Episode Details

In this episode, we meet Megan Macedo, writer and marketing entrepreneur on authentic story-telling, knowing yourself and being an artistic entrepreneur.

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Megan grew up in Northern Ireland at the tail end of The Troubles, an experience that has shaped her story and career.

She runs a marketing and storytelling consultancy in London and writes and speaks about authenticity in marketing and taking an artistic approach to business.

She created the short film, Becoming Yourself In Your Business, and a video interview series, The Business of Self-Disclosure.

Megan hosts workshops and retreats in the UK, Ireland and the US and has shared the stage with the likes of Jay Abraham and Perry Marshall.

In this episode we talk about:

• Authentic story-telling and actively being yourself in the world;
• Using experimentation to find out who you really are and what you care about;
• Why most of us are artistic entrepreneurs trapped in traditional corporate bodies; and
• The fear of scaling our ambitions.

Connecting with Megan Macedo

You can reach Megan on LinkedIn and on her website.

Thanks to Perry Marshall for recommending Megan.

On what growing up during The Troubles taught her

• We internalise the environment that we grow up in. People go through traumatic things and it changes how they interact with their family and their loved ones. It changes how children are raised. How it relates to my work is that I have this understanding, or curiosity at least, around this stuff and around Northern Ireland because I grew up in it, and I can see the stuff playing out at a cultural level. I can see it playing out at a family level. I can see it play out at an individual level.
• Quite often, there's a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't get spoken and there is a whole side of ourselves that we don't show out in the world, and our work suffers as a result of that.

On having a sense of identity

• When people feel unfulfilled in their work, or they feel like something isn't quite right, I think a lot of that is because they are not letting themselves be seen in their work. I think that one of our most primal needs is to be seen and to be known.
• Erik Erikson did a lot of the seminal work around identity formation. He talked about something called psychosocial reciprocity, which says that in order for us to have a fully mature, grounded sense of identity, it's not enough for us to know who we are on the inside; we also have to have the world respond to us as that person.
• We have to actively be ourselves in the world. And then the world gets to see who we are and respond to that person.
• But...most of us are in some degree of kind of misery because we keep that part of ourselves a secret. So we show up as some kind of professional persona in the world and that's who the world thinks we are.

On the value of having an authentic story

• If you take a load of vitamin tablets, most of it will just end up down the toilet. Your body will pass it because it doesn't recogn