Most of Jeanne Sparrow’s clients hate it when she proposes the following exercise: to look at themselves from the outside, by recording their behavior and reviewing it. She encourages them to pay attention to verbal and nonverbal communication, and ask, “Is what I intended to say what I actually did?”
Jeanne is a speaker, consultant, a former broadcast journalist and the author of a new book, Fearless Authenticity. She focuses on helping people find and bring out their uniqueness and authentic selves, especially when they communicate.
“Yes, what you do may not be unique as far as the job title or the deliverables,” she told host Amy Boyle during the latest episode of the Speaking of Phenomenal podcast, “but the way you do it is.” As Amy put it, figuring out what our unique contribution to the world will be is a matter of “finding the why behind your what.”
Jeanne spent 30 years in broadcast before writing her book. Throughout her life, she realized success and satisfaction come not necessarily from material achievements or honors, but from being true to who we are.
“Who we are is the gift we have to offer the world,” she told Amy. “We don't necessarily have to go looking for our purpose because we were put here to do something, and the truer we are to ourselves, the quicker and more efficiently we will find what we are supposed to do.”
Her mantra “live it, tell it, sell it” is about figuring our who we are, sharing it with the world and put it to the service of others.
When she thinks about the upcoming changes in the U.S. next year, what comes to her mind is the concept of authentic communication and how we can be a gift for others during exchanges in a meaningful, not transactional way.
She has some concrete tips: to focus less on the things we want to say and open our ears and minds to what is being said to us; to consider why people feel a certain way, why they feel a certain path is the right one and whether this path excludes others. For her, “an exchange actually gives energy, and it creates energy between two people.” But the quality of the energy depends on us. We can build a dialogue, or we can build a wall by making the whole conversation about us.
The “sell it” part of the equation is to acknowledge our capacity for service and find the courage to make that happen. “A lot of times we focus again so much on ourselves that we forget that there's another person on the part of the exchange that we can be of service to, and it doesn't cost us anything.” And that’s when we build more empathy and find opportunities to collaborate.
As the year ends and we think about what we want 2025 to look like, Jeanne suggests a few simple but vital questions: Are you giving time to the things that feed you? Are you giving time to the people and the relationships that are important to you?
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Carolina Baldin is a freelance journalist from Brazil. Having worked in law, policy and regulation, she is passionate about everyday stories that illustrate larger issues. She graduated from a master's program at Northwestern University in 2023 and became a guest blogger on the "Speaking of Phenomenal" podcast blog in March 2024.
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