Promised Show Notes Materials (take a drink):

• YouTube Video All the world's a stage | As You Like It | Act 2 Scene 7 | Shakespeare's Globe (length 3min 12 sec) Actress Sophia Stone’s powerful performance of a monologue (also known as “The 7 Stages of Life”) from Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It” using British Sign Language and spoken word.
• My LinkedIn post about feeling like I had to pick my left brain or my right brain and a FABULOUS photo of me in all of my late 1980s glory complete with crimped hair.
• I was involved with the Minnesota Youth in Government program in high school but the YMCA has Youth and Government programs across the United States.
• Article from Business Insider where Michelle Obama explains why she too is disgusted by the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
• Proxy Podcast with Yowei Shaw, which she describes as “The world's first podcast for emotional investigative journalism™”. She incorporated her scream of despair at being laid off from her job as host of NPR’s Invisibilia podcast into her theme song which I adore.

If you’re a Renaissance Person who’d like to join the conversation as a guest on my show, complete this quick form and I’ll get back to you as I’m scheduling recording dates.

Follow me on LinkedIn, where I put most of my social media energy and Facebook.

Stay updated about the Renaissance People Community I am building. This podcast is just one part of a multifaceted project because that’s how Renaissance People roll!

If you're extra curious, check out Renaissance Woman Consulting to learn more about some of the many types of work I do.

And should you care to support the production of this podcast, I'd love it if you'd buy me an oat milk cappuccino, the caffeinated beverage of my choice.

This podcast is hosted and edited by Sara Kobilka.

Theme music is by Brian Skellenger

Podcast distribution support provided by K.O. Myers of Particular Media

(sung) Connecting the Dots with The Renaissance People

How do you introduce yourself when you meet somebody new? I mean beyond being like, hi, I'm Sara Kobilka. What do you say next? So, my first degree is in broadcast journalism. And as a broadcast journalist, we were taught "know thy audience". That's Communications 101. Know who you're talking to. So in some cases, this is kind of easy.

Hi, I am so-and-so's mom. I end up saying that a lot. Or, hi, I am somebody's wife. Hi, I am the person teaching this class, or I'm your neighbor. But what do you do when you want them to understand some degree of the fullness and complexity of who you are. When you're a Renaissance person like me, that isn't always the easiest thing.

As I was sitting down to get started with this very first episode of connecting the Dots with the Renaissance People, I knew that this needed to be an introduction, a chance for people who don't already know me, to get to know me a little bit better. My first audience, of course, is gonna be people who already know me. Thank you for continuing to support me. But obviously the goal is to grow. And I thought back to when I was a kid and I think I had a lot of foresight in something that I did as a child, which was, there was a quote that I had hanging on the wall in my bedroom, printed out just on a plain sheet of paper, no fancy poster, and here's what it said.

"All the world's a stage. And all of the men and women merely players, they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."

So for those of you who are theater fans out there, you may immediately recognize Shakespeare's words from his play "As You Like It".

This goes on, in case anyone's interested, to talk about the seven stages of life. And side note, if you want to be really inspired, when I was Googling to get set for this, I found an amazing recording from the Globe Theater where Shakespeare did all of his plays. And actress Sophie Stone performs this using British sign language and spoken word.

Phenomenal. You'll get to see the rest of it, and. It's called the Seven Stages Speech, because Shakespeare talks about how you go from being a baby to a child, full grown adult, and then you die at the end. But that's not how I read it when I was a kid. I read it, and I took a little feminist turn on it. I named my company Renaissance Woman Consulting, little jab at the one MAN in HIS time, plays many parts.

I saw myself as playing those many parts simultaneously. I was thinking about it the other day, I grew up in an environment, a small school, only 185 people in my graduating class. But what that allowed me to do was be involved in everything or a lot of things, at least simultaneously. I could be in band and theater and also participate in track and cross country skiing.

I once tried to do the musical and volleyball during the same season, and that was a little too much. But then I could also be on math team and debate and National Honor Society and be involved with Youth in Government. I could do all those things. And at that point I was praised for that. We look at those kids who are involved in sports and the arts and then also doing well academically, and we label them as being well-rounded.

Good job, good for you that you're interested in these things. You're excelling in a bunch of things. Now, this may have shifted in recent years, and I'm certainly seeing it with my own children, being in elementary school and people having a bit of an obsession with hyper specializing. Gotta get your kid taking Chinese at 5:00 AM and you gotta get into one sport and they better be going to state as soon as possible. That is happening more and more, but I think there's still this message of, let's keep our kids well-rounded. Let's give them a chance to try a whole bunch of things.

I feel like personally I was pushed away from the idea of being well-rounded, say starting my junior year of high school. That's when there was a big focus on thinking about. What are you gonna do for college? It wasn't if you're gonna do college at my school. It was, what are you gonna do and more specifically, which of the Ivy League schools are you going to apply for?

A lot of people were going to those big, fancy schools, but for myself, I was not really drawn to that. I had already decided at that point in time. That I was interested in broadcast journalism. I had wonderful opportunities when I was in high school through the Youth in Government program to actually see what a working TV station could be like.

I had decided that I wanna get paid to talk, I would love to be paid to talk. Isn't that great? So I decided what I wanted to do. I had figured out that the best school for that in the country that I thought we could afford for me to attend was the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri (M-I-Z! for anybody, uh, who's a Mizzou tiger listening).

But I digress. I wanna go back just a little bit and it is that deciding part that actually irks me to this day. I had decided to go into broadcast journalism, which I enjoyed, which I thought was a really meaningful career, but I had felt like I had to make a choice. And in my case, the choice felt like it was between my left brain and my right brain.

I had done really well in all sorts of artistic theater, music, writing, debate, social studies, all of those classes. Yes. And I had done really well in math and science. I had taken AP calculus, so I hadn't actually needed any math classes for my general education requirements. And I had taken an honors science program, so I was pretty far along when I got there for my undergraduate degree, all I needed was one lab-based science class, and I could have been done with math and science for the rest of my life. I could have, but I got about one semester into college and was like, hold on, wait a minute.

Part of me is missing. I miss that one plus one equals two. Next question. Moving on. I missed the scientific thinking, the analyzing... excel spreadsheets even? I don't know. But I was missing that side of me. I had felt like the message everybody was telling me was, you gotta pick. You could be well-rounded as a kid, but now you're moving into the grownup life. And as a grownup studying in college, you gotta pick something.

Maybe you can have a minor in something else, but you gotta pick what direction your life is gonna go. And the fact that we're asking 16 year olds to have an idea of what they want to do for the rest of their life is laughable to me. I hate the question, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Because be, singular, is not real to how the world actually operates. You can be a multitude of things. That's where I really feel driven to send a message to the world, to kids, to adults. That it is okay to be complex. It is totally okay to be somebody who is a math person and science person, and an artist and a musician.

And all those different things. That complexity makes you interesting. I once gave a talk called "Normal People Bore Me" because I'm not that interested in just kind of the average person. Two and a half kids though if they actually had half a kid, that would be really interesting. But somebody who works for the local industry, everybody else works for and cheers for the local sports team and has lived in the same town for their whole life. I don't have as much to connect with when I talk to them. And so I like those complex people. I like those interesting people. I like the conversations we get to have.

So I wanna give you a couple more things in this first episode just so you can kind of get to know me , and what I'm gonna do in future episodes, because for the most part, when I listen to podcasts, I like the conversations between people. There are some solo episodes where I really get a lot out of just hearing someone speak passionately about a topic, but more so I'm drawn to the episodes where two people are having a conversation and it's really interesting and they're sharing and learning and growing. I get really excited when they specifically say, we'll add that into the show notes. I'm hoping that my podcast could become a maybe, uh, a drinking game of whatever you choose for the number of times we say, oh, we'll put that resource in the show notes because I wanna share resources. I think that's so much fun and I want others to learn from each other.

And Renaissance people are some of the best people to learn from. So I'm gonna give you one last thing that I think is kind of fun and interesting, a little behind the scenes look at this podcast.

So I wanna share some of the names that I was considering and then didn't end up picking when I was naming this. So I was playing around with Connecting the Dots, Made Connections, that sort of thing.

But then I also had some names that I was playing with along the lines of On a Tangent or Off on a Tangent, because I think that Renaissance people are very much the ones who go off on a tangent about something because they get inspired by what you say and it makes them think of something else. But what they do a really good job of is they connect it back to what you were talking about.

So that tangential conversation actually ends up being really valuable and even expanding your thinking about the original topic. I want this to be a space where no one feels like they have to apologize for going off on a tangent. Because that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna connect these tangential things and it's gonna make sense.

I also want it to be playful. So I, I thought about, Let's Play Connecting the Dots or Connect the Dots and Pass it On. That was another idea because I think that great ideas need to cross the boundaries, these artificial boundaries that we put between different industries, that we put between disciplines, the left brain, the right brain, all of those different things.

If we're gonna think outside the box and we're gonna solve these wicked problems of the world, that creativity is not gonna come from staying in our lane and only talking to people who are like us. It's gonna come from learning from other people and growing.

Another thing that I really enjoy, which I've actually used as part of my tagline for Renaissance Women Consulting, is cross pollinating. The idea of being a cross pollinator who is sharing ideas and bringing them from one place to another. That's another kind of very visual idea. Plus, I'm a gardener. I love to be out in the garden. So pollinators are some of my favorite little creatures to see out there.

I am going to force myself to stop right there. When I was recording this initially, I was like, Hmm, can you start a podcast with a recording of yourself screaming? I do know of an example of one that starts that way, or at least partially started that way.

Yowei Shaw has a great podcast that I'll put in the show notes where she is talking about the emotions, and she's an emotional journalist and the conundrum of her own experience losing her job. And she started with a scream of frustration about losing her job at NPR. For myself, the scream of frustration that I kind of wanted to start this off with is the scream of frustration heard round the world by Renaissance people.

And that is, there's so much I wanna put in here! And I have to limit myself. I cannot make this a two-hour episode of Sara rambling on and on. There'll be other episodes, there'll be other times to talk about other topics. So I'm just gonna say that this is enough. That I am Sara Kobilka. I'm a Renaissance Woman.

I refuse to be categorized in my left brain or my right brain. I use both sides simultaneously and that allows me to think creatively and do all sorts of different things. And I'm building a community for my fellow Renaissance people because too often people tell us that we're too much. Sometimes we get labeled as nerd and that's okay. We're embracing that term. We're taking it back. We are multi hyphenates. We are multi-passionate. We are happy to walk around and embrace contradiction. We're gonna talk about improvisation and how we say "yes, and". We can hold two opposite ideas in our heads and say, yes, both of these things are true and...

And when I have other people on, we'll get to have a little bit more fun and play some connecting the dots games. Of, Hey, here's where one group is talking about this thing, and here's another group that's talking about this thing and how they can learn from each other. And we'll talk about where do we go and who can we surround ourselves with, who will help us thrive, who will keep us inspired, who will keep us connecting dots and living as genuine Renaissance people, not limiting ourselves?

That's where I wanna go. That's gonna make me happy. And I feel like if I'm thriving in having these conversations and you get to listen in and maybe join in the conversation yourself, then you can all thrive too. I've been recording this entire thing, sitting with my head under a blanket, sitting on the floor in the living room, because that's the best space for audio.

So I'm now gonna pull my head out from under the blanket, put my hair in a ponytail holder because it's gonna be totally staticky. And go to town editing this because I'm a broadcast journalist first. I love a good edit, and I will see you next time when I will have my very first fellow Renaissance person on as a guest.

Let the chatting, the sharing, the adding to the show notes commence.

(sung) Connecting the Dots With The Renaissance People.