
Courageous Conversations
Welcome to Courageous Conversations, where host and seasoned executive coach Paul Tripp sits down with leaders and innovators to explore the moments that shape them, challenge organizations, and redefine industries. From navigating workplace mental health to redefining success in a multi-generational workforce, this podcast dives into the breakthroughs and pivotal experiences that define leadership. Thoughtful, practical, and deeply human, Courageous Conversations offers insights and inspiration to help you lead with impact. If you’re ready to pause, reflect, and take your next bold step, this podcast is for you. Tune in and discover what it really means to lead with heart, resilience, and purpose.
Courageous Conversations
Rewriting the Narrative with Tobin Addington
What can writers teach us about navigating career pivots? In this episode of Courageous Conversations, host Paul Tripp sits down with screenwriter and storyteller Tobin Addington to explore the art of reinvention—both on the page and in life.
Tobin shares how writers, much like business leaders, face defining moments that force them to adapt, rethink their direction, and break through creative roadblocks. From reimagining characters to rewriting his own career path, Tobin reveals the strategies he uses to push past uncertainty and stay true to his voice.
Whether you're an executive considering a career shift, a creative struggling with self-doubt, or simply someone looking for inspiration, this episode is packed with wisdom on embracing change, taking risks, and finding new ladders to climb.
This episode is brought to you by AceUp and Produced and Edited by Buttered Toast.
Welcome to Courageous Conversations, where we explore the transformative pivots leaders make in their careers. But today I'm flipping the script. We often think about leadership pivots as those defining moments that forced leaders to change direction, adapt, or grow. But what about writers? How are their pivots similar to business professionals? Our guest today, Tobin Addington, is not just a brilliant writer, but someone who has had to pivot countless times throughout his career, stirring his writing and characters through unexpected challenges. In this episode, we'll dive deep into how a writer leads the narrative of their own career, Just as a leader does with their teams. I'm curious, how will today's episode push you to rewrite your story? All right, let's dive in. Tobin, welcome to Courageous Conversations.
Tobin:Thanks. It's great to be here.
Paul:I really wanted to talk to you on the topic today of the pivot of leadership, because often we think of the pivot of leadership or those transformational moments or experiences that leaders have that require them to pivot. But because you are an intellectual that I really enjoy engaging with, And you're a writer. I thought how interesting it would be to talk about a pivot related to writing because you've had to pivot throughout your entire career in different ways as the leader of your writing. And so let's dive in. What are you the product of?
Tobin:Like most people, I'm the product of a lot of things. Mostly I'm the product of stories. I think that we all as human beings are nothing more than a accumulation of stories, stories we're told, stories we tell about ourselves. It's the way we make sense of a chaotic world. It's a way we make sense of good things that happened to us and bad things that happened to us trying to create some sort of order. And so I think of myself as a product of stories, stories about my past stories, but my family stories that I have just attached myself to that come from other or more deeper places. And I think it's probably why I do what I do.
Paul:Interesting. Would you just start us off with a favorite story about you? Something that was maybe unexpected? What's a favorite story?
Tobin:You know, it's funny. The first thing that comes to mind when you say that, when I think about what I'm a product of, I think about the first story that I remember really enveloping me as a kid that I would play, most kids do imaginative play, you imagine your characters, you imagine your, whatever, whatever the sort of thing you're growing up in. When I was six years old. I saw on cable TV, because this is before there were VHSs, you couldn't watch movies whenever you wanted them. You had to catch stuff when it came up on TV, if it wasn't new in the theater. And I saw a movie from 1939, blew my mind. It was a story I was familiar with, but told in a new way. It was the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, the Michael Curtiz Technicolor Robin Hood movie. And something about that movie, seeing this dashing, daring noble guy who stood up against corruption and for the little guy and something about and sword fighting just. Electrified me to the point that I got myself some green. Tights and I got a sword and I got a hat and I got the bow and arrow with the suction, thick cups on the front and would run around the woods behind our house for hours playing Robin Hood. I would check the TV guide every week to see when it was going to air again, twice a year, it showed up on TBS or whatever. And so it's two stories. One story is the story of this guy who finds a way to use his skills to stand up for people who can't stand up for themselves. and a story of me finding story as a way to express something inside me that I couldn't otherwise express, having to do with feeling powerful and running around the woods as a six, seven, eight, nine year old kid.
Paul:You know, that is such an interesting observation of we relate to the story that's in front of us, but also the story that it tells to us.
Tobin:Mm Yeah, definitely.
Paul:And then there was the story that your parents saw manifesting in your interpretation of the story, right?
Tobin:Absolutely. Absolutely right. You're, you are generating your own story as you live. And people around you are telling a version of that story that they see from their perspective.
Paul:When you are writing a story and your character experiences a need for a pivot, how do you know how to make that pivot as a writer? Like, how do you know which direction to go? Because this parallels real life. People are like, well, shit should I go do this or that? Take this job or that job, right? How do you make the decision for the character?
Tobin:It's really tricky. We writers spend a lot of time complaining to each other or moping with each other or banging your heads together to figure this out, either in our own stories or, working in teams. There are so many things that come up when you're crafting a story, when you're writing a story that will force you to change the direction that the story goes. It could be external, someone you're writing something for gives you a note and says. You have to change this thing, or you have to find a new way to do it, or you find yourself, you've written yourself into a corner, and you are stuck, and you can't the path that you were on is no longer available to you. It doesn't, it does, it's not providing any more sustenance to you. And you have to find a new way to move forward the way that I have over time found my way through that after you sort of bang your forehead against the keyboard and tell it bleeds. And sometimes just come to the terms with the fact that you have to pivot that you can't, that it's fruitless to keep going the way you thought you were supposed to go, then it's a matter of. For me. Quieting myself until the path I should go on reveals itself, which might mean taking a step away from the thing I'm working on and not working on it for a while, for days, for weeks. It might mean increasing my meditation. It might mean more exercise, something break the pattern that I was in that had me locked into the direction that I was going so that the new path. shows itself. I mean, people talk about this all the time. You're in the shower and the great idea comes. You're on a run and the great idea comes. You're on a swim and the great idea comes. So I have to always remind myself in those moments to go do those things to allow that doorway to open that I hadn't seen, that I wasn't able to see before.
Paul:It's so interesting to hear you talk about how when you're blocked with a character, you need to put the character down, put the story of the character down and walk away and break from the narrative that you're creating. And I wonder, for leaders listening, they get stuck and they know they're stuck and they're both the writer and the character, right? And the way they, yeah, what I heard you say is take a break, step away, go swimming. That's how you do it when you're creating the narrative.
Tobin:Yeah, that's right. Getting out of my own way is my way often to find a way forward. And sometimes we don't have a lot of time to do that. And I'm sure this crosses industries, obviously, that time is you don't always have a week to go not work on a thing. So sometimes it has to be fast. If I allow my subconscious the space to work on the issue that I'm on to find that new to do the bushwhacking to find the new trail for myself, it can do it quickly. It might only need to be a walk. It might need to be a good night's sleep. It doesn't have to be long but sometimes not standing in front of the problem. allows the problem to resolve itself a little more easily, or you do find a new way around it, I think.
Paul:Give us a real example of that with a character that was, you were like, we're so stuck. I wrote the wrong story.
Tobin:Absolutely. I was working on a movie project, a number of years ago. I have on my walls in my office, I have cards up and I have all the sort of I've planned out the way I think the story is going to go. The way that I write is often by blue skying at first. And then because I'm writing for film and TV, I write scenes on note cards. I put those notes, cards up on the wall and I can move them around and see the movie taking shape.
Paul:Like a vision.
Tobin:Like a vision. Exactly, exactly. I had all the note cards up, I was writing my way through the story, and I had a character who I thought was the main character of the story, who was pushing the story all the way through, and I got like halfway into the script, so I was 50 some pages into a 110 page movie, and he had a complete story. brick wall. It felt like the scenes that I was writing for that character were artificial. They were, I was writing what was on the cards, what felt right on the wall, what the plan was there, but it didn't feel true. It didn't feel it wasn't getting me the kind of the juice that I needed out of the story. It's hard to explain, but I was, I was, I could have just sat there and kept writing terrible scenes and finished what was on the wall. But what I realized was I was following the wrong character. I had the wrong main character in the story. It was the wrong point of view. And when we talk about, writing in characters in film and TV, we talk about the character having an arc. Very often the character changes over time and the thing they wouldn't do in the first scene of the movie, they are forced to do by the end or choose to do in some kind of new way. The character that I had chosen. Had nowhere to go. They started good and they stayed good the whole time and there was no, they had no growth. They had no change. So as I came to the second half of the story, when the stakes were supposed to get higher and everything's supposed to get more difficult, they were waltzing through it because they had no growth. And so what I had to do when this was a humbling experience, you have to rethink the story and write it from a different character's point of view. So it became a different character story and that meant rewriting everything that I'd had, but once I found that this secondary character, that had more farther to go, that once I identified the issue that I had with that character, then I was able to write through the rest of the, I mean, I put new cards on the wall. I did the whole thing over again. But that's what it ended up being a point of view, a perspective thing. In that case, that was an extreme case. It's often not quite so extreme, but that was one way, one way through it. The way I figured that out was I stepped away from that for a while. It was a couple of weeks. I was like, I don't know what to do. I'm never going to finish this thing. It's terrible. I'm terrible. The world is terrible, and I had other jobs, so I had the luxury of not having to do it in that compressed time period, and a couple weeks later, I realized, oh, I was doing some kind of exercise it's like, oh, maybe it's a different character's story. They're more interesting anyway. And it was like, ah, there it is. I figured out what it is.
Paul:That whole example reminds me of so many people are stuck in careers where there's no story arc. They're in their thirties, forties. They want something different in their life, right? And you said, you know what? I realized I needed to rewrite the story. And there's so many parallels to what you said about what people faced in a leadership pivot and how you write for characters. I think the one thing I'm curious about for you, yeah. How did you know writing was your thing?
Tobin:Looking back on it, I think I, I knew it before I knew it. We've talked about the story before, but, I was in second grade. So I was, it was not long after I found Robin Hood and I was seven, whatever. And I'm in second grade and we had to write, we had spelling words each week. You had 10 words you had to learn how to spell. And each week, one of the assignments was to write those words into sentences. So you knew how to use them in context. So I wrote my, no one suggested this. I just, Because I was a little bored, maybe, with writing random sentences, I wrote my spelling words into sentences that were a story and the teacher, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Simmons, read my story to the class that week. She didn't tell me she was going to do this. We all sat down. She said, I wanted to show you this. She read this story. And as I have learned to appreciate since then, it's the first time someone really, it felt like I was really being seen. It's the first time people were seeing me, not just who I was the good student or, my mom's the kindergarten teacher, all the things that you're known for, but really truly inside that I was a storyteller that I had stories in, even if it's about this little dog that captivated people. And so in retrospect, I think that's when it really, even without me intellectually knowing it, because I wrote stories from then on. I mean, short stories, then plays, then found movies and never looked back and never really questioned it. But I think that's the moment when it really happened.
Paul:You know, you say you've never questioned it. And I think that's the one thing I am amazed by in you is that you write like you're running out of time to quote Hamilton. And, there are times in people's careers where they feel seen and they're like, ah, this is the thing. But then winter comes and there's a quiet space by which that recognition doesn't happen or accolades don't come or how have you maintained the fire all these years? I don't understand it.
Tobin:It's a great question. And it's hard for me to articulate because I don't fully understand myself. It's as primal to me as, I don't think I could not do it in one form or another. I've gone for long stretches of time and not received, accolades or, financial gain from it. It's not that kind of calculation, for me, but I can't not do it. There was a time I had a health issue where I couldn't, for a variety of reasons, couldn't watch movies. I, visually, had a hard time sort of being able to process visual information in the normal way without feeling ill and things. And so I couldn't, it was hard to work on movies at that time because I was like not able to interact with them in the same way. And it was a scary time and a pretty discouraging time. What I could do was listen to audiobooks. And eventually I could read. I couldn't watch movies, but I could read with one eye. And so I started writing novels. Not particularly with a thought to them being sold just because I needed to write something and there are stories in me that are desperate to come out. I just needed a way to uncork that, to exercise that. and so for about a year. I didn't write a scene of a movie or TV show, which I had not done. I've for what 30 years now. At that point for 20 some years. And so I found this other way of getting a story out that I could do. Not for accolades. They're in a drawer, you know, they're just in a drawer. But it's almost, it's like breathing, it's therapy. It's a thing I just can't not do. If I were, I imagine if I, when I was, before I met Robin Hood, I wanted to be a dentist because my great uncle was a dentist. If I had become a dentist, I think I would still write.
Paul:So when you meet people, do you write the story as you're meeting them? Are you like, Oh, this is the backstory of that person. Or do you just take it at face value?
Tobin:I think a lot about writing now. It's not a thing I do just for fun. By accident, I've thought about the craft a lot, so when I meet people or I'm at a dinner party or, go to, the kids, open house at school and meeting people, I'm not thinking about it as a scene or as a character as I'm there, but what I'm trying to do is absorb as much of it as I can, dialogue, the way people are dressed, the way people talk to each other, the way they look, the best stuff That I write will have some sort of source in an experience that I've had I was writing this horror movie. Not long ago. And there's this dinner scene where this couple met this guy. And at first he seems a little scary and then he's kind of charming. And by the end of the dinner, he does something like completely nails on the chalkboard to 1 character. I've been at dinners like that with people that I didn't know at first. And you're like. Trying to gauge what they're like and are you a threat? Are you not? And the stakes are heightened in the movie. It's all, we're doing it for drama. But those feelings underneath are feelings that in retrospect, I have experienced at similar dinner parties. So not thinking about necessarily at the time, but often in retrospect, I'm mining my past experience for. The material.
Paul:So basically everybody's game.
Tobin:Yes. If you know a writer, you are your prey. Yes.
Paul:Okay. Much like leaders stepping into new roles. How do you decide when it's time to leave a genre or a format or subject behind and explore new territory specifically? I'm thinking genre or format because I know you have made some pivots, you're on. The own network with a couple of Christmas movies now, right? And that wasn't a genre that you were tapped into a few years ago.
Tobin:No, no, that is interesting. Yes. The tricky thing about, I imagine most careers, but my experience is mostly in the arts, is that There's no path laid out for you. I think maybe this is just a person who likes order, I, grew up thinking, oh, I assume a career is a ladder, right? You climb rung to rung to rung, and the next step is in front of you and it's a meritocracy. And if you do this part well, you'll be rewarded with the next step and off you go. And at some point. I think most people, for me, certainly, you find that you run out of rungs on the ladder and you're like, well, there's a ladder there. There's a rope over there. There's a, and I got to jump to something else. What do I do? And I think that for a lot of us, maybe we stand at that point in the ladder for a while and look around for. Paralyzed in fear or whatever about knowing what to do. For me, the Christmas movie, so I mostly write mysteries and thrillers. That's the genre that I'm most accustomed to a lot of investigations, anything with an investigation in it, I'm like, I'm there. When the opportunity came up, to write a Christmas movie. I hadn't sold anything in a while, nothing that I had written, for a long time, since anything had been fully produced, that was just mine that I'd written entirely myself. And so I was at a bit of a end of a rung of a ladder, not thinking, gosh, maybe I'm not going to write anymore, but more like, what do I do next that will put me on a new ladder that will put me in a new path. And it was, just suggested to me, Hey, they make a lot of Christmas movies. Is maybe there's something in that genre that you could write. And when I began, the way that the pivot happened there for me is rather than thinking, Oh, these are cheesy movies that, I don't usually deal with. They're not usually the genre I would seek out. I thought back to, in the 1930s and 40s, the people who wrote monster movies for Universal or who wrote,, gangster movies by the dozen for Warner Brothers, like all these old studio guys who would sit in their little Bungalow and, on the studio lot and just churn out these genre movies that some of which we now look back on and say, wow, that's a classic. Casablanca is one of those movies. By the director of Robin hood when I thought about it that way, what's the challenge in this for me? Could I find a new way? How can you twist within the formula a little bit to make something fresh? Can I twist the formula of a Christmas movie enough so that I'm interested in it? I'll be darned, the first one I wrote sold and was shot within two years of me writing it? I've done two since then. That's a remarkable amount of stuff produced in a short period of time for someone in my profession, unless you're super, super famous. Now I'm at a place where I like that ladder. That ladder is fun, but there are new challenges that I'm also eyeing at the same time, and finding the new way to make that next pivot by choice, more than pivot by I'm stuck and I need to find a new way but it was part of it was humbling myself at the top of that ladder to go do a genre that I would not normally have pursued and I will admit at the time felt a little sheepish About doing, which is not fair to the genre or the people who like it, but it's just naturally,, I came out of film school as like a snobby film kid, right? So it's finding sort of yourself in all of these, in all of the constellation of all these things, as you build the story of your career, of your life, of whatever it is.
Paul:How do you balance staying true to your creative voice while responding to the changing demands of the world? We've moved away from cable. We've gone to streaming right now. It's moving from, HBO and those two internet.
Tobin:What's wild is we're reinventing cable right now because streaming services are adding ads And they want you to take the cheaper ad tier because they get money from the commercials so we're just reinventing cable, but yeah, it is it's a great question Especially right now in my industry, there's a lot of upheaval. We've gone through a COVID where people weren't going to movies through a big strike where we weren't producing anything. We weren't writing anything to then a contraction of my industry where there are fewer things being made. It's a tricky time right now in our business. And what I've found that I, it's what the challenge for me is to understand that that's happening and accept that there's some fear and anxiety on my part. Because just naturally there are fewer places to sell the things that I, my wares don't sell as many places anymore because there aren't as many buyers. There are still people who want stories and as long as there are people who want stories there are people who will listen to me because I found that I can provide something that not a lot of people can and In fact, I can provide something nobody else can which is the stories I tell It doesn't mean that they will sell. It doesn't mean that they'll be super successful, but it is acknowledging the fact that there are things I can do that nobody else can do. And I think that when, for me anyway, when I realized that, when I really truly realized that it freed me up to understand that there is a marketplace. And I'm not gonna write something right now that you could do that could never, ever be made, or, I'm not just putting a middle finger up to an industry. But I'm going to try and find a way to write the things that to say no to things that maybe would be good to do, like from a, if your plot, your career kind of thing, but that aren't a thing that just I can do. And so finding that confidence has allowed me to keep so far, not going to blood to keep true to that sense of creativity that I tell stories that just I can tell, and then. Allow for the fact that some things will hit and some things won't. But if I try and be fake about it, that's a for sure way to go nowhere. Either into jobs I would be terrible at, or things that have no return at all.
Paul:I don't know, it's a confidence game. Tell me, tell me, when was that pivotal moment? When did that awakening occur where you were like, Oh my God,
Tobin:it occurred for me, it occurred in stages. There were steps toward it. The first time I had a script win a giant contest, like a big, big prize.
Paul:When you were in New Jersey.
Tobin:We were living in Brooklyn. Yep. And I was teaching in New Jersey. We don't say we lived in New Jersey.
Paul:Sorry. I didn't, did I say lived? I should have said worked. You're right.
Tobin:You lived in Brooklyn. Sorry, New Jersey. We'll say the same thing. Everybody's got their, their pride of where they were. That's good. Okay. Good, good call. Good call. So I won this big prize and. I remember writing, the people who had who gave out this prize to the organization had a newsletter they sent out and they wanted me to write a column for it, having won the grand prize at this best of 5, 000 scripts or whatever. And I remember the thing I wrote was, you have to write stories only you can tell. So intellectually, I knew that. You know, I could articulate that 15 years ago, but I didn't really feel it. I wasn't living it, because I was still trying to find stories that would do something specific for me as in business or whatever, it was a little, I was jumping from ladder to ladder, you know, just with a little bit of a flail to it, and I was really concerned about what people were going to think when it was done, so it wasn't until working with a coach and looking really deeply into why I do what I do, Recognizing that I can offer things that truly nobody else can. And letting go of needing to prove anything to anybody. Now, I say that as though it's just gone. It's not just gone. That comes back, I fight it all the time. But I know what it feels like to not give a crap. To write a thing that's like, well this I'm just writing. It's coming out of me. I can identify where it means something to me. And so I'm going to express it in a way that frees myself a little bit from. Expectations of people's perceptions of me of the story of whatever and so the more I've done it the easier it has become and the less pressure I feel in terms of the outside world's approval Interestingly the more the outside world approves it has allowed me more success It's opened more doors. There are things happening in my career now that are really exciting That only have come about because I am practicing owning the fact that I have stories to tell and ways to tell them that nobody else has.
Paul:Authenticity, right? So, let me ask you about that. You get the idea, it's pouring out of you, how do you stay in that moment? Cause it takes, what, a couple weeks to write a story? Maybe a month. How do you keep the flow going?
Tobin:It's a great question. For those of us who write movies and TV, I mean, the last script I had the idea for a year and a half ago, you start writing it, it can take months. Sometimes with the Christmas movies, it's a much more, it's a quicker turnaround. That is sometimes weeks, which is crazy. So the trick is. For me, on the longer duration things, like when it is going to take months, there are two things that I have learned over time. One is I used to wait for inspiration to strike. Used to be like, and there's a story of, that I've always remembered that I think is true, of Tom Waits. The musician talking about writing songs and for years he thought he was wait for inspiration and there's a window that would open it would only be open a certain amount and then it would close and if he either got the thing or he didn't and the story is he's driving across Texas or something and as the window opens in the sky and a song is coming out and the way the story goes he shakes his finger at the sky and says I'm busy come back later And it did. The window opened later. And the way he describes this is, he realized it was a practice. It was a partnership. Him and his muse. It wasn't a divine inspiration that you either grab or you don't. That with a certain opening yourself to it, you can be in conversation with the inspiration that you have. So understanding that, and understanding that was the first thing. The other thing for me is, When I'm trying to stay in a thing, and it is tricky, you're right, because there is, even though I practice opening and closing the window, like, you do want to catch the thing in as much totality as you can. The trick for me is to, and I forget, some teacher I had along the way put it this way, they said, touch it every day. You don't have to write a lot, even if it's just, right before you go to bed, for me, writing a story, I call up my outline and just read it one more time. Or re read that scene, or listen to the piece of music. While I'm driving to work that day, that Reminds me of how this is supposed to feel. And if I touch the story, even on days when I'm not actively working on it, some part of me, some part of my being stays in it so I can get back into it more easily. I'm not having to sort of start from scratch. I don't know how that translates beyond writing, but I bet you do.
Paul:I do. I mean, as you're talking, I'm thinking of all the people out there that are working out or dieting or having a difficult conversation or whatever that thing is right. It's the daily practice of no judgment, some nights you might just read the script, and just be like, that's enough. I did it. I stayed in touch with it. I allowed it to happen. And so many people often think, Oh gosh, I've got to give 30 minutes or 20 minutes. What if it's one minute? I did one sit up, one push up, or whatever the thing is, just to stay in touch with it. That's the story I heard you just tell.
Tobin:Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Paul:What about feedback? I can imagine you get feedback from your agent, from publishers, right? From studio heads. Often when feedback comes and we're resistant, ego might get in the way or instinctive, you don't know what you're talking about. How do you balance that and stay motivated?
Tobin:One of the things that I really learned in grad school is how to take notes. By which I mean take feedback. It wasn't because there was anyone who was particularly cruel, but one of the things that happened to us a lot when I was in film school is that we would bring work in and we would be, I wouldn't say always torn apart, but people were very harsh in their critiques. They were trying to prepare us for a world that wasn't coddling us. When we left, like most businesses, I would think it's real harsh, you know, there is a sink or swim you there's, there's a thick skin you need. And I remember I had teachers there, one particularly said, you need to be more tough. That's good feedback. Thank you. I say through the tears, you know, and he wasn't saying like, don't cry because we're all going to cry, but like, Take it a little bit. So what I learned to do is what I, and who were the one time in particular, I brought this movie in my final, my thesis film, I bring it in and they bring in outside people to watch our movies. Like I, one of the, I mean, I won't give away who, but like, The people whose movies you have grown up with are in this room to watch your movies along with anybody from the school who wants to come. You didn't give it away. My father in law was visiting, like, it was Big, right? And so I'm sitting there, and I show the movie, and I go to sit down in the front of the movie theater with my notepad in front of these people who are the panelists, and they destroy me. They don't like anything about this movie that I have spent years, money, like it's a big deal. It's like the thing I'm leaving school with. But this point I'd had a few years of it. I'm writing in my notebook, And I'm not really writing what they're saying. I'm just saying F you, F you. I hate you. I hate this. This is too, but it looks like I'm just taking notes. I'm just nodding and taking notes. Then I go back, and then I cry. And then I think, what are they saying underneath what they're saying? They don't like what's happening. We call it in sometimes, writers we call it, what's the note under the note? The thing they can't articulate. They're trying to give me all the answers. It should be this, it should be that. What, what are they not connecting with in the thing that I've made? And so I made a bunch of changes to the movie, and I brought it back. There's one person from that original panel, and two or three new people. And I loved it. It won a faculty award at a number of awards at the film festival. It was like a, and it played, it screened at more than 40 film festivals around the world. But the thing that I had learned is, two things, don't get defensive and start defending the thing when people are giving you feedback. They're responding from themselves. They're probably, maybe they had a bad day. Maybe they're in the middle of a divorce. You don't know what's going on with them as they're giving you feedback on the thing that you've got. So certain amount of is going to get filtered out by, yeah, you're just, that's just you. That's just your opinion. You don't say that though. You just take the notes and say, I think you're in the middle of a divorce. If not, you should be, you're like, you're arguing back with a pan of nobody looking at you or, you know, without them, without them hearing it. And then it's looking for what they're really saying underneath it. Because in my business. We all get feedback all the time. We're all being told no, almost no one gets to make the thing exactly the way they want to make it. And if you are, if you, the better you get at the, you know, at choosing your collaborators and choosing the people you work with, the better the feedback is, the more you can understand it, but still you have to put it. You have to look for what they're really saying underneath it. Can I have one more story? I can tell one more story. It's just a great. I
Paul:mean, there's so many parallels here. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, absolutely.
Tobin:It was another time, a number of years ago. still doing the sort of apply to competitions and things and I won a best dramatic movie screenplay Award in order to get the money I had to do certain rewrites to the script for the company and they sent me the most condescending And this wasn't even like they were going to make the movie. It's just literally to get my thousand dollar prize money or whatever. The most condescending list of things, like they were telling me how to write. I'd been doing it for 15 years at this point. It wasn't like, I mean, longer before I even count before, like when I was a kid, like I was writing screenplays for a long time and I had had stuff made. I mean, it wasn't, I wasn't new to this, you know, it was so condescending. And at first I called my manager, I was like, I'm not even going to do this. It's not worth the thousand dollars to me to do this. And she's like, okay, that's fine. Take a breath. Look at it again the next day. I looked at it again the next day and it still pissed me off. What I did is I imported into, into, you know, Word or whatever, my computer, and I wrote a new, I erased their opening, and wrote, Congratulations, we love this script so much. We, we chose it as the top of our, we give you this big award, we think it's fantastic. And then, I rewrite their notes, So that all the content is the same, but the tone is better. And then I end with, Thank you again so much. If you don't do anything with this, that's fine. But we really see a future for it. You know, can't wait to talk to you more about it. And so then the next day I read that. I was like, oh, that's nice. What a nice set of notes that they have. That's a trick I've used. I have for sure used other times too. When you get notes from people to just rewrite the opening. So that it builds you up a little bit, makes you feel confident. To then sort of take the suggestions that they have.
Paul:What I love about what you've said here is when feedback comes, the words that come at you are less important than the note underneath the note. I love that. And then the other piece is when you do get negative feedback written or whatever. Maybe rewrite it, right? I mean, God, now we have chat GPT, take this and make it positive, and then see what you could do with it.
Tobin:Sometimes that allows you to see what the note under the note, because if you're in your feelings, you can't always, right? If you're feeling combative, you can't see what they're really saying. You're just seeing the attack. And if you rewrite it, then you can determine, is that a really good idea or is that just coming from their feelings?
Paul:So we've got a lot of listeners who are struggling with different things in their life, right? They're at a dead end, or they're confused about something, or they don't know how to move forward, or they're in the wrong career, you're a writer. How do you write them out of their scenario into a new one?
Tobin:That's such a great question. What I would do for both the person and the character. is go back before we're at the roadblock. I'd go back a ways in their life and figure out what they want. The big question we ask ourselves in making characters is always, what does the character want? What does the character want? What's the thing that's driving them deep inside the lizard brain, right? What is the thing that they truly, truly want as a character? Because whether we acknowledge it or not, every interaction we have In life is about us trying to trying to get something and that can be as simple as approval. It can be, you know, trying to get a raise. It could be trying to find a partner. It could be whatever it is where we are driven by, by desires, by needs, by. And so I think that. For me, anyway, when I have, when I meet people who are stuck, when I am stuck, when I'm writing characters who are stuck, going back to origins, going back to what is it they're really after? What is the path that they were on that maybe they've, maybe they took the wrong path. Maybe it's like my script. You go back to the beginning of that story. Where would I be if I were really following what I wanted? What's really, what's really important to me underneath. We, we don't live very long, really. We don't get to do, we don't get to do a lot. So, is what you're doing today something that you're going to look back on in, 10 years? If we're lucky 20, 30 years and say that was satisfying this led me to like that was a good use of that time It may be that what you need that day is to sit in your pajamas and have ice cream and that truly may be it i'm not saying people need to be productive all the time But what what are you pursuing right now? And if what you're pursuing isn't something that's going to matter Maybe you should be pursuing something else. Maybe the want is something different for you
Paul:So interesting. Oh, so interesting. Write us into your future. Tell us what's next.
Tobin:What's next for me?
Paul:I know what just happened, and I won't say unless you say.
Tobin:I can't, I can't, I can't say. Things are, things are too, I can't say specifically, but I will say, but I will say, there are a variety of opportunities arriving for me that I have made for myself. that take me to a different ladder. The difference now, in terms of how I feel about them, compared to how I would have felt about them five, ten years ago, is I don't feel like this is the only new ladder to jump to. If the thing that, you know, as bigger projects, as I begin to embark on bigger projects, Bigger companies with bigger people involved. I am now at a place where if the thing that's on the horizon falls through, there are three other things that I am in the works on right now that will move me to a different ladder right now. And ask me tomorrow, but right now I'm feeling at a place where. I really like the things that are coming my way, bigger projects, it's not going to ruin me if it falls apart tomorrow because there are three or four other big things that I have generated entirely by myself that I could step right into.
Paul:Let me ask you on that. Is your character so mature in their story that they have written these ladders into existence or is your character so brave in the telling of their story that they've written these ladders into existence? Is this an age dependent, experience dependent thing?
Tobin:I think maybe for me it is because I'm an experiential learner. I kind of have to go through. Enough of a thing. I've been able to, more authentically write characters who are close, who, through whose experience or age I have moved through. And so I feel like for me the bravery has come with time and with work and with age.
Paul:Interesting. What question didn't
Tobin:I have friends who were super brave when they were 22, who've had a lot of success, you know, and they just have a different, it's a different path. And they're encountering these things in different ways and ups and downs and whatever. My path just moved, my path moved this way and I'm really glad that it did.
Paul:Yeah. So Tobin, what question didn't I ask you that you would like to answer?
Tobin:Boy, good question that I would like to answer. Yeah, that's tough. I mean, as, as often when we talk, your questions are are excellent and deep and move in ways. I don't expect the question that one often gets as a writer is where ideas come from. I don't know that it's a super. Interesting question, necessarily, and maybe that's just because, you know, I am a writer and maybe the question, maybe the question that I would like to answer is how to feel okay at the top of the ladder when you don't know where the next ladder is. Because what's really scary is not knowing, for me, and it can be paralyzing to have come to the end of a ladder and be standing there and you don't know where gravity is and you're at the top of a really tall ladder and like, are you going to fall? Are you going to fall off the ladder and like, die? And that's a really hard place to be. And I think it's important to acknowledge that for people who are at that position it's scary. It's really scary.
Paul:Yeah.
Tobin:And the thing that ultimately helps me through that is, I think something we've talked about along the way is, so what happens if you fall? What's the worst that happens? In the situation we're talking about, if you fall, will you catch yourself three rungs down and climb back up? Will you fly?
Paul:Through this conversation, you've told me you maybe close your eyes and take a step back and just let the ladder sway for a while. You don't have to look up anymore. You told me that I was always used to looking left, but now I'm going to look right and see if there's another ladder over here. You told me that in the, in the conversation today. And then the trust, the knowing of, you know what? I've climbed all those rungs. I'm still going to climb. I just don't know where it's going to be. But sitting in the knowing of that's what's coming next for you. Before we close, is there any question you'd like to ask me?
Tobin:I'm curious how you, you've alluded to this somewhat in our conversation. Okay. But I know that a lot of the people that you work with, maybe I just assume this, aren't necessarily in creative fields or fields that we think of as traditionally creative. And I'm wondering, I guess part of it is, why me? I'm wondering what, I'm hoping there's been value to people who are in less creative fields. traditionally creative careers and what made you think that this would be useful?
Paul:Tobin, what you had to say today and what you do is so parallel to people's situations in terms of pivoting and being at a dead end or needing to look around the corner when they can't see it. And because you write characters, you almost write the human story of existence, but you write it in different genres. And so just to listen to you talk today, if people. You know, if they didn't get it the first time, if they listen again, you have so many life lessons and so many ways in which people can relate to their circumstance tangentially that is applicable to them. And as I was thinking of people, I'm like, well, the power of the pivot, of course it's Tobin because it's what he does all the time with characters and he writes and there's genres and feedback and I mean, you experience everything everybody else experiences in business. You just experience it in a different car. That makes sense.
Tobin:Yeah, I mean, I've had to become more business savvy as my career has grown. So I am kind of fascinated by it. And I draw. from, different ways of thinking about how to make things. And we're all making things one way or another and how things are organized and made in a more sort of business sense. It does make sense and I hope it's. You
Paul:know, there's all these leaders out there that are, were an army general that have no experience in civilian world, right? Or Lance Armstrong, the athlete or pick an athlete who are writing leadership books. And what's interesting is it's all the lessons and experiences we have about. Making a pivot and, rewriting our narrative and, giving and receiving feedback. All the things we all go through as human beings, you do it as a writer. And so maybe a leadership book on from a writer's perspective would be a bestseller because you've got all the skills and tools. You do it for your characters. So I just think it's fascinating. I can't thank you enough for your time. I know you're busy writing, but I couldn't think of a better guest to have on when we talk about the power of the pivot, because that's what you do.
Tobin:Well, I'm a big fan of yours and I really appreciate any opportunity that I have to, to chat with you is, uh, is one I'll take for sure.
Paul:Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Wow. What a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Courageous Conversations. I hope you found today's discussion as inspiring and thought provoking as I did. And a special thank you to our guest Tobin Addington for sharing his journey and insights. If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who could benefit from this conversation. We've got another exciting guest lined up in our next episode, so make sure to tune in as you don't want to miss it. Until then, stay curious, stay courageous, and keep the conversations in your life flowing.