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#58 Dana Ray — The Power of Naming What You Do

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A note from Matthew Carey (host of Studio Time) —

I've spent a lifetime helping creative colleagues make art they can be proud of. Now I want to take that a step further and help them make careers they can be proud of.

I learned a repeatable method to create an Audience by Design and I'm on a mission to share that with others. I’ve created a workshop for artists and creatives who have spent forever perfecting 'the show' and are now ready to get serious about the business.

My vision is to create a community of artists with careers that sustain them creatively, emotionally, and financially.

This 6-week workshop will help you build a loyal audience who wants to support and engage with the work that's meaningful to you. I believe it will fundamentally change your relationship with your fans and transform how you feel about your career.

Dana Ray works with unboxable leaders to name their work, and tell the true story of what it is about. She is a writer, speaker and facilitator who works with leaders, artists and changemaking organisations.

Dana and I talk about one of her earliest memories of using words to document and process her lived experience, the lesson she learned from a Bulgarian hairdresser, and how the process of uncovering your primary verb can help you do more of the work that you were born to do.

Find and follow Dana online:

Links and show notes from this episode:

Episode Transcript:

Matthew Carey  

Hi Dana, and welcome to Studio time. 

Dana Ray 

Hello, Matthew Carey, thank you for having me. 

Matthew Carey 

Oh, it's, it's my pleasure. You're a big journaller, and you have a collection of your notebooks from over the years. I wonder if you could tell me and the people listening the story about your very first entry in your very first diary.

Dana Ray  

My mom really valued journaling. One of the things that she did for each of me and my siblings before we were born, was she journaled letters to us and then continue journaling letters to us over the course of our childhood. One of the first things she gave me as a gift when I started to learn how to write was a little diary. I had done some scribbles in a previous notebook, but the one that I really was committed to was this beautiful plasticky pink book that had a clasp that closed. One of my first pages was writing about a trip that I took with my family to the Smoky Mountains. We were standing on this overlook where you can see over the mountains and the valleys in the American South, and my mom has this picture of me writing with a pencil in the notebook instead of looking at the view. I am cataloging the events of the day, and I'm writing about the view that we're seeing, and I'm talking about going on a hike. All of my spelling was phonetic, I was growing up in North Georgia at the time, so I had a southern accent. My phonetic spelling captured my North Georgia accent. I think that says a lot about how I've lived my life since then, which has been as much about the observation and the chronicling of life as it is about the experience of looking. Or another way of saying that is looking is enriched by the act of observing in language and capturing things for myself and for the people around me in time. Which makes me sound like a historian, which I'm not, but I am a chronicler of my own experiences, for sure.

Matthew Carey  

What I see in that story, is you capturing the moment with words while your mum was capturing it with an image. How are those methods, writing words and capturing images, of documenting or processing an experience different for you?

Dana Ray  

To use language is to capture the internal dialogue and the internal narrative of an experience. As a writer of personal essays, and someone who works with people's stories, that's how language works and writing works. I would not say that's necessarily true of all language — journalism is an entire field devoted to a very different form of language and observation. Taking an image is about capturing a different part of our senses. Writing is our internal dialogue and the image of this moment in time of what our eyes have seen.

Matthew Carey  

I see two different sorts of photos, there's the photo where we pull out our phone to capture a moment, and then there's the photo taken by a photographer. A photographer is looking to compose an image and capture something specific. It feels to me like there's something similar there in the idea of composition between an image and a paragraph or a story, perhaps. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Dana Ray  

The difference that I'm hearing in your description is the difference between the writing or image taking we do to preserve or process our own lives and our own stories, versus the images or writing we end up constructing to have a conversation with someone else, or to create an experience for someone else. Who is it for? What is it for? Those questions change the approach of how we use these art forms and how we look at things and how we use our tools to capture or create. Because capturing and creation are two different energies for sure.

Matthew Carey  

There's a moment a few years back that really stays with me where I went to an exhibition of artwork of Edvard Munch, the guy that painted the famous painting The Scream. Apart from his work with paint brushes, photography started becoming fashionable towards the end of his career, and he would take self-portraits with the camera. It wasn't until then that I really thought about what a difference photography made in the world. Once we could see ourselves from another person's point of view, I think that started changing everything. That seems to be part and parcel of what you do as well — helping to capture people's stories and reflecting stories from another perspective.

Dana Ray  

I wish I knew more about the history of photography, because I'm having fragments of details in my head that I can't form into a full fact. One of those fragments is the way that photography changed our relationship with war. The stories we told about it, and the ways people at home related to the acts, and the violence of conflict. I think that's interesting - our relationship with this human invention of violence changed by our ability to capture it and see it after it was done happening. 

Matthew Carey  

There was a Part B to that. Stories and photographs are both things that help us with memory. Before photos came along, the way that we would remember things is either by telling stories to each other or writing them down. They would assist in our memories, because what I've learned is our memories are not necessarily of the actual incident that happened, but they're more a reflection of the last story we told ourselves about what happened. Once we had photographs, then we were able to actually look at what happened or use our senses to take us back to that spot. This idea of how we use stories and photographs for our own memories, but also to share those memories with other people, is important. How have you used stories to either communicate your memories or other people's?

Dana Ray  

I have been studying telling my own stories for as long as I've been able to write. I formally pursued that as in training as a writer, first in undergraduate school and then as a graduate student at Bucknell University, where I came in as an essay writer, and a memoirist. My objective was to tell stories about my life experiences in a way that could draw conclusions that were more universal than just myself. When I look at what my own individual stories have been, and how I've used them, I've used them almost like little photographs, or poems strung together, where I want to explore an idea and I'm using my own sensory memories, my own felt reality of a moment in time to try to parse my way through an idea into something meaningful. That's my work as a writer, which is one half of the work that I do. But on that writing side, it really is trying to understand myself and understand the world, and how those two things have been in conversation since I arrived here. That's what I use language to do. All of my favorite writers are essayists. Behind me is a bookshelf, and I keep all of my favorite writers with me, so I can pull them out and reference them.

Matthew Carey  

There was something else that I heard in that first story you told which I wanted to tease out a little bit and see if there's anything there. I didn't realize that your mom had been a journaler, and that she captured the experience leading up to your birth for you to read and to discover later. Now that story of you as a as a seven-year-old, starting your own diary and writing your story, feels to me like a continuation of that thing you knew that your mum did. Is there anything else that your mum did or does that you've tried to carry on? 

Dana Ray  

My mother, Susanna, used writing and journaling as a spiritual practice. I was raised a Christian, specifically evangelical, even relationship to the Southern Baptists in a lot of ways. That was her heritage and that is the one that she passed on to me and my siblings. She used journaling very much as a dialogue with God and a dialogue with the people around her, which was the same as a conversation with her own spirit. So as a tiny kid, to see her reading her Bible and journaling, those were two parts of having an internal life that was yours and separate from the people around you. She would take time to go away by herself, to think, to process, to pray, to journal, and write and think things out. That practice very much became my own and is something that continues for me to this day. Writing, journaling and processing is a sacred space. We all get to have access to an internal life that is separate from other people through that act of writing. My mother was the one who taught me to read, she taught me to write, she homeschooled me the whole way through high school. My education was really directed and crafted by her. I was very lucky to have a parent who has natural gifts in pedagogy and experience design. It was a very creative, vibrant, and communal experience to be homeschooled. She was very much the one orchestrating and choosing all those different things that showed up in my life and my siblings' life. When it comes to how I care about people gathering, what gets said from a stage, or how something gets written - that's really coming from her. How people experience the world, and how those experiences can help them grow or stop them from growing - I really get that from her. I'm working on a project with her right now. She is a full-time nurse in a trauma unit and she's noting that nurses coming in from graduate school don't always get the chance to learn the tactical skills of nursing, especially when someone's life is on the line. She's very good at mentoring and developing people's tools and skills and figuring out what needs to happen. I'm working with her to help pitch, and network, and get the right data and the right people on her team to make this program a reality at her hospital.

Matthew Carey  

That sounds like a fantastic project. I'm looking at you as we record and I'm seeing the bookshelf and I'm wondering, does that bookshelf behind you now reflect a bookshelf that was in your life growing up?

Dana Ray  

I grew up around so many books. There were books everywhere! We would go to the library when I was six or seven, and everyone would leave with a stack of books that would go for the full length of your arms, right up to your chin. We would have to somehow make it to the car with this massive stack of books that we would then go through in a week, then return and get more books. Mom was always reading out loud to us. We had so many read-aloud books. The curriculum that she bought to teach us came with at least 25 or 30 readers - different books from different historical time periods, about different eras in American or World history. We were learning history through narrative and fiction. So yeah, I grew up around lots of books.

Matthew Carey  

Clearly words have been an integral part of your life the whole time. You got a degree in English there in the US and then you spent time in Bulgaria as a Fulbright teacher. I want to ask you were you fluent in Bulgarian when you got there? 

Dana Ray  

Not at all. The first time I went to Bulgaria was in 2012. I went as an English teacher for a kid summer camp. By the end of those three weeks, I had gotten the hang of the alphabet, I could catch certain words. If they were the exact same words as an English word, but in a Cyrillic alphabet, I could start to read those. Supermarket is the same everywhere. They just have it in the Cyrillic alphabet. I could start picking out those words by the end of those three weeks. But when I lived there, I taught in English, my students knew English, all the extracurriculars were supposed to be in English. My daily life really consisted of English but getting around required Bulgarian. I became very adept at certain negotiations in Bulgarian - like buying a bus ticket, or saying how many peppers I wanted at the market, or telling a taxi driver that they were charging me too much. I could get very intense about certain things in Bulgarian, but I never got to an in-depth intimate conversation level.

Matthew Carey  

I'm curious about your experience with the multiple languages given your fascination with words. Do you think that the language you speak influences the thoughts you think, and the actions you take?

Dana Ray  

That is a question for the evolutionary linguists. It is a question that divides the field and is something that people are actively studying and trying to figure out. On a broad sweeping term, I don't know. Much smarter people than I, are deeply divided on that question. What we do know is that certain terms can allow for different experiences of the world. One of the terms that has been studied in a replicable study is that when a language has multiple words, for nuanced shades of colour, the people in that language group can identify those shades of colour faster than a language that doesn't have a specific word for that shade. Russian was the language that was studied (in comparison to English) and certain words they have for shades of blue. The speed with which you're able to do it is milliseconds. it's measurable, but it's very slight on an external basis. But if that study were to be extrapolated, we can say that our perspective of the world, our ability to perceive the world is changed by our access to language for that world.

Matthew Carey  

This is maybe moving off from that question, originally, but for full disclosure, I'm 46 years old. There are people younger than me who use words that I'm not familiar with. I then, have to get hip. (Except they wouldn't call it get hip.) Sometimes it takes for me to understand what the word means, to understand what the meaning is. Maybe I would have had different language for that meaning once upon a time, but sometimes, it’s a whole new thing. For example, it took me a while to get my head around memes. Memes seemed to me to be a new thing. We didn't really have meme-like ideas when I was growing up, and now we do,

Dana Ray  

I remember exactly where I was when I learned the word meme. I was working in a writing center at Penn State University, and a student was in a Culture Communications class. He came in with a paper that he wanted help on. The paper was a help memes and meme culture. I'd never heard this word before. Through the whole one-and-a-half-page paper, he was talking about the role of memes as a communication tool. specifically looking at the meme, I can has cheezburger? I was wondering - what are you saying? What do these words mean? I can has cheezburger? I still don't understand. I'm still lost on that one. But I remember sitting there thinking, "I'm a year older than you and I am lost." And this was probably 2008 or 2009.

Matthew Carey  

Using different words can have a big impact, can't it? Because if you do know what "I can has cheezburger" means, then you belong to that tribe. But if you don't understand it, number one, you know that that meme's not for you. Secondly, if I was trying to communicate it to you, where you were at that point in time, they wouldn't necessarily be the best words to use to communicate that idea.

Dana Ray  

I think our experiences have a lot to do with what language makes sense to us. We name things after something has come into existence. When it's a new word, it means that it's an experience that someone has named. Or sometimes it's a microculture group who's had an experience that they've named. Then that word, or that experience, is something that is transmitted beyond the bounds of that community. Once I experienced memes, I knew what the word meant. But defining it wasn't the best way to explain it to me, especially when memes were something that was happening in a very particular subculture of the internet at that time.

Matthew Carey  

If we travel back to Bulgaria for a moment - you've told this story that I love. I love the story of you trying to find the right hairdresser. Would you tell me that one again? 

Dana Ray  

Living in Bulgaria changed a lot of how I saw the world because I was having new experiences. Those new experiences were shifting how I understood myself, what I wanted out of life, and who I was in the world. I was too nervous to go to a hair salon by myself and try to figure out how to get my hair cut, so I went from shoulder length hair to hair in the middle of my back by the end of my time there. I was rolling over it in the middle of the night, and it was hurting. Probably more important, though, is that I was changing as a person, and I wanted a new haircut to help declare how much I had changed. I was super into the idea of getting a pixie cut. I'd been thinking about it for years but hadn't been brave enough to do it. I decided it was time. One of my students had a great haircut. I wanted one like hers. A friend of mine took me to the woman who trimmed his beard and cut his hair. He called her ahead of time and said, "She has really long hair, she scared. She's gonna do this dramatic thing." When I got there, she was shocked, because she was like, "I thought she must have had difficult hair. You were so explanatory on the phone." She spoke Bulgarian and I didn't speak enough of the language to fully communicate with her, but my friend was there with me. I sat down on the chair, and we explained what kind of hair I wanted. Unlike everyone else I talked to about this plan in Bulgaria, who had said, "Oh, are you sure?" "Men like women with long hair?" "Have you asked your boyfriend yet?" She said, "If you want to change your life, it is my job to help you." And I was like, "That's it. You can cut my hair however you want, just do whatever." She put my hair in a braid and cut it off, and I had the shortest hair that ever had. It was pretty close to a pixie. I caused much drama in my school. When I got back to class later that day to teach. I had one student cry because she was so upset my hair was gone, and my mentor teacher was upset, because I hadn't asked her for her opinion first. There were many different reactions, but it was a really liberating moment. And one that I think of often when it comes to art, and particularly craft that is used in service of other people. Who are you making it for, and what kind of change do you want to make for them when you do your work? For her that core philosophy was "If you want to change your life, it's my job to help you. I'm not going to question your choice; I'm just going to be there to help you enter this new stage of your life. To translate who you are now with who you are becoming in the form of your haircut." And that's why I love haircuts.

Matthew Carey  

This is interesting because this is the first time I've heard that story and heard it in a new way. Whenever you've told that to me before, I've heard the hairdresser felt like it was her job to help you go on that journey. But today, I heard the hairdresser say, "It's my job to get out of the way. You're already on that journey. If you just need your hair shorter, I can facilitate that so you can do what you need to do." Which way do you interpret it?

Dana Ray  

I heard it as she heard the change I wanted to make, and she saw her job as an assistant to make that change happen. It wasn't her job to figure out what the change ought to be, or what it should be. I came in with a statement about who I was, and what type of hair I wanted, and it wasn't her place to question that. It wasn't her job to say "Are you sure? Do you think your boyfriend will like it?" Instead, it was "No! You want to change your... My job is to help you change your life. And you've told me how you want to change your life. I'm here, let's do it."

Matthew Carey  

Because you'd come up against other hairdressers who had tried to talk you out of it. They try to talk you down. "You've got a lovely long hair; you should stick with it." You were committed to this different hairstyle, and one thing a hairstyle does is it frames your face. You were literally looking to reframe your face. How did that reframe affect the way you thought about yourself, and in what ways do you think it changed the way other people saw you?

Dana Ray  

Within the context that I was living in, the hair was a statement about gender. It was a statement about how women were seen or understood within a larger culture - both the culture in which I had grown up, and the culture in which I was living in Eastern Europe. It was a statement about choosing to embrace my independence, or solo identity, after having a year of struggling to fit into someone else's hierarchy of how my work needed to be expressed. It was letting go of years of a certain presentation of who I was, to try something new. It was an experiment, I could have hated it, but it gave me a new starting ground. I looked different. I looked different than everyone I was around at the time. That gave me a new sense of who I could be, and a new self-affirmation of who I was.

Matthew Carey  

If you've had long hair for a long time, it's an investment. It's what Seth Godin would call a sunk cost. You spent a lot of time growing that hair, and if you get it cut short, it's going to take a long time to get it back. You did something that was risky, in a way. You didn't know whether you're going to like it the next day, but you did it and you proved to yourself that you could take risks, and you could survive them. That became a story you had in your journal, to take with you. I wonder whether you reflect on that experience when you need to take new chances.

Dana Ray 

I think that that moment had more to do with a deep sense of knowing myself. It was a risk. It was an experiment. But calling it an experiment was a little backdoor, in case I hated it. I didn't need the little backdoor at the end of the day, because I was making a choice that was rooted in a strong sense of what I wanted and needed. Maybe it sounds weird to talk about hair that way. No, there are too many genderqueer people in this world to know the impact that hair makes on your sense of alignment as a person. I would say that the haircut was a reflection of many risks that had come before it and was an external expression of choices that had already been made, rather than being the choice in and of itself. It was more of a conclusion to a long series of events, or long series of choices. I was very comfortable making that choice at that point. A little breathless, but I was determined. There have been a couple other times in my life, stylistically or otherwise, where I was very determined to make a certain choice. I have never questioned those for a moment when I've made them.

Matthew Carey  

Maybe this leads into a similar story, maybe something different. When you came back from Bulgaria, you continued your studies. You had a vision of yourself in academia. But you observed the people around you both in education and in entrepreneurship and your thinking started to change. What was it that you were seeing and how did that challenge the identity that you'd already imagined for yourself?

Dana Ray 

I started to ask the question, what did I want out of my dream of academia? When I pictured a story of myself as a professor, what was I doing that made me so happy? That story was always being in a room full of students and working with them on their writing. Or talking about a piece of literature and them finding language for the experiences they were having, whether with a text or with their poetry, or their short story, whatever it is they were working on. By finding that language, they found new choices or new avenues to know themselves. It was not in that clear of words. I'm putting words to my reflection many years later. But the thing I wanted was to be a teacher and to be a teacher of language, and words, and that craft. But what I saw once I was in my master's program was that a lot of professors spend a lot of time doing other things. Especially in today's world of academia, where we have (at least in the United States) we have a system of adjunct professors who are almost less than part time but spend an enormous amount of effort to be in-classroom instructors in terms of grading, but are paid like they're very, very part time when they're not really. To get both a salary that gives you options in life, and to have any kind of recognition among your peers, you have to play a publishing game, a teaching game, and a politics game within the institution that you're in. As you're searching for your work, you rarely get the opportunity to choose what type of place you end up working at. You just take what comes to you, unless you're in the top few percentage points - the best of the best - coming out of your studies. You spend a lot of time negotiating for institutional structures, for budgetary opportunities, you're applying for grants, you are dealing with classroom things that have nothing to do with literature or writing, you're dealing with interdepartmental conflicts, you're writing papers for publication and you're pursuing tenure. There's so much that goes into playing and winning in academia. When I understood more of the pieces that would be required of me, I ended up saying, "This is not a game that I care about winning." What helped is - I was hanging out with a bunch of entrepreneurs, who were doing the types of things that I had wanted out of academia but weren't in an institution of any kind. They were starting co working spaces, they were running their own classes, they were giving lectures, they were facilitating events, and I saw them offer and create types of connection for people that I had wanted to offer as a professor. And I said, "Well, I'm gonna go try something else. How can I put food on the table using writing?" That's how I ended up in marketing, and then entrepreneurship.

Matthew Carey  

I think that's interesting, because there was part of being a professor that really appealed to you. But as you looked closer, you realized that was a relatively small percentage of the job of a professor. You're not the only person to do that. We see the part of the job that really appeals to us and put blinkers or blinders on and don't see all the other BS that surrounds it. What I hear is you're saying that there are so many things that a professor would have to do, and hoops they'd have to jump through, things that they'd have to defend or to argue for with people who don't necessarily have the same agenda as them. You were trying to find some way to cut through all that and do more of the stuff that was important to you. You went through a similar process when you started in your job in branding,

Dana Ray  

The thread underneath it all is the exercise of saying, "What have I loved about this, and what do I want from this?" Then asking whether that thing is actually available in the path that you thought you had to take to get it. Sometimes it is, and then it is absolutely worth the rest of the stuff. And sometimes you can find it in another area that doesn't require the same kind of structure around it. There are plenty of people for whom the whole of academia is dream work, and it's absolutely worth putting up with stuff in order to thrive. For the rest of us, you got to ask the question, "Did you really want to get stuck there? It's not the only place in the world that could give you a platform and a space to be who you are.

Matthew Carey  

Dana, you went into branding before going out on your own. What was it that you discovered in branding that you wanted to take further?

Dana Ray  

I was working in a B2B tech agency. What that meant is that we had clients from really large organizations and businesses who were selling business to business. They had something in tech, they wanted to sell to someone else who also did tech. I also had the fun of working on a couple of nonprofit projects while we were there, and really found that I thrived in interviewing clients, and better understanding what they valued - about the products they were buying, or the events they were attending - whatever that piece was. In that process, I started to see how some of our clients who came in for branding needed something that was half a step prior. Rather than a new logo, or refreshed colour palette or new website - I mean, who doesn't need a new website? Let's be real. We did some great websites. These companies or individuals or nonprofits, didn't totally see what made them unique, and what their specific relationship was with their audience. While my agency was absolutely brilliant and helping them figure out their relationship with their audience, what seemed to be missing was that fundamental definition piece. What are we? Who are we? What do we do? What are we better at than anyone else? How does that relate to what people say they want when they buy from us? And that is where my work really made a difference on some of the projects. When I wanted to grow to do more of that in my job - I was at a small company of eight people - when I was lobbying to change my position, there wasn't room for that to happen. So I said, "I think I want to try going out on my own and doing more of that definition work. Pre-branding, if you want to call it that."

Matthew Carey  

You were helping people really understand what they had, and why they had it, so that they could better communicate it to other people who might want it?

Dana Ray  

Yes, and have a stronger grasp of it for themselves, so they can make stronger decisions around what work that they loved was going to look like.

Matthew Carey  

When you say them like that, they seem like very basic questions. But they're not necessarily questions that are easy to answer. Why are they difficult questions, Dana?

Dana Ray  

Well, one, oxygen is basic, but it's not simple. I don't know that basic things are always simple. The other reason is that we can't see ourselves. Our brains, our entire physical structure, is designed to observe the outside world and make decisions around it. It is less geared to effective self-sight. There's a lot of self-reflection we can do. There's an entire independent universe in every single person. Still, it's really hard to say those things that are so integral to our regular everyday experience. Having someone else to dialogue with is necessary for any good idea I've ever seen come into existence.

Matthew Carey  

That's interesting. When I meet somebody who I think should know one of my people, I can and will gladly speak about those friends and colleagues with confidence and talk them up. But when it comes to telling somebody about myself, my vocabulary is suddenly a lot more limited, and I find that I'll talk myself down. Why do you think our experience or attachment to stories differs depending on whether those stories belong to ourselves or to somebody else?

Dana Ray 

I think the word is [unsure of this word]. You use that to describe the difference in your experience between describing a friend and describing yourself, I think we're very confident and clear on the stories we can tell about our experiences of other people, but we don't actually know how our presence in the world translates. We need someone else to help us get that language and build that confidence and practice in talking about ourselves.

Matthew Carey  

Great. This is the work you do. How do you help other people discover, express, and communicate their stories about themselves? Tell me about your work.

Dana Ray  

I describe my work as helping brilliant, and incredible, and unboxable people name what their work is. To put it in a sentence, in a few words. Not so that you are confined to a genre or an industry or a label, but to articulate what is the thing that when you show up in a room and you are most like yourself - that is the thing that you're doing, that is the thing that happens as a result. Because when you can name that, that's a brand positioning statement. I work with my clients to help them find the language for their experiences of themselves as an internal statement - I call it the ground truth statement. Then we translate that language into external communication and storytelling. But it starts with that internal piece of finding words from my own experience of the world - and the words I've used to name those experiences - in a concrete way that you can do something with. You can make decisions. You can design a business. You can define your internal messaging. You can access your why. All those things are possible through language, and through naming and defining who we are.

Matthew Carey  

Tell me more about how doing this with somebody else - how doing this process with someone like you - is useful? I know you've said that language evolved as a communal activity, and that our vocabulary comes from conversation. So how does having somebody else hear and reflect the words that are already in our heads help?

Dana Ray 

Do you mean technically by what mechanisms that helps or what is the result for someone going through the process?

Matthew Carey  

I think a little bit of both would be useful. I think, an example of helping to see a part of the process, and then maybe what the results that you've seen lead to.

Dana Ray  

The fundamental mechanism that brings about the change is the same that operates in great therapy, a great friendship, a great mentor/mentee relationship, or any relationship. It's when you have the experience of being seen. When someone other than you, unconnected to your story in life, who has nothing to do with what you've done before in your existence, who fundamentally doesn't benefit if you win or lose it just it doesn't impact my life, having someone independent, to say back to you, "What I'm hearing is this." You've done this for me multiple times in this conversation. You've said "What I'm hearing in this story, and this story, is this thread about your mom. Or this thread about journaling. Or this thread about storytelling." When someone else does that for you, you have the ability to make conscious what was previously unconscious. It was there. It was operating, I was the one who said those things. And you said, "Hey, I'm seeing these parallels." That gives me space to go off and make something new in our conversation. To tell a different story. To think of something else. It's generative, we make stuff out of this type of being seen. I do this process to get to the ground truth. It's a multi hour workshop, and then we do integration and translation into your bio, or whatever, over the next four to six weeks. But the workshop itself is actually pretty fast. In that time, my job is to learn your stories, and how you use language. What your body looks like when you're lit up. What your body looks like when you're kind of disconnected. So that by the end of those three and a half hours, I'm able to supply language to you, and test words with you, so that the story is absolutely correct. You've seen it. I've seen it. We've both processed it. I get to have this dual vision of both internal to how you operate, and an external vision person who can see how the dots connect in a way that you can't because it's in you. You can't see it. Then the results of that are really, really cool. My clients tend to have two reactions, they either get really, really excited, or they have intense relief, and they kind of slump back in their chair[...] Then they go off and start figuring out how to tell their story and I'm right there with them to help them communicate that publicly. One of my favorite examples comes from a workshop that I gave that wasn't 1:1. You may know Taylor Harrington, who is the current Director of Digital Marketing for Akimbo Workshops. She attended the first ever public workshop I gave. She was a student. I was living in the same town. She used that experience to name that her work - when she was most herself - was all about building understanding between herself and others, so that we can go explore what was possible. That was the thing that explained her work in disability, her work in PR and her advertising degree. Her work as - I think she was a camp counselor too - I can't remember. She used that story the whole way through undergrad to get internships and opportunities. That was also the story she told to an alum from her university who introduced her to Seth Godin. Then that was the story she told Seth Godin. He said, "I don't have a job for you. But I'm going to make one because I want you on my team."

Matthew Carey  

The idea of taking the thing that you do, the action you're taking when you're most yourself. That's the exciting element of that idea for me. 

Dana Ray  

I call it the primary verb, what is your primary verb? 

Matthew Carey  

That reflects what we're talking about. Being a professor is the identity. Sometimes you might say, "Oh, I want to be a professor." But really, there is a specific activity, that primary verb in being a professor, that's the thing that actually excites you. Going to the meetings doesn't excite you, but helping your students, doing the teaching - that would be the primary verb in that example?

Dana Ray  

I would say that my primary verb is hearing what we're trying to say and finding the words to say it.

Matthew Carey  

I listened to an interview you did with Gina Morgano on the Practice Parlour podcast as research before we spoke today, and you were talking about words as a form of action. Something you said that I thought was really interesting, is that it's very dangerous to aspirationally name yourself. That it's very important to name yourself based on what you today and what you've already been. Can you talk to me about not aspirationally naming yourself?

Dana Ray  

I know I have a tendency—and I've seen this in my clients when we're in the middle of the ground truth process—to try to come up with the words for the person they think they're supposed to be. For the values they think they're supposed to have. For the type of business they think their clients expect them to be. That's aspirational. But I don't think anyone becomes friends with someone because they are aspiring to be a person, they are friends with them because they're who they are right now. Maybe who they are right now has dreams and visions and ways that they want to grow. They have an ambition to be the kind of person or they have a value to grow in a certain way, but that's different than saying you're something that you're not. You don't have to be anything else. I think your primary verb is great, whatever it is all on its own. This is very Godin-esque, but you'll find the people who need and want to be around that thing that you do. So say what you are. Stop trying to hide behind industry language, or what you think a brand statement is supposed to be. Tell us how fabulous you are right now because you're fabulous right now. Most of us just want to know what that is and what that looks like so that we can get behind you, and celebrate you, and support you, and buy from you, and benefit from you. But we can't do that until you tell us. So tell us.

Matthew Carey  

I can see that using the two parts of your story, where you've come from and where you are right now, are useful if you're looking to create a description that you can use in a bio, on an about page on your website, or in a description of who you are in an application, whether it's for a job, or a scholarship, or whatever. That's useful because that's what sometimes people are looking for. They're looking at who are you and what have you done? What about the future part of that?  If we put aside the word aspirational, how do clients use this work you do to think about the work they're going to do tomorrow?

Dana Ray  

Okay, this is where I want to separate the term storytelling from naming. We use stories in the ground truth process to get to the act of naming. Those stories are restricted. It's not any story, it's the moments where you have felt most like yourself. I take my clients through a reflection series to get them rolling on what that is, and to name that feeling in their bodies. Then we use it to pull out a minimum of three (but it's never three, it's usually more like 10) stories, (they just start falling out of people) of when they felt like themselves. That can be from their work, that can be from the time they play with Legos as a kid. We're really looking at a huge span of time. The way that I'm thinking about it is — the person and each of those stories is the same person. Every single one of those instances shares something in common because you were the person who was there, you were the person who experienced it. What is that common thread? That common thread is going to be you, and that's what we're seeking to name. So when I say story, or to help tell your story, I don't mean the literal plot structure of your experiences. I mean, a specific statement of what is it you do, and what is the thing that happens as a result? That application is very useful for these more general communication pieces. But in terms of the future, you can do the same exercise, tell a story of yourself in five years, or ten years, or twenty years. Tell yourself a story of something that you felt most like yourself doing. Where you felt most alive, or super proud of yourself, or a sense of accomplishment - whatever that word is for you. Then ask the question, "what moment within this moment is alive for me?"  Not just "oh, I won an award." Which part of the award ceremony? Was it getting a phone call? Was it the moment your grandmother leaned over and put her hand on your arm? Was it the moment you were up there with a collaborator and you saw how proud you were of each other? Was it not the award at all, and it was talking to a school the next week? Give me a story within the story of this moment of accomplishment in your dream world.  Then ask what is the thing that happened in that moment? Was it connection? Was it sight? Was it... (I don't know. There's a lot of verbs out there in the English language, I can't go through them all.) We can do that with our aspirational stories so we don't get stuck in a specific version of the future, but we have the essence of an action, which is the essence of who we are to keep moving towards, and keep unearthing and being more and more aligned with that person.

Matthew Carey  

Do you have an example of your own future story that you'd be willing to share?

Dana Ray  

One of my future stories is to give a keynote talk on the power of language to a really big group at Creative Mornings. It's an international organization based in New York, they have chapters all over the place. I have a lot of love for my local chapter. At the New York chapter, Debbie Millman is a regular facilitator for their conversation. So I think you get the scale of how they're working. But what I think I want out of being able to give a talk in that space, is that I want to talk to a room of artists. I love artists. I love how they make things. I love how they're always pursuing their craft and getting better and creating things from nothing. I want to be able to tell stories that open up opportunities for people, and I want people to tell me how great they are. That's a room of people that I would be delighted to be in front of. I also highly value mutual respect. I want to work with people that I respect and whose respect I feel. I would be honored if respect was offered to me in that room because I respect those people so much. Oh, and writing a book. I'm going to write a book at some point. I've always known that. So that's another future aspirational thing.

Matthew Carey  

On which section of the bookshelf behind you will that book go? There are nine compartments there. Which one will it go to? Top left? Bottom right?

Dana Ray  

I don't know. I arrange my books by whether or not I think the books (if they were people) would be friends in real life. But I like all of these people. So I don't know if I could choose. 

Matthew Carey  

Who would your book be best friends with? 

Dana Ray  

I think currently, my future book would like to be friends with Lulu Miller's "Why Fish Don't Exist." It is part research, part academic scholarship, part personal memoir. 

Matthew Carey  

That sounds like it ticks all your boxes, Dana Ray. 

Dana Ray  

I know. That's why I picked that one. Right there. That book.

Matthew Carey  

If we use the Professor example as a template, I think people in the arts can have these very broad identities, as a musician, an actor, or a dancer. But what I'm hearing is that you think it's useful to get more specific and find out what your primary verb is. But the primary verb might not be to act, to play, to dance. 

Dana Ray  

I guarantee it's not. 

Matthew Carey  

Can you give me an idea of how that might be useful? What's one step that somebody who's listening might take to reconsider their story and reconsider their primary verb?

Dana Ray  

The way I would describe it, is to think about "What is my work about? What is my art about?" That can give you hints and indications of what's happening on a deeper level. One of my recent clients is an interdisciplinary sculpture artist. As diverse and far-flung as the art fields are, interdisciplinary sculpture is one of the odd ones among the odd ones.

Matthew Carey  

Because interdisciplinary sculpture doesn't tell me anything about what they do, right?

Dana Ray  

It doesn't. I start with that to demonstrate how non-descriptive an industry term can be. So that's technically her little corner of the art world but I don't know anything about her when I hear that she's an interdisciplinary sculpture artist. In our work together, we were looking to identify her primary verb. I have a line drawn where I don't share people's specific ground truth because it's internal language to them. And I tell them, I won't ever share their language publicly. But I can tell you that the result of her new artist statement is that Sara Dittrich, I'm going to pull it up and read the thing because she worked so hard on this, you can go to saradittrich.com. In her about page, she builds introspective experiences that shift perspective. From passive seeing to active looking. From passive hearing to active listening. You still don't know what her work looks like, but you know, that you're in for an experience that is going to change how you operate in some way — at least for the time that you are interacting with her work.

Matthew Carey  

And now I want to see what it looks like, sounds like, or is like.

Dana Ray  

Her work is so diverse. It's never one type of experience, but that is the thread that holds all of her pieces together. They all do that in one way or another.

Matthew Carey  

Great. Well, I could listen to your stories over and over again, Dana Ray, because you tell good stories. They're so rich, there's so much to learn from those stories.

Dana Ray  

I am a storyteller in process, I do not feel like I have a handle on storytelling at all.

Matthew Carey  

Well just call me up anytime you feel like practicing. I don't want to be too simplistic about it, but it feels like if we go right back to that first story — the journal and the photograph — that there's something there. The journaling was your inner processing and inner description, and your inner life. That was your words of what was going on there. And in a sense, your mum with a camera was your dialogue partner for that particular activity because she saw what was going on, and created a thing so that she was able to reflect that back to you. Between those two things, you created something that was more than either one of them individually. 

Dana Ray  

I like that. I'll accept that interpretation. 

Matthew Carey  

The permission to have somebody else help us tell our stories is liberating. We don't have to necessarily know the answers ourselves. I know every time I try and sit down and do it for myself, it feels like I'm pulling my hair and my teeth out at the same time. So thank you for articulating that, and thank you for showing up for people that are doing interesting work, want to do more of it, and want to share it with more people so that all that can happen. Thank you, Dana. 

Dana Ray  

Thank you. It's been a delight to have this conversation with you Matthew.