Sigalle Barness is the chief storyteller at Lawline, a company that provides legal professionals with growth opportunities through online learning. She is the host of Lawyers Who Lead, a weekly podcast that challenges the notion that the law lags behind by celebrating a diverse and exciting range of experienced lawyers who are driving meaningful change in the legal industry. Sigalle has undergone executive leadership and business strategy training through renowned Scaling Up Performance coaches, an education that has helped drive Lawline’s significant revenue, profit, and subscriber growth under her leadership.
As a child, Sigalle devoured everything from sci-fi stories to classic novels to cookbooks. Over the years, she has found great joy in retelling what she learns to others. Along the way, Sigalle realized that she has the ability to convey even the most complex concepts in a simple, transparent, and engaging way. Forever a storyteller at heart, Sigalle continues to use narratives to create and convey various concepts in an authentic and compelling way that is reflective of the audience before her. This has resulted in stronger company culture, smarter marketing methodologies, and authentic client and partner relationships under her leadership. Sigalle always keeps human connection at the forefront of everything she does.
Transcript:
Bryan Wish: Sigalle, welcome to the One Away show.
Sigalle Barness: Thanks for having me, Bryan.
Bryan Wish: It’s a pleasure. It’s been so nice getting to know you the last, what? Two, three years, three years. Um, and as of late, much more. So what is the one away moment that you want to share with us today??
Sigalle Barness: Sure. So this is a moment that I have not shared with anyone publicly yet.
But it happened, just recently in April 2021. It was an evening where I was very tired after lots of work. Lots of stress. Kids were put to bed. Lots of things ahead of me. I took a moment to have a conversation with a friend who was also going through something really, really difficult. And in that moment, I started to feel really weird, um, as we were having a zoom meeting and I had a seizure.
Since that seizure, and since that experience, which was more than just the seizure itself. It was a few minutes preceding the seizure. I have completely changed the trajectory of my life.
Bryan Wish: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing this publicly for the first time here.
Sigalle Barness: You make it very safe Bryan so thank you.
Bryan Wish: Oh, well, I’m glad that you feel that way about being here. So it seems like this, the seizure was a major trigger moment for you, to rethink things. About your own yourself and your own life and your own path. How would you describe yourself before the seizure, you know, who was the Sigalle. By the way, I don’t want to overshadow the event in itself.
Sigalle Barness: Of course.
Bryan Wish: But I’m curious, how have you defined yourself prior to that?
Sigalle Barness: Just to rewind slightly, I graduated law school. I went into the practice of law. I never really thought I was going to be a lawyer. I really wanted to be a writer but was given lots of advice from my parents telling me that this is probably not going to give me the life that I was looking for financially. And so to look at something a little bit more concrete, and I could use writing as a hobby.
I listened and I went to law school and it was a great experience. And I learned a lot and I practiced for a few years and quickly realized that it was not the life for me. I then ended up finding the organization that I work for now, which is Lawline, it’s an online legal education company.
And what was great about it was it allowed me to stay very connected to the law while also, um, not practicing. So I got to get all the good parts of staying academically connected. I got to see the changes in the law. I got to network with different lawyers, understand their lives, understand their perspectives, and then help transform the education around how they help their clients.
I’ve been at the company for almost 10 years. I worked my way up until I became the Chief Operating Officer of the organization. During that time I also had two children. They’re 11 months apart and the pandemic hit. And somehow, I convinced myself that I could do all of those things a hundred percent.
And I worked really hard to basically take care of two toddlers at home without any help. My husband of course, was a great help, but no other help, we didn’t send them to school because we were scared during the first year of the pandemic.
Run an entire company, try to understand and be compassionate to everyone in the company, as they were also going through a really difficult time with the pandemic. Move the entire company remotely. Um, and it was growing. The business was growing. We’re an online education company, online education boomed during the pandemic.
And so I was trying to manage the quick scaling of this company. And that all culminated into a person that was both trying to do 100% in all aspects of her life and feeling that they were failing in all aspects and I think that culminated into kind of the day where I had the seizure, where I just couldn’t take it anymore.
Bryan Wish: Wow. I mean, when you give so much of yourself to, I think everything else except yourself, the body, the body keeps the score, as they say, and creates maybe those moments that are life-altering.
On what you said though. I mean, I just, I want to peel a little deeper there. Do you think you were more unconsciously just moving through the script of life of, I need to do the stable job. I need to do the kids. I mean, those are great joys, but was it more of a unconscious, just, I need to do this because this is what I’ve been told, or how have you been able to reflect on that?
Sigalle Barness: I have been able to reflect on that and it’s a great question. I grew up, my parents were, were immigrants. I grew up, you know, first-generation here in the United States. I grew up with parents who were like, there is a very specific path.
You go to school, you do well in school, go to college, you get a job. Maybe you go to graduate school, maybe not. You get a job. You make money, you get married, you have children. You continue to do really well in your profession. You become the best parent that you possibly can and start laying down the stones for the next generation of your family.
And that is not how my life went. My life took a lot of twists and turns, but I always, I always had this underlying feeling like I was living life wrong. Because I wasn’t staying down that narrow path. I graduated from high school. I was not a good high school student. I didn’t get into any colleges when I applied, because my grades were terrible. I ended up just working as a waitress which is a fine thing. But it wasn’t what I was looking to do with my life, but I worked as a waitress for a long time.
And I kind of resolved myself to say, you know what? I thought I was going to go to college and I guess I’m not. And it was only after my father being like, you should try working at a temp agency. And I did. I always prided myself on having a good work ethic.
So I started a temp agency, the temp agency, I took any job they gave me. It would be like one day at this office, three days at this office, three weeks at that office. And I would work my best and there was always great reviews of me. So finally, this really big client came to this temp agency. It was a Siemens corporation. At the time they were working very deeply in silicon chips and they put me forward for the position and I worked in their patent law department where I just learned very, very quickly about patent law. And that kind of set me on the trajectory to think a little bit more deeply about law school.
So long story short, I wasn’t a college-educated person. I only then decided, let me go back to college, let me go to law school and then, you know, the rest, but, um, I felt for a very long time that I was failing the timeline.
Bryan Wish: But you, you grew up in this sounds like more of a survival type of environment with your parents being immigrants. So you, you saw this firsthand nature of just like, I’m going to think barely getting by, but like, it’s like fighter survival mode to make it work and be able to live in the states.
So to grow up, that’s naturally going to, uh, shape you.
Sigalle Barness: Absolutely. I grew up, um, in a predominantly like white town in New Jersey. Um, and it was fine, but I am of Israeli and also Tunisian origin. Um, and people would be like, where are you from? Like, what are you like I was very different and I didn’t understand why people didn’t understand why I was eating the foods that I was eating at lunchtime.
Um, you know, people were eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and I was having like couscous and marmuma and like hummus and like all of these other things. And I was just trying to understand how did I fit in to this world? People didn’t understand that I could speak Hebrew. Actually my first language is Hebrew, so my second language was English, even though I was born here. So I was saying a lot of English words wrong. Cause all the English I knew was from my parents. I didn’t know that you said salmon, not salmon. Like I didn’t know that.
Yeah, there was a lot of things that upon reflection, I didn’t, I didn’t understand the experiences that I was having or why I was having them or why I felt different or why I felt like things were hard. And my parents were going through their own things and did the best that they could, by moving me to a town they thought was good and trying to get me an education, but there wasn’t a lot of guidance there as to, and the self-awareness that perhaps we have today around parenting our children.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. You were born different from the beginning and maybe couldn’t quite make sense of it. And let’s go a little further.
When you have those life altering moments or trigger moments for you, that was your seizure, it becomes easier, I think, to take the time to process the past. Have you found yourself in the last, you know, 6, 7, 8 months kind of blaming yourself for certain things or maybe finding gratitude in certain things in the way you haven’t expected? I’m just curious, uh, kind of your evolution since the event.
Sigalle Barness: Yeah. I’ve had a lot of different experiences since the seizure. This was actually not my first seizure. I had one when I was a baby, apparently that I don’t remember. And my parents were told it was like a febrile seizure. Never had one again until I was 21 years old. I was also told like, you should be okay, this should never happen to you again, but let’s put you on some medication anyway. This was almost 20 years ago, so the medications back then were not great.
Slowly got took myself off of them. Didn’t have another one for another 15 years. Was told okay that’s it. You had now two in your adult life, you have to be on medication forever. The reason I’m telling you this is because after that moment I took really good care of myself.
I had a child to think of, another child was coming after that. I was working out, I was eating well. And I think what was really difficult for me was feeling like I was at least physically in the best shape of my life. I lost a lot of weight. I was feeling strong physically, and still having the seizure. The hard part after all of this was realizing that I didn’t have control. I wanted to blame myself and I did blame myself by being like you overworked herself, you put too much on yourself.
Um, but I think also, I started a really deep healing process where I realized that you can only do the best you can do and you literally tried your best just now and it still happened. And there is no reason to keep beating yourself up over this or anything moving forward as long as you feel like you did the best you can do.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. And it was the healing seems like it stemmed from trying to control your environment to not repeat. Maybe you taking care of yourself, you’re doing everything you could to almost like not repeat another event like that happening. Yet when it happens, it’s easy to say to yourself, what the heck did I do wrong?
Sigalle Barness: Right. Yeah. And the thing with seizures is that I am grateful that the seizures that I have are not often, you know, there are people that have seizures every single day. Um and they, they can’t manage with medication. In my case, I’m fine. And I shouldn’t have one again, hopefully.
But it was also the moments preceding the seizure that I think were really important. So I don’t know how much you know Bryan about seizures and I think it’s important to talk about, cause I actually don’t see a lot of people talking about seizure disorders, but there is an actual scientific term for the moments before someone has a seizure, which is called an aura.
It’s not a mystical term. It’s an actual scientific term. An aura is actually a partial seizure. It’s your body telling you, hey something really bad’s going to happen. And you’re going to have a seizure soon. Many times the people are in this moment. It could last from a few seconds to up to an hour before someone has a seizure. Um, people experience really, really weird things. They could be anything from voices to visions, to feelings of disattachment to anything in between. I did a lot of research on this afterwards because I had a very specific moment where I realized how vast the universe is and how small we all are in comparison to it.
And how the things that we worry about are so unimportant in the larger scheme of it all. And this was literally the weirdest feeling that I had right before I lost consciousness. I was speaking to my friend and I had this moment and I have actually been so much research on this afterwards where other people have very similar feelings right before they have these seizures, they manifest in different ways but the message is very much the same which is like, I saw a larger part of what this is all about. Like the curtain was revealed for a moment and I got to see it and that holding onto that and understanding that all the worry and the pain and the self-doubt and the fear is so unimportant in the larger scheme of things. So it’s liberating.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. I want to lean into what you just said. It’s really interesting about the curtain kind of being pulled back to see something larger, uh, for you and it sounds like many others. What was that for you?
Sigalle Barness: Yeah, it’s been difficult for me to talk about with a lot of precision, because it’s such a hard thing to quantify in words, but I’ve tried writing about it a lot and I’ve explained it to a few different people. Are you asking like what I actually experienced? Like what did I see?
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Sigalle Barness: Okay. So I was in a zoom meeting with a friend and simultaneously the room kind of looked like a white room and in front of me, it was a very long strip, like almost like a movie film strip that was going by. Very, very small little pictures in them and I had this understanding that this was everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. If you could look right, it was just as far as the eye could see if you could look left, it was far as the eye could see.
And I remember still listening to my friend talking, she was telling me about, you know, some things that were going on in her life that were really, really sad. And I was trying to help her. So simultaneously as this happened, I don’t even realize at this point, because your brain is already going in the seizure direction. So I don’t really know what’s happening. I’m just experiencing at this point. Um, but I tell myself like, how do I let her know that everything she is going through is going to be okay because it doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. I see it now, like it’s right in front of me. I see it and there was a moment where I almost felt like if I had stayed in it a little bit longer, I would have known more, but then I blacked out and I lost consciousness.
Bryan Wish: Wow.
Sigalle Barness: I know it’s crazy and it’s like, it’s really hard because I’m talking about this to you in a podcast that’s public. And I feel like some people are going to be like, wow, Sigalle, that seems like …
Bryan Wish: How do you feel in this moment sharing this? I’m just curious.
Sigalle Barness: I feel a little scared, um, that people are gonna think like, oh, something’s wrong with her. But I also know that I’m not the only one that’s experienced these things. And I also know that I want to shed light on the experience of people with seizure disorders that are dealing with this and trying to live their lives with these other experiences that are happening to them and I want to normalize that conversation. And so that empowers me to keep going in this conversation and feel strong about. And not be fearful of the criticism that might come from it.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. That’s, that’s powerful that, um, you know, Brenee Brown or someone, I think it talks about like the sharing of it. It’s actually the healing and like giving it language and naming it is actually like the liberating. We kind of air it out. So I appreciate you sharing it openly. And I’m excited for you to maybe share it openly with your people to let them in on your own human experience.
Sigalle Barness: Absolutely. I think after the seizure, I basically resigned from the Chief Operating Officer position. And I think a lot of people at the company were really confused as to what happened. And I think if anyone from my company listens to this, they’ll have a better understanding than they did before, about why I did the things that I did.
I didn’t really share publicly in the company. People knew that something health wise had happened, but there was no, you know, the confidence was kept as far as what I wanted to share or didn’t want to share.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Sigalle Barness: But, you know, as we talked about before we started recording, I’ve come to a place where it’s important for me to start showing people more of who I am and not being fearful of that, because I know that that is the way that I get to attract other people like me.
Bryan Wish: Yeah.
Sigalle Barness: You know, we talked about the story between the two people that are blue and they want to find other people that are blue. Um, but they hide that they’re blue because they’re fearful that the world will judge them for being blue. And so they spend their whole lives looking for someone blue while hiding, and then one day they walk by each other and then they miss each other because they didn’t recognize the other person cause they were hiding.
And I don’t want to hide. I want people to see who I am and I want to attract the people that I think I can connect with on these levels. And, um, that is what I’m trying to do. That’s what keeps me empowered in this, in this podcast.
Bryan Wish: Yeah and it requires you to like own that story of yours because it’s your now kind of personal power to go help other people through it and perhaps create programming and thoughts and things all around it, that you can help others navigating some more challenges. If you don’t own it, you won’t find other people who are blue.
Sigalle Barness: Yeah, exactly.
Bryan Wish: So Sigalle you, you shared, um, you’ve made so many changes in your life. Obviously it sounds like your job is one of them. I would love to know what this experience has made you change and evolve about yourself, um, in all areas, whatever you’re comfortable sharing.
Sigalle Barness: Sure. So, um, you know, I did quickly realized that I didn’t want to be the Chief Operating Officer of Lawline anymore. I felt that I didn’t have the bandwidth that I thought I had pre seizure to be able to do all the things that I wanted to do in all aspects of my life. And so I had to prioritize and I was given the time by Lawline, which is just one of the reasons why they’re so wonderful as I was given the time to really think about what I wanted, um, what my priorities were and what I wanted to be.
And I came to the conclusion after many months of thinking about it, that first and foremost, I needed to feel that I had the emotional currency to give to my children and my family and my husband. I was feeling very stretched thin before the seizure, where I had taken on, um, so many people ‘s emotions and the things that they were going through and trying to help every single person, um, that when the time came to give it to my children, it was very, very difficult for me.
We do not have an endless amount to give. We just don’t. Just like anything, things like resources are limited and so for me, I had to first give as much as I could to my family. And then what was left, I realized I wanted to put towards something that was for me. And that thing was storytelling. Ever since I was a kid, I have loved telling stories, reading stories, writing stories, acting out stories.
When I was in college all my electives were… um, all my electives were in writing, even though I was an English major. Like every elective and I lost that along the way. I lost the ability to do that, not the ability to do it. I lost the ability to do it for work.
And I wanted to get back to that and Lawline gave me the opportunity to design a role in which I am able to do that for the company and for the people within that community. And I am so excited to be able to now be the Chief Storyteller at Lawline. It’s a role that has been designed to not only talk about what Lawline does. It’s actually not about what Lawline does at all. It’s why we do it. About the stories of the people that make this community of attorneys at Lawline great.
Bryan Wish: That’s empowering, right? For being able to make a huge shift professionally, be supported, shout out David,
Sigalle Barness: Yeah. He’s the best.
Bryan Wish: Uh, or for enabling, um, that transition to happen.
And also, I mean, I’ve done this now, probably two and a half years. It creates so many great business relationships and partnerships and things that you with the consistency that will shape out in the way you’ll never predict, but it’s so meaningful and worthwhile. So, I think it’s actually something many companies overlook.
And so you can not only fill a void for yourself, which is amazing that your, your soul can be kinda nourished within, but it’s going to benefit the company long term. It’s not an immediate result, but it’s a longterm play in people. You’ll be very memorable. Lawline and you to the people, you, you touch through the work you do.
Sigalle Barness: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Bryan Wish: It’s cool that you get to shift in a way that is more aligned to, I sound like the person that you’ve always been.
Sigalle Barness: I love the word nourishing because it is, I’m doing work that does truly nourish me now. And I get to do it for Lawline. And I also do it for clients when I have time. The ability to give people a way to share their story. And like you said, own their story. It’s such a satisfying thing and it’s such an empowering thing and I just feel so grateful to finally get here. It took a long time. I’m 41. Um, but I, but I got here.
Bryan Wish: Guys, just so you know she doesn’t look a day over 33.
Sigalle Barness: Thank you. Yeah, no, thank you and just I’m going to take us on a tangent really quick. I have decided also that I will not allow myself to think about aging as a negative thing. I have seen a lot of people get sick, die, in the past few years during the times of COVID not always because of COVID.
I’ve seen people die and not have the ability to do the things that they wanted to do or be able to complete certain things that they wanted to complete. See people grow old. Um, and I feel like it is such a gift to age. I get to do so much because I age.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. I love your uh view on aging. Cause I think you’re right so many people view it negatively. It sounds like you’re saying we all go to the same place in the end and I have the chance to live out, what I’m supposed to do now. And it sounds like coming from a place of more gratitude than anything that you can even able to experience this shift from, you know, clearly a very painful last couple of years.
Sigalle Barness: Yeah. It’s a lot more freeing if we can just let go of the things that are making us fearful and the things that are making us angry. And I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do, but I also don’t think it’s easy to continue feeling that way either. So might as well do some of the work.
Bryan Wish: Did you feel your life was really rigid when you’re trying to control your health so that you don’t have another seizure?
Sigalle Barness: Yeah. I think it was fine at first. Um, but I think it quickly became more rigid when the pandemic hit, because I was so fearful of dying from this disease and leaving my children motherless, um that even pushed me further to work out more and to be strong. Um, I was literally at a point where I was like, I need to be able to carry both toddlers and run for a long period of time for me to feel like that I’ve gotten to a place physically that I can protect them.
I mean, this is where my brain went right during the pandemic, especially at the beginning when we knew nothing about it. It got rigid and it all came from a place of fear. It didn’t come from a good, the motivation and the why behind it wasn’t it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t like, I think the healthiest way to approach physical wellness.
Bryan Wish: Yeah. I mean, it makes total sense though. It’s like, it’s how you knew to operate when the world kind of shut. Were these behaviors that maybe you exhibited and have kind of reflected on in now changing, like where were those exhibited maybe growing up by your own parents? Or do you think this is just your natural kind of response mechanism?
Sigalle Barness: What part?
Bryan Wish: Like that fear, like coming to take on the world all at once.
Sigalle Barness: You know, I didn’t have it when I was a kid. I mean, probably a lot of us were different as children, but I had a very, I was very different as a child and I reflect a lot on that child and try to bring her back. Um, as a child, the world was magical. Like magic 100% existed. All you needed to do is believe, and you could do anything.
And I think my parents got divorced, my mother remarried, we were moved around a lot, started to not do well in school. You know, life hits you in different ways. Um, and that slowly kind of, uh, eroded the child that I was and made her someone that was resilient for sure. But what I also realized was that I was going into planning mode all the time and prediction mode. So I got very, very good at identifying red flags around me, whether it was a weird person that I encountered in the street to something bad that might happen at work. And I planned around that diligently so that it would not happen.
And I realized I was creating these defense mechanisms to not be hurt. So everything around me was planned so that I could not be touched. I planned around it. I knew that this was going to happen and I got so good at it. But the problem is, is that all I was doing was just planning around not being hurt. Everything was a potential threat. I’ll just plan around it. I’ll prepare
Bryan Wish: Yeah. And it’s amazing how much comfort and maybe like safety we find within the planning. Yet and you can really come at their own detriment as well without realizing it so …
Sigalle Barness: Yeah, well you’re never living in the present. You’re always planning for the future.
Bryan Wish: There you go. Um, okay. Back to the future, back to the events that have followed since, how do you think you’ve shown up as a better wife or mom to your kids and husband, since all these shifts have taken place in your life?
Sigalle Barness: I think I’m still a work in progress. But I think I’m way more present now with my children. Um, a lot of the time before that was them playing and doing things and me like looking up from the computer, looking up for my phone, great job, or giving them a hug and kiss, and then moving back zoning in on what I ever needed to do. Um, and not really taking the moments to really see them and see how they’re growing.
And then the small things that make them happy or really, truly being the guide that I want it to be like when they were upset, helping them work through those emotions. Um, and so now. I spend a lot more of my free time learning about parenting and reading about it because I have that time now. I spent a lot of time telling them stories.
To them, I’m like the best storyteller in the whole world. Like you have no idea. Like, they’re my, my biggest fans. Like they tell me, they’re like mommy, you can tell stories. And I’m like, thank you. I’ve basically done what I needed to do in this life now, as long as they think so. Every night we tell stories every night I am, I bring them into the storytelling.
So it’ll be like once upon a time, Bryan, um, you had a really amazing horse. What was that horse’s name? You know and slowly, they get to start telling more and more of the story to me.
But what I also found was that I was able to get them to memorize things that I thought were important. Like our address. The state we lived in, the country, we lived in, like, we have a story that keeps going where we start with a rocket ship and we go into space and we look down and we see the planet earth.
And then we go back down because we want to go back home. And we go to the United States of America to the state of New Jersey, to our town, to our street. And they’re able to now tell anyone. I mean, sometimes they tell too many people our addressed, but I’m like if they get lost, they know where to go.
And also, you know, they’re enjoying the story along the way while they’re learning. So I’ve been really, really enjoying that.
Bryan Wish: That’s so cool. It’s like your kids are your own test subjects and also you can grow and nurture and develop them and have them take part in something you really care about. So that’s pretty cool.
Sigalle Barness: It is. And Neil Gaiman actually said this, I don’t want to take the credit, but Neil Gaiman said that, you know, a good story when you tell a kid a story and you stop in the middle and they say, what happens next? Right? And so that’s what I try to do all the time. I try to get people to ask, well, what happens next?
Bryan Wish: So this is fascinating to me. And then giving your new role and that passion and thought has been within you. You know what. What do you think are the components of a good story? I mean, if you had to break down a science of, of what makes a great story, I mean what ingredients would you say are necessary components?
Sigalle Barness: There’s so many formulas out there. Um, what I’ve found is there’s always has to be a person or an individual or a thing that the reader has a stake in. You have to figure out how to get the reader to have a stake in that person. And usually the way that you do that is you show some sort of vulnerability, something where they’re not perfect, that they are trying to figure out things just like the reader and bringing them along on how they figured that out and giving the reader the tools and the ability to apply what they’ve read into their own lives, even if it’s not the same exact experience.
So for example, I read a story when I was little and I take it with me to this day and it’s like this complete sci-fi story. A whole bunch of people that go to Mars and they find like all this stuff that’s very dangerous . And within that story, they learn about.
How to fight back against an evil and how to take the trauma from that evil and be able to heal themselves along the way. I read it as a kid. And one of the things that I’ve done is I’ve actually gone back to the story it’s called Season of Passage, by the way, it’s by Christopher pike, who was a young adult writer. I love him to death. I’ve read every single book he has ever written.
Um, and to this day, I still go back to that story within the story and I read about this woman that overcomes these like terrible people on Mars. Um, and it’s like, I’m not, I’m not fighting aliens. Right. But like the, the ways in which she thought about like her experience, the ways, the way she fought, the way she like gathered her strength, like those are things that I still take with me to this day and I still think about this character..
Bryan Wish: That’s so cool. Uh, I mean, I love what you said about like making the listener have a personal stake and like okay. The opening them up with some vulnerability and then kind of letting the plot unfold. And then of course there’s a million formulas, but this is the Sigalle formula. That’s all that really matters. So.
Sigalle Barness: Yeah. And there’s a lot of different ways to achieve that, right? I mean, some people will tell you it’s you got to hook them in from the beginning. Right. And I think that’s true. I mean, you got to get people from the beginning. There’s gotta be that first line or two that really kind of gets people to stop scrolling or stop or not continue on. But at the end of the day, it’s gotta be substantive. It’s gotta be real. It’s gotta be vulnerable. And only then will people recognize its authenticity and continue reading it and take something from it.
I believe you have to be able to give the reader something to take. You’re giving a gift when you write, you’re giving them something that they can take with them, whether that’s a laugh, whether that’s a cry, whether that’s the tools to get through something that’s difficult for them, whatever it is. It’s I almost look at it as like a tangible thing. When I think about it, what gift am I giving to the reader for, for taking the time to read this?
Bryan Wish: Yeah, no, that’s great. It’s great. You have that perspective and outlook, right? So you can be creative, but it can be valuable to the people listening or reading or watching. So yeah, that’s, that’s really cool. Um, so let’s, let’s, let’s do some vision questing here. So take me five, 10 years out Sigalle.
You’ve had the moment that was very hard on you but you’re making shifts in your thinking about things differently. How do you see that evolving, over the next few years, five years, 10 years.
What’s that look like for you?
Sigalle Barness: Yeah. Bryan people ask me this a lot and I always try to answer and say, I know I know what it looks like and know what I’m going to be real with you. I don’t, I don’t really know. And for the first time in my life, I am taking a minute to just explore and discover.
I for so long have needed a plan. And for so long had planned it out and it has worked for me in many ways. I’ve had a very successful career. I’ve done a lot of things that I’m very proud of. Uh, but now for the first time, I think in my life, I am in a very wonderful position in which I can just take my time and explore.
I get to explore this role. I get to focus on my writing more. I get to refine my content creation skills. I get to learn from others. And I, am stepping away for a little bit from the frenzied urgency of needing to know exactly what life’s going to look like. And being more steady and moderate about the expectations so that I can truly live in the moment and I believe that life will eventually work out. But in the meantime, I’m just going for the ride right now. And it’s the first time in my life that I get to do that.
Bryan Wish: Wow. Well, I know how powerful that is, uh, and that I’ve been able to tell you that a year ago or relate to that. Um, but I think it’s, life-changing that you’re giving yourself the space to discover, explore, feel into, without the, I need to have X by Y and needs to look like this. And you might have loose ideas or big visions, but you’re like, you don’t need to hyperplane your way to it.
You’re going to give yourself the freedom to let it shift in a way that is feels right for you. Um, which I think is so cool.
Sigalle Barness: I mean, I know that you and I have talked about this before, but I wrote a LinkedIn post a few months ago that was talking about that if we’re lucky, life is long. You know, people always talk about life is short, but actually if we’re lucky, life is long. I mean, you can live 70, 80 years. That’s a long time. I’m 41. I feel like I’m old, but I’m not, right? If I’m lucky I have at least 40 years left of my life. Maybe 50, maybe 60, who knows? Right. It’s a long time.
It’s like a whole other, double the life that I have now. I get to do as much as I possibly can. I can live many lives. I can do many things. As long as I am feeling happy with those decisions and I’m feeling fulfilled. I just do not want to feel like it’s necessary to follow that linear timeline anymore.
I don’t find feel that it’s necessary to follow any formula that people set out as like the key to happiness. I’ll know it, I’ll feel it, and I’ll follow it now and I’m just really excited about it. I’m just really excited about focusing on all the different things that I can be and trying out all the different things that life has to offer.
And then if I want to stick with one and I want to do it for a long time awesome. But I don’t have to.
Bryan Wish: Well, that’s, that’s great to give yourself that flexibility, on your own journey, um, and doing it, it sounds like you’re doing it for yourself, which is great. Uh, and I couldn’t be happier or more excited for you for, uh, what’s ahead.
So I want to close on a few, just final questions, and then we’ll tell people where to find you and all the things. These there going to be more quicker punchier questions that they’re just coming to me
If a stranger on the side of New York or straight in New York, asked you for advice on life, what would you tell them?
Sigalle Barness: It’s never too late. Whatever you think you want to do? It’s never too late.
Bryan Wish: Awesome. Okay. A favorite quote?
Sigalle Barness: I don’t want to be redundant, but it’s never too late to be what you might’ve been.
Bryan Wish: Great. I like it. Let’s let’s just end on those questions I think that’s beautiful. Tell us where people can find you, learn more about ya?
Sigalle Barness: Absolutely. Um, people can connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Sigalle Barness. They can also email me at sigallebarness@lawline.com and I am always, always happy to meet with people, talk with people about their journeys, um, and I hope to hear from some people soon.
Bryan Wish: Awesome. Thanks Sigalle.
Sigalle Barness: Thank you.