Behind the Curtain: Interview with Jackie Le Fevre
"You need to know what you values are, what it is that you stand for, who you see yourself as."
There are probably only a handful of truly impactful speakers that you can remember listening to.
If you think about all the dozens of talks you’ve attended, what sets these few a part? Most likely, it was that they were genuinely passionate about what they were talking about, and they were authentic.
When you learn how to lean into your passion, and develop your authentic voice: it can transform the way you speak and engage with audiences.
In this podcast interview, we speak with zoologist, and values and culture expert: Jackie Le Fevre. She teaches us that tuning into your personal set of values can transform your talks. Finding your authentic voice can not only give you more confidence, but it will open up your ability to tap into your natural enthusiasm; helping you become a more influential speaker.
Interview with Jackie Le Fevre:
Q: To start us off Jackie, what topics do you speak about?
A: I tend to talk about topics that relate to who people think they are, and what they want to do.
Values is my main hook. But around that I talk about things like authenticity, inspiration, courage, fear, and the emotions that either get in the way of people fulfilling their potential or the emotions that ease people on so they can become as truly brilliant as I know they are, and basically shine. Yes, I talk about things that help people shine.
Q: How did you get started with these quite broad topics of values?
A: It comes from where I started in the beginning, which was as a zoologist.
I was fascinated throughout my school career, then my university career by the behavior of animals. I have always found them extremely good company. Whereas there are occasionally human beings that I meet that I think “I’m not too sure about you.”
But animals are marvelous. Part of the reason I find them so marvelous is because they are just being, just getting on, and doing what they need to do to get by. There’s no artifice, there’s no pretense, there’s no inauthenticity in that.
I’ve been always interested in why they do what they do, because in any given situation an animal has always got a choice. It could do A, or it could do B, or it might do C. But it then does something, and it always does the thing that to it looks like the best way of achieving a survival outcome. There’s a purity of intent about animal behavior, and that I love. But what that pushes you into thinking about it is context. Where is this place, what is this point in time? What are the pressures, what are the constraints, what are the opportunities? It’s quite fuzzy stuff.
To find a golden thread to pull all of that together, the lens I chose to look through in the end was values. Values are in simple terms things that are meaningful to us as individuals.
Now, my values will be different to your values, because you’ve lived your life, and I’ve lived my life. I’ve learned certain things about the way the world works, and your world has worked for you in slightly different ways. But there is likely to be some common ground between our values. I’ve got a really big value around discovery insight.
I love not just learning stuff, but I love that moment of revelation where you’ve learned something, and suddenly it makes sense of something else that you learned before that you didn’t quite grasp. But now that you’ve learned this other thing you think it all goes together like this, now it all makes sense, and I love that.
Q: Those connections.
A: I love that. With the work that you do, Esther, in talking to people about what they do you’ve probably got quite a strong research kind of originality, pioneering kind of thing going on in there to discover all these new things. Then that aligns very much with my insight value if that makes sense.
The short answer to your question is I’ve ended up doing this now, because it’s actually a glorious syntheses of all the things I’ve learned over the last 30 years. It has crystallized, and brought it all together.
Q: When you give a talk, how do you assess the audience, and decide what aspect of values you’re going to talk about?
A: You have to start by listening to the person who is inviting you in. What you’re trying to hear is where the energy is, and what they’re saying. I’ll give you a story to illustrate this.
Somebody phoned me up a couple of years ago now, and they were from a local government, in a council, in the UK, and they were organizing an annual conference for their stakeholders. This is different volunteering and community sector groups, different private sector organizations, different companies, health professionals, police, and so on. This big multi-agency conference, and they put this on every year.
This guy phones me up, and he says “Jackie, we’d like you to come and talk about [sighs] modernizing the volunteering and community sector.” I don’t think he realized that he sighed before he said the title of the talk. I said “Okay, right.” He said “Can you do that?” I said “No.” He went “oh.” I said “The thing is now you need to go back to whoever has tasked you to speak to me, and say to them: what is it that is most important? Is it most important that we get Jackie in to talk about something, or is it most important that we have a talk on the modernization of the volunteering and community sectors?”
I said to him the reason I say this is there are lots of people who know that topic far better than me. With my values around personal authority and integrity, I can’t come out and talk about something that I don’t know as well as other people do, because really you should have them speak. However, if you want me to come and talk about something then that’s fine, and we can talk about your conference program, and we’ll find something that fits in and compliments the rest of the program, but it has to be something that I can authentically talk about. I told him to just find out what it is that’s most important.
Then he phoned me back an hour later again. “I’ve been told we have to get you, because you can be quite funny.” I said “okay, fine. What you want is a topic that fits in your agenda, but that can have a lightness of touch brought to it. You want some idiosyncratic stories. You want a little bit of quotes that are slightly on the cynical side that will raise a bit of smile.” He said “Yes, that’s what we want.” I said “Okay, that I can do. Send me the rest of the conference program, and I will write you something that fits into the gap.”
Q: How did the speech go?
A: It was fine. I enjoyed it. I did get some laughs. I won some fans and some critics from it. Because in the context of the conference it was appropriate to lay down a bit of a challenge to some of larger public sector agencies. Because it was in the context of austerity, reducing budgets in terms of statutory services. They were needing to look for cheaper ways of doing things. They were looking at the volunteering and community sector going well if you’re a charity, and you’ve got volunteers, and you’ve got less overhead you should be able to deliver that service to people that you care about.
It’s a good service for you to deliver, but you can do it cheaper than we can. We’ll take this service, and we’ll commission it from you because it will be cheaper. Now that’s not the greatest reason to go commission that service from those people. If you’re looking at public services, you need to commission from people who will do a good job for the right reasons, and then you buy it if you can afford it. It’s a slightly different logic.
In my talk, I laid down that logic as a challenge, and said don’t start with price. Start with quality, and then you buy the best quality you can afford. At the end of it all, one of the senior officers in the local authority that was hosting the conference came up to me and said “Very interesting, cheers for that, you’ve just made my life more difficult.” I thought “Well if that’s because you were looking for an easy way out then I’m quite glad I did.”
Q: Sometimes you don’t mind being a little bit controversial if it gets people talking.
A: I think as long as it’s appropriate, and as long as there’s grounds for it. I’m not a great one for throwing a lighted torch into the middle of the room just to wake people up. I’m not a “shock-and-awe” kind of girl.
But if it’s appropriate to challenge the conventional wisdom, because actually the conventional wisdom is only giving us more of the same, and more of the same is not the answer, then yes, I’m very happy to challenge.
Q: What advice would you have for speakers who tend to go on the safe route, to be more courageous, to be more brave?
A: It’s about finding your own authentic voice. It’s about sounding like who you actually are, rather than trying to sound like somebody else. But a lot of the advice I was given in the early days was “Oh, they’re really good, copy what they do.” or “Ooh, listen to them, they’re dead wicked they are, they are fantastic, just do what they do.” But none of it rang true. If it doesn’t ring true you can lose your audience in a split second. You need to know what your values are, what it is that you stand for, who you see yourself as.
I have a really high priority value around simplicity/play. Simplicity/play value is about finding simplicity in complexity, and finding playful ways of communicating it that people find energizing.
It’s fine for me to tell self-deprecating stories. It’s fine for me to stand there and say “I thought I knew it all, and I ended up in this situation. This happened, and that happened. Then I thought: Le Fevre, you need to learn a thing or two before you open your mouth next time.” I’m very comfortable doing that. Someone else who maybe had a high priority around being respected by others would not feel necessarily comfortable to tell that kind of story, so I would never say to them tell that kind of story.
I’d say find a story that you can tell that is true to your values. Then you will come across as authentic. You won’t need actually as much bottle to do it because it’s true, and because it’s you. The audience will come with you. They’ll believe it because it’s true. Then you’ve got them really. Just be yourself.
Q: What happens when you try to adopt somebody else’s style? What have you seen happen in the past with either yourself or other speakers
A: In the early days I tried being some other people, and it was a disaster, completely. I completely lost my thread. Not only losing my thread, but I lost the tone that I had been using to try and tell the story in the sense of unpacking the information for people. Whilst to the audience it may seem like you’ve just sort of indulged in a slightly dramatic pause before you go into the slide, to use the speaker it feels like you’ve stood there for five minutes saying nothing.
What that does is that floods your system with cortisol. Cortisol is a stress chemical. Now chemists call cortisol, I think this is right, they call it a stupid chemical.
Because what cortisol does is it floods into your pre-frontal cortex. That’s your big crinkly bit of the brain at the front of the head where your rational, logical processing takes place. Cortisol floods in there, and literally shuts it down, stops you from being able to think.
Now, it has got a good adaptive reason. This comes back from the days when we were hunter gatherers, and we would be out looking for prey on the savanna. You’ve got this cortisol response so that if you see a lion this floods into your head, you immediately run and climb a tree. You don’t stand there thinking to yourself “I wonder if it’s going to get me or get Bob, because if it’s heading for Bob I’ve got nothing to worry about.” You don’t want to be doing any thinking in a threat situation like that.
Q: No, you want to be running up a tree.
A: You want to be running. Yes. You don’t want to be caught staring at the lion’s teeth and going “Does he floss? He looks fantastic.” No, you don’t want to do that. All you want to do is be up a tree, or down a hole, or somewhere out of the way.
The problem is in 21st century life we don’t face those sorts of threats anymore, but we still produce a lot of cortisol. If we feel threatened, like forgetting what the next slide is, that can make us feel very vulnerable. That produces a load of cortisol, and then that impacts on our performance.
The beautiful thing about speaking from your values enabled voice is that when you are personally connected with your highest priority values it buffers you from cortisol. It actually physiologically protects you from the worst of the stress responses. Remaining in your own voice, and telling your own story, is key to being able to perform to your peak.
Q: My last question for today is can you tell us a bit about the organizations you work with, and what it is that you do with them?
A: I run my own company, which is called Magma Effect, and we work dominantly in the UK, but we can work further afield. If anybody would like to invite us out to play we would love to come.
We use values as a golden thread for doing all kinds of things from strategic planning, and governance development, and leadership workshops, and all of those sorts to things. To slightly more nuanced work where increasingly we get involved in supporting organizations to evaluate their work. Not just to assess, which is kind of counting stuff as to whether did we make all those sales, oh yes we did. Not that stuff. But the more how did we end up with those results.
Given where we started, and the things that we did, how is it that those things led to those results. Because that’s quite a big messy question. It’s very much about some of those things I was mentioning at the beginning in terms of behavior and ecology. It’s about the environment, and the pressures, and the dynamics of the different interactions as you went along. That tends to be a value story to be told. What it was that you were projecting, how you were responding to other people, and how they were receiving, we do a lot of that kind of thing. That’s all great.
But the thing that’s actually quite exciting over and above that at the moment for me is being involved with the Minessence International Cooperative. Minessence is the home of the AVI Values Profiling tool, which is one of the main things that I work with. Just over a year ago now a group of us from around the world set up this brand new cooperative to both function as the home of the AVI tool. But more importantly as a learning organization for anybody interested in practicing with values, and become more valuable in their own work, and their own life as a whole. That’s very exciting. Just over a year old, so really quite new, but gaining momentum. The purpose of the Minessence International Cooperative is to enable people to bring values to life. That’s it.
A bit about our speaker:
Jackie Le Fevre is the Director for both Magma Effect and the Minessence International Co operative. She worked specifically with helping individuals and companies find their values, and how to use them to transform their business and better understand their outcomes.
Jackie has been working with one of the world’s leading values profiling tools, AVI, since 2005. She believes that values consciousness positively changes working practice and performance and sometimes even literally transform lives.
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