From Behind The Scenes To Stepping Up

Patty spent decades behind the scenes helping build Chicken Soup for the Soul into a billion-dollar brand. She co-authored multiple New York Times bestsellers and helped shape a movement that touched millions. But while she was busy making others successful, she realised she was playing small in a world that she helped create.

Today, Patty helps women stop hiding, start speaking, and give themselves full permission to be seen, heard and fully expressed. Her message is a blend of real strategy, hard-earned wisdom and a loving kick in the pants, perfect for anyone ready to rewrite their story and step into leadership.

Thank you so much for joining me, Patty. I know I'm thoroughly going to enjoy this conversation.

As I said to you before we started recording, I started my business back in 1994, and as a woman going into a very male-dominated industry, I actually didn't even blink twice about that, because I had three big brothers and my parents were in business, so I didn't see it as a hindrance. It was more the fact that there was very little connection. There were no mastermind groups like there are these days, or coaches. There was the mothers' group at the school gate who would say, "What are you doing starting your own business? Oh no, I don't think so." Having to really eke out an existence at the start, and then build on that, it always comes back to believing in yourself and seeing that potential.

So I'm going to ask you this first question, because it's very near and dear to my heart. Like yourself, I started off as a secretary. But here you are: you start as a secretary at a small personal development company and end up co-authoring New York Times bestsellers and helping build a billion-dollar brand. What was the moment you realised you'd gone from taking notes in the room to actually shaping what happened?

Patty Aubery: Wow. I think it took longer than it should have, Michelle, to be honest. I was 24 years old when I answered an ad in the paper that said "secretary wanted," and I really didn't know what I wanted to do, be or have. I didn't know anything about personal growth, and I didn't really care about it. I just wanted to make the $25,000 a year, because it was 1989 and that was okay money back then.

It wasn't really until about 1993 that we got our first book published, and right after that I got pregnant. Then our book hit a bestseller list at the end of '94, right about when my son was being born. So it was this whole "what am I doing, do I drop everything and be a stay-at-home mum, or do I just grind through this thing and fake it till I make it," as Mark Victor Hansen would say to me: "Come on, kid, you've got to fake it till you make it, and visualising is realising." So I did that.

I think I was just so busy and so crazy with everything that it didn't really register for me. I think it took a really long time. I remember my publisher saying to me on the phone, "This never happens - write everything down and save your money, write everything down and save your money." But I think I started to notice something shifting when I did my first book, which came out in 1996: Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul. I wrote that and compiled those stories for my mum, who was diagnosed with breast cancer about two weeks after I had my son, JT, who's now 31.

My husband came home from the office and said, "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is your mum has breast cancer. The good news is they caught it before you could even see it on a mammogram." That was, I think, the first time I really saw myself as something more.

I went from secretary to Vice President of Operations very quickly, because I worked for Jack Canfield. He's really nice, and I was really bossy, and I took over everything and said, "By the way, I'm changing my title." I was probably the secretary for two months, and then I said, "Are you going to make cards?" and he said, "Yes, I am." We were just making it up, Michelle, as we went.

After that first book was published, it was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm actually an author," because I struggled with "who am I to write a book?" I got Cs in English. I went to San Diego State. I'm not Jack Canfield, I didn't go to Harvard. But my sister was working for me at the time, reading stories, because people sent stories in all day, every day. She was studying for her boards for her nursing degree, and she said, "We should put this book together for Mum." I was afraid to even ask them, to be honest. I said to her, "Why would they let us write a book? We work here." She said, "Patty, you've been doing this since 1989. This book is finally seeing the light of day. It took five years for it to make five dollars. If anybody deserves to write a book right now, it's you."

So I worked on that first book for four or five years, and I thought I was going to throw up when I asked. I was convinced they'd say no. Right when I said it, they said, "Sure, we'd love that, you should totally do that." I thought, "Okay, alright, good, I'm good, okay, we're done," thinking, "Oh my God, what just happened?" Then having to compile it alone, without Jack working on it, it suddenly became my project, not just Jack and Mark's. It was a different level of personal - you know that feeling of "uh oh, it's all up to me now." Your self-esteem gets challenged: am I really good enough, can I really pull this off? Even though I'd already done two or three other books with them and I knew I could, now it was attached to my name. It became much more personal. That's when I realised this was a different level.

Michelle Pascoe: Very much so. For my listeners, I've got a couple more questions. First off, can you give us a bit of background, Patty, about Chicken Soup for the Soul? It's a book that was there for me. Can you give my listeners some background on Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield - they're very well known in that space - and that belief and going forward, in those really early days of just getting in and doing it, having your brain in control instead of your heart and your fears all the time. So can you give my listeners a bit of background on what the basis of the books was, and how many were actually produced in the end?

Patty Aubery: When I met Jack, he was doing "self-esteem in the classroom" workshops. He was teaching self-esteem, and he'd go out and speak at teachers' events - the "ten steps to success" and so on. That was basically it, but he always told stories from the stage. He came back one day, around 1990 - it could have been '89 - and said, "I feel like we're supposed to be putting the stories in a book. People always ask me if I have that story in a book." He said he always told the women who had his Nightingale-Conant tapes, or career-track cassettes back in the day, and women would say, "I don't listen to stuff in my car, because I'm in my minivan dropping off and picking up, I don't have time." So he said, "I think the universe is telling us to put this in a book." Because I was 24 and didn't have an opinion, thank God, I said, "Okay, let's do it."

He started making a list of every single person he could think of who had a great story. He said, "Let's go after all the speakers in the world." Then Mark Victor Hansen came along - we were probably three-quarters of the way through the book by then, a year or so in - and Jack met Mark at a breakfast conference. Mark asked what he was working on. Mark's really gregarious, bigger than life, and Jack is quite timid. Jack told him what he was doing, and Mark said, "Well, I should co-author that with you, because I probably gave you half those stories." They barely knew each other at the time, they'd only met a couple of times, but Jack thought, "Oh my gosh, Mark Victor Hansen wants to write this book with me," and I said, "Okay."

So we did the first book, and it was great - I was so lucky, because I had Jack, who was "dot the i's, cross the t's, do the same things every day," and Mark, who was "sky's the limit, kid, fake it till you make it, visualising is realising." I used to say, "If this doesn't work, Mark, we're starting a church," and he could have pulled it off. Having both of them meant we did that first book, but we couldn't find a publisher. Everybody turned us down, everybody said anthologies don't sell. Our agent eventually gave us the book back and said, "I'm really sorry, but nobody wants this." You pay your agent 15% of gross sales, so when he gave the book back, we thought it was the worst day on the planet. It turned out to be the best day, and I'll tell you why.

We went to Book Expo of America - I think it was called the American Booksellers Association back then. Jack and Mark had backpacks on, and I'd printed all the manuscripts, and they were handing them out themselves to publishers. Still, everybody said no. We'd put our stuff in a booth at the event, and a guy called Peter Vegso, who owned a small recovery-publishing company (he'd published John Bradshaw's books, and had something called US Journal / Health Communications, doing a lot of trade work for the recovery market), had known Jack from a conference where Jack spoke on self-esteem. He let us put our stuff there, and at the end of the three days, as we were leaving, Peter said to Jack, "Hey, if you want, I'll publish your book." Jack said, "Well, I really want someone who actually likes it," and Peter said, "Why don't you give me a copy and I'll read it." He read it on the way to the airport, before he had his own jet, and he loved it. He called and said, "I love this, but I'd need you to guarantee 20,000 books sold." We'd been collecting pledge pages - "I promise to buy this many copies" - in stacks, and we brought him all of them, and he said, "That's not enough. You'd have to literally buy these back from me if they don't sell." We said okay, because we were desperate - we were three years into this with nobody wanting it.

So he published it. It was a really small publisher, doing about seven million a year, and the book started to happen. It took about sixteen months to hit a bestseller list, and then he'd call saying, "Keep those chickens rolling." So we did Chicken Soup: A Second Serving, and then Marci Shimoff called - she sent a fax that said, "Hi Jack and Patty, I'm in a silent retreat for ten days, but can you talk on Friday night at 9pm, when it's over? I have a really good idea." So we waited at the office until nine, and she said, "I have this great idea - Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul." Jack said, "I love that idea," and I said, "That's a stupid idea, women are buying these books already, why would we do that?" He said, "Hold on, this might be a good idea," and told her he'd run it by Mark. She said, "Hold on - last time I checked, you're men and I'm a woman." With the power of asking, Marci became the first person to do a book that didn't just carry Jack and Mark's names. That set the stage for me to go on with Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul, then Christian Soul, Expectant Mother's Soul, Father & Daughter Soul, Busy Mom's Soul, Working Woman's Soul - all the layers of where I was developing in my own life - which let me do fourteen books in total. That was a huge deal.

It started with the idea that if we could get a bestselling book, we'd get higher speaking fees. That was really it. But when we were going to publish the first book, the publisher said, "There's a blank page at the back of the book, what do you want to put there?" I said, "Nothing, just put it on the press," because I was so sick of it - I'd edited it eight times on a tiny Mac screen. Jack said, "Hold on, let's ask people if they have a story." I said okay, and everybody had a story - people were sending them in by the thousands. We worked upstairs in an office in LA, and the mailman asked if we could please move downstairs, because we were getting thousands and thousands of stories in the mail. That's when we figured out we were really onto something.

We started to notice themes, Michelle - people sending stories about their pets, about grieving, about faith (Christian Soul was a huge market), pet lovers, teenagers. When we went out with a teen book, our publisher said, "You're crazy, teens don't read books, they buy CDs and clothes, I've got two girls, it'll never work." He was wrong. We knew our market by what we were getting in the mail, so we weren't just making things up.

Over the years - we started in '93 and sold the company in 2008, so about fifteen years of being published - we did 300 different titles, 300 marketing plans, and by my count, more than 500 co-authors and 26,000 contributing authors during that time.

Michelle Pascoe: My goodness, the collective power of people. Thank you so much for giving us that background, because it really paints the picture: there's Marci ringing up, once again believing in herself, really doing what Jack was espousing, having the self-esteem to make the call and say, "Hang on, I'm a woman, this is going to work." And then seeing within yourself what you could do, and what you've achieved.

So many people are the ones actually holding an operation together, the person everyone relies on but who never gets named on the cover, so to speak. What would you say to someone in that position right now, who doesn't yet think of themselves as a leader? In all my years in business, working from frontline people in hospitality right through to senior leadership, some people don't always see the potential in themselves, do they? It takes somebody else to do that, or - I always believe it's your choice, it's the life you choose, not the one others choose for you. So what would you say to someone who's thinking, "I've got this opportunity to go for the next role, it might not be the senior role, it could be middle management" - what would you say to encourage them to take that leap of faith, like you did?

Patty Aubery: I would say, "If not you, who? And if not, why not?" If your story is "I'm not ready," that's a story that will keep you stuck and comfortable, but it won't support you moving into your future. The story could instead be, "What opportunity would I have if I did this, and how could I change the lives of the people I'm now leading?" It's very hard - I think I didn't fully get this myself until I was sixty, in some ways. I think it took having a grandchild for me to say, "I'm fully an adult," because sometimes you're just so busy you don't realise how much people really need the leadership and the guidance.

I work a lot with speakers and authors, and people are afraid - our egos get in the way of any decision. It's like, "What if I don't do well?" Well, what if you do? What if saying yes to the offer is you saying yes to yourself? What if you just change one life, because you had the guts to be the manager somebody came to, or the leader who said, "I'm having an issue, I need some support"? You'll get there, but we all start somewhere. We were afraid to ride a bicycle, afraid to go to kindergarten, afraid to get our driver's licence. Every transition comes with a little insecurity, because we've never done it before.

So I like to say: if I'm nervous, it means I'm growing. If I'm nervous, it means I'm not settling. If I'm nervous, I'm doing something new, I'm being brave. So enjoy the nervousness, and laugh about it next year.

Michelle Pascoe: Yes, because it's part of that transition, isn't it - that feeling of trepidation, "What am I doing, is this the right thing, what are people going to think of me if I fail?" I think that's what holds so many of us back, worrying what people will think, whether it's family, friends, or people who don't even know us - like on these silly devices these days, where somebody a million miles away that we'll never see - who cares about their opinion? Think about the people who have actually made an impact on you.

You mentioned it's taken you years, and here you are at sixty, a grandmother - I'm the same. It's amazing when you become a Nana, it changes your whole perspective on life. It's wonderful - eat ice cream at six in the morning, who cares, it's breakfast, have some more chocolate topping, that's fine by me, just go for it.

But it's also hearing from people - I've been in this industry for over three decades now, and someone said to me in a meeting the other day, about someone I haven't coached for over six years, that she still goes back to what I said to her back then. Even though I've done this for so long, I just sat there for a moment thinking, "Wow, I made that much of an impression on somebody, that it's stuck with them." Here I am, like you - we're well-seasoned adult women, we know our stuff - but there was still that moment of real pride inside me, not proud like "I'm great," but proud of what they've done, and how far they've come. Do you feel like that too, with all the books you've done and the conversations you've had with people?

Patty Aubery: I do, I do now. I think for so long it was so fast, I was so busy - at one point I was doing eighteen books in one year, trying to have kids, a husband, two partners and a publisher. I say I was "chief chicken," it was pretty nuts. But I do love watching the women in my life who've been mentored by me go further and further. One of my favourite gals, who I've mentored for over ten years now, has a big publishing company - she's published over a thousand titles for other people. She came to me when she was in corporate and hated it, didn't know what she wanted to be, and now she does exactly what I tell her to do, and it's great.

As much as I was in this personal development world, I had Jack and Mark, who are amazing, but men are not mind readers, they don't pick up on things, they're not intuitive. As a woman, when I see someone who I know has the potential but maybe doesn't have the self-esteem, or doesn't have anybody pushing them, I know it's my job to make sure they go further and faster than I did, because if I'd had someone like that, I don't even know what I'd have been capable of. I accomplished a lot, but I feel like I could have done so much more. So it's great to see it, and it's a good reminder: if I hadn't gone into that conference room that day and asked if I could do that book, my whole life would be different.

Michelle Pascoe: Yes, very much so.

Patty Aubery: And if I hadn't taken the job that said "secretary wanted, $25,000 a year," my life would be different. I never wanted to be a secretary, and when I took the job, my father said a few choice words: "What are you doing working for that effing hippie? I sent you to school to be in business." I said, "Dad, the hippie went to Harvard." Sometimes you have to follow your gut instinct. I didn't know who Jack was from Adam - I thought he looked like Howdy Doody. I wasn't one of those people going "Oh, it's Jack Canfield" - I didn't know, I didn't care, I just wanted my $25,000. I was a valley girl, it was 1989, big hair, long nails - a different ball game, different priorities. But just following that little instinct that says, "I don't know why I'm supposed to do this, but I am," and not letting anybody talk me out of it.

Michelle Pascoe: Yes, that's the thing - don't let anybody talk you out of it, just keep going, and find the people who will support you. It's that person who will listen to you and say, "That sounds great," and they don't even have to be in business.

I've got a very good friend, nine years older than me, who's been there for more than two decades now. We'll sit there and all I do is talk about business, and she's never been in business, but she always supports me: "That sounds like a wonderful idea." I think that's what you need, because you can go to your masterminds and get people saying, "You need to look at your formulas," which is important, but it's also nice sometimes just to talk to somebody who sees that you can do this.

Patty Aubery: I totally agree. I don't know if I could do it without my friends.

Michelle Pascoe: It makes such a difference.

So, you've coached people out of playing small, and we've just touched on that lightly. What's one tool or shift you use that gets someone from "I don't want to make it all about me" to actually owning their voice, without it feeling like they have to be somebody they're not?

Patty Aubery: A couple of things - one is to scare them straight. I always ask, "How many of you have daughters?" and a lot of the women raise their hands. Then I ask, "How many of you would want them to settle, the way you are now, by not owning their voice and stepping forward?" And they go quiet. So I say, "Okay, if you can't do it for yourself, do it for your kids," because it's monkey-see, monkey-do - that's the first thing we love more than ourselves, we'd throw ourselves in front of a train for them. So instead of throwing yourself in front of a train, just ask for that next big thing, do the scary things, and I promise you, or your money back, that at some point it will start to feel normal.

We might have to go overboard in the beginning, even embellish a bit. I do exercises in my workshops where I have people introduce themselves really obnoxiously, because normally we're just, "Hi, I'm Patty and I do this." It's about recognising it and then doing it over and over again. Most of the women I work with aren't trying not to be themselves - they might try to follow someone else, or do something the way someone else does it, and that doesn't really work, because if you're not doing it from some deep, rooted passion, good luck, because building anything is not easy. You have to really love what you're doing.

I say be yourself, because you're going to get judged regardless of who you act like. So at least be judged for who you really are, because it's way less maintenance, and it's easier - if I'm trying to keep up with the Joneses or be someone else, it's exhausting, and I'm going to get judged anyway, not by everybody, but by some. So just get judged for who you really are and call it a day.

I won't lie, it does take a long time. Jack and I have this banter about transformation - I used to say, before an event, "We'll just throw a turkey in the oven, it's no big deal, we'll just make the food." What I've come to realise is you can't microwave a turkey. We're like turkeys - you have to slowly cook them, and be patient with yourself, and not expect yourself to be perfect. No one starts off perfect. But what we see on Instagram, on Facebook, on stages, is what we think looks like perfect, and by the way, it's never perfect - God knows what's happening at home.

One of my gals, who I have a non-profit with - it's called Goal Friends, it helps marginalised women who are incarcerated - the first time she was going to speak, Michelle, you would have died. She's this beautiful southern blonde who owns an ad agency, she's got it all going on in meetings, and I get her on stage and she's like, "Hello... ha ha ha..." I thought, "Oh my God, she's not ready." We got through the whole day event, and we laugh about it hysterically now, but she said, "How many times am I going to suck?" and I said, "I don't know, twenty." She got through twenty things as fast as she could, and she wasn't going to suck twenty times, but she kept hounding me, so I just came up with a number. Now she says, "I'm on number nineteen, I don't suck anymore."

So it's about hanging out with people who will support you, telling yourself stories that support your future rather than keep you stuck in your past, asking for what you need, and if you can't be yourself around someone, get rid of that someone, because it's not worth trying to be somebody else.

Michelle Pascoe: Definitely. Don't be around the naysayers - sometimes they're our partners, our parents, our siblings, even our children - "Why do you want to do that?" I know particularly in our hospitality industry, there are a lot of women who make up the greater percentage of those working on the floor, in the bar, those sorts of areas. When it moves into middle management, supervisor roles, we lose quite a lot; manager level, we lose more again; senior management, we lose a lot. I've always pushed for women in our industry, but I'll be honest, they don't stand up, Patty. That's the problem - they don't even apply for the jobs.

I just ran a big conference here in Australia last week, the Australasian Gaming Expo, where I was the MC for three days, and I organised a couple of panels. I was absolutely scratching to find women leaders who were already in leadership roles in our industry, and who would also come on stage and actually talk. I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot - how can people say, "We want these leadership roles," if they don't even apply? What are your thoughts? I go blue in the face saying, "Come on, you can do this."

Patty Aubery: Well, what I normally start with is: men will apply for something they're 50% qualified to do; women feel they need to be 98%. I acknowledge it's going to be scary, but again - do you want to be known as a settler? When my mum was rediagnosed with cancer - she was 54 the first time, and it was about fifteen years later when she was rediagnosed - as she was dying, she said to me, "I did not raise a daughter to be invisible. You need to speak up." So when I was really scared, I thought about my mum. I did it for her - I was like, "My mum's watching, I promised her I would not be invisible, I'm going to make her proud." I had to find my own hack.

Then when my kids were born, I always asked myself: do I want them to settle, do I want them to shrink back, do I want them not to ask for the lead role, or not to be on the soccer field in the right position? There were lots of times I second-guessed myself - we're all human, we go two steps forward, one step back. But I remember once, driving somewhere with my younger son, Chandler, I asked him, "Do you wish I was around more to drive you to practice?" and he said, "Mum, anybody can take me to practice. Not anybody can show me how to live my dream." He was about nine.

I also had a husband who used to say, "Why aren't you staying home, we don't need this" - his own mum was never home, so he had his own issues, and he wasn't really supportive of me working. When he met me, I didn't have any money, we were starving, we couldn't even pay our toner bills or our rent, and he'd say, "Someday I'll buy you a new Lexus, if you're a good girl," and then I surprised him - the plane's coming to get me. It was hard - we went from nothing to a lot, and he had to deal with that.

But I have to look at the people I love in my life. I look at my daughter-in-law, who's 31 now, in a management role, and she gets flustered, but when I show up as one of her customers - she works for a software company - she can say, "My mother-in-law is a million-dollar earner." I'm not doing it every day for me, but the fact that she can say that and be proud, I do it for that.

I'd say to women: let's sit down and practise what you're going to say, let me help you. Last year I MC'd an event for the first time, for an association I founded with Jack that's been around twenty years, and they'd never seen me speak. Jack was giving me a hard time because I had no time for him - I said, "I have to prepare," and he said, "What? You taught me to prepare a lot." I did a great job, and everybody was like, "Oh my God, can you MC my event, how many of these have you done?" I said, "I've never done one before," but I made a commitment: I was going to get up there and be outrageous, because my initial thought, following all these thought leaders - I had to follow Ocean Robbins from Baskin-Robbins, who's amazing - was, "I'll never be this good." Then I thought, "What can I do differently?" I noticed the MCs weren't really engaging the audience, so I got up and said, "Everybody stand up, I want you to clap and go 'whoa,'" and every time someone presented, that's what we did, because today we're going to win. I did funny things, researched everybody I knew - I went above and beyond, and I didn't know what I was doing, but I thought, "I'm just going to have fun with this and go outside my comfort zone." It really worked. I think so often, when we're out of our comfort zone, we tend to play small, and then we look awkward. I wish there was one pill I could give people to just be brave and do it, but really you probably have to walk through it yourself to learn how to step up next time.

Michelle Pascoe: Very true. But going on stage like that and having a bit of fun, it was coming from your heart - and we know that word "authenticity" gets done to death sometimes, but it's true. You could have done that from the space of "I'm the cookie-cutter presenter," but everybody can see through that. When it's coming through you, they'll get behind you, they'll support you, and they'll have fun - that's what it's all about.

Our lives are so similar in where we started, apart from both being secretaries. I started my business because my mother passed away in '94, from cancer. I had two very small children at the time, and like your mother said to you, it's about who you are, build something. Out of the small inheritance I got from her - my father was still alive and a big supporter of me - I bought my first word processor and printer, which cost an absolute fortune, about $10,000, ridiculous back then in 1994. But that was my driving passion, like your mother was for you: you're doing this not just for yourself, but for your children. I've got three children, a son and two daughters, and both my daughters have their own companies now too. Like your son said, yes, anybody can pick you up and take you to sport, but it's also about knowing why you're doing that, and how much you're there for them.

So, what's changed in how you help women find their voice? I think that's a critical point - I know a lot of people listening to this will think, "I've got these ideas, I want to write," or I've written two books myself, and I think, "Oh gosh, people say write another one," and I think, "Goodness, that's so much hard work." But we've got a lot of ideas, and we actually have to put them into practice and find that voice. So, now versus when you first started speaking about your own experience, what's changed in how you position yourself, and what that voice is saying, both inside your head and outside?

Patty Aubery: A lot's changed. I'm older, and I don't care as much, at some level, about what people think - you get to a certain age and that's it. But I also have a formula now. When I used to watch Jack speak - he's a master - I'd think, "If I can just memorise this, I can do it." It came through working on a program - I was in Dubai, and I had this crazy idea to create an online certification based on a book he'd written called The Success Principles. He told me I was crazy, it would never happen, and $25 million later, I reminded him the other day, and he went, "Is it really that much?" I said, "Yeah."

I didn't know what I was doing, but I had my COO - I was president, he was COO - and I said, "I have this idea," and he said, "If Patty has an idea, I'm going to listen." I had no idea how to do it, but I told him what I saw, and he'd write it all up on stickies all over my kitchen counters and cupboards. As we went through all the content we'd shot for Jack, I realised there was a methodology - I kept asking, "What is it that makes it work wherever he goes, in any country?" I realised he always talks about a principle, then why that principle matters, then gives some statistic to convince the "type A" people or accountants in the room that it's legitimate, then does an exercise with people to ground it, then tells a really good story that exemplifies the principle, and wraps it up nicely.

So I thought, there's a formula here - how can I use this for a keynote? There's a welcome, an introduction, something to break the ice, a poll to see who's in the room and get them engaged, then I talk about what I'm going to promise that day. As I saw this and started drawing diagrams, I began teaching it, even to Jack and our students, and teaching it to myself, because the more I taught it, the more I embodied it. Now that's what I use to teach other people. I have it as a graphic, and linear, six ways to Sunday, because we all learn differently. People say, "Do you remember Richard Simmons?" - I call it the "Richard Simmons meets Aubery" deal: if I colour-code it, every talk has a blue card, a yellow card, an orange card, a green card, a white card. I've dissected it to an inch of its life, so I know the formula, and it always works if you use it, then customise it with your own content and stories, whether they're someone else's or your own, and master those stories.

Now I always know I have an introduction, and I just need to know what problems my audience is having - give me three problems, and I'll come up with the solutions, wrap stories around them, and I have a talk. I show this to other women especially - I'll interview them and pull the information out of them, because I remember what it was like being in India somewhere, about to present, with papers all over the place because I didn't have a formula. When I show these women a new way to do it, the lights go on - "Oh my gosh, maybe I can do that" - because you're learning a new skill, learning to structure your content, learning to stand in front of people and act normal, all at once. It's like if I said, "I'm going to teach you to drive, and show you the route to the grocery store" - I'm not going to put you in a Lamborghini on the back roads doing 500 miles an hour, we're going in the little Ford pickup, going slow, the easiest way.

I'd be curious what you'd say if I asked you: what's one problem you see all the time that you could talk about? I'd just pull it out of them.

Michelle Pascoe: Yes, that's true - you have to yank it out, and then show them. Sometimes it's sitting around a table with a group of women who feel that scenario has only happened to them, and then they talk about it and realise, "Ah yes, but that also happens in our venue," or wherever it might be - there's a commonality, and then, what can we do to fix it?

If you could go back, Patty, and say one thing to yourself the year before you decided to stop being "what's her name," what would it be, and what do you think is stopping most people from having that same conversation with themselves today?

Patty Aubery: If I were to go back, I'd say yes to that first event I was invited to speak at, for 10,000 women in a stadium, because it wouldn't just have changed people's lives - it would have sold more books, made me more money, and given me a new skill set I was afraid to embrace. That's what I'd do.

As for what stops most people - I think our stories are just habits, the same way we can quit eating doughnuts, or quit smoking, or quit bad thoughts. I don't think we have limiting beliefs, I think we have bad habits. I always ask myself, "What if this is just a habit?" Neurologically, scientifically, our brains work a certain way, and they keep us safe from anything unknown - you can look up the different parts of the brain, or ask ChatGPT. When you realise that's your amygdala saying "alert, alert, this has never been done," and once you start doing it, repetition is the key to success, because the more you do it, the more your brain says to itself, "I survived it," and it gets easier, because your amygdala starts responding differently, seeing that it's working. We don't even know what's going on inside us - we're making up a story about what our brain's doing. Once you know that's what's happening biologically, you can say, "If I actually do this, my brain is going to stop telling me it's scary." So just do it - even if you don't believe it, try it, what have you got to lose?

Try to reposition all the things that happened to us when we were little - somebody said something, we got dropped off somewhere, we got forgotten, we got a D, we got Fs in English, whatever it might be. What if those stories are just bad habits? Let's create new stories that support our future, moving forward. We're making up the bad stories - let's make up the good ones.

Michelle Pascoe: Yes, and it's about being in control of what you're thinking and saying about yourself.

I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, Patty, and I think we could talk for a lot longer, but before we finish, I'd love you to answer two things. First, please tell my audience where they can connect with you, and second, is there something I haven't asked that you'd like to share with my audience?

Patty Aubery: They can connect with me at PattyAubery.com - my website will be up in the next couple of days, so by the time this airs it'll be there. That's P-A-T-T-Y A-U-B-E-R-Y dot com. I've got some free downloads: five things you need to know when you're writing a book, and some other resources for speakers. That's where you can find me, or on Instagram, same handle, Patty Aubery.

Is there anything you haven't asked me? I don't think so. I'd just say that I didn't come from anything big - I didn't have funding, I didn't go to any special schools, I was an average person doing very ordinary, almost C-level stuff, but getting involved in this work, even though it was a weird way to get involved, really did change my life. So if you don't have people around you reminding you how amazing you are, find new friends, or find a new community, because if I spoke to my friends the way I've sometimes spoken to myself, I wouldn't have any friends left, because we can be mean to ourselves. We need to change our own thoughts, in our own minds, but we also need that external support, or it's really hard to sustain that "if I believe it, I'll see it" way of thinking. We need to be reminded that we're good enough, and that we're worthy of it - that's just how it works, until, hopefully, one day we don't need to be reminded anymore.

Michelle Pascoe: Wise words. Thank you so much, Patty. I really have loved this conversation, as I said. We'll put all those links in our show notes, and I look forward to reading more books that you produce in the future, and seeing you on stage one day.

Patty Aubery: Thanks, Michelle. It's great to talk to you - take care.