Unmasking Change: Authentic Communication With Tamsen Webster

Effective communication is at the heart of every successful transformation, be it in your personal or professional life. Join Tony Martignetti in a captivating conversation with communication expert Tamsen Webster, author of Find Your Red Thread and Say What They Can't Unhear. Tamsen shares her fascinating journey, from experiencing a pivotal panic attack to becoming a leading voice in strategic messaging and change leadership. Learn how her childhood of moving between worlds and a passion for human behavior inspired a powerful framework for authentic communication and lasting change. Learn how to craft compelling and resonating messages that inspire action and transform how we connect with the world.

---

Listen to the podcast here

Unmasking Change: Authentic Communication With Tamsen Webster

It is my honor to introduce my guest, Tamsen Webster. Tamsen is part message designer, part English-to-English translator, and part doctoral student. She helps leaders craft their case for large-scale change. In addition to her work in and for major corporations such as Harvard Medical School, Fidelity Investments, and Klaviyo, she is a Judge and Mentor for the Harvard Innovation Labs and a Professional Advisor at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

She has spent over ten years as the idea strategist, 1 of only 9 legacy-level TEDx events in the world. She was named to the Thinkers50 Radar in 2022 and is the author of two amazing books, Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible and Say What They Can't Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change, which is truly remarkable. She lives in Boston with her husband, 2 sons, and two Brindle Greyhounds, Hazel and Walnut.

‐‐‐

It is truly a pleasure to welcome you to the show, Tamsen.

I am so glad to be here with you. 

Using Communication For Creating Lasting Change

I'm thrilled because we're going to have a really good conversation. I'm looking forward to exploring your journey. One of the things that I love to share with people is this idea that you’ve done so many amazing things but you don't start off doing these amazing things. There's a journey. We do this through what's called flashpoints. Flashpoints are these points in our journey that reveal our gifts to the world. I know that we're going to learn some remarkable things from you. What I want to do is give you the opportunity to share what you're called to share. We'll pause along the way and see what kind of themes are showing up. How does that sound?

That sounds like a perfect plan. I love it.

I'll turn it over to you and you can take it away.

There are two things that come together as themes in my life. 1 is lasting change and the 2nd one is communicating for that lasting change. That 1st major flashpoint was when I had my 1st panic attack when I was 17. Speaking of flashpoints, what set it off was I was performing in our high school's production of The Wiz, which was amusing because, for any number of reasons, it was not a terribly diverse school. Let's put it that way. We had a spectacular student named Rita. She was amazing. They decided to build this whole show around her and rightly, she had this amazing voice. She was incredible.  Other than that, this pretty fairly lily-white school in Southern Virginia was like, “We're doing The Wiz?”

The image of the wizard is not a real thing. We were representing that on stage at our school with this foam mask that was hanging over the stage. There was this moment in the dress rehearsal where we were testing the special effects. There was what was called a flash pot sitting underneath the mask. When the mask was supposed to first appear, they set off a flash pot. In the dress rehearsal for this, someone had overfilled the flash pot. When it went off, there was this tower of flame that went up and caught this foam mask on fire.

It's on fire. It's burning. It's foam that's burning. People are grabbing the fire extinguishers and putting it out. I full-stop freaked out. I had this deep fear of being poisoned, and to be in this room which suddenly was filled with the fumes of plastic burning and then the fire extinguisher. I was also hopped up on prednisone because I'd been sick for a couple of weeks. I somehow drove home that day. I’m sorry for the people of Norfolk and Virginia Beach because I should not have been driving. By the time I got home, I was not functional.

I remember my mother driving me to the emergency room and they were giving me adrenaline shots. I don't even know what they were doing, but all of a sudden, it was like, “I'm dying,” and they were like, “You have a panic disorder.” This was in 1990 and we did not understand a huge amount about panic disorders and anxiety disorders at that point, but I can tell you one thing. There was nothing I wanted more in my life than to change it. That set the ball rolling of, “What does it take to make a difficult change happen? How do you do that long-term?”

The communication part of it, I'll be a little faster with. It was 1991 when I graduated high school. This was fourteen economic crises ago. It was not a great time to be looking for a job. Even though I had been very much an art kid and whatever, A) I knew I didn't have the hustle and B) I wanted to be employable. I was like, “I'm going to get a business degree,” and then I was bored stiff with that. I figured marketing would at least give me a way to be creative and employable.

I ended up adding a second degree. At the same time, that was in the humanities. I got an American studies degree as well. I had this really lovely balanced professional plus humanities piece. This two-track looking at things from multiple perspectives, which was also embedded in the American studies approach, when combined with my deep interest in transformational change came to it so that starting with my first job out of grad school where I was a change management consultant and asked to develop the communications methodology for that change management consulting firm, I've been doing some form of communication for change since 1997.

This has been my deep question of the world. How can we build lasting buy-in for large-scale change? How do we accelerate the understanding and adoption of new ideas? What words are necessary? What do the words have to contain in order for all that to happen? Whether it's an actual dialogue or an internal one, fundamentally, most of the things that will prompt that change or prevent it come down to the words that we say and the meaning that we associate with. That all started with the literal flashpoint. That's how these themes first arose. Let's put it that way.

There's something about what you shared. Oftentimes, people have a pivot that's so dramatically different in their lives where they say, “I was doing X and then I got into Y.” It was so different that you're like, “How do they do that? How do they make that change?” For me, there's something about what you're doing. It's almost like there's a tree and you've expanded the branches on the tree. For you, change communication has always been the root.

It’s the throughline or the red thread, if you will.

What you do is so deeply embedded in who you are but you continue to expand the ways that you use it and the ways that you explore it. Would you agree?

That’s fair. I would reverse the tree metaphor to explain that. What I mean by that is by starting in marketing, that's the tasty fruit of the tree. If you're talking about a fruit tree, and let's say it's apples, that's the thing that gets handed over from one thing to the other. That's the thing that gets passed. Let's think about that as the service because I work so much in nonprofits. That's the education or the art exhibition. I have worked with B2B and B2C, and I still do. It's the product. It's the thing that your audience will take hold of.

When you're in marketing, you're trying to make that apple as shiny, tasty, and attractive as possible. What I discovered was that sometimes, it could be this beautiful shiny apple or we would think it was a shiny apple and people wouldn't grab it. Maybe they would grab it and then they didn't like it. It was like, “What's going on there?”

I started to look at the branches. I was like, “Maybe it's that they don't like this kind of tree,” which was where I backed in from marketing and communications. Marketing was the undergrad. I did managerial organizational communications for grad school, and then I was out into the world and doing development communications, marketing, performance and audience development, fundraising communications, and brand design.

When I started to look at branding, I was trying to figure out, “Maybe it's the kind of tree. Maybe you're a Granny Smith person and we are Macintosh. How do I make it so that it's more clear from the beginning that you're coming to the right tree where I'm not trying to get people in where that doesn't work?” I was like, “Okay,” but then I would still see that it didn't often work. You can have a really solid brand, but then it breaks in the day-to-day explanation of it.

Impact Of Social Media On Branding

Another flashpoint was the explosion of social media in the late 2000s. All of a sudden, the content beast needed to get fed. There was this huge gap between some kind of brand tagline and the need to create content every day that some of the inherent weaknesses of how most people approach the brand became immediately apparent. Number one, a lot of branding is aspirational at best. You've got this gap between what an organization says it is and what they want it to be, and then what people's lived experience of it is. That's the first thing.

The second thing is oftentimes related to that because it isn't based on what is true or as the theorist Chris Argyris would talk about, it's not what's in use, the branded use or the principles in use are not the same. There wasn't enough meat there for a content program, a social program, or a digital program to figure out what you do with this brand day-to-day.

The third thing is not to mention because these brands are often so aspirational, in my mind, that was part of the core issue with that classic battle between marketing and sales. Marketing would have this beautiful brand and sales were like, “This does not work when I'm talking to humans about this.” I was like, “Maybe if I go into sales design, I can figure this out.”

By going into sales messaging again, I'm in the trunk of the tree. We're in the message. This is about what at the core of all of this we arare talking about. How healthy is that? If the trunk of the tree isn't healthy, then the branches aren't going to be. If the branches aren't healthy, then the fruit's not going to be and all that good stuff.

This is where I started to do a lot of work which showed up in my first book, The Red Thread, and said, “How can I create a structure that reveals where there are gaps in the health of the tree?” That's where I used a story structure because that's how we make sense of information in the world. That's also one of our best ways to communicate information because it's how we make sense of the world. That worked really well.

I was like, “Yet, there's still a problem. Something could be beautifully architected in either a Once Upon A Time story or a Red Thread-type story where it's in that format. We've broken it into its component parts and presented it. It can be letter-perfect. Whether you're using my Red Thread structure, Donald Miller's StoryBrand, or Nancy Duarte's hero's journey adaptation, I would see that it still didn't always work. There was still that issue that sometimes, people wouldn't want the fruit. Why is that? What was happening? There was still something that even if everything seemed healthy, someone would bite an apple and there'd be a worm in it. I was like, “Ugh.”

What I ended up doing, where I am, and where this book is, to me, is the roots. It came to me saying, “If it's not working, it's because there's something at the root of all of this or at the foundation of all of this that isn't working.” It is one of the points I make in the book but it is the foundational piece of where all of this begins. If any message in any format to any audience isn't intuitively agreeable to that audience from the get-go, no amount of content branding, brand design, advertising, PR, or any of these other formats like copy, website, social posts, or whatever will ever solve for that.

Where this book really came from was saying, “Given the 25 years that I've spent on this, these are the requirements to have a healthy tree. It's healthy from the roots. The soil is healthy. The roots are healthy. All of this will lead to a healthy trunk which will make it easier.” I can see from the outside 100% where people are like, “You've applied this to all sorts of stuff.” I'm like, “Yes.”

To me, it all comes down to the root is what has to be there, which is how agreeable the idea that's captured by this institution, this organization, this product, this approach, this talk, this presentation, this web copy, or whatever. How agreeable is it? We can then worry about how understandable it is and worry about how attractive and written it is. It is a thing that with these concepts, they apply to a whole bunch of other things. In my mind, it's because it is the thing that gives rise to everything else.

You shared a lot. I want to react.

Something you brought up earlier about my hyperfocus on this is that I'm increasingly recognizing that I am and have had many of the signs of autism for a very long time. You experienced one. I acknowledge it and I own it. That is also part of where it comes from. I get so excited about stuff and I want people to know that I'm like, “Here's everything I've ever known about anything all at once.”

Importance Of Authenticity In Messaging

I love it, truly. One of the things I want to react to from what you shared is it's not just about companies or a project. It's about people too. The latest book is very personable too. It's a lot about your story. When I think about the messaging, one of the things that was rolling around in my head is that we can no longer fake it until we make it.

Not when it comes to messaging. There’s too much information. There's no place to hide in this world. There are too many sources of information. There are too many ways to publish it. Everything you do is on display all the time, which, to me, would be very exhausting to try to cover that up. Continuing that line of what I've been learning about autism and recognizing in my own behaviors, people with autism, ADHD, and things like that do something.

There's a category of behaviors that are classified as what's called masking. Meaning, you are playing the part of a normal person based on what you've picked up. You’re like, “This is how other people act in this situation.” You learn to do that even if your instinct is not to do that. You don't necessarily understand why that's the way it is but you've picked up, usually the hard way, that's how you need to be. That's exhausting. We can be really good at it.

T he whole reason why I've paid so much attention to all of this stuff is because I've stepped so wrongly so often from childhood to teens to early twenties to early organizational things. A lot of this was developed out of self-protection. I was like, “How do I not screw up?” I say all this because this is exactly what I saw with branding. I see it with personal branding. I see it with organizational branding. A lot of it serves the same point as masking. We're going to try to put this mask out there that we think is going to be more acceptable to people than what we may believe we are. We don't even know what's valuable about who we are so we're going to go, “What do we see other people think is valuable? Let's mask as that and put that out there as our brand.”

Branding, whether personal or organizational, can be a form of masking — trying to put out a version of yourself you think will be more acceptable than who you truly are.

If that's not how you are, it's the same thing. Whether that's a personal brand or an organizational brand, it takes a toll as masking does on somebody who is neurodivergent. Meaning, it's exhausting to try to be this thing that does not come naturally all the time. That's where you see so many individuals and organizations misstep with their branding because there is this gap between what they wish it were or what they think other people will like and what they are.

Much of this is clicking into place for me with my own life. It always made more sense to me naturally. I'm like, “Why do we even try this other thing? Can't I tell you what I think? Can't I  tell you the truth? Can't I  tell you what is working about this and what's not?” They’re like, “I can. I have to be a little more gentle with how I do that.” Also, from this belief was like, “I believe there's value.” It started with myself but I also saw it with other people. I'm like, “I wouldn't understand why an organization would pretend to be one thing when I saw clear value in something else.”

A great example of that was when I worked at the Boston Conservatory. I was there for four and a half years. It's a performing arts college of music, dance, and musical theater. I was there as the head of marketing, which meant I had a broad base of responsibility. It was marketing for admissions. It was helping to support fundraising communications. It was bringing audiences in for things. The admission stuff was interesting because that's where you have to really represent the brand.

Back in the day when there was physical printed material to send out to students, they don't do that anymore, but when I first got there, they did. On the cover of this viewbook was the inside of a theater, which makes sense with performing arts, but it was not a theater that belonged to the Boston Conservatory. I was like, “What the heck were you thinking?” They were like, “Our theater sucks.” I'm thinking, “When do you think people are going to discover that? They're going to come onto campus and be like, “Where's this theater?” You're like, “We don't have that theater but we have this one.” I'm like, “They're going to pay you a stupid amount of money every year to a place that bait and switch them on the viewbook. That is stopping now.”

The thing is I saw incredible value there because the conservatory at the time, which is part of Berkeley College of Music, was a scrappy place. We had polls in the middle of our dance studios. The practice rooms weren't soundproof. Yet, we had this astounding body of alumni who were working in the field. I was like, “That's not by accident. Let's embrace that. Let's say that what we're doing is training these performing artists to be employable in the real world.

In other words, they may be trained to be a diva in one way but they are not going to be a diva in another. They're going to understand, especially when they're first out of school, that they're not going to have pristine studios or pristine practice rooms. No matter how talented they may be as a classical euphonium player, their first job is probably going to be in the pit of something else.” That's what we did. That's where we pivoted the messaging. That was so often at the core of what I believed to be true. I was like, “Isn't this easier to be what you are?”

Over time, because I had to make this case to other people, I started pulling in research, background, concepts, cognitive science, and all of these other things that supported what felt intuitively right to me. When it comes to these nine principles of what they can't unhear, I'm not kidding when I say it's like my manifesto. It’s saying, “There is not only a better way to do this, but it's a lot easier and therefore a lot easier to sustain. It's not asking you to be something that you're not and do something that you're not even if unintentionally.” It's my Tamanifesto, if you will. Also, I'm a dork and I'm willing increasingly to own that.

I want to point out a bit of a nuance and you let me know if this is right or wrong. It's one thing to cut through the noise and say the message that is truly yours but sometimes, we have to package it in a way that connects with the audience. For example, I often talk about this idea of if you want to bring woo-woo to leadership teams and sell them on this idea of consciousness and what have you, it's not an easy sell but if you can speak their language of what this gets them, then they might be more receptive to it. It's not disingenuous. It's making sure that you speak the language of your audience.

That's right. That's why I call myself an English-to-English translator because it is about dipping below the propositional language that we may be using about what something is. We're dipping deeper into either what the actual experience is of that or what we mean by it. This is a thing also that I have seen throughout my life. Another slow burn of a flashpoint throughout my life was that I often was in the in-between.

The first encounter with that was the fact that my dad was in the Navy so we moved around a lot particularly when I was very young. While all of your understanding of the world metaphorically is happening as you're picking things up and whatever, I was also being physically picked up and put down in new places with new people in a completely new environment. We went from the Philippines to Connecticut to Hawaii to San Diego to Virginia all before I was five, and then we stayed put. The fact that I had done all that already meant that fundamentally, I was bringing a different frame of reference even as a five-year-old in ways that I didn't could not even fully understand into everything else.

I say that this has an effect because my sister has her own way of dealing with a very similar thing and the fact that my sister is an Emmy award-winning screenwriter in Hollywood. She won Emmys for The Handmaid's Tale. She has the writing credit on Pacific Rim 2 and some amazing things. She was one of the executive producers of the Penguin Series that came out on HBO. She's done some cool stuff, but her process of dealing with all of this was internal world-building. I continue to be fascinated.

As someone who got picked up and put down, what that did for me was that it meant that I was always trying to figure out, especially if we layer in the fact that I am suspiciously autistic, “How am I supposed to be here? What are the rules here? How do people operate?” What that meant was because I'm also deeply fascinated by people and stuff, I was like, “These people are fun.” In high school, I was deeply involved in the arts, but I was like, “These people are fun,” so I was also the manager of the varsity boys' baseball team.

I can pick out of a crowd somebody who's been in the Military, somebody who's played baseball, or both. I will find them in any group of people. When I started school this summer, I was like, “These guys seem nice,” and then they were like, “We're Army Rangers.” I'm like, “I knew it. I didn't even know that when we started.”

What that meant was I was always in between these groups. I was in the arts and I was in sports. I didn't play sports. I was keeping score. In undergrad. I was studying business and I was in the liberal arts. When I did grad school, it was the same thing. I liked doing two degrees at the same time so I found a program that would allow me to do that in grad school too. I was doing my MBA and a Master's in arts administration. My jobs were about how to change management and how we could get two companies to come together. I was sitting in between fundraising and marketing. I did that again at Harvard Medical School.

Marketing, branding, or any form of communication and messaging is in itself something that sits in between. It sits in between the organization and the market. If we're talking about internal communications, it's sitting in between the leadership and the executive team or the leadership and the staff. Seeing that sometimes people in wildly different groups were talking about the same thing but they were referring to it in a completely different way was bananas to me. In certain cases, I would say, “This group would really benefit from this group.” You couldn't bring over and be like, “Let's bring in musical theater singing.” That's not going to fly. Things that I learned were like, “Let's talk about this using the terms or the concepts that people already understand.”

As you've picked up from Say What They Can’t Unhear, the big overarching thesis of that book is that every decision that we make has a story behind it, specifically a story we believe, and the beliefs that we agree with are the ones that we already have. The best way to build buy-in is to build that story based on elements that people already agree with. Meaning, I already want an answer to this question. I already agree with the principles that this is based on. Therefore, thanks to logic, Aristotle, and neuroscience, if you agree with those two things, you're going to agree with the way that they come together.

Every decision we make has a story behind it, specifically a story we believe.

Even more bonus, by finding those things, we end up talking in terms and concepts that are nearly universal, if not totally. It's this cool magic trick that by continuing to swim upstream and find the roots of the tree, I’m like, “This is what's at the root of it. What are the mechanisms by which we even come to an initial acceptance or rejection of something that somebody's saying to us?” The biggest thing that we overlook is how much of that happens without our conscious knowledge. It's all about saying the quiet part out loud. That's very much the theme.

Embracing Duality And Finding Common Ground

That last thing you said is an important thing, which is saying the quiet parts out loud. Part of the gifts that you bring that I am noticing as you talk about this is the ability to be comfortable with duality and have the ability to see both sides of a story or both sides of the spectrum but also be able to be that bridge between the two and know, “You have more in common than you have difference. Ultimately, there's something here that we can find the common point that brings it together.” We can talk about that.

I believe that. There are all sorts of empirically validated theory and hard science or physical science that supports that. That's where my attention is, particularly with my doctoral program and all of that. Whether this unwavering hyperfocus on this topic is attributable to autism or not, I'm very glad that I've had it because it was part of what made writing this last book so easy in a way. A lot of times, when people are trying to write books, part of what gets in the way is the imposter syndrome and the, “Who am I to say this?” or whatever.

This was the one topic where I was like, “If I can't write a book on this or I don't have authority on what it takes to make a transformational change and what somebody has to hear in order to do that, then I got nothing. Otherwise, what were the last 25 years for? If we go all the way back to my panic disorder, what were the last 33 years for?” This is one of those places where I was like, “I know this.” This isn't, “I suspect that this is the right theory in this room with the candlestick.” I was like, “There's a lot to back this up.” The more that I'm researching it, the more that there is. It does come down to what is underneath it all.

I had long thought of myself as this human decoder ring, which is like our human Rosetta stone. That's when the whole English-to-English translation came into play. Another flashpoint in my life was when I started to moonlight as the first executive producer and idea strategist for TEDx Cambridge, which is now TEDx New England. That was the first time I had to go from doing this intuitively myself and then explaining to other people how to do what I did intuitively.

A couple of years ago, I had to figure out what was implicitly happening and then turn it into an explicit framework that other people could follow. That was a big risk on my part because I was like, “I don't even know if this is teachable.” A lot of people would try to tell you, particularly people who work in creative agencies, “This is the gift.” I'm like, “Some people may be more predisposed to some of the traits that are helpful here.”

Another thing that I know to my core after doing this aspect of it for eight years is that it is teachable. This is a teachable and learnable skill. Once I started to realize that, I was like, “I don't know how I don't put this back out in the world.” I am not of the camp that believes that knowledge is ownable. I may have expertise and it perhaps is because I'm at least a third generation of teachers or professors. I'm the only one in my generation of my cousins that went to the doctoral level but there are layers of teachers and professors going back to my grandparents.

Knowledge is not ownable. You may have the expertise, but you cannot call it yours.

It feels like between that and my dad and my mom because she was also a civil servant, there is this service mindset that's also part of my family that I feel like I don't know anything else I would do with this. It's like, “Why wouldn't I put back in the world? We need these ideas. We need this change. We need all of this.” I'm not saying it's solved but it's an addressable problem. If I have found a way that seems to be adaptable to most situations and most people, I feel it is an obligation to put it out there. That made writing the book easy because I couldn't imagine not serving not only this idea but the ideas that this idea serves. Does that make sense?

Value Of Service And Sharing Your Gifts

Yes. It makes absolute sense. It's such a great perspective to have. There's a sense of being of service but also, it's almost selfish to hold back this beautiful thing that you've started to realize about how you can help people. Not only that, but it doesn't diminish your value in the world by doing this. It almost enhances your way of showing up in the world. People see the value you're bringing and they can see that there's more that you have to offer even beyond that.

Thank you. I do feel like a conduit for this. I don't feel like I've been given anything. It's part of the reason why I'm so in love with the degree I'm getting as an educational doctorate in adult learning and leadership, which is very much about how we make meaning of the world. That's the ability to consciously make meaning and critically reflect on things that have happened and what that means. That is generally what people agree separates childhood from adulthood. It is the degree to which you consciously and unconsciously bring prior experience into the meaning and making of any new situation.

When I think about my work, I don't feel like Monty Python foot-stomping me with this idea and somehow meant to deliver it to the world. It's more that this is the thing that makes sense given all of the experiences that I've had. That comes from the personal motivation of feeling viscerally and stepping wrong when trying to say the right thing or believing so passionately in an idea and then having somebody completely dismiss it out of hand because of my youth, my gender, or whatever.  Struggle and effort have to be there but if we can reduce the pain of the path, then I would've gladly taken some of that. Part of this conduit for this is, “How can I help other people?” That feels right to me so that's what I'm doing.

Tamsen’s Highly Recommended Books

I know we're coming close to the end. I want to make space for the last question that I ask every guest. The question is, what are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

There are 2 books that immediately came to mind, 1 that always does, and then 1 that I had a lot of experiences that have reconnected me with my seventeen-year-old self. The one that immediately came to mind, which I believe that anybody who wants to talk to people should read at some point, is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The fancy word for what he is talking about is dual process theory. It is the understanding of how that interaction between what he refers to is the fast brain, which has gotten that misnomer of lizard brain or monkey brain, and then the slow brain, which is our human prefrontal cortex and all that good stuff.

It's such a wonderfully accessible introduction to that. To show the effect that's had, one of the core theoretical frameworks that's going to be underneath my research is dual process theory and how all strategic communication formats that we've been following since 1958 have not been updated to account for that, which is cuckoo bananas. It also explains a lot about why all those things are broken along the path of that tree.

With the other book that came in, there was a part of it that was very much an inspiration, at least at some level, for the style of the new book. It was a book that I read multiple times when I was a teenager. That was Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, which is a lovely book. It's cuckoo. It's sci-fi, whatever I had originally gotten into. I was debating whether I would talk about Stranger in a Strange Land, which is a seminal book that’s also appropriate if we think about the very idea of Stranger in a Strange Land.

What I loved about this was that Time Enough for Love is not only about love but there is a main character, a guy named Lazarus Long, who has lived for years. There are these intermissions in the book where they are extracts from his “notebooks”. Even those notebooks were printed separately and illustrated. The notebooks were these wonderful things like a poet who reads his prose in public usually has other nasty habits. They were these gorgeous, fabulous insights, some of which were funny and some of which were deeply powerful. There's one that goes something like, “You can have peace or you can have freedom but don't ever fool yourself into believing you can have both.” I was like, “Ooh.” That idea of these recognizable truths is very much the idea behind Say What They Can't Unhear.

It's been a while since I've re-read this but I would bet that if I went back and read it again, it would be stunning to me how much of my own personal philosophy was shaped by this. Not to mention that one of my longest enduring handles, Tamidir, was a take on one of the nicknames for one of the characters whose name was Hamadryad. They called her Hamidir for short. There you go. Time Enough for Love and Thinking, Fast and Slow. There's a time element there.

It's wonderful. First of all, you're not alone. This is not the first time that book was mentioned. It's interesting how people have this connection to Robert Heinlein’s work. I have not read his books, but I'm going to have to go back and read those books because I am feeling a call to that.

I would start with Stranger in a Strange Land. It's a little bit of a slow burn. It's like Schitt's Creek. You have to get past the first season and then you're like, “This is amazing.” It could also be like Parks and Rec, which had like, “People say this is good,” and then by the time you hit the second season, you're like, “I see.” Heinlein’s a little bit like that. Stranger in a Strange Land is like that. It's not a book that'll capture you right from the get-go. In Time Enough for Love, there is a future history series that he called. Some of these characters show up in multiple books but Time Enough for Love was one of my favorites.

This was so much fun. I can't thank you enough for coming on. You shared so many great insights. I'm blown away and inspired. Thank you for coming on.

It is my pleasure. Thank you so much. It's always fun to talk about random things. I've always said that I'm a magpie by nature. I love black and white. I’m often in black and white. Black and white patterns decorate my office. I was reminded that there's another black and white bird that I resemble. I've always said that I'm like a magpie because I find shiny things, collect them, and I’m like, “Shiny ideas, I love them,” but then I was reminded that there's another black and white bird that has another behavior that I exhibit. Those are penguins. Penguins do this thing called pebbling, which is they'll find a little pebble that they think is wonderful and then they'll share it with their friends and loved ones. They'll hand them a little pebble.

I loved being reminded of that because A) It is another black and white bird but B) I realized that that's the framing that I choose for what other people might consider info dumping. I'm always handing out little pieces of information. I realized that for me, that's my penguin pebble. I'm like, “You might find this useful. Here was this pretty pebble I found. You'll like it.” Thanks for allowing me to scatter pebbles.

The pebbles you offered were so wonderful. Thank you so much. I love that concept. Before I let you go, I want to make sure that I give you an opportunity to share where people can find out more about you. What's the best place to find you?

The thing that's more focused on me is TamsenWebster.com. The thing that is more focused on how you can help other people make transformational change is MessageDesignInstitute.com, which is the home where all these ideas, frameworks, research, and stuff are going to be. Go to TamsenWebster.com or MessageDesignInstitute.com. I would love it if people sign up for my newsletter through Message Design Institute from being a subscriber. It's often where I will test new ideas first and get feedback on them. It's also where I let people know when I'm testing out a new way to learn these things. I love hearing back from people. That would be lovely. If anybody wants more pebbles, that's my main pebble delivery device.

They should buy your books, which is awesome. It’s an important thing.

I also had this realization in the last few years that I am an academic at heart and I'm a crappy business person. I forget to be like, “Buy stuff.” May I share something I'm very proud of?

Please.

My new book has gotten onto two lists that I'm very excited about. One is that it made the long list of the non-obvious non-fiction books of 2024. I am very excited about that. It was also selected as 1 of the 10 Best Business and Management Books of the Year by the Globe and Mail in Canada. I'm excited about that.

I don't want this to end. I want to keep on going.

I have to go prep for a client call though but this is awesome. Thank you so much.

Thank you again. Thanks to the audience for coming on the journey. That's a wrap.

Important Links

• Message Design Institute
• Tamsen Webster
• Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible
• Say What They Can't Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change
• Thinking, Fast and Slow
• Time Enough For Love
• Stranger in a Strange Land

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.ipurposepartners.com/podcast