Trenton Reynolds: ♪ It is Saturday, May 13th, 2017. This is Room in the Trees, a podcast about living life as an artist. About finding your voice, accepting your voice, and figuring out what to say. The following was recorded on May 12, 2017. This is episode 41, Liz Graver. Room in the Trees is hosted by Sabrina Harrison and me, Trent Reynolds. Show notes, including pictures, links, video, and more for every episode can be found at roominthetrees.com. If you like this podcast, please consider showing your support. You can become a subscribing patron at patreon.com forward slash room. And please rate us or write a review on iTunes. It really helps us reach a wider audience. Today we are talking to Liz Graver. ♪ There are many accomplishments and qualifications I could cite to introduce Liz. She is a wonderful, successful, powerful human being. But instead, I'm going to let you meet and enjoy her through our conversation. So, really needing no introduction, here is our conversation with my longtime friend, Liz Graver.
Liz Graver: My undergraduate degree in marriage and family therapy, I knew that I love people. I always knew that I love people, but I thought that that's just what people who love people do. And I studied that and I graduated in that and I realized that as much as I love people, that the pathology of people, which is to say that people in their broken state was probably less as enchanting as the actual loving people was. And so I tapped out because it was emotionally difficult for me. But I went to work in the corporate world and I started climbing the corporate ladder and it was very easy for me because it was interesting for me to learn that a lot of business surrounds human relationships and the human dynamic and how well people can understand them and navigate them. And I found myself rising quickly and easily where I saw others struggle. And I landed myself in a job where I was able to travel the world globally. And I would come back and I would do these debriefing sessions with our chief officers. And I would, at some point, one of my officers pointed out to me, you never talk about the meetings you held or the business you conducted. You only ever talk about work. the people that you saw and met and the things that you observed. He was like, "I think that maybe there's something there." As long as I've been alive, if there's a creative within 30 feet of me, I will find them. Gravitate to them. It's always been inside of me, but I went back to school for social anthropology. I knew that I wanted to go to a good school. And I applied to a couple good schools and got into a couple and decided to go to the University of Edinburgh, which in and of itself was amazing. And it seems like every friend I met there was an artist and made. That's just my record.
Trenton Reynolds: Can you give a summary of what social anthropology is? Like, how would you define that as a?
Liz Graver: course of study? Social anthropology, well anthropology is the study of humans. We all know that. Social anthropology is kind of the study of humans within societies. And so it comes from the College of Political Science. So, you know, governments and those kinds of things affect anthropology, institutions, all the kinds of ways that we study humans within societies.
Um,
Liz Graver: So it's a little bit less mating rituals and a little bit more just the flow of humans and their interactions. Every social anthropologist is going to kill me right now. I do not speak on behalf of the scholarship at all.
Trenton Reynolds: But I was telling Trent- Is it generally more holistic in its approach? Just trying to see not just individual behaviors, but context and-
Liz Graver: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, and that's where I landed myself back in the States just a couple of months ago, I guess six or seven months now. And I'm working PR at a company and I am focusing on their corporate social responsibility efforts. And I'm specifically tasked with your humanitarian operations since those are global operations.
Trenton Reynolds: - What does not necessarily come through in the details of your, professional history is just how how scra i i just want everybody to know like like you because you are so you are so scrappy and fun and like and just the biggest heart on the planet i really do think that and uh you know hidden hidden in all this you know the degrees and the positions and the climbing of ladders you know, is the fact that you're a ton of fun.
Liz Graver: Well, that is very kind of you to say. It's classic 13th of 15 children syndrome.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Are you seriously the 13th of 15?
Liz Graver: I am. I am. I don't know if it's awesome, but it was survival of the fittest. So no doubt I wanted to understand humans as quickly as possible.
Yeah.
Trenton Reynolds: Yeah. So I could I could spend the, you know, a whole hour just gushing about you and I'll try to withhold that impulse.
Liz Graver: You cannot gush. That is way too much pressure.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I'm curious aspect of it's great to talk to you and I wish we were all just palling around hanging out somewhere. Edinburgh right now. I agree. I've always heard Edinburgh is really special and.
Liz Graver: Yeah, I don't even know why we spoke of my background because my background, it's almost like this public versus private self. My public self is so sometimes compartmentalized and different than my private self. Whatever's happening in my career, I always have a private side gig. I love music. I... spent a lot of time in my master's degree in my post grad program writing about music and music festivals and what happens in the creative space and what happens, what does that mean for the human condition? I not only play instruments and love music, but I also write. And and I always knew that whenever I was I said this already, whenever I was around creatives, I was at home.
Trenton Reynolds: In my perception, you're you have always had a very confident and strong voice. Like you're very assured and you knew, or at least you communicated that you knew what you were here on the earth to do and to, and to what you wanted to communicate to other people. And it seems like your training, as you've gone across the world and seen more people in more contexts that you probably have even a greater insight now. both on what it means to have your own personal identity and then also in relation to a more global sense of identity and self and voice. So I guess this is, I'm saying it in a very complicated way but I wanna talk about voice and what your experience has been I guess, what the evolution has been for you in finding your identity and how your studies have affected that or your experiences have. affected that wow does that make sense is that too too big you need to need to narrow that a
Liz Graver: little bit how do you say how did you get to be you i don't i don't know um you need to narrow that
Sabrina Ward Harrison: okay i think we need to give the the comment that you're asking this in relation to the conversations we've had and about your own personal experience with finding your voice and having your voice be heard. I'm interested in this subject because there's this part that feels like a little bit, you know, it's a generalization about Canadians, and I think you shouldn't say that, but the feeling that you couldn't, you don't wanna stand out too much or be too loud or be too direct. I didn't come from a family of necessarily being extremely direct and, you didn't always just say exactly what you were feeling. For me, finding my voice is something I've done through my work, but it's not something that I've wanted to be the kind of person that's just like, yeah, this is what's up, this is what my work's about, and stand really clear. behind that.
Liz Graver: But-- - Well, I feel like, let me say a few things I feel like I'm hearing. Number one, you know, you talk about being Canadian, and I wonder, one could ask, how much does culture influence what kind of voice you have? I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, so the East Coast culture has always been a little bit more forward. and confident and I remember when I first moved to Utah to do my undergrad, I felt like many people found me abrasive and without tact, and I spent many years trying to polish my edges and I felt many times it's so funny that I know that you're Canadian, Sabrina, but, um, I, I had a corporate position where I was managing our Canadian market for about six years. And I just remember that every time I walked in, I was wild West guns swinging and everyone was mouth wide open job. What do we do with this force? Yeah. And I had this energy that needed to be, um,
Liz Graver: One could say, going back to my family dynamics, my kinship structure, that it's because I am a part of a very large group. And to have made any sort of impression, much less valuable impression, was to be heard. And I found creative ways to be heard, not just raising the actual decibel of my voice, right? And then thirdly, one thing that I have to say to you guys that's very interesting is is I feel like creatives always seem to think they struggle with voice, but it isn't so. I just feel like their medium is different than their actual vocal cords. And that is the most beautiful thing about the human condition in the world is that, you know, Trent's voice comes out. with his art and I don't know much about you Sabrina, but I was perusing some of your published works yesterday and I love, I love the way that yours comes out as well through your journal. It's just a different type of voice, but it's still there and I think that you guys, I hear you guys both say you struggle with it, but I know Trent a little bit better than I know you Sabrina, but he doesn't struggle with it. He struggles with his, Well, he struggles more with his confidence than his voice. His voice is beautiful. I watch Trent create art. I watch him write. I watch him play the guitar. The kid has voice, substantial voice. I suspect you are very similar as birds of a feather.
Trenton Reynolds: Well, I think with Sabrina... I feel like you have a kind of confidence, like you don't even have to question it. It just flows. In the way that you write, in the kind of images that you create, it doesn't feel to me like you ever really had to worry about where it was all coming from or what it was going to be because it was just there. And I guess that ease and that confidence is... Yeah, maybe it is about confidence. And I guess I feel the same way about you, Liz, that it feels like that energy and that confidence, that power and that identity, you really didn't have to try at it and you didn't have to question it because it was just so clear. What I struggle with is to... is to have a confidence that I know what it is and I know that it is clear and I know that it is there and can be relied on and unquestionable. Does that make sense?
Sabrina Ward Harrison: And there's no voice that's the same, and so there's something else touching upon the authenticity of the person's own voice. in this day and age. I'm curious, Liz, what your thoughts are about the idea of people copying. Literally, the energy of something is just sucked out of it when someone is trying to copy a certain voice or imitate a certain voice. And I'm curious your observations and how you can sense an authentic voice in authentic.
Liz Graver: - That is a great question. Oh my goodness, I love that question so much. I'm overwhelmed with thought.
Yeah.
Liz Graver: Authentic voice. The thing is, is we see voices who appear confident in the world. And we try to mimic them, but why a voice would ever be confident? And I don't even know how we're going to define confidence. is different for different people. I dated this boy, and he was so beautiful, like a beautiful soul. And he was kind, and he was calm, and he was grounded, and he was just pretty much The Yin to My Yang, or actually I don't know if that's the Yang to my Yin. And I once wrote a little, I wrote a little children's story about him. And I never, I write so much, it's never going to get seen, it's never going to get published. But I wrote about how this loud girl roars and walks up to this boy and screams like, you know, what are you doing? And he's quiet and soft-spoken. And he's like, you know, why do you scream? Why do you roar? And she's like, I like the wind. I like all of these big things, you know, tumultuous things. Why are you quiet? And he's like, I love, you know, the calm ocean or I love the whatever. And at some point in this story, there's a role reversal where, you know, he rars back at her and she calmly says, like, let's go play. They mimic each other or, you know, she gets a little bit quieter, he gets a little bit louder, but the authenticity lies in his voice is calmer and her voice is not. And my whole point is, is I think in authenticity is frequently found when we try to mimic one another's creativity, try to mimic one another's voices because confidence is sometimes a still lake and sometimes it's a raging hurricane so I don't think that it presents in one solo singular way, which is why it's funny to me to listen to the both of you say, like, you know, maybe I struggle with confidence a little bit in my creativity or in my voice, in my voice, perhaps more specifically. And I think insofar as I've been digging around about, you know, both of you and your accomplishments, it doesn't appear that way. It does not appear that way.
So.
Liz Graver: I don't know what to say about that. I think both exist. They do both exist. And I think that you can be outwardly confident and inwardly questioning. And I don't think it would be true confidence if you weren't inwardly questioning.
Trenton Reynolds: For you, have there been times when you feel like people have projected this confidence on you and you haven't felt that inside? Holy. Or you felt like you weren't?
Liz Graver: Entirely. Grad school. Period. Full stop. Yeah. I walked into it with so much endorsement, so much recommendation, so much accomplishment. I walked into it as a mature student in my 30s, and everyone expected me to do well. I went to the University of Edinburgh, and I got there, and I can't believe I'm going to say this. I had no intention of sharing this story. And the first semester was nothing but a spiral down into darkness. There was zero confidence. They were all quicker, brighter, faster, smarter. They were all just coming from undergrad straight into post-grad. They were in their element, and me, I was fumbling and... And I felt like I had no voice. And I felt like I struggled with voice all through my postgraduate career. I'm a religious person, and I was in a major that is infamously atheist. And I didn't dare say much. And there's so much about the core of who I am that I felt like I had to keep going. discreetly underwrapped. Not hidden, not, you know, not being inauthentic, but discreetly underwrapped. And one of the coolest things that I think ever happened to me was I was probably the least what you would say vocal, and I don't just mean with my vocal cords, I probably projected the least about myself in this chapter of my life than I ever have in any other chapter. Lay low, status quo, whatever. And at the end of the whole entire chapter, I made a friend who was in the PhD program for social anthropology. And the last week, um, We met up at a coffee shop at a cafe, and we were just talking about it, and he was asking me about my thoughts of the program. And he said, I was sitting in the department lounge the other day and was listening to a couple of our professors speak about you. And I was seriously shocked. absolutely out of my mind, terrified to hear what he said next. But he was like, they were saying how cool it was to read the things that came from you because your voice came out in your writing prose. And he said they thought it was super cool how you ended the program still religious because many had come in religious but had left atheist. And they were identifying just things that where others didn't. melt or change or flexibly adjust that I was just unabashedly steadfast in my being. And I felt like I had said nothing, done nothing, the entire program. Of all of my fearlessness, it felt... like it had been replaced with nothing but fear. And still, when you are authentically being yourself, it is amazing to me how someone could return and report back any sort of feedback that they noticed your strength or your confidence in the midst, in the throes of my lack of confidence. confidence is not what we are defining it to mean does that make sense and so yeah you have a voice
Trenton Reynolds: always that is being projected from you that makes it even harder to to kind of get to the the source of what it is that we're actually talking about. And I think that is part of the struggle, right, is that it is so elusive and it is so constantly changing, right? But there is something that is unchanging, and that's... I mean, you are unchanging, right? But how... See, that's the thing. And then you talked about your story about you and this more gentle but confident personality and how you influence each other and become a little bit more like each other and start to adopt... And there can be an authenticity in that exchange, in that kind of evolution too, right? It's not that mimicking is always necessarily a bad thing or an inauthentic thing, but it has to be in a way that you own and that adoption or that changing has to be authentic as well.
Liz Graver: - Absolutely, absolutely. - I'm so confused. - It's funny how you say it's elusive, but there is, I don't know, I have nothing to say.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Which is rare, indeed rare. Remember Trenton, you talking about, well, we were talking about introverts and extroverts and the element of how there's a natural assuming that someone who is extrovert, that stands for confidence.
Liz Graver: Absolutely not. My very best friends all ironically, ironically been introverts. And... I feed off of them, not as an extrovert, but as that exchange that Trent and you just talked about. I feed off of their confidence, because I feel like I need to, I feel like for me to have voice, I need a stage and an audience. And introverts are so much cooler to me because I see their voices, and they do it without an audience and a stage. it is ever more growing elusive at the end of this we will be like well we knew less than when we started we're just being a puddle
Trenton Reynolds: on the floor Just goo.
Liz Graver: - Dude, Pluton and Socrates would be ashamed of this discourse and the path it's taken.
Trenton Reynolds: - I resonated with something that you just said. You went to a school that you knew was atheist and in pursuit of a degree and a course of study that is infamously atheist. And so you felt that that part of your identity you needed to kind of temper that or hide it or felt like, you know, that in that context it wasn't appreciated or acceptable or, you know, maybe compromised other people's view of your intelligence or, you know, all this type of thing. I had a very similar experience when I went from BYU, which is a Mormon, very religious, conservative environment and culture, right, a very specific kind of culture, to Chicago, the School of the Darn Institute of Chicago, which, you know, is a very contemporary... Yeah, it's night and day. It's night and day. And I almost... It's the same experience. I almost immediately, when people found out that I was Mormon and that I was religious, I could see it. I could see it on their face. I could see it in their bearing, this shift take place, you know, of how they viewed me and thought of me and you know, assumptions that they made about me. You know, I didn't know the depth of those assumptions things, but I could actually see a change in facial expression, how they treated me. And so I started to... What was the difference? There was more closed off. It was more like, like this guy is... Simple minded. Simple minded, yeah.
Liz Graver: Or just not yet enlightened. You have not yet seen the truth.
Trenton Reynolds: Right, definitely, definitely that. And also a little bit of reservation, like, you know, he's judging me. There's a lot of different reasons why people might think that I would be critical of them or not be open to, you know, having a friendship or, you know, whatever. So I just felt like there was a lot of assumption and projecting of different kinds of hate and So I started to learn just the same thing, just to kind of lay low and not get into that, not have those conversations unless they came up kind of naturally. I just, and that it forced me to kind of shut that off and the reason I'm telling the story is because recently, in fact this last week, I got a job at a Jewish high school. and I went in for... You got it? I got it, yeah. Yay!
Trenton Reynolds: Oh, it's so good. Yeah. It's huge and life-changing and it continues to blow my mind even now. But the point is that I went in for these interviews and... And they were asking me about my religious belief and my faith and my... And it was so deeply uncomfortable for me to start sharing that because for so long, I've just kind of laid low. And I think there's something about that, that not necessarily everybody is religious or, you know, can identify with that particular dynamic, but... I think a lot of us have a sense that part of us is unacceptable or part of us will be viewed as unintelligent or unrefined or you know fill in the blank and when we have when we're walking around with that sense of others Not accepting us or the world not accepting us I think that's when perhaps or one of the things that could contribute to a Sense that we don't have voice and it's not that we don't have voice but it's that this kind of blockage that we've self-imposed, right? That keeps us from, from letting it out.
Liz Graver: Does that make sense? It totally does. Now you've just sparked something into me. Um, you say, um, you know, when others, uh, I forget how you said it. Oh my gosh. I wish we could rewind and listen. Um, basically this fear that others will, and you said, fill in the blank. And in my head, I thought, reject us. but I want to say this. This is one thing I can pinpoint about confidence. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. This is epiphanal to me right now, so this may or may not make sense. The need for validation from outside is probably the most counter-productive I guess, I don't know what word I want to use, is the most destructive thing to voice, period. This is something that I know about myself. Maybe this is the equation, perhaps most likely it is not. I have never looked outside for who I am and what I am. I have been me with a stage. I have been me without the stage. I have been me whether it's been comfortable to be me, and I have been me when it has been uncomfortable to be me. And regardless, I can't say I've never cared what others thought because I am human. but I rarely care what others think. I don't need you to validate me. And that much I have always known. So I wonder, I wonder if my source of confidence I one, I mean, I can take spiritual leaps into what I believe my source of confidence is, but it is not in this world. It is not found of this world. It is not found from people in this world and things in this world. My confidence to me is zero. in me and in doubt to me, whether from another or from some sort of other worldly being, matter, universe, whatever it is, the paradigm you subscribe to. But it's not of this world, that much I know. Confidence is something you have here but don't get from here.
Trenton Reynolds: This reminds me, Sabrina, of a conversation that we had recently about why. Why it is that we do what we do. The reason that you communicated, and I might be getting this wrong so you have to clarify, is that you felt called to do it. You felt like it was like your- Absolutely. Otherworldly. This is what you were supposed to do. So the why wasn't necessarily something that had to make sense or that had to be validated by some kind of practical need in your life or in any given context. It was just this thing that you felt driven to do.
Liz Graver: I love that. I want to validate that even having never had this conversation with you, Sabrina. I love that. If I knew nothing else about people who... have voice, it always seems like their voice was never validated by outsiders. Like Trenton just said, you feel the call, you have a purpose. Outsiders don't negate or change or whatever that feeling that you know. You have a call, you have a purpose. you have voice now and regardless of what outsiders say or believe or think about it, it's just, it's not up for negotiation. It's not, it's undisputable.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: And I don't know. I think it's also just forgetting yourself, getting out of like, not taking yourself too seriously. Oh, totally. I take an unchaining yourself from your own head and thinking about other things and other people and other, um, I think when you forget yourself, then you're just naturally you.
Liz Graver: No, I second that. I think... the more you are in your head, the more you are your own worst enemy. Get away from that. Bar none. Hands down. Do not get in your head. Get out of your head.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: I was talking, I was thinking about this the other day, about remembering, like it's been years since I've done, you know, go on a book tour. But back when I was doing that, you know, you know, like early 2000s you know before social media and the internet was really up and going the feeling that I had to I mean it's kind of remarkable now that I had to do that because being an introvert being so private not being a performer not wanting to be on stage and having to go to a random city and show up at a place not knowing if anyone's going to be there and read from my journals about my thighs and my breasts and like if this guy, and feeling disheveled and like, it was just torturous and terrifying and like wanting, clearly, you know, you want to, you're trying to deliver something. People are showing up to hear. It was just like thinking about that now. I mean, no wonder it was just, it was just like the idea of, um, you know, wanting to, whatever that's approval or just make it through those experiences of sharing that, that kind of stuff. That's something I've been thinking of recently. And I, I, I've been asked recently to speak more often. And I think it's a good reminder that I, I can write myself off as someone who can't do that and can't step into that position. And I, and I, And I think it's good to be given, being asked what you truly think about something and talk about it with clarity and decisiveness is, I think, important. I and I I think I'm also interested in the next phase in my life and creatively and personally how my voice is you know being called to be used and it's be expressing itself I'm not I'm not sure the shape that's going to take.
Liz Graver: I want to comment to this. I think earlier when I said outside validation, I think that so much of our relationships with outside validation, our communication is verbal. So Sabrina, you say you would have to speak about this or that you're being asked lately, recently to speak more. And I think the reason that I'm feeling like I want to push against voice like that is because so much about voice, true voice, is pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic. Meaning communication is probably one of the worst ways one can project voice, much less confidence. I think that's why I personally love the arts. Where you shine, Sabrina, yesterday I was looking over you, stalking you like any good guest would. And I was feeling connected to you. And I shared zero words with you. Your voice was strong and it was confident whilst you were in the throes of vulnerability. You know, it was extra linguistic. It was not speaking. And so, so often we have pinned confidence or voice down to words. speaking just that's so very semantically and very basically speaking I went to Edinburgh and I spoke less there than I have my entire life and yet my voice came through so I assure you that confidence and voice and voice and confidence are so much more than linguistic
Trenton Reynolds: Love you, Liz Graver. And thanks for listening. We're glad you're there. You can find out more about Liz and read her story in the show notes at roominthetrees.com. Check out our podcast t-shirts at roominthetrees.com/shop. and when you get a t-shirt post a picture of yourself wearing it on instagram and now go use your voice in whatever form it exists speak with or without words
Sabrina Ward Harrison: Back in the old fashioned days of picking up a phone.
Trenton Reynolds: You just push the numbers. That's all you had to do.
Sabrina Ward Harrison: You just pick it up. It's sitting there on the table and you pick up the handset.