Win friends and stop trying to be an influencer with Meshel Laurie

Have you ever been online and wanted to get involved in a discussion. Maybe you comment and click post without even thinking about it. For the next morning, you wake up to a barrage of responses. Things have gotten totally.

Out of hand.

Should you jump in there and start defending yourself? Or maybe you could have spent more time considering what you're going to say before you posted.

Or is no response the best response?

The comedian, podcast and radio host and writer Michelle Laurie this just.

Used to be part of her job.

One night, she would make a comment on TV and then afterwards deal with the fallout on social media, sometimes for weeks. Not long ago, Michelle decided to walk away from this side of being in the media and totally changed her online presence. Michelle is also a long term devotee of Buddhism, which informs a lot of her work and life practices. So what are some of the most impactful practices from Buddhism that Michelle uses and how can

Company, Smart Fella.

So, after so.

Many years on air with all the big broadcasters, how did Michelle approach starting Smart Fella?

Well?

I asked other people how to do that. That's sort of my modus operande. I always just ask other people who seem to be doing it well, or I try, and you know, at least watch other people who seem to be doing something well when I'm trying something new.

And I have some friends, some young.

Women who were producers on the project who have since left there and started their own production company.

Their company is.

Called Clothesline, and yeah, I went and asked them, how do you do that? And they said, oh, well, this is how we did it, and I sort of followed their lead and it's working.

And I work with them now a lot as well.

We sort of work together on different things because they mainly do visuals and I mainly do audio.

So we work it out.

And what made you decide to take the planet, Because that can be a really scary thing to do.

Well.

The thing with me is I'm sort of always waiting for somebody else to do the hard stuff for me, and it never happens. It's just the story of my life, and I end up having to do it myself. And I for years have thought, well, I'm obviously really good at podcasting and making a podcast, because this podcast, Australian True Crime in particular, is really successful and it's been consistently one of the most downloaded podcasts in the country

And I kept.

Thinking over the years, somebody's got offer me a job. Surely, like all these networks kept popping up, and I thought, surely one of them's going to say you should come and work for us, because you're obviously really good at this. And the reason, honestly that I'm good at it is because I've worked for networks. I've worked for the biggest radio networks in the country for a long time, so I've learned from the best people.

It's not that I'm an.

Incredible prodigy, like I've just like really experienced and I've learned from great people. In the end, I just I guess I just had that COVID moment that I think a lot of a lot of us had where I felt like, why not do something extreme when I do something crazy? And I think it was that in the end, I just wanted to break out last year and just do something.

It seemed like the time.

That's awesome.

Now I know that Buddhism plays a big role in your life, and I want to know what practical ways have you changed your life to focus on Buddhism.

Well, everything I do, hopefully the way I do everything is influenced by Buddhism. And that's just about trying to take a moment before I do everything and not react out of emotion, and yeah, try to take a moment to think about why I'm doing what I'm doing and not react out of anger or greed or jealousy or any of those sort of negative emotions, and try to be acting always for a good reason, a sense of reason, or I mean, obviously I don't achieve that all the time.

So that's the aim.

Don't start a production company because I'm my ego is bruised because I haven't been hired to run podcast one or something.

So what are it like some of the rituals or habits that you've taken on, Like as a result of studying Buddhism.

I chant in moments when I need to to center myself, calm myself, meditation, try to meditate every day.

And what does meditation look like for you?

Because I know, like there's so many different types and ways of doing it.

Buddh's meditation is pretty straightforward.

It's about sitting still and allowing thoughts to move in and out of your mind without judgment, is the way we describe it. So allowing thoughts, I mean, ideally you want to try and keep your mind free from thoughts, but when they pop into your mind when I'm sitting still and concentrating on my breathing or whatever, when a thought pops into my mind, when I suddenly think.

Oh, that's right, I'm supposed to be speaking to a mansa.

Ideally I will not have an opinion about that.

And how do you do that? That sounds so hard your practice?

And that's you know, we have a cute saying.

That's why it's called a practice and not a perfect you know, I have a meditation practice. So it's just practice. It's just it's just starting a habit. It's a habit. And it's like, you know, you you can develop a habit to drink eight glasses of water a day, Well, that takes time. You have to work at a habit of meditating. It's hard, it takes practice, you get better

Else is better at it. No, that's what meditation is is failing at it constantly. That's what it is. You know, monks fail at it.

If you listen to two monks talk about their training, it's all about that.

It's all about getting in trouble for being bad at meditation, you know.

I find that so encouraging.

I've tried to develop a meditation have it numerous times, like I feel I feel like I should given a host of podcast about work and productivity.

But I've just failed miserably every time.

That's it. You weren't you weren't failing, you were meditating. That's what it is.

I've had that One of the first Buddhist teachings you put into practice was the idea of letting other people go first. Can you tell me about that, like what that means and how that in practice?

It's a great one. It's that simple. Just just let other people go first. I mean everywhere in traffic, when you're walking through doors, everywhere you go, when you're getting on an escalator, when you're getting in a lift, just the simple act of standing back and gesturing for other people to go in front of you is a really great exercising humility and it just makes people happy. It's a great habit to get into putting other people first.

Now.

One of the hats that you wear is as a columnist, and I got to say, I love the column that you write for Sunday Life when you are in there, which is every few weeks.

I am very well behind at the moment, but yees.

You, well, please catch up because I love reading what you write.

I want to know where where do you get your ideas from?

Well, it's uh.

Now that I'm not in breakfast radio, it should be easier, but no, I'm behind. I just try to think about life in its very simplest state, try not to get too complicated about it. Try to think about the minutia, you know. I think that's where it's sort of at

They're my favorite things to read about.

And even that emotional Openness column was about I felt like, oh, maybe you are that personal.

Maybe you know a person like that, or maybe you're going.

To read it and go, oh my god, what a freaks she is, or you know, like just But also that column was about making friends as an adult, and I wanted to because a lot of adults say it's it's impossible, and there's a lot of loneliness around, and I wanted to just encourage people to not think that way, to just be more open.

I must say, I do love the idea of making new friends as adults, because it's something that so many people struggle with. So what are you consciously or even unconsciously doing when you're forming new friends as an adult saying yes?

Tell me about that?

Just saying yes. I just say yes. I say yes to invitations, I say yes to I just I'm out and about and having kids and having my kids go start their little lives, their little social lives was such a great experience for me. And I must say that when they were first born, I was I said to another lady, oh God, I'm not looking forward to them going to school and having to hang out with the other.

Moms and and she said to me, Nah, you don't get it.

Those women will save your life so often, and I didn't get it because from the minute they went to daycare, like three year old kinder and I met this group of mums and then my kids are now almost twelve, and it's the same group of mums and they are my life. They are my everything. It is so much about just saying yes and just being open to it.

You know, I don't be like that.

I mean, there's so many great people, and I meet great people who are so much younger than me every day, so much older than me.

Every day.

I have friends, you know, ranging from the early twenties to their eighties.

Like, don't be like that. You're missing out on incredible people and experience and knowledge, wisdom, you know.

Now, I want to talk about social media and what's your relationship with social media?

Like these days, Oh, I don't participate much. I love a bit of Insta and I just sort of crept back onto Insta not long ago. But then I was going to say I had a bit of drama this morning. But I think I've smoothed it over. But it's like the thing is, you know, we all look at the same thing, but we see it differently, right, So you know we can you know, I can make a joke about a post and then sure enough some women.

Will go, oh, Michelle, I wish you wouldn't be man because and it's like a year joking like how is that? Oh my god? I mean that's that's where it's really dull. So yeah, I don't.

I don't like social media at all, and I think unfortunately, I think the problem with it is that it's really

Can we just write it?

Can we just you know, think about what it is you trying to create without thinking about these voices coming out of your phone that may or may not happen. It's very stifling creatively.

So you know, I don't read it. I'm not on it.

I'm just back to creating what I create. I make podcasts, I write books, and I don't ever go anywhere to find out what anyone.

Thinks about it.

Basically, I'm creating like it's nineteen ninety.

So there.

We will be back with Michelle soon where she's going to share some surprising parenting hacks and how she finds the stories to cover in her top ranking true crime podcast.

But before we get.

To that, if you're not following me on some of the social channels, why not start because I post a lot of other content through them. So you can find me on LinkedIn to search Amantha Inver and you can find me there and let me know that you found me through the podcast, or you can find me on Twitter at Amantha and also on Instagram at Amantha. I. I want to talk about true crime, and I don't know, like, how do you find the stories that you want to explore and report on.

They mostly come to us now.

They are through Facebook or through the website. It's mostly people either listeners or they're all listeners, but either people saying, I'm really interested in this case, could you I'd like to know more about that. So we'll normally get like a lot of listeners saying that they want to know more about a certain case, or it's people saying, this is my case and I would like to talk to you about it.

This has happened in my family. Oh, this happened to me.

So yeah, that's how they mostly come now, which is great for many reasons.

Yeah, what about in the early days where that wasn't happening.

Well, then it was.

It was really a matter of us just talking about In those days, Emily and I spent a lot more time together and we just talked about things that had always fascinated us, and one thing would lead to another, and yeah, we'd just kick around ideas, or we'd read a book, or there'd be a new book out or something like that. You know, we seem to have this backlog in our minds of stories that we'd always been

We're sort of one thing.

Leads to another and it sparks ideas and different people pop up from it from that.

So yeah, and how do you find information on the cases?

Well, usually, you know, the case comes first, the idea, and then we go researching. We'll read coroner's findings, we'll read sentencing remarks, we read a lot of court documents. We actually go and get those those documents. We've got a lot of good contacts now, so we we might talk to the investigating officer and oftentimes they'll still have some good documents, they might have their brief of evidence. Still,

So.

We tend to rather than just read media reports, we tend to actually go and get the official documentation and read that for ourselves. Family members send amazing things. I've had family members send me autopsy reports.

What makes a true crime story like the right kind of story to delve into?

For me personally, I'm always fascinated by systems that have failed, like social systems. I'm always fascinated by a story in which you know, the offender has slipped through the net of let's say, the mental health system or the family court system, or you know. We have in Australia very clear how do I describe it? We have really clear data that shows how young men in particular can move through a set of institutions in Australia and become increasingly

If you look back at the really.

Violent offenders from the seventies and eighties, like the Chopper Reads and the Mister Renter kills and all of those those guys, those hit men from back in the day, they all went through youth detention as well, and they all came through very similar conditions as well.

So there's nothing new about that now.

The final thing I want to talk about is parenting, because you've got twins else.

I remember when my.

Daughter was three months old and I took her to sleep school to teach us both how to sleep really, and there was one woman that had twins, and I just remember thinking, how is she actually surviving this.

So I want to know, like, your twins are, how.

Old they are? Eleven? Eleven and a.

Half, eleven and a half, So tell me what a sum of the parenting hacks that you have found most effective to managing life with twins.

Oh again, I would not nominate myself as an expert, but I think the thing with twins for me is that the poor things they just they just don't have a choice but to be good.

There was just no option.

They could never be spoilt, They could never I mean I could never even carry them around really because there was always another kid. I could never indulge them because there was another kid. They just spent their whole babyhoods hearing the word.

Wait, are there any tricks that you have found effective to just taking the pressure off yourself as a mum?

Well, just taking the pressure off myself.

As a mum, I mean really that simple. Well that's again, that's just the bood is you know, talking is just do it. I mean, the only thing that's putting pressure on you as you The only thing that's real is your reaction to everything. That is the only thing that's really happening. There is no pressure. What is the pressure.

Such such a nice thought to finish on, Michelle, because when you say that, you say that's that sounds like you're going mm hmmm, nice thoughts Not for.

Me, No, no, no, I do mean that genuinely. My final final.

Question, Michelle, is for people that want to consume more of what you are putting out into the world, what is the best way for people to do that?

Well, now there's the True Crime Australian True Crime podcast, and there's well, yes, there is that, And there's a book coming out called CSI Told You Lies, which I love because it's about the people who do It's about forensic pathologists and they do the autopsies and I mean they're just the most beautiful people. And I know it sounds weird. Everyone always goes, why would you do that there's a job. Well, they do it because they can

It's just about.

Accepting, preventative, accepting that we all change, you know, when you go you're not the person I'm married, it's about going, oh, that's right, you're not meant to be.

We're all meant to change. It's okay.

Basically I haven't read that one, but as a divorcee, I feel like I should put it on my book list.

Perfect. It'll make you stop hating your ex.

Excellent Well, Michelle, it has been an absolute joy talking to you. I will link to all those things in the show notes and thank you so much for your time.

Thank you girl. Bye.

Hey there, that is it for today's show. Now, if you are not following or subscribing to How I Work, you might want to hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening to this from because next week I'm so excited to share my interview with Oliver Berkman, who is a writer and columnist for the Guardian, and he thinks a lot about time and time management, and we get into a completely different diff to think about time and how