Let's Get Personal

The story I really care about...and why

I miss thinking.

Don’t get me wrong, I use my brain all day, every day, and often well into the night. But, these days, I’m rarely thinking. I’m processing, planning, and preparing. Creating to-do lists, mental sticky notes, and attack plans for execution. My brain ends every day exhausted, but more from constant motion than from stretching, growing, or expanding.

When I was in high school, one of the reasons I was so involved in my Youth Group is that I secretly loved going to church. Our paster, who ended up being a fairly substantial asshole, was an exceptional orator. His sermons might have started with scripture, but they always somehow ended very, very close to home. I left church each week thinking, the words rolling around in my brain, tripping the sensors, begging for further exploration, refusing to settle without receiving more time and attention.

Those sermons are the reason I have not fully abandoned Christianity. That, and organs, the instrument, not the body parts…obviously.

It wasn’t just the story of God, Jesus, and his wayward disciples, who frankly seemed like idiots just tripping over themselves. It was getting to know God incarnate - what made God angry, what made God reticent, what prompted such love, and why God allowed such pain. The story of God’s actions were pedantic, but the story of God personified was fascinating.

I once managed a team of Medical Science Liaisons. Our job was to tell the story of our product to healthcare providers in such a compelling way that they would choose our product over the competitors. When I started, I firmly believed that we would do that with our data, bowl them over with the size of our studies and the utility of what we measured. I quickly realized that not only was that a fast means of boring an audience to sleep, but more importantly, it didn’t work.

So, we hired a company to help us hone our presentation skills, to become a mean, lean, storytelling machine. When in doubt, bring in the experts, right? I expected that they would video tape us, make us study our flaws, critique each other, and practice until perfect. And they did all that, yes, but their first piece of advice was unexpected.

“Make it personal,” they said. “Where are you in this story?”

Huh? We were talking about fetal fraction, cell-free DNA, and aneuploidy. How was I going to make that personal?

I was a decent public speaker before that training, and I knew it. So, unsurprisingly, I did well with the video, the group critique, and the practice part, but I got owned on the storytelling piece. I wanted to make the story about the product, and as I was repeatedly told over that incredibly frustrating three-day journey, “They won’t care about the product if they don’t care about you.”

Embarrassed, and aware that I was setting the tone for my team, I slowly started integrating myself into the story of our product. I talked about crying in my office after getting off the phone with a patient who was on her way to terminate a pregnancy that we thought, but weren’t sure, had a lethal genetic condition. I couldn’t convince her to wait for the test results, and I was terrified she would terminate a pregnancy with an otherwise totally correctable birth defect.

In talking about myself, my failure, my fear, my frustration, I opened the door for physicians to see themselves, to get curious, and to connect to a human, not a thing.

It was a powerful lesson.

I joined Substack largely to hold myself accountable for thinking, and writing, about joy. I started reading other authors on Substack because I selfishly wanted them to help me think about something other than joy. I quickly realized that the authors I read most consistently put something of themselves in every piece. Not just in memoir, either, but motherhood, politics, culture, anxiety, history, money, sobriety, whatever publication I read, chances are if I read more than one post, its because I saw a glimpse of something in the writing that made me curious about the author.

In a world where connection is meted out of every aspect of our lives, being mentally tickled to touch another person through their writing keeps me tethered to my humanity. People are interesting. Robots are not. People are complicated. Robots are complex programming. People make me think. Robots make me want to throw up.

I often wonder what I can do to support my “think tank” of authors on Substack. Of course, paying for a subscription to their publication is an obvious choice, but I’m often asked to share a particular article via a Note. To “restack” it, as the vernacular goes. Sometimes I do, but only when that particular article says something that I know will resonate with my audience. But, since I’m often not reading their work because of a particular piece, I’ve been stuck on how I share not just an article with my audience, but the author themselves, since it is the person behind the prose that most excites me.

Where is this going, you’re wondering. I know you are, because I’ve usually dropped an F-bomb by now and started steering you towards some semblance of a conclusion.

In short, I’m trying to make it personal. To tell you why I often look to the byline before buying in to the story. To share why thinking is so much more to me than just brain activity. To invite you into my support conundrum in hopes that when I get to sharing how I’m changing this publication, you’ll be able to connect with the personhood, not just the product.

There’s more to come, but for now, I’d love to know what makes you think, or, if you’re at all like me, who makes you think. Here on Substack or anywhere else, for that matter. Drop a comment below 👇 and let us know. And if you don’t, I’ll just assume you and the disciples are related. Your call. 😉