Feelings are great for when you’re behind the microphone. But when it comes down to being behind the mic, how much do you reveal? That can get a little tricky when you haven’t worked through what’s really holding you back.

My guest today coined the term Hilarapy, the creation of comedy as therapy. Lizzie Allan is a self-designed comedy therapist and professional comedian. Whilst embracing her own healing journey from madness and addiction, she discovered that comedy and vulnerability had the power to change the world.  

We also reveal what it’s like to:

  • Take ownership of your story
  • Show discernment in vulnerability 
  • Get comfortable with failure

Links worth exploring from the episode:

Engage with Lizzie Allan:

Connect with Mary!

Podcast cover art by Emily Johnston of Artio Design Co.

Transcript with audio description:

[MUSIC IN]

CLIP – LIZZIE: When I stand up straight and I tell my story and I own who I am, which we’re talking about being vulnerable behind the microphone, when I own who I am, there’s nothing you can say to me like, Hey, you did that. And I’m like, Yeah, but I told you [LAUGHS], you know, and I’m not ashamed. I already told you that as well. So you could try to make me ashamed of it, but really, you’d only be doing yourself, like making yourself look a bit stupid, right?

[MUSIC OUT // PAUSE A BEAT // INTRO]

<< Ghosthood Featuring Sara Azriel “Let’s Go” BEGINS >>

MARY: Welcome to the Podcaster’s Guide to a Visible Voice.

<< WOMAN SINGS: Let’s go >>

MARY: Reveal and define your voice to speak your truth through the power of podcasting. And I’m your host, Mary Chan.

<< WOMAN SINGS: So so so so let’s go >>

MARY: Hello and welcome! This is episode number 53. Discernment in Vulnerability When You’re Behind the Mic with Lizzie Allan of Hilarapy.

[MUSIC FADES // NEW MUSIC STARTS]

MARY: There are many times in my life where I giggle a lot [LAUGHS] and I try not to in inappropriate circumstances. But sometimes when you’re just having a conversation, I giggle. I make light of a situation, not to make fun, but to bring out the positive side of things. Or maybe even unconsciously, I do it to hide behind my true feelings. Okay, there I admitted it. Feelings for me growing up were not really experienced unless it was one of the two spectrums: happy, well, maybe not even that happy, but like, content or angry. That was usually about it in my household [LAUGHS]. So that’s something that I have to work through. Feelings. Oh, such a bad word in my head. But it’s not. It is not. Feelings are great for when you’re behind the microphone. But when it comes down to how much do you reveal behind the mic? That can get a little tricky when you haven’t worked through what’s really holding you back, like for me and my feelings.

So my guest today was someone I had met over a year ago at a networking event where she gave the keynote on the topic of the importance of laughter and light. And I was like, Oh yes, it is important. I’ve used it lots growing up and I still do today. This message, though, really bubbled up for me earlier this year when the deaths of my mother-in-law and then my father happened within four months of each other. And I was really silent, especially on the social media front. But when I did come through, you know, social media posting here and there, newsletters, etc., I pondered out loud to you, how much is too much to reveal? And then you wandered along with me. So thank you for that. Thank you for responding to my posts and my newsletter and connecting in real life as well. This thought though, this question, spiralled into a few back and forth with new podcasters as well, because they had the same question, wondering the same thing. They all wanted to know how to claim or find their podcast voice. The creation of comedy as therapy, or Hilarapy as she coined it, is from co-founder Lizzie Allan, a self-designed comedy therapist and professional comedian. Whilst embracing her own healing journey from madness and addiction, she discovered that comedy and vulnerability had the power to change the world. Oh, that message resonates so much with me. So she is the perfect person as my guest today to dive into the uncomfortableness that can happen when we share our stories. And just a note that we do start off with talking about death as I share with her what has been happening in my life, and she shares a brief story about how she dealt with her cousin’s death. So definitely a topic that, although seemed so taboo in our culture, is quite perfect for podcasting. As usually when you’re listening by yourself with your earbuds on, no one else is listening around you, or if you are in grief, feel free to hit pause and come back to the conversation later or even skip ahead. Talking about the importance of light and laughter before we get comfortable in that uncomfortableness of vulnerability behind the mic, we shall begin with something that Lizzie started off that networking event I was telling you about. She started off her keynote with the song and I loved it. It had me buzzing and humming along and of course laughing at the appropriate spots. This is Lizzie Allan and her song Aliens and Sexual Shame.

[MUSIC FADES // LIZZIE PLAYING UKELELE STARTS]

LIZZIE: [SINGING] Sometimes this life can be hard. Crazy things happen, I’m scarred. Life can be a bit of a blur because the concept of time is absurd. When I was a kid, time went so slow. Now that I’ve grown, it’s go, go, go. Feels like I’m rocketing straight to my grave. A slippery slope, suck it up and be brave.

My monkey mind is on overdrive. How does a person like me survive? All I want to do is drink and get high, but I chose abstinence, oh why? Da, da, da, da, oh, why? Why would I want to get high? [LIZZIE SINGING MUSICAL NOTES]

I want to see a UFO when I dream of being on a television screen shaking hands with that special guy. That’s right. An alien from the sky. Feelings caused me so much pain. Hated I mentioned my sexual shame. I don’t know why it doesn’t seem fair. I’m still having problems with facial hair.

Aliens and sexual shame. You probably all feel exactly the same. That’s how I make it through, you see? Imagine everyone is just like me. Aliens and sexual shame. You probably all feel exactly the same. That’s how I make it through, you see? Imagine everyone is just like me.

[SINGING ENDS // MUSIC FADES OUT]

MARY: Thank you, Lizzie, so much for coming on the show. I just want to share a little story first about how I love to laugh. Like, I think I sometimes giggle a little bit too much because I use it as not to make fun of a situation, but to really see the positive side of things. And it got me thinking earlier this year when my mother-in-law died and my dad died in the span of a couple months of each other. And it… I’ve had a pretty bad year. So death has been in my life very recently, but it’s such a taboo subject. So when I talk to people about it, you know, you get the looks of either, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I need to know more. This is actually kind of funny or death is not funny. Do not talk to me like this. [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: Mmm.

MARY: So, I take this laughter approach as well to my work in podcasting and being behind the mic. And so I had listeners asking me about, Yeah, how, what, what do you share? What do you not share? Death is taboo, isn’t it? Is it not like, how do we be ourselves behind the microphone? So thank you so much for coming on the show and I can’t wait to dive into all of this and so much more with you.

LIZZIE: Thank you, Mary, and thank you for sharing that. I, yeah, I can relate, but I do have quite a healthy relationship with death as well since you brought it up. I think, you know, it’s one of the things that we do not embrace in our society. We just see it as something we should run from. But it is, in my opinion, one of the trendiest things… 

MARY: [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: …you could do, really. I mean, all the greats have done it, haven’t they? 

MARY: Yeah. 

LIZZIE: Elvis.

[BOTH LAUGHING]

MARY: But that’s in some ways why you came to me, top of mind, when I was brainstorming. Okay. Who can I bring on to talk about vulnerability and being behind the mic? And so why do you believe that being funny is the best way to approach these very serious topics?

LIZZIE: I don’t know if being funny is perhaps what I’m going for in terms of the healing aspect. I think finding the absurd in the human condition is what brings relief from the seriousness, from the sort of darkness or the tension. A punchline actually provides relief from tension. So you build up the tension with the set up and you break it with a punch line. And in life we build up quite a lot of tension and that needs to find a release. And humour has this beautiful way of allowing us to step outside of a situation and kind of observe the absurdity or find some sort of humour. I mean, I think it’s so hard to explain really, because comedy and humour and laughing is a phenomenon. Nobody can really explain what it means to laugh. Why do certain things make us laugh, like physically response? Our physical response is to laugh. What do you think?

MARY: Well, I’m very silent over here because I’m thinking about it and I’m trying to find an answer. And you’re right, I’m like, I don’t know why. Like I said earlier, I use it not to make fun of a situation, but maybe it’s what you were saying, it’s that relief. For myself, it’s a relief to not be so bogged down by the seriousness of things that if we can just open up and share that experience that we had, that it’s okay.

LIZZIE: Yeah. I also think there is two ways that we can use humour. There’s the mask. We can try to stay above the feelings by making it funny, but then there’s appropriate humour as well, where we’re okay to feel what needs to be felt. But then there is also humour there. Then there is also room for laughter. But in terms of, you know, what we, what we started this conversation with, which was the death thing, I was over in England and it’s coming up I think over, just over four years ago, my cousin was killed tragically in a farming accident while I was visiting. And it was really difficult at the time I was, and still am, a person in long term recovery. And his funeral was this big alcoholic festival in a sense, you know. There was… just like, it was a farming community, as you know, alcohol was very prevalent in England and celebrating. And, you know, and any sort of gatherings happen around alcohol and a death and a funeral and sort of celebration of life were all very fuelled with alcohol. And I felt incredibly separate in my morning. I felt separate from my family. I couldn’t really feel, you know, connected in the ways that I really needed to be during that time, because it was just so, you know, it just took the rug out from underneath all of us. And so I went into my bedroom, I think at this BnB I was staying at in the countryside and I started to do stream of consciousness writing where I was writing out everything because I was, I was filled with such a mixture of feelings. I had this sort of sadness of the death. I had the disconnection from my family. I had anger at the sort of ridiculousness of all this alcohol and blah, blah, blah. So I had this like really confusing mix of anger and all these feelings. So I put, I put it all onto paper and this is part of my creative process when I’m doing my healing and my, you know, funny sort of vulnerable comedy really is I first have to really feel what needs to be felt, and I have to work through it. And sometimes that’s painful and a bit messy and all of those things. And then from that, I started to see these sort of moments of absurdity, these flashpoints within the writing that I could then lift out of the work and create some humour around. And I ended up doing a show about death, about this passing. It sort of morphed. It was a bit about the funeral and my experience at the funeral, and then it morphed into this kind of whole exploration of death and the afterlife. And then what if I could, what if I could like, sort of, turned into this Dragons Den pitch where I could like [LAUGHS]…

MARY: [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: …what if I could make a spirit phone, a phone made out of spiritual elements and take it with me when I die and video conference into my own funeral? And then I made this… if you want to see it, it’s on YouTube.

MARY: I’m going to find this. This sounds great. 

LIZZIE: [CHUCKLES] Yeah. It was quite, it’s quite good, actually. And this man actually came up to me at the end and he said, My mum died two weeks ago and this really helped me. This really helped me to grieve her death or to kind of let go a little bit about the seriousness that I was holding around it. In the sense like, I don’t think my auntie was ready to watch that video or that piece, but my family watched it and really were, you know, people felt it was, it was helpful. Some people. I can’t speak for everyone [LAUGHS].

MARY: [LAUGHS] Yeah.

LIZZIE: Some people thought it was totally inappropriate. But there we go. That’s kind of how I did that one.

MARY: I love this. So what I’m hearing from this is that you worked through it first. Because one of the questions that I usually get from listeners is, Well, how do you know, you know, what to share and when to share it? And I think it takes that working through process first for you to digest it all and then to realize what is important to share.

LIZZIE: Yeah.

MARY: And then have that confidence to do it, share it, be behind the mic. But that’s how you make those human-to-human connections is sharing those stories. So in that working through, in the end still, I guess, is the main question. How did you still figure out what was appropriate and not appropriate?

LIZZIE: Well, actually, you know what? This is quite a difficult question to answer because some people will come along and blame you for the way that they feel because they haven’t worked through their stuff.

MARY: Mm. Yes.

LIZZIE: And so that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t then be who you are in the world. I think what it comes down to is ownership of your story. I spoke about my experience of death, and that’s totally appropriate. It’s not okay for me to talk about your experience of death. That then becomes something that I am crossing a barrier. If I take this kind of format and I’ll tell you about something that was a little bit sort of different, for example, about four years ago I was considering having a baby the gay way. So going through artificial insemination and I did change my mind in the end. But initially, I went through the process and what happened was it brought up a very real understanding that I had internalized homophobia, that for the first time in my life I recognized that I had internalized stories about being gay that weren’t mine, and before that I had just not been willing to look at it and I just suppressed any feelings of shame and just refused, right? But this was so unavoidable that I was forced to realise that I was broiling with shame. And the, the thing about shame is it wants us to stay in the dark. It festers in the dark. It wants to be, it wants to keep me separate and keep me cut off and and keep me in a little box. But the truth about shame is it cannot withstand the light. The light of our consciousness. And shame is a fear-based emotion. And fear is actually a creation of the human mind, not of the essential reality of all things, which is… consciousness is love. Consciousness, I guess, is another word for God or whatever. And it’s that sort of life force that, in my opinion, that gives, you know, that gives life to the grass, the fox, to you and me, to the clouds and the weather and everything. So the consciousness, in its essence, is love. It’s not judgemental or any of those things. All of those things are kind of manmade, in my opinion. So shame is a very lower, lower consciousness vibration and we can be taught, our shame. We can carry shame from the generations above us. We absolutely, definitely do carry generational, societal, you know, all of those things. And so I am carrying this shame, or previously was carrying this shame, and the stories basically, that weren’t mine. And so I did this thing and my whole body wanted me to retract and just run away and not face it. But instead I thought, Well, I’ll do a show. I’ll do a whole show where I will embrace both the dark side of this shame and my coming out story. All the, all the things I think about myself, and I’ll couple it with a load of comedy. And the comedy came from, you know, the stories of going and have these sort of hilarious but very traumatizing sort of artificial insemination and things like that, which is just so invasive and gross and ridiculous. But at the same time, so much comedy came from it, you know, and this sort of, you know, there was so much to come from it. And I did it. And after that I was forever changed. It lifted some heavy thing lifted and I brought the light. I brought the light. I was incredibly vulnerable. I cried on stage as well as being totally hilarious as well, and it was just transformative. And I no longer carry that level of shame. Of course, it pops in now and again. So my point is, is I owned my story, so I’m able to stand now and tell you that, you know, all of that information without need for your approval or your sympathy, because I don’t need either. I’m absolutely fine with it today, which then makes me stand taller, makes me able to own my sovereignty, right?

MARY: Mhmm.

LIZZIE: And… and also, you know, when I, when I stand up straight and I tell my story and I own who I am, which we’re talking about being vulnerable behind the microphone… when I own who I am, there’s nothing you can say to me like, Hey, you did that. And I’m like, Yeah, but I told you. 

[BOTH LAUGHING]

LIZZIE: You know? And I’m not ashamed I already told you that as well. So you could try to make me ashamed of it but really, you’d only be… you’d only be doing yourself, [LAUGHS] like making yourself look a bit stupid, right?

MARY: But as you’re telling me this, the whole time I’m also thinking, but with that shame comes bravery. That you had to be so brave to decide to turn this into a show and this is now public domain. You know, how do you make that transition from I will be sharing this?

LIZZIE: Well, that’s a good question. Well, I have trained as a therapist and in training to become a therapeutic counsellor, I had to do my own work. And there was parts of myself that I was not willing to show the world, because at some point in my past, I decided that it was unacceptable. That was an unacceptable part of me. But I’ve thrown out the baby with the bath water because there are no unacceptable parts. Every part of us is completely needed, even if it’s a shadow part. We need to be able to kind of show up as all of us. I had a really good answer, but now I’ve sort of waffled on…

MARY: [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: …and got off point. What was the question?

MARY: The bravery aspect. How did you decide to go from the story to actually sharing it out loud?

LIZZIE: Because I had faith that there would be something on the other side of this experience for me. And the faith that I had was that I would be able to own my story, and so I would have freedom from the shame. And that’s exactly what I got. And shame isn’t… it’s a strange thing, really, but we have to agree to be ashamed to be ashamed, right? 

MARY: [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: You can’t… Somebody can come along and go, Shame on you, but if you don’t believe that you should be ashamed, then you won’t carry the shame. So it’s my personal decision. I’m responsible for my shame. And here’s how I decided to do it is because I could no longer deny that I had an uncomfortable, and more than uncomfortable, I had a horrendous amount of shame that I was no longer willing to live with. And so I was going to bring the light of it to me. And part of that healing process, and part of bringing the light was to realize that people do not vilify me for my shame. In fact, they celebrate me for bringing the light because in doing so I brought the light to every single person in that audience, because whether they were carrying shame over their own sexuality, which no doubt some people were, there was other things that people could relate to. The universal shame, whether you got it because you carry too much weight or you’re a woman and you believe women are less than men, right? It doesn’t matter what the story is. It could be because you’re gay, because you’re not the right race, because you’re blah, blah, blah, like fill in the gap, right. There’s always going to be a ton of stories out there in the world that don’t serve you. But as soon as you adopt them, then you have internalized a negative story about yourself. Then you know that’s on you, right? 

MARY: Yeah.

LIZZIE: And we have a choice. And so when I discovered, which I hadn’t really, I guess, been able to fully see the extent of what my shame did to me. Until I could fully see it, I couldn’t make a choice. And then when I saw it, I was like, Well, hell no!

MARY: [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: I’m bringing a light to this. [LAUGHS] I’m not doing this. No, no, no. I can’t. No, not what… No, no. N-O., stop.

MARY: [LAUGHS] Stop. Done.

LIZZIE: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Exactly. So. So now I was lucky enough to discover this formula. You know, I was lucky enough to discover this brilliant idea of mixing real therapy with comedy. Yes, comedy has therapeutic value. Massive therapeutic value, but so does therapy. And if you marry the two, you get to, kind of, this beautiful, kind of holistic dance between the light and the dark. You know?

MARY: Yeah.

LIZZIE: You can suddenly see that both… You know that, Yeah, I can be crying. I can be needing to howl with the pain of what my body’s trying to release from the stories or the abuse or whatever happened. Right? Because we all have trauma. Like, it doesn’t matter how much your parents tried to wrap you in cotton wool, nobody can stop that disconnect happening because we need it. We can’t stay babies, right?

MARY: Yes! [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: We can’t stay babies. We need to be disconnected, but then we need to come back to the truth is that we were never, ever disconnected because we’re all part of the one consciousness. Boom drops the mic and leaves.

MARY: [LAUGHS] You have been mentioning the light and whenever you mention that, I think for me it equates into the word “vulnerable” because vulnerable is such a big buzzword these days. It’s like, oh, everybody wants to be vulnerable. You got to be vulnerable if you want to grow, you got to be vulnerable to make a connection. So I’m wondering, what does that specific word mean to you when it comes to sharing your stories?

LIZZIE: Here’s the thing. People can be vulnerable and tell you a whole load of the terrible things that are going on in their lives. But what are their motivation? What is the motivation? Is it to get attention? Is it to find connection? Is that wrong to want attention and connection? No. You see, it’s so subtle and nuanced because also, you know, if you look the word up in the dictionary, it also means that you’re open to attack. You know, this country is vulnerable to attack from blah, blah. A person’s body is vulnerable to disease, right?

MARY: Right. I see what you’re saying. Yeah.

LIZZIE: So there is this kind of risk set up inherently in the word. But what we’re talking about when we’re using vulnerability as a tool, maybe not at all, but a position, right?

MARY: Yup.

LIZZIE: We’re talking about taking down the mask, aren’t we?

MARY: Yes.

LIZZIE: We’re talking about, okay, so here’s the truth about me. But, you know, being vulnerable doesn’t mean you go around just like telling the bus driver…

MARY: [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: …how difficult your day’s been, right? 

MARY: Right. 

LIZZIE: Or what have you. But being vulnerable to me in the sense that we’re using it and… it just means I’m standing in my truth and I’m going to tell you something about myself and you’re probably going to feel more connected to me because it makes you feel safer for you to tell me some of your truth.

MARY: Yeah, I was thinking, too, that, you know, being vulnerable doesn’t mean you have to share every detail or share all the feelings. But maybe that being vulnerable just means sharing where you’re at and how that relates to the present situation. So I’m going, thinking back to just personally me, how I did this was in the beginning of the episode talking to you saying how the reason I wanted you on was because of all this death that’s happened in my family. And I remember our talk that we had, you know, before a year ago. And so, you know, I didn’t have to tell you all the details about death, but just revealing that little bit, I think, is still being vulnerable. It’s yeah. It’s removing that mask, as you were saying. 

LIZZIE: Hmm. 

MARY: Would that be part of it?

LIZZIE: Yeah, I think so, definitely. And being vulnerable, you still have discernment. You have to have discernment, in fact. You have to be able to say to yourself, well, you know, this isn’t a person who can hold my stuff, right? This isn’t a person who can give me safety here, especially if you need safety, right? Because that’s a whole nother thing as well.

MARY: Yeah, yeah.

LIZZIE: For example, yeah, no. Yeah. If I’m, if I’m needing safety, if I’m still in the middle of something and I’m, you know, and I’m needing a friend, I know who I can go to to be vulnerable. But if we’re talking about public vulnerability…

MARY: Mhmm.

LIZZIE: …then discernment is very important, because I do, I tell a lot of people stories about my past. I have had a relationship where something that I had disclosed at the beginning of the relationship about my past got brought up much later and used against me and it was really painful. But at the time, I don’t think I was well enough to manage it because I wasn’t living in my full, authentic self. It wasn’t until years later that I did the work like the really deep work, and stepped into a much bigger understanding of what vulnerability meant. Because my mother is an oversharer. She overshares. And so I think I learnt to overshare. So I don’t really have a problem with telling people most of the things that I think 75% of families would like to keep in the family. 

MARY: Yes. [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: [LAUGHS] But I don’t… those things don’t matter to me. But some of the other things that I share now that took me a long time to share publicly and still I think, okay, no, I’m not going to do that story in front of this audience and that’s a, you know, judgement on my… but I have done some, I have to say that now that I am in ownership of my story and stories plural, no one has ever been able to use anything against me to my knowledge. 

MARY: Mmm.

LIZZIE: Right? And I don’t think, you know, I think energetically as we call in our solid self, you know, as we do the healing work, as we grow and we pull back those parts of ourselves that we might have disowned then we get kind of bigger, you know, we stand up straighter and our energy centres are more connected to the earth and auras go out a little bigger and brighter. You know, there’s not a lot of negativity that can come into that space. In fact, none because light, as I always keep going on about it, darkness ceases to exist in light, which makes darkness an illusion in a sense, right? Because darkness can’t… you can’t bring darkness into light can you?

MARY: No. no.

LIZZIE: Doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work because light, it doesn’t go anywhere, it just ceases to exist. If you’ve got darkness in a box and you open it up and the light floods in, the darkness doesn’t go somewhere else, it ceases to exist. Boom, it’s so easy.

MARY: When you look back at the person you are today, you know, in a few words, how would you describe your younger self before you went behind the microphone?

LIZZIE: I would say I was pretending to be confident. 

MARY: Oh.

LIZZIE: I had a mask of confidence and I did it pretty well.

MARY: And so then how would you describe yourself now with all this experience behind you?

LIZZIE: I would say I’m solidly confident and I’m enjoying my life. I’m in joy. Yeah.

MARY: What’s that difference in confidence from before and now? How do you know that confidence has changed?

LIZZIE: I’m not pretending, so I’m not having to strategize. So instead I’m being moved through my life. By love, by joy, peace, by bliss, by connection, by creativity. And before I was like, I was in strategy, you know, I had to kind of think, how do I… how do I get my needs met? But it wasn’t conscious.

MARY: Yeah, yeah.

LIZZIE: None of it’s ever conscious. 

MARY: Yeah. 

LIZZIE: It’s when I look back, I’m like, Oh, right, oh right. That’s how I was… that’s how I was showing up in a relationship, I was trying to be shiny. I was trying to be happy, I was trying to be… And when I couldn’t be, I would have to remove myself from the relationship or friendship, I would just, you know, go and isolate because I couldn’t be happy and funny. And I knew that’s what people would want. And if I wasn’t that, then maybe my emotions or my feelings hurt people. You know, that was all old stuff playing out as a belief. It wasn’t true and none of it was true. Now it’s like, I’m just learning every day. I don’t even know if I’m learning every day. I’m just stepping into a new experience of myself every day. And I, I presume I’m going to be telling a lot of people a lot of stuff about the shit I’ve done in my life, right?

[BOTH LAUGHING]

LIZZIE: And most people are going to go, Oh. And then they’re going to go, Oh, well I’ve done something sort of similar, and I definitely don’t like to tell anyone, but maybe it’s not that bad after all. She’s getting away with it. [LAUGHS]

MARY: Yes, yes. [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: And that’s really my message, isn’t it? It’s like I’m not really trying to air my dirty laundry. I’m just trying to say, like, don’t get hung up on your past. Like, embrace it and own it and move forward with it as part of who you are and how you came to be and what you know today. Yeah, we’re all trying to be so shiny. But there’s no point. What’s the point? Nobody’s shiny like it’s a massive like, joke. 

MARY: [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: Everybody knows it’s a joke. So…

MARY: Yes. Yeah.

LIZZIE: …get on with it. 

MARY: So as we are moving into our now, the future, you were mentioning before that you’ve started a podcast. So tell us a bit about that.

LIZZIE: Okay. I’ve started this brilliant podcast called Dead Duck Podcast. You know, it’s Dead Duck, but you have to put Podcast in to find it on Spotify or anything like that. And it’s me and my friend Rebecca, Rebecca Eames, who is also a fellow therapist. We trained together. She’s also British. She also lives in Vancouver. Yeah. And we’re exactly the same age. And we grew up about an hour and a half away from each other in the UK.

MARY: What are the odds?

LIZZIE: I know. And we were just, we just landed in the same training programme and she’s, she’s very different to me but very, very funny and Dead Duck is the term that was given to a person or thing destined to fail. So it’s a podcast where we help each other get comfortable with failure because as any of us know, we live in a world that’s hyper success focused. And if you’ve ever tried to do anything out there, people, you will know, that you just meet failure after failure after failure. And we just have a really good laugh about how much we fail. And yes, so it’s a bit of a kind of therapeutic vibe to it, but it’s basically just two friends chatting. Yeah. So check it out please. And like and review.

MARY: Yes, I am going to go listen to that one because I think…

LIZZIE: Oh, thanks.

MARY: …I need more Lizzie Allan in my life. [LAUGHS]

LIZZIE: [LAUGHS] LOL [CHUCKLES].

MARY: [LAUGHS] So to end off, I always ask my guests this and since, you know, you’ve started your own podcast and I know you’ve been a guest on many podcasts, but what are you excited about podcasting right now?

LIZZIE: I am excited about how much the podcast helps me to get through my life [LAUGHS] because I get to look at my life from the outside so that I’m not alone chugging through, you know, churning through the day-to-day stuff. I get to, kind of, have a chat about it and dissect it with my friend and it makes me feel really grateful.

MARY: It is so true though, like because you have a co-host situation…

LIZZIE: Mmm.

MARY: …that does make life so much better. You have the right co-host. So, podcasting still becomes fun and it’s not part of the churning day-to-day. I think people sometimes miss out on that fact that podcasting can be fun because they think, Oh, it’s another content funnel creation thing.

LIZZIE: Oh, yeah.

MARY: And I’m like, No, it’s not.

LIZZIE: No, it’s fun.

MARY: It’s about chatting and talking and trying things out, right? Like you try something on an episode and did that resonate with you? And if it didn’t, well, let’s try that same like theme or impact, but in a totally different way. You can try it with the next episode or you can unpack with the two of you. 

LIZZIE: Mmm.

MARY: I bet you unpack so many things that I bet if you listen to past episodes and just hear that being unpacked over time is quite amazing as well because you have that conversation, but you can still reflect on it and go back to it if you need to.

LIZZIE: Absolutely. Yeah, I love it. I find it incredible. A creative outlet. I love it. And just being on your podcast today, it’s just been beautiful. Mary, thank you so much.

MARY: Thank you. I totally enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for making me think more, I’m going to start diving deeper into, you know, certain aspects. And I love what you were saying about just the power in your ownership. I’m going to think more about that as well. So, Lizzie, thank you so much for coming on the show and Dead Duck podcast. I’m going to go…

LIZZIE: Dead Duck Podcast. Yes.

MARY: I’m going to go find that one.

[BOTH LAUGHING]

LIZZIE: Thanks, Mary. Bye.

[MUSIC IN]

MARY: Oh, I knew it. I loved that Lizzie brought the light. I knew she would. And make sure if you need to get yourself some more Lizzie Allan time, follow her on her podcast as well. Dead Duck Podcast. If you look those up on Google, you’ll find it. She also has a TED Talk called Transform Your Shame into Comedy. That one is a great one to watch as well. Both of those things will be linked in the show notes, so you can easily just click to it. And then also in the show notes is the link to her Stand-Up Comedy Act that she did for a fundraiser. She referenced this when she was talking about the death of her cousin. So she talks about the S-phone, the spirit phone and her cousin’s death. If you wanted to bring some laughter into your day, click on that one as well. I really highly recommend it. Okay, let me know how this episode helps you and how you’ll show up the next time you’re behind the mic with your story. Leave me some feedback with a voicemail. There is a purple button that says Send Voicemail. Click on that from your phone and record me a little message or send a note, type away. Send me an email to visiblevoicepodcast@gmail.com and then until next time, chat with you soon and speak with Spirit.

[MUSIC ENDS // PAUSE A BEAT // OUTRO – SHOW CLOSE]

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[MUSIC ENDS]