. It's a personal development program. It's a professional program, professional development, and you've got to try and stick to your script as much as possible.

Nicky: 3:57

So, memorizing 16 minutes yeah, I'm pretty proud and I remembered everything. So I'm pretty proud and I remembered everything. So I'm really proud To the point that it's okay. A lot of people ask for lines live and that's okay as well. So I do want to do a shout out to all the fellow speakers and definitely check them out as well. And it is such great timing because, as you said, we had the book launch and just that self-reflection. So really, for the last nine months it's been nine months since we first put pen or fingers to typing pads, keyboards, to start the book, since the application for the first TEDx round came around you know that was, I think, feb March. Not long after you messaged me I was like, wow, this is meant to be, and so it's. My sister studied and was an accredited midwife.

Nicky: 4:42

It's like birthing a baby I mean not literally, but it's a nine month. You know we've birthed these things to the world and the synchronicity between the two of them coming together and this message of healthy hustle. The TEDx talk is called the Art of Healthy Hustle and, of course, you know the book is called Healthy Hustle. So in reflecting on this, I will also say it is incredible how many people have reached out to both of us from the book launch, from the TEDx, to say wow, I feel like you were talking directly to me when we had our interview from the TEDx. It's just amazing. So the first thing I want to say to everyone is we're not alone. You are not alone in this If you resonate with anything we've ever talked about. The reason we were able to do a book and a TEDx talk is because there's so many people out there feeling the pain of this, of going hang on. I want to be successful and achieve great things, but I also don't want it to break me. So that's that healthy, healthy hustle piece.

Ness: 5:39

I feel like adding to that. We see you, we've been you and that's what I love about our experiences that led us into writing the book. For you it was about hitting the burnout wall. You know, for me I didn't have that experience, but I was definitely experiencing the entrepreneurial addiction which we have another podcast on. We'll put the link to that.

Ness: 6:02

So there were different ways of arriving at that end point, which was unhealthy hustle. And then, obviously, what we talk about, what we're passionate about, what we help people with, is finding a better way. We've got to still hustle, but we really want to find a way to be able to do that in a way that's really healthy. And I know, ironically, there were times throughout the last nine months where we would have conversations around, particularly for you, because you were juggling the both of those at the same time and there's a lot of hours that you put in above and beyond, but particularly around noticing writing a book on healthy hustle and feeling like I'm very unhealthy in my hustle at the moment. So no one gets this stuff perfect.

Nicky: 6:49

No, no, it's absolutely not. It's that evolution. That is my first big learn. First big takeaway insight is that the healthy hustle, this evolution, this journey whatever we call it to healthy hustle continues. It's not like you write a book on it and you get it. And I shared, at the book launch, a story where I was right at the peak of we'd written the book but we were in the middle of getting it published. There's so many moving parts of that because we self-published.

Nicky: 7:17

I was at, I think, the third out of the fourth draft of the TEDx script, so you're getting detailed feedback. You're getting encouraged to stretch and pull and dig deeper. These things were happening. We just started working with the speaker coaches. Also, we've got everyday BAU business going on and I find myself in hospital getting checked out because I had chest pains and Jules was looking at me lying on the hospital, mapped up to the ECG, whatever the monitors and things, and she's like Nikki, you know you just wrote a book on healthy hustle. I was like, yeah, okay, that's true. So everything was fine. It was just, you know, a lot happening and the hustle wasn't so healthy. But the beautiful thing in that is that I realized, okay, what do I need to do? What are the principles, the strategies, the tools that I need to step back and reconnect with? And genuinely, I looked at the book.

Nicky: 8:10

Even when we were writing the book and writing about entrepreneurial addiction, I'm like there are times where I have felt all those six signs and right now I'm feeling some of them. So let's just keep this in the flow instead of going into destructive chaos. But that's the first lesson and the first learn. There will be moments where it is so easy for the hustle to become unhealthy, also crazy. I've had people come up to me and say it's chest pain things. There's a common science.

Nicky: 8:32

So again, this is a reminder that you're not alone. We have to take care of our health number one. And it's easy to get wrapped up into it when we love what we do and there's lots of really cool things going on or we're caught in that busy trap, pop the pause button. What do you need to reconnect with? And I'm really proud to say that in that moment, which was probably a few months ago now, I was like great, I'll get back to those principles. And I talked to you and I was like what can I do with Jules? And it was easier to implement that stuff Definitely as it would have been than it would have been 10 years ago.

Ness: 9:07

I love what you say there, because I guess the thing that I notice about high achievers is that we have an expectation that we are the best at the things that we do, right. And so if you're listening to this and you associate with that, you want to smash your goals, you want to be the best version of yourself, you want to achieve these things, and often we would have the conversation around hang on a minute. It's our business and it's our book. We choose these deadlines. We can actually push it back. You know.

Ness: 9:31

There's nothing out there externally telling us that we must do this, and in fact we did push the launch back by a couple of weeks just because we saw what was involved in coming up. So what I hear in that is don't be a perfectionist and have self-awareness enough to be put. The call out that line in the sand moment. That when you say, okay, I've got to pause now, because if I keep going in this direction, if you kept pushing and pushing, then you would have turned into, you know, like potentially more serious complications. Instead, you've stepped back. At that point in time could say it could have happened earlier.

Ness: 10:10

But at that point in time and said I need to do something differently. And I'm going to go back to what I know, to what our research and our clients, what we've seen happen in relation to how to get out of that kind of hustle, hard mentality and reprioritize so that you are putting yourself back in first place, because the you know, when we look back on that, nikki, you had a been. If it had been more complicated and more serious than that, the flow on impact to our business, to your family, to your friends, would have been much bigger than you know having a book out in the world.

Nicky: 10:45

And even to achieving the goals. You know, if it got worse then it would have impacted me being able to do the TEDx talk at all, Absolutely, or, you know, and I think it's really it's quite kind of cool reflecting, because I had familiar feelings of that burnout wall and I remember saying to you and my psychologist at the time it's like I pumped the brakes on and I just rolled and I like tapped the little burnout wall but I didn't smash into it and I was like I'm really proud of that, Like I could see it, and I rolled. And my psychologist was like I'm really proud of that, Like I could see it and I rolled, and my psychologist was like well, that's too late.

Ness: 11:16

You know like you just did that and I'm like hang on, I was really proud of myself that I spotted it but she's

Nicky: 11:20

like well, no, because you tapped it. Like what do you need to do? You know it was just, it was a really good wake up call. But again, it's that whole thing Know how to repeat patterns. You know you've got different ones, Ness, you've got different ones, everyone that's listened. And be kind to yourself. When you kind of F it up a little bit because that will happen as well, because that was a big piece of that I'm like what, how could I? You know, I was sick of myself. I've read a book on this. It's like hang on, but I'm human, it's okay, and it's kind of awkward even sharing this story. But I think it's important because hopefully somebody out there needs to hear this. It's okay, be kind to ourselves. Let's just regroup and then start again.

Ness: 11:58

Have you heard? Our book Healthy Hustle the new blueprint to thrive in business and life is available right now to purchase. In Healthy Hustle, we take you through real world, practical and achievable steps to move you away from unhealthy hustle to a place of happiness and living, whilst continuing to achieve incredible business results. Order your copy now at healthyhustlecomau. Okay, so that's lesson number one.

Nicky: 12:26

Lesson number one. Lesson number two. Lesson number two this is one of my favorites to talk about because, as I said, you know I did a TED. I had a dream of doing a TED talk for many years and even when I put the application in I was like butt clench moment massively.

Ness: 12:40

And then when?

Nicky: 12:40

I had to do the interview, I was like, oh God, I'm going to vomit in my mouth, and then all of the different things. But what I realized, and what was really great in shaping my mindset to really prime my mindset, was that I'll be ready. Don't focus on the future too much, because my future self will be ready for that. If I'd have started panicking three months ago or thinking about, oh my gosh, I've got to get up on stage and look, there were moments of that but I could bring it back and go hang on. My self right now is not ready, but my future self in three months will be ready because there's all that work, all that mindset, all that practice, all that prep, and we can apply this to anything in life.

Nicky: 13:17

So often we, our clients, worry about a problem in the future that hasn't even happened yet or may not even happen A time, an event. I mean I was talking to someone the other day who was having nightmares about things going wrong at her wedding and I asked her when her wedding is, and it's in 12 months. I was like, oh, okay, okay, you're going to drown yourself in this fear and worry because your person in 12 months is going to be ready for whatever that thing is, and I really, really really saw this come to life with this TEDx talk. So when I was able to say, okay, your future self will be ready, and I tell you what I was ready, I was ready and I did it. So I think that's a really important lesson. Where are we projecting To the past, to the future? How can we come back to the present?

Ness: 14:04

Oh, God, I resonate with that so much because I often, you know, use the language around. You're trying to solve a problem you don't already have.

Nicky: 14:14

Yes, so true.

Ness: 14:15

You think you've got to go through. You know you're at step 10, that's the problem you're trying to solve but you haven't gone through steps four, five, six, seven, eight, nine in order to get there. And for me, you know, my biggest lesson around that personally, was going back quite a few years ago. My brother had his 50th birthday and he does a lot of long distance walking, like we're talking PCT trial in America for six months. So him and his partner are crazy about walking. And for his birthday he took us up to Mount Hotham in Victoria because they often walk from Walhalla to Canberra and that's a massive distance over a long period of time. And he took us up to the top of this mountain and he pointed in one direction and he said as far as the eye could see in that direction, plus four or five days is Wahala. And then he pointed in the other direction and he said as far as your eye can see, plus another four or five weeks, is Canberra.

Ness: 15:08

And I remember at the time having a hyperventilation moment going oh my God, oh my God that would be. You know how could I do that? And I'd be thinking. I was thinking about how heavy the backpack would be, how many blisters would be in my feet, how cold the nights would be. Like I'm spiraling out of control in my mind around how horrifying that sounded to me, without stopping to realize, well, I'm never going to do the walk, and even if I was crazy enough like them to do it, the amount of preparation they put into doing that, the you know, the materials they had, the lightness of their packs, the shoes that they'd chosen, the walks that they did leading up to it.

Ness: 15:48

I was trying to solve a problem I definitely didn't have or was ever going to have. And because they were able to do that, because they did what they needed to do to get there and I know if that was my mindset on a walk with them, they would have ditched me at day two. But we do this in business and we do it in life, and I just think it's such a great lesson to reflect on to just pause and go. Hang on. Hang on. Do I actually have that problem right now? Yeah, because that's where we get stuck.

Nicky: 16:19

Completely and your future self will be ready. Yeah, and you know what? Even your future self this afternoon, even if there's a meeting that you've got and you're nervous about, you're a different version of you in an hour to what you are right now. You're listening to this podcast, so you'll be definitely a different version.

Nicky: 16:35

But every conversation we have, every experience we have, every moment we have creates more depth and strength and breadth and experience in who we are to be able to deal with those future problems. So there's really two messages here. One is that one is that our future self is a different version of us. We'll be able to handle the problems in that moment, and two is linked to that. So don't worry about the problems that aren't even here yet, because they may never come.

Ness: 17:00

Yeah, just focus on the next step.

Nicky: 17:02

Exactly, and if they do come you'll be ready. Yeah, yeah.

Ness: 17:05

Yeah, and just focus on the next step. Yep, beautiful. That's my lesson number two. All right, let's go to lesson number three. Lesson number three Trust yourself.

Nicky: 17:14

Oh, my goodness, our mindset, our brain, can tell us some stories, or what? My goodness, I was again. My future self was ready. I was prepped. I'd put in the hours, I'd put in the work. I found the delicate balance of not over-rehearsing but rehearsing. You know all of that. Half an hour out, I'm backstage, I'm getting ready to get mic'd up. Man, I got in my head. I don't even know. I think I don't know why it happened, but I spiraled and then I panicked and I thought I don't remember my script. I know, and nobody.

Nicky: 17:45

Most people were out, the session had started, I was on last of the day, which is amazing, and also a great stretch of matters and things, but I handled it all so well. I had a great day. And then, in this moment, half an hour out, the spiral, the panic around, I forgot my script. So I tried to sort of say it in my mind and my mind went blank.

Nicky: 18:05

The thing that everyone has told me in this lead up and what I had to tell myself in that moment and I had fellow speakers shout out to Nick and Zara, if they ever listened to this, who really helped me with this is trust yourself, all that work that you did.

Nicky: 18:19

It's kind of linked to that. Your future self is ready, but in that moment you still have to let go and trust yourself again, for whatever that is, whether that's that meeting that you're a bit nervous about, that big walk that's ridiculously long and over the mountains, whether it's that sales conversation, whatever it is that you have, you can do all the prep. You still need to let go and trust yourself, even though it feels like you're free falling. And that was the moment that I had. So when I just went, whatever I'll go out If I, if I stuff it up and I forget everything, whatever which I didn't, I remembered every line, you know. So trust yourself, even when your brain is telling you all the reasons to panic or or to not. We need to let go and connect to that trust and beautiful things will happen.

Ness: 19:04

That's my third lesson. That's amazing. I love that. One gave me chills because I think that there are so many times that, particularly in business, in leadership, that that self-doubt comes up I hear a lot of people talk about.

Ness: 19:19

You know, one of our common asked questions is imposter syndrome. How do you overcome imposter syndrome? You know, how do you have these when you're sitting in a meeting and you're, you know, trying to have your voice shared but you feel so nervous about it because you're worried what's going to come out of your mouth. You've just that message around trust yourself, because every single person that has had that conversation with me in a coaching session or just in passing in a general conversation, you can bet they know their stuff. They haven't earned a place at the table in those meetings to not have something important to say, and so I think that you know that message around trust yourself, even when you're going through.

Ness: 20:00

You know challenging times in a business, for example, if you have to have a really difficult conversation with someone. If you're a good human being and you have to have a really difficult conversation with someone, if you're a good human being and you have the best outcome in mind for that person, for you, for the good of everything you know, coming to a resolution, you've got to trust that you're going to be able to do that and you know the choice that you have in that moment is to be courageous and just do it anyway. And then afterwards you realize actually I had that, I was okay, or it freezes us and it stops us from doing the thing. It'll stop us from having the conversation, which makes it a bigger burn and a harder thing to do. Down the track right, how many people, myself included, have tried to avoid a problem, bury head in the sand a bit and hope it goes away? And if it's a people problem, I bet you it bites you on the bum if you don't do anything about it.

Ness: 20:53

In business, the things that you don't want to do In sales, picking up that phone for the 15th time of the day to make that call and feeling the. What am I going to do if the person-.

Nicky: 21:05

Answers If they answer. If they answer actually?

Ness: 21:09

well, my fear was, why did they yell at me like I mean, it's never going to be that rude?

Nicky: 21:13

yeah, I know, I mean, even if they are, this is that whole, it's that resilience piece, but but there is, I often say in sales training you know what if they pick up, what if they say yes, like sometimes that's the thing that we can be fearful of without even realising it. And they're classic examples of trust ourselves. It's our brain that is getting in our way. It is feeling that we are getting out of our comfort zone, so it's trying to keep us safe. All the reasons why you shouldn't do that thing or you know. But yeah, great examples.

Ness: 21:42

Yeah well. So let's recap the top three. Number one was Embrace.

Nicky: 21:47

the healthy hustle is ongoing. We don't arrive.

Ness: 21:51

It's not a checklist, tick and flick, we're not perfect Cleaning your teeth once and thinking I'm done, exactly, it's a journey.

Nicky: 21:59

Fantastic Number two. Your future self will be ready. Love it.

Ness: 22:04

And number three Trust yourself. Yeah, that's so awesome. So if we were well, it's an interesting one because we're talking about your lessons from a TEDx talk, so there could be a small percentage of listeners who are keen to do a TEDx talk and could take some sort of action in the next 24 hours. But for the rest of us, who don't have that on our wish list from your lessons, what do you think could be an actionable action that someone can take in the next 24 hours? Great question, Ness.

Nicky: 22:31

And I actually didn't think of this until this moment. I also think it doesn't matter if you want to do a TEDx talk or not. These lessons are transferable into everyday life, and so I'm going to start with the first one. With this healthy hustle being an ongoing, I want you to rate yourself. Just actually pause for a moment and rate yourself out of 10. 10 out of 10, the healthy. Let's look at that. So, if you rate yourself 10 out of 10 for healthy, that means that you have been having micro moments, you're sleeping well, you feel optimal energy, you're having breaks in the day, so it's healthy, as in incorporating it into your working day. And then rate yourself 10 out of 10 or out of 10 for hustle. Now, if you were we want the hustle to be. Optimal is probably I don't know between five and seven, eight, but maybe your hustle is 15. I don't know if this even makes sense, ness, but like, is the hustle over 10? If it's beyond 10, that's a problem.

Ness: 23:25

Does that make sense? Did I just make that?

Nicky: 23:27

actually really complicated.

Ness: 23:29

No, I hear that we parked the healthy part and then we're looking at another scale. So if we're like we're feeling for the hustle. If we feel like we are hustling day in, day out. We are time poor, stuck in the busy trap. We're juggling, everything feels chaotic. We're probably going to be going. I am past a 10. Exactly.

Nicky: 23:50

So you kind of want to check in if you've got between like with, because the thing is, if your hustle is two out of 10, are you on holidays?

Ness: 23:56

Like that's all good if you are but we want a bit of hustle.

Nicky: 23:59

So we want the hustle to be probably between five, seven, max eight. If your hustle is eight to 12 or over the 10, you know, eight to 10 or over, then I want you to pause and go. I need to bring a bit more healthy in. So I gave you a complicated way but I feel like in my mind it works.

Nicky: 24:15

I think they marry they marry together you want to look at them both. You've got to make sure you're at least 10 out of 10, you know working towards 10 out of 10 for healthy and you don't want to be over eight out of 10 for hustle.

Ness: 24:26

I'll stop talking now.

Nicky: 24:27

Otherwise I might confuse things even more. Just reach out if you've got a question, if you want me to try, and I don't know.

Ness: 24:33

Absolutely, and I encourage every single one of you listening and watching today. Please, please, please, go click that link. Listen to Nikki and her TEDx talk. You won't be disappointed. It's quite amazing. So thanks for tuning in today. We'll see you next week. Thanks everyone. Thanks for listening to today's ep. If you loved what you heard, connect with us over on LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation over there. Did you hear you can now buy our book Healthy Hustle the New Blueprint to Thrive in Business and Life at healthyhustlecomau. Want us to speak to your team or run a workshop on healthy hustle in your workplace? Send us an email or go old school and give us a call to discuss. Until next time, happy listening and here's to thriving in business and life.