Risk Forward
Victoria Labalme is the Founder of Risk Forward and Rock The Room, which is a full suite of programs designed to help people express their hidden genius. Her strategies have been embraced by more than 700 organizations, entrepreneurs, senior executives and thousands of individuals around the world. As a performing artist and member of the Speaker Hall of Fame, she is known for her keynote performances. I can vouch for that. We shared a stage at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit. She is also known for her workshops, her private consulting, and online learning.
Victoria, you have this wonderful book, Risk Forward: Embrace the Unknown and Unlock Your Hidden Genius. My first question before we get to your own story is did you start this book before the pandemic or did it happen to be a great timing?
I started it many years ago. I did a TEDx Talk on this topic back in 2016.
That’s what a thought leader does. They have their pulse on the zeitgeists of what people are going to need before they even know they need it, and that’s certainly you. Let’s go back to your own story of origin. I know you do such a fascinating job of this in your talks. You decide where you want to start the story whether it’s school days or the moment you decided, “I’m going to be an actress,” or wherever you want to start.
Growing up, I found that I was often making choices that took me down paths that are different from other people. I know many can relate. I made these choices that other saw were odd. I went to college out west and my family was back east. I decided to sign up for a 75-day expedition when my friends were signing up for graduate school. I was going left when everyone was going right. When people were getting married, I was staying single. When people were having babies, I was off dating different types of men. I always carved my own path. The thing that I found is that there was this judgment along the way where people would say, “What are you doing? What’s the plan? What’s the goal?” Whether it was your major or whether you’re going to get married or what your career was going to be, and I often didn’t know. Many people had a lot of different interests. We all often do, but we’re taught that’s wrong.
Pick one thing and major in it for the rest of your life.
It’s a counterproductive proposition for people who are multidisciplined, multitalented, and multi interested. I did lots of different things and oddly enough, me going into the not knowing, not getting married, not having a career path, not knowing how I’d put everything together led me to an extraordinary career. The book is about how we can go from this not knowing and follow what lights us up and find our way forward.
One of your early careers was being an actress. Give us a few highlights of Sex and the City back. I know you were on one of those episodes. I know people are always curious to hear some of those details.
I talk about that in the book. I tell a great story from being on Sex and the City. To answer your question, I started doing television commercials as an actor. I was interested in physical expression. I studied with a French mime, Marcel Marceau. I started studying all kinds of acting, performance, writing, directing choreography, character work in comedy. I got picked up by the manager who manages Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. I started doing all kinds of television appearances in a film with Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in documentary acting. My career started to take off and then something suddenly happened at the end of the 1990s. It was 2001. I witnessed 9/11 from my window and very much like the pandemic now, the whole world changed. I found myself again in a phase of not knowing and what’s next.
I started helping presenters, executives and entrepreneurs express themselves on stage and on-camera because I had this background. I had no idea how that was going to turn out. Someone had invited me to the National Speakers Association. They’d seen me in a comedy club and said, “You should come.” I thought, “I don’t want to be a speaker. That’s cheesy. That’s motivational. I want to be famous.” After 9/11 and like us in the pandemic, a lot of people started re-evaluating their choices. I thought, “How can I help? Here’s a place people are asking for my contribution. I’m being called to contribute.” I said yes. That yes was not knowing where it would lead. I had no plan. I had no goal but it took me into a whole new territory and I started in the world of speaking. I went from acting and performing to speaking in corporate, associations, and entrepreneurship. That career took off and that’s now how we met. I started coaching executives and entrepreneurs on storytelling, on presentation, on camera, on stage, in meetings and in life.
What I’ve found has happened since the pandemic is, I’ve been getting a lot of requests from sales teams saying, “In addition to teaching our team how to tell better stories to win business, can you help them be better on a Zoom call? None of them feel comfortable on the camera and they don’t have good lighting and there are some basic skills that they’ve never needed before?” What you are doing now is at a whole new level of, “This isn’t a nice thing to have a note. This is a must thing to have a note.”
I’m finding too that a lot of the people I’ve been helping are about how to bring out their own unique gifts. What you’re seeing with a lot of Zoom is everyone’s starting to look the same with their green screen background in their whizzbang technology. If you’re going to stand out and bring out what I call your hidden genius, what do you have that’s different from everyone else? How do you capitalize on that and trust that even if no one else is doing it? Part of what people get from reading the book Risk Forward and the whole methodology is to trust that, the permission to trust that what they’re doing is cool.
We also talk about how to navigate our way through the fog of the unknown, which is such a great visual. We’ve all been in fog. We’d have fog lights on our car and yet sometimes we have woken up a little foggy, pick our brain for whatever reason and no judgment. I’m fascinated to know when someone’s trying to embrace the unknown which is, “How long is this pandemic going to last? Should I change careers?” What is your advice in the book that can help people navigate that?
To circle back to what you called out, there are seven phases in the book and the first is to embrace the fog. I call it The Fog of Not Knowing. Most people see not knowing as something negative. In fact, in the pandemic, everyone says, “How do we get out of this? How do we have certainty again?” The assumption is that it’s bad to be not knowing. What the Risk Forward makes the case for is there’s huge potential in not knowing because in that gap or in that phase, one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to try to rush out as quickly as possible. To use the fog as an exact metaphor, it’s like jumping through the fog and you run into a wall. You go down a path that’s not right for you because you’re so panicked to get out.
The first phase is to embrace it and to say, “This might not be such a bad thing.” I’m not in any way saying that the pandemic is a good thing in the sense that people are losing their lives, their jobs, the economy has challenges, people are stressed in their marriages with their kids on Zoom. There’s a lot that’s very difficult, but there are also a lot of people saying they’re re-evaluating their lives and their choices. The fog is that gap between knowing and not knowing, that we want to not rush out of it too quickly.
You also talk about that sometimes taking action can be a mistake and I’m guessing that’s completely tied in to what you said about rushing into something because many people will tell everybody, “The worst thing you can do is think about something and don’t take any action.” That’s not always the case. If you run into a wall, there’s got to be a fine balance between no action and action too fast.
I have a client named Anne who like many people got into this treadmill of success. She was very successful and she felt like she had to keep going. She had to keep producing and people would always say, “You got to keep going. Why not?” It’s the more is better mentality. She came to me and she said, “I’m exhausted.” The thought of doing these next projects makes me drained. It’s not feeling good. What I want to do is risk forward and take a break. It’s not risking forward to always go for it.
It’s not because you have an excuse like, “I’m pregnant. I’m sick.” This is like, “I’m taking a break because I want to.”
She lives in South Africa and she had the option to go into the bushes as they call it in South Africa. She said, “I want to not do this next series of projects. I want to pause on this. I want to honor myself and take a little break.” For her, that was the risk forward. That’s where the taking action. You’re that speed to market, go for it. We are in such a production type of culture where you’re evaluated and praised for your achievements, rather than acknowledge that sometimes it’s okay to take that break. She’s a private client. I was working with her in the Risk Forward private, VIP experience. She took the break and when she came back, she had clarity about where she wanted to go. Her launch did even better because she had taken that time off. She would have eroded her focus by doing all these other projects.
The big companies like Google give their team sabbaticals because they realize the value of it. You know this from your acting, the worst thing in the world to go to an actress, “What are you working on now?” If you’re somebody in the corporate world, “Have you gotten promoted lately?” Nobody wants to get stuck in that. That is a perfect segue into your tackling the five myths of achievement. Let’s pick the biggest myth and double-click on that a little bit.
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