Talk About Talk - Executive & Leadership Communication Skills

Do you have Communication Skills questions?  Listen to Andrea answer 12 communication skills questions from a live Q&A event hosted by FishBowl. Learn how to handle a difficult boss, communication tips for introverts, ideas for how to network and secure a new job, and more!   RESOURCES   FishBowl https://www.fishbowlapp.com/ Andrea on Fishbowl – https://www.fishbowlapp.com/fb/andrea-wojnicki Maye Samoiel https://www.linkedin.com/in/maye-samoiel-cpa-cica-cfe-ambci/   Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Website – TalkAboutTalk.com Free Newsletter  LinkedIn  Linkedin bi-weekly communication skills newsletter: “Talking About Talk”  TRANSCRIPT   Welcome to talk about talk episode #102. This episode is different from any other talk about talk episode you’ve ever heard. You’re going to hear a recording of a live Q&A that I did a few months ago. You’re going to hear my unscripted answers to unscripted questions about everything from how to deal with a difficult boss, to how to improve your communication if you’re a shy introvert, to lots of networking advice, including what to say when you’re re-entering the workforce after mat leave!, and how to ask for feedback This Q&A was recorded live from The Fishbowl app. Have you heard of Fishbowl? Fishbowl is a platform for professionals where they can have honest career conversations. You access Fishbowl from your phone and you can choose from thousands of Industry, Community or Company Bowls (or Groups) to have honest conversations with other verified professionals that are working in roles and industries similar to your own. The conversations on the Fishbowl app are in the form of questions and answers. You post a Q to a bowl and random fishbowl members will type their answers. It’s an incredibly supportive environment. They also have these live verbal “Ask an Executive Coach” Q&A sessions, which is where the content for this episode came from.   My friend, an ambitious and impressive young leader named May Samoiel. Invited me to participate in one of these Fishbowl live Q&As.. Maye is a dedicated forensic accountant and consultant by day and in her spare time, she’s also a Community Leader on the Fishbowl app. When Maye asked me to do this, I jumped at the chance. And I’m glad I did.  It was great fun and I had the opportunity to hear real communication skills Qs from a live audience of over 750 professionals. Yah. SO there were well over 750 FishBowl members in attendance, raising Qs, which Maye moderated and asked me.  Live.    It turned out so well that I asked the Fishbowl folks if I could get a copy of the audio file so I could turn it into a podcast episode.  And VOILA, here we are! A few things you need to know: The audio is definitely comprehensible, but if you hear a few glitches it’s because we aren’t on fancy microphones, its all through our smartphones and via wifi. So there are glitches. But you’ll easily be able to understand everything, Also, you wont hear a summary at the end of this episode, because the answers to each of the Qs are relatively succinct.  Like I said, this episode is different from any other. But like other TAT podcast episodes, you can always go to the shownotes for this episode on the TAT.com website and reference relevant links and the transcript there. One last thing: what you’ll hear first here, is my friend Maye giving me a pep talk, then Rachel from FishBowl telling us its time to go live. I thought you might enjoy this peek behind the scenes.  Ok – here we go! Hello, Maye. Hi, how are you? I’m so excited. This is totally outside of the norm for me, right? You’re gonna do great. No doubt. I seen your work so I have total confidence gonna be amazing. Thank you for the pep talk Maye. Yes, that’s it. Absolutely. Give it another minute. Welcome, everybody. Welcome, welcome. Okay. So I’ll leave it up to me and I’ll drop down to the bottom. Thank you, Rachel.  All right. I see people are joining in. Well, fellow fishbowl members, and especially you Andrea was sneaky. Welcome to our Ask an Executive Coach event. My name is Maye and I have the pleasure to host today’s fishbowl live session. I’m a manager in a consulting firm and a fishbowl leader. But most importantly, I’m very excited because today, we have Andrea Wojnicki with us. You might have heard of Andrea, if you don’t know her yet. She is a Communication Coach and podcaster I talk about talk a learning platform to help ambitious executives improve their communication skills. She earned her doctorate of Business Administration and marketing from Harvard Business School, where she focused on consumer psychology and word of mouth. over her career, Andrea served on the faculty at the University of Toronto where she taught MBA students, she authored several academic papers and HBs cases. And she worked as a brand manager at Kraft. So for the very first time since we started the ask an executive coach series, she is generously donating an hour of her time to help each and every one of us with professional questions, dilemmas about communication. So thank you so much, Andrea, for joining us today. Before we jump into the subject, Andrea, can you tell us just a little bit about yourself and what led you to coaching? Sure. Thank you so much. Maye it really is a pleasure to spend this time. As you know, when you asked me to do this, I jumped at the opportunity. Yeah, it sounds like it’s right up my alley. So the difference between what I do and what many other executive coaches do is, I’m not focused on being a life coach, or even on being an executive coach, I’m really more focused on communication skills. So about three years ago, I started talking about talk really as this platform where you can choose whatever works for you, if you want to subscribe to the podcast. That’s great. If you want to subscribe to the newsletter. It’s basically like getting free communication skills coaching. I also do one on one coaching with executives, some entrepreneurs and some people at big companies. And I do workshops and online courses. So it’s really kind of multimedia. So I thought this is a medium this fishbowl through which I haven’t participated yet. So I’m really excited. And I have spent some time in various bowls, lurking and reading. And I was just telling Maye, I love the supportive environment and the atmosphere. Thank you so much, Andrea. And so I see a lot of people join today’s conversation. So, Andrea, someone already contacted me through private messaging. And the person is asking if you have a supervisor who is negative or critical, is it worth wasting time communicating your worth and defending yourself? Or is a more productive use of time to move on to a better opportunity with a more supportive boss? Okay, this is a great place for us to start. I think it’s it’s also a very common question, unfortunately. So I think I have two ways of thinking about how to answer this question. The first is actually some advice that I got from my father. When I had this happened to me, I was working as a brand manager. And it wasn’t my boss. It wasn’t my immediate boss, but it was her boss, who was it not just berating me, but berating other people. He was really making work, not fun. And I was very upset. And I remember when I called my dad, and I said, I don’t I don’t know what to do. And he asked me this great question, which I’ve shared with some of my clients. And they say, Yeah, that’s a great way to think about it. He said, Does the values of this person who’s giving you a hard time does his or her values reflect the organization? If they do, and you aren’t aligned with them, you should probably move on. However, if this person is an anomaly, things have a way of working themselves out. And you may actually learn a lot from learning how to deal with this person. And I said, No, his values really aren’t aligned with the organization. I would say that he’s the anomaly and he said, well, then stick it out and you’ll be fine. And he was right. So that’s kind of my first piece of advice on that one. The second thing is you If you can think about what might be making this person, so negative or critical, there is a model called the scarf model. And scarf is SC, AR F. It’s an acronym. And it’s a way of diagnosing what might be actually going on psychologically with people. If they’re being negative or difficult. Each of these letters is a word that could be something that they believe is under threat. So S is status. C is certainty. A is autonomy. R is relationships, and F is fairness. So the question is, and almost 100% of the time, one or more of these things, you can probably diagnosed as the person is feel feels that they are either feeling that their status is being threatened, they are uncertain, they don’t have autonomy, their relationships are being compromised, or they think that something’s not fair. And if you can figure that out, then that can help you understand how to best deal with the person. So we’re getting we’re getting kind of immediately right into the nitty gritty of some psychology here. But this is a really powerful framework for understanding how to deal with negative or critical people. I love your advice. I mean, first of all, the question about is that person really their actions? Or what they do? Does it reflect the organization’s value? I find that really key thank you for sharing that piece of advice. That’s my dad. Yeah. Yes, and yeah, this car model, so status, certainty, autonomy, relationship and fairness. Thank you so much for that. I also picked a question that I saw in one of the bowls, and someone posted that they’ve just joined a new position and need to introduce themselves during one-on-ones to the team. Any tips you can share? I have Maye a fantastic framework that I’m actually really, really excited to share with you all here. I’m excited to share it with you. Because this actually was a podcast episode topic that I released less than a year ago, probably six months ago or less. And it’s already the number one most downloaded episode of all time. Yeah. After it was released. I got emails from strangers thanking me and I have the shivers right now. Because even just a couple days ago, I was talking to one of my clients. He’s a wealth advisor, and he has these very, you know, wealthy prospects that he’s talking to. And he has to introduce himself, and he used the framework. And he said, Andrea, it’s gold. It works every time. And I’m like, yes, yes, yes. So let me let me share with you all, this one, this one, you don’t need to write down, okay? It’s so easy to remember, it’s three things. Are you ready? Yes. present, past future. So it’s not chronological. Once you remember that it’s not chronological, it’s easy to remember, it’s present, past future. So it’s also not a script. It is simply three words. The present statement is, I am. So hi, everyone. I am Dr. Andrea wash Nikki, I’m a Communication Coach at talk about talk. So you say who you are and what you do, it’s present tense. And then the second step of the framework is past. This is where you elaborate with relevant details that give you credibility. Now, it depends on who you’re talking to who you’re introducing yourself to. But you could say, in the past, I earned my doctorate at Harvard Business School where my research focused on word of mouth, as you can tell, I’m really obsessed with communication. So you go you go past statements, maybe things that add credibility, if it’s in a job context, which is what we’re talking about here. You could talk about previous positions, you had previous projects that you worked on. And then the third step is the future oriented statement. And here’s where it’s not. It’s not just and I’m looking forward to working with you. It’s a really enthusiastic statement, there is research out there in psychology and in organizational behavior, that proves that when you express enthusiastic emotion, be it in writing or be it verbally, the outcome of the relationship, or the negotiation or the meeting or whatever it is, is going to be more positive. So end your self introduction with a positive statement about the future that you’re expressing with enthusiasm. So a great one would be I’m really excited to learn your questions that you have for me in this fifth fishbowl session. Let’s do this. Wow. One of the reasons that I think this works so well for people is we’ve all been in this situation, whether it’s in real life sitting around a boardroom table, or whether it’s going around the zoom, the Zoom screen, one by one, we’re introducing ourselves. And you know, whoever’s leading the meeting says, Let’s go around one by one and introduce ourselves. And suddenly your brain starts going, Oh, my goodness, oh, my goodness, what am I going to say? How long should I talk? Am I saying too much? Am I not saying, right? You’re not listening to anyone, if there was a quiz about people’s names, or what they said, you’d get zero, right. But once you have this framework in your mind, you just have to fill in the present, past future. And you nail it every time. Amazing. It is true that like when we have to, when we go in circles, and we have to choose ourselves, sometimes my brain freezes, which is quite funny. So present, past and future. Thank you so much for sharing that. All right, I’m going to go on with someone that just pin me actually privately a question. So someone is saying, as I’m progressing in my career, I’m being presented with more public speaking and moderating opportunities. However, I’m more of an introvert. What tips or advice can you share to become more comfortable and be successful in these settings? Okay, I love this topic. Ah, there’s so many things I could say. Let me start by saying that most of us feel nerves. And in fact, a great majority of us feel nervous or a lack of confidence. When we are quote, unquote, on stage, I always say quote, unquote, because it’s not always literally on stage, it could be physically on stage, right? But it might be you’re leading a meeting, or you’re giving a presentation, it doesn’t necessarily need to be on stage. I have a story of when I was a young brand manager at Kraft and I was asked at the last minute to give a speech about one of the brands at the national sales meeting. And I was so nervous that I was shaking. And I went up to the podium and there was a spotlight on me, and I felt like it was a heat lamp. I was sweating. And I was red. And I was shaking. And I got off stage. And my boss said, Andrea, I almost had to grab you and save you. Are you okay? I said, No, I’m not okay. And she said, your face is redder than your hair. And I made a promise to myself. At that moment, that is never ever going to happen. Again. That is absolutely ridiculous. This is what I said to myself. And so I really did two things. One was, I went out of my way to volunteer for every opportunity that I had to get, quote, unquote, on stage. And as I said, that doesn’t mean necessarily physically on stage, but it could be. So that’s one thing, volunteer, every chance you have, I promise you, I promise, promise promise you, the more you do it, the easier it gets. Okay, so that’s one thing. And then the second thing was I just I started collecting, at first informally, and now certainly formally, tips and tricks and mindsets to help me kind of overcome any confidence issues that I might have. So I have all sorts of tips, you know, from, you know, making sure you’re very, very well prepared if you have the opportunity to practicing. If it’s a speech or a presentation, things like adopting a mantra, things like and Manos that I’ve asked people to do this for me before, and she jokingly started doing this before it before we’ve got on quote unquote onstage tonight. That is to give me a pep talk. So you could literally ask a friend or a colleague, to give you a pep talk. So there’s all sorts of tips and tricks. But if you want to improve your skills really quickly, there is one thing that is really, really hard to do, but incredibly effective. Do you know what it is? Like to sing good? Viet. I mean, it’s actually recording yourself. Right, right and watching or listening to it? Yes, I do this as a podcaster. I record my podcasts. And I always do the first round of edits. So I listened to myself. I’ve forced myself to watch myself on video a few times. And now with my clients who are asking me these questions, I also asked them what and we do it together. Sometimes we’ll watch them and we’ll point out the things that worked really well and the things that they should work on. That is the fastest, I promise you, the fastest way to improve is to listen or watch yourself. So if you want to ask your boss if you can record a meeting and then watch it later. It is very hard to do, but highly effective. Great, amazing. Well, the person just said love this great advice. Thank you. So yes, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that. I see that we have DaVinci who just joined Hi DaVinci Hey, how’s everything? My background has been entrepreneurship. I’m moving into investment banking and And moving into the finance game, obviously, it’s different because I will be go, I will transform from being CEO to, you know, a managing director or some other form of employee. My question to you is, what information or guidelines can you present to someone like myself, that’s going to be the most optimal, the most effective way to utilize my time when it comes to a position search. And I would also like to throw in there that I’m not at the entry level part of my career. So what do you have for someone like myself who’s seasoned, who’s been an entrepreneur, but now moving into an employee role where like an investment bank or something like that, what advice could you share? Thanks. Great question. Davinci. I think I can I can answer that from a communication perspective. And what I would do if I were you right on, yeah, the first thing that I would do is, I would go to LinkedIn. And I would make sure that you have everything in order there. And I will probably connect with you later. If you don’t connect with me. First, the three elements on your LinkedIn profile that you absolutely have to nail are your your headshot, your banner image in the background, and your headline, and all three of the, this is free real estate, right. So just make sure those are filled in and for your headline, it’s not just your current title. So use that. And don’t be afraid to incorporate some key words, like investment bank, you said ibanking. And these titles that you’re seeking, like, don’t be afraid to put things in there. I mean, as long as you’re being authentic, and you’re qualified for them, right. So but you can put industries, you can put disciplines, you can put titles that you have, you can put interests in there. So that’s the first thing I would do. And then the second thing is, you need to start doing some strategic networking. So on fishbowl you got up on stage, people are seeing your name, they’re there, they understand that you’re looking to make a career change, I hope lots of people will will connect with you on on fishbowl and maybe on LinkedIn as well. Reaching out in terms of networking, as you said to executive recruiters, I happen to know several executive recruiters very, very well, I speak to them on a regular basis. And, you know, letting the ones that you know, and maybe the ones that you don’t know, know that you are actively searching right now for a new position is a great idea. Don’t expect them to spend an hour with you going out for lunch, or they’re really networking with organizations who are hiring them to find people like you. So the idea here is you want to become top of mind for them. And you can do so by you know, getting on their radar, making sure your LinkedIn is looking great, asking them if they have any ideas for you. But don’t don’t be too I guess, greedy in terms of asking them to serve you because their clients really are the organizations that are hiring them. So just understanding the dynamics there is very helpful. But there’s a lot of great networking opportunities out there. As you probably know, it’s going to be your friends friend that helps you secure your next job. And so getting out there networking with people going to online events, going to real life events. And the one piece of advice that I really have for networking that I promise you works. And it may or might not seem as obvious, but it really works is to be generous. So be a giver, not a taker when you’re networking. And then people will remember you exactly the way you want to be remembered. Not as that guy that was trying to sell me or that guy that was trying to get me to do favors for him. You want to be a giver, not a taker. So whatever you’re doing when you’re networking, you can try to add value. And there’s lots of ways you can add value, right? You can add value by offering advice, offering suggestions, listening to people providing resources, it could be information or other resources that you’re helping them with, by connecting to other people is a great way to add value in a network. So sometimes it takes some creativity but if you always go into a networking opportunity thinking, how can I add value? How can I be a giver, not a taker? Things will work out much better for you. I think that’s fun. Oh, I’m glad Yeah, you think I was gonna say you suck or something. No, that’s great. Thank you, nice to meet you. Dementia pleasures mine stay in touch. Amazing. So we have more questions coming in. And over here I have someone asking any tips on how to remain impactful when going for maternity leave break and upon returning back. How to remain impactful? I think what this person is asking is how do you stay in the game when you’ve left the game for a little while, you know, the first thing that actually came to mind was is the fact that this platform fishbowl provides a fantastic opportunity for people that are in that situation, right? I mean, I can imagine being on mat leave, or having some sort of extended leave, and wanting to keep one foot in the door, so to speak, and grabbing my phone and turning on fishbowl and maybe even creating a bowl for executives on Matt leave, right or joining one or, you know, actively participating or whatever your style is. I think that leveraging these these platforms, like fishbowl is really a low stress and probably highly effective way of keeping in the loop. And you can also connect directly with the people that you were working with and with the organization and with the industry through social media, and then come back at least not having missed kind of the main headlines. You know, I think that the your mat leave should be your mat, leave. But obviously this person is concerned about also reentering. And I think fishbowl is fun. And like I said, for the most part, the the conversations that I’ve seen are very supportive and positive. And people love uplifting others. So, to me, if I was on leave, it wouldn’t feel stressful to stay involved with my industry on a platform like fishbowl at least. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I know that some people like to reconnect as well, like once they’re back, and just what I liked when people returned is when they share their experience as well. So yeah, sometimes people feel awkward about reaching out to people in their network to maintain relationships. And I have to say, coming back to work after a leave a leave of absence for whatever the reason is, and saying, I’m just back from a leave of absence, I’d love to go out for coffee with you, or I’d love to have a quick zoom call or whatever it is. That’s a catalyst, right? You have a reason? Because you’re re entering the workforce. Can we just get reacquainted? Or can we get caught up. So I would say make a list of the whatever it is, whether it’s 10, or 30 people that you want to reconnect with, and then use your leave as the reason that you want to reconnect, say, aye. I’ve been out for whatever it is three months, six months a year. And I just love to get caught up with what’s going on with you personally and professionally. Use it as a reason to reconnect with as many people as you can. Great advice. Thank you so much. I have a really a ton of questions coming in at the same time hair goes the next one. What is a first impression? In your opinion, what is the best framework to think about it? What is a first impression, it’s an evaluation or a judgment of someone, often based on stereotypes, right? Our brains are wired to make judgments about people. But we can take the knowledge of that to try to create a positive impression around other people remember what I said at the very beginning expressions of positive enthusiasm, sharing enthusiastic emotions with people about the work about the connection that you’re having with them, is going to make an incredibly positive impression. So put a smile on your dial one thing that I did, I was giving a workshop and I took like a piece of cardboard, and I taped it next to my camera with an arrow pointing at the camera with a happy face next to it. And then as I was giving delivering the workshop, I would see this happy face and it would remind me to smile and to look at the camera. Because it’s that impression, right that people are going to be left with so people care about your body language. They care about eye contact, and they care about your enthusiasm and yeah, okay, we’re talking about introductions. I know you shared the Present Past and future tip. Someone here just sent a message saying, I’m a Foreign lawyer who became a New York lawyer lately. Can you give me some advice on introducing myself? I find it difficult to dig out my past experiences, and have difficulty writing up some impressive experiences that I have. Okay, so first of all, I have to say that a lawyer with global experience is very impressive. So turn that thing that is unique about you into the positive and memorable thing that becomes your superpower. So yes, I’m qualified to practice law in New York City or wherever it is. But I also have this global experience. So you’re probably twice as valuable to your potential client than someone who doesn’t have that experience. That unique thing about you that you can’t deny, that becomes your superpower. And you need to you know, figure out the words to describe it in the way that is authentic and impressive. And lean into it. Don’t shy away from it. So, you know, you’ve got for an experience, call yourself a globally experienced lawyer. Wow. Just hearing that is already impressive. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Someone else is asking what is the ideal way to maintain a consistent healthy relationship with an immediate supervisor. I’m guessing through communication here. It’s gonna say, communication, communication communication. So beyond I mean, that’s obvious, right? But I think asking questions. If your boss says that was great, asking questions. So can you tell me what was great, and maybe what I can work on for next time, right? So. And that leads me to another point, which is the whole thing about having a growth mindset, if you can demonstrate to your manager, that while you have, you know, certain technical expertise, and maybe leadership potential, that you really have a growth mindset, you’re proactively focused on improving and learning. That’s one of the most impressive and satisfying things that as a manager, you could have, right? Is you want the person to want to succeed and to want to learn, right? And how can we showcase like, growth mindset? Or how can we, you know, develop that in ourselves? The way I define a growth mindset is, I know what I know. And I’m keen to learn more. So there’s really two parts of it, right? So I’m confident about my expertise. And my experience. That’s part one. And part two is, I’m always keen to learn more. And by the way, I’m walking into for the first time and open q&a, it’s a little bit nerve racking. So you know what I said to myself, Andrea, you’re gonna be fine. You have a growth mindset, you know what you know, and you’re keen to learn more? If someone asks you a question that you can’t answer, or that you haven’t thought about before, great, there’s an opportunity to learn. So this kind of mindset can get you out of a lot of challenges and issues. But if you can demonstrate to your manager and frankly, to everybody, but to your manager, that you have a growth mindset, what does that mean? I know what I know. So that means you are performing your job duties above and beyond you are delivering what they asked for plus, plus plus, on time on budget. And then the second part is, you’re sticking your hand up, you’re proactively volunteering to go the extra mile and to learn. And if they see the two of those things in combination, I promise you your career is going to take off. Yes. Because oftentimes we can feel stressed when when we get a question, like you said, for which we don’t have the answer. But a growth mindset would help us out of that. The growth mindset helps us out of a lot of things. When we’re nervous, even if you’re about to go on stage and you’re thinking, just remind yourself what you know, and what you want to learn. Absolutely. All right. I have another question that came in. It says recently, I joined a company. Soon after I was offered a position in a dream company where I had interviewed before joining the current job. How can I justify myself? I get this guilty feeling, And what should I say while I’m resigning? So this is a little bit outside of my realm. Right? So I’m not a career counsellor. But I am a communication expert. So just in terms of communication, I would think about the parties that are involved. And what can you leverage, if you’re sure you want to take the dream job and you’ve just taken this other job, the best thing you can do is tell your future employer that you made a commitment and you need to not just leave them in the dust. So you need to be fair to them and give them at least whatever it is two weeks or a month notice. And by the way, by doing that, you’re also signaling to your dream job employer, right, your new boss, that you have integrity. So you’re not just going to like not show up one day and switch jobs. Yes. Yeah. So being I think being open and as fair as possible to both sides. Okay, so someone here is asking any advice for an introvert who needs to create more energy chatter on Zoom calls? Okay, I have so much to say about the introvert and extrovert scale. First of all, introversion is not a negative thing. In fact, introverts have many, many superpowers. Introverts, research shows are better listeners than the rest of us. So think about that for a minute, right? The introverts that are maybe in your or maybe you are an introvert, in your life are listening. They are genuinely interested in what other people are saying. They spent a lot of time in their in their heads ruminating about conversations that have happened. So don’t put yourself down for being an introvert, maybe kind of lean into that power that you have for being such an effective listener. And if you ever listened to my podcast at the very end, I asked five, what I call rapid fire questions and one of them is simply introvert or extrovert. And, you know I am I interview some very impressive people So I have to tell you, a significant majority of them, tell me something like I am a quote unquote, reformed introvert, or I am a high functioning introvert and I’m like, What the heck does that mean? And they said, I’m naturally an introvert. I’m very internally focused, I’m a little bit shy. And I have, over the years volunteered enough times to get quote, unquote, on stage or to speak at a meeting or to give a presentation, that now it’s not such a big deal, but it’s not. It’s not kind of wouldn’t wouldn’t have been my natural preference otherwise. So many, many successful people in business and in life are introverts. And if you just practice with the, you know, verbal skills and being out there communicating, you can definitely be an effective communicator. And the last thing I want to say is a big part of understanding where you sit on the introvert extrovert scale, by the way, most of us are in the middle. So I ask in my podcast, introvert or extrovert, it’s kind of a trick question. Most people are in the middle, and the term for that is ambivert, and bi ambivert. But for the people that are introverts, that means they get their energy, when they are alone, right, being alone fills fills their cup. So just knowing that can help you kind of figure out how to manage your day, and how to manage your week. So if you have something coming up, that’s going to require a lot of energy, you should probably have some time alone before that. And if you need to be in a big group or conversing, if you’re going to like whatever a networking conference or something, then you know that after it, you’re going to be drained. So just when you’re organizing your day, and especially if you’re working your way up to important meetings are a presentation, think about where your energy is going to be and how you can fill yourself up. So I’m an extreme extrovert. I know that after I am doing presentations, or I’m with people that I’m going to be wired afterwards, so I always scheduled stuff on my calendar after so I can calm myself, Dale, I think it’s a big thing about it’s not just about being shy or not being shy. It’s also about how you manage your energy. What a great point actually, I consider myself to be a natural introvert and I can say, like, over the years, I just developed some tips for myself, I don’t know if that’s going to be useful, but there are some subjects that I can bring up in a conversation. I really don’t mind talking about them. And like, you know, like, for example, my, the dog I had for a weekend or I can really bring up that subject easily. And just even if I’m kind of repeating the same story sometimes or obviously not to the same person, but just have these little stories about specific subjects that you know, you can speak to, and just give your brain a break, like, a moment to breathe. Yeah. I find that it’s very helpful to do that. Because then you can think of okay, what’s, you know, why are we here? What are we supposed to talk about? And it kind of gives you a few minutes for the pressure to go down to. That’s true. That’s true. And actually, I really love your point about stories and anecdotes, or even topics that other people seem to find interesting and then kind of storing those away. I don’t know if anybody in the audience here is is a member of masterclass or if they’ve joined masterclass, but I’ve been watching some of those lately, and I watched the Sara Blakely masterclass recently, and her storytelling is phenomenal. And then today, I was in Tony Robbins, breakthrough 2022 session, and she was on as a guest, and she told exactly the same stories. And I was like, but you know what they’re compelling. Like, she’s filed them away, like, these are the stories that people want to hear. Yeah. So you don’t need to reinvent yourself every time. You’re in public. Absolutely, no, that’s great. Oh, I have one more question that just came in. How do executive leaders view the future of executive leadership? That’s a tough question, Andrea. So I’m not sure what that means, to be honest, but it’s related to another topic that it might be related, I think. And that is how to demonstrate leadership. Imagine you are in your, your year end review with your boss, and maybe you’re a director or your your vice president, you want a promotion to become a partner, or to become an executive vice president or to join the C suite, right? And they say, Well, you need to demonstrate leadership skills. What the heck does that mean? Here I am, I’m doing my best. I’m demonstrating a growth mindset. I’m technically Excellent. How do I demonstrate leadership? And so I get this question often enough that I’ve actually created like a list of a podcast episode on this. And there are many kinds of leadership, right? There’s people leadership, there’s thought leadership, right? There’s, you could lead a meeting, you could lead a project, you could lead an initiative. So for any of you out there who have aspirations to get promoted, obviously, job number one is to deliver your deliverables with excellence, high quality, work on time on budget, every time being proactive about exceeding expectations. And then beyond that, demonstrating leadership. So maybe formally or informally mentoring more junior folks in your organization, that is absolutely demonstrating leadership, right? Or maybe identifying that area where you are an expertise in creating thought leadership. So start off start a bowl on fishbowl with this area that you’re an expert, or start a like a special interest group at work. I know some, for example, some female executives in various industries that I’ve that I’ve been working with, they would do like once a month they invited you know, the 10 women in some organization to go out for lunch for networking and for supporting each other and the person who initiated that absolutely is demonstrating leadership. Thinking about the topic that you’re really passionate about and going deep, deep deep on it, and then sharing your knowledge on LinkedIn or maybe internally by writing white papers or doing presentations or training, doing training in an organization. It’s a fantastic way to demonstrate leadership. And then I guess the last one is just really being proactive. And not just putting it out when they say, Does anyone want to volunteer for this saying yes, and actually adding to it? So I’m not sure if that answers. I don’t think it does. But I think it’s really important in the back of our mind to always be thinking about how we can take the next step. I don’t know the person said, Excellent. So I have someone here. And they have a question about feedback. Does anyone ask for feedback from peers? Or colleagues? How do you ask for it or approach to the conversation? feedback is a gift, I want to say thank you to my friend Sharon, who, by the way, is an executive recruiter and a very, very successful one for that little little line that she shared with me. feedback is a gift. And sometimes it can be hard, especially if you’re hearing something that you didn’t want to hear or that you’re surprised about. But please, please try to consider feedback to be a gift. We, we only know what we know, right? We don’t know necessarily what other people are thinking or observing or how something may be interpreted. And we know that things, things will be misinterpreted all the time. So if someone says something to you consider it a gift. That’s the first thing. And then two other things. So when I ask for feedback, be it on a presentation that I’ve given, or coaching that I’ve given, or maybe a website that I’ve just updated, or a course or something like that, I like to ask people, and some of you may have heard this, but I just want to reinforce this is a great framework. It’s called Start, continue stop. So based on what you’ve seen, whether what again, whether it’s a meeting, or a website, or whatever, what should I start doing? What should I continue doing? And what should I stop doing. And by asking people that in that way, you’re it’s really sort of a non threatening way for them to provide you with the good, the bad and the ugly, you’re expecting it and they see that you’re expecting it right. So start, continue, stop. That’s the one thing. The second thing is, if you can only ask them, for one thing, ask them to highlight something negative, because people telling you what you’re doing great is never as helpful, I shouldn’t say never, because maybe maybe you need an ego boost that day. But it’s rarely as helpful as someone identifying the thing that could use improvement. So I am creating an online course that I’m going to be sending to about 20 people in my network. And I’m going to be giving it to them for free. But I’m going to be asking them for feedback. And I’m going to be specifically asking them for negative feedback on it. And yeah, it’s gonna be hard because I’m gonna have to reduce things and but I know that that is really going to take it to the next level. So feedback is a gift, especially negative feedback. Wow, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. Yes, it is a it is a gift, specially if we know how to use it afterwards, to better ourselves. So thank you so much for for taking the time today, Andrea, and thank you for all the participants for joining in on our session today. I hope that you will be joining the next one. And I wish you all a wonderful evening or day depending on the time of the day where you are. But depending on which one you’re in, I want to say thank you to everybody for the fantastic questions. I really had a lot of fun. And thank you me for inviting me and for moderating this and if anyone’s interested, I would love to connect with you on fishbowl and on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks everybody. Thank you. That’s it for this episode.  I hope you enjoyed this unusual podcast! Email me anytime at andrea@talkabouttalk.com. I love hearing from you – suggestions, feedback and ideas. Bring it on.  THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #102 Communication Skills Questions – Q&A from Fishbowl appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Social media is an effective but under-leveraged tool for communicating our personal brand. Let’s get strategic and learn how. Consider 3 things: WHERE you’re engaging, HOW you’re engaging and WHAT you’re saying. Here’s your opportunity to get updated on social media from an industry expert, Andrew Jenkins, author of “Social Media Marketing for Business.”   RESOURCES   Andrew Jenkins Volterra Digital – https://volterradigital.com Twitter – https://twitter.com/ajenkins LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjjenkins/ Recommendations: TikTok – Corporate humour from Laura Whayley: https://www.tiktok.com/@loewhaley Pivot podcast:    https://podcasts.voxmedia.com/show/pivot BOOK: “Social Media Marketing for Business” – https://volterradigital.com/book/   Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Andrea’s LinkedIn post directing people to the “Dove Toxic Influence” film: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andreawojnicki_toxic-influence-a-dove-film-dove-self-esteem-activity-6925788696591921153-zwmH? Andrea’s LinkedIn Post about the Japanese Olympic Official’s disparaging (and incorrect!) remarks about women:   https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andreawojnicki_tokyo-olympics-head-thinks-women-talk-too-activity-6763091578274889728-hFkO? Email Andrea Website – TalkAboutTalk.com Free Newsletter  LinkedIn  LinkedIn bi-weekly communication skills newsletter: “Talking About Talk”      TRANSCRIPT   Alright, here we go with episode #101.  We’re into the 2nd 100 episodes now. And I thought a great way to kick off the next 100 episodes would be with another look at social media. Why?  Well, its prevalent, social media cannot be ignored. Social media is a great way to network and it’s a great way to learn things.  And social media is changing fast. There are new platforms, and new capabilities happening all the time within the platforms themselves.  But in my opinion, the MAIN reason why social media is worth our attention it is a fantastic and under leveraged tool for communicating and reinforcing our personal brand. As you probably know, I’m a big fan of purposefully, strategically managing your personal brand. And social media is the perfect tool to help you do that.  It’s free, for the most part, it’s accessible, it has massive reach.  And yet, most of us don’t take the time to think about how to leverage social media as a tool to communicate our personal brand.  It’s not our fault – these platforms were built to put us on autopilot. Do you catch yourself going into autopilot when you’re on social media? I CANT be the only one! Welcome to Talk About Talk episode #101, where we’re turning off autopilot and focusing on our personal social media strategy.  Let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki (please call me Andrea!). I’m the founder of Talk About Talk, and I’m your communication coach. If you’re an ambitious executive with a growth mindset, looking to advance your career, then you’re in the right place. At Talk About Talk, we focus on communication skills topics like personal branding, storytelling, confidence, and yes, social media. And if you check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website, you’ll find tons of resources to help you, including the new online course on Personal Branding, as well as 1-on-1 coaching, the archive of this bi-weekly podcast, and the free weekly communication-skills newsletter. Please go sign up for that newsletter if you haven’t already – you’ll find it all at talkabouttalk.com.  In this episode, you’ll hear from an expert who’s dedicated his career to social media. My friend Andrew Jenkins, author of the recently published book. Social media marketing for business. I’ll leave a link to the book in the shownotes.  Yes, it’s Social Media Marketing for Business. But I have to say, whether you manage social media for your business or whether you’re focused on social media for yourself, for your personal account, I promise you’ll learn lots here. Let’s get into it. I’m going to, briefly introduce Andrew. Then we’ll get straight into the interview and at the end, as always, I’m going to summarize with key learnings. Three key learnings, actually. Of course!  So you can keep doing whatever you’re doing. As our guest Andrew says, one of the reasons podcasts are so popular is I can’t watch a YouTube channel while I’m walking the dog. But I can listen to a podcast! So whether you’re walking the dog, driving a car, or making dinner. There’s no need to take notes ’cause I do that for you. You’re welcome.  OK, let me introduce Andrew. Andrew Jenkins runs Volterra, a professional services firm specializing in social media and social selling strategies. Based in Toronto, Canada, he was formerly the Head of Social Media Strategy for Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and has worked with firms in North America and Europe, including CIBC, Rogers, Bell Canada, InfoSpace and The Aga Khan Foundation. A regular international speaker and panelist at numerous industry conferences and events, Andrew also teaches a course on Social Media Strategies for the Enterprise at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.   INTERVIEW (unedited) All right. Thank you, Andrew, for joining us here today to talk about social media marketing. Thanks for having me. So your book is called social media marketing for business. But when I read it, I realized that much of it is really directly applicable to us as individuals, whether we are, you know, sole proprietors, or small business owners, or whether we’re working in a corporation and we’re managing our own personal brand. My first question for you is, do you think that we should have a personal social media strategy? Oh, very much. So you know, a lot of people think social media is about an organization promoting itself. But the efforts of an organization from a marketing and sales point of view will often cascades down to the relationships that individuals have with individuals in either from a direct to consumer point of view, or to individuals at another organization, in the case of b2b. So it still comes down to people to people. And that’s based on trust and rapport. And that ladders back up to personal brand people buy from people who know them, and like them, and trust. And so you need to convey thought leadership to build trust, you need to be consistent to build trust, and all that ties right back to personal brand, and increasingly organizations that are relying on the relationships of their employees, not only to amplify their messaging, but also to act as ambassadors and advocates for the organization and their messaging, take a Facebook page with a million fans versus 150 employees with on average, you know, 400 connections, and all those employees sharing the corporate content can potentially outperform a single Facebook page. And that’s just one example. Oh, gosh, I think your point about firms encouraging their employees to amplify has been happening for a while. But now they’re even creating some content, it’s certainly become more commonplace. There are actual software solutions under the umbrella of employee advocacy, where I can, as an organization, put some content into the system that’s been reviewed, pre approved, and even like the copies already written, and so on, and it cascades down to the employee. And they just have to click share and out it goes on their LinkedIn profile or on it goes on their personal Twitter account, whatever they’re comfortable with. But also there was a lot of the heavy lifting on the part of the employee and employees want to help their organization for the most part, but don’t know where to start. And so they need some of the work done for them. Oh, this is all ready for me to go and share done. Increasingly, socials used to show a portal into an organization from the corporate culture to celebrate employees, friend of mine just shared on LinkedIn, a video from there, they had done an internal promotion for employees, or if not employee, sorry, employees promoted this scholarship. And then in front of hundreds of the employees they interviewed, the person they interviewed thought that they were like, down to the final two. And then they were informed that they were the winner of the scholarship. Wow. Yeah. And it had nothing to do with the corporation was the catalyst of this, the company was the one offering the scholarship. But I mean, it was just nothing but feel good content, but it was shared by employees. Yeah. And it’s so smart for these organizations, right? Because they’re improving their brand equity with their customers or their clients, but also internally, huge halo effect. Huge, huge Halo fest self reinforcing. Brilliant. So as you know, I think and write and coach a lot about personal branding. So I’m imagining being at an organization where many we’re employing software solutions, where they created content that was offered to them right as something that they could share. And then they could add their own comments to it. And I’m thinking, so I get a checkmark from my boss for amplifying the corporate line. In the meantime, I’m also managing my personal brand, right? So the things that I’m passionate about my expertise, my reputation, my identity in the workplace, do you have advice for people about what to think about maybe in that specific scenario, we’ll start there say they’re launching a new product, and they want everyone to talk about it. Sure. But even something as basic as LinkedIn itself. A LinkedIn company page has a feature that says when you post content, it says there’s a button to push notify employees, right? If the employees that are on LinkedIn will receive notification, that there is new content to share. And we have a client that on a monthly basis, we would tabulate the growth of the followers of their company page. But we would also calculate the potential reach of content shared by the employees that shared their content. Here’s the potential reach through the company page itself. And here’s the potential reach based on the amplification from your employees. And no disrespect to the client and the company page. But visibly, the reach through their employees was far greater. Of course, it’s the network effect. Right? That’s right. Yeah. But going back to your question about at the individual level is a personal and important and where do you start kind of thing comes down to what you’re comfortable with. Some people don’t like to write, but they’re comfortable in front of a camera. So fire up your phone, there’s a reason there’s a video feature embedded in LinkedIn or Instagram or now TikTok and so on. Don’t get hung up on production value over immediacy. You don’t have to look any further than Tik Tok, as an example, to see, people don’t care about the production value. I keep using LinkedIn as an example. But the LinkedIn corporate account on Tiktok, one of the first videos I saw was one of their young staff a 20, something in a LinkedIn corporate t shirt sitting on their couch in their own home, you know, riffing off some sort of meme. And well, if that LinkedIn now owned by Microsoft allows that or as seen sees that as permissible content, you know, don’t get so hung up, and there’s an expression to just ship it. Yes, you want to make sure that you’re not saying you’re doing it, and that’s inappropriate or is against corporate policy, but don’t get hung up on that has to be perfect. Just put it out there. And what’s the name of your podcast? Again, Andrew, the low production high value show exactly. I agree 100%, it’s better to get it out there than to wait till it’s ready to wrap it and put a fancy bow on it. Right. Nobody cares about the fancy bow, it’ll Cisco predicted by the 2022, that 80% of the content being shared on social would be video. And so the bar is low, the barriers to entry is are nearly non existent. But if you don’t like being on camera, you can write a blog and used to also that you’re incorporating artificial intelligence to read the blog, transcribe it, turn it into an animated video so that people can essentially watch it, it can pull in stock imagery, and so on. This is gonna be something we’ll be leveraging for my book, there is a solution where I can read texts, whether it’s from my book or my blog, or what have you, and it records my voice, then I give it a new piece of text that I have not read, and it reads it in my voice. Yeah, that’s not surprising. I mean, I hadn’t heard of it, I’ll admit, you’re the first person that told me about that. But I can see because AI is really about patterns. And so they see the pattern and the tone and the pitch and, and so on, have a voice. So we use get some blogs, and we use some solutions. So if I would like a lovely to listen to female British accent of voice, yeah, I can have that. Or if I want to take away the burden of reading my own book, to create an audiobook, I can read a portion and then have my AI voice take over very cool, or even if I just wanted to use like little snippets of audio as pieces of content, but I only had to read it. Read one piece of text once. Yeah. So I think that’s an interesting thing to offer. When you’re thinking about creating your content, don’t just assume that you’re posting, you know, a lot of people think so what am I going to post I’m either going to write something witty and find an image for it, or I’m going to find an article, and then I’m going to write two sentences about it. There’s so much more you can do. Right? Exactly. You can work smarter, rather than harder, do not fall into the trap of one and done. So I made a video or I wrote a blog and I shared at once and then I move on the shelf life of a tweet is 15 minutes. So there is nothing stopping you from sharing it again. And you can so here we are having a discussion. It’s gonna be a podcast, the transcript can become a blog, we can pull a quote like you when you read a magazine article, and there’s a quote in a box that stands out to be provocative. That’s a, that’s a pull, quote, well, I can take a quote, from a podcast, create a visual graphic, and use that as a teaser to promote go and listen to it. I can pull on create an audiogram, where it’s again, it’s it’s taking an excerpt from the podcast, but you can listen to it. Yep, we’re recording this on zoom as well. And I can have the full episode. But that also I can cut it up into, you know, six to 12 smaller clips, which is what we do with my podcast. So suddenly, every single episode becomes 15 to 20 pieces of content. Right? Beautiful, as opposed to one. And that’s it’s a win win. It’s a win for the producer of the content, but it’s also even a win for the audience. I think, yeah, well, you’re seeing increasingly No, I see a blog, and you can read it, or there’s an embedded audio file, you can listen to it. And it was one of the reasons podcasts are so popular is I can’t watch a YouTube channel while I’m walking the dog. But I can listen to a podcast True, true. So there’s sort of think of it as media but it’s different ways of presenting the content right. And then I want to get into the different platforms in a minute but before we do that, can you share with the listeners some examples of of what kinds of things that professionals can be posting. So, you know, in the olden days, Andrew, we used to talk about writing a white paper as a way of establishing your thought leadership. And we’ve blown way past that. So can you share with us a couple of ideas or examples that you have for how we can really create a reputation of thought leadership on social media? You know, I joke about white papers, having worked for a technology company that produced white papers related to their software, and have authored one or two myself, there’s nothing wrong with all those more substantive pieces of content. The example I like to give is, so I’m the former head of social media strategy for the Royal Bank of Canada. And any organization that releases some milestone report or milestone piece of content, whether it’s a white paper or case of a bank, maybe it’s an economic report, there will be people who want to devour that lengthy PDF file that they downloaded and had to give their email in order to get to. But there’s nothing to stop the creation of an infographic with highlights from said report, there’s nothing to stop a short two to three minute interview with the economist that authored it, to get their highlight from it. There’s nothing to write a blog that summarizes that sets the stage for or teases out why you should spend the time to read this longer report. People get hung up on this thing about what do I have to say? Do I have to write something? And one of the examples I give from something I did was I shared an article from I think, was Fast Company or but they were talking about Marissa Mayer, which at the time when she was the CEO of Yahoo, and she talked about the key to her success was working some insane 120 hour work week or something. Yeah, she likes to brag about her hours. Yeah, yeah. So I shared the article, and I preface it by with one word, agree, question mark. And the discussion followed from there, you don’t have to author everything. Similarly, my post on LinkedIn that had more views by far than any other post I ever created was, when the Japanese Olympic official made that horrific quote about if women are going to join boards, we have to allow more time for meetings, because they’re not succinct, was basically the gist of it. And I said, he took 38 words to say this, I use three do the research because the research shows that’s in fact, not true. Right. And it just blew up on LinkedIn. So you’re right, encouraging people to weigh in and establish thought leadership. Well, and with that in mind, you don’t even have to share a piece of content. Yeah, don’t just like what someone shared. Comment. Yeah, even share it yourself as a supporting supporting their content efforts, and add your own commentary to it, help the conversation, contribute to the conversation. And don’t get hung up on this that I must, quote, produce content. The content is the driver of a conversation. The ultimate goal is yes, you want to share content that’s thoughtful, informative, educational, helpful, and occasionally, you earn the right to be promotional, but you can also simply start by being conversational. You are as an organization or an individual competing for someone’s attention. You’re having to fight to get them to stop the scroll, stop their thumb, and richer media stops. The thumb provocative commentary stops the thumb and it isn’t about like posting a million times. You can post once a week and be very, very engaging and provocative. Join the conversation and Tik Tok is a perfect example of where comments are extremely important. Brands are building real cred by piling on to some of these videos in the comments. They don’t have to reshare a single thing that just have to show up in the comments and they get brand love the nice segue to the platform’s I want to ask you, if you have any interesting stories to share with us or advice about I’m going to pull three of the platforms Okay, so LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok, those are the three that for me, I think are most interesting and just talking to a lot of other professionals. And more and more TikTok, I have to say, Well, I’ve seen a corporate presentation from TikTok now, I mean, it was already fascinating before the pandemic, but one of the reasons it took off was people had a lot more time stuck at home to produce content, but also communities found them people found communities on TikTok like nowhere else before. One of the biggest communities is mums of TikTok. They found a community that provided humor provided support provided life hacks to make their life easier as moms predominately moms were dealing with working from home having to help the education of their children from home. There was so much burden unfairly placed on them. But there was this community there was this outlet. And that note we’re not only did they derive support and so on from it, but They were also contributed to it. And it just I talked about it with my students at the University of Toronto, I find it utterly fascinating. I’ve not produced a single tech talk, but I’ve been on it for four years, just as a net consumer, and it skews younger. But if you’re going to be there and you want to produce content there, again, you don’t, doesn’t have to be high production value, but it’s all video, you’re not sending out a static image like Instagram. So what I’m hearing maybe as a professional who’s looking to kind of up their personal brand online, I’m thinking about Gen Y and, and Gen X in particular, who might be like, Oh, TikTok feels a little young. I keep hearing more. It’s not just anecdotes anymore, right? There are stories about people who, whether it’s personal or professional are finding a niche on Tik Tok, and it’s probably worth our time to explore. People are still finding their thing. So Her name is Laura. She’s from Toronto. 1.2 million followers on Tiktok. And her thing is corporate humor. And she crowdsources What’s your most unusual email signature that you’ve seen at the office? Or she has a work bestie and she’ll ask him, How do you say that’s not part of my job description? professionally? Yeah, well, I love it. Well, I’ll just say on the case of Tik Tok set up an account listen first and this goes with any platform that’s imagine, see if your audiences there if you’re a brand forget as an individual, but we often recommend this to brands set up an account so that no one else does. Yeah, no matter whether it what you feel about Donald Trump’s network, true social, I have seen tic TOCs of a guy who set up the account for Walmart on true social, and Walmart can’t do anything about it. Wow. So this from a brand protectionism, it doesn’t mean that you have to love whatever the platform is, or whether you’ll ever use it. But to avoid any, someone hijacking your brand. Just to be mindful of that. Yep. Or even your name. Okay, so how about Twitter? Talk to me about Twitter, every time someone dismisses Twitter, and then you have something like the Academy, the Oscars of the Academy Awards, and everything that happened that night, we are reminded of just how integral Twitter is to our lives, whether it doesn’t matter whether you have an account or not. That’s where news comes out. That’s where news trends and from a social media listening and sentiment and so on, and now you know, Twitter is not everyone in the world, I completely understand that and get that I remember a conversation you and I had a couple years ago, Andrew, where I said, I don’t like how I feel when I spend too much time on Twitter. So I’m just gonna leave. And so I have a personal account, I have a business account. And I it’s pretty dormant. Yeah. And I remember your response to me, I actually, I’ll never forget it. I think it’s brilliant. You said, you curate what you see Andrea. And I was like, Oh, that’s true. I, I need to do some social media hygiene on when following. Choose who you follow, move people to lists and follow lists. If you’re on a desktop, you want to use TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, and you can have a bucket of influential people you follow up, you’re gonna have a bucket of hashtags, you can curate and remove a lot of the noise. And I mean, yes, Twitter can be overwhelming, but a lot of it comes back around. I love Twitter. It’s so rich in information. People say well, like what’s what’s the value of Twitter. So first of all, news dissemination. Yeah. And then I also say if you wanted to, like everything that was possibly could learn about a particular subject and have, you know, just overwhelming amounts of information about it for you to sift through. Would that be a value to you? And they will, yeah, I go, Well, hashtag project management, hashtag leadership, hashtag change management, you will find an absolute ton of information. Okay. And LinkedIn, talk to me about LinkedIn, what’s new on LinkedIn, it’s getting more active. There’s over 800 million members globally, people are recognizing, oh, I’m not having my coffee meetings to network. I’m not having my I’m not going to these conferences and corporate events, and I’m not out. So I have to make my connections digitally. And then that cascades into personal brand and making connection. Those are all the positive things. What I’ve also seen is people getting really lazy, and they are just spraying and praying. They are sending out automated messages through LinkedIn into my inbox and referred to asking you to connect and then you connect, and then two minutes later, you get a pitch, which is why it’s being now referred to as you just got pitch slapped. Yep. And it’s getting so bad. That I’m getting messages from two different people from the same organization with the literally identical or verbatim message. I hate it too. I feel like no matter what you do in your business, you’re selling something and someone wants to sell to you. So for me, people want to be guests on my podcast and I’ve been telling people lately I get a minimum Good company. Yeah, I get a minimum of five emails a day minimum, some of them end up in my junk, some whatever. And I have a strategy now and I share this with with some of my clients and actually to other podcasters. I didn’t ask for those people. I’ve never invited people to say if you want to be a guest emailed me, I’ve never said that. So I just I don’t respond, I just delete and if they’re incessant, I block. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m thinking there. This is not just podcasters. This is like, whatever your business is, people want to sell to you. If you didn’t invite that conversation. I was raised to be polite, and not to ignore people and to reciprocate when people are nice. These people want to sell something to you. If you didn’t initiate that conversation. It’s okay to say no, I just had to get that in there. It’s very actually relieving. It was a relief, because I was feeling a lot of guilt about deleting these messages. I felt a little bit of that too. And more recently, no, for LinkedIn, especially. I’ve gotten like someone after a five drip series of emails. Yeah, we’re the fifth one has shown me. Yeah. Are you not the right person? Yes. Yeah. Just reply. But there was someone who reached out to me. So I added to my LinkedIn profile, job title, author, and then I use the publisher. Yeah, there you go. You’re, it’s open invitation. It’s open season on and two people message me about promoting my book. Yeah. But what was worse was someone messaged me through LinkedIn and said, took a look at Company X. And looks like you’re, you know, things are really, you know, growing there. And perhaps we could talk about your talent acquisition needs complete, missing the fact that I’m not an HR and that I’m merely an author for said, publisher, I don’t work there. And so it’s just again, it’s automated message. Yeah, lazy and like you blew it, you might look more foolish. It’s like showing up at a sales call. You don’t know the client. So ill prepared. You know, like, what was the point of all that energy? Yeah, only a complete misfire. So. So I guess the main message here for LinkedIn is to be thoughtful and purposeful, and personal with your communication. So if your messages do not automate, now, if you want to schedule the posting of an article fine, because that makes it easier to manage. But don’t outsource the messaging of people don’t outsource the looking at someone’s profile, because we can tell a mile away and all of them will eventually get shut down. They are against LinkedIn Terms of Service. And you want to get your own account shut down for you using it. Yeah, that actually makes me feel even better about deleting them. Because I hadn’t thought of that. It’s probably not even a human on the other side. Oh, for sure. Okay, let’s get to the five rapid fire questions. Okay, the first question, what are your pet peeves? Sort of what we just talked about the automated messages in LinkedIn just being lazy and unprofessional. Question two, what type of learner Are you more visual? If I can watch and replay a YouTube video then so I can scan instructions, but I find a video more helpful. Question number three, introvert or extrovert? Introvert.  Question number four, communication or media preference for personal conversations, casual conversations. I prefer like zoom or in person. I don’t like phone. Okay, the last question and we were talking about this at the very beginning. So we’re going full circle. Yep. Is there a podcast or blog or an email newsletter that you are recommending the most lately or enjoying the most? Well, we talked about earlier, but PIVOT in terms of a podcast. I’m paying attention to the morning brew newsletter, which I think just sold to somebody for like $75 million. Wow. So yeah, I’m gonna check that one out. Thank you very much for your time, Andrew, and the listeners are really going to appreciate all of these insights. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #101 Communicating your Personal Brand on SOCIAL MEDIA with Andrew Jenkins appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Andrea’s top 3 communication insights after 100 episodes of the Talk About Talk podcast. These are the under-rated insights that Andrea encourages us to focus on, regardless of your profession or seniority. 1.) Keep it short.  2.) It’s not about you. 3.) Adopt a growth mindset.  SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST   RESOURCES   3 Big Thank Yous: Brian Campbell – audio & video producer at Content Consortium Andre Carneiro – digital marketer and Google Ads consultant at The Agency Sharon Mah-Gin – executive recruiter at Executive Search Alliance Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Website – TalkAboutTalk.com Free Newsletter  LinkedIn  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #100 Andrea’s Top 3 Communication Insights appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Are you a Sage Leader?  Sage leaders are inclusive, they are mentally fit, and they listen. Sage leaders are exceptional communicators. Learn how to communicate as a sage leader from executive coach Angie Alexander. RESOURCES   Angie Alexander LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/angie-alexander-yyc/ Instagram @sagecoachangie Clubhouse @angieayyc – weekly Mental Fitness & Sage Leadership room in the Thought Leadership Branding Club – Thursday at 8amMST, 10amEST   Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Email Andrea Website – TalkAboutTalk.com Free Newsletter  LinkedIn    TRANSCRIPT   I have another Q for you.  I know I’ve been asking you a lot of questions lately, but here’s a new one. Are you a sage leader? Do you even know what a sage leader is?  When I first heard the term Sage leader, I thought. I know it’s a good thing, but I’m not quite sure what it is or what a sage leader does. Well, That’s exactly why we’re here right now. In the next 30 minutes. You’re going to learn not only what a sage leader is, but how you can communicate like a sage leader. Let’s do this. Welcome to Talk About Talk episode #99, (YES 99!) where we’re focusing on communicating as a sage leader. In this episode, you’re going to hear from Executive coach Angie Alexander, who coaches executives on Sage leadership. at the end of this episode. I’m going to summarize with three things that you can keep in mind that you can start doing right now to ensure ensure that you are communicating as a stage leader. Are you ready? p Before I go any further, let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki (please call me Andrea!). I’m the founder of Talk About Talk, and I’m your communication coach. If you’re an ambitious executive with a growth mindset, looking to advance your career, then you’re in the right place. At Talk About Talk, we focus on communication skills topics like storytelling, confidence, networking, and yes, communication skills for leaders. These are the skills that will take you from a strong B+ in your career to an A+. And if you check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website, you’ll find online courses, corporate workshops, 1-on-1 coaching with me, the archive of this bi-weekly podcast, and the free weekly communication-skills newsletter. I really hope you’ll go to the website and sign up for the free weekly communication skills training newsletter.  So welcome to Talk About Talk episode number 99, focused on SAGE LEADERSHIP. I’m really excited to introduce you to my friend, executive coach Angie Alexander. Who focuses? Her coaching. On helping executives become sage leaders. Gosh, that sounds like something I’d like to become. I don’t know about you. Let’s get into it. I’m going to, briefly introduce Angie. Then we’ll get straight into the interview and at the end, as always, I’m going to summarize with key learnings.  So you can keep doing whatever you’re doing. Whether you’re going for a walk. Whether you’re driving the car. Whether you’re doing housework or whether you’re just lying on the couch. There’s no need to take notes ’cause I do that for you. You’re welcome.  OK, let me introduce Angie Alexander. Angie is a Certified Mental Fitness Coach with skills in organizational effectiveness, facilitation, decision analysis, process design & improvement, change management and project management. She has a passion for bringing teams together to work more effectively, make better decisions, be more innovative and think more strategically. Angie’s “people skills are her super power.  But wheat makes Angie stand part is that she can also talk technical stuff too.  She’s a Professional Engineer with over 20 years experience in the Western Canadian oil & gas industry.  And she earned her Engineering degree from McGill. Lately she’s been coaching executives, many of whom are also engineers, and she also hosts a weekly Mental Fitness & Sage Leadership room in the Thought Leadership Branding Club on the ClubHouse app.  If you want to check that out or connect with her, all her coordinates are in the shownotes for this episode. Today, we’re fortunate to have her here to share her thoughts on communication skills for sage leaders.   INTERVIEW (unedited) Thank you so much, Angie for joining us here today to talk about communication skills for leaders. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here. Me too. Okay. My first question for you is, what communication skills do you think set apart the most effective leaders versus less effective leaders? You know, so many leaders think they’re good communicators. Because they tell people stuff, right? They tell them. And I think effective leaders think a little bit about their audience, and they engage their audience, they engage their team, and it’s not just about a tell, it’s about listening. So leaders who are, are more empathetic and more vulnerable in their communication are, are better communicators, and they’re more effective. And, you know, typically those that aren’t great communicators. They’re only thinking through their own lens of communication, they think that their communication style is the communication style, and that if I’m communicating this way, you’re going to understand what I’m saying. And they’re not necessarily appreciating the fact that we tend to hear through our own lens. And if my lens is different than your lens, it’s not going to learn the same. So checking in. But it’s really that that empathy and the understanding of others way of thinking their communication styles and meeting them versus just assuming that my communication style is the same as yours. And therefore you will completely understand what I’m saying. I have to say, Angie, I love your answer. I have noticed, people generally when they think about communication, they think about projecting, right. Yeah, they they think about being the communicator means the person that’s doing the talking. And here, here we are on the talk about talk podcast, but a big part of it. For really, truly effective communication is listening and the empathy and everything that you were talking about. So I just have to say, so insightful. It’s not obvious, right?  Right.  And I don’t know if you ever took psychology or any communication courses in university, but they talk about the encoder and the decoder. And if we’re not talking about both of those that were missing half of the equation, so yeah, this is huge insight. It’s fundamental. So you mentioned the term vulnerable, being vulnerable. So the best leaders, when they communicate, they are vulnerable? Can you extrapolate a little bit on that? Yeah, I’m sure a few of the folks listening to us just had like, either throw up a little in your mouth, or, you know, a quiver or something that’s like, There’s no way. Vulnerability gets a bad rap, right? Like it, it’s so often equated with weakness. And, you know, if I show any vulnerability, I’m weak. And that certainly shows up in leaders. You know, particularly, like I work in oil and gas, so it’s a very old boys network kind of thing, lots of very male dominated. So for men to think about being vulnerable is or women in leadership in those in those roles, or they see vulnerable, like, vulnerability is about sharing everything. Right. And I think it’s finding that line between oversharing, which isn’t really about being vulnerable. It’s okay to say, this is what I’m working on, it’s okay to say, I don’t know the answer to that, but we’re going to figure it out. together. I think a lot of times leaders are afraid if I say I don’t know the answer, if I show that I’m uncomfortable, or I show that I’m scared, or whatever it is, that people aren’t going to trust me to lead them and keep them safe. But the reality is, as soon as there’s any chink in the armor, they’re gonna be like, wait a second, what’s going on. Whereas if you share a little bit of your flaws, I like to coach people in the group sessions that I do, I talk a lot about vulnerability in sharing and how it’s contagious. So if you share a little bit, I’m more likely to share a little bit. As a coach, I’ll share in that in that space. But I encourage people to share 10% outside their comfort zone, it’s not about like, I’m comfortable here. And I’m asking you to share way out here, which is way outside your comfort zone. So let’s not judge each other’s vulnerability, but let’s just know that that I’m stretching myself a little outside my own comfort zone, whatever that might look like. So for a leader who’s never shared anything with their team about anything, for them to admit that they have a dog that they love to, you know, sit down on the couch and cuddle with might feel very vulnerable compared to the person who’s always sharing about their pets. And now they’re, they’re sharing something else that’s a little more vulnerable. So it’s just showing a little piece of yourself to others. I love your distinction between oversharing perhaps, in terms of transparency, and giving people an unfiltered view of every aspect of your life, right, there’s that versus you reminded me of the term psychological safety. So I’ve been working with some clients and in terms of optimizing psychological safety in their organizations, and this relates to you said, leaders are supposed to imbue trust and make us feel safe. And safe to your point does not mean perfect. there’s so much around, like, and what is perfect mean? That means different things to each of us. But it’s the fact that, you know, we can’t control everything. So, you know, for a leader to be able to say, here’s the things that we can’t control. And these things, you know, like, sure this worries me a little bit, but here’s what we can control. Right. So I think as a leader, we’re not just saying Oh, hey, like, here’s all the things that can go wrong. And here’s what I’m worried about. But but then to take that and say, okay, we can do this together. Like, how empowering is that? When a leader says, I’m not sure that we know that, that I have the answer for that. But I know that as a group, we can do that, I know that as a team, we can do this together. But to be able to say, I will pull everyone together and give you the space that you need to do what you need to do, I think is is really, is really valuable. So you’re reminding me again, and I didn’t see this coming when we were talking about this interview in advance. And, as you know, but I wasn’t thinking about the overlap between this discussion and psychological safety. But one of the tenants of psychological safety is that it is one of those rare factors in leader in organizations, that is top down. So the leader has to create an environment and to demonstrate themselves cycle. A culture where you can be psychologically safe, where it is safe to be vulnerable to use the term that you just used right? To admit that you don’t know everything to admit that you’re afraid of something to put your hand up and say, I’m not sure the direction we’re headed is right here, or have we considered like all these things, they scare people back to your safe point, right. So yeah, I love this. And the other thing I wanted to highlight was I think the other thing that you’re talking about might be articulated in terms of a growth mindset. So yes, people that have a growth mindset, aren’t afraid to say, I don’t know. But let’s find out. Because I want to learn to Yeah, yeah, it’s a curiosity. It’s an openness. I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together. I love that. And I love that openness and curiosity. And it ties into something else that you and I have talked about the past is improv is that ability to start on a path, have a structure, have a bit of a plan, but be willing to adjust as we go. Let’s embark on this journey together, knowing that we don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but we’re going to go in this direction.  So as I’m listening to you, sort of roleplay what you would say, if you were the leader, I keep hearing we and us as opposed to I and you. And of course I pay attention to words, words really matter. You and I keep hearing we you’re very inclusive, and I can imagine that that would be very motivating. For employees, you know, the directors and the quote unquote, underlings to hear a manager say, I’m not sure how this is going to work. We’re gonna need to figure this out. It’s not I’m gonna figure this out and tell you what to do. It’s not I do, it’s we and us. you know, that’s a such a big part for me of leadership and the importance of, we’re in this together. You know, I don’t, I don’t know, part of it, I think is I’ve never, you know, we I’ve probably dealt a lot with my own imposter syndrome. So I’m like, I can’t do this by myself. But having moved out of that, and learning how to deal with that and tap into my own, my own superpowers, maybe as a as a leader is to realize that there is a lot of power in me. And that, you know, at some point, there’s things I have to as a leader, I have to own and I have to take on, but giving the giving, being part of a team and being the leader of that team and inspiring that team to move forward. And you don’t have to be the official leader to do that. People will rally around those that create that environment. Whether you’re a leader on the org chart in the hierarchy or or not, we all have that and ability to to lead through that inspiration and vulnerability and create that we can we can do this together. environment. That’s a really great point, though, I just want to underline that, that when we say leaders, we don’t mean the person with the status at the very top of the organization. We mean anyone who has the opportunity to demonstrate leadership at any level in the organization. So my next question for you, I think you may have answered this, to be honest. But if anything else comes to mind, the question is, what do you think are the most common or biggest communication mistakes that leaders make? Yeah, I think not communicating. Right. So either assuming that everybody knows what they’re thinking, by not communicating? That’s, I think a big mistake is, you know, either you feel as a leader that, you know, I’m not going to burden people with this information. I don’t have all the answers yet. So I’m not going to communicate. don’t they just assume they’re doing their jobs, they know that their note, no news is good news, all of those things fall into that bucket of not communicating enough. So if you are communicating as a leader, some of the mistakes, again, I think taking, taking the “I” stance instead of the “WE” stance can be can be a big, big issue that that sort of directive, communicating and not considering your audience. Who are you communicating to? What do they need to hear?  So interesting, though, because your answer to that question, I kept thinking, I’ve heard from other people, that I believe that this is true, that the frequency and the amount of information that’s being shared by leaders actually should be amplified. When there is a crisis, like for example, the pandemic because people are working from their homes, there’s a lot of uncertainty, right? People don’t do well in, in uncertainty. So what should leaders be doing? They should be sharing more information more frequently. And to your last point, perhaps, through multiple media, they shouldn’t be checking in on Zoom meetings, they should be writing it right. They should be creating podcasts actually be creating videos like whatever it is going multimedia so that however, different people consume information, the best they can access it. So I think that’s a great point. I agree. Great. So I know that you focus in your coaching business on sage leaders. Can you tell us what you mean by Sage? I am intrigued. Yeah, I love that word. And it doesn’t mean the plants. I do mental fitness coaching. And in our mental fitness coaching, we learn how to tap into our inner essence our true self and we call that our sage. If your your Sage is who you are and who you’ve been since you were a child. It’s our ability to be empathetic. It’s our ability to be calm and laser focused in our actions. It’s that curiosity like that the true curiosity, right if I’m if I’m leading, if I’m a sage leader, and I’m asking you questions. I’m truly curious about that I really, I don’t know the answer. And that’s why I’m asking, help me understand what I’m missing. I might even lead with I, I think I know the answer to this question, or I have an idea what this might be. But I’m really curious to hear what your what am I missing in this situation? So being open to that, again, it’s a vulnerability to say, I don’t know where this is going to go. Right. But I’m going to ask the question. And for me, that’s a sage leader is one who, who has that presence that creates that environment of safety and vulnerability. And you want to be with people who emanate a bit of that sort of wisdom and calm and peacefulness, but at the same time, create that safety. And they, they you know that when you’re with them, that they’re going to be listening to you so that that, you know, they know what you need from the situation. And they’re listening to you. And you’re part of the ongoing solution. So, as you know, Angie, because I did pre issue to you a discussion outline, the next question that I was going to ask you is how does this relate to communication specifically, but I think you kind of answered that, right? You talked a lot about, yeah, asking questions, for example, and being vulnerable. And you really made me think of something that’s off script. This is getting a little bit meta, but the best podcast interviewers that I’ve heard, or even interviewers that you hear on the radio, or maybe on the news is, are the interviewers that really listen to the answers that they’re asking, and then ask the question that they know they’re genuinely curious about opposed to the next question on the script. Right? Right. I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to an interview where somebody answered answers a question. And then the interviewer asked them a question that is totally unrelated. And you’re like, wow, they are following a script? Yes. Totally. Yes, absolutely.  we’re talking about this interview in terms of sage communication. It’s a little bit different from being a sage leader, but I think if you want to be a sage interviewer, you need to truly listen to what the person is saying. And then ask the question that you’re genuinely curious about. Right. Right. Right. And, and isn’t a podcaster or an interviewer a leader? Well, perhaps a thought leader. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the smallest sense, you’re, you’re leading the conversation. Right? It’s, it’s your conversation to lead but also creating that thought leadership. So yeah, sage, you could be a sage podcaster I love that, too. So your description of a sage leader and a sage communicator also made me think about listening skills. There’s not just two levels of listening, there’s actually four. So one is you’re not listening at all, then there’s passive listening, which is kind of pretending and interjecting just to demonstrate that we might be interpreting some of what you’re saying. And then there’s active listening, which is being engaged in interacting on a more sort of authentic level. But then the ultimate level of listening is collaborative listening, where you’re working with the other person, and this goes back to your “we” language, right? So you’re actively working with the other person to come up with something that either one of you wouldn’t have come up with, on your own. So do you agree that a sage leader and a sage communicator is really focused on collaborative listening? I didn’t know the term but I was thinking that there is something beyond active listening. For sure. Especially, I mean, maybe it’s just how we coach people on active listening, because often it’s repeat back what you heard. Yeah. And that’s usually if somebody is doing that, and they’re just saying, so what I heard you say, and they say, it’s like, oh, I’m very good at like, repeating back exactly what I heard. that’s a great point. That is a great point. That’s like demonstrating active listening, but it’s not collaborative love. Right. Right. And so it is beyond that. let’s see where this goes together. Because we both have something valuable to add to the conversation.  So okay, so I think I may have a collaborative idea here based on Okay, good. Let’s do it. I’ve been encouraging people, when they’re in meetings, and these days, many of the meetings are online, and they receive, you know, an agenda. Here’s what the agenda is, and here’s what the meeting objective is. Encourage them to also write down on a sheet of paper or on their computer. I encourage them to write down what their personal objective is. So the meeting objective is for us to whatever update the critical path or update status on whatever whatever the make a decision, whatever the meeting objective is, and then ask themselves, what what’s my personal objective here? It might be for example, to clearly communicate to everyone that unless certain timelines are met over the next week that we’re going to miss our, our launch. Or it might be that I want to demonstrate my expertise in something, right, for example, but I’m hearing that there may also be an opportunity to identify a team objective. Right, which might be different from what the actual meeting objective is. It’s like the meeting objective is tactical, and maybe there’s a higher level objective. Yeah. As you were talking, I was thinking, like, the risk there is, if I go in with my own objective, I can be so focused on that objective, that I’m not necessarily listening, I’m looking for the opportunity to insert what it is that I’m trying to get across, right, I saw depends on the objective, I liked your objective around, you know, showing a little bit of my expertise, because then there’s opportunities to, to show that but I think we have to be careful with that. Whereas if it’s a team objective, there’s like a, there’s three levels to me if strategy objectives and your purpose, what any, anything like that, and it can start with my own purpose. I don’t want to be part of a team unless I’m growing in some way I’m learning something, I’m moving in a certain direction. So So there’s, you know, there’s definitely always, why should I participate in this meeting? Unless I’m going to get something personally out of it? from a growth perspective? Then there’s the team. There’s a whole other topic on meeting agendas. And I think we often were very tactical in our meeting agendas, and it’s bullet points. And an easy adjustment to that is put it in the form of a question. Put your your meeting agenda point as a question. And even your overall objective, if you think about it in terms of a question, you go in immediately with curiosity, what are we trying to learn? What are we trying to get out of this? is, you know, do we have the right timeline for this particular launch? Do we have like, you know, versus checking in on the launch dates or something like that? Right. So asking questions is, yeah, such an integral part of being a great listener? Yeah, right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m assuming now at this point, I mean, I’m aspiring to be a sage leader and a sage communicator, and I’m assuming all the listeners are fully bought in as well. The last question, before we get into the five rapid fire questions that I have is do you have any advice for how aspiring sage leaders can improve their skills as as an effective communicator and an effective leader? Yeah. For me, all of this stuff starts with self. It’s really it’s about mental fitness, it’s about being able to not give into imposter syndrome. I just read your newsletter, about the crow on your shoulder. I love that. So, yeah, that ties in a lot to, you know, in the work that I do, we call them saboteurs. But it’s those voices in your head. And we often get people to try and name their, their judge, which is the is the main one and I can totally see the crow being a great archetype or, you know, visual of that Judge that’s harping away at you all the time. So, as a sage leader, if you’re aspiring to be a sage leader, you’re working to turn those down, do the work to you know, improve your mental fitness, which does take it, you know, don’t don’t ask me to come and fix your team, right? It’s not about fixing your team. It’s about fixing you. And it’s not even fixing, it’s just, it’s being stronger mentally, so that you can turn down your own inner voices and move them off to the side. So you can really allow that inner essence that sage to be present and to be leading the conversations more, because that creates this almost like this aura around you of stability and peace and, and an action like that action focus. It isn’t flurry, it’s okay, we’re gonna hear everybody, and then we’re gonna move forward. And it’s, it’s, it’s easy, we move forward with ease and flow, when we’re all in that in that place. And we’ve, I think many of us have experienced that when you’ve been in the presence of somebody who creates that environment. It doesn’t feel hard. You know, we can make tough decisions, we can have tough conversations, because we’re all in this together. And we know what we’re trying to do and it in it. You know, we work through it together and we’ve we float forward. So do the work yourself is really the bottom line for for a sage to be a sage leader, you start with yourself. So I feel like the conversations almost come full circle right at the very beginning, I asked you what communication skills set apart the most effective leaders and you talked about instead of telling, you’re actually engaging, you’re using we you’re being vulnerable. And we talked about the psychological safety. And now you’ve added this really important insight that you can’t be projecting this. Unless you’ve done the work yourself. You’ve personally gone deep in, like you said, your imposter syndrome. And if that crow is sitting on your shoulder telling you you can’t do this, you got to show them that you’re perfect. Back to what you said at the very beginning. You’re not going to be able to demonstrate vulnerability. Beautiful Okay. Alright. So let’s move on to the five rapid fire questions. Are you ready? Yes. Question number one. What are your pet peeves? Yeah, great. It was a good question. Because originally like, I don’t have any pet peeves. I’ve worked so much on my mental fitness. Nothing bothers me anymore, which is totally crap. It’s not true. So I have two one we kind of talked about before we got on onto this call was about different noises. So for me, it’s definitely like loud chewing or slurping drinks, or whatever I get. I get all about that. But then the other one that this is so funny, I used to play flag football in university. And whenever we watch football on TV, there’s no I roll my eyes every time they marched out the little chains and measure to the eighth of an inch, the placement of the ball. And if you watch how the ball gets placed on the field in the first it’s a total pet peeve of mine the accuracy is complete crap like it after it’s been put down, but who put it down? they come marching out with the chains and measure it to like yeah, anyway, that is very silly. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Question number two, what type of learner are you? I would say mostly auditory. I, I, if I’ve heard stuff, I’m more likely to remember it. I definitely like to do things to learn stuff. I remember it that way. But auditory, for sure. Listen to a book listen to I had to go to class in university. I couldn’t read somebody’s notes or read a textbook. I had to hear it for myself. So I’m not surprised you said that because I know you’re very active on clubhouse Question number three, introvert or extrovert? I’m definitely on the introvert side, because I need to be by myself. But I’m a gregarious introvert. So I’m happy to talk. I enjoy talking to people. So I struggled when I was, or when I first started learning about it. And I came out as an introvert. And everyone’s like, there’s no way you’re an introvert. You’re so chatty, you get along with everybody and all that. I’m like, yeah, no, but I need to, like I move myself down into this room in the basement, so that I could be away from the noise of my husband. Because it’s draining. It’s draining. I like the I like the quiet. Okay, question number four. Communication preference for personal conversations. Yeah, as much as I love phone calls. The reality is, I’m a texter. You know, and, you know, texts, whether it’s text or WhatsApp or something, and with my kids at Snapchat, Okay, last question. Is there a podcast or a blog or an email newsletter that you find yourself recommending the most lately? Yeah, the one lately is Adam Grants work life and has everything on rethinking. I just love that. It’s that open and curiosity around rethinking things, constantly growth back to the growth mindset. Yeah. You know what, I adore Adam Grant as well Yeah.  Is there anything else you want to add Angie, about communication skills for leaders? No, I think it’s just remain curious and open and recognize that communication comes in different forms, and thinking about the different ways that people like to communicate, but really be open, be curious and listen, listen more and talk less. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your insights. Angie, it was a lot of fun. And I learned a lot. Thank you. Thanks for having me.   THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #99 Communicating as a SAGE LEADER with Angie Alexander appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Personal Branding is important, yet it never seems urgent. Dr. Andrea Wojnicki shares 3 specific reasons why we should all take the time and effort to develop our personal brand, plus she shares a variety of resources to help you develop your personal brand: a new online course, podcast episodes, newsletter blogs, and more. RESOURCES   LEARN: Online Course 5 Steps to Nail Your Personal Brand – reveal your superpowers, articulate your strengths, and introduce yourself with confidence! Learn at your own pace and get 25% off with the code TALK25   LISTEN: Podcast Episodes #84 Strategic Principles of Personal BrandING  Before you start promoting your Personal Brand, you need to articulate what it is! Learn the 3 strategic principles of Personal Branding, plus the most common mistake that people make when crafting their Personal Brand. #71 Personal BrandING, AUTHENTICITY & TMI  How can we be authentic without sharing TMI? How can we be transparent, without appearing unprofessional? Copywriter and messaging strategist Tom Megginson encourages us to be authentic and focus on our audience. Code-switching and filtering are 2 ways to maintain authenticity without compromising professionalism. #77 Personal BrandING: Reinforcing your Personal Brand with Implicit Communication Personal branding is more than just the words we say about ourselves. Learn to reinforce your personal brand through consistent implicit communication, ranging from your personal style, possessions, affiliations, how you show up for meetings, and more.   #68 Communicating Your Personal Brand ONLINE  Actionable advice on how to communicate your personal brand online, including 3 KEY PRINCIPLES of personal branding, plus instructions for how to UPDATE, PARTICIPATE and MONITOR your personal brand online. #90 DEMONSTRATING LEADERSHIP: Leadership & Your Personal Brand Have you been told it’s time to start “demonstrating leadership”? Learn 5 ways to communicate your leadership potential and make leadership an integral part of your personal brand. You can create thought leadership, demonstrate people leadership, you can talk leadership, and more.     READ: Newsletters Strategic Principles of Personal Branding  Developing Your Personal Brand 5 Insights to Strengthen Your Personal Brand Personal Branding – Who Am I?  Personal Branding – Navigating the Authenticity-TMI Tension Update your personal brand online – 10 steps Your Online Personal Brand  Reinforcing your Personal Brand with Implicit Communication  Personality Tests    Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Website – TalkAboutTalk.com Free Newsletter  LinkedIn   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #98 The Power Of PERSONAL BRANDING appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Your Personal Style provides an opportunity to communicate your Personal Brand. People often see you before they hear a word you say! Learn a technique to help you define and cultivate your Personal Style, plus a simple tip to help you decide what clothing to buy and what to leave in the store. Thank you to Anne V. Muhlethaler for her valuable advice.   RESOURCES   Anne V. Muhlethaler AVM luxury brand consulting – https://avm.consulting/ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-v-muhlethaler/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_outoftheclouds/ Out of the Clouds podcast: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/74-mindfulness-with-anne-muhlethaler/   Recommendations BOOKS: DELIVERING HAPPINESS by Tony Hsieh – https://amzn.to/3K0kjYH PEAK MIND by Amishi Jha – https://amzn.to/3vk3WlI DIFFERENCE by Bernadette Jiwa – https://amzn.to/3LYOLEp Jack Kornfield – https://jackkornfield.com/podcasts-heart-wisdom/ Esther Perel – https://www.estherperel.com/   Podcast Episodes OUT OF THE CLOUDS Anne’s Interview of Andrea – https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/out-of-the-clouds/dr-andrea-wojnicki-on-hi_eog7VRbD/ Talk About Talk #74 MINDFULNESS Practicing our Communication Skills with Anne Muhlethaler – https://www.talkabouttalk.com/74-mindfulness-with-anne-muhlethaler/ Talk About Talk #16 Talking Fashion & Style with Toronto Fashion Week’s Carolyn Quinn – https://www.talkabouttalk.com/16-s2-talking-fashion-style-with-toronto-fashion-weeks-carolyn-quinn/ TRANSCRIPT   Here’s a Q for you: DO you have a “personal style”?  That’s a hard one, isn’t it?   Let’s try an easier Q. What’s your favourite color? What colour is your personal favourite? Anyone who knows me. Knows my personal favourite colour is turquoise.  Without Question. But what if you asked a fashionista?  Say renowned fashion designer and STYLE ICON Coco Chanel?  What would she say? According to Coco Chanel:  “The best color in the whole world… is the one that looks good on you.” I love that. Welcome to Talk About Talk episode #97, where we’re focusing on Personal Style & your Personal Brand. In this episode, you’re going to hear from someone who’s worked in the fashion business for decades about how to cultivate your personal style. You’re going to learn an exercise you can try to help you figure out your personal style. You’re going to learn a hack for how to decide whether you should buy something or not when you’re in a clothing store, and you also learn what elements to think about with regard to your Personal Style – beyond just your clothes! Why does this all matter?  Because your personal style has a significant impact on your personal brand. Oftentimes, people SEE you before they HEAR a word that comes outta your mouth. Your personal style matters. Your personal style is a significant factor in how you communicate your personal brand. A quick primer on personal branding.  Your PB is what people say and think about you when youre not in the room.  It’s your identity or your reputation. And certainly, you can control, or at least influence your personal brand. You can strategically manage it. ONE way to do so is through your personal style. Before I go any further, let me introduce myself.  I’m your communication coach, Dr. Andrea Wojnicki (please call me Andrea!). I’m obsessed with communication, and lately I spend a lot of time coaching executives and running workshops on personal branding, in particular. If you happen to be an ambitious executive with a growth mindset, looking to advance your career, then you’re in the right place.  At Talk About Talk, we focus on communication skills topics like storytelling, confidence, networking, and yes, personal branding. These are the skills that will take you from a strong B+ in your career to an A+. And if you check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website, you’ll find corporate workshops, 1-on-1 coaching with me, the archive of this bi-weekly podcast, and the free weekly communication-skills newsletter. I really hope you’ll go to the website and sign up for the free weekly communication skills training newsletter.  So welcome to Talk About Talk episode number 97, focused on personal style and your personal brand. Recently, when I’ve been coaching some impressive executives on their personal brand, a few of my clients have asked me – point blank – what they should wear. One marketing executive with a vivacious personality and a personal brand to match, asked me what she should wear.  At the time, she was wearing a boring black suit jacket with a beige shirt underneath.  No accessories that I could see. Lovely hair. I suggested she go with bold accessories or colours to reinforce her bold personal brand. I also made a note to myself: I NEED TO TALK TO ANNE! Who’s Anne?  Well, you’re about to meet her.  And you’ll love her, I promise. Amongst other things in Anne’s impressive bio, she worked at Christian Louboutin – arguably one of the world’s top shoe designers, for years, and she even managed his communications.  SO COOL.  Here’s how this episode is going to go. I’m going to formally introduce Anne, then we’ll get right into the interview. After the interview Im going to summarize everything for you with key takewaways.  And all of this (the summary, links to everything we mention, plus the transcript) are all available in the shownotes on the TalkAbouttalk.com website. So as always, you don’t have to take notes, because I do that for you. You’re welcome.  All right, let me introduce Anne. Anne Muhlethaler worked for Christian Louboutin, first in the UK as general manager, then in the US and France where she spearheaded global communications for over a decade, overseeing all channels including public relations, social media, content creation, retail marketing and events, as well as wholesale collaboration programs and partnerships. Nowadays, Anne leads AVM Consulting, a branding and communication consultancy that provides bespoke communication and business development strategies for fashion and luxury brands worldwide. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, Anne’s also a meditation and mindfulness instructor. You can hear more about this side of her in TAT episode #74. Yah, Anne’s a sort of a renaissance woman. And she writes one of my favourite weekly blogs. She’s smart and she’s thoughtful. She also has a beautiful voice (she’s a singer) and she hosts a podcast (that’s actually how we met).  Her podcast is called “Out of the Clouds” – I’ll leave links to her podcast and newsletter in the shownotes.  So as you can see, Anne’s got a lot going on.  She’s smart, she’s generous, and she’s on a mission, as she says, to make us better at living. Let’s start with how we look – our personal style.   INTERVIEW (unedited)   Thank you and so much for joining us here today to talk about personal style.  Oh, thank you so much for having me, Andrea, I’m delighted to be talking to you today. Okay, let’s start by talking about the definition of style, particularly relative to fashion. I have my own ideas about how those terms are distinct. But I would love to hear from an expert. When I was thinking about style and the topic in general, I just thought I was going to quote a friend of mine who happens to actually be from Toronto from Canada. I actually interviewed him on the podcast as well. His name is Todd Lin. He is a menswear and womenswear designer. And apparently he’s producing a short line of knitwear. And what he said to me is, fashion is about ideas. And sometimes these ideas become clothes. And I think that it’s interesting in a good way to get into the conversation, because fashion does convey a lot of concepts. And whether you choose to actively think about this as you get dressed, whether it’s for yourself, or going out for work, or not, fashion itself, as around belongs to the world of ideas. And when he said that, to me, I thought, wow. And so style is entirely different style is something that can be applicable to your writing, the way that you express yourself, the way you decorate your home, or how you get dressed. And I think that our personal style for most people does evolve a lot through our lives. But I think what’s interesting in this question is to first identify what is it that we like, before talking to you, I was thinking, What do I like, I’m pretty colorful, not that you’ll see it today. But there’s texture, where sometimes I don’t have color. I’m very eclectic, and I like a multiplicity of things. And you will find this in my personal dress style, as much as you’d find it in my home or in other things that express something about me. So I think that style is much wider than what we see through our clothes. But it’s obviously an important part of it. Do you have like a list of ways or places where style shows up? So you said how you decorate your home, your clothing? What else can we be thinking about in terms of expressing our style, I think that the way we write the way we speak on the phone, for example, I’m a thoughtful email writer. And that means I don’t write emails, how I speak or how I text. So I’m relatively formal in my email style. And that is something that you’ll find across the board. And that hasn’t changed over time. And in terms of in person or over the phone. Again, I like to be very considerate. It’s something that comes to me relatively naturally. But I also am very intentional about it, my style is very warm, and tends to be a little bit more casual. I work mostly in English, but I do obviously engage in French. And occasionally in Italian, there is a formal rule or lay in Italian. And wherever possible, I’d rather be using the more informal but with a lot of warmth and with you know, consideration, which means that you’re expressing respect. Okay, so you said so much there that I want to dig further on. You use the word intentional. And you also said that your personal style, what I heard was that it’s informal and warm. Yes. But it also varies across medium, right. So as you said, texting versus phone calls versus an email and your newsletter, your newsletters, definitely feel informal, but warm. Does that informal and warm tone? carry over into how you dress? Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a very interesting segue that you’re making, but love formal dressing. So in my previous career, I had an enormous amount of opportunities to get very well dressed for lots of events. And let’s be honest, I’ve really enjoyed that. I have a, I have half a closet in my guest bedroom that is entirely dedicated towards evening where that I hasn’t seen the light of day for over two and something is wow. So yeah, I prefer informal. And I think that you can find warm through the colors you can find warm through the textures. And so where possible, I try to make sure that my wardrobe is not going to give me any discomfort. Because you know, wardrobe disasters can happen. Oh goodness, I definitely want to talk about wardrobe disasters. I guess that’s a good segue into what are some of the mistakes that you see people making? I mean, listen, when I think about mistakes, I think about the ones I’ve made, first and foremost, for me, the mistake is when we try to be someone we’re not. And that happens a lot when we don’t know who we are. Personally, in my career previously when I was in London in particular, from my mid 20s into my earliest At ease, I never had a desire to be in fashion, I wanted to be a singer, I had a whole thing. And so as things progressed in my career kept on moving up and up and up, I found myself first having salary that didn’t necessarily reflect, you know, the opportunities to get dressed with the designers that were surrounding the store I was in. And then the secondary thing is, I didn’t know how to get dressed to be a fashion executive because I wasn’t sample size. And a lot of the women that were in and around me, were very skinny and could afford to buy anything that was discarded from fashion shows, and the samples that designers make at the start of the season that you can buy for 80% off or something at the end of each season. So for me, it was, it was a real struggle, I found it very difficult to get dressed for a few years. So do you have any specific examples of mistakes that you made, it could be a specific article that you wore that you were like, steak, or like a way of thinking about how to dress that you realized wasn’t working for you? Listen, I for a while I went down the route of the dress, because it just felt easier, you know, put a pair of tights on put a pair of heels slip on a dress. And I think that for a lot of women, when we need to show up and be relatively formal, because we have a lot of appointments, there’s a lot of see title coming to our office, it just feels like it’s the more considered choice because you don’t need to think about it mega heart, you know, you don’t need to over accessorize. You put a big coat on top of that handbag, and boom, you’re good to go. And some of the dresses that I got in looking back, not my favorite fashion choices of all time, whether it catastrophic, probably not. Yeah, and I definitely remember a couple of very nice dresses like super chic, short dresses. But the fabric felt itchy. I have this vision. And I remember one or two bit particular winters in London, where I feel it was just a little bit itchy. And just feeling just a little bit too tight here. Not quite right there and just not not quite comfortable. But I am a very, very big fan of comfort, particularly to express your personal style through clothing, and through shoes. You want your clothes to be something that enhance you, you know, there’s always that famous Coco Chanel quote, I’ll paraphrase. But she says you want to be seeing the woman, not the dress. And I think the minute that your clothes give you any kind of discomfort or make you feel self self doubting or losing your self confidence because something is not quite right, then people are going to notice the way you’re dressed rather than notice you sure  you want your clothes to be an extension of you. Right? You don’t want them to dominate you.  No, not at all. Especially not your shoes, especially for women. So you’re really focusing on the shoes, which is understand, given where you’ve gone Yes. I’m sure that any and all women who are going to listen to this podcast are going to of course, think of shoes if we talk about personal style. And if I say comfort, the first thing that’s going to come as to you know, the state of that toes. That’s really interesting. So I have a friend that she’s stunning and she used to be a model. And she told me that when she was doing her modeling courses, they taught them hair, hands and feet. Before you leave the house, check your hair, check your hands and check your feet as long as those three things look fantastic. You’re probably good to go. That’s such that’s such a good piece of advice. Yeah, I remember that when I first landed in London and started working in the boutique Christian Louboutin. I was always enjoying reading magazines and being around fashion. Beforehand, my mum was incredibly stylish woman. I wasn’t, she was not that excited about my fashion. But I remember just wearing a lot of very simple things like a white t shirt and a pair of cargo pants, and having a good pair of shoes. And I think that’s why so many of us focus on footwear. You can have a couple of very simple items to wear. And just one great accessory that just lifts everything up and that it’s sometimes through that accessory that you get to say something about what your style is true. You know, I was thinking about this quote that my friend shared with me and I was thinking nowadays, it’s also the handbag, the handbag seems to be pervasive or common in terms of when when we talk about accessorizing Yeah, I’m not a massive handbag person. So I have a few. I’ve never really been much into the bags of late. So I think that This is something that you’ll find in any and all fashion websites and magazines. But for me, it’s a little bit less important. And I think that it also becomes less important because a lot of us have spent a lot of times at home. And I think the difficulty for handbags is that you really need to have the functionalities. And you really need to be careful about the weight. So everything that you just said, it could also apply for our footwear, right? It’s like, form and function, there’s the aesthetic, and then there’s, is it comfortable. And then you said for you, you know, the shoes are probably the accessory for other people, there is the it bag, and they want to have the bag or they have a particular bag that they use to express their personal brand, whether they’re conscious of it or not. And I feel like that might be a nice segue into personal branding, because I think there’s a very strong connection between our personal brand and our personal style. And in fact, you know, when I’m coaching my clients on personal branding, after we’ve articulated what their personal brand is, we move into this long list of ways to express the personal brand, including how they dress. And I shared with you previously that recently several clients have started to ask me, Andrea, how should I dress? Can you talk a little bit, I guess, in general about how we can express our personal brand through what we’re wearing? Sure. I’m thinking about your clients, and maybe helping you answer that question. There’s a reason why in a lot of movies, there’s a moment where someone’s going through, you know, what, like that pretty woman situation where she tries on all of the clothes and she comes back out. And she’s like a new woman. We like a makeover. Right. But I think that the piece that we all forget about the Mi Coover is that there’s a lot of tying on that happens beforehand. And what I think most of us don’t give ourselves the opportunity to do I mean, I certainly did not for most of my life, is to do it properly. And to go okay, so what should I wear? Let me try tons of things on. And let me do this with someone who can give me an informed opinion. And by that I don’t mean your mother, or your best friend, or your husband. First of all, without spending a lot of money, just go to a store you love and go and speak to someone and say, Listen, I’m trying to figure out what my personal brand is. And I’d like to try few things on. Is there anyone that can help me and just spend an hour, right spend an hour, take the accessories that you are most likely to be using, whether it’s shoes or a bag, a pair of tights, I keep on thinking about women, but it’s the same for guys. And and give this a try. And also by the way, you’ll be doing that store owner or that store assistant a favor. Because it’s rare that someone proactively says listen, I’m looking for something, I need help. And I think that when we ask for help, we’re much more likely to come out on the other end, feeling like we’ve succeeded and found something that really suits so I remember a few years ago, I hosted a bunch of large events in the south of Europe in Italy and scorching hot temperatures. And I was very uneasy about what I was going to wear. And I was working at the time quite closely with Net-a-potter the multi brand online store. And so one of my friends who was at the time, the head of their personal shopping service, said Listen, come to the personal shopping suite and tell us what you need, how many events what time What’s the occasion, blah, blah, blah. And I’ve got to be honest, it sounds a little bit full on but it was absolutely amazing because I don’t know most of the clothes that they had on in stock that season. And you want to go towards a professional who’s going to say try this on it’s gonna be amazing. And on the rack I’m thinking oh, I’m going to look like I’m wearing a tent. And you know what? Some of the best dresses have ever bought in my entire life and it still holds up seven years later because it was the most amazing dress and I would have never even gone towards that designer because I am not that fond of Michael Kors. And yet proven wrong. So I think whether you are in to high fashion, vintage, regardless of the level of your budget, it’s really worth going and actively trying to figure out what suits you and you don’t need to buy a lot. But be clever and make sure that you come out with something that you love so much you want to wear straightaway. That’s my go to role. If I don’t want to wear it today, even if the weather is not appropriate. And I probably don’t want you oh that is a fantastic test. I love that if you’re if you’re not excited to put it on immediately. Leave it in the store. I also love your advice about going in and seeking that professional. And I’m actually thinking back to this amazing sales person, Connie who’s helped me a couple times. And I remember I went in there after I had my third baby. And I felt really frumpy. And I had to go and speak at a conference and I was going to be, you know, quote, unquote, on stage. And I told her all this, and she helped me pull together a suit, I actually still have it. So I went to her with the occasion. And also, here’s how I feel. Now, here’s how I want to feel. So I was really implicitly expressing to her my personal brand. I’m feeling frumpy, how I want to feel is professional and put together. And, and I’m a pretty bold person, which, which leads me to my next question for you. I’ve had this question twice in the last two weeks, and I’m doing a lot of one on one coaching with and in these two cases, it was women, but it could apply to men definitely equally as well, who have said, okay, so I am a bold leader, Andrea, what should I be wearing? And you know, to one of the women, I said, well, the easy answer is that you need to wear something bold, but it needs to be true to you. So you know, it could be color, it could be an accessory, and I said you have gorgeous hair, you know, pull your hair up and in front and show off your gorgeous hair. I think this may be a common thing, right? There’s people who don’t look bold, but they are bold, and they step it up. I think that one of the easiest things to do is to do a visualization exercise. So I recently was coaching someone who has had a lot of stops and start with her career. And so what we did is we sort of stepped into the future, so to speak, ask her to close her eyes. And to visualize what it’s going to be like the day she’s got the office, she’s dreaming off. And so we start to visualize the space, the environment, the location. And then I asked her to be more descriptive about the internal design of her office. And I asked her what she looked like what she was wearing. The thing is, when we start when you close our eyes, when you go inwards, and we start projecting, we immediately have ideas that we’ll come up with in our mind’s eye. But essentially, we have a connection to that other person that we’d like to be embodying, let’s say, and so the goal at the end of a coaching session like this is to say, okay, so what out of that future you that you want to be? What can you bring into your life today? So is it the black polo neck that you described me that you were wearing? Is it the way that you were holding your hair, she was descriptive about her glasses, for example, or about the watch she was going to be wearing. So some of us will have an idea about we could be a piece of jewelry. And so it’s funny, because once you start having that sort of inner consultation, it becomes much easier to step in those shoes, because somehow you’ve been in them before, right? I think you’ve mentioned hair, and I would go to her as well. Whether you’re a man or a woman, yeah, consider well, how do you want your hair to be like you? How do you want to be seen, if you’re a woman, be very tactful about how you want to wear your makeup. And I always go back to that quote that you introduced me to. This matters, because your personal brand is what people will say when you leave the room. I love the idea of thinking about the future you the desired future you write thinking not only about the office that he or she is in, but also about how that person’s dressed. And then you’ll feel like I noticed you used a metaphor with shoes, you said you have walked in those shoes before, at least in your mind, right? When we step into that visualization about ourselves, there’s a real opportunity to bring that desired feeling because it’s the feeling we want, right? And start to make it real, make it manifest, make it manifest by choosing at least one component of what comes up in the visualization. Brilliant, brilliant. Your recommendation for doing this visualization also reminded me have the saying it’s almost a cliche, right? Don’t dress for the job you have dress for the job you want. But this is a way to really take that to the next step. Imagine yourself in that office. What are you wearing? on that stage? What are you wearing? Yeah, and I think that it’s also the beauty of it is you’re wearing it for yourself? Yeah, absolutely brilliant. But I like the idea that we in that way we’re dressing for the job we want but really, we’re dressing for ourselves. Right? Right. So you’re gonna be quoted on this. Absolutely. And because the cliche phrase of dress for the job you want not the job you have. In our minds, we’re thinking about other people that have that job or that kind of job and how they dress. But you’re saying no, no, no, you in that job? How are you dressed? How are you feeling? So observing yourself from another person’s perspective, but then really being focused on am I communicating implicitly? How I feel and how I want to feel? Yes, I think that’s wonderful. And I believe that one of the best things that we can do in tandem with this exploration is to make sure that we are clear about what our values are like, what is it that I wanted to be conveying about myself? And I think that there’s a, there’s a work of self reflection, which I think that you do a lot with your clients, so that they really have a clear perspective on what they want to put across. And then carrying that through and see, is there a correlation? Or is this dissonant? Is there something about what I’m presenting to the world that goes against what I’ve put on paper as to what my personal brand is? Beautiful. Okay, we’re gonna move on to the five rapid fire questions. Are you ready? Number one, what are your pet peeves? I really can’t stand it. When people put out a newsletter and say to new followers, Oh, tell me where you are, who you are, where you’re from. And then they ask you to email you and then your email and the one response that really I cannot stand it really pisses me off? That is very fair. Okay. Question number two, introvert or extrovert? enthusiast, ik introvert, which some people find confusing. Okay, the third question is actually related to a comment that you made about the way that people imagine things. What type of learner Are you? How do you internalize information I internalize in two ways. First in writing, I find that I’m a very big note taker. So and I take notes, very liberally on my phone or my computer hand, I have paper everywhere post its, but I also am a big, I think it was thanks to Seth Godin, who in a Tim Ferriss interview, had said, These are my favorite books, and it’s worth having them on audio and listening on repeat like six or seven times. Every time I listen to it, more of the knowledge seeps in and I don’t, I’m not gonna remember everything otherwise. But so for me, I’m not just a learner, I’m integrating when I repeat, and repeat and repeat either reading, writing or listening. Okay, last question. Do you have any recommendations for books, blogs, or podcasts that you’ve been sharing with people? I’m going to be very specific on the podcast. So I trained as a coach with Martha Beck last year, and she has a podcast called The Gathering pod. And she did two interviews with the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. I cannot recommend this enough. She’s the neurologist who had a stroke, right? Yes, yeah. And I also really, really love the podcast by Jack Kornfield. It’s called the wise heart, the wisdom heart. I can’t remember. But it’s a beautiful and generally there’s long talks, and he’s quite funny, and he’s super thoughtful. And it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s like a hug. As a newsletter, I want to tell you, Esther, Parral rocks my world. I mean, frankly, it’s worth the hype. She’s really impressive. And as for books, how much time do you have for me to recommend books. I’m going to give you what I’m reading at the moment. So right now, I am listening on audible to the late Tony Hsieh his book which is called Delivering Happiness. This is the founder of Zappos, and I’m really, really enjoying it. I am also loving this book called Peak mind by Dr. Michel Jarre. I really loved her tech talk about attention, which I think everyone should see. And the book is, is really delivering and I also have it on Audible. And then this one, which I’m actually quoting today, in the intro of my newsletter, it’s called difference. It’s by the writer, Bernadette jiwa. She’s a wonderful, wonderful writer. And she generally writes about marketing, communication and business. It’s very smart. It’s very simple to understand. And it’s, it’s generous. I really, really like her. Your recommendations are so compelling, and I can’t wait to devour every single one of them. So I will also link links, I mean it, I will leave links to all of those in the show notes and also to your website and your blog, because I know I’ve told you this before and I want to say publicly your blog is one that I read top to bottom, and I always am so glad that I did. It is very thoughtful and very smart. So thank you so much. I’m so excited. Yeah, I love it. I mean it. Is there anything else you want to say in terms of our personal style and our personal brand? I would say just I think that we all deserve to be seen. And I think that this is something that it’s a journey that we can support each other on and don’t forget, you can ask other people for help. It’s worth it. That’s great. Thank you so much and for sharing your insights and your time I will Love this conversation thank you I could have talked about this for another three hours.   THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #97 PERSONAL STYLE & Your Personal Brand appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Body language is a significant element in our communication. Here’s a 3-point body language scan to help you optimize both how you are perceived and how you feel. Perhaps you’re not sure what to do with your hands? Or perhaps you catch yourself slouching and your mind is wandering. Think: “3-Point Body Language Scan!” Suddenly, you’re engaged, credible, and enthusiastic. THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #96 The 3 Point BODY LANGUAGE Scan appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Andrea interviews leadership communication expert Judith Humphrey (part 2). Learn about imposter syndrome, communication differences between men and women, effective self-promotion, the leaders’ script, when we should apologize, and what to do when your boss suggests it’s time to demonstrate leadership. This is part 2 of a two-part feature (ep. 94 & 95) on “Taking the Stage: Communication skills for Leaders.”   RESOURCES    Judith Humphrey WEBSITE: – judithhumphrey.com LinkedIn & Twitter: @judith_humphrey Instagram: judithhumphrey_ Books Speaking as a Leader by Judith Humphrey Impromptu: Leading in the Moment by Judith Humphrey Taking the Stage by Judith Humphrey Chatter by Ethan Kross Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Website – https://talkabouttalk.com Free Newsletter – https://talkabouttalk.com/blog/#newsletter-signup Email – Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com Free 20min consult – Book Andrea  LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ TRANSCRIPT (unedited) INTRODUCTION Greetings and welcome to Talk About Talk episode #95, focused on TAKING THE STAGE: COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR LEADERS. I’m your communication coach, Dr. Andrea Wojnicki (please call me Andrea!). Are you an ambitious executive with a growth mindset, looking to advance your career? Well, you’re in the right place.   At Talk About Talk, we focus on communication-skills-topics like personal branding, confidence, and networking. This is the critically important stuff they don’t teach you in school. And if you check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website, you’ll find online corporate training, 1-on-1 coaching with me, the archive of this bi-weekly podcast, and the free weekly communication-skills newsletter. I really hope you’ll go to the website and sign up for the free weekly communication skills training newsletter. But you can choose what works for you! Welcome to Talk About Talk episode number 95. This is the second of a two-part focus on TAKING THE STAGE: COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR LEADERS, where I interviewed communication guru Judith Humphrey, founder of The Humphrey Group.  If you haven’t listened to episode 94 yet, I encourage you to listen to that first. But this episode really is to good stuff. You’re going to hear the second part of my conversation with Judith, and then you’re going to hear my summary. I’ll summarize for you new ways to think about things like self-promotion, imposter syndrome, apologizing, and communication differences between men and women.,  Yes, we’re gonna get into stereotypes! Are you ready?  OK. We left off with Judith’s summary of her Leaders’ Script.  Do you remember what it was?  4 dimensions.  The grabber, proofpoint or main message, structure or supporting points, and last, the all-important call to action.   INTERVIEW …really when you think about it, that call to action, is translating your leadership message into activity is something that has consequences. So I found it to be very powerful. People really love it. I encourage my clients when they’re going into meetings to think about what the what the meeting objective is, and then also what their personal objective is. And it’s not that they’re necessarily at odds, but it’s about being mindful about, here’s, here’s kind of the objective that we all share. And then, personally, this is the part that’s really important to me. So I think, actually having that mindset in the back of your mind, and then applying this framework also might might be very effective. And you could, you could, at the very end, when you do a call to action, you could relate it to the meeting objective, for example, but then also make sure that your personal objective is, is accommodated. So it’s also going to be prominent in my next book, which is the job seeker script. Ah, when you think about the job seeking process, it’s a series of events. But another way of looking at it, it’s just a series of scripts, you need a script for your elevator pitch, if you should pass by somebody. Yeah. You need a script for your networking conversations. Yeah. For your resume, for your cover letter for your interview scripts for it for your answers to questions in the interview, and even for your post interview discussion about salary. So the book will cover all those scripts. So are they scripts? Or are they frameworks? Like, are you actually memorizing what you’re saying? Or? That’s a good question? I believe that the more you can write down what you’re going to say the better. Okay, so there are frameworks in the sense that the words come from the job seeker, I don’t provide the words, I provide the framework, the leader script provides a framework and it provides the template, but it forces people to structure what they’re saying. So that they make a point that they really tell their story in a way that’s powerful narrative. And do so at every turn in the job process. Yep. And you know, communication is so important today, more than ever, yeah. Well, I don’t have to tell you that. But I mean, when you think about the digital world, right? And we have so little interpersonal contact, we have to be that much clearer in what we say true, more persuasive, and what we say. And so this leader script will apply to every situation that anybody is in in a business setting. So your next book is going to be focused on job seeking. And that relates to a question that I wanted to ask you about self promotion, and kind of what is it and if you have any do’s and don’ts, and I can imagine, you know, when when we’re applying for a job, and we get that coveted interview opportunity, we need to promote ourselves right way. So can you talk a little bit about that? self promotion has two definitions. One is what I consider to be the way I think about it, and then self promotion can have a sense of Undertow to a lot of people, they don’t they they find it. Find it. Ugly. Yeah. And that’s informative. That’s a good word. I like that they find it ugly. Yeah. But it’s not. I mean, true self promotion, when you think about it, is when you actually speak about yourself in such a way that other people want more of you. They love what you’re saying about yourself. So so the ugly self promotion turns people off. So it’s not truly self promotion, is it? That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, it’s ineffective. But true self promotion, is the process of delivering messages about yourself that move people that inspire in the case of job search, that inspire those who hire, right, inspire those who hire right. It’s another title for a book. But they so what is that? What is that secret recipe that we call true and effective self promotion? Again, I believe it goes back to having the right message about yourself. Yeah, it’s personal branding. Yeah. And then being able to develop that message in such a way it’s credible. So you might say, you’re in a job interview. And as you suggested, what do you say? You might say, your message would be about all the things you’ve done already, you know, I’m a seasoned it expert. That would not be good self promotion, because people are looking to what you can do in their company, right. So your message in In an interview, if you want to be truly self promotional should be what you can do for them. Yes, very confident and empathetic message. Exactly, yeah. And so, obviously, each situation is different. And you have to define your message, your self promotion message in a way that will move your audience. It’s empathetic in that sense, you’re always thinking, what is it that’s going to really move the room or move this person? Or have them believe in me? Yep. And, bad self promotion, it’s self aggrandizing. It has nothing to do with your audience, whereas true self promotion is messaging that reaches your audience and inspires them? Yeah, I was thinking, as you’re saying that it’s about articulating the impact that you will make for them or on them, right. As opposed to, here’s what I can do. Exactly. And if you’re in a meeting, and you want to be self promotional, it doesn’t mean you’re going to talk about yourself necessarily, it means you’re going to bring forward an idea that inspires people to believe in you. That’s what self promotion might not even be about you. It might be an idea that you talk about, it will give purpose to the team, right? It could be a story of something that you did or even that you observed and interpreted and learn from right. actly. Yeah, yeah. So you can take the eye on self promotion. Interesting. Okay. Okay, so, so I’d like to focus, I guess a little bit more on some tactical communication challenges that many of us face. And the first one that I’d love to hear your perspective on is interrupting. And I don’t know, probably like me notice, especially when virtual meetings became the norm, all of a sudden, interrupting was actually impossible, because when someone’s speaking on Zoom, only one voice can be heard. And it’s tough to see people raising their hands or whatever they’re doing. So certainly, interrupting is rude. But sometimes we do need to interject. And so I was just wondering if you could give us a few pointers on how we can interrupt or interject in a way that is not offensive to begin with, I think you have to wait for someone to stop speaking. So interrupting is not a good thing. And there’s always a pause. There’s always the moment, the moment that that person finishes. That’s the perfect time to express your views. So another aspect of speaking well in a meeting is listening. Finding the moment of silence and interjecting your own viewpoint. That is a very good point. And when people think about communication. They think about speaking, they don’t think about listening. And so maybe the next time it’s happens to all of us, we’re in a meeting and someone maybe kind of is taking way too much of the airtime and maybe they’re starting to repeat themselves. And it’s like they’re not coming up for air instead of thinking about it. rejecting focus on listening to what they’re saying, right? And then you’ll come up with the true added value. And you also will be able to hear when they pause. Yes, exactly. That’s right. You’re so busy formulating your ideas and not listening. You won’t even hear the policy. And then you might end up interrupt values a new answer to that question for me, Judith, it is I think it’s good. Yeah. Yeah. So my next question for you, is a little bit different. So, so changing topics here, as, as Canadians, and as women, I’m sure you’ve heard the stereotypes, we are often way too apologetic. So and I know that you’ve done training of men and and of women and mixed groups and in in Canada, in the US, and actually all over the world. So do you have any tips on us over coming this apology syndrome that we have, that some of us have Andry? I could talk for hours about that? I bet. It’s just giving voice to the inner crow. Apologizing is essentially saying, I don’t belong on stage. I don’t really have a right to speak, but I’m going to anyway. Excuse me. Wow. And there’s absolutely no reason for it. And of course, it diminishes the impact that you’re going to have because apologizing thing I’m sorry. But I’d like to add something. These are all diminishing expressions. I’m sorry. It’s got to go the whole expression. I’m sorry. should go? Because try to think of it time when you really need to say I’m sorry. Yeah. You don’t need to attack it’s I can’t even think of a time when can you think of a time manager when you might say I’m sorry. So your your example of being late. I was just thinking in my head. I have this saying that I came up with which is jargon is like profanity. We need to be aware of it. And we need to save it for when we need it. And I’m thinking I might add apologies to that list. Yeah. We need to be conscious of apologies in our language and in our communication, and save it for when we really need it. So yeah, if I was on a subway, and it got stopped, and there was a roomful of people waiting for me. And I walked in, I think starting with an apology and saying, I apologize that I’m 15 minutes late. Let’s get on with this and making a strong statement about like your everybody’s time is important, and that you want to be productive. And then getting into it. I think that’s an example of when maybe an apology is is fine. But I hear for example, particularly women, and particularly Canadians, in a meeting will say, I’m sorry, can I say something? Oh, yeah. Well, if you can’t, then why are you here? I agree with you on that one instance of apologizing. Yeah, if you’ve held people up, yeah. You have responsibility to say something like that. I agree. That’s true respect for your audience. But the other thing shows disrespect for yourself. Right? Very, very well put, you will be quoted on that, Judith, I promise you. So related to this questioning about about men versus women communicating in your book, taking the stage, you highlight how some successful women talk about how hard they work in perhaps too much. And you talk about Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Jessica Parker and Marissa Mayer. And it reminded me of some academic research that I actually I was at in a leadership conference hosted by Harvard Business School for leaders leadership skills for women. And one of the faculty members there was talking about some research that she’d conducted recently with a whole bunch of academics. And they interviewed successful women and one of the Common themes that came out of these successful women was how they all shared this narrative of how hard they worked. And I was wondering if you have any comments about this, like, do you think it’s helping us to talk about how hard we work? Or is it related to imposter syndrome and that CRO, like are really badly is, is probably related to the fact that we want to prove ourselves. And so we constantly refer to the amount of work we’ve produced. But work doesn’t win us any points. In fact, it wins us more work. So losses will pile work on women, because we are able to finish it, and do it and not complain about it. And whereas men delegate much more. And that’s a vast generalization, it doesn’t apply to every man or every woman, of course. But it’s really true, I saw that in my business life, that the women would be happy to take on work. Because it kept them busy, and show to the world that they were valued. But the men felt their value came from delegating. Interesting. So the fact that we brand ourselves as workers is not going to ever get us into any large career position, because the higher up you go, the less actual work you do. And the more conversation you have, the more communication you’re doing, the more meetings you have, but you don’t do the work. So that that reminds me of another question that that I would love to get your perspective on. See if you agree, so I’ve had this conversation with a couple of my clients about how earlier in your career, learning the technical expertise, the processes, depending on the industry that you’re working in, of course, those are the skills that are probably at the top of the hierarchy are prioritized in terms of what you need to learn. As you mature, your tenure increases, and you become more senior in any organization, your communication skills themselves may become more important. Do you agree? Yes, you do? Well, I think the higher up you go in an organization, the more you need to communicate. Because you have teams and groups of people that report to you directly you have colleagues across the organization you have to relate to, you have bosses. And if you’re a VP, for example, and you’re reporting to a C level executive, you’d better know how to communicate with that person. And it’s an art, you know, when you’re when you’re a junior person in an organization communicating means you let people know what you’re going to do. You do it and you show that you did it. Yeah, that’s true. It’s, it’s about performance of tasks. Yep. But as you get higher up, communicating is about listening, doing much more listening, asking questions, yeah. Walking around walking the room, where people work, asking them about their work. So it’s really checking in with people. It’s letting people speak listening to them responding to them. Somebody asked me recently. This is a person who is in his early 30s. He’s got a big job already. But he said, you’ve worked with a lot of senior executives over your career. What advice would you give me about changing my communication style? And I go up the ladder? It’s a great question. Yeah, it was really great question shows you he’ll go places. Yeah. Sometimes the question really reveals everything. Right, exactly. So I thought about it. And I said, the thing that will change, if you’re effective, is you’ll want to speak less and listen more as you go up the ladder. And so that’s what I would advise to anyone listening to this podcast, I should go higher and higher. Draw and other people listen to them, ask them questions, because your success is going to depend upon them. Right. So that’s a whole communication strategy for upper level. Absolutely. So in a couple of the podcasts that I’ve done, focused on listening skills, I encourage people to track the ratio to literally or consciously think about, How much am I talking versus other people. And then I say true leaders will do that not only of themselves versus everybody else in the room, but they’ll also track the ratio of other people at the table and encourage people who haven’t spoken up to speak up, But it’s true that, for example, in job interviews, if you talk less than the interviewer, you’re more likely to get the job. I talked about that a lot. That’s true. Yeah. I’m talking to you and I have the same thought bubble over. That’s funny. That’s funny. Okay. So I want to go back to, I guess the differences between men versus women when they’re communicating. And I’m curious, in your experience, what do you think the most common mistake is that women may make? And then also that men may make when they’re communicating? But women diminish themselves in so many ways? And of course, best generalization? Yeah. But this is the reason we in the Humphrey group launched the program called taking the stage. They had global reach just incredible number of women. Over half a million women took this program. But it shows you that there’s something about the way women communicate, it’s different from the way men communicate. And when I first realized this, I was sitting with a client in a coaching session. And what she was doing was wrapping herself into a small ball. Oh, so her arms were closed. Her legs were crossed. Her head was down her shoulders were a little bit hunched. And she was speaking in a meek voice. I said, this is not something I saw among the men. Yeah, Coach. So making ourselves small is the way I put it. Yeah, shall small in terms of body language, in terms of our voice, our voice, we raise the voice? Or speech? So we’re asking your question? Yeah. At the end of the sentence, yeah. So we diminish our voices, instead of grounding our voices. We make furtive eye contact. We smile too much. We speak with caveats. You know, I could be wrong. Sorry. Only it’s only a thought. So we diminish ourselves, make ourselves small in so many ways. And so I would say, in terms of body language, voice, language, expression, women need to be bigger, have a bigger onstage presence. So would you say that the that men maybe need to dial it back the other way, as you were describing this woman physically sitting across the table from you, I was thinking it’s the opposite of the man spread, right? Like the guy that separates his legs and leans in, and he’s taking up as much space as he physically can. And that’s really an interesting topic in itself. Yeah. Because not all men do that. Yeah, of course, not all women make themselves small. So these are generalizations. But if you were to find a parallel or look for a parallel between what women do what men do, or antithetical, look at them. The men traditionally, and I think that’s changing. I think it really is changing that men are different than they were 10 years ago, 15 years ago as leaders, but in a good way, in a good way. Yes. Yeah. I would never assume that men have one style, and women have another style, because things have changed. They’re much stronger women, and more understanding men, collaborative men, I’ve been really impressed with the transformation on both fronts. So I, I think that men, the men, I know, the men I’ve worked with, are really doing their greatest, to be more inclusive, more collaborative. But what I like about the way men speak, is they show a level of confidence. And I think women need to show men show strength in their thinking, they’re not afraid to bring their thinking forward. They’re confident enough not to use a lot of filler words or caveats. And they assume that people are going to listen to them. And that people are going to act on what they say. So I like that style a lot. And I know in the past, there’s been an exaggeration of men speaking out maybe too boldly, too loud, too big. But I don’t see that as much. And I see men being almost well, I shouldn’t say this. almost a mile. I mean, yeah. So it sounds as if what you’re describing is what we covered a few minutes ago, in terms of it’s the ideal self promotion. Yeah. But I really love your point about their default mindset is that people are gonna listen to Yes, exactly. It’s a very powerful mindset to have. It is a very powerful mindset. Men assume that they’re going to be heard, and that their leadership messages are going to be understood, and perhaps even followed.  So, before so before Judith, we get to the five rapid fire questions, I just want to finish off with one question that I’m really curious to hear your perspective on. And that is that when I first started doing when I first started talking about talk, I was very emphatic that the number one communication superpower is listening. And since then, over the last several years, I’ve modified that to be that there may be three, there may be three communication, superpowers, listening, confidence, and storytelling. I’m wondering what you think about that. I think that they’re all truly important. Listening is the beginning of everything else. So you can’t speak well, unless you listen well. And I think that should come first, as you stated. Storytelling is the means of getting your ideas across. It’s, it’s increasingly important. And in fact, I’m listening to a masterclass on storytelling, really good. Confidence comes from another place, so we can listen. Because we know it’s good to listen. We can tell stories, if we learn how to structure scripts. But confidence comes from a deeper place. And I always say it’s the, it’s the reason we speak up at all. I mean, it’s on a different plane, from listening and storytelling, interesting. It’s not a technique. It’s a state of being hmm. And it’s so important. We’ve talked about it today in this interview, Andrea, but confidence is something you have to delve deeply into your soul to get. And even some people are born with it and Bournemouth greater amounts of it. Other people have to go through their life, building their confidence in the ways we’ve talked about, you know, speaking up when they’re afraid. And it’s not just a female thing, that confidence, I once had a client was a VP. And he said, every time he raised his hand to speak in a meeting with their other executives, he got really scared. But he did it. He told his story. He listened and everything worked out. So you see what I mean about confidence on a different plane? Yeah, that’s a very interesting point. I agree. And again, you’re going to be quoted on that. That is, you’re making me think about things in well, you and I share so much in terms of our passion and our expertise and our innate focus on this topic of communication. I really enjoy talking to you about the stuff I have to say. And now we’re going to move to the five rapid fire questions. Are you ready? I’ve so much enjoyed this session. I hope the rapid fire doesn’t. It will test you but just say the first thing that comes to mind. Okay, question number one. What are your pet peeves? I don’t really have any really nothing that honors me. Except listening to people diminish themselves. That would be the only thing from the communications point of view when people undercut themselves. And I just published an article pass company on caveat. caveat. It comes from the word beware. Yeah. So you’re warning your audience not to take you seriously. That upsets me when people do that? Because it doesn’t look good. So even your pet peeve is focused on communication. I love it. Yeah, I don’t really have anything else. I’ll think things. No, no, that’s okay. Okay. Second question. What type of learner are you? That’s something I’ve never discovered I probably learned from all this. I think I you tell me you know more about this than I do? Well, to be honest, most of us are all of them, but some people. So I do find that I am all of them. I mean, I’m a podcaster obviously, I’m an auditory learner. I listened to a lot of podcasts. But I’m really, if I had to choose one, probably a little bit off the charts in terms of visual. I’m often grabbing a sheet of paper and I’m drawing I’m illustrating a concept. Yeah, yeah. Question number three. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? I’m both. I mean, I mean, right in the middle of the two I have been tested for this. As an extrovert. I really enjoy talking to people and getting ideas people. But as an introvert, I enjoy a quiet mind. So I noticed my husband loves to listen to podcasts, and he’s always reading the newspaper and always absorbing information. I actually don’t like to do that, to my mind. I like to keep it open. So if I’m walking, I don’t want to hear anything. If I’m walking, I want to think. Okay, next question. Communication or media preference for personal conversations. I always say phone is the best for me phone because at least is a real voice. Yeah. I use instant messaging more than I ever did. But it’s, it’s immediate. That’s one of the great things about it. But it’s not human. It’s not personal. It’s not personal. There’s no tone, there’s no expression. Just emojis. Okay, the last Rapid Fire question is, is there a podcast or a blog or an email newsletter that you find yourself recommending to people the most lately? Well, of course, I’ll recommend this one. Your podcast, particularly this episode, oh, no, all the episodes I know. I want to hear all the episodes. But I’ve been listening to the masterclass series. I’m a member of the master class. Right now. There’s a two for one special. It’s amazing. Yeah, you get to see these fabulous people. Ringo Starr, for example, teaching drumming. And I’m listening to one, an author who teaches at Bard College, talk about storytelling, the art of storytelling, right? These are so fascinating, not only because these people have such a storehouse of wisdom to deliver, but they speak so well. And their body language and their just their whole speaking style is wonderful. And you learn from it. So you’re you’re learning from the content that they’re delivering, but you’re also observing their communication. So it’s kind of like a meta mask leads for you. Wow, that’s a great recommendation. Is there anything else you want to add Judith about communication skills for leaders? Well, I think you do a great job with these questions and podcasts. And you’re hitting all the all the right notes in terms of what we’ve talked about today. There’s nothing more I mean, we could spend another few hours if you want. I agree. I agree. We’ll do that after our talk here. It’s been so enjoyable. Thank you so much. Thank you for bringing me on. Thank you for your time and for sharing your expertise. It’s fantastic. Thank you so much!   THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #95 TAKING THE STAGE part 2 – Communication Skills for LEADERS with Judith Humphrey appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Andrea interviews leadership communication expert Judith Humphrey. Learn about imposter syndrome, communication differences between men and women, effective self-promotion, the leaders’ script, when we should apologize, and what to do when your boss suggests you need to demonstrate leadership. This is part 1 of a two-part feature (ep. 94 & 95) on “Taking the Stage: Communication Skills for Leaders.” RESOURCES  Judith Humphrey WEBSITE: – judithhumphrey.com LinkedIn & Twitter: @judith_humphrey Instagram: judithhumphrey_ Books Speaking as a Leader by Judith Humphrey Impromptu: Leading in the Moment by Judith Humphrey Taking the Stage by Judith Humphrey Chatter by Ethan Kross     Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Website – https://talkabouttalk.com Free Newsletter – https://talkabouttalk.com/blog/#newsletter-signup Email – Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com Free 20min consult – Book Andrea  LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/   TRANSCRIPT   INTRODUCTION Greetings and welcome to Talk About Talk. I’m your communication coach, Dr. Andrea Wojnicki (please call me Andrea!). Today we’re focusing on “Taking the stage: communication skills for leaders.” Taking the stage is the name of one of the books written by our guest for this episode, communications skills guru Judith Humphrey. I met Judith over a year ago on LinkedIn. Yes, I practice what I preach. I was networking on social media. Imagine! Given our common focus on communication skills, our paths crossed many times on LinkedIn. We started chatting. Then we realized that we live less than a kilometre away from each other in Toronto, Canada. She took the time to hand deliver a few of her books to my house! I devoured them. Then – I emailed her and invited her out for lunch. Judith was so generous with her insights and advice, that I asked her if I could interview her for this TalkAboutTalk podcast. And – here we are! I have to warn you, this episode is dense. My conversation with Judith was so full of learning – that I decided to split it into two episodes. This is good news – You’re going to learn a lot – I promise! You’re going to learn Judith’s metaphor for the impostor Here’s a hint. It’s a little character that sits on your shoulder. You’re also going to learn a simple script for You’re going to learn about the positive and the negative side of self-promotion. You’re going to learn how we should think about When to apologize and when not to apologize. You’re gonna learn some of the differences, yes, the stereotypes, regarding how men communicate versus how women And a whole lot more. So much more, in fact. that I decided to split this conversation, this interview into two episodes, as I said. Here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to introduce Judith to you now. And then you’ll hear the first half of the interview. Then the next episode, episode number 95, will include the second half of our conversation, followed by my summary. As always, you don’t need to take notes. Because I do that for you. If you go to talkabouttalk.com, click on podcasts and then shownotes, you’ll see everything right there. A beautiful, concise summary. Links to all the references – books, articles, social media handles, and so on. And then also the full transcript of our conversation. While you’re checking out talkabouttalk.com, I encourage you to subscribe to the free communication skills newsletter. It’s free, and it’s like getting free communication skills coaching from me in your  inbox  once  a  week.  You  can sign up quickly and easily on the TalkAboutTalk.com website, where you’ll also find the shownotes and the archive of past episodes. So as I always say, just keep doing whatever you’re doing. Making dinner. Walking the dog. Or just lying on the couch. You don’t have to lift a finger to take notes because I do that for you. Alright, let me introduce Judith Humphrey. Judith is a communications expert and Founder of The Humphrey Group, a pioneer in the field of leadership communications. She established The Humphrey Group in 1988 and today the firm works with clients globally, with offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Mexico City. The Humphrey Group has a broad range of programs for leaders, including Taking the Stage® the firm’s landmark program for women, which has been offered to over half a billion women around the world, in five languages and on all continents. Judith is the author of three books: Speaking as a Leader: How to Lead Every Time You Speak; Taking the Stage: How Women Can Speak Up, Stand Out, and Succeed; and Impromptu: Leading in the Moment. You can find these books in the shownotes for this episode. Judith is also a keynote speaker and a regular columnist for Fast Company, with over 100 published articles to her name. She’s now writing her fourth book.   INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT (unedited) Thank you so much, Judith, for joining us here today to talk about how leaders communicate. Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So I’d love to get started with the mindset that we show up with when we’re taking the stage. And when I say taking the stage, I mean, when we’re showing up probably for a really important communication context, whether it’s giving a speech or leading a big meeting or doing a presentation to investors. I’m curious about confidence, specifically, and whether you had imposter syndrome. I didn’t realize it at the time. But my whole life, I’ve really grappled with the notion that I have a right to speak up, I have a right to be heard. And I remember when I was actually very young, I was in church. And an older gentleman said to me, so how are you? And I started to reply, and he looked away. And I thought, there’s something here that I need to fix. Hmm. And so my whole life I’ve been speaking up. And speaking in watching people as they observe me and hear me, it’s very, very important to me to feel that I have a voice in any discussion. And I’ve expressed my voice in various ways throughout my life. As a violinist, I chose to play the violin, and played on many stages. When I was young. I went into English and communications and became a speech writer. In my early days of career, I was actually an instructor also in university, taught communications, and ultimately created a company that was designed to teach leaders how to communicate. So it sounds like you were from the get go from a very young age, you were intrinsically motivated to ensure that you personally, were being heard through these various media, right? Whether it’s a musical instrument or your voice or your career impact, but then in your career, you, you evolve to actually encouraging other people to do the same thing? Yes, because I knew how important it was to me. And so when I became a speechwriter, I thought this is such  a  powerful  way  of  expressing  myself through those speeches, but having those executives express themselves. And I really got tremendous joy of being a speechwriter. I didn’t care whether I was giving a speech. I just knew that my words were being expressed publicly. And it was very exciting to create those words that would be heard by larger audiences. Wow. I keep thinking when you describe that I keep thinking of the word amplify. Yes, yeah. Yes. When you write something on the page, it just stays there on the page until you have somebody express it. And then when, when is the CEO and I was writing for all CEOs, several banks. They would be speaking to large groups of employees or the public or clients. Some speech writers have told me they don’t like to go to hear their speaker deliver their speeches. Oh, but I enjoyed it. I’ve provided input and coaching to people that are giving speeches. But I’ve never actually written an entire speech. So that I guess I got to put that on my to do list. I read in one of your books that your college boyfriends, called you a modern woman. And I put that in quotes. Does that mean that you were always confident back to the imposter syndrome thing? Sure. I had a little voice inside my head, as we all would say, don’t speak up. You’re not as good as the other people in the room. I mean, for example, when I was in college, first year university, I was in a university where there are a lot of prep school grads, the women it was a women’s college. And a lot of the women had gone to private schools, like going to public school. So they were very assured. And they would raise their hand and arrange their cigarette. Clock and literally, it feels so confident doing that. I wasn’t I didn’t have that confidence. So when I did, I made a resolve that I would speak up once in every class and I did And at first, it was difficult, but it got easier and easier. And I think that’s the the message I would leave about this. The more you speak up, the more confident you’ll become. I agree 100%, in one of my previous podcast episodes, focused on confidence, I share the story about me having an epic failure at a national sales meeting that I gave a speech at when I was probably 25, maybe 26. It was horrific. And from that moment on, I made a promise to myself that that would never happen again. And I would seek opportunities to do public speaking so that I would accumulate experience and overcome it. And I would say that it does work. So I agree 100%. And that preparation is so important. I mean, when I talk about the imposter syndrome, in my book, taking the stage, and I don’t actually refer to it as the imposter syndrome, I refer to it as the inner crow cackling away, telling us we’re not good enough to speak up to be hard to be listened to. And so, when I talk about that syndrome, I say there are a number of things you can do to counteract it. First, recognize that it’s not you, you know, that voice inside you saying sit down or don’t speak up is your socialization? Yeah, it’s something we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves, but we don’t have to believe it. And we need to acknowledge it as something different. It’s something that’s not really us. And it doesn’t reflect our capabilities. That’s the first thing. The second thing, when that voice inside you that you can call the imposter voice. You need to talk back to it, see it for what it is, and say, No, I’m not going to listen to that voice. It’s not me. It’s not real. It’s nothing I need to carry with me through life. And the third thing to pick up on your point, you need to prepare, you need to put time into preparing, whenever you do, whether it’s offering a point of view in a meeting, if you can prepare that the night before, think about the fact that you want to raise that point. It’s it’s great to prepare it, write it down, jot it down in bullet points, and learn it, rehearse it out loud. Or if it’s a speech do the same. So you’re prepared so that when you walk up to the podium, let’s say it’s informal speech, you can say I am ready. I am good. This is going to be great. And you leave that imposter syndrome behind. Oh, that is beautiful. I love all of that advice. I love your metaphor, I guess of the inner crow. I can see this black crow sitting on my shoulder and I’m swatting it away. Right like it, it makes it something as to use the term you’re labeling it and and rejecting it as another. Yeah, it’s an other. It’s not you. It’s that black crow on your shoulder. We hear it. But it’s outside us. I love. It reminds me also, I recently read a fantastic book. I don’t know if you read it. It’s called Chatter by Ethan Kross. And it’s about our inner dialogue or monologue. And it’s about our inner talk our self, it’s about our self talk. And he recommends that we actually talk to ourselves in third person actually based on research. So if you said, Judith, push that inner crow away, then it’s almost like you’re taking, you know, a Mind’s Eye View or it’s almost like you’re coaching yourself or someone else is coaching you. So saying it in third person and I. So I think we could combine those two, right? And say, Great, Judith, that’s the crow. Push the crow out of your mind or push the crow off your shoulder. Yeah, that’s a great suggestion. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think there’s some power in that. So we spoke a little bit about taking opportunities to present yourself whether it’s giving a speech, and I shared my experience, after my epic fail of trying to do that. In your book, you talk about seizing opportunities to shine, and showing up. Can you talk about what some of these opportunities may be? I mean, there’s there’s the obvious ones, right? There’s giving the speech at the national sales meeting, but when else might we seize the opportunity to shine. Any opportunity where you’re in front of an audience is an opportunity to shine. So it could be the sales conference. It could be taking on a special project, a high profile project, volunteering for that, not waiting for someone to come to you and say would you do this. Speaking up at meetings, I think meetings always are the most constant item in our business lives. And speaking up at a meeting, as I mentioned, I did in classes and I graduate, forcing myself to speak up at least once. In every class, the same thing could be true. Speak up at least once in every meeting. And know that you’re going to do that before you go into the meeting and think about what you might say. Speaking up, in conversations, even casual conversations where the discussion is, when you feel you can make a contribution to speaking to your boss, if you feel your job, for example, needs to be redefined in some way or you feel you’re ready for another job. A higher level jobs, speak up, go to your boss, prepare to make your case. Every day is full of opportunities. I actually interviewed people for my last book, impromptu, and I asked about 20 executives, how many times a day, would you have an opportunity to speak up  impromptu?  And  they  said, anywhere between 19 and 25. Even at the end of a zoom call, you can say do you have a moment? If you want to speak to somebody about a particular topic? That’s a great suggestion. Yeah. So you don’t need to let other people define your agenda. Say Do you have a moment, if it’s your boss, or colleague, or someone you want to work with? introduced that idea that there’s something more that you have to offer? The day is full of opportunity. It is. So that relates to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is about demonstrating leadership potential. And you talked about maybe proactively suggesting to your manager or to your boss about how your job might be redefined. Or maybe suggesting that you’re ready for the next step. Yeah. And I know from talking to my clients that many of them say that their boss has given them the feedback that they need to demonstrate leadership potential. Do you have any advice about how people can do that? Well, first of all, if my boss said, I need to develop leadership, or demonstrate leadership potential, I might ask myself, Is this someone who just wants to keep me in my present job? Because there are a lot of reasons why our bosses don’t want us to leave. If we’re doing a great job. And we go to our boss and ask for a promotion or a new assignment. The  boss  might  well  say,  where  you  first have to develop leadership potential, meaning, I’m not interested in elevating you. So we have to find out whether that’s a genuine comment, or whether it’s describing your boss’s reluctance to move you. Yeah, that that is fantastic advice. That’s not what I was expecting you to say. But I think that’s really true. If you really soul search for what the reason is that they would say that to you. Is it because you genuinely haven’t demonstrated that potential? Or is it because there’s an expectation within the organization that there’s a two year tenure before anyone can get promoted? You know, and so I think clarifying that, So if a boss genuinely says to you, I’d like you to demonstrate leadership potential first. You say? So what leadership opportunity you’re going to give me. I’d like an opportunity to shine in a leadership role. I like to lead a project. Yep. I’d like to lead. Lead a team, I’d like to be able to demonstrate my leadership potential by actually being given a new assignment. Yeah. Yeah. So increasing my responsibility in some way.  It  could  be  a  team  and  I have a list of suggestions. You could lead a team, you could lead an initiative, a project, a new product launch, you could you could even lead meetings, right, you could lead status meetings on a weekly basis or something like that. So Yeah. I think also you, you demonstrate leadership potential by doing a great job with every project you have, by making sure that everything is delivered on time, on budget, according to the terms of that project. So you become a very reliable person within that organization. Yeah. And you also shows very strong communication skills that’s really important for leadership, and communication skills that not only are directly to your boss, but to everybody, all your colleagues on the team. But it’s a beautiful segue to the leaders script, which you talked about in your book, can you share with the listeners, what what is the leader script, at the heart of all of my training, and my three books, speaking as a leader, taking the stage and impromptu, at the heart of all of my intellectual property, is this template called the leader script. And it actually goes back to my university days when I was teaching students how to write. And as you all know, when you learn how to write an essay, you learn to have a thesis, and then develop that thesis. But that doesn’t seem to be known in the business world. People write whether it’s a speech or a presentation or an off the cuff remark. There seems to be no clear structure, no purpose, no message, no point. How many times do we listen to people speaking? We’re saying, what is the point? Yeah, get to the point, please. So my training is based on the leader script, and the leader script is a template for designing whatever you’re saying, whether it’s impromptu or whether it’s a presentation, or whether it’s a speech, designing it around a message. And there are actually four dimensions of the leader script. The starting point is a grabber you always want to start with a bridge to your audience, grab your audience’s attention show that you’ve heard them show, you’ve heard the question. So there’s the grabber, then you come to your point. And your point is framed. So the  people  understand  that’s  your  idea.  That’s what you want to get across. Here’s my message, you could say, or my point is, also you’re very sorry, interrupt. You’re very explicit about this is my point. Because otherwise people just hear it as one other sentence in the larger document. Yep. So my messages are, my view is my point is, or here’s what I feel, or here’s what I think. Here’s what I believe is even stronger. Yep. One sentence. We should move ahead with this project. That would be a message or I need a leadership. Opportunity. If I’m going to prove that I have leadership potential that’s a message right so many stages crisp, short into the point. And then the next part of the leader script is persuasion. It’s taking that message and saying how can I best develop it. And there are various ways to develop a message. One way would be giving reasons. So, three or four reasons why you believe you’d like an opportunity to prove your leadership potential are ways ways that your boss might deliver on that request. So you, the boss might give you a team to oversee might give you a project to bring home might give you a high profile event to host. So there are many ways but those are ways so you can develop that message was ways you can develop other messages chronologically. So over time, so if your message has something to do with something happening over time, so if somebody says, let’s say you’re in a job interview, and somebody says to how do you see your career evolving over the next 10 years, if you’re hired, then you say, Well, to begin with, and then and then by the third year, and then by the 10th? Year, right? So it’s quite a logical development. So those are some of the patterns of organization, you can also use, there’s a final pattern that I think is very important, and that is situation response. If someone said to you tell us how you solve the problem, a typical interview question, say, what the problem I saw was this, and then you describe the problem, right? And when you finish that, then you say, and here’s the solution I brought about our I and my team brought up around them out. So that situation response or problem solution. So those are all patterns of organization that can develop your  message.  So  so  far,  we  have  the  grabber the message. And then when I call the structure or the proof points, yeah, the final part of the leaders script is a call to action, call to action is something all great speakers use to end their speeches, John F. Kennedy said, Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country that was part of his call to action in his inaugural speech. But when you’re in a meeting, your call to action might be, let’s say the meeting with  your  boss  in  which  you’ve asked for a leadership opportunity, you can say, so will you be willing to give me a leadership opportunity, or so I look forward to a new leadership opportunity? What do you think the best  approaches,  so  you  want  to  really close on a high end, even if you’re a job interview, you don’t want to end with ambiguity, you want to end by saying, I look forward to the prospect of being hired by your company, it would be great to be in this role. And so that would be a call to action because you’re describing  the  action  you  want  to  happen next. So that’s the leader script for parts, grabber. Message, proof points, or structure and call to action. I love it. It sounds a little bit like an outline for an essay that we would have learned in English class, and you’re nodding your head. It absolutely is. But you’re right. It is uncommon. And I love how explicit it is right? You have the grabber. And then you declare your main message or your main point, right? And then you support it. And then you ask for what you want or what you need, right? You close it out with the action. I’m going to leave that outline in the shownotes for the listeners, because I always say to them, you don’t need to take notes when you’re listening to the podcast, because everything’s there for you. I’m also going to leave links to the books so they can read more about that in detail. It’s fantastic. I love mostly how explicit it is very explicit. Yeah. And it’s scalable to right. So if you think about it, it can be stretched out for a full speech, right? Or it can be compressed for short, impromptu comment, right? In a meeting, right? You know, but when you hear people that are worthy of being listened to, what do they have, they have the those components, they grab our attention. They make a point, they prove their point. They ask for action. And really when you think about it, that call to action, is translating your leadership message into activity is something that has consequences. So I found it to be very powerful. People really love it. THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com   ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #94 TAKING THE STAGE – Communication Skills for LEADERS with Judith Humphrey – part 1 appeared first on Talk About Talk.

THREE is a powerful number that we can use to improve our communication. 3 makes things easier to understand and easier to recall.  3 is balanced and substantive, but not overwhelming. Consider the power of 3 in your communication, whether you’re categorizing, listing, highlighting, influencing, ranking or creating a framework. Make 3 your default. RESOURCES   References THINK AGAIN by Adam Grant TALK LIKE TED by Carmine Gallo NYTimes “1, 2, 3” Schoolhouse Rock “3 is a magic number”:  Threes in the Bible   Prime numbers Fermat prime: Fn = 2n + 1, where n=1, then F1 = 21 + 1 = 3  Mersenne prime: Mn = 2n – 1, where n=2, then 22 – 1 = 3   Dr. Andrea Wojnicki & Talk About Talk  Website – https://talkabouttalk.com Free Newsletter – https://talkabouttalk.com/blog/#newsletter-signup Email – Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com Free 20min consult – Book Andrea  LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ THANKS for LISTENING.  Talk soon! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/ Web: https://talkabouttalk.com/ Email: Andrea@TalkAboutTalk.com ***When referencing resources and products, TalkAboutTalk sometimes uses affiliate links. These links don’t impose any extra cost on you, and they help support the free content provided by Talk About Talk. The post #93 The Power of THREE appeared first on Talk About Talk.