Ever been stuck in a conversation at a networking event that feels a little too long? You’re not alone.

In this short, practical episode, communication coach Dr. Andrea Wojnicki shares five graceful ways to exit a conversation politely without burning bridges.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

If you ever dread awkward endings, these strategies will help you handle them with tact and ease so you can keep your conversations (and your reputation) positive.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

Andrea Wojnicki: The next time I go to one of those awkward networking events, I am going to graciously thank the person for the connection and move on. Have you ever found yourself at one of those infamous networking events, and you’re going around and you’re meeting new people, and then suddenly you find yourself in a conversation that’s lasting a little too long?

You probably have, you’re back to the wall, and someone’s firing questions at you and telling you their life story, and you’re thinking, I need to get out of this conversation. This context is awkward even for an extrovert like me. So in this episode of the Talk About Talk podcast, you are going to learn five creative, clever, and polite ways to graciously exit a networking conversation without burning bridges.

Are you ready? Okay. Let me start with a true story. This actually happened to me. I remember once I was at a networking event, there was a room full of powerful women, and I wanted to meet all of them. And I found myself, after about half an hour or so, engaged in a very intense conversation with one woman, and there was no one else around.

And she was firing questions at me, and she was telling me her life story. And I remember thinking, I don’t want this conversation to go any further. I need to find a graceful exit. And you know what I did? I looked over her shoulder, and then you know what she said, Andrea, is there someone else you’d rather be speaking with?

Is there somewhere else you’d rather be? And I actually thought to myself, Oh my gosh, this is like the networking event nightmare. I’m stuck talking to one person. I’m trying to figure out a graceful exit. And she actually calls me on it more on what I should have done in a moment. But first, let me introduce myself.

Let’s do this. Let’s Talk About Talk. In case we haven’t met. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where I coach ambitious executives like you to improve your communication, your clarity. And your credibility so that you can achieve your career goals.

If you’d like to learn more about me, I encourage you to go to talk about talk.com, where you can read all about me and all of the services that I offer. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I spend lots of time there and I would love to hear from you.

Okay, let’s do this. Five ways to graciously Exit Networking Conversations. 

Here’s the first one. Connect them with someone. This is actually what I should have said to that woman who asked whether I’d rather be talking to someone else. I should have quickly said. Actually, I just noticed a friend over here that I’d love to introduce you to, and that I should have grabbed her and pulled her over to a friend and introduced them, and then you have your way out, right?

You’ve created a threesome and you’re the third wheel, so it’s time to leave. I’m not saying take the person you don’t want to talk to and introduce them to another unsuspecting victim. I am encouraging you to think about real positive connections that you can make. After all, this is a networking event.

You can do yourself and everybody else a favor by establishing connections. Okay, so that’s the first one. Connect them with someone else. The second one is the old food and drink excuse. Here’s what you do. You announce something like, Listen, I am famished. I haven’t had anything to eat all day. I’m gonna head over to the food table and fill my plate, and I’ll come find you later.

And then you just leave. The other thing you could do is bring them with you, say. I notice you don’t have a glass of wine, or I notice you don’t have a cup of coffee. Let’s go over to the beverage center and help ourselves, and then bring them with you, and you’re bound to find other people along the way that you can meet with and talk.

So that’s the second way. Announce you’re getting food and drink. 

My third suggestion is to turn the conversation to networking and meeting people. This is actually about telling them why you’re there. You could ask them, So what’s your objective here? And they tell you, well, I wanna learn this, I wanna meet people.

And you could say, listen, I really do too. I’m really trying to expand my network. So if you don’t mind. I’d love to exchange business cards or exchange LinkedIn connections. And then I’m gonna move on, and I’ll connect with you sometime later this week, and then you leave. So the secret here is being honest and telling them exactly why you’re at the event.

You want to make as many connections as possible. You want to expand your network. Make sure you tell them that you’re gonna reconnect with them later. And then make sure you do always follow up. So we’ve already covered three of the five ways that you can graciously exit networking conversation. Do you remember what they are?

Number one, connect them with someone. Number two, announce that you need food or a drink. And number three, focus on networking and tell them you’re trying to expand your network. 

The fourth way to graciously exit a networking conversation is to invite them to take a selfie with you. This is a great one that I haven’t heard before, but actually one of my clients who’s become a friend shared it with me.

She said she finds herself in this situation all the time, and you know what she does? She says, I’ve met a lot of people tonight and I plan on meeting a lot more. So here’s what I’d love to do. Can I take a selfie with you? And if you’d like, I can send it to you, and that way we can exchange phone numbers or email addresses, however you’re sharing the photo.

This is creative, and it establishes the connection and it gives you an out. So that’s the fourth thing. Invite them to take a selfie with you. 

The fifth and last strategy is to just tell them. Be transparent. So there’s really two ways that you can do this. Depends on how confident you are. If you’re not feeling particularly confident, you could revert to suggestion number three, right?

You could tell them, listen, I’m feeling really awkward about this, but I feel like I need to move on because my whole objective, my goal for this event, is for me to meet as many people as possible. So please don’t take this personally, but I’m gonna move on. It was lovely to meet you. And then close the loop with them, right?

So that’s one way of doing it. The other way that you can do this was actually inspired by a woman who I met a couple of times at different events, at dinners and cocktail parties, and she was the master of this. She would spend three to five minutes chatting with me, getting caught up, and then she’d say, Listen, I need to make my rounds.

So I just wanted to say it was fantastic to get caught up with you. I look forward to seeing you again soon, and I’m just gonna move on. And then she would go. And I remember consciously thinking to myself after she did this with me a couple of times at different events, like, wow, I really want to master that, that eloquence, that graciousness.

She wasn’t making excuses, she wasn’t calling out the awkwardness, she was graciously telling me how lovely it was to see me again and that she was gonna move on, and then that’s what she did, and I didn’t feel in the bit slightest. This is my goal. The next time I go to one of those awkward networking events, I am going to graciously thank the person for the connection and move on.

What’s your goal? Remember the next time you go to a networking event. If you find yourself in a conversation for a little bit too long with someone, try one of these five strategies. Number one, connect them with someone. Number two, the food or drink, excuse. Number three, tell them that you’re focused on networking and meeting as many people as possible.

Number four, invite them to take a selfie with you. And number five, just be transparent. Okay. That’s it for this short episode of the Talk About Talk podcast. And yes, this is episode number 199. The next episode is a big deal. It’s gonna be episode number 200. I just wanna say thank you so much for listening to the Talk about Talk podcast.

If you’re not subscribed already, please hit subscribe or follow on whatever platform you’re on, whether it’s Apple or Spotify, or YouTube. Where now, yes, you can watch the Talk About Talk podcast. Thanks again for listening and talk soon.

The post 5 Ways to Graciously EXIT a Networking Conversation (ep.199) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

How do you speak up with confidence without sounding aggressive? Leadership coach and TEDx speaker Ivna Curi shares how to find the balance between boldness and respect so your message lands with influence.

In this episode, you will learn:

Whether you lead teams, pitch clients, or want to be taken seriously in meetings, these strategies will help you speak boldly and be heard.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🌐 Website: https://AssertiveWay.com

📖 Building A StoryBrand by Donald Miller: https://amzn.to/3IMAduF

🎧MORE HERE: Ivna interviews Andrea for her Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/how-to-identify-and-communicate-your-personal-brand/id1623647915?i=1000719522727

Ivna Curi: Speak to people in a way that makes them wanna hear your power in your delivery and that conviction, and then listen to people in a way that makes them want to speak to you. 

Andrea Wojnicki: Are you an assertive communicator on a continuum from anxious to passive, to assertive, to aggressive? Where do you stand? Do you know what the important difference is between assertiveness and aggressiveness?

Yes. We want to be assertive. No, we do not wanna be aggressive. But what exactly is the difference? In this episode of Talk About Talk, you are about to find out. Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. I’m your executive communication coach, Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. You can learn more about me on the TalkAboutTalk.com website.

And please, if you’re not already, please subscribe or follow the Talk About Talk podcast on whatever platform you’re on. Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you’re listening, hit subscribe, or follow. Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. If you’re tuning into this episode, then I’m gonna guess that you could use some help with what we call self-promotion, a little help with feeling more bold and sounding more assertive and confident. 

If you happen to be one of the lucky few for whom this does not resonate, maybe you’re already bold and assertive; well then, I encourage you to listen anyway. But from a different perspective. As a leader, chances are a significant proportion of the folks who you work with and who report to you have serious issues speaking up and being assertive as a leader; part of your job is to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard. We call this encouraging courage. I love that we encourage courage.

Whether you’re an individual seeking more courage yourself, or maybe you are a leader, making sure everyone gets heard, you’re gonna wanna hear some of the insight from our guest expert today, Ivna Curi.

I met Ivna on LinkedIn. She had me at bold, unapologetic, and assertive. 

I knew the Talk About Talk listeners would wanna hear her message. Ivna leads practical workshops that empower leaders to navigate hard conversations with confidence, ultimately improving performance across teams. She’s also the host of the Speak Your Mind Unapologetically podcast, a TEDx speaker, a Forbes contributor, and the author of Unapologetic Voice.

Here we go. Thank you for being here today, Ivna, to talk with us about using assertive language. 

IC: Thank you for having me, Andrea. 

AW: Okay, so out of the gates, I’d love to start with some definitions. I noticed with your podcast and your TED Talk, and other things that you do on social media that you use the terms bold and unapologetic a lot, so I thought we would start there. What exactly do you mean when you say bold and unapologetic? 

IC: And that’s a great question because a lot of people use those terms, and everybody seems to have a different definition of what bold and unapologetic means. And I actually use unapologetic a lot because it, people are very attracted to that.

Uh, they love it. However, it is not what people think. Unapologetic and being bold is not venting off. Our frustration is not purely self-expression. It’s not just being authentic. It’s not being honest and blunt. What it is, is being able to express ourselves respectfully, so fully express ourselves, our thoughts, our ideas, our concerns, our boundaries, our perspectives, everything that we are, you know, those, those important conversations, our feedback in a respectful way with the purpose of influence. 

So it’s not simply, let me just speak and get it out of my system. Right. And make myself heard, there’s a purpose there. There’s something that we want out of that conversation. There’s an element of influence on the other end. So it’s, it’s not about just saying whatever, or controlling other people.

AW: So I heard two, I heard many things I love there, but I heard you say respectfully. Yes. And I think that’s really important too, ’cause I agree. It’s dangerous. I talk about building your personal brand unapologetically, but that doesn’t mean you’re just not being respectful and you’re not filtering.

Right. So I think that’s important. And then you talked about with purpose or for with influence. So, I’m gonna start to think about that term, unapologetic, using those ideas as well. What about bold? How does bold fit in there? 

IC: Bold means, and here’s something that happens a lot, a lot. I see a lot of people speak tentatively with hesitation so that they can be polite and kind and nice, and that’s the opposite of bold.

Bold means speaking with conviction. Bold means speaking in a way that’s definitive, being decisive, not holding back, because we wanna be polite and make people comfortable. There are other tools to do that. There are other tools to be warm and build connection, but when it’s time to express our thoughts, our ideas, our concerns, our perspectives, we gotta be bold. We cannot try to be tentatively. Polite. 

AW: So I heard you talking about this. I told you that I watched your TED talk, which I’m gonna link to in the show notes here and recommend men that everybody else watch it. But as I heard you speaking, even before you mentioned it, I thought of psychological safety.

IC:  I’ve had 13 managers in my career before I took on a completely more entrepreneurial role, and the very best one of them for me that made the biggest impact for me in my career and my ability to be productive as well. Yes, he provided psychological safety, but he pushed me towards risk every single day in the world, the world beyond him, while I was interfacing with external vendors and supply chain client, angry customers.

Other leaders in the organization, they were not happy, and they were not giving me safety. Now, my manager gave me safety when he would push me towards the world, the dangerous world out there, make me speak up, basically coach me through it, but not protect me. And then he would be a safe space for me to come back and say, I, this did not work.

I struggled with this. How should I do better here? Amazing. And that’s how I was able to evolve and be still able to speak up and express myself in different situations and be more independent, be more autonomous, and grow and develop as a leader. You know how they say with children, sometimes overprotective helicopter parenting can be damaging to kids, and helicopter leadership can also be damaging if it’s excessive.

And sometimes, as a leader, and I’ve been there, you, we feel like we’re the mom, we’re the dad. We gotta protect from everything, all bad things. We gotta protect our, our little children, our team from any struggles, any challenges, any difficulties, any hard conversations. 

AW: So this is a nice segue, I think, to the benefits. So I’m hearing that for parents, it’s a good thing to encourage your children to take risks. For managers, it’s a good thing to encourage psychological safety and encourage your people to be bold and unapologetic. So, in the context of at work, what are the benefits of being bold and unapologetic? 

IC: So being bold and unapologetic. As assertive communication. So respectful communication. Yeah, with influence is very powerful because especially in hard conversations, you know how transformational hard conversations can be. Mm-hmm. To relationships, to business, to productivity, that actually enhances the quality of collaboration. Because often when people are collaborating, there’s some people who tend who are naturally more passive, more quiet, and they tend to step back and avoid conflict, which means they’re always compromising.

They’re compromising on their ideas, they’re compromising on their perspectives. And so that collaboration doesn’t work because the more dominant types are always, you know, getting their way, getting their point across. And we’re not leveraging the diversity of thought of that team, of that organization, to come up with the best ideas to problem solve, to innovate, because it’s not truly inclusive, because the communication in that meeting is not truly inclusive.

But if there is an environment that has psychological safety to some extent and where people, there’s an environment that, a structured environment for participation, but also people are able to communicate in a mutually respectful way with influence. Then that problem-solving ability goes up, organization’s resilience goes up, conflict reduces significantly.

People spend a whole lot of time, like about a month, a year, dealing with unproductive conflict. Festering conflict. So there and miscommunication gets reduced tremendously. And miscommunication is, is is a daily reality for most leaders. True. 

AW: So I’m hearing a lot of the same benefits that accrue for psychological safety. Right? I feel like if you’ve created an environment where people can be bold and unapologetic, almost by definition, you have an environment of psychological safety, and so that’s why you wanna encourage those things. You mentioned that some people on your team are gonna be quieter and more passive, is what you said, right?

So, to those people, what advice do you give them to encourage them to be more assertive? 

IC: So, a couple of things. One of them, one of the things that people who are confrontation, avoidance, and just, focus a lot more on preserving their relationship than winning or getting their point across, is they also feel like they need to feel confident before they speak up.

AW: Mm-hmm. 

IC: They wanna be fearless and that’s just not the order of things. That’s not gonna magically happen out of the blue without speaking up or engaging in those conversations. They’re not going to start to speak up more because they’re they just suddenly became confident out of nowhere, right? That confidence comes with experience in doing something and skill.

So I always encourage courage, and courage is something that we can also develop. To take that step beyond the comfort into a little bit of that risk, but in a measured, experimental way. Because people are often in their heads, and they project a fear and a consequence that’s much greater than reality.

And when even if they speak up and things go in the wrong direction, and here’s what happens typically. People who tend to be more passive, right? So we have assertive, aggressive, passive, and passive-aggressive are the most common. And obviously it’s situational as well, but people have a tendency to be more passive and compromise and agreeable people pleasers, they’re scared, and they tend to, when they try to be more assertive, they tend to go too far into aggression because they don’t really know what they’re doing yet.

And so when they go too far in aggression, people know them. As someone who’s, you know, always quiet and let, and letting others speak and agreeable, that causes some tension because people don’t understand, they haven’t seen this, this individual before speaking up like that. And they’re, they tend to be a little bit aggressive because they don’t know the techniques.

So being able to get the manager support and saying, Hey, or put in the development plan, personal development plan, Hey, this is something that, a skill that I wanna develop. And getting the manager to support you along the journey, knowing that you will make mistakes, and it’s just part of the process. So you can get that feedback in terms of response from people.

Think about what you’ve done well, what you could do better, and then try again, and the make that official so that people around you can support you in that mission is also critical. And then the last thing I’m gonna say is the skill piece. And when we don’t know how to speak up, obviously, the consequences of retaliation, backlash being seen as net, is difficult, as aggression go up.

However, when we upskill ourselves, when we know what we’re doing. Yeah. And how to have these conversations and the frameworks to do so, especially the harder conversations, it de-risks that conversation and it increases our influence to achieve the outcomes, to make our message land in the other end.

And when we increase the reward because people are here us to understand us, and they’re acting or responding the way we want them to respond because our influence went up and the risk goes down, then we naturally feel more inclined and more courageous and more confident to do that thing even more, which is speaking up.

AW: So it can be like a sort of a vicious downward cycle. It’s like a positive upward cycle when you start to do it. So as you were describing that, even I was imagining a continuum where at one end you have people that are paralyzingly anxious, right? Yes. And then at the other end, you have aggression, and in the middle you may have an equilibrium of the ideal level of assertiveness. Does that sound kind of right? 

IC: Yes. And the thing that most people confuse with, like they think that it’s a bit of a personality trait, but it’s something that can be very much learned and taught. I’m naturally very passive. I avoid confrontation. I am a people pleaser.

When you talk about brand, the brand I had for my, the first 10 years in my career was nice. Yeah. That was the word that people used to describe me, and I had to put in an intentional effort to develop and understand how to communicate with respect, with, yes, with kindness and empathy, but also with a bit boldness. Right. And influence to get that message across. 

AW: Yeah. So you said this, there’s this common pattern of folks that are a little bit more passive. When they try to become assertive, they may jump past assertiveness to become aggressive. What exactly is the difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness?

IC: And that’s crucial for people to understand. Yeah. Because they get this wrong all the time. Yeah. So philosophically, it’s around control and aggressive. When we’re communicating aggressively, we’re trying to control others. 

And their behavior when we are assertive. We control ourselves. We’re controlling our communication so that we can influence others.

AW: Back to the influence. Okay. 

IC: Back to the influence. And so that manifests in many different ways because sometimes a lot of people, a couple things that don’t have influence. Right. That tend to be a more aggressive, very typical, in assertive training, you always find this, which is the I language versus the U language.

People use this all the time. Yeah. In aggressive communication, the very subtle things that we say, Hey, you hurt my feelings. There’s like a client that came to me and said, I was super assertive Ivna, you would be so proud of me. I had, I arranged this meeting with this person who had changed my slides last minute, all this, and I told them, you hurt my feelings.

I had to break it to them. Like, listen, you were courageous. That’s beautiful. I’m so glad you took initiative and you had the conversation. But the reality is that, you know, you hurt my feelings, is can be seen as very aggressive as opposed to when this happened. You know, I felt this or this action that you did impacted me in this way.

AW: This way, right 

IC: This way. Or another one that I see all the time is people say, you know, you made me feel disrespected or you disrespected me. Right? It sounds okay, but it’s actually, it can come across as very aggressive and judgmental, and it lacks evidence, and it’s not constructive. So there’s many different little subtle things that we say in our language that can come across as aggressive if we’re not careful.

And it’s definitely not influential, right? Right. Making someone putting, making someone defensive is not going to increase our influence. When people are asking others to change behavior, and this, most people don’t, they’ll complain, but they won’t. They won’t talk about the thing that they want different, that, that to change, right?

The requests, they’ll never bring that up. And when they do. It’s something like, you know, stop being disrespectful or stop interrupting me, or, I don’t like this. Versus a future-oriented, constructive invitation. Mm-hmm. To change something. Yeah. Little subtle things that make a huge difference, and I could spend a whole hour just on. These, these differences and how they manifest in our communication. 

AW: So one, one clear one that I heard there was saying I instead of you. Yeah. And then there’s, there’s also the one that’s a little bit closer to that, which is when you do, this is how I feel. Which might be okay. Right. But what are, are there any other little tactical tweaks that you can share in terms of our language that will keep us in the assertiveness realm and out of the aggression realm?

IC: So the deso or the desk script are very famous for assertive communication, having hard conversations. The one that I teach is a version. That goes beyond that. It has a few more elements so that it can be a, it, it can vary and be adjusted based on, uh, the power dynamics, based on personality, based on how strong a relationship you have with that person, and all those other elements based on.

You know, something that I see a lot like women struggle sometimes. A younger woman, maybe with an older man in, in those different elements. But the basic assertiveness script that can really help for these conversations is called DESO or DESC Script. 

AW: Yep. 

IC: So D is for describe the situation. You know, I noticed, in these meetings, I’m getting interrupted a lot, or I’ve been interrupted three times in the last five team meetings. The more specific we can get, the better, versus saying things like, you are always late, or you always interrupt me, or you never do this. The second step is explaining your sentiment or your feelings, or in a business context, it’s much better to talk about expressing the impact of someone’s actions on us or the team, or the client or the customer. It’s a lot more professional than just talking about our feelings. Yeah. 

AW: In the context of being productive and meeting certain objectives. 

IC: So that’s where the, when this happened, is the context, you know, I felt this, or the impact of this action was, their team lost, didn’t feel psychologically safe to express their thoughts, and we didn’t get enough discussion around this. 

Then the S stands for specifying our request. I like to call that an invitation because a request, sometimes people can  feel like it’s a act as if it’s a demand, and we don’t want that. We want it to really feel like an invitation.

So the invitation is forward-looking, and a great way to start this is, hey, going forward, because then people are more amenable to that versus the past is more blame-oriented. Hey, going forward, I would appreciate if you, you know, you let Sally or others in the team speak before sharing your ideas.

Since you’re superior to them and they might feel threatened to speak otherwise. And the last one is O for outcomes or C for consequences, which is giving people a reason to accept the invitation, right? That way, we can make sure that we get the most collaboration out of the team. We get the most ideas before we make a decision.

Right? Then getting at some level of confirmation. Does that work with you? Are you good with that? Agree. And then closing with the relationship. Once again, Hey, thank you so much for making the time to talk about this. I really appreciate your collaboration. And then you’re done. 

AW: Yep. And you sound confident and clear. You are not being aggressive. Right. And you’re trying to meet everybody’s business objectives and everyone’s personal objectives. Yeah. 

IC: Yeah. And you’re in control. You have the influence to being respectful. You have the framework, so you know the key points you wanna make. That allows you to not to make sure that they don’t derail you. Yeah. If things don’t get overly emotional. 

AW: Yeah. 

IC: So it’s very easy, very thoughtful, 

AW: And you know that I love a framework Ivna, right? Like I know you, you’re not talking about It’s not, yeah. It’s not a script, it’s a framework, and you can fill in the blanks and you’ll sound great. And it’s easy to remember.

I love it. Okay, so on this continuum from aggressiveness to assertiveness, and here we have this kind of passive apologetic maybe. Is it ever, okay, so I’m sure you get this question from your clients, like sometimes, isn’t it okay to use apologetic language or weak language? 

IC: And I get in my workshops, I get a lot of pushback on this because the group usually is primarily passive.

And, you know, and I’m encouraging, and some of them say, Hey, you know, here in the south, that’s, that’s what we do. You know, we, we, we ask for permission for everything, right? We apologize for everything. And I get it. There are cultural nuances at the same time, in a workplace context, it’s very different. If you’re in the bakery and you know, there’s someone in front of you and you cut, I mean, there’s a, it’s just a different situation.

It’s a different situation. If you’re talking to a superior and, you know, pitching an idea. Versus talking to a direct report and trying to make them feel safe and showing vulnerability. So it’s all about being intentional with that. Generally. We also wanna role model for our teams that they can be bold.

That’s okay to be bold, and it’s important to role model that as well. 

AW: Yeah. They’re watching you. Right? They’re watching. 

IC: They’re watching you both on the vulnerability, but also on being bold. Yeah. With your ideas. So being able to express ourselves, our ideas, our thoughts, our concerns, set the boundaries, whatever that is, self-expression that is respectful is, no apologies for that.

AW: Right? 

IC: No apologies whatsoever. Yeah. Now, where does it make sense? Okay, well, we make it a mistake. Even then I would, I would be cautious about. When to issue an apology, when to talk about an apology, and when to position that in a different way for which is, for example, acknowledging the impact of our actions on others and that at least for me, it would feel so much better if someone is expressing, not just saying sorry, because it feels empty. 

AW: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

IC: And lacks meaning if there’s not a demonstration of understanding of empathy towards the impact that person’s mistake had on me, on my team. 

AW: Right. 

IC: And an intent to change things going forward. Right. That is way more powerful than just saying, sorry. Yeah. 

AW: I know there’s this formula that I’ve seen a million times on social media about when you’ve done something wrong and you know you need to apologize. You go up to the person, you say, I apologize for, you label what it is that you did. Then you describe, as you said, what the negative impact was that you understand, and then you say, here’s what I’m gonna do, going forward.

So you’re saying if I had to skip step one. Not, not hear the, I’m sorry. And I just had step two and three. I would be fine with that. In fact, I’d be better off. I get it. Yeah. 

IC: Better off. Yeah. I don’t care about the, sorry, apologize part. Yeah. Just show me that you’re committed to make things different and that you understand my perspective.

AW: Yeah. So I thought you were gonna go in a different direction with this, and so I wanna just share this conversation that I had with a senior client of mine. She was running for CEO of her organization, and we were talking about her communication plan, ’cause she needed to make sure she had all the stakeholders who would, who were, had input onto the decision of who the CEO was, including a board of directors and some of the senior, existing senior executives in the organization.

And she said they are very diverse, and some of them are very old school. Very hierarchically thinking, and I am the only woman contender for the CEO position, so I need to be very strategic about how I’m communicating with these folks. Never mind the gender dynamic itself. Like, never mind, like, how do I bring up the fact that I’m the only woma,n or do I bring that up?

Right? There’s the whole point of how I talk. And so we, we actually created a strategy where we wouldn’t call it apologetic language, but it was more like she would use language where she’s deferring power to the other person because that’s what they expected. And again, this is, you used the word intentionality.

She was very intentional about it, and she definitely comes across as a bold woman and a confident woman. But she said sometimes that can backfire. So I was just, that’s where I thought you were headed. So let’s go to the other end of the spectrum. I wanna ask you, have you ever had clients or even people in workshops who are like arrogant and like beyond aggressive. They’re just like, well, they’re probably aggressive and arrogant. Have you ever come across that? 

IC: They do happen, but they don’t happen often. I come across a lot more people that have the poor me victim mentality, and that’s probably harder to deal with. The arrogant types.

There are people who resist feedback, and change initially, but they tend to open up and under and understand a different perspective. So I haven’t, uh, I haven’t seen truly like arrogant people. Now, arrogant people like most other of these, you know, the, these, this dysfunctional waste of communicating.

They come from insecurity, from wanting to protect themselves, from wanting to command. I’ve had clients say, I wanna keep my edge so people respect me. Yeah. Wow. So Wow. 

AW: They don’t, I haven’t heard that one. I haven’t heard that one, but I can imagine you haven’t heard I, yeah, 

IC: Yeah. Like how do I keep my edge? And so what they don’t understand is that there’s, you know, I have actually whole talk about this, which is speak boldly, connect openly. Mm-hmm. I speak to people in a way that makes them wanna hear your power, your delivery and that conviction. And then listen to people in a way, in a way that makes them want to speak to you.

And when you combine those and you’re able to know when to use each one and how to combine them together in important conversations, then you do not lose your edge. 

AW: Yeah. 

IC: But you do not, you’re also not controlling people. Right. People are there with you because they want to be with you. 

AW: Yeah. I love that. I love that. So in the vocabulary that I use, I would say communicating with conviction and credibility. Also, having a growth mindset and genuinely being interested in what other people are saying because you have a true belief that your collaboration is gonna be more effective than you just telling them what it’s not.

You’re not delivering a monologue, right? You’re sharing your thoughts, and then you’re listening to their thoughts, so you can come up with the best solution or decision or whatever it is. I love that. Okay. Is there anything else before I get to the three rapid-fire questions, Ivna, that you wanna share? I guess the ultimate question is for the folks that are erring on the side of being apologetic or not assertive enough, so that they can land, they can maybe move along this continuum a little bit closer to the ideal level of bold and assertive communication.

IC: I am extremely passive by nature. I’m socially anxious people pleaser. That is my, that’s who I am. My tendency, however, I felt like that was my strategic strength in the past. We talk about identities. We talked about brand. I actually thought that was part of my brand. I’m just like an easygoing collaborator.

That’s who I am. Once I found the other side of, once I found the real me, nobody is authentically passive people pleaser. That’s not you. Everyone is assertive. I just haven’t hadn’t found it yet. Once I found assertive evening, oh my gosh. I’m never turning back, ever, because this evening feels empowered, feels free, feels happy. I attract the right people to my world. I can actually command people’s attention when before I couldn’t, and my self-confidence and my self-worth, we talked about self-worth all went up. Yeah, this is the real me. 

AW: Oh, I love it. So people pleasers are not pleasing themselves. It’s 

IC: I apologize for not them, they’re not pleasing themselves. Yeah. That’s not who you are. Yeah. Gotta break free and be willing to experiment. I’m all, I’m very big in social experiments, in a controlled way with the support. Try new things, figure out, learn some of these frameworks, learn how to do things so that you make fewer mistakes, how people respond, adjust, try again and people who are people pleasers tend to catastrophize the consequences of speaking up a lot more than reality. 

So when you start to get that real feedback loop from the environment you’re in and people starting to respond positively to your speaking up moments, that’s going to give you tremendous confidence, courage to start finding that new, more powerful version of yourself. 

AW: Amazing. You will be quoted on that. Okay. You ready for the three rapid-fire questions? I am. Question number one: Are you an introvert or an extrovert, and how does that affect your communication? 

IC: So I am introverted, introverted, socially anxious, and a people pleaser.

So that was me. However, none of that is static. So, when we start to expose ourselves to the thing that is uncomfortable or different, we enjoy it. When I go to conferences, I enjoy meeting new people and talking to them, but do I like to stay at home and do in solo walks? Absolutely. 

So it’s something that we can evolve into. Now, what I do say is a lot of people just don’t understand the differences between all of those things. Yeah. It’s important to understand a little bit of that, a little bit of psychology, so that we can not think that that is who we are and we can’t change that, or that it’s gonna somehow hurt us. 

AW: Right. A lot of people have a negative association with introversion, and I say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It is not a judgment. It is a way of being, and introverts typically are the best listeners. And it doesn’t mean that you are also socially anxious. You can, you know, go, like you said, go to the networking event and get out there and on stage like you’ve done.

It’s just gonna take more energy, and you can manage your energy, right? Like this is a different construct than I think a lot. A lot of people think that introversion means you’re paralyzingly shy and you can’t be around people. No, no, no, no, no. 

IC: Right. Simon Sinek is introvert. 

AW: A lot. A lot of incredible teachers are actually, yes. Okay. Question number two. What are your communication pet peeves? 

IC: One of the things a co, there’s a couple of them. One of them is really polite people. They drive me crazy because. I can’t get a good conversation. I can’t move when their politeness is disguising what they’re really thinking, and it kills conversation.

It kills the ability to find mutual value, which is what I’m always looking to explore. And so I’d rather someone be, I’d, honestly, I’d rather have someone be blunt and unpleasant than politely. Not say anything. Yeah. Politely. Boring substance. Yeah. Politely boring. 

AW: I bet. Doesn’t I have a hypothesis? I bet that as people are listening to this episode, they’ve got someone in their mind that they know I know someone.

Very well actually, who is very polite and often during and always after my conversations with her, I always think she’s so polite, and I don’t, I have no idea what’s going on in her head. I have no idea. Right. I love that. Okay. Is what else? Any other pet peeves? 

IC: Yes, yes. So something that I’ve been experiencing a lot, and maybe you do too.

From these people who call themselves who, who broadcast how nice they are, how servant leaders they are, how kind they are to people, and they ghost me. Like there’s no tomorrow what? They ghost, ghost, ghost, ghost, ghost, ghost, ghost. And I’m okay. I think there are circumstances where, you know, we, we, it’s fine to ghost people.

That’s okay, but I’m talking about. Like, we’ve had several interactions and you’re still ghosting me. Hmm. And it is a pet peeve ’cause it upsets me. However, one of the things that assertive people do, and I keep reminding myself, is to take responsibility for things. We have the power to influence communication with other people, even if they’re not being assertive.

So in all these instances, if someone’s being overly polite and expressing themselves, and if they’re ghosting me, I always have the ability to respectfully, with the right kind of questions, the right kind of action, the right kind of attitude, consistently open people up, and that’s very empowering.

AW: I’ve heard, I have to tell you, I’ve heard this theme. Being ghosted as a pretty common pet peeve. Recently, I’d say in the last year, four or five people have told me that this is their pet. Oh, really? Pet peeve. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like it. 

And there, there are we and we, I ended up getting this conversation with, with one person expert that I was interviewing, and I admitted that I used to respond to every email and LinkedIn message that I got from anyone. And then I realized so many of the unsolicited emails were coming to me, and I just, I couldn’t do it. And someone said to me, you do not need to respond to unsolicited sales pitches. Yes. That is not ghosting someone. So, you clarified when you were just talking about being ghosted, you’re not talking about pitching someone for the first time.

AW: No. You’re talking about an, you know, like a, a dialogue that suddenly stopped. Right? Yeah. 

IC: You’ve had 3, 4, 5 interactions. Yeah. You had meetings, you spent one hour together, three hours. You’re not asking, you’re not pitching anything. Mm-hmm. Explicitly. But people are scared of you. Yeah, they’re scared of us.

They’re scared when people ghost. Here’s what my interpretation of it: they’re scared of their own reaction. Inability to handle a conversation. They can’t say no. They don’t know how to say no. They don’t know how to say, well, I have concerns. They don’t know how to express or even think through, and talk about. What’s bothering them? So insecure. 

AW: Well, and that gets to your point of how to, how you can, as a communication expert, make your question a way that will help them get over that. So, okay. Rapid question number three. Is there a book or a podcast that you find yourself? 

IC: I have to recommend my own podcast.

AW: Yeah. To start with, there’s a link there. There will be a link to it in the show notes. Yes. 

IC: So speak your Mind Unapologetically podcast and actually listen to myself. As a reminder, because I do have to remind myself sometimes of what I teach. Yeah. So when I go on walks every now and then, or if I’m in the plane traveling somewhere, yeah.

I’ll put it on my own podcast and listen to what I have to say. 

AW: I think that’s really, that is really smart. I sometimes, when I haven’t heard myself for a while, I go back and I listen as well, partly because I want to keep improving. But you also wanna remember certain like frameworks or whatever you were teaching.

IC: Now I’m like, oh wow, that was really smart. That’s awesome. 

AW: I like that. That’s good. That’s good. I love that you admit that on the podcast episode. I do, I do. I’m, oh, I like that. What else? What else is in your podcast feed that you recommend? 

IC: I’m gonna give you books. Yep. Okay. So we talked about. Branding. I love the book.

Building a StoryBrand, uh, gives a great understanding of how to build that, that, that, it just gave me really a lot of, a lot to think about. Atomic Habits was a great book, and I think about building habits around communication skills as well, and that came from that book. It’s a great book. Principles from Ray Dalio.

Love Ray Dalio. Bold man. Bold thinker. If you want to have some bold thoughts on how to approach things and culture, and organization. Yeah, I really like that book. Acting With Power by Deborah Greenfield, also. Great book. I haven’t heard of that one. A Stanford professor. Okay. Really studied the whole power dynamic thing and how do you act with power, especially as a woman in a work environment.

AW: Amazing. So I’m gonna put links to all of those books in the show notes. Is there anything else that you wanna leave the Talk About Talk listeners with in terms, in terms of cultivating the ideal level of assertive, bold, unapologetic communication? 

IC: Yeah. So embrace the process of getting there. It’s not, it doesn’t happen overnight.

Surround yourself with assertive people or bold people, and that is a bit contagious as well. Uh, often when we’re not bold, we don’t feel comfortable around bold people, but I encourage you to surround yourself with that kind of people so that you can see how it works and the kind of results that it lead, it creates, and how people respond by observation, and that’s going to naturally cultivate that desire to discover how you can, and there’s no more authentic thing than being able to express ourselves fully in any environment. 

So that should lead the way. Figure out what’s most important to you and make sure that, and, and focusing on the goals that you have, the dreams is going to help overcome the fears of being able to speak up, so focus a lot on the dreams as well. Those were my little tips.

AW: Very inspiring. Thank you so much, Ivna. I really enjoyed the conversation and getting to know you. Thank you. 

IC: Thank you so much, Andrea.

AW: Thanks again to Ivna. Okay. The first thing I wanna say, did you catch the difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness? I think this is important. 

Aggressive is control of others. Assertive is controlling ourselves and expressing ourselves. 

One of the simplest ways to do this is simply to say, I, not you. I have something to add. I wanna share something important. I love this disciplined focus on assertiveness versus aggressiveness. We all want to be assertive, and we want to encourage it in others. Before I let you go, I also wanna highlight the DESO or DESC framework that Ivna mentioned. This was a new framework for me.

As you probably know, if you follow me here on the Talk about Talk podcast or on LinkedIn or if you subscribe to my newsletter, you know I love a good framework. It’s not a script, it’s a guideline or a prompting sequence that you can customize and optimize for your context. This DESO or DESC framework will help you when you need to be assertive.

It’s describe, explain, specify the consequences or outcome. So you describe the situation, then you explain or express the impact. Then you specify or invite the other person to hear a message, to make a change. And last, you clarify the consequence or the outcome. This is the impact. Sticking to this framework will help you sound confident, concise, and yes, assertive.

I love this framework, Ivna. Thank you so much for our inspiring conversation. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling encouraged about being courageous. If you enjoyed this episode, please hit subscribe, and if you’re interested in learning more about how to optimize your communication at work so you can show up with confidence and credibility, then I encourage you to check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website.

There are lots of communication skills, resources for you there. Thanks for listening and talk soon.

The post How to Become a Bold, ASSERTIVE Communicator | Ivna Curi (ep. 198) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

How do top leaders captivate audiences and drive action? Carmine Gallo distills the communication habits behind Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos into practical moves you can use right away. From minimalist slides to memo-driven meetings, and from relatable stories to memorable metaphors, this episode shows how to simplify, persuade, and be heard.

In this episode, you will learn:

Whether you lead teams, pitch clients, or present to executives, these strategies will help you communicate with clarity and credibility.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🌐 Website: carminegallo.com

📖 Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo: https://amzn.to/3N9Fgn2

Carmine Gallo: We’re all storytellers. We’re wired for story. It’s how we process the world through narratives and stories. It’s the way we communicate information, mostly through stories, not bullet points on a slide. 

Andrea Wojnicki: If you wanna communicate like the world’s top leaders, then you’ll love this episode with Carmine Gallo, bestselling author, storytelling guru, and expert communication coach. We’ll reveal storytelling secrets from Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, and break down how you can craft stories that connect, persuade, and stick. 

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. I’m Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please call me Andrea. This is Talk Sbout Talk, the podcast where I help you communicate with confidence. I also write a newsletter. We’ll put a link to that in the description. 

After years of following Carmine Gallo, I finally connected with him on the Inc. Magazine Slack channel of all places. Yes, we’re both columnists for Inc.Magazine. I’ll leave links by the way to his and my articles in the show notes too.

Thank you so much for being here today, Carmine, to talk with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about communication skills. 

CG:  Well, thank you for inviting me. I think one of the reasons why I like your approach is because, unless I’m mistaken, it comes from an academic research background, doesn’t it? Didn’t you get a, uh, you got a PhD from the Harvard Business School? 

AW: I did. I got a doctorate of business administration, uh, with a major in marketing. 

CG:  Yeah. So I shared the perspective of putting things into contacts and sharing ideas that we can back by research and data. These aren’t just opinions, but everything we talk about is really backed by the latest science, which is always cool.

I think we come from different perspectives. Obviously, I’m not from an academic background, but we probably reach similar conclusions. 

AW: Yes. And I know from reading most, if not all of your books, Carmine, that you do a ton of research for your books, whether it’s interviews or counting things in various Ted Talks, which we’re gonna get into.

CG: Excellent. I see some of my books on your bookshelf. Yes. You, you a smart, you’re a smart podcast host. 

AW: Yeah, that’s the image I’m trying to portray here. Carmine. Okay. So. I have so many questions that I wanna ask you, but I really wanna start with this one, which is, I know based on your books and your writing and your articles that you’ve studied, many of the world’s greatest communicators, including Ted speakers, including Jeff Bezos, including Steve Jobs, and on and on and on. So I wanna start there. What do these incredible speakers have in common? Maybe what surprised you about them? Who stands out for you as the number one speaker in your mind? 

CG: In my opinion, still the world’s greatest brand storyteller was Steve Jobs. He brought a completely new dimension to presentations. His presentations were like theatrical performances. They were fun and engaging and interesting and entertaining. So I wrote the first book on how Steve Jobs gave these awe-inspiring presentations. 

That’s where I really started getting into the research, trying to talk to people who had worked side by side with Steve Jobs or who were in the practice and rehearsal rooms when he was getting ready for these huge keynote presentations, like the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and some of the other iconic presentations. 

AW: Can I just add, I’m so glad to hear you say that because I teach a lot of workshops on communication skills, and there’s a series that I’ve been doing for some physicians, some healthcare workers, and on the set, the workshop that we do focused on formal presentations, I ask them to watch that 2007 presentation, ’cause I think it is iconic as well. I’d love to hear maybe what you think stands out about that in terms of his preparation and delivery. 

CG: I’ll tell you what they all have in common. The great Ted speakers, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs. Getting back to one of your questions, and this will answer the Steve Jobs one too, it’s, he had the courage, they all had the courage to keep it simple.

Minimalism. When we talk about minimalism right now, it’s more about product design, or when you walk into an Apple store or a luxury store, it’s minimal, more white space, fewer products. Well, you can also apply that to presentations. So if you look at that, Steve Jobs’ presentation. There’s one picture on a slide.

One photo, one image, two words. You, there are no slides. That Steve Jobs probably ever delivered, you know, maybe decades earlier. There are no slides with just text and bullet points. It’s an image and minimal text, or just an image that takes a little courage. That’s what I mean by having the courage and the confidence to keep things simple.

Simple meaning everything from the words you use. Less jargon, more familiar language, all the way to the presentation itself, if you are using slides or visual materia,l to have the confidence to tell the story and let PowerPoint complement the story, but the slide should complement the story first. Does that make sense?

You are the storyteller, not the slides. 

AW: Absolutely. Yeah. So. As you were answering that question, Carmine, you made me think about something that I wasn’t planning to ask you, but I wanna get your opinion on this. I have this theory that a lot of us, maybe even most of us, make a lot of mistakes because of our generosity.

We think that the audience needs to know everything that we know about the topic, right? So then we end up losing focus, which is kind of your point here, right? So, I have this saying that I say to my clients, which is the most generous communicators, ironically, are more precise and more focused, and they’re sharing less quantity.

CG: Again, I mentioned something in the beginning that we’re reaching similar outcomes from different perspectives. I’ll tell you a story that I learned from the TED Talk organizers, but it doesn’t have to do with generosity; but it’s saying the same thing. Okay. 

So when I was writing a book on the on TED Talks that talk like TED, the organizers of the TED Conference, tover some 30 years have learned that when a speaker is invited to give a TED Talk, whether it’s 10 minutes or at the max 18 minutes, the speaker often asks in, in frustrated, in a real frustrated tone, how can I possibly tell the audience everything I know in 18 minutes? You can guess what the answer is.

AW: We don’t wanna know everything that you know. We just wanna know the one thing, right?

CG: Exactly. What’s the big picture theme? Then you can fill in some details, but the point is never in any presentation really, to tell people everything you know. It’s to tell the audience what they need to know at that time.

Depending on the audience, depending on your intended outcome. Then presentations and public speaking become so much simpler, and don’t try to condense everything, you know, select what the audience needs to know. You mentioned generosity, so let’s unpack that a little bit. I feel like I’m gonna turn the interview on you because I hadn’t thought about it that way, and I think it’s an interesting way to think about it.

AW: So, Carmine, I go back and look at some of the early newsletters that I was writing for my Talk About Talk audience, you know, six years ago. And I’m like, wow, I just was giving them everything. Every week. They were getting this huge volume. Was frankly a bit scattered, but I know in my mind that I had the best intentions.

I wanted to teach them everything that I could, and I realized over time that being more focused is really the generous thing to do. Yeah. I like, I like that approach. 

CG: Interesting way of looking at it. 

AW: Yeah, I think it was, you know, the lesson was from me looking back at my past work and seeing my mistakes.

CG: You know, I use the word courage at the beginning of this. Uh, I think everything we’re talking about, advanced communication, persuasion, does take a little courage. At least you gotta build up your confidence because if you’re not confident, let’s say you just got outta grad school, you have a business degree.

Wanna tell everybody how smart you are? You want everyone to know how smart you are. And then as you progress through a career and you see people who reach the top who are extraordinary speakers, they tend to do what we’re recommending here, which is holding back on a lot of information and only giving the audience the information they need to know. 

They’re much more selective than people who just enter the workforce because they’re already confident in their role. They don’t need to prove anything to anybody. So it does take a, build that confidence early before you’ve been in a career for 40 years.

AW: So, that is a different way of looking at it. Right. Maybe six years ago, I didn’t have the confidence as a communication coach that I now have, where I’m like, I know the, and also, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Right? Of course. 

CG: Yes. Yeah. Then I think that’s a big part of it too. I’m only half joking, but I think it does take a little confidence to be simple.

It takes confidence to deliver a PowerPoint presentation and not have a hundred words on a slide or eight bullet points and just have one picture. Uh, yeah, that takes a little confidence, but I’m not, I never ask anyone to completely blow up their PowerPoints, but within the culture that you’re in, within the corporate culture that you’re in, if most PowerPoints are really wordy and cluttered, see what happens when you insert a couple of PowerPoint slides that are completely opposite, and then you can kind of go back to the others. But see what happens. Try experimenting counter culture.

AW: I love it. So I wanna drill down on the confidence topic. A lot of the folks that I coach experience imposter syndrome, or they talk about anticipating feeling nervous and anxious before they go out on stage, either to lead a big meeting or to give a presentation.

What are some of the hacks or maybe mindsets that you share with people to boost their confidence? 

CG: It’s tough. Yeah. You’re supposed to be. Anxious about public speaking. So I think that’s the first thing. And I’m sure you’ve talked about this before, which is it’s natural. It doesn’t help a lot to say that, but when you talk to neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, you should be nervous.

Uh, because our, you all, Noah Harari has written about this, the famous historian, I’ve interviewed him once, but he was talking about how, uh, storytelling and communication skills were all important as we developed as a species, uh, because people could rally around a leader, a story, and uh, and share stories.

So anyway, we were having a whole conversation about storytelling, and then we got into this whole topic of, well, people are nervous, public speaking, and you’ve all said, yeah, you’re supposed to be, it’s mission critical. It’s from an evolutionary standpoint that you are liked by the tribe. If you were not accepted, you were banished outta that cave and that wasn’t a good outcome.

So to him it was like, yeah, so it’s natural. You’re, it’s, you’re supposed to be that way. So I kind of think that’s the first step. It’s like, yeah, okay. Acknowledge it. It’s a yes. This is a thought that’s coming through my head. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s there and it should be because I’m excited and, and I wanna share my ideas and I, yeah, I want to get them across.

But can I tell you before we leave this topic, there’s only one tactic on that I’ve come across that works. Terms of alleviating stress. And it’s the same tactic that professional athletes use before the big game, uh, or that law enforcement or military or anyone who actually has to execute something under high pressure.

They practice that skill thousands of times. I thought you were gonna say deep breathing. Carmine deep breathing. Actually, we could talk about this for the whole podcast, but deep breathing is a part of it. The Navy Seals use deep breathing to get their fear under control. So I’ve actually talked to seals about breathing exercises, but that’s a part of the training and preparation.

The point is they practice for it. They practice getting nervous. They practice putting themselves in high stress situations that they’re not familiar with. So I think the problem that most of us have when it comes to feeling anxious about. Speaking is because we’re doing something that we haven’t done a thousand times, and if you don’t practice and you don’t rehearse and you don’t put yourself under some kind of stressful situation.

You just worry for three weeks ahead of your PowerPoint. Yeah. You’re gonna be worried about it. Okay. 

AW: Yeah. Yeah. So, I’ve told a story of when I was in my twenties and I worked at Kraft Foods and I had to give this big presentation at the national sales meeting, and, and I completely bombed. I was shaking and I’m sweating, holding my script or whatever.

And then, yeah. So thankfully I independently made a decision that is never gonna happen again, and how am I gonna get over it? Is by volunteering every opportunity that I have to practice. 

CG: So at that time, whether that was intentional or not, or whether it was a conscious thing, you were going through those steps that, uh, and a professional athlete, uh, you know, or high-performance athlete goes through, so they don’t get nervous when the pressure is on.

You practice and you had practice games, you had a lot of them. Yeah. I honestly believe that’s one of the few tactics that works because it’s like any skill. The more you do almost anything, you get more comfortable at it. But very few of us give a presentation in front of a board 10 times a day. Of course, you’re gonna be uncomfortable, so you do need to put in that practice time and if deep breathing exercises help you and they should help you incorporate that into like your practice sessions.

Go through some deep breathing, then rehearse out loud, maybe in front of a friend or two. 

AW: Add a little attention to it. Make it as realistic as possible. I love it. I love it. I’m gonna be thinking about you next time, Carmine, when I’m rehearsing a keynote. So you’ve mentioned storytelling a few times, and I know you’ve written books about storytelling.

I feel like as a communication coach, and you might agree that at this point, everybody knows that storytelling is, I think, necessary for truly impactful communication, but it’s really hard. Why is storytelling so difficult? I think they’ve heard of it and some many know that they’re supposed to do it. 

We make it sound, uh, and I’m saying we creatives like us and people who talk about it, I think it’s important not to make it sound like it’s just for novelists and creative types and marketers, because I think a lot of people turn off almost immediately and think storytelling.

CG: I’m not writing the next Great American novel. Yeah. Okay, that’s cool. I’m sure there’s something to learn, but how does it apply to me? So I think it’s very important that we tell people. We’re all storytellers. We’re wired for story. It’s how we communicate. It’s how we process the world through narratives and stories.

It’s the way we communicate information, mostly through stories, not bullet points on a slide. So you, we are storytellers you, but it may not be your title. Your title does not have storyteller on it. It’s Vice President Development Manager, but you’re a storyteller. So understand that you’re the storyteller first.

It applies to each and every one of us. Some people just do it for a living. They’re called writers or screenplay writers, but you’re a storyteller too. You simply have to adapt it, understand it first, and then adapt it to a business, uh, business setting. 

AW: So. Imagine. I am not a storyteller. I am a vice president of marketing or hr, whatever finance at this organization.

I do some public speaking. I do lots of internal meetings, and I fully agree with Carmine and Andrea that storytelling is critical. Where do I get the stories and how do I think about integrating them into my communication?

CG: You’re a storyteller first. So stories come from your own personal experience. When you tell a case study, we’re all familiar with case study examples. A case study is a story. You just don’t call it a story, but it’s, it’s a story. So whenever you craft a narrative, it’s so much more impactful than simply delivering information. And I’m sure you’ve talked about the neuroscience of why that is, but essentially it goes back to, again, you all will tell you our evolutionary traits.

As Sapiens, we processed our world through stories and that’s how we became explorers and learners and people who, uh, cooperated with each other. You can’t cooperate just by giving people facts. You have to motivate them and take them on a journey. There’s a lot about storytelling gets pretty involved. I mean, you, you can get really, really deep into it.

So what I like to do is just start, you know, big picture stories can be personal anecdotes. An anecdote about yourself, your background, uh, why you came up with your idea. It could be a case study. Our competitors are doing X, Y, and Z, but if we do this, we’ll get ahead; we will get a big jumpstart on them.

If we do not take this, uh, if we do not adopt this new platform, we could be left behind and we may lose a lot of money and we may lose customers. Let me give you an example of a company that happened to. Oh, okay. It’s an example. It’s a story. So you’re telling stories all the time. Just think more deliberately about what those stories are.

Well, let me give you an example. I was thinking about the other day. Let’s say that I were to say. Andrea, after this interview, I think I’m gonna hit the golf range and practice something that I saw on YouTube. Okay. That’s a story, that’s a little mini story I can even go on about what I learned on YouTube and, and, and the outcome and what I hope to accomplish.

It’s not relevant. Okay. That’s, it’s odd. It would be awkward. It’s not relevant, but it’s a story. What if I were to make it a little more relevant and use myself as an example of something that would be put into context, and I would say something like, Andrea, let’s talk about practicing and alleviating nerves in public speaking.

I’m a golfer. As any golfer knows, there’s a big difference between hitting the ball well on the range and walking to the first tee, and that’s where we all collapse because we get really nervous when we’re on the first tee. That’s called first tee jitters. Well, public speakers have the same thing, and I think one of the solutions is to practice like a professional golfer does, and practice under extreme conditions and a little stress to get used to being on that first tee.

Now we can have a whole conversation. Okay. So that’s, that would be the beginning of the conversation, but it is a little story about myself, um, and what I’ve experienced on the golf course, but it’s relevant. I’m making it relevant to this conversation, so it doesn’t have to be. We’re not creating the next, you know, uh, three-hour blockbuster movie here.

It can be just something simple to connect with one another, but to make it so much more interesting than to bring up a slide and start hitting numbers data. Insert pie chart here. Insert Excel here. Data, bullet points. That’s why people are put to sleep. And if you want to cut through the noise, you need to keep people alert. People get bored easily, and bad PowerPoint or bad presentations will put people to sleep. We don’t want that. 

AW: So the story does not have to be epic, is what I’m hearing. It doesn’t have to be epic. A vignette or a metaphor is a. I guess effective and appreciated by the audience, even if they’re not conscious of it.

CG: Yes. And by, and when you do those kind of things, you’re, you’re just, you’re already telling a story. Just make it more deliberate. Do more of that. Less of just facts and figures. And if you’re going to use a fact, figure, or statistic, wrap it in some kind of story. Okay. The, yeah, this, um, this is an important number, 82%.

We can increase our profits by 82% if we follow this, my idea, this three-step process that I’ve been researching, okay, that’s information. It’s not a story. Uh, and then you can say. So let’s imagine what this would look like. You come to work in the morning, instead of doing this, you would do this. And just by doing this, by the end of the year, we would increase our profits.

Oh, okay. So now you’re taking me into like a journey. It doesn’t have storytelling does not have to be that complicated, but I think that when people hear storytelling. They kind of tune out because it’s, oh, that’s more for creatives, not for me. 

AW: I think you’re right. We overcomplicate it. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be epic. You don’t have to be a great novelist. 

CG: I love epic. I, when I teach and talk about storytelling and write about storytelling, I get pretty involved, um, you know, pretty deep into it, but doesn’t have to be epic. Everyone’s a storyteller. It’s how deliberate you are about it. 

AW: So speaking of Epic, let’s talk about Jeff Bezos, your most recent book, the Bezos Blueprint.

Carmine, I absolutely devoured that book. So first of all, I had no idea that he was such an incredible communicator. Like it was all news to me. And then the systems that he was mandating at Amazon were all news to me as well. For the listeners who aren’t familiar with the book and also like me at the time, are not, uh, familiar with Bezos and, and kind of what he did, can you share some of that with the audience?

CG: Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994, and he had a challenge, and the challenge was, how do I explain this to people? Because in 1994, the question was not. Why would I buy books online? Although that was one of the early questions. No, the Quest, the first question Jeff Bezos got when he was raising money for Amazon was, what’s the internet?

So by default, Jeff Bezos had to create and think through a lot of communication tactics that would make things easier and more understandable, and I think he got better and better at communication. So I wrote a book called The Bezos Blueprint. The Bezos blueprint. Plays off of many of the tactics that Jeff Bezos pioneered at Amazon to fuel the company’s extraordinary growth.

But then I go into the research behind it and I use a lot of other examples, both from people within Amazon and uh. And other companies that will do some, or other leaders who do something similar. Uh, remember Jeff Bezos did something that I think very few people know about. I’ve written about it. Other people have, but it’s not that commonly known.

Uh, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon. That was enough for me. When I first heard that, I said, I wanna know more. There’s a story there because who would do that? And then what he did was he banned PowerPoint within meetings at Amazon specifically, and he replaced PowerPoint with the written word.

Well, that is really interesting. And again, it’s, it counterintuitive. Uh, Jeff Bezos, he used to work for a hedge fund. He graduated from Princeton with computer science and electrical engineering. He is a data guy, a technologist. He’s talking about written memos and how writing is so much more effective than PowerPoints in paragraph form.

Right? Like a, like a narrative. Yeah. He said, you gotta write, I want to hear a, I wanna read a memo, like a narrative with like a title and examples and stories and subtitles. Like, like a, a short book. Who does that? Not Steve Jobs didn’t even say anything like that. So to me that was so fascinating and the more I got into it, oh my, my gosh, I just kept learning more and more and more about Jeff Bezos and some of the skills he pioneered.

And I argue they’re kind of advanced, a communication tactic. It’s not public speaking 1 0 1, it’s for aspiring leaders and, uh, more senior executives. Can I tell you one of my favorite? Uh, I’m sure. You know this; you’ve probably read it in the book. Maybe you were gonna ask me about it, but can I tell you about my favorite tactic of Jeff Bezos that No, I’d love to hear, I think is under appreciated.

I’d love to hear the analogies, analogies, metaphors. Yeah. Always thinking about an appropriate or interesting metaphor. A comparison between something that’s new with something that the audience would find familiar. He was very, very creative, and that’s more of an advanced skill. Very few leaders are good at using analogies and metaphors, but boy, when you are, it’s a real skill to have.

So, very few people know this, but do you know what metaphor was used to? Start Amazon. How did Jeff Bezos come up with a term Amazon? 

AW: I forget, but I keep thinking it was, he wanted something that started with A.

CG: That’s the common story; that’s a side effect of what he was looking for. He wanted to find some kind of comparison, uh, and easy to understand metaphor that people would get immediately.

Amazon. The Amazon River is the, is no first, he started with the bookstore. I want to start a bookstore. I wanna create a bookstore, uh, that offers the largest selection of books. Largest selection, largest earth’s largest selection, Earth’s largest river, the Amazon River, Amazon. Oh. And it starts with a, it’s a metaphor.

Amazon itself is a metaphor. He went on to do other metaphors in business, like in the startup world where I live in Silicon Valley, everyone talks about the flywheel. Everyone’s got a flywheel because the flywheel is what gonna helps, uh, create momentum and growth. That comes from Jeff Bezos popularized the flywheel.

He didn’t invent the concept. He read about it and he thought, that’s an interesting metaphor. So he was, he’s creative in that way. Some of the most famous metaphors in business today come from people like Jeff Bezos or another great communicator who is a Warren Buffet, another one of my favorite financial communicators.

AW: Tell me more about Warren Buffett. What do you respect about his communication in particular?

CG: He recently announced that he is gonna step down from Berkshire Hathaway after leading it for some 60 years or so for decades. I think it’s 60 years he’s been writing an annual shareholder letter. That letter is taught even at business schools because Warren Buffett can take complex financial information and make it interesting to read.

How does he do that? Well, he uses metaphors and analogies in every letter, there’s always some kind of an analogy. So the next time you’re watching business news, stock analyst is gonna come on the air and say, we like this investment. It’s got a moat around it. A moat, you know, like a castle and a moat.

That means it’s, uh, hard to, hard to enter, hard to enter that industry, keep the competitors out. That came from Warren Buffett. He first wrote that in a shareholder letter about 20 years ago, and now everybody uses it. It’s shorthand. It’s great. Oh, yeah. There’s a moat around it. We like that stock.

There’s a moat there. Okay. That came from somebody, it came from Warren Buffet who really talked about it, and now it’s kind of attributed to him, but he does all, he does this all the time. So if you, here’s the lesson for everybody. The advanced lesson is if you have a. An idea that’s new, unfamiliar, somewhat complicated, find a familiar, uh, comparison to make it more relatable.

]We call it an analogy, a metaphor, I don’t care what you call it, but find a familiar comparison, and that’s how people will remember it. 

AW: I love it. It’s like, I’ve heard this, this formula, when you’re selling your idea, just say it’s like a. Blank, but blank. Right? 

CG: There you go. That’s an analogy. Absolutely. It’s like a blank. 

AW: So, I wanna ask you before we get into the rapid fire questions, Carmine, I’d love to hear your take on communication these days, particularly in business and with AI. So, how can the most effective communicators or people who are looking to boost their communication effectiveness use ai?

And I’m gonna say maybe other than asking it to help you brainstorm metaphors which I feel like it’s low hanging fruit. Like, if you’re looking for a metaphor, describe a situation and then you can ask. And I, I heard this years ago, actually, um, when people were talking about what to use AI for. 

CG: Okay, don’t make the assumption because I make this mistake too.

Because we would use it for something like that. We understand its uses, don’t make the assumption that everybody knows this because they actually don’t. Uh, when I’m speaking to very high-level business professionals or people who are very comfortable with chat, GPT and ai, and I bring up exactly that, you know, it’s really good for if you wanna brainstorm a metaphor and they look at me like.

You know, with that glazed look, the, the, the how, what, how would you ask it to do that? What do you mean? So, I think there’s still a lot of learning to do. Most people, I don’t think use AI as, I think it’s a good, uh, as a tool that we can use for, IM improved communication. So yes, use it, brainstorm. Give me some suggested comparisons or analogies or metaphors for this idea, and it’ll come up with a few things that may or may not work, but they’ll at least get you to start thinking about the concept in a very different way.

So that leads me to what I think about AI at this point. It is a wonderful tool for communicators because most people, again, are not. Thinking and obsessed with communication as we are. So they’re not really thinking about storytelling, and yeah, they’re not thinking it through. So they do need a little more help.

And AI is terrific for researching and then organizing and, uh, outlining too. Making your structure just a little simpler to follow, pulling out some key phrases, ask it to simplify your writing, and the first thing it’ll do is start identifying jargon and unfamiliar words. Uh, you might find that that is going to be a lot easier for most of your listeners or readers to understand.

So I love it. I love it for that good brainstorming tool. Terrific assistant. Partner, whatever you wanna call it, thought partner, but do not for a second. Think of that AI in any of the platforms replace you, your distinct personality, your lived experiences, your imagination. AI cannot imagine things that haven’t happened before.

Okay, newsflash. You know that it can’t do that. It looks for patterns that have already recurred. I remember speaking to one of the leading world’s leading scientists in ai. He wrote a book about China versus, uh, the US in terms of the AI wars, right? And, uh, I was speaking to him and. I must have been reading a lot of scary AI stuff at the time because I was like, oh my gosh, AI, it’s gonna replace everybody.

It’s gonna take all our jobs. It can do this, and it can do that, and it’ll do that. And the guy looks at me like, you know, he tilts his head well, you know, like a dog when they tilt their head. ’cause they don’t, they’re confused. And he said, you know, it’s, it’s not real, right? It’s not a human, you know, it’s not human.

It can recognize human emotions, but it doesn’t have human emotions. But it was very matter-of-fact, like what are you talking about? So his point was, and he actually later got to this, he said, great tool, amazing tools, but. Nobody wants to hear AI lead them, motivate them, get them to collaborate together as a team.

Uh, nobody wants to hear AI give them a pep talk. It’s, there’s a difference between a real lived experience coming from you, a real emotion, a person who has emotion connecting to another person emotionally, and what AI does. So if you can just. See AI for what it does and use it. I think it’s a fantastic creative brainstorming tool, but don’t just copy and paste.

CG: The story’s gotta come from you. That, and that’s how you set yourself apart. Being unique. Be distinct. 

AW: Yeah. I, you’ve probably read this line a million times as well before, it’s not likely that your job’s gonna be replaced by AI, but it, it will be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI better than you do. I’ve heard that. Thanks for reminding me. That’s a good line. 

CG: I think there’s a lot of truth to that. 

AW: I actually, I stand corrected. You know my point, when I first asked you the question about metaphors and thinking, we all know this. I recently interviewed an AI expert named Jonathan Mast, and he was spewing off these stats, and I kind of had the same attitude.

AW: I was like, you know, everyone’s using it. He goes, no, Andrea, 18% of the US workforce right now is using it daily. And I was like, oh. 

CG: I’m an early adopter. Yeah. Again, I’ve been, and I’ve been using it; not only am I among the 18%, but I think you and I, are probably a subsection of that 18% because very few people are using it for.

This kind of creative brainstorming that we’re talking about. So there’s plenty of room to grow, uh, and learn more about how best to use AI. I’m learning something new every day, so it’s kind of fun. It’s fun for me. 

AW: I was gonna say, send me your tips. I’ll send you mine. I find it fun as well. Uh, before we get to the three rapid-fire questions, one big question.

It’s a big one, Carmine. If the Talk About Talk listeners could change one thing about the way that they communicate to make it more impactful, and you can, this can be written or verbal, whatever context you choose. What’s the one thing that you would suggest where you see people making, getting a lot of traction when they learn this, whatever it is.

CG: Well, you caught me on a week where I’m gonna give you one answer, but. Two weeks ago, I may have given you another answer, but today where I think people can move the needle and it maybe it’s a reflection of my pet peeve and something I get really frustrated about, because people have the curse of knowledge.

They know way too much about their particular industry. They start in the middle constantly. When someone asks you, can you tell me more about this topic? They want you to start. At the top, at the 30,000-foot level, and then drill down. And,  I think this is why people sound confusing. They’re convoluted; they trigger another, uh, set of questions.

I see this all the time on business news. Even the business hosts, the technology experts are saying, can you simplify this quantum computing? What is it before you explain how it works? You know, it’s like, just what is it people are, they don’t ask you, give me the big picture, but they want you to start from the top and then start drilling down.

Um, and, and so, find that that’s where people tend to make things far more complicated than they should be because you’re not starting from the big picture, you’re starting in the middle. And my frustration a lot is when I get directions or instructions from an organization or a bank, you know, you call up your bank and you get all these complicated instructions, and what they’re not doing is they’re not starting at the top.

Here’s a credit card, Carmine, and this credit card allows you to do X, Y, and Z. Let’s talk about Z. Yeah. Okay, great. Top and now. Now we can start going down the funnel, but start at the top and then don’t start from Z because now I’m confused. Why are we even going to Z? Why do we need Z? Start at the top, and you’ll start seeing.

I think if you just start being aware of this. You’ll begin to realize when you’re listening to a really boring presentation or you’re listening to instructions that are somewhat confusing, it’s because they’re not starting at the top. 

AW: Yeah, they’re starting in the middle, so I’m gonna be doing two things. I’m gonna be watching out for this. I would say it’s zooming out first and then zooming in is another way of putting it. I’m gonna be looking for that all the time now. And secondly, I’m gonna be watching the business news through a whole new lens based on this conversation as well. 

CG: Well, my background was as a journalist.

I was a broadcast journalist, and then the last few years of my career as a journalist, I was in television news. And, uh, the reason why I started writing books. Speaking on the topic of communication storytelling is because you’ll appreciate this. When I was at C-N-N-C-B-S, few other outlets, we always went back to the same people.

We always went back to the same sources. Not, we didn’t cover as much politics back then. It was like serious, just business news. Uh, and so we would go to the same analyst, the same economist, the same stock market experts, and I started to ask, why are we going to these same few people? Because they could explain it a lot better.

Uh, so when you have that skill of being able to explain complex material in a way that is interesting and engaging, uh. You’ll stand out, not just on television. Of course, you’ll stand out in any field because people appreciate it, and they crave that simplicity or an interesting way of getting their information.

AW: You will be quoted on that. Carmine, that was so well put. Okay. Are you ready for the three rapid-fire questions? 

CG: Yeah. And rapid fire, meaning I only get one sentence, or can I expand or can I expand? Oh, you can elaborate. 

AW: I wanna hear. I wanna hear. 

CG: Okay, so it’s kind of loose, rapid fire.

AW: Yeah. It’s loose, rapid fire. Yeah. Okay. Question number one: Are you an introvert or an extrovert? And how does that affect your communication? 

CG: Okay, years ago, I would’ve said I’m an introvert, which people don’t expect. But, um, then someone called my attention to the fact that there’s different types of introverts and extroverts. So I’m, uh, something called a thinking introvert.

I dunno if you’ve, have you heard of these things? I’ve done a lot of research and reading on introvert and I have not heard about that. I don’t know if it’s thinking introvert, maybe it’s a different term, but it’s kind of a subsection. I am kind of, I’m thoughtful. I am someone who does kind of stay in their own head a lot, but I am also someone who can speak to audiences in big groups.

But that doesn’t mean I’m like a big group kind of guy. I can do it. I could do it comfortably. But usually if I’m speaking to a group of people, I would rather listen to them, get them to talk about themselves, and just sit and listen rather than just talking about myself, which I feel uncomfortable. And someone told me, no, that’s introversion, but it’s the type of introvert who can be an extrovert.

I said, okay. Haven’t read a book on that yet, but I’ll go with it. 

AW: Carmine, you and I couldn’t co-author that book. I have so much to say about that. There’s gotta be a name for it. Yeah. Uh, well, I think people are confusing shyness, which is social anxiety, with introversion, which is getting your energy from solitude.

Okay, well then, I think I’m an introvert first. Yeah. Uh, okay. You’ve already answered this, but maybe you can give us more. My second question is, what are your communication pet peeves? Other than not zooming out before you zoom in any other pet peeves?

CG: The next time you’re listening or watching CNBC, whatever program has a lot of like stock analysts and business professionals, listen carefully to these experts wh,o instead of sounding confident, this stock is moving in this direction because of X, Y, and Z.

They come across as almost like teenagers, almost like kids. Uh uh. So we really like this stock because of, well, you, you know, there there’s just a lot of, um, like, um, well, momentum, right? Right. Is that right? You know? Right. Like, you know, oh my God, my head’s exploding. Just thinking about that right now. And it’s not just a few; it’s constantly during the day.

Right. Well, no, don’t say right. You’re the expert. That’s why you’re on television. You tell me. So, but I think this is an example of something that a lot of people suffer with, and, uh, and it diminishes the perception of confidence, fewer filler words, and you don’t have to start every sentence with, and then end it with Right. You know? Right. Those things diminish the strength of your message, so be aware of it also. 

AW: Well, one of my pet peeves is when. Interviewees start every answer with great question. And I don’t think you did that once. I don’t think you did. So when, when someone interviews me, I have this rule, I’m allowed to say it once, and I usually say, I only say this when I mean it.

That is a great question. And then I answer it. So, the third question, is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending a lot lately? It could be related to communication skills or not. 

CG: I tend to like podcasts that have interviews with really interesting people and I will tend to follow those that have more interviews with creative types, uh, but fun interviews with creatives.

For example, if I were to look on my Spotify list, you know, let’s be honest of what I have on my podcast list, it would probably be like Dak Shepherd who has that armchair expert, Dak Shepherd, because he. Interviews a lot of people who are authors or historians or Hollywood types or creatives. So I like learning from a lot of creatives.

Uh, smartless, you know, that’s another one that I tend to enjoy. I think I lean toward those because they interview a lot of Hollywood types, but also directors, creatives, and storytellers. So I’m always just intrigued by someone who’s an interesting character. And books too is, I’m a history buff, so I tend to read a lot of history, but history that’s really fun and interesting and engaging to read because getting, we’ll end here I think, or wrap this up because it’ll come full circle. 

Almost every major event throughout history, if you study it or read about it, there’s always someone who triggered that event, and they had to be really persuasive. So I like to read history books because I learn a lot about communication in history.

AW: Yeah. And it’s stories. It’s his story, right? 

CG: I love got people who can write a book, uh, they’re called like nonfic or, or, um, nonfiction narratives. Uh, I think that’s the category. So they’re real history books, but written in a narrative form. And I always loved that because I, I’ve told the authors who I’ve read, uh, sometimes I’ll tell them how is it that I knew exactly what was going to happen?

I still had to turn to the page to the next chapter. How did you do that? I already know the history of it and you made me wanna read till the end. That’s what a good writer can do. So I appreciate good writing.

AW: Amazing, Carmine. Is there anything else you wanna share with the talk about talk listeners that will help boost their communication effectiveness? 

CG: I love to keep in touch with them. Find me on LinkedIn. I think I’m the only Italian Carmine in California. There’s not many. There’s not many of us, so just look for Carmine Gallo, the author. If it pops up and I’m in California, that’s probably me. But, uh, yeah, I, I love to keep in touch or just go to my website, carmine gallo.com.

But those are both great ways of actually contacting me so we can have a conversation. 

AW: Amazing. I’m gonna put links to your LinkedIn to CarmineGallo.com and to your fantastic books in the show notes. I wanna say. Thank you so much, Carmine. I said at the beginning, I’ve been looking forward to this interview for a long time, and you exceeded my expectations.

I really appreciate you sharing your time and your expertise with me and the listeners. Thank you. Oh, thank you. 

CG: Thanks for inviting me.

AW: Thank you again, Carmine. It was wonderful to finally have the opportunity to talk communication with you. Now. As always, I’m gonna summarize. With three main points that I hope you’ll take away.

The first point is focus. Carmine spoke a lot about minimalism. This is about precision and brevity. And interestingly, how it takes courage to have this focus to be a minimalist in your communication. More focus, fewer words, less clutter on your slides.

This relates to the second point that I wanna reinforce. When you give a presentation, you are the storyteller, not the slides. Think of Steve Jobs, minimalist slides, black background, one simple image, maybe two words. The slides support you. They do not tell your story.

And the third point, if you’re nervous about presenting, just know this. You’re supposed to be nervous. It’s supposed to be that way. So what can you do about it? Practice being nervous. Go out of your way to put yourself into situations where you feel anxious. Raise your hand to lead every meeting and present every talk.

This is what high-performance athletes do. They practice hard until competition day comes, and then muscle memory sets in. Practice really does make perfect. And that is it for this episode. Thanks again to Carmine, and you can check out the show notes for links to everything that we discussed, and of course, to connect with both of us.

Now, if you enjoyed this episode, I’m gonna ask you to please leave, talk about talk a rating or a review. This helps us get discovered by more folks, and I really appreciate it. If you’re not subscribed yet, just click subscribe or follow. Okay. Thanks for listening and talk soon.

The post Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos & the Secret to Unforgettable Communication | Carmine Gallo (ep. 197) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

What questions do ambitious professionals ask to help them improve their communication? In this special Q&A episode, Andrea answers listener questions on imposter syndrome, brain fog, elevator pitches, and executive presence.

In this episode, you will learn:

This special Q&A shines a light on common speaking challenges and provides frameworks you can use immediately in meetings and presentations.

💻 Website: TalkAboutTalk.com

Andrea Wojnicki: It is critical to feel confident and to be perceived as confident. If you wanna establish credibility, then you’ve got to be confident, and the good news is that confidence can be learned. 

Hey there. Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. You are in for a fantastic episode. I am really, really excited about this one. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been asking you for questions in my email newsletter on LinkedIn and Instagram, and even here on the podcast, what communication skills questions do you have for me today? I’m answering those questions. This Q&A episode is your chance to hear my answers to your questions. This is like a free coaching session. 

Let’s do this. Let’s talk bout talk. In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where I coach ambitious executives like you to communicate with confidence, clarity, and credibility.

Why? So that you can make an impact and achieve your career goals. You can learn more about what I do if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com, or you can connect with me on social media. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn, and I would love to see you there.

Okay, let’s get into this. I scoured my inbox and my social media feeds to collect your questions, and we’re gonna dive in right now. Let’s talk about talk. I’ve got question number one printed right in front of me. Let me read it to you. This is from a listener named Steven who emailed me. Here’s his question.

One thing that’s tripping me up with communication skills is what others are thinking about me and about what I’m saying. Are they thinking, Ugh, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Or is it something like, what in the world is this guy talking about? I’m so lost. I also begin to overanalyze my audience, and I think that they’re all zoned out, and the look that they’re giving me is a look of, we don’t really want to be here.

Andrea, I need your help. All right, Steven, a couple things for you. First of all, what you’re describing here is a perfect example of imposter syndrome, and you need to know imposter syndrome is very, very common it is. Only a few exceptions that I can think of, of clients of mine who do not experience imposter syndrome.

And the good news is you can overcome it with practice and with different mindsets and tactics. So that’s one thing you’re describing, imposter syndrome, and you can overcome it. The second thing I wanna say, based on the way that you worded your question for me, Steven, is I’m gonna diagnose you as someone who has very high self-awareness.

Let me back up for a minute here and talk about the research on self-awareness, which is very important if you wanna be an exceptional communicator. So. The research on self-awareness shows that there are really two different types of self-awareness: internal self-awareness and external self-awareness.

Internal self-awareness is probably what most of us think about when we think about the term self-awareness. It’s being conscious of our thoughts. Our feelings, our emotions, and even our physicality. Like, I’m hot, I’m cold, I’m shaking, I’m nervous, whatever. Okay, so that’s internal self-awareness. There’s another kind of self-awareness that maybe we don’t think about as often.

External self-awareness. So external self-awareness is being aware of your environment and context around you, and specifically aware of your impact on others. Steven, the way that you worded your question to me it sounds as if you are very high on external self-awareness. And I wanna tell you, this is great news because this is a key ingredient for exceptional communication.

I hope that in and of itself will help to elevate your confidence. I’m gonna provide you with one other tip that I hope helps, and it is simply to check in. It is okay whether you are in front of an audience. The way you worded your question, you used the term audience, so I’m guessing that you’re talking about when you’re giving a formal presentation.

But even if you’re in a meeting, you’re seated around a table or around a screen. If you’re online and you’re making your point and you’re interpreting through your external self-awareness that people might not be getting their message and you might not be clear, they might not agree with you, whatever the point is, it is a power move.

To pause and say, I just wanna check in with everyone is the last point that I made here, clear. And you could be more specific and say the point about whatever the my, the reason, my recommendation, or my rationale here, whatever it is, check in and ask them. You can be very explicit. Can I have a raise of hands on?

Is everyone clear? If you’re clear, raise your hand. Or you could say. Raise your hand if you have any questions. I would love to pause and answer it right now. So when you do this, you’re helping your audience. You’re making sure that they, if they have any questions, they have an opportunity to ask and to check in.

And you’re also helping yourself. You’re clarifying whether what you’re interpreting in terms of your external self-awareness is in fact, true. So I wouldn’t do this, you know? Four or five times in a presentation. Of course, maybe you do it once or twice, but if you’re making a very important point that you wanna make sure is clear, or if you’re catching some cues in terms of facial expressions, body language, that things might not be clear, it is a power move to pause and ask them explicitly. I hope that helps, Steven. 

Okay, let’s move on to the next question. The next question I have here is from Christine, who emailed me. Hello, Dr. Wojnicki. I wanted to write you about the communication issue that I struggle with. I’ve noticed that since I’ve been going through menopause, my memory and energy has plummeted, and the brain fog has me grasping for words.

It’s like I can’t mouth these simple, everyday words that are on the tip of my tongue, and it’s infuriating. I feel dumb and flaky around my coworkers, which then turns into the imposter syndrome as communication is paramount in my line of work. This feeling has damaged my confidence to a certain extent and has caused me anxiety.

Okay, Christine, there we go with the, with the imposter syndrome topic again, so. I wanna clarify before I answer your question that I’m gonna answer this in the context. Not of getting over a menopause brain, but you could have baby brain if you have a young infant in your house. It could be that you are sleep deprived, maybe you’re hungover, whatever, you’re not at your best, you come, maybe you got in a big fight with your spouse before you got into work.

The point is, you know that you’re not at a hundred percent. And how do you make sure that your communication is optimized in this context? I do have three suggestions, and for those of you who have been listening to the Talk about Talk podcast, you know I’m a big fan of the power of three. So Christine, I’m gonna give you three suggestions, and two of them are kind of obvious.

And the third one is actually my main recommendation for you. The first thing I wanna suggest is if you’re going into a high-stakes meeting. Even if it’s just a status meeting with your boss and you’re feeling, you know, sleep deprived or you have menopause brain, whatever the reason is, preparation will help you immensely.

So make sure you understand what’s on the agenda, make sure you understand what your role is, think in advance of some things that you can say. The truth is, most of us don’t do it, and if you spend some time preparing in advance for the meeting, you may end up providing more value than others in the meeting, despite your brain fog. 

Okay, so think about what the topic is, think about what you might say, anticipate, and prepare. My second suggestion is, again, before you go into this meeting, separate from what the agenda is. I want you to focus on your personal brand. I want you to focus on your unique professional identity, and what do I mean by that?

Before you go into this meeting, Christine, think about your unique strengths, skills, expertise, and passions, the things that you know, you can add value on in the meeting. So it’s probably an internal meeting and you’re meeting with other people that work at the same company. What unique value do you bring?

And then make sure those are the things that you comment on that will help elevate your confidence and help you be a bigger contributor in the meeting. So that’s my second suggestion. My third suggestion for anyone out there generally, but especially if you’re not ticking at a hundred percent, like Christine was talking about with brain fog, is to think about using frameworks.

Frameworks are great because they will boost your confidence. You have a structure that you’re following. The structure is also proven, so it’ll make better sense to the people you’re communicating with, and it’ll help boost your confidence. Two frameworks that come to mind are my self-introduction framework and also using the power of three.

So my self-introduction framework is present, past, future. If you go into a meeting and you’re asked to introduce yourself, whether you have brain fog or not, please use the self-introduction framework. It’ll help you do so with confidence. Here’s the framework, present, past, future, present. So start with who you are and what you do.

Hi, my name is Christine. I am a construction consultant at ABC company. Okay. Then you move to past. Here’s where you establish credibility. So you, depending on the context, you mention one or two or at most three things about yourself or about your past that are relevant to the context, and that will help you establish credibility.

You could say, I’ve been here for three years, where I came in at this role, I got promoted to this, and last month we succeeded in achieving this goal. Right? So you say a few things that are relevant to establish credibility for yourself. Then you move on to the future tense. Here’s where you say something enthusiastic about what’s to come.

You could say, I’m really looking forward to getting to know all of you better, working on this project together, and knocking it out of the park. So research shows, enthusiasm wins. End your self-introduction with a statement of enthusiasm. So that’s one framework you can use is the self-introduction framework.

And then the other framework that you can use is just using the power of three. Imagine Christine, you have brain fog and your boss says, in this meeting, we need to make a decision. Are we going with option A or option B, Christine? And you’re like, oh dear, and you’ve got brain fog. Just remember the power of three.

Here’s what you say. There are many advantages and disadvantages, pros and cons, for option A and option B. I’m gonna go with option B. Three reasons that come to mind. Number one, reason number two, reason number three. Even if you don’t have three reasons at the top of your mind, Christine, when you say this, you’re smart enough that they’ll come to you.

So highlight three reasons and then say again. I understand that there are some advantages to option A. But for these three reasons, I really recommend that we go with option B. And you sound so succinct when you say this. You’ve got structure to your answer. You’re doing your audience, the other people in the room a favor.

You’re telling them, I’m gonna tell you three reasons why. So when you get to the second one, they’re like, she’s not gonna keep rambling. She’s only got one more. You’re doing them a favor. You’re doing a self yourself a favor. You’re boosting your confidence and you’re communicating with clarity. Okay, Christine, thank you for that question. I hope that helps. 

Let’s move on to the next question. The next question is on LinkedIn. Actually, I got questions from many, many, uh, folks including Jad, Mohammed, and Daniel. They are all asking for tips on developing, or as a few of them said, nailing their elevator pitch or their elevator speech. My answer to this general question may surprise you.

It’s this no. I will not help you nail your elevator pitch or your elevator speech. Why? Two reasons. One, an elevator pitch always sounds rehearsed because it is, and you don’t wanna sound rehearsed. Secondly, an elevator pitch or an elevator speech is not customized and therefore it is not optimized for the audience.

Okay, Andrea, so you’re not gonna help me with my elevator pitch. So what do I say when I get on the elevator and the CEO is there, and I know I’ve got two and a half minutes to get from the 40th floor down to the main floor with the CEO? What do I say? Here’s what I tell you. You don’t start by talking about yourself.

Instead, bring something up about the other person that they care about. I promise you the CEO has people pitching them all day. Does anyone ever ask them how they are? Does anyone ever comment on the work that they’ve done? So that’s my first piece of advice is check in with the other person. It could be as simple as, how’s your day going?

Even better, ask them about a project that you know they’re working on, or maybe one that they just completed that’s positively impacted your work, so make it about them. Then you can go into your pitch if you want to call that if you don’t know the person. This is a fantastic time to use a self-introduction framework: Present past, future. 

Make sure that your future comment is very enthusiastic about what you’re working on, and relate it back to the CEO or the person that you’re talking to. If you’ve already met them, you can still use the framework, but just customize it. Use the self-introduction framework. You could say, well, you may recall, I work in this department, right?

So talk about who you are and what you do. Go to the past tense and say, Recently, I’ve been working on these other projects, and we had some great success. So this is your chance to sell yourself a little bit, right? Establishing credibility, as I said, and then again, end it off with a positive statement with enthusiasm, talking about the future.

So the research shows that enthusiasm wins, as I said before, whether it’s in the context of sales, negotiating, teaching, and coaching. People are more likely to close the sale, to win the negotiation, to successfully coach and teach people when they demonstrate enthusiasm. And you wanna make a positive impression on the CEO, right?

So end with a, I’m really excited about this project, and I hope I’ll be able to present the outcome of this project to you soon. Something like that. So, to the folks who are inquiring about nailing their elevator pitch or their elevator speech. Don’t think of it as a speech. Think of it as an opportunity to check in with the other person, and then use the self-introduction framework to guide your comments.

Okay, moving on. I had a lot of questions about formal presentations. I’m gonna share three with you here. The first one is from Amisha on LinkedIn. Who said, what’s the best way to practice public speaking when you don’t have a live audience? 

Okay. Amisha, I’m so glad you asked this. When I read this question, I was like, I’m for sure gonna answer this. I work from home, okay. I don’t have a bunch of colleagues that I can go and practice or rehearse my keynote speeches or my workshops with, so you know what I do. If it’s a high stakes presentation, I will literally stand up and practice presenting to the wall. What do I mean by that? I mean, I did this recently.

I was in my kitchen. Nobody else was home, and I had to deliver a 15 minute, so very time-bound keynote speech. I wrote out my speech, and then I narrowed it down to one sheet of paper with my main points. I stood up with my sheet of paper. I’m not reading a script, right? I’ve just got the main points written there.

I used the timer on my phone to record how long I would take, and I practiced delivering my speech the first time I gave it. It was 30 minutes. That’s not good. I need, I only had 15, so I sat down, I cut some things out. I tried again the next time, it was 20 minutes. By the time I practiced it a third time, I had it down to 15 minutes and it flowed.

And here’s the thing, when you practice this way, even though you’re practicing, you’re standing up, you’re practicing talking to a wall, your brain has muscle memory. So when you go out on stage, it’s like, I’ve done this before, and I find that works really well. So don’t use the excuse that you don’t have people to present to, to rehearse to, as an excuse for not practicing. Practice does make perfect.

Next question about formal presentation is from Nikolage on LinkedIn. How can I stop my voice from shaking during presentations? I don’t have an issue with my voice shaking now, but earlier in my career it definitely happened. I remember when I was a sales rep and then I was working in the marketing department at Kraft Foods, I had to give some presentations, and very often I would be sweating and shaking, and my voice would be shaking.

So I have a couple things to share with you that help a lot physical things. Mental things, so physically first, I know you probably know this is where I’m headed. Breathing is key. I’ve had the great opportunity to interview some fantastic vocal coaches over the last couple years on this podcast.

And breathing is always a core tenet of optimizing your voice. So recently in the research that I’ve been reading, it’s actually your exhale. So yes, you want to breathe deeply and slowly, but particularly your exhale why. When you slow or elongate your exhale, your brain says, oh, I’m not gasping for air.

Everything must be okay. And then it calms your body and your brain down. So just try this before you go out on stage or before you answer that big, important question in a meeting: take a slow, deep breath and really slow your exhale. Now you, you don’t wanna blow like that into the microphone, but you get the idea.

So slow your exhale. This will calm your body down and make your voice sound better. The other thing physically that you can do that most people do, but not everyone does. Make sure you have water. So if you’re in a meeting, always have water with you, and especially if you’re going out on stage. I used to bring a glass of water.

Now I always bring a plastic bottle with a lid just in case it falls down and it seems like it’s Murphy’s Law if I have it there with me. I won’t need it, but there have been a few times when I’ve been on stage in front of an audience where my throat has gone really dry and I desperately would’ve appreciated a sip of water.

So bring a bottle of water with you, whether it’s a meeting or whether you’re on stage. So you’ve looked after yourself physically, you’re breathing deeply, elongating your exhale, and you’ve got your water with you in case you need it. Mentally, what do you do to optimize your nerves and not have a shaky voice?

What I do, what works for me, is a mantra. My mantra goes like this, Andrea, you know what? You know, and you’re keen to learn more. Lemme break that apart for you. You know what, you know, this is about me doubling down on my expertise. I’m not saying I’m good at everything, Andrea. You’re the best. No, no, no, no.

You know what you know, you know consumer psychology, you know communication, you know, whatever the topic is of the speech that I’m giving or the keynote. So, remind yourself of your skills and your expertise. This will elevate your confidence and provide you with focus. Okay? And then the second part of it is.

You’re keen to learn more. This is about me reminding myself of my growth mindset. There’s a good chance someone in the audience is gonna ask me a question that I haven’t thought about before and I don’t have an answer to. This is an opportunity to learn. So with my mantra, I’m reminding myself of my strengths and my growth mindset.

You are welcome to steal or borrow my mantra, by the way. But regardless, I encourage you to use a mantra. This will focus your brain on the good, right, and it’ll also distract you from your anxiety and your nerves. I find it works, and I have lots of clients who do the same, and they say it works for them.

Okay, third question about formal presentation. Elena on LinkedIn asked, what’s the secret to recovering smoothly after you lose your train of thought on stage? So. Yes, I’ve had this happen to me a few times when I’m actually giving virtual presentations. It’s happened when I get distracted when I’m looking at someone on the screen, and I know that it, it happens to people all the time.

I do have an answer for you here. The answer is to be singularly focused on what your main point of your presentation is. This actually has a couple of benefits, right? If you think about it. The presentation that has many, many main points is going to be less engaging and less memorable than the one that has one key point.

So this will provide you with focus and that will benefit your audience or your listeners. The other thing that having a main point does is it allows you to reset. So imagine you’re giving a presentation and someone asks you a question, you know, mid presentation, and you answer it, and then you’re like.

Hang on a second. Where was I? And whether or not you have slides, you might not remember what you were gonna say next. If you go back to your main point, that will bring you back to your presentation and the focus. And in every situation where I’ve heard this happening, it’ll remind you of where you were.

So it’ll boost your confidence. It’ll help your audience. And if you lose track of where you are in the presentation, it’ll bring you back. Be crystal clear on your main point. 

The last question I have here is also from LinkedIn. Two people ask me this. Daniel and Monia separately ask for tips on developing executive presence.

So I think about this a lot because executive presence is something that I would say most of my clients are seeking. And so I have three things again, the power of three. Three things that we can all work on to help us elevate our executive presence. The first one, maybe this will surprise you, maybe not.

The first thing is to focus on your basic communication skills, and when I say basic, I don’t mean easy, but I mean the kind of elementary communication skills, things like listening, storytelling, formal presentations. If you think about the folks around you who are exhibiting executive presence, they all have exceptional communication skills, so you can elevate your executive presence by focusing on your basic communication skills.

The second thing is to focus on elevating your confidence. A lot of the questions that we’ve had here in this Q&A episode have been focused on imposter syndrome and confidence. So think about the tactics and the mindsets that will help you. Everything from deep breathing, reciting a mantra. To doubling down on your personal brand or your professional identity, really thinking about what your unique strengths are.

All of these things will help boost your confidence. And the truth is, if you’re feeling confident, people will perceive you as confident or as exhibiting gravitas, and that’s when you can start to establish credibility and executive presence. So we’ve got the basic communication skills and we’ve got confidence.

The third way of establishing executive presence is actually a really easy one. And it’s interesting. People always answer this one with, oh, I already do that. Or, of course, and it’s something that they can easily change. And it’s this, use the word lead when you’re talking about yourself, when you’re introducing yourself, when you’re talking about your work.

Use the word lead. Leadership led, the team I led accomplished this. My leadership style is this, I lead the blah blah, blah function or the blah blah, blah team, right? So however you can use the term, every time you use the word lead, you are either explicitly or maybe implicitly reinforcing your status as a leader and establishing your executive presence.

So three ways to help boost your executive presence. One. Work on your basic communication skills. Two, elevate your confidence using mindsets and tactics. And three, use the word lead in reference to yourself and the work you do whenever you can. 

Okay, I’m gonna stop there. We’ve covered imposter syndrome and self-awareness, how to boost your confidence and clarity when you have menopause brain, or really any time you have brain fog, why and how to replace your rehearsed elevator pitch with something a little more customized and compelling.

I’ve answered questions about nailing formal presentations and specific advice about how to develop your executive presence. When I look at all of the questions that you asked, there really are three, yes, three themes here. 

1. The Power of Using Frameworks

First, the power of using frameworks. You can optimize your communication with frameworks to guide you while still optimizing and customizing what you say.

Yes, I am a big fan of frameworks. 

2. The Signifance of Our Confidence

Second is the significance of our confidence. We started off with Steven’s description of what it feels like to have imposter syndrome. Yes, it is critical to feel confident and to be perceived as confident. If you wanna establish credibility, then you’ve got to be confident, and the good news is that confidence can be learned.

That is what I spend a lot of time actually helping my clients with. 

3. The Impact of Developing Your Personal Brand

The third and last theme is the impact of developing your personal brand. And what I mean by this is focusing on your unique strengths, expertise, and skills. Taking the time to identify your unique strengths will go a long way, and it’ll boost your confidence and it’ll establish credibility with the folks that you talk to.

I hope this was all helpful. If you’re not already subscribed to this talk about Talk podcast, please hit subscribe now, and you can also forward this episode to your friends who might find it helpful. And as you’re going about your day, if you can think of any new communication skills questions for me, I say bring it on.

You can connect with me through the TalkAboutTalk.com website, or you can DM me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you. Talk soon.

The post Answers to Your Burning COMMUNICATION Questions | Q&A with Dr. Andrea Wojnicki (ep.196) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

What does it take to build a strong network? The Honourable Marie-P. Charette-Poulin shares the networking strategies that built her career across decades of leadership in broadcasting, law, public service, and politics. She also reveals her “7 Rules of Networking,” principles rooted in service and respect that apply to both career and life.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

From negotiating with unions at CBC to serving in Canada’s Senate, Marie’s career has been defined by connection and grace. Her stories illustrate how networking can shape careers, build trust, and even save lives.

This episode is essential for anyone who wants to network with authenticity and create relationships that endure.

💻 Website: TalkAboutTalk.com

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marie-poulin-450392126/

📖 Biography: She Dared to Succeed: She Dared to Succeed: A Biography of the Honourable Marie-P. Charette-Poulin by Fred Langan:https://amzn.to/3HIjGr5

The Honourable MPCP: Networking is not projecting. Networking is actually showing interest in the other person. You’re not showing interest in yourself. You’re asking questions about the other person, and once you start networking, you can actually say that every individual multiplies.

Andrea Wojnicki: I met Marie recently at a conference where we were both delivering keynote speeches. My keynote was about delivering executive presence, and her keynote was focused on effective networking. We immediately hit it off, and I asked her to join me on the Talk About Talk podcast, and here we are. In this episode, you will learn Marie’s secret sauce to successful networking. It’s a recipe with seven ingredients.

You’ll also hear some unbelievable stories from her incredible career in broadcasting, public service law, and higher education. In case we haven’t met yet, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk. You can learn more about me and what I do at TalkAboutTalk.com or by clicking on the links in the show description.

Now, let me briefly introduce the Honorable Marie Poulin, and then we’ll get right into the interview. Her impressive bio includes so many accomplishments that I’m afraid we’re gonna run outta time. So let me hit the highlights. Here it goes. Let’s do this. Let’s Talk About Talk. 

AW: The Honourable Marie-P. Charette-Poulin is currently parliamentarian in residence at St. Paul University in Ottawa. Earlier in her career, Marie worked her way up at CBC Radio Canada as a producer, then a station manager, and as a senior executive. She then shifted to the Canadian government, where she served as Deputy Minister at the Privy Council and as parliamentarian in the Senate.

She was also a partner at the International Law Firm Gowling, WLG, and an international development officer with the Institute on Governance, working in Iraq. Her involvement with not-for-profits, as well as foundations and advisory councils, demonstrate her commitment to public service, higher education, and community involvement.

Marie’s biography entitled, She Dared to Succeed by Fred Langan was published in 2023. People say that Hoorable Poulin’s trademarks are her smile and her laughter. I would add a third trademark, her incredible grace.

Thank you so much, Marie, for being here today to talk with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about networking and the impact that it can have on our careers. 

The Honourable MPCP: Thank you, Andrea. It’s an honor and it’s a joy. I had the pleasure of hearing one of your talks, and it was simply inspiring, so thank you. 

AW: Back at you. I mean, that’s why we’re here, right? We really connected at that event. I wanna start by asking you, I guess, the general question, which is based on the fact that you’ve built an extraordinary career across broadcasting, across public service, and across politics. What role would you say strategic networking played for you in terms of opening doors and advancing your career?

The Honourable MPCP: It’s not only advancing your career, but I think that what networking does is helping you be of service to others above all, because people call you and they say. Do you know someone in this field? And I’ll give you an example. 2020. It’s the winter, and a longstanding friend of mine.

And so we’re in 2020, and she calls me and says, Marie Paul, because that’s my, she knew me in grade one. Marie Paul, do you know anybody at the Ministry of Health in Ontario? And I said to her, Oh, Rashelle, I’m so sorry. I don’t know anyone. She says, Marie, you’re the most connected person I know. Yeah, think. And I said, Oh my God, Rashelle, wait a minute.

Give me a little bit of time, but don’t leave your email. I will get back to you. I immediately called my contact, got the name of the very senior, a public servant in the Health Department of Ontario was able to get the name, the email address, the phone number, and sent everything to Sarah. A few days later, she sent me the most beautiful email saying to me, you probably saved the lives of many of my nuns because of the information I was able to gather, and I can’t thank you enough.

And the beginning of 2020, what was it? The beginning of COVID. Yeah. And we, so we still didn’t see each other twice a year. And she always says to me, you saved the life of nuns. And I can’t thank you enough. Okay. And so that’s what networking, that’s really what networking is all about. It’s not about us, it’s about the others.

AW: So out of the gates, you’ve given me the shivers. This happens to me sometimes when I’m coaching people and we come up with something really profound. You’ve given me the shivers with the first story that you’ve told Marie. Oh my gosh. 

The Honourable MPCP: She wasn’t a blank. 

AW: But this beautifully illustrates the impact that effective networking can have.

The Honourable MPCP: Yeah. 

AW:  It also beautifully illustrates your mindset or your philosophy around networking. Right. That of providing service. 

The Honourable MPCP: But I had never realized that networking was networking network until the former Prime Minister Jacques, I went into his office one day for coffee and he said to me, how’s the most connected person I know.

And I said to him, What do you mean boss? Connected. He said, you have a million dollar Rolodex. How do you do it? You can’t imagine how much people appreciate it. But I had never realized until he mentioned it. And I think it’s also because he has a lot of influence on me that I did a double take, and as you say, I had shivers because I hadn’t realized that actually, that’s what I’ve been doing since the age of five.

AW: So then in retrospect, I guess what impact did this skill of yours that you may not have been conscious of, and then you became conscious of, right. What impact did it have on your career? 

The Honourable MPCP: It made me decide to be more of service to others. So when I was invited by the University of St. Paul in Ottawa, which is a bilingual small Catholic university, but is very inclusive because we have many Muslims, we have many Protestants, and we have many nonbelievers. So it’s a very inclusive, small university. So when I was called by the then rector to join the university as a parliamentarian and resident.

I thought, Oh my God, maybe I could be of service to the university. And you know, that’s how it’s working. It’s been 18 months. I’m learning every day. I’m enjoying every day, but I really feel that I’m being of service to the leadership of the university. To the professors, to the deans, and to the students.

AW: Amazing. That is fantastic. I think all of those stakeholders are very fortunate to have you around. I remember. When you and I were at this event a couple months ago, where we met, you shared a story about how there was a sudden change early in your career when you were working with the CBC, and then how you ended up using your network or cultivating your network, right, to help you evolve to the next stage. Do you wanna share that story? ’cause I think it’s quite, um, fascinating. 

The Honourable MPCP: Well, it’s interesting, you know, when I began at the CBC in 1973 as a researcher at $15 a week. Loved it, loved it, loved it. Became a radio producer. Then I was sent to Sudbury to open all the Francophone radio services in Northern Ontario, one production center with 35 repeaters.Fantastic. 

Ben invited me. He was then president of the CBC, invited me to come back to Ottawa to become the vice, the Associate Vice President of all the regional stations across Canada, Rimouski, Quebec City, Moncton, Vancouver, Edmonton.

AW: Can you just stop there for a second? Just for the record. This is a big job, especially for a woman then. Can I say that? 

The Honourable MPCP: Well, this was the eighties. 

AW: Yeah. 

The Honourable MPCP: And there weren’t many women at the executive table. 

AW: Exactly. 

The Honourable MPCP: I have to admit. There was only one more, and there were 15 executives. So I fell in love with the country. Well really fell in love with public broadcasting. Then invited me to move to become Vice President, Secretary General to the Board, and I worked hand in hand with him, and after that, the new president who came in invited me to become the Vice President of Human Resources and Industrial Relations.

When I told him I know nothing about human resources, he said. Yes, but you’re connected to all the presidents of the 33 unions. You’ve worked with most of them. And I said, yes, I’m from operations, and you know, Mr. President, if I could be of service to you, I will be. So I had been vice president of Human Resources for two years, and one morning I came to the office and there was a little brown envelope under my door.

I opened the envelope, and there was the summary of the bonus, the yearly bonuses. At that time, for the seven vice presidents who were what we call support services, vice presidents, finance, internal audit, engineering, human resources, and industrial relations, and so on, and there were six men in one. All the men received $15,000.

And don’t forget, this is 1992, and I received $6,000. So I went to see my immediate supervisor, who was the senior vice president, and I put the page in front of him, and I said, I’m a bit surprised because I renegotiated 33 union agreements in 10 months. It really went well. But I said, so why? It’s the president’s decision.

So I went to see the executive vice president, who had the same professional development as I have had within the organization. And I said, I did the same thing, put the page in front of him, and said, I don’t understand. I renegotiated 33 union agreements in 10 months. He said, Come on Marie. We know you’re just that cheerleader.

So I slowly got up, took the page back, started walking towards the door, and he said immediately, Come on Marie, we can talk about this. And I turned around, smiled at him, and said, Michael, I have to go out and buy my pompoms. And I turned around and slowly left. I didn’t slam the door, went to my office, closed the door, called my husband Bernard at home and started crying, and said, Bernard, I have to leave the CBC. He said, What are you talking about? I told him the story. He said, Marie, you know you’re right. You have no choice. You have to leave. 

Don’t tell anybody your intention. Come home tonight and let’s make a plan.

AW: Smart. 

The Honourable MPCP: So what did we do When I got home, he made me say to him, Marie, who do you know where? That’s when I realized, who do I know? And so I started saying, oh, so and so there, and so and so there, and. Who’s the Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council because we worked together when I was Secretary General, and he was then the chief of staff to the Minister of Communications, and Oh, I know the chief of staff to the Prime Minister.

I said, I know Hugh Siegel. We met in Sudbury, remember? Sure. In, uh, 19, uh, 80, uh, he came with William Davis to the radio station, and so I went through the list. We decided that I would call, not directly these people, but that I would call three different friends who would call them to give them the message that Marie Poulin was interested in a new professional chapter.

Nothing about what had happened. I didn’t tell anybody, and I didn’t share it for years. And so the next thing I knew, I was invited for lunch by the clerk of the Privy Council, Glenn Shortliffe, because my timing was impeccable. They were looking for deputy secretary to cabinet in communications because the outgoing had just given his resignation, and the job was open.

So the timing was perfect, and so I was able to announce to the president privately that September. That I would be leaving on October 1st. And so there was a tradition that when a vice president would leave the CBC, there would be a special dinner in the boardroom with the members of the board, all the vice presidents, and the vice president and his, because it was usually a he, his spouse.

AW: Yeah. 

The Honourable MPCP: So there was no dinner for me. There was a lunch given in the cafeteria, chaired by the president. And all the vice presidents, my husband was not invited. 

AW: Oh, wow. 

The Honourable MPCP: And so when I was invited to say a few words, I thanked my colleagues for their cooperation and told them how much I had enjoyed my 20 years at the CBC. And I thanked them all for their friendship and their success stories. And then the lunch was over, the president left, and the senior vice president and the executive vice president. And every vice president came and shook my hand and said, Marie, you’ve got class. 

AW: Mm-hmm. You do. 

The Honourable MPCP: And I never forgot it. It was the lesson of my life where you can be respectful in a very difficult situation.

AW: Yeah. 

The Honourable MPCP: And not slam the door, but just make sure that other doors are opening. Because of the respect that you’re showing. 

AW: So to me, Marie, this exceptional story really it highlights many things, but two of the things I just wanna identify are is one that being so gracious, having such class is actually a sign of strength that ends up helping you, but it does take strength. And I just want you to know how much I respect, you know, all of the decisions that you made there really made it, your story really made an impact on me. 

But the other thing about your story is how you weren’t in a situation where so many people are, where they realize too late that they have not been cultivating their network, their professional and personal network, right? That they, they’re like, oh, I need a job, and, and your husband was smart enough to say, let’s come home and brainstorm what contacts you have and what the plan’s gonna be in terms of leveraging that network that you’ve been servicing.

So this is my question for you. What were you doing that you can think of now in retrospect that you can maybe suggest to the Talk About Talk listeners as advice in terms of cultivating a strong network? 

The Honourable MPCP: I think that, first of all, we need conditions, or what we call premises. Okay. To be able to reach out to people successfully. And there are seven of them. Can I share with you? 

AW: Yes, please. 

The Honourable MPCP: Because they’re fun. So I have seven of them. Number one, intellectual curiosity. You gotta wanna know what makes other people tick. Number two, reliability. People have to know that you can count on them, but also on your discreteness. So important number three, authenticity. You have to be comfortable in your own skin. I’m proud to be from Sudbury, from Northern Ontario. It’s fun. I like cars. When you’re from Northern Ontario. You like cars and you like water, and by the way, those are three qualifications, curiosity, reliability, and authenticity. Being comfortable in one’s own skin that make up the results of the Berkeley study. These the three conditions to being successful. So, what else do you need?

You need generosity. Number four. You never hesitate to give of your time when a person asks you for something.

AW: including being on a podcast. 

The Honourable MPCP: That’s an honor. 

AW: Yeah. Number five, courage. You’ve gotta be bold enough to ask for help. Number six. Appreciation. Oh my God. You’ve got to take the time to express gratitude to say thank you.

That thank you, goes a long way. Number seven, respect. No matter if it’s the former prime minister or a former clerk in a store, you’ve got to show respect to every every person. Those are my seven premises to be able to network. Now, what does it take to develop networks and everybody can, no matter if you’re shy or outgoing or tall or short, or working as a waitress or working as the governor general, 

AW: Or male or female.

The Honourable MPCP:  Or male or female, right. Thank you. Yeah, because there’s one precious tool. And it’s called the business card. I’m still using it, and people are, or more and more using them. The Japanese have found out that it’s such a precious tool because even today it’s sensual. You touch a card, you have all your information on that card, who you are, what you do, how you can be reached if you have a psych.

You have an address for your site. Everything is there, but it has to be accessible. I always have them in my right-hand pocket. When someone gives me their business card, I put them in my left-hand pocket. They’re not in a purse. They’re not inside. They’re not in a satchel. They have to be very accessible.

AW: So Marie, I remember when you and I met at this event a couple months ago, and you and I started speaking before we delivered our keynote speeches. And I asked you if you had a card, and you said yes. And then you said, do you have one? And I had to run and grab my purse and pull it. 

And then you taught this to me in your keynote, which is Andrea, keep your cards on in one pocket left or right, and then use the other side for the ones you receive. Such an obvious thing, but so helpful. So helpful. And I have to say one other thing about business cards. I feel like they were waning, and I feel like they’re now coming back to your point. Oh yeah.

Most of the people at that event, most of the women that were at that event, they were all CEOs, right? Female CEOs. Yes. I think. Almost every single one of them had a business card. 

The Honourable MPCP: Very much. And if they didn’t, they did 48 hours later because they all sent me emails. I received emails for the whole week. Following or so. And they certainly have business cards now, and what’s interesting is that it is very practical to be able to simply, with your phone, get the electronic address from the other person. But when you get home, it’s amongst all your other contents. Whereas the business card, when you enter your pockets, you remember meeting that person or those people, right? And you say, Oh, wasn’t that nice?

AW: Right? So it’s a reminder. It’s also a cue to follow up. Right. We were talking about that. We were talking about the fact that if you don’t follow up, you may as well have not met the person. Frankly, you can put them in your LinkedIn if you’re not following up. 

The Honourable MPCP: Very much so, and there are different opportunities to follow up also. So it’s key and it’s personal. 

AW:  So Marie, in addition to having business cards and sharing them with people, with this left pocket to the right pocket strategy and following up, what other specific tips will you would you like to highlight?

The Honourable MPCP: It’s involvement is saying yes to the invitations. To gathering, gather where you can meet people and new people, old friends, but new friends, new colleagues, old colleagues. It’s so important. It’s giving that time. And thirdly, I would say that it’s taking the time to write a handwritten note, example. A friend of yours gets a big promotion.

It’s nice to send an email. Of course it’s, but you know, that handwritten note is special. Let’s hope Canada Post stays in business for handwritten notes, please. 

AW: Yeah. Beautiful. You’re right. You’re right. An email is better than nothing, but a handwritten note is, is a very personalized gesture and it, and it takes a little above, beyond. 

The Honourable MPCP: I act my talk. I even suggested to get personal letterhead done so that when your note is received, it’s clear on who it’s coming from and it gives it a touch of professionalism. Yeah. Which is so important. So be it. If you’re a doctor or a cashier, or a sales representative. That personal note makes it very special. 

AW: Yeah. I love this idea of, of, I love personalized things just generally, but having personalized stationary, it’s, you know, in relation to your personal brand or your professional identity, it’s signaling, you know, a certain conscientiousness, a certain class. 

This is a common theme with you, Marie, is this, is this class, and Grace that you have, I wanna ask you. A couple of other more specific questions about networking. Do you think it’s different for women versus men especially, you know, today? Do you think it’s networking is different for women? 

The Honourable MPCP: I don’t see it. I don’t see it as different, honestly. Andrea. Yeah, I do think that there are, there are individuals, both men and women, who are shyer than others, and so they don’t want to project who they are. But networking is not projecting. Networking is actually showing interest in the other person. You’re not showing interest in yourself.

You’re asking questions about the other person. And once you start networking, you can actually say that every individual multiplies. I always say, if you know one senator. You know, 105 senators, because you can reach out to that one person and find out who is interested in this issue that I could connect with.

And so it’s the multiplication, therefore of your contacts, which is really, really important. And you’ve gotta be bold to ask, as I was mentioning earlier, you know, we asked our doctor. For the name of a specialist. Well, we have to be bold to ask a colleague in a law firm, for instance, Does one of your colleagues practice this type of law?

AW: Right. Brilliant. I love what you just said also about for shy or introverted people who may be apprehensive about networking. It’s not about you, it’s about the other person. You absolutely are gonna be quoted on that. I love that. 

The Honourable MPCP: But the other thing also, Andrea, is that if you really want to be up to date. You have to keep what I call the Rolodex.

You have to keep that list of names of contacts. Up to date, right? When you get new business cards, you have to enter them in your phone. And I have to say, it’s work. 

AW: It is work. It is work. But you can get a lot of traction. 

The Honourable MPCP: Yep. Whenever I’m on the train to go to work, uh, from Hot Water Toronto, I always take advantage of those four hours to put my list up to date, and I don’t stop.

And while you’re putting it up to date, what’s interesting is you fall on a name. Oh, Dr. Andrea, I wonder how she is. You sent Dr. Andrea A. Little message. How are you? Right? And so it’s a way of not only keeping the list up to date, but also the contacts, right? 

AW: Again, the business cards are serving as a catalyst to remind other people about you. And then also, as a reminder to reconnect very much.

The Honourable MPCP: The biggest challenge is maintaining your list, right? Is maintaining those contacts. So I do it in a very very specific way. When I was called to the Senate, I discovered that there was a tradition on the hill that all parliamentarians from both houses would send out a New Year’s card to their constituents, their friends, their contacts.

So I started sending out New Year’s cards, and so even if I’d left the Senate 10 years ago, every year I send out New Year’s cards to family, friends, and contacts. The challenge is that very often people have moved. Right now, that’s another challenge, but I have to say that those cards have more impact than we can ever imagine.

Someone sent me an email, or more than one actually. It’s so nice to receive your personal card with your personal wishes, Marie. Thank you so much. And same to your family. So that’s one way of keeping up a network. 

AW:  You’re keeping, there’s another, you’re keeping top, top of mind with people, right? And, and it’s, and it’s lovely. You’re, you’re, it’s once to hear. You’re not asking for anything. You’re just providing your well-wishes. 

The Honourable MPCP: That’s it. And do you know the pleasure I get outta saying writing. Dear Andrea, I trust you’re doing well. May the new year bring you the best of everything, Marie. It’s that pleasure you get in those 30 seconds of thinking about that one person and his or her loved ones, right? It’s very, very special. Then there’s something else that I’ve started doing, and I started doing this quite a few years ago. 

I’ve always loved birthdays ever since I was a little girl. So whenever I meet someone. I always try to find a way to ask them their birthday. So every fall my husband buys me a new calendar. It’s huge, and it’s a paper calendar. I put in an every date birthday of Andrea, birthday of Steve, so that every month I have about 75 birthdays that I know of. 

AW: Oh, wow. 

The Honourable MPCP: So that when I get up in the morning. One of the first things I do over coffee is check the calendar and see whose birthday, and I send out a wish.

AW: So nice. 

The Honourable MPCP: And it takes a few seconds to send a birthday wish to two people, three people. 

AW: Amazing. 

The Honourable MPCP: And it’s special. It’s their birthday, it’s their day. So is special. 

AW: So I’m seeing this common theme of providing service and not asking anything in return. I’m also hearing a common theme of you using, there’s certain tools or practices or exercises that you do that serve, I used this word before as a catalyst to remind you to reach out to people. There’s the business cards, there’s the calendar, right? I think it’s absolutely brilliant. 

The Honourable MPCP: And I know it’s not online, it’s not electronic. Why? Because I can see huge. Yep. Huge. Right in front of me, and it sort of sticks out. Birthday off, birthday off. With all my, my, my agenda for the day. So it’s, uh, it’s fun.

AW: So people could put the birthdays in their electronic calendar. Oh, absolutely. Or on their paper calendar. So that reminds me of, I guess the last question I wanted to ask you before we get into the three rapid-fire questions, which is obviously the art of networking. Maybe not your philosophy around it, but how you do it has evolved over the course of your career with the internet and computers and phones, and everything and the rise of social media.

So how has that impacted your networking or what you see other people doing? I find that it’s facilitated it. 

The Honourable MPCP: Yeah, ’cause networking now has been made so much easier, and it’s right there, right in front of us. So thank God. I love, love, love being able to send an email being able to, and most former parliamentarians. Don’t go on social networks too much. We’ve been, uh, harassed enough. But I do go on one or two, and I love being able to react to someone who’s been promoted, just been promoted, or use that information mm-hmm. To send a personal note to the person who’s been promoted. Right. Which is nice. A handwritten note for a promotion because it’s a success story.

AW: So the internet and technology is providing us with the ability to have, I guess, a broader network. It’s also faster access. And I remember after you and I met, we were emailing back and forth, and I said, I missed the name of your daughter, and I’m trying to connect with her on LinkedIn. Right. So that conversation could have happened, but it would’ve taken a long time if we were sending each other letters. Right. So it was like instant. Within a couple days, I reconnected with your daughter, which was lovely. 

The Honourable MPCP: It’s interesting. I find that a phone call sometimes can be intrusive because people are so busy today that I prefer sending an email when the person will read it at a convenient time for him or her.

AW: Yeah. The asynchronous nature. And I think that that’s why with, I guess, the generation Z, the generation Y and Z, they are staying off the phone. Right. And it’s like they wanna have asynchronous communication. Yeah. 

But I understand them. 

AW:  Yeah. Well, once again, you’re considerate of others. You’re in the service of others, and you’re so gracious. Are you ready for my three rapid-fire questions? 

The Honourable MPCP: Oh my, that’s, this is interesting. Absolutely. So I take for granted that you ask those three questions to all your guests.

AW: I do. 

The Honourable MPCP: Oh, interesting. 

AW: I do, I do. 

The Honourable MPCP: Okay. 

AW: Okay. And, I can share with you some of the trends of what I hear, but let’s, let’s go. The first one is, are you an introvert or an extrovert? And how does that affect your communication? 

The Honourable MPCP: Oh, that’s interesting. I think we all are a balance of folks. Because I love meeting people. I don’t like being the center of attention. As a former radio producer, I like bringing the light on others, but I love meeting people.

On the other hand, I was raised by nuns and priests who taught me the importance of closed retreats. So I try to go away four times a year for a few days, just on my own, to go into complete silence and prayer for a few days. 

AW: Wow. 

The Honourable MPCP: Yeah, and it really nourishes the soul and the mind. And the body. 

AW: For how long have you been doing that?

The Honourable MPCP: Since 1992. I was very, very, very tired. I had just finished renegotiating those 33 agreements at CBC, and my husband greeted me at home with a ticket when I got home, and he said. You’re leaving for Mexico tomorrow morning for a trip on your own for a week. 

Because you need to rest, otherwise you won’t survive. And that’s when I discovered the pleasure of being in silence. By yourself, even though you’re in a social environment of an all-inclusive, for instance. No, I’m not sociable at all. I say hello. That’s about it. I do a room service. Yeah. And I really go into silence for a few days. And I really, every time I come back, I feel as though I’m a new person.

My husband always reads me at the airport and says. Where did you leave the last 10 years? Oh, wow. 

AW: So nice. Your husband sounds absolutely amazing. Okay. Rapid fire. Question number two. What are your communication pet peeves? 

The Honourable MPCP: The fact that people are introducing themselves only with their first name.

History has taught us that when there was slavery, people were known only for their first name. I like to hear the full name. The first name and the family name. That’s my pet peeve. 

AW: Nice. That’s a unique one. Okay, question number three. Is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending to people lately?

The Honourable MPCP: Well, I could always recommend Fred Langan’s book. She Dared to Succeed, which is the title of my biography that he wrote. There is one book. 

AW: I’m gonna put the link to that book in in the show notes, by the way, so people will see. 

The Honourable MPCP: Thank you. Fred Lagan is a great biographer, as you know. He works for the global male. Yeah, and he’s a great biographer. The book that really touched me was The Power of Kindness by Dr. Brian Goldman from Toronto. Have you read? 

AW: I have not read the book. I’ve met him. I will also put a link in the show notes to that book, and I need to read it myself 

The Honourable MPCP: And maybe do a podcast with him.

AW: That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea. Is there anything else you wanna share with the Talk about Talk listeners, Marie, about networking with grace? 

The Honourable MPCP: Oh, I just say to all your viewers and your listeners that you’re doing a great job because what you’re doing is you’re giving us an opportunity, Andrea, to learn from others.

So thank you, because I’m learning from others and I love learning. I have to say, I did a Bachelor of Arts and Psychology, and then I did a Master’s in social sciences. At 59 years old, I went back to law school. It was the best thing I ever did, and today I’m working at the University of St. Paul, but I’m also studying Canon Law as a student. So, I’m really having fun learning.

AW: Learning is where it’s at. I am with you on that. Marie, thank you so much. The pleasure really has been all mine. I really enjoyed meeting you the first time and now interviewing you here. Thank you so much. 

The Honourable MPCP: Thank you, Andrea, and a warm hello to all your viewers.

AW: Thank you again, Marie. Isn’t she inspiring? Such a fantastic role model. Now, typically I conclude these episodes by summarizing three main points, you know, me and the power of three. But in this case, I’m going to conclude by sharing Marie’s special sauce for networking. 

Seven ingredients. One intellectual curiosity. You gotta wanna know what makes other people tick. Two, reliability. People have to know that they can count on you. Three. Authenticity. You have to be comfortable in your own skin. Four is generosity. Never hesitate to give of your time, especially when someone is asking. Five is you gotta be bold enough to ask others for help.

Six is appreciation, as in expressing gratitude. And number seven is respect. No matter if it’s the former prime minister or the president or a stranger on the street or a clerk in the store, you’ve got to show respect to everyone. I feel like this list of seven things is gold, not just in networking, but in life.

Intellectual curiosity, reliability, authenticity, generosity, and asking for help. Appreciation and, of course, respect. Marie, thank you again so much for sharing your insights and your stories. We are all inspired now to network with a little more grace, and thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you’ll share it with a friend, and I hope you’ll subscribe on whatever platform that you’re on. Talk soon.

The post 7 Ways to NETWORK with Grace | The Honourable Marie-P. Charette-Poulin (ep.195) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

What does it take to earn a board seat and influence what happens once you’re in the room? Award-winning corporate director Deborah Rosati shares what she’s learned from over two decades in the boardroom. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Deborah Rosati is the founder and CEO of Women Get On Board and co-founder of Women Funding Women. Her mission is clear: to help women show up with confidence and credibility at the highest levels of leadership.

From asking better questions to knowing when not to speak, this is essential listening for anyone pursuing board roles or seeking to show up with confidence in high-stakes meetings.

💻Website: TalkAboutTalk.com

💻Website: https://deborahrosati.ca/

💻Website: http://womengetonboard.ca/

📖 Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins: https://amzn.to/41mgXuf

Deborah Rosati: I think, as women, we sometimes hold ourselves back. We’re not good enough. We’re not smart enough. We’re not pretty enough. And you know what? We are enough. 

Andrea Wojnicki – Talk About Talk: If you ever wondered what it takes to land a corporate board seat, you’re about to hear from someone who’s made it her mission to show you how.

Deborah Rosati is an award-winning corporate director who served on boards for over 20 years. She’s also the founder and CEO of Women Get On Board and the co-founder of Women Funding Women Incorporated. She’s on a mission to increase the number of women on boards, close the funding gap, and cultivate the next generation of female corporate directors and founders. In this conversation that you’re about to hear, Deborah shares what boards actually look for in their candidates, what holds many women back, and the exact playbook that you can use to go from quiet expert to board-ready, visible, and in demand.

You’ll also learn an acronym that you can use to guide your communication in board meetings and beyond. And I love this acronym. Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

I’m Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and this is Talk About Talk, where we coach ambitious executives to stand out with confidence and credibility. To learn more, click the links in the show description. Now, let’s jump right into my conversation with Rosati.

Thank you, Deborah, for being here today to talk with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about getting women on boards. 

DR: Well, thank you, Andrea. Delighted my favorite topic each and every day. 

AW: So we’re gonna put a little bit of a communication skills spin on this as we were talking about, and my first question for you is, can you help us identify some communication skills that are particularly important for board members?

DR: That is a great question. I think I’ve thought long and hard on that. I would say for board members in particular, you have to remember your role. Your role is there to have an oversight, insight, foresight in hindsight. So you’re not there to manage the business day to day. So how you’re showing up is really important.

That ties back to your role from an oversight perspective. So active listening. You have to be going into the boardroom, not telling the executive team what to do, but listening and be really active. And I know I have to work on that each and every day. But that listening, because if you’re there to provide and make informed decisions, you have to understand the issues, and you need clarity around the issues.

And so a way that I like to communicate on the active listening is, so Andrea, let’s say you are the board member and you’re presenting a sensitive matter, I might come back to you, Andrea, and say, so Andrea, what I’m hearing you say is x, y, z. Am I missing anything, or can you help me understand? Right? And that’s really that active listening, where you’re listening to that person.

But maybe you need to clarify, maybe you need some additional information, or, uh, you don’t wanna come across as a board member telling the person across the table from you what to do. And I’ve been on the other side of that as an executive, where once a quarter would come in and tell me what to do as the CFO, and I vowed to myself, I would never be one of those board members.

So I feel like active listening is number one. Secondly, showing up with empathy, being an empathetic listener, and being empathetic in your communications. So. I think as women, we do a really great job of showing up with empathy. We’re listening. That’s our EQ, right? EQ, our emotional intelligence. Empathy is one element of it.

So when you’re coming in, you’re looking, you’re observing. I might be observing that someone’s really tired in the boardroom, someone’s really tired around the table. Executive, it could be a board member, and maybe it’s a communication that you have not right then and there in the board meeting, but it might be after you call the person up and say, Hey Andrea, I noticed you’re really tired.

Is everything okay? Being empathetic? Maybe understanding, you know, the board meetings that the length of the board meetings, the time that you’re communicating with each other, and maybe some people have different styles, right? Some people like to be confrontational, some like to be collaborative, and so really that rolls up to that emotional intelligence, and I think as women, we do a really good job showing up with that, but we can lean in with that empathy.

AW: So, listening and being empathetic. I have to tell you, I’ve been on some not-for-profit boards, and I remember this, this sort of mantra, which was nose in, hands out. You see the head nod. Um, I feel like this should be updated based on what you said, which makes a lot of sense. Maybe it’s ears in hands out. 

DR: I love that. Well, so yeah, so Andrea, you’re right, there’s a commentary called Nose and Fingers Out. So whether you put your fingers in or you put your hands in, whichever, it’s basically saying, listen, your job is to have an oversight, not to get into the trenches. So I do like that ears in because we, you have to be listening. 

And I think the other element that really I amplifies your communication skills in the boardroom is there’s a term called WAIT. Have you heard of that? 

AW: No. Tell me. 

DR: Oh, I love it. So you have to think about when you’re showing up in the boardroom, why am I talking? 

AW: Oh my gosh, Deborah. I love that. 

DR: I have to remind myself all the time, Andrea. So these are tips for me as like, okay, I get excited. I wanna show up, I wanna comment, but then I have to step back and go. But wait a sec, Deborah. Why am I talking? What do I need to bring to the table? You don’t have to be the smartest in the room. You don’t have to be the loudest in the room, and even your positioning of when you lean in to have a conversation. Are you the last to speak? Are you the first to speak?

AW: Oh my goodness. So I am gonna steal, first of all, I love acronyms 

DR: And this one is someone else. Don’t you worry? It’s public domain. 

AW: Okay. Okay. So why am I talking? I encourage my clients to think about no matter what level they are in the organization, to track the ratio. How much am I talking versus everyone else? And when you’re junior in your career, a lot of folks need to speak up. So if there’s four people in the room, try to speak at least 25%, the folks that are more senior.

They need to speak typically less than their fair share, and also, as a leader, make sure that everybody else is speaking their fair share. So, making space as a leader for everyone to contribute. And so you’re taking this kind of idea of tracking the ratio and actually turning it inward and saying not only how much am I talking, but why am I talking right now?

What is the purpose? And I think, um. I would just write this word on the top of like the meeting agenda and write, wait, and then look, when you look down, ask yourself why am I talking? And it will amplify our self-awareness like exponentially without a doubt. And that kind of goes back to that empathy and emotional intelligence.

And I, the other element I think when you are in the boardroom is you want to be an ally for others in the boardroom. So, especially if you’re chair of the board,  your role is to be the sort of the lead conductor. You’re facilitating an orchestra to have conversation to put out the best music as a team.

So when you’re thinking about facilitation, not only as a chair, but as another, as a fellow board member, is look around the room who hasn’t spoken. So you may be able to amplify someone else’s voice. And it doesn’t, that doesn’t apply just in the boardroom. That applies everywhere where you go, whether it’s an executive meeting, whether it’s a client meeting, whatever meeting it is.

But I do think it’s important to, if you notice that someone has not spoken up, and some cultures, they’re more submissive not to speak up, right? So you wanna encourage dialogue. And that really goes to that whole diversity of thought and diversity of practice. And everybody has different communication styles, as you know.

AW: Yeah. And, I absolutely agree. The onus is on you, whether in the boardroom or outside of the boardroom. If you are an effective leader, you’re making sure you’re pulling out everyone’s valuable opinion. Otherwise, why are you at the meeting  that’s a whole other topic. 

So Deborah, I feel like that this is all great.

You’re going into your meeting, you’re listening, you’re ears in. Hands out or fingers out. You’re being empathetic. You’re asking yourself, why am I talking? You’re prepared. Sometimes things go sideways in these meetings. I know. And sometimes you’re an, you may anticipate it because there’s some sort of, uh, restructuring or investigation or there’s major, uh, succession planning issues going on.

You’re nodding your head. Yes. Checked. Been there. Yeah. Been there, been there. So when things get intense, when maybe there’s even conflict, maybe amongst board members or between the board and the executive, do you have some guidelines for either mindsets or tactics that people can try to keep things productive. 

DR: Well, you know, there’s a saying, stay calm and surface with grace. So if you can think of that, of course, there’s always gonna be conflict. There’s going to be, because there’s, the stakes are high. So you go through, you’ve talked about some very stressful, very complex matters. So could be an M and A.

Let’s use M and A as an example, okay. For acquisition. And I’ll give you, I love to give stories, so if I can, kind of. One. So typically when you get into these unique situations, they’re special situations, and usually you’re forming a special committee of the board. And that special committee has a mandate, right?

Because a lot of these special situations are very time sensitive. So, you’re forming a special committee, and that maybe it’s two or three, maybe four members of the board, depending on the size of the board, or going on this special committee, because there’s a lot of diligence, there’s a lot of work. At the end of the day, you, if you’re gonna make an informed decision on whether you’re gonna accept a proposal, whether it’s a special investigation, whether it’s succession planning, crisis communication, you’ve gotta make an informed decision as a board.

So you ultimately have to collaborate, but you sometimes have to go into special task force special committee to go deeper into the, and so I had a situation where we were a board and the chair of the board, we formed the special committee and he said, okay. And there was four of us. And he said, you’re all gonna lean in.

You’re gonna lean in. And Deborah, you’re gonna lean in on due diligence and Sue and Joe, let’s use their names. You’re gonna lean in on this, and you’re gonna, and really what he was doing was really trying to activate us in an area that he knew we had expertise, but he didn’t want us all leaning in the same direction. Right.

And it was powerful moment in time for me as a director where a chair all saw the value that I could bring and he just positioned it. And I never thought that my work was about leaning in. And it made that special committee really impactful and very agile because we all had our lean-in roles, and it really allowed us to facilitate our special committee meetings.

So when we showed up. It was, we each had areas that we were leaning in. We were closely working with, I was working with valuation experts, I was working with investment bankers, I was working with the CFO. I was working like there was a team, and I was showing up in a lot of those meetings to just be eyes and ears of the board not to.

And so that when we met as a special committee, I could lean in on where we were in the process, where the discussions were, and so to me, that communication was the delegation divide and task, but it was framed in this lean-in concept. So what he took the expertise of the various, and it was really great because we were able to divide and conque,r and it was a really successful M and A and we, it was in 60 days or less. So you’re working, you know, round the clock. But it was really valuable. So from a communication that chair of the board who ended up chairing the special committee, really empowered us as a committee. 

AW: So Deborah, what you’re describing here works, integrates so beautifully with the work that I do with my clients on helping them develop their personal brand or their professional identity, and to summarize it as succinctly as I can.

Basically, there is real power in identifying your unique strengths and passions and especially as you, as you become mid-career and, uh, more senior in your career, if you wanna have, you know, your most satisfying and successful career, which of course you do double down on those strengths, and you’re saying in the board context, this can actually help you be productive.

So I just wanna underscore for the listeners that everything they’ve heard me say in the past about personal branding, you could definitely not. You can, you should apply to your board role. Make sure your board chair and the nomination and governance committee understand exactly what your strengths are.

I wanna share a really, it’s not even a story, it’s more like an anecdote, but I was on a hospital foundation board and I have a PhD in business, so I can talk finance and strategy and marketing and blah, blah, blah. But in this foundation meeting that I’m thinking about, in particular, the finance guys, the finance committee.

I was going way deep in, in like in front of all of us, right? And I was, I actually thought to myself, why am I here? I can’t contribute anything, whatever. And they kept getting more and more and more into the minutia. And then I thought to myself, I had this moment where, kind of like you said, I was like, why am I here? Why am I talking? 

I’m here because of my strategy and branding expertise, and communication expertise. So I raised my hand and I literally said the words based on my expertise. From what I’m hearing from a financial perspective, we can communicate it this way to our foundation, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Stakeholders and everyone, I remember physically, everyone turned and nodded, and I was like. Oh, there’s magic in really doubling down on what your unique role or expertise is on the board. Right. 

DR: Can I just extend that out for you, Andrea? Because I know we’re gonna talk about women and communication style.

So what you did, and I love it, and I wanna elevate that for you, is instead of saying, Hey, I don’t know why I am here, you turned it around, you positioned to say. I’m here. Yes. Here’s what I’m hearing and here’s how we can apply it, and here’s what I bring to the table. Right? You were able to turn it around to use your value proposition and what made you unique, but it took you had to step back from the situation, right?

AW: I did. I did. 

DR: And but you, I love that. That was so powerful. I’ve had situations, if I may, ’cause this is very much the same topic, where I was just joining a new, uh, public company board post a GM. It’s during COVID, there’s Zug base, Switzerland. Nobody’s, I haven’t met a single person. In person, go into the AGM, and they’re just forming this nominating corporate governance committee.

And I know for certain they wanted me to chair the audit committee, ’cause yes, I have financial expertise, but there was this moment in the meeting that I had this pivot. Sometimes you just have to wait for it and wait. Find that nugget. So it came up. The question came up was like, well, what’s a nominating corporate governance committee?

I’m new into this board role. We’re all virtual. And all I said to the chair of the board is, can I take this? I would like to answer this question. He said, you go ahead, Deborah. And at the end of the sentence, I said, And by the way, that’s the committee I wanna chair. 

AW: Oh, wow. Beautiful. So there’s something about focus here, right? It’s not that I didn’t say I was good at everything. I said, based on my specific expertise, here’s my input. And you were saying, I can take this. I’m not saying I’m leading the meeting, I’m not taking over, but I want to answer this and this and yeah. So there’s something magical about focus.

DR: Well, but I think what it does is we’ve given ourselves permission. We have the confidence to say, yes, I know this. I don’t know everything, but I’m gonna lean in here, and this is where my focus and I know I can make those contributions. But you have to be certain and confident that you can deliver, 

AW: Right? You don’t wanna overpromise and underdeliver, but you do wanna be confident at the same time in what your specific focused expertise is. 

So let’s shift then to women on boards, and I know you’ve. I did a little bit of reading and research. Deborah, I know you’ve been the only woman on the board before.

I was the only woman in the marketing department at Rotman when I was on the faculty there, teaching in the MBA program. It’s a fascinating experience. A little bit horrifying. I will admit. Do you have any advice generally for women who find themselves as the only one or one of the only ones in terms of establishing credibility beyond what we were just mentioning and highlighting your unique expertise? How else can we establish credibility and influence in our board roles? 

DR: Well, we have to have courage and confidence without a doubt. And but to build that credibility, you just don’t show up and say, Hey, I’m credible because I have my FCPA and I have my ICD. And I’m a doctor. I have my honorary doctorate that people read that.

But it’s, you’ve gotta build that trust and that credibility, right? It’s not instantly. So for me, when I go into situations or I go into new environments, it takes time. So you’re reading the person, and I’ll give you an example of where it was instant credibility, but I didn’t do it intentionally. I’m in a board interview, and I am meeting with the CEO and the CFO.

It was a public, and I read all the disclosures. I read the financial statements, the notes to the financial statements, and I asked one simple question and the question was, I noticed in note 15 of your financial statements, in your segmented information, that you’ve got a healthcare division. When are you spinning it off?

The CEO looked at me. He said, are we under an NDA? And I said, well, no, it’s in your notes through your financial statements. The CFO looked at me, and we just continued on. So I wasn’t there to do a aha, but I was there to understand how impacting the company. And so it was just it. It wasn’t a trick question; it was just a question, but it was helping me inform where the company was going.

So whatever your expertise may be is use it appropriately at the right time. Don’t be flustered by it. Don’t ask for permission to do that. I responded, and I said, no, we don’t need to be on an NDA because it’s so, when you’re informed and you have that information, and you have the expertise, it is really powerful to show up with it. Don’t not use it, but use it at the appropriate times.  

AW: So, I’m hearing here be very prepared, which on one hand is almost like generic advice, but on the other hand. I know from being on boards that’s not always what happens. So be very prepared and don’t underestimate the power even of asking questions in terms of establishing your credibility. Right. 

DR: Well, it’s that style. Yeah. I always like to kind of approach it. If I’m not certain, I might just say, Hey, can you help me understand? I’ve seen it this way. I don’t know if I fully understand where you’re coming from, but help me understand, well, that’s a different approach than saying, why did you deliver this?

This does not make sense. It’s like you understand and don’t forget as board members. From the Rotman, from ICD, they talk about the divide, and they think about a Grand Canyon, and there’s this big divide. The board’s on one side, management is on the other side, and there’s this divide. Management spends 2000 to 3000 hours in their day job and what they do, the board is maybe two to 300 hours, so 10% of their time. So there’s a big divide between what management is doing and understands the business versus the board. So it’s always, you’re always trying to think about how you can get better alignment and how those communication skills can help you at the end of the day, make a more informed decision.

AW: So this sounds like advice that everyone would benefit from, not just women. Is there anything in particular that, uh, and I’m not, I’m not negating it, it’s still critical, but is there anything in particular that stands out based on your own experience and or mentoring women, stories that you’ve heard, things you’ve observed that maybe women need to pay more attention to?

DR: Well, I like to use the Barbie analogy, and yes, I’m wearing my Barbie pink. I think as women, we sometimes hold ourselves back. We’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not pretty enough. And you know what? We are enough. And so the reason I say that is I talk to a lot of women, and they’ll say to me.

I don’t have financial expertise. And I say to them, guess what? Not everybody on the board needs financial expertise. You need to have financial acumen. You need to have financial literacy, but you do not need to have, so the whole, or there’ll be the conversation is, well, I’m not a lawyer. I said, not everybody on the board is going to be a lawyer.

And so sometimes we discount what we truly bring to the board because we talk about what we don’t have versus. We have, and I think to you with your clients and your personal branding, it’s all about who you are and what and how you show up and what you bring to the table. As women, we need to show up with our best foot forward, but we have unique skills.

AW: Yes. So lead your strengths and then, you know, in your interview or whatever, you can say, here are the areas where I have baseline knowledge or experience, or I’m getting training on this thing, or whatever. But highlighting first and foremost what your strengths and your expertise is. 

DR: I would take it one step forward is just build on your strengths. I don’t think you need to talk about your weaknesses. If it comes up and say, Hey, Andrea, I noticed you haven’t been on a public company board. Tell me how we can get comfort around that. You might say, well, actually, I have worked for public companies in marketing and communications, and here’s the value that I contribute. Right? So I would take the weakness out because as women we will always go default to that as opposed to, here’s how I’m leading. 

AW: I love it, Deborah. So, something that you don’t know about me yet is that I am a huge fan of the power of three. In fact, it’s a joke with many of my clients in my, I told you that at the end, I’m gonna summarize with the three key learnings that I wanna reinforce.

I have a self-introduction framework that was published in the Harvard Business Review, a simple framework for introducing yourself. It’s three steps. It’s like three. I have three kids. It’s all about, when I say, whenever you’re wondering how many. Make three your default, and I read that you have a unique perspective on the power of three. Can you share that with the listeners? 

DR: Thank you, Andrea. So it is not something that I made up. It’s out there. It’s the power of three with respect to boardrooms and women in the boardroom. So one woman on a board is a token, two is a presence, and three is a voice. I think that I have been the only one, a token or the only one, two, and it changes the dynamics, and I know we’ll get into that different style as well.

AW: But also just on threes, Dale Carnegie, did you ever do public speaking or read hit? 

DR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of influence. He said, you know, you’ve, for public speaking, it’s three Es. You’ve earned the right, you’re eager to tell, and you’re enthusiastic, right? So, yeah. I love the three I. I love three. It’s everywhere. I love threesomes.

W: Deborah, you’re gonna get quoted on that. Okay. That’s funny. So you said you’ve had experience as a token, as like one of two in terms of the presence and in terms of three being a voice, it’s real. 

DR: It’s real and then tip it where you actually have a majority of women on board and that’s, I’ve had that experience, so I’ve had the full range, but usually being the only.

AW: Yeah. Oh gosh. I, you’re reminding me of, and I can’t remember who it is, but it’s one, it’s a, a powerful like managing director of one of the big investment banks on, on Wall Street, and she’s had an incredibly successful career, and she said. People always told me, Oh, poor you. You’re the only woman in the room.

And she said, in the back of my mind, I was always like, no, that this is what makes me memorable. I’m the only woman here. So, I mean, there are strategies that we can use sometimes when we’re forced into it, but it’s not ideal. 

DR: Well, I always look at it that I was given the opportunity as a professional, so I never looked at it to say, Hey, I’m a woman, I need to be treated different. 

I have two examples. If I may, 2015, I go for a board interview. It was public company and it was, uh, intergenerational. It was all men, and it was retail. 80% of your purchaser or consumers and retail are women. So they were going to be bringing the first woman on their board.

And I walk in and I have my first interview with the CEO, and he says, you know, I’m not interviewing you because you’re a woman. I thought I am 30 plus years into my career here, or maybe somewhere, maybe 25 years. I thought that’s a really odd way to start a conversation, but I thought I was prepared. I reviewed all the documents and I was very curious on the position and the opportunity.

So all I said to him was, I’m not here because I’m a woman. I’m here because I can add value to your board, and let’s talk about your strategy? I had a two-hour strategy conversation with him, and I just stepped back and I thought, well, he is probably uncomfortable. He probably didn’t know how to position it, and I didn’t take offense to it. I thought I just came back even stronger. Um, and.

AW: Good for you. 

DR: And I had to, it was 2015 and I’m like, how is this happening in my career? And then I have one other scenario was I was in venture capital. And I was the only female general partner in that particular office. And we would have meetings, and my colleagues would go to the men’s bathroom.

They’d come back from the men’s bathroom, and they’d made a decision. So I started following them to the men’s bathroom, and they started taking notice, and they said to me, what are you doing standing out here? I said, if you’re making decisions in there, then I’m gonna be in there making decisions with you. They did not do that ever again. 

AW: Wow. Deborah, you’re ballsy. Well, I had no choice. Oh my gosh. Desperate times call for desperate measures. So I’m gonna guess, is it true that you weren’t always this confident? I mean, it sounds like you were confident in your voice, right? You, you said to this, this, uh, CEO, that I’m not just speaking as a woman, I’m speaking as someone who’s qualified that you basically told these men that it’s not appropriate for you to be making decisions in the men’s room. Early in your career? I mean, were you always this confident woman, or did you evolve over time? 

DR: I think evolution definitely evolved, but I think from a young age. I had an older brother. I have a younger sister. My brother didn’t wanna go to school. I said to my mom that I’ll go to school for him. He didn’t wanna swim. I said, I’ll swim for him. So I guess I had this kind of throughout my life. I wouldn’t say I had as much confidence as I do now, and kind of what I know now versus what I knew back then. But I always had curiosity.

And I always, when the door opened, I felt that door opened for a reason. So I’m gonna walk through it. There have been many a times where I fell down and had to pick myself up. There are times where I thought, what was I thinking? And why am I doing this? But I think the confidence really came from just wanting to always be moving ahead, doing something unique, doing something different.

But having the base that I’m a professional, I’ve been trained a certain way, I’ve had different situations, and at the end of the day, it really comes down to your inner drive, right? 

AW: I’ve heard you use the term curious and curiosity a few times. Can you comment on the role of curiosity in your success and the success of other folks that you see?

DR: Well, curiosity to me is something about you have an open mind, you’re curious on something, you’re curious why is this not? And so for me, when I founded Women Get On Board, my curiosity was why are these women always asking me how I got on a board? And this was like going back to like 2009. I started doing slides, and I called them, Women Get on Board, I do these presentations.

And I was just curious, well, why do I always get asked this question? And like, I know there’s other women on boards. And so that curiosity really led me to being as an entrepreneur. It’s like, well, how come no one else is doing this? And if there really is this demand, what should I do about it? So that was curiosity for me that really created this platform for Women Get on Board. 

And then the curiosity of just opportunity to meet women like you and have conversations. I’m curious when I go on every call that I have and every meeting I have, I’m curious, how did you get to be where you are? What do unique, and how can I help you? So that curiosity is something I guess, ingrained in me.

AW: So I was telling you before we press record here, that this morning I did a workshop and I was coaching some women on their branding and their, and their confidence, and we ended up talking about the growth mindset or curiosity a lot and how I have definitely no, I mean, I advocate for, for a growth mindset.

I encourage it in myself, in my kids, in the folks that I coach, and I have noticed that most of my clients self-select. They are; they have a growth mindset. They want to improve; otherwise, they wouldn’t be investing in coaching. Right. But there are a few who are less so, and they inevitably are not as successful.

Like I, I think there’s a very strong correlation between a growth mindset, curiosity, however you want to, a lifelong learner, whatever, however you wanna label it, and success. So I was curious about, and I’m, I’m not surprised, before I get into the three rapid fire questions, Deborah, I wanna ask you if you could go back to when you were maybe interviewing for your first corporate board role, and then also when you were first starting to attend, uh, these meetings. If you could go back and give yourself some advice, what advice and Yes. I’m asking you this so that other people that are listening can maybe extrapolate. What advice would you give to your younger self? 

DR: My younger self, so I have been serving on corporate boards for almost 25 years, and it really came to me ’cause I was in venture capital, and as a general partner, I served on the portfolio company boards.

So, by virtue of that position. I ended up being a board member, but post that when I was independent. For me, was doing due diligence, do as much due diligence on the financials, on the people, on the culture, on the industry. And a lot of people feel like, oh, it’s an opportunity. I can’t ask these questions.

And I’m like, you have a fiduciary duty to do due diligence, and the company is gonna do due diligence on you. So I would do, I would. Earlier self, do more due diligence. And you know, I don’t know if it was overanxious to get on that certain board or do it, or you knew the people. But I would say, be prepared.

Do your due diligence, research, and you know what? Be prepared to say no, say no. This isn’t the right fit for me now, but I know three other women, right? So there’s nothing wrong with assessing an opportunity and saying no. Right. It’s your reputation, it’s your time. Also, know when to leave a board. Um, so always know your exit strategy.

Is it the right time? Is management change? Is it situation? So just be really deliberate in why you’re joining a board. So make sure it aligns with all your values, you’ve done your due diligence, and also know when to leave a board.

AW:  I think smart for people, even in the positions that they’re taking outside of their board roles. Right. It’s almost like we’re going full circle here, Deborah. You started with the, why am I talking? It’s, and then it becomes like, why am I here? Like you have a purpose. You’re aligning your objectives and your values with those of the organization. You have a purpose, not just for talking, but actually for showing up and for, you know, formally taking that role.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are not as thoughtful or purposeful, right? About what they’re doing and why they’re doing it in the moment or generally in their careers. 

DR: Well, what I see a lot of too, a lot of women are very want to get on a board and they’re super excited. I’m on a not-for-profit, and then they go on another not-for-profit and another, and really, what I say to them is, why are you not elevating your board leadership?

Why you’re not chairing a committee, why you’re not sharing the board because part of that evolution in your board journey is to elevate your board leadership, too, right? So as you develop your skills and your knowledge in the boardroom, you should also want to be taking on those leadership roles. And if you look at the data, less than 8% of TSX-listed companies have female chairs of the board.

AW: Sorry, what percent? 

DR: 8%. Oh. Wow, that was last year’s data. 8%. So if we’re gonna go, we have a seat at the table, we also should be leaning in and taking on leadership roles. A hundred percent. 

AW: Okay. Are you ready for the three rapid-fire questions, Deborah?

DR: Bring it. 

AW: First question, are you an introvert or an extrovert? And how does that affect your communication? 

DR: Well, I’m sure I won’t surprise you. I’m an extrovert. 

AW:  No, I’m not surprised. 

DR: And how does it affect my communication? Well, I’m working on listening. Because I have a lot of energy, I have enthusiasm. I show up. I wanna fill those blank spaces. So I have to work on why am I’m talking. I have to work on, so I know I can bring the energy in, but I also wanna make sure that I’m giving space for others and be very inclusive for others to show up and have their thoughts known.

AW: Deborah, this is like a masterclass in self-awareness that you’re doing, and actually the very first answer that you had was, was, you know. Ears in, hands out or the listening skills. So you are, um, a testament to self-awareness. Okay. Question number two. I’m actually very curious about this. What are your communication pet peeves?

 DR: Oh, my communication, pet peeves are people that talk the talk. But don’t walk the talk. So they can be great communicators. They can be telling you all the great things. At the end of the day, they don’t show up, they don’t deliver. You talked about under-promise and over-deliver. So they have the opposite, over-promise and under-deliver.

And so to me, you know, there’s, there’s a style you always observe and you take away. You’ve thought, oh, I really liked how they showed up. So that would be a pet peeve as somebody who just wants to take up space, who wants to be the loudest, wants to be the smartest in the room, but at the end of the day, doesn’t give other people opportunity to speak.

AW: Or they’re not doing the work to back up their convictions. 

DR: Yeah, and as women, one of the things I have heard as well is we’re worker bees. So when you show up on a board, we might get delegated, like I had that lean-in concept for the special committee, but it was, we were all leaning in, and we all had different areas.

But if I was the only one leaning in and it was all men on a special committee, I might have to step back and go, wait a sec, this does not make sense. Right? I think when we show up, we wanna make sure that we have an equal voice and we have influence and power. And it’s not being delegated to be the worker bee, uh, on the committee or on the board.

AW: Yeah, a hundred percent. Uh, recently had an episode with Dr. Amy Diehl, who’s a co-author of a book called Glass Walls, and she talks about all of this, including office housekeeping or unpromotable tasks, so you can guess what that is. So you wanna make sure it’s not that, and she said, Andrea, it’s not that you’re not doing those things, but it’s that you’re not the only one that’s doing them.

Right. And I think if the same thing goes for all of the work. You don’t wanna be like, oh, good girl, de doing all the work while the guys are doing all the talking. No, no, no, no, no. You’re speaking for your work. And then they’re speaking for their work, not just raising their hands and, and, uh. Whatever, boasting, whatever, whatever vacuous comment it is.

Um, okay. Third and last rapid-fire question is, is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending a lot lately? 

DR: Can I give you two, please? The one that I read recently, and she has, she’s got her global podcast theory, um, is Mel Robbins, as you know, and she has her book, Let Them Theory.

Phenomenal book. It’s about communications, it’s about relationship. And I kind of went in and she has re she’s got it research back. But the real is about setting boundaries for yourself. Let them, so, you know, we all have kids, they’re growing up. Sometimes we wanna do everything, sometimes we have to let them.

And then her view is, let them, but then let me, so you as an individual. So it’s really about setting boundaries and communication, and in lifestyle and everything from family to work, to love relationships. It’s, it’s a full gamut. Friendships, friendships, um, why certain friends are in your life today, and then proximity and not necessarily proximity.

So, you know, it almost kind of gives you the permission to say. Yeah, I, uh, maybe I don’t have that friendship anymore because I moved away, or maybe I wasn’t investing in it, and it’s okay. I think it was really giving us permission to let them, it’s called the theory. You said there were two, is it because it’s a podcast and a book?

Well, I read it in Audibles. Okay. So I listened to it in Audibles. So the other book that just, and you probably know her, Lisa Bragg with Bragging Rights. I know her very well. Yes. You would really speak to some of the work that you’re doing as well, is that whole. Having a purposeful self-promotion. I just heard her speak last week at a women in AI, and you know who one of the award winners were, Andrea? 

AW: Yes, I do. Sherry Shannon-Vanstone. 

DR: Yes. Uh, Lisa was there, one of the speakers, and it was really enlightening and I hadn’t heard her speak on her book. So then I just said, I’ve just ordered four copies for my friends, and she’s like. Congratulations. Go on Amazon and put some good reviews on. But I liked her approach is really, it is that we as women, we have to be more purposeful in how we self-promote ourselves.

AW: So I will put links to Mel Robbins’ book and to Lisa Bragg’s book in the, um, in the show notes. And I’m, I’m not bragging here, but I have to tell you, I’m quoted in Lisa’s book. 

DR: So, Andrea, am I not surprised? ’cause I haven’t read it. I just got it. But I’m like, read delve into it. 

AW: Yeah. You can see the connection. You can see the connection, yeah. Is there anything else you wanna share with the listeners that talk about, talk listeners, Deborah, about getting on boards, about communicating about your board role or communicating when you’re, when you’re in the board meeting? 

DR: I would like to say that it’s a journey. And if I look back over the 25 years, how I showed up 25 years ago versus how I show up now is different.

And I think you have to be kind to yourself. A lot of people set these expectations, and they should be this and they should be that, and it’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You gotta work your way there. And so it is a journey, and you wanna map it out and each time you take on a new board role or a new opportunity, make sure you’re learning up and you’re going outside your comfort zone. Always be pushing. 

Don’t go to status quo. Don’t go back to, Hey, I’ve always done it. You should. It should be continuous learning. So that’s why I’d say it’s a journey. It’s a very fulfilling journey, but be very deliberate and strategic where you put your time and how you value yourself.

AW: Thank you so much, Deborah, for your time and for sharing your expertise. I learned a lot from you, and I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. 

DR: Thank you, Andrea.

AW: So many nuggets, whether you’re seeking to improve your communication, or you’re seeking a board position, or you’re a woman looking to establish credibility or perhaps all of the above. Thank you so much, Deborah. Okay, let me share with you now my three key learnings. If you’ve been listening, you know that I am a big fan of the power of three, and it turns out so is Deborah.

So let’s make that the first point. The power of three when it comes to women on boards, one woman on a board is a token, two is a presence, and three is a voice. If you lead a board or a committee, or even just a team, I hope you’ll consider this rule of three. One is a token. Two is a presence. Three is a voice.This is the power of three. 

The second point that I wanna reinforce is the power of preparation. Deborah shared a powerful story about how she asked a CEO something related to a footnote in one of his financial statements. That is preparation, and preparation is key. Preparation can drive your credibility and your confidence.

This reminded me of a quote that I heard recently from Janet Yellen, the economist and former chair of the US Federal Reserve. I heard her on a podcast, and she said that she attributed to much of her success to ensuring that she was always the most prepared person in the room. 

Okay. Moving on to the third and last point that I wanna reinforce, Deborah shared this lovely acronym that I hope you’ll remember, and I know I’m gonna remember this.

I’m gonna start writing this on the top of all my meeting agendas, it’s wait. Why am I talking? This is about being self-aware. Got it. Well, that’s it. Thank you again to Deborah Rosati for sharing her generous advice, and that’s it. Thanks again to Deborah Rosati for sharing her generous advice to help all of us, especially women, get on boards.

And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode. I hope you’ll share it with a friend, and please subscribe or follow us on YouTube if you’re not subscribed already. Talk soon.

The post Women: Get on BOARD with Deborah Rosati (ep.194) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

What if using AI could make you a better communicator without making you sound like a robot? In this episode, executive communication coach Dr. Andrea Wojnicki sits down with AI strategist Jonathan Mast to reveal a 4-step framework that helps leaders use AI effectively without losing their voice or their edge.

From writing difficult emails to brainstorming, summarizing data, or prepping keynotes, Jonathan’s framework empowers you to collaborate with AI like a pro. You’ll learn how to prompt like a strategist, refine your outputs, and lead by example in this new era of communication technology.

Copy & Paste Jonathan’s AI Perfect Prompting framework:

💻Website: TalkAboutTalk.com

💻Website: https://whitebeardstrategies.com

Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell: https://amzn.to/45atGkM

Jonathan Mast: Now is not a time to punt this to somebody else. It’s time for you to embrace what you wanted to do upfront and change people’s lives by leveraging AI to amplify your skill and experience. 

Andrea Wojnicki – Talk About Talk: What do you do when everyone around you is suddenly talking about AI? Like it’s magic? Here’s what you do. You slow down, you ask better questions, and ideally, you call on someone like Jonathan Mast.

Jonathan’s been leading conversations around digital strategy and AI long before the headlines caught up. He doesn’t deal in hype. He helps leaders understand how to actually use AI without losing trust, authority, or human connection. In this episode, you’ll learn why tone, clarity, and credibility matter even more in this age of AI.

How to avoid sounding like a robot. Yes. Even when you’re using one, and you’re gonna learn the exact playbook that smart communicators. Yes, like me, are running right now to stay ahead without selling out. 

Let’s do this. Let’s Talk about Talk in case we haven’t met yet. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where we coach ambitious executives to stand out with confidence and credibility. I also write a newsletter where I share my coaching tips. You can subscribe to this newsletter by clicking on the link in the episode description.

Alright, let me introduce Jonathan Mast. Jonathan stands at the forefront of AI prompting mastery. Empowering us to leverage artificial intelligence for measurable growth. Jonathan has emerged as a leading authority on practical AI implementation with an engaged audience of nearly half a million AI enthusiasts and entrepreneurs.

His perfect prompting framework, which you’re about to learn, teaches businesses how to effectively communicate with AI prompts through ChatGPT Claude and Gemini to achieve exceptional results. As the founder of White Beard Strategies, Jonathan focuses on helping executives and businesses leverage AI to save time, increase profits, improve their communication, and deliver more value to their business.

His philosophy emphasizes AI as a tool that amplifies our skill and our experience, rather than replacing human creativity and judgment. His international speaking engagements across North America, Asia, and Australia are packed with practical takeaways. And now. We have him here. Let’s do this. 

Thank you so much, Jonathan, for being here today to talk to me and the Talk about Talk listeners about how to use AI to improve our communication.

JM: I’m excited to be here. I think it’s a tremendous tool and I’m sure we’ll get into some interesting discussions. 

AW: Me too. Me too. So let’s start really broad. We all know that AI is big in the news, and it’s big at work. It’s big with everything we’re doing these days. Can you share with us some ways that executives, in particular, are using AI to improve their communication? I realize this is a very broad question, but I thought we’d start broad. 

JM: It’s a good thing, and I think there’s probably two or three key ways that I’m seeing that is really working, especially for executives. First is as executives, I’ve never yet met an executive who like SOPs, we all understand they’re important, but we hate them because it means we need to take time to get the stuff that’s up here or the thoughts, and at least in a lot of cases, maybe even add more than what’s up here. Because we’ve got ideas worth 30,000, 50,000 feet, but coming back into 500 feet for our staff, it’s painful. And ChatGPT and I I’ll use ChatGPT to say AI. I mean, it’s really any AI model can literally take and within a couple of minutes, grab the information that’s in our heads. Not literally, I mean, we have to share it, but you can get that information, and it can then create literally step-by-step SOPs for our team. And what I found and what so many of my students have found, especially the executives, is that we have these great ideas, but we’re often, and I’m gonna say it myself, we’re almost scared to go to that 500-foot view because we’re really good at 30 to 50,000 feet.

We’re not so good when we get down below because a lot of us don’t do well with some of that minutia. Some do, but a lot of us don’t. And so,we do better with vision and things like that, and ChatGPT is just amazing at increasing that communication and helping. The other part that I find is real important as executives, it always seems we’re the ones that are tasked with the difficult emails.

The ones that are really important, whether it be from a legal perspective or a compliance perspective, or whatever we’re dealing with, sometimes just to make sure that we don’t tick off the customer while we tell them where they need to go, and that can be difficult. And AI, again, does such a tremendous job of that because I can get an email from you, Andrea, and I can say, all right, I need to set these boundaries. I need to do this, and I need to be nice about it, and I don’t have to be nice. AI will do that for me, and then I can just edit it. And that really difficult email that I probably put off for three days, while my assistant was like, Jonathan, you gotta do that email. You gotta do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m not, ’cause I’m really not sure what to say.

I can now get done in just moments with AI. So those are two areas that I think are really impactful for executives in particular. 

AW: Amazing. So SOPs and difficult emails. So as you were describing this, I was thinking pretty much all of us have been using AI even before it was really on our radar in terms of, you know, using it as a thesaurus and for grammar check and spell check and all of those things. And now it seems like everyone that I know is using it for brainstorming, and many people are using it for writing, but I think there’s a huge range in terms of the adoption. What would you say is pretty typical right now? Can you share with us any statistics or observations, or trends that you’ve noticed in terms of adoption?

JM: So the most recent statistics I saw, and of course stats, as we know can lie, and they can be made to say anything we want, but we’re indicating people that what they called regular users of AI, and they define that as using it on a daily basis. What they didn’t do is define whether that was one prompt a day or whether that was a hundred prompts a day.

But the numbers that I saw on that were just shy of 18% of businesses are regular users. Given how broad that is, that means to me that most people still are not using AI effectively. Most executives are not using AI effectively, and certainly, our teams are probably not using AI effectively, and that presents a massive opportunity for us because of how the time savings and the value add that can come when AI is leveraged properly.

AW: Yeah, so I did not look at the statistics before I opened up this interview. I am shocked that it’s so low. So I’ve been using by that standard AI for over a year. I remember I bought a subscription to ChatGPT, and I put it as like when I open my browser, that’s what it goes to, ’cause that’s gonna prompt remind me to use it.

I’m looking at my screen right now, and I can see it in the corner of my screen. And then I just had a lot of fun, and I even on LinkedIn, I would see examples of prompts that people are using, and I would try it, and I’d be amazed at what it could do. And I started experimenting. So. 

So, maybe you can share with us what some of the other low-hanging fruit is.

So if you’re one of the, you’re not included in the 18%, right? So you’re in the majority, you’re not using it, or you’re not using it regularly. What’s the low-hanging fruit in addition to the SOPs, the standard operating procedures, and the difficult emails? I love that point. Make that email that you thought was so difficult to write a lot easier with AI. What’s some of the other low-hanging fruit, in particularly in a business context? 

JM: Well, you mentioned brainstorming. I think that’s one that AI does a tremendous job at, and not enough executives are using it for. You know, sometimes it’s difficult because either we don’t have the people around us to talk to, or sometimes we’re just not comfortable sharing some of our thoughts, because let’s face it, sometimes we want to nuke everything, and that’s probably not what we should be doing.

AI gives us essentially a safe place to go do that and to have those conversations, and it’s really effective. So I think that’s one. The other area that I think how I recommend people get started, and especially executives, is take a book like Dan Martel’s, Buy Back Your Time. One of the things Dan talks about in the book is go through your day and literally for every 15 minutes, just write a one to two words about what you were doing.

Do that for every day of the week, but at the end of every day by yourself, or sit down with your assistant and highlight everything that energized you that made you go. Yeah, man, I love that highlighted in green. Everything that made you go, I wish my assistant didn’t even have to deal with this. Take a pink highlighter. I’d say red, but they don’t really have any that I’ve seen. And take a pink highlighter and highlight that pink. Then use AI to help you get rid of all the pink stuff, or to help you leverage all the pink stuff. Every person I know, executive or not, has got items that they, we just do because we’re in the habit of them, or we somehow are in the, even though we know better, it’s just, it’s easier if we do it.

We know that’s not the case, but we get stuck in that. Take those pink items and start there. Those are things we don’t wanna be doing anyway. That means we’re probably not doing a very good job, and if we are doing, we’re procrastinating. And that means as an executive, we’re wasting really valuable resources, telling our assistants, I’ll get to it tomorrow. I’ll get to it tomorrow. I’m guilty. I’m not pointing any fingers. I’m guilty of that. My assistant will say, Jonathan, what about this? I’ll get to it tomorrow. She’s now learned that when I have difficult emails to write, guess what? We have a custom GPT that’s trained on Jonathan’s tone and style. She writes it, and she sends it to me, and she’s like, can we just send it this way?

Guess what? That’s easy. That’s. I like easy. We do the same thing for a lot of the other things that I need to do. One of the things that I need to do, a lot of executives need to do, we need to review reports. Most of us don’t exactly get that’s not, that’s not our jam. That’s not what gets us all excited.

But imagine being able to take those reports or have our admin take those reports and literally have ChatGPT in a predefined way analyze that and give us a summary. And now I can get that. Every Friday, for example, I get a report from my team, and it’s done in audio format. It’s all created by AI. And when I do my 45-minute walk in the morning, guess what? I listen to the report. What that means is one, I’m walking anyway, so I need something to do. In other words, just walking ’cause my ADD kicks in and I can’t just walk. Two, I actually get to review data that I might not otherwise review on a regular basis, ’cause the report would come through and maybe I’m the only one, but sometimes those reports didn’t get read.

Sometimes those emails would get archived. I’ll get to it later if I need it. Now I’m getting them in a way that’s digestible. It’s easy. We tweak it so it fits my tone, what I wanna listen, the key points that I want information on, and then if I’ve got questions, it’s really easy. I can ask my team, Hey, help clarify this, or what happened here? What’s going on? We had a 20% drop. Doesn’t seem like we should have. Are you sure that’s right? All those things are really quick follow-ups. And we’re getting ’em done faster as opposed to delaying them and missing them, and possibly if there is a problem causing more damage, ’cause we missed something.

AW: Okay. So, to your point about people not reading the reports, this is an aside, but I have to tell you, I know they don’t. ‘Cause I remember years ago I wrote a detailed summary of a day-long meeting that we had at an offsite, and I asked everyone to read it, and embedded in the document I wrote, if you’re reading this, email me now, and I’m gonna take you out for a very fancy lunch. No one emailed me. 

JM: I was gonna say no. You didn’t buy any lunches, did you ? 

AW: No. I bought zero lunches. Fascinating. So I love that.

I wanna get real here for a minute. Imagine that you are a senior executive, or you’re coaching a senior executive on how to create and then deliver a really important presentation. So it could be your annual general meeting report to shareholders. It’s a big presentation. Maybe it’s a keynote, right? Related to your thought leadership. How can you use AI along the way to help you optimize your preparation and your delivery for this high-stakes presentation? 

JM: If you’re an executive, the first thing I recommend you do with AI after you play with it once or twice is go, and you’ve probably got multiple personality tests you’ve taken. If not, go up to 16 personalities. Take their Myers-Briggs assessment and take the personality test, takes you 10 to 15 minutes. One. If you haven’t done it, I’ll be shocked, but if you haven’t, the insights will be amazing. Take that and give that to. ChatGPT or whatever model you’ve got, because we need to first train the model on who we are, our tone, and our style.

And this fits directly in with your question because if I’m preparing an important presentation, it need to know who I am and how I would say things. Because if I just let AI do it, it might sound like AI and not sound like Jonathan, and that’s not good for my brand or anything else. So step one, train it on how you sound, it’s as easy as I said, giving us some personality results. 

Secondarily, make sure you talk about the audience that you’re presenting to and what’s gonna be important to them. Generally, the good news is we tend to know both of those things. We tend to know going in, here’s my audience, here’s what I am. Then explain what you’re trying to do very simply, and probably the most important part when you’re explaining it. End your prompt, which is what we call it when you’re asking ChatGPT what to do. End it with this question. Ask me any questions you have. In other words, you’re literally going to be asking the AI to now interview you, to ask you the questions it needs in order to gather the information to answer your question.

When you do that, your life gets easier because you’re already running at a million miles an hour. You don’t want to have to pause and think through it. Now, you literally, and I do this a lot of times when I’m walking using the voice mode, I literally say, ask me any questions you’ve got, and it will then I’ll hear it through my headset, and it’ll go, okay, tell me about this. I’ll respond, ask me another question, respond. Now I’m taking that downtime, so to speak, my walk time, turning that into something productive, and I’m giving real, relevant information to the AI model so that it can put that together.

Keep in mind it’s been trained on the best presentation techniques, the best ways to reach your audience. It knows a lot of their pain points already. Now I can help you put together that the other part and the last part have it start by creating an outline first, and then filling out the outline as multiple prompts, multiple questions.

Don’t expect it to be a slot machine where you’re gonna pull the handle once you’re gonna give it one prompt, and you’re gonna get the perfect keynote. It won’t happen. You need to do it step by step, and when you do that, you can take that prep time. That was again the thing, you were dreading the thing you were trying to figure out how to get done before you got home tonight, and you can have it done in maybe an hour or two instead of hours or days.

AW: I love your slot machine metaphor. That’s beautiful because I think that’s how people, a lot of people think about it. There’s these lists that we see as lead magnets all over the internet. Click here, give me your email address, and I’ll send you 50 AI prompts or a hundred AI prompts. And it’s like, I just need to find the right prompt and it’ll solve all of my problems.

So this, Jonathan, is actually why I invited you to be on this podcast, because I was listening to you and you said, forget the AI prompts. I have a framewor,k and I was like, what? So you don’t know this about me, but I am not a fan of memorized or rehearsed anything. Self-introductions, anything. It’s all about having a free yeah, high five, high five. It’s all about having a framework that you customize. I would love it if you shared with the audience your prompting framework, which I’m just gonna say I started using literally the same day that I heard you say it. And it is magical. 

JM: Well, thank you. First of all, like you, I don’t like memorizing things; it’s just not how my brain functions. I can memorize frameworks though, because they make sense to me, because it’s a recipe that I can follow and.. 

AW: And you can customize it, right? Sorry to interrupt you, but you can 

JM: Exactly. No, you’re, you’re absolutely right. I don’t, I’m not tied in. I like probably most executives, I don’t like you to tell me what I can’t do.

Well, this is about you can do not what you can’t do, and therefore it works. Four simple steps. The first is tell the AI model. Doesn’t matter what one you’re using, what type of expert it is. So let’s just say, hypothetically, that we’re gonna write a press release. I’m gonna start off by telling it you are an expert at writing press releases.

Not very complicated, but as you can imagine, I’ve now narrowed that scope right down to where I need to go. Step number two: give it background information. Andrea, if you and I are working on a press release together and you are the expert, and I walk up to your desk and I go, Hey Andrea, I need a press release.

And you go, great, I can do that. Then I turn around and walk away, and you go, but I got a couple questions, and I don’t give you any context. What’s the likelihood that press release is gonna be relevant? It’s not. No matter how brilliant you are, if I don’t give you the context. ’cause my wife reminds me she can’t read my brain.

Neither can AI, and you need to give it context. Now that doesn’t have to be a lot, but give it the context you have. Then step three, this is what normally we just prompt with. So we told that the expert, we gave it context. Now we ask it our question. That’s where most people start and stop. But we’ve got one more really important step, and if you only remember this one, just ask your question.

Do step four. In other words, steps three and four, the two most important. Step four is you end your prompt with this simple statement. Ask me any questions you have. That’s it. Because see, the AI is not sentient and it, we can’t read our minds, but it has been trained on the proper format and framework on how to do about everything, and that includes press releases or anything else.

So when it reads through its framework and goes, Jonathan doesn’t know a framework ’cause he doesn’t know how to write press releases, but he missed these four things. And when I say, ask me any questions you have, it will then do so. If I don’t add that though, it’s been taught to make assumptions, and it will just fill in the blanks assuming the data that it thinks is correct.

And we all know what happens when we assume we resemble the southbound end of a northbound mule. So AI does the same thing. 

AW: Oh, I’m just saying this again. I really wanna underscore to the listeners that it’s magical. So, for example. Immediately after you shared this. I’m trying to think of maybe what I used it for. Maybe I was asking it to edit an article that I’d written for Ink Magazine. So I would say use your business and communication skills expertise. I actually found that if you give it two different types of expertise, I think it kind of levels up. It’s like a multiplier. And then I gave it the background.

I’ve written this article. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I say to it, I am going to upload a draft, who the target market is. I give it all the information. Here’s the word length I want, here are my three main points that I wanna make, blah, blah, blah. And then I say, before I upload the draft. What clarifying questions do you have that will optimize your response to me?

And the other thing that I would always add is I would specify, because I’ve noticed a couple times when I didn’t specify that the AI would give me a list when I wanted a paragraph or vice versa. It would give me a paragraph when I wanted a list. 

JM: And that can be a fifth part of it, if you want, as to how you want it to respond to you, give it the format. Absolutely. 

AW: Okay, so if there’s one takeaway, you know, I think it’s the framework generally, and then specifically your question about clarifying questions. Do you have that will optimize the output? What, I mean, this framework might help answer this question, but what are some of the most common mistakes that people make when they’re using AI?

JM: The first one’s probably gonna surprise people. They overcomplicate it. AI is not as complicated as we wanna think it is. It can be, but there’s no reason to overcomplicate it. So even with the perfect prompt framework we just went over, that’s by the way, what I call that four steps.

If you go through that and you spend too much time overthinking, wow. What type of expert should it be? I’m really not sure. I want to pick the right one. Just get close. You don’t have, I loved what you said. You’re an expert at these two things. Okay, great. And they can be anything that you want. Then don’t overcomplicate it.

The other thing, and we talked briefly about this, is many, many people treat AI like a slot machine, and they assume it’s one question, one answer, one question. No. It’s a conversation. Just as you and I would have a conversation if we were collaborating on a project, AI is the same way. You’re gonna do something, you’re gonna get a response back that’s close.

You’re gonna go, you know what? I forgot to tell you this. I forgot to tell you I wanted a paragraph and not as a table. Don’t start over, just have a conversation and go to the next step or go, well, that’s an interesting perspective. What would happen if we changed this variable and have a conversation?

Many of my chats are 20 or 30 back-and-forth questions with AI as we get to that point to refine. Now, at some points we get there and I’m like, never mind. You’re just not understanding me. And like any relationship that happens occasionally. And then the good news is that nobody ever gets mad when I say that and I just start over. But that happens only occasionally, like you said. So the two biggest, again, overcomplicating and treating AI, like it’s a one question, one answer. We’re hoping to hit the jackpot. Both of those, I think, are the two mistakes. 

AW: It’s like an iterative tool, like your analogy of two partners working together to solve a problem, right? And they’re. Building on each other, other’s ideas? So recently, I’m gonna say in the last couple months, I’ve noticed in the output that I’m getting from ChatGPT, there are some common kind of markers. There’s often a solid line if I ask for a list. So if I’m creating a podcast where I’m writing an article or something, I will independently brainstorm what I think should be there.

And then I wanna make sure I’m not missing anything obvious. So I will separately ask ChatGPT, give me a list of 10 things that qualify here, and then I just usually I go, yeah, I’ve got that. I got that. Okay, I’m fine. Right? That’s kind of probably the most common thing that I use it for, but I’ve noticed when I ask it for these lists that there’s these solid lines that are just bizarre that.

And then I noticed the rocket emoji, and then I saw people. I noticed a woman that I work with who I respect very much. Obviously, she’s using ChatGPT, ’cause a lot of her work has the rocket ship emoji in it. And then I started reading on LinkedIn. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn. I started reading people’s posts saying, you know what’s with all the rocket ship emojis? Stop using them.

And if you’re gonna use ChatGPT or other AI, at least edit out the markers. And then the most recent one is the em dash. So,  I actually asked my ChatGPT to stop putting those solid lines to stop using the rocket ship to stop using the em dash. It’s not very obedient. It keeps using them. And then I will actually say, I asked you to stop doing that, and it says, Oh, sorry, thank you for the reminder. 

JM: I’m glad I’m not the only one. Yes, you’re absolutely correct in that it is not perfect. I will give you a hint in order to do have it do a better job of doing that. Begin or end your prompt because it’s important where you put that and start with, and it sounds really weird, they’re called delimiters, and this is gonna sound over complicated, but it will help three quotes in a row and then a square bracket.

Whatever do not do is closed, square bracket, and three more quotes. It’s like taking a yellow highlighter to that section of your prompt and saying, don’t forget this. Not perfect. I have a 17-year-old, and it’s like a 17-year-old who goes, I forgot that was highlighted. It won’t be perfect, but it will help out with that.

The other hint, that can be hugely valuable when you copy and paste out of Chat GPT, and yes, I do it too, and then I often edit afterwards. When you’re pasting it wherever you’re going, instead of doing a command V or what control V, do a command shift V or control shift V, and it will paste without the formatting.

And a lot of times it’s faster to just to go back in and add a quick heading in, and it will remove those lines that now we’ll still keep the em dashes or the en dashes. You’ll still have those, but it’ll get rid of all the emojis. It’ll get rid of all the extra lines, and then you just simply need to go and tell it find the em dashes. Em dashes are weird in that if my wife was trained as a journalist and so she’s like, I’ve been using em dashes forever. 

AW: Me too. I love them. My agency was like, we love them. I said, you need to stop. 

JM: Yeah. Now all of a sudden people get angry ’cause they’re like, you used an em dash. And I’m like, well, that was actually proper. Well, yes, but that means you used ChatGPT. Well, no, I actually been using those for most of my career. Now all of a sudde,n that’s a hot button for those people that decide to care. 

AW: It’s such a shame. The em dash is a beautiful thing. I’m fine with losing the solid lines. I’m fine with losing the rocket ship emoji. Are there any other markers, Jonathan, that you’ve noticed recently? 

JM: There are a number of what they call non-space markers, and it’s kind of like. People are like, Oh, this is some sinister conspiracy theory. No, if you’ve ever copied from Microsoft Word to another thing, you’ve gotten weird characters somewhere because of the formatting.

They’re simply formatting characters that are used in markdown, which is the language that AI tools write in. It’s not a big deal, but again, that’s another thing where you’re command shift or control shift V will remove those non-space characters. And when they say non-space characters, it literally means it’s a character in the code that doesn’t show up when you paste it anywhere. So that’s a good way to get rid of that. 

AW: So I wanna ask you at this point, if you had kinda one other than your brilliant framework. Okay, ’cause that brilliant framework is probably your answer to this question. Other than that, is there one thing that you want people to know about AI? It could be a misperception or something that’s way easier than they thought. Like if there’s one thing that you could share with the audience that will inspire them and help them use AI really productively in their jobs. 

JM: I  believe AI is like electricity. And when I say that, I mean that AI is on the path to become so ubiquitous in our lives that we’re not even realizing we’re using it when it comes to so many other things in life.

We think about them, but we don’t think about the electricity until we lose it. Then all of a sudden we realize everything that we were using it for, and pretty much for most of us, it’s not like we wake up and we decide to use electricity. We’re just using it by living by everything that we do, by everything that’s on in our residences and everything else, and AI’s headed down that path and why I wanna share that, especially for executives.

I believe it’s fundamentally your responsibility to your business and to your team to teach them how to use it in a way that provides value to the organization and to your clients. Because if you don’t, your competition will. It’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when, because it didn’t take very long for the world to go electricity rocks, and everybody started using it. AI is gonna be even faster, and the time is now. It’s not too late, but the time is now to start leveraging it as a tool. 

The example I always give, and it’s probably not perfect for your audience, but if you could just imagine you’re a roofer for just a moment. If you are putting shingles on a roof, you don’t wanna do it the old-fashioned way and carry up a bucket of nails and carry up a hammer and one by one, knock those in. It takes too much time. Instead, you wanna be up there with a pneumatic hammer that literally every time you tap it to the roof, it puts a nail in because it’s much faster.

And nobody in their right mind would not use a pneumatic hammer just because they weren’t familiar with it, and they liked their hammer because it wouldn’t be productive yet. That’s the same thing that so many of us are telling ourselves. Well, I’m just not ready for it, or I’m just not. It’s time. It’s here.

It doesn’t, it’s not scary, it’s not sentient, it’s not gonna take over the world. We can still unplug it, but it’s time to embrace it. 

AW: Jonathan, I have to say I love your metaphors. I lost track of how many amazing metaphors you’ve used. All right. I’m gonna move on now to asking you the three rapid-fire questions that I ask every guest.

I know you’re gonna be familiar with the first one based on your comment about Myers-Briggs. The question is, are you an introvert or an extrovert, and how does that affect your communication? 

JM: I am both depending on the situation. I am an ENTP, and I am very comfortable acting as an extrovert, but I need time to recharg,e and most of that time is spent on my own.

AW: So you may be an ambivert. 

JM: Yeah. Might be. I’m not familiar with that term. Yes. 

AW: Yes. Most people are actually in the middle. And it’s ambivert. I’m an ENTJ. So we’re close. Second question. What are your communication pet peeves? 

JM: So my biggest one is it’s never been worse. I hear people say that all the time to make a point. I’m a student of history. I’ve studied a lot. Everything we’re experiencing today, we’ve experienced before; how we’re experiencing the manner in which, you know, AI is brand new. We’ve not gone through AI before, but we’ve had the printing press, we’ve had the steam engine, we’ve had the internal combustion engine, we’ve had the internet, we’ve had PCs.

We’ve went through tectonic technological shifts before, and all the naysayers were wrong, and everybody who. Embraced it came out on the far end smelling like a rose because they found new opportunities, and that’s definitely the one that just drives me crazy. It’s never been worse. 

AW: So the extremely negative, the superlative that’s negative, especially related to AI. 

JM: Related to anything. I mean, whether it’s the news that’s going off or it’s AI, I mean, I, again, I hear it fairly frequently, and it’s just one of those things I just want to scream and go, No, it’s not true. What about, you know, we didn’t live in the and in during the Black Plague. It could have been worse, trust me. 

AW: Okay, let’s go to question number three. Is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending to people lately? 

JM: Uh, there’s a book that I recommend regularly because I do think it appeals to starting to use AI, and I think we talked about it earlier, and that was Dan Martel’s Buyback Your Time, especially as an executive, and I think most of us know this, but sometimes we have to be reminded.

There are things we don’t need to do in our lives because we can pay people to do them, and it’s more productive. It’s not a bad thing. I grew up in an environment where you were trained, you always did everything yourself. That’s the way it was, and I had a hard time learning that some executives didn’t. Some do, but if you’re in that understanding, how to buy back your time is so incredibly important. 

AW: Jonathan, I listened to that book last summer, and I had the same reaction. This is gold. It’s absolutely gold. So, Jonathan, do you have anything else that you wanna leave the audience with in terms of suggestions, tips, or advice in their adoption of and use of AI?

JM: Well, I just wanna encourage everybody as leaders, which I think almost all of us in the audience would identify with. We have a responsibility of those that we lead. And I wanna encourage you to not just on the surface, go, okay, this AI thing is something I’ll have somebody else do. It is a way to absolutely amplify your skill and experience.

And most of us became leaders because we wanted to do good in the world. We wanted to add value, we wanted to change things. If that’s you, I just wanna encourage you that I believe that AI, I’m 56, just for relevancy. It is the single biggest tech to technological shift that we’ve seen in the last 50 to a hundred years, maybe ever in history.

And now is not a time to punt this to somebody else. It’s time for you to embrace what you wanted to do upfront and change people’s lives by leveraging AI to amplify your skill and experience. 

AW: I love it. Leaders are role models. People are watching you. People will adopt the habits that you adopt. So leaders have a responsibility to model their use of AI and to adopt it.

And there is no better time than today. Thank you very much for sharing your time and your expertise with me and the Talk About Talk listeners. Thank you, Jonathan. 

JM: Thank you, and pleasure.

AW: I hope you’re feeling as inspired as I am now about using AI, and I’m thinking I’m gonna diverge from my usual practice of sharing three key learnings with you. For this episode only, I have one key learning that I promise will make a huge difference in your productivity. It’s this. 

Copy and paste Jonathan’s perfect prompting framework, which you can find in the show notes. Paste it somewhere where you can easily access it. I pasted it to the top of my to-do list. Then you can easily copy and paste it right into AI whenever you have an AI query. As a reminder, Jonathan’s perfect prompting framework has four points: 

One, tell the AI what specific area of expertise you want it to focus on. Maybe economics or social media, or something else. Two, provide context who you are, what you need, and relevant details. Three, ask the question; four, then ask AI to ask you any questions that will help it to optimize its output. And that’s it .

Again, you can simply copy this AI prompting framework directly from the show notes in this episode. Now, if you wanna go to the next level, you can add two more points to the framework. These are two points that I find very helpful. Think of them as bonus points. The first is to tell the AI what kind of output you’re looking for.

It might be a list, an email draft, a matrix, an image. Whatever, tell it exactly what format you’re looking for. The second one is to remind it what you don’t want. For me I do not want em dashes, and I do not want rocket ship emojis. Otherwise, I find that if I don’t constantly remind ChatGPT, what I don’t want, it keeps forgetting.

I really hope this prompting framework helps you as much as it’s helped me. If you know anyone who might find this episode helpful, please share, and please subscribe to the Talk About Talk podcast if you’re not already. Thanks again so much to Jonathan for sharing his framework and all of his insights with us, and thank you for listening to talk about Talk.

Talk soon.

The post AI PROMPTING Secrets You’ve Never Heard | Jonathan Mast (ep.193) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Think networking means being transactional or self-promotional? Think again. Shelly Lombard, former Wall Street analyst and founder of Schmooze, shares her playbook for building a strategic network without feeling fake. You’ll learn how to reconnect with weak ties, build visibility on LinkedIn, and follow up in a way that feels natural, not awkward.

Ready to speak up, stand out, and lead with gravitas? Join my 6-week Women’s Personal Branding Masterclass, starting Oct 15. Register by Aug. 15 and save $250 with code EARLYBIRDFALL at TalkAboutTalk.com.

 Shelly Lombard: Reach out to those weak ties. Say every week, three people, somebody I worked with 10 years ago, I’m just gonna ping them. Hey, thought of you. That kind of thing. It’s only transactional when you’re not keeping in touch with people. 

Andrea Wojnicki – Talk About Talk: If you think networking is just schmoozing at cocktail parties or collecting LinkedIn connections, you’re gonna wanna hear what my guest has to say. Shelly Lombard spent 30 years on Wall Street making high-stakes investment calls and building a career that, frankly, most people would envy. However, by her own admission, she did some things wrong.

In this conversation that you’re about to hear, Shelly opens up about the missed relationships that could have completely changed the trajectory of her career and how she finally learned to stop believing that just doing the good work would earn her a seat at the table. If you’ve ever hesitated to reach out or worried about bothering someone, then this episode will change the way you think.

You’re gonna get practical tips to grow your network without feeling pushy or fake or self-promotional, and you’ll walk away knowing exactly what you need to do to build real relationships that open real doors. If this is your first time here, I’m Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. This is Talk about Talk, where I coach ambitious executives like you to communicate with confidence and credibility.

I also write an email newsletter that you can subscribe to at the link below if you’re on YouTube. Or in the show notes if you’re listening on any other podcast platform. 

So now, without further ado, let me introduce Shelly Lombard, and then we’ll jump right into our conversation. And at the end, as always, I’m gonna summarize with three key learnings that I wanna reinforce with you.

I met Shelly Lombard on LinkedIn, believe it or not—and let me tell you, Shelly is a force for good.

She worked on Wall Street for over three decades, and early in her career, she was one of only a handful of women specializing in investing in distressed companies. In the early 2000s, she became one of the most quoted automotive analysts on Wall Street, frequently appearing in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and CNBC.

After her Wall Street career, she began serving on corporate boards, including the board of Bed Bath & Beyond, among others. Shelly recently launched Schmooze, an initiative that supports and encourages professional women to build strong business networks and close the gap between where they are in their careers—and where they want to be, whether that’s a board seat, the C-suite, or a career pivot.

Schmooze offers mini masterclasses in networking—and yes, I’ve personally led one of them. Let me tell you, Shelly has created something really special. She also hosts Schmooze events that serve as an alternative to the golf outings and sporting events that men have traditionally used to build business relationships.

Thank you so much, Shelly, for being here today to talk with me and the Talk about Talk listeners about networking.

SL:  I am thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for having me. 

AW: I’m so excited about having the opportunity to talk to you in person. It’s virtual, but we’re one-on-one here. I really admire what you’re doing on LinkedIn.

Before I pressed record, I was sharing with Shelly how much I enjoy reading her posts on LinkedIn. She shows personality, and you can tell that what she’s doing brings her joy, and then it, in turn, brings the rest of us joy. In fact, last night I read one of her posts to my teenage daughter, and I made her laugh.

Shelly, thank you for making LinkedIn a better place. 

SL: Yeah, and teenagers are tough too, so she, yeah, I’m impressed because she laughed. That made me feel good, ’cause teenagers are tough. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

AW: Toughest critics. Toughest critics. Yeah. Okay, so I just read your introduction, but I want to ask you, after spending over three decades in Wall Street. How did networking specifically help you succeed in such a competitive, intense environment? 

SL: Yeah, so you know what? What I will say is that I was not as successful as I could have been. I was not intentional about networking. I wasn’t strategic about it. I could have been much more successful if I was. I had a good run, but I would’ve been more successful. My career would’ve gone maybe in different directions, et cetera. I approached networking. I was very happenstance, half ass, oh, I like you. Let’s have lunch. But there was no really, oh, let me think through. I probably should get to know this person.

I did belong to a small group of women. At that time, there were only a handful of women doing what I was doing on Wall Street. Women on Wall Street were there. There weren’t as many of us. But what I was doing, which was investing in distressed companies, there were even fewer. So we formed a little group and we would get together for dinner, every other month or something like that.

But that was about the extent of it. And I think one reason I wasn’t more intentional is that I’m an introvert. People don’t believe that, but I am definitely an introvert, and I’m shy. So that’s different from being an introvert. I’m an introvert, and I’m shy. And then the second reason is I didn’t know any better.

Like my parents were teachers, and it was expected that you would go to college and then get a good job, and then, hopefully, stay there for your entire career. But nobody told me anything about networking or forming relationships. They didn’t know that wasn’t their world, and I didn’t figure it out on my own.

So I felt like I missed out on opportunities that I didn’t even know I was missing. I’ll tell you a quick story. Two guys I should have kept in touch with, and a lot of the people I worked with over three decades did really well on Wall Street, and I didn’t really; I wasn’t strategic enough to stay in touch with any of them.

One was a guy named Chad, our bank merged with another bank. He was my boss’s boss. Great guy. And he, as part of the merger, lost his job. Great guy. He landed on his feet somewhere else. I should have kept in touch with him, but I didn’t. Another guy who after the merger, replaced this guy, Chad, his name was Jimmy.

And Jimmy was my boss’s boss. Like he was way up there. And so when the two banks merged. They had a meeting for everybody who was vice president and above, and I think I might’ve been the only person of color in the room, certainly the only woman of color in the room. But as a result, Jimmy knew me, and this was years ago.

I’m sure it would be different these days, maybe not so much different. But as a result, the good thing was Jimmy knew who I was, so I would get on the elevator and he might be on there already, be like, Shelly, hey. And then he liked FaceTime. So he was one of those people who liked you to be at your desk for long hours on trading floors.

People usually left six o’clock, but I might be there like seven o’clock, and he would walk around just to see who was still working. He liked that and he would always talk to me, Hey Shelly, how you doing? And I would just say, Hey, and go back to work. I never engaged with him. I never tried to develop a relationship.

So like I said, I’m shy. I’m an introvert, and I just didn’t know any better, and I didn’t figure out it out on my own. And had he obviously was reaching out to me. Had I taken him up on that, I might still be sitting at, it’s now JP Morgan, but I might still be sitting there and it would’ve made a world of difference in my career.

AW: So hindsight’s 2020. You identified Shelly the one thing that you did do right was you connected with some women and you had dinners with them, every second month, which is great. But would you say it’s true, maybe then that you started Schmooze because of some regrets that you had about how you managed your career, specifically in terms of networking?

And if so, I see you nodding your hair, your head there. What gaps are you aiming to fill for women in business through Schmooze? 

SL: Yeah. So you’re absolutely dead on, right? I started Schmooze to help other women avoid the mistakes that I made. And so a turning point for me was working from home. So, toward the latter part of my career, I worked for a small boutique that researched investments.

And, fidelity was a client, Goldman Sachs was a client, and they let us work from home. And so working from home was great for my life and for managing my kids, and I didn’t have to commute into Manhattan, et cetera. But when I reared my head from that job, when that job ended right around the time of the financial crisis, a little bit after that, I realized I had let my contacts go dormant.

Like people would call me and say, Hey, meet me in Manhattan for a drink. And I’m like, girl, I’m. Sitting in my pajamas, with a baseball cap on, and I’m getting ready to take my son to soccer. The second thing, inflection point was when I left Wall Street and I started serving on corporate boards, and once I did, I learned that 80% of corporate board rules are filled through relationships.

One woman said to me, when somebody leaves, when one guy leaves a corporate board, the other guys in the room look around at each other and they go, okay, who do we know? And so if you are not known to them, if you don’t have a relationship with them, they obviously go to a guy in their network. So those things hit if I didn’t realize it before, those two things, working from home and corporate boards. hammer the point home. 

So what I’m trying to do with schmooze is one, encourage women to do it and to understand how important it is. And also to give them tools. So helping them to learn what I call networking hacks, like curiosity. So one of the things that kept me from inviting Chad or Jimmy out for a drink or a cup of coffee was like, I’m like, okay, now I gotta talk to him.

What do I talk to him about? And curiosity is a hack. I didn’t have to be charming. I didn’t have to be like knowledgeable. I  thought I had to be all these things to have a conversation with them if I had engaged with Jimmy over what about what the bank was doing, ’cause he was a real deal junkie. He loved deals and being a big bank and a big kahuna in the market.

If I had started saying to him, Hey, so I hear we’re working on a deal for Procter and Gamble or something like that. What’s going on with that? He would’ve talked to me for hours. So I didn’t have to be smart. I didn’t have to come across as charming and knowledgeable about the market.

Curiosity would’ve helped me to build a relationship with him, and we’ve actually had a schmooze class on networking internally and how you can use curiosity to build your internal network, and it would’ve made all the difference with Jimmy. 

AW: I love that word, curiosity, because I think it’s very, instructive. It’s very actionable for people, ’cause we’ve all heard that if we wanna engage in a great conversation, we need to ask questions. But actually labeling that as curiosity, what can I be curious about with this person? I think that’s brilliant. So you’ve labeled, I guess now the first hack, and you spoke about your story about it being particularly difficult to network when you were working from home.

Do you have any hacks for the listeners out there, including myself who want to network when they’re mostly working online at home? 

SL: Yeah. So I think you have to be, it’s, it was great for, my life wasn’t so great for my network. Visibility on LinkedIn makes all the difference in the world. So really lean into those tech tools.

People talk about being zoomed out and too much Zoom, et cetera. But that was one of my issues back when I was working from home, is that Zoom didn’t exist. LinkedIn was a baby. So using those tools like Zoom to have coffees, LinkedIn, one of the things I intended to talk about today, which I’ve learned really makes a difference in social media, has made it possible, is being visible.

And so what I would say to people working from home is be intentional about it. I wasn’t so people I was running into, so when I worked at the place where I was working from home, we had a PR person. So we our revenue model was subscriptions. So other firms did trades, and they got commissions.

Our firm was strictly subscription-based, so people like Goldman Sachs at Fidelity, and hedge funds had subscriptions. So we had a PR person who would get us. In the paper. And I would, I was always quoted in the New York Times, the journal, I covered the auto industry. I was quoted in the auto news.

And so people knew who I was, but I never followed up. Like I never, kind of took advantage of that. And so what I would say is working from home visibility is an important thing, and whether that’s being visible inside your company or outside your company, I was visible, but I’m, I’m happy to talk later about following up and the importance of following up.

SL: I left there, that company, and lots of people knew my name, but I hadn’t followed up and built relationships with any of them. So I think working from home, you need to be more intentional. About relationship building, and you also need to be more intentional about being visible both internally and externally.

AW: Oh gosh. Even in those quick anecdotes that you shared and stories of regrets and things that you were doing well, things that were going on. There’s so many hacks to, I think in the conclusion here, I’m gonna be listing what the hacks are. So there’s networking inside your organization, and then also being conscious of networking inside and outside of your organization.

There’s the point, I think, that was subtly made. By you here, or maybe implicitly made, which is when something happens, like a press release, or you attend an event that could become a catalyst for you to share on social media, right? So nowadays, if you were interviewed, you could show the video or a photo of it, or even just talk about it right on social media to reinforce.

So use these little events or big events as a catalyst, a topic for you to share with your audience. I’m wondering, just to back up for a minute, do you think this is different? For women versus men, Shelly. 

SL: Yeah. And remind me to talk more about visibility ’cause that’s another hack that I make sure I wanna talk about you.

You started talking about it being visible, but yeah, absolutely. So I think it’s two things. With women, it’s a mindset. So we are trained to be good girls and pleasers, and we’re not comfortable being transactional because it implies that you’re not nice. I remember when I first started, so I got into this group before this group of women, who invested in distressed companies, existed.

I remember being in a deal with another woman, and I reached out to her, Lisa, and I reached out to her and I said, Hey, you wanna have lunch? And then I felt Ooh, I felt like I didn’t want think that I wanted something. And so I remember saying, I just wanted to, I, I just thought, we should have lunch.

And she was like, it’s okay. So I think women have a tougher time being transactional, and men don’t, they’ll take you to a Knicks game, they’ll take you to a golf game, and then they’re not. woo. If you reach out to them three months later, and hey, you know what I noticed, so and can you introduce me?

I think also too, in terms of mindset, women think our work speaks for us, and it’s, it does not, your boss doesn’t always know what you’re doing. People in other companies that do what you do definitely don’t know what you’re doing. People outside your company definitely don’t know. So I think with women, it’s, we are afraid to be transactional and ask for stuff, and we’re also thinking, oh, my work speaks for itself. I think the other thing is time. So my sister has a thing, all roads lead to mom, all roads lead to mom. You are the emotional support person. You are the person who finds the summer camps very often. Maybe it’s different, in different, situations, different families.

But I know in my family, my, my husband was involved. He would ferry people of soccer, et cetera. But I was a person who thought, oh, it’s time for Lindsay to get braces. Oh, you know what, Andrew needs to get his physical now so he can be ready for soccer in the fall. Yeah. Oh, Lindsay needs an SAT tutor.

Yeah. I have never sat next to a man on a trading floor, and trading floors are open, so you don’t have an office and everybody’s, you can hear everybody’s conversation. I’ve never sat next to a man on a trading floor and heard him make a phone call about a birthday party. A clown, a pony? What time? What time does the bouncy house need to get there?

Do I need extra insurance? That’s totally left to mom, and I had a little nanny at some point, but there’s certain things you can’t delegate. like finding a tutor or recognizing that the kid needs a tutor. So I didn’t have time to play golf, didn’t have time to get good enough at it to use it as a networking tool.

So I think the two differences for women are mindset. And then also time, because when all roads lead to you, I think I read something a couple of years ago, it said, moms don’t do everything, but they make sure everything gets done. So even if it’s you saying to the babysitter, oh, can you do X, Y, and Z?

A lot of times, that falls on us. And so I think women have to approach networking, be more intentional about it. It may not just happen. And I think we also have to be more intentional about how we think about it. 

AW: Yeah. So when I asked the question at first, Shelly, I thought you were gonna say, yeah, because it is harder for women because there are fewer of us which, which is your experience, and I believe it is in many industries, still the same. And you didn’t even go near that. You’re talking about the transactional nature of men’s relationships with each other about how women are assuming that their hard work is gonna speak for itself.

And then this all roads lead back to mom. So here’s the thing, if you’re aware of these things, then it can almost become a superpower because you can work to un to undo them or to at least mitigate their negative impact. I just wanna share in terms of this transactional relationship, that’s a different way of saying something that I had a conversation with, actually, a classmate of mine back when I was a student.

And she was talking about how, she first introduced this concept to me. She said, at work, men are friendly and women are friends. And I was like, oh. And that’s a good thing and a bad thing, ’cause we should be friends. We should be thinking long term. Yeah. But also we shouldn’t be taking things so per, when we’re friends, we’re taking things personal. Men aren’t taking things personally. It is. And that fits beautifully, I think, with your transaction points. So I just wanted to highlight that. 

SL: Yeah, that’s actually a great point. That’s a great point. 

AW: Yeah, I love it too. It has so many implications, and if you don’t know what it means, if you haven’t thought about it that way, maybe it’s less relevant for you. But people right away, I find go, oh, and then suddenly you’ll see it everywhere. and the whole thing about women putting their head down and doing the work, and then not being recognized or compensated for it because they’re not speaking for their work. There’s this beautiful quote.

You must speak for your work. Your work doesn’t speak for itself. And furthermore, if you’re a leader, it’s not just about you doing the work; it’s about getting the work done, which means you can delegate. 

SL: Yeah. Two things I’d like to add to what you said is one, think about networking, not just networking with other women, but networking with men, and so I belong to a host of women’s groups, but I think that, look, most of the people on boards are men.

So if I wanna get a corporate board seat, I gotta be one of the names that comes up when the men in the group say, okay, who do we know? ’cause we have a, we need an audit chair. And the other thing that I would say is that I think that we often think of relationships as being transactional because we are notaking the time to invest in people, in, in other words that it’s not just, and, I guess the thing is, or invest in ourselves and I’ll step back and make this point. Women in terms of feeling it’s transactional or it’s manipulative. That’s the word that I was looking for.

So it’s transactional when you deal with someone else, but if you don’t let your work speak for itself and you’re speaking for it, you’re being manipulative. And what I say to people. It’s only manipulative if you’re not doing the work. You know what I mean? We resent the people who would try to get ahead on their smile alone.

They’re charming, they manage up, and then they’re not really doing anything. They’re sleeping in their cubicle, or they’re talking on the phone, or whatever. But if you are doing the work, then it’s not, it’s not manipulative. And so you should. not feel like, oh, I gotta let my work speak for itself, because if you’re actually doing the work, take pride in speaking about it.

And so those are the two things that you said that kind of made me think about you need to network with men and women. And two, speaking up for your work is not a bad thing. You’re not being manipulative. And when you’re actually doing the work, 

AW: I heard a man quoted on the Tim Ferriss podcast, and he said. When you’re more junior in your career? I actually, this first part of it I added because I believe when you’re more junior in your career, there are people looking over your shoulder to see that you’re doing the work, and then you get promoted once you hit mid-career. This is, this was his point. If you don’t speak for your work, you might as well have not done it. Ooh, drop the mic. 

SL: That’s a drop the mic drop. Yes. Because nobody knows. Absolutely. Nobody knows. That’s a great point. 

AW: Yeah. I love that one. So it’s inspiring. 

Let’s go back to the visibility point, though. You were talking about how it’s about relationships, and it’s also about visibility. So do you have any other hacks for how, how do you personally, or how do you coach the folks that are part of Schmooze to boost their invisibility? It boosts their visibility, whether it be online again or in person. 

SL: So I guess I learned along the way that visibility is a relationship hack. It’s a networking hack. It’s a networking multiplier. And so that’s a way that technology has made networking easier. And what I would say to people is, you need to be visible. Post on LinkedIn, and I’m gonna do a whole class on what to post on LinkedIn and tips for posting, and what to say, and all of that kind of stuff.

But when you do that, you attract a network to you. So people who I don’t know will click and follow me. Click and ask to connect with me. And I don’t even need to reach out because you know my posting. And if you’re not posting, maybe you send professional updates to people who you know. So it’s just email.

So instead of, oh, I’m not comfortable posting on LinkedIn, but I have 50 people that I work with or used to work with, that I’m just gonna send ’em an email, B, C, everybody. And hey, just wanted to let you know what I was up to. And that helps you attract a network because maybe they will say, Oh, that’s interesting. Let me let Sally know what you’re doing these days. The other thing is you help people remember you. And so somebody who had, I posted something and he had a better comment than my post was, he said, networking is about being remembered when it counts. So it’s one thing to have all of these contacts and connections on LinkedIn, but if something comes up that you would be interested in, but that person who’s in your network, but they don’t even remember you, then that’s a problem. So visibility is one thing that LinkedIn and email has made easier. It’s easier for you to be seen and be remembered. I am gonna, do a class.

I was actually, we were saying before we started recording that, before I was a banker, I was a writer. So, LinkedIn, writing for LinkedIn, and writing for my newsletters comes a little bit easier for me. But there’s certainly tips I’ve learned along the way that can help you be visible. And like I said, people whine about too much Zoom, but one, it’s how I met you. Yeah. It enabled me to connect with people all around the country and the world. Yeah. I just interviewed two women who have a company called Power Suit. They’re based in New Zealand. I’m publishing that interview on a Friday, and they talked about networking with the women in their group.

The kinds of things that they may be struggling with, et cetera. So the ability to do coffee on Zoom would have changed my life. When I was working from home, it just wasn’t available. But, and so now I won’t say people don’t have any excuse, but because as people are still, especially women, press for time, et cetera, but you do have many more tools than you had 10 years ago.

AW: It’s not that there’s no excuse, but maybe there’s less excuse. So, back to your point, I love this. I wanna underscore this point about being remembered at the right moment when it counts. This goes back to something that you and I have talked about in the past, right? Which is establishing and reinforcing your brand.

So, Shelly, you have expertise in networking now, and you said in the automotive industry, in the financial and banking industries. So, how on LinkedIn, if someone comes up with this list of five things that they wanna make sure people know about them, do you have any tips of what to share on LinkedIn?

SL: Yeah, so what I would say is it depends on your goal. So I don’t post a lot about corporate boards, unless it’s networking your way into a corporate board. But I don’t post a lot on being on corporate boards or that kind of stuff, ’cause right now I won’t say I’m not looking for a board seat. If one drops in my lap, that’d be great, but I what I would suggest is pick a lane.

Like you can’t be known for five or six different things. You are known for communications, and then you expand out from that. I’m known for networking and so people lane, that helps you make your posts consistent and people will remember you. Like people always say to me, oh, we need somebody to teach on networking.

And I have to say, let me step back and say I am not a thought leader or an expert on networking. I have learned from people like you, I’ve learned from the almost a hundred women I’ve interviewed for my schmooze newsletter, and I’ve detected some patterns and said, okay, this makes sense. This is what works.

And so I approach LinkedIn. You know what, let me tap into the experts, ’cause I’m not an expert at this. And so that’s how I pro, approached it. And now I’m starting like curiosity was something multiple women, when I interviewed them, they mentioned it. Curiosity. Oh. I said, why is this person take you under their wing?

And you, they became your sponsor. Oh, I was curious about what was going on in the company and how we were making money, and this pivot we were gonna do. So after seeing curiosity pop up various places. I was like, okay, that’s a relationship, that’s a networking hack. Particularly internal. So what I would say is I am, I’m not a thought leader on networking, but there’s certain themes that I have learned and that I have distilled from my conversations with women who were much better at it than I was. And those are the kinds of things that I want to share with other women. 

AW: So, Shelly, I think you are describing something that I actually just shared, in a bootcamp that a couple hours ago I was teaching in a bootcamp on LinkedIn, and I asked everyone in the bootcamp to rate themselves on a score of zero to 10 on their LinkedIn profile and then also on their activity on LinkedIn.

And they were all way below five, like zero outta 10, three outta 10, whatever. And most of ’em said they avoid it. They don’t really know what to say. And your point here is that the thought leadership doesn’t have to come from you. You can share your interest, expertise, and passion in something by sharing other people’s perspectives, right?

So I said the first thing I want you to do is go to the home page on LinkedIn, start scrolling through your feed. Find an article or a post that’s interesting, and then repost it with comments. Not just repost it, and right repost it with a comment that’s I absolutely endorse this, and I would add this one other point, or I absolutely endorse this, particularly this one thing. And then you are implicitly sharing your expertise. So, Shelly, with those 100 women who you’ve interviewed, you are sharing your expertise through them. I think it’s a brilliant strategy 

SL: And that’s a great point. I. Didn’t. That’s how Schmooze started. I hadn’t done the networking, didn’t know how to do it, so I started interviewing women, and so I gathered things.

It also was a great way to increase my network, ’cause the women I interviewed were oh, okay. and so now many of them, in my network, so to speak. And yeah, I launched mine. From, I won’t say a place of weakness, but I guess a place of curiosity. I didn’t do this well, and so here are some women who have done it well.

Here are the themes that I’ve found. And so that’s how Schmooze started is just a LinkedIn newsletter. But absolutely, I would pick a lan,e and I think targeting it to networking or whatever works for you was one of the keys. if I’m just introducing, or I’m just interviewing, managing women who’ve made it, so to speak.

They could be talking about anything, sponsor, mentors, anything. But if you boil it down to one thing, and now I’m known for networking. Now, some things coming out of that, or networking to get a board role. And then, one of our popular classes was being an advisor to a startup, which is a way to expand your network.

So there are things that come off of that. But what I would say to people, similar to you, scroll through, see what people are talking about, even if you don’t have an expertise, like I’m not a thought leader, I don’t think. Now I’m starting to see themes. So I’m like, okay, lemme put this out there.

Visibility networking hack. Let me put this out there. And so I picked a lane, and I just started posting what other women were saying about it, about that lane, which was networking. And that really resonated with people. And I’m not. There’s a lot about women in management going on out here, but I picked Elaine and then was very consistent about posting on that.

As you said, even if it was the thoughts of other people, because it was like, wow, she did it right. I didn’t let me share what she did. 

AW: Yeah. Shelly, you have convictions, you have opinions, you do have thoughts on strategic networking that would definitely qualify you as being a thought leader. I truly think as soon as you start teaching something, and this is actually another hack, right?

As soon as you start teaching something, you are demonstrating leadership in that area. And this is something that I sometimes coach, especially women who are struggling with demonstrating leadership, right? They’re, they’ve been told, you’re ready for the promotion, you just need to demonstrate leadership.

And they’re like, how do I do that? How do I do that? And I said, one thing is find something that you can coach and mentor, and teach people about, and then you’ll be seen as a leader. And I think that’s what’s, that’s what you’re doing. I admire what you’re doing so much Shelly. 

Before we get into the three rapid-fire questions I wanna ask you this, maybe perhaps overwhelming question, which is.

If someone who’s listening here is ready to level up their networking strategy this year, or in the short term, what is the first thing, or one of the most important thing,s that you would tell them to do starting today? 

SL: Okay. So I think the most important thing is schedule a time to do it. Don’t expect that it’s gonna happen, like just, organically. So maybe 4:00 PM on Friday when you’re starting to wind down and look forward to the weekend, or maybe on a Sunday afternoon where the kids are doing something else, or you are on the sideline of your child’s soccer game and you’re chatting with the other parents, you can steal a minute and do a few things, connect with a few people.

So, schedule a time to do it. Step some small goals. So we just recently, that’s why recently started a schmooze accountability group where people can meet and say, okay, these are three things I wanna get done this week. So set out some very achievable small goals every week that you can meet.

And a couple other things I wanna make sure to mention, weak ties. I think it’s LinkedIn and Harvard did research on where most people find jobs, and they find them through people they don’t know as well. They don’t find them through close ties. I’m not gonna find them through my friend Sharon, who I went to business school with ad we are really close because we have the same network, but it’s people that they don’t know well. So I would start, if I’m gonna set aside the time and start, do some small goals, reach out to those weak ties, say every week, three people, somebody I worked with 10 years ago, who I haven’t talked to in a while, I’m just gonna ping them.

Hey, thought of you. That kind of thing. Thinking of you, it’s only transactional when you’re not keeping in touch with people. Another thing you may wanna do is send a professional update and then schedule a coffee catch-up. Hey, just wanted to let you know this is what I’m up to now. Let’s grab a Zoom coffee and catch up.

And then I would also say go to at least one in-person event per month. If you can . Read Andrea’s article about how to nail your self-introduction, and people tell me, read that first because that will equip you for going to a meetup. But it doesn’t have to be in your industry or in your functional area.

It doesn’t have to be the National Association of Accountants and your accountant or it doesn’t have to be people in AI and you’re in AI. I often get invited to things about women and wealth. And it’s like I did the Wall Street thing. I’m not interested, but I go anywhere. Go anyway. Because in addition to strategy, being a part of networking, serendipity is as well.

When you meet people, you meet their network. In addition to that introducing people to other people in your network is really helpful, so you can help other people. So I’m going to something, somebody just invited me to something, women in their money, or something like that. And so I’m gonna go because I don’t know who I’m gonna meet.

So it may not fit into my strategy, but I may, there may be serendipity, like I may stumble across somebody and happens to me all the time, who like, oh, didn’t know you were gonna be here. Or, oh, even though you do that, I don’t do that. But you know what, this is how we could work together. So strategy and serendipity.

And can I just say one thing? So, just to recap, schedule a time to do it. Set some small goals. Don’t forget about weak ties. It’s only transactional if you’re not, keeping in touch with people. It feels less transactional if you are not reaching out to ’em once every 10 years. So send some thinking of you, thought of you, LinkedIn messages or e-mails, maybe a professional update, and then go to one in-person event per month.

Can I say one other thing before we go to our rapid-fire questions? Yes. Yes. Follow up. One of our most popular Schmooze courses is the Fortune is in the follow-up. After you meet someone, LinkedIn or we introduce each other to each other on LinkedIn and you had a coffee chat or you met ’em in person, do a, oh, it was such so great to meet you, 24 or 48 hours after then Comment on their posts, re-share their posts like you said, oh, so and so said this. I thought it was so insightful. Let me re-share it with some comments. And then we recently had a session with Susan McPherson, who wrote the book, The Lost Art of Connecting. And she talked about approaching it. And this also takes it out of the realm of being transactional or being like a bad person or manipulative person.

The whole thing is, how can I help? Even if the person isn’t active on LinkedIn, you can forward articles, information about conferences. It doesn’t have to be work-related. If you and small talk is helpful because you’re not connecting with a title, you’re connecting with a person. So you know, if they’ve said they’re from Chicago, send ’em something on the White Sox.

If they said they’re planning a trip to New Orleans, I’m from New Orleans, you can send ’em an org article on the 10 best restaurants in New Orleans. So your follow-up doesn’t have to be work-related. One huge follow-up hack is introducing people to in your network to each other. So in addition to saying, how can I help?

Saying to them, would it be helpful if I introduce you to so and and one point that Susan makes in her book is that you make people feel seen. It’s obvious if you introduce people to each other, you notice them, you notice, made a note of what was important to them, and you try to be helpful so they feel seen.

And that has really been helpful to me in terms of following up, introducing people in your network to each other. So even though I don’t need anything from you, I don’t, we are not even doing the same thing, but I know somebody who is doing the same thing at you as you, let me introduce you, and that’s where the serendipity comes in. And also the follow-up. 

AW: I love it. You know what you made me think when you were saying that Shelly is in the same way that if you don’t talk about your work, you might as well have not have done it. If you don’t follow up with someone after you make a new connection, you might as well have not met them.

SL: Oh my goodness. That is amazing. Yes, absolutely. I learned more sitting on you. Yeah, that those three insights are worth the price of that mission. It is those, you said a couple of things that resonated with me. Fabulous. Absolutely. 

AW: Shelly, back at you. I got, I’m gonna say this again, reading your posts on LinkedIn, always make me smile and you make me think. You do make me think, right? So, thank you, and let’s move on to the five rapid-fire questions. So the first one, I already know the first part of the answer because you already said it, but maybe not the second part. The question is, are you an extrovert or an introvert? And how does that affect your communication? 

SL: I’m definitely an introvert, as I said, and I’m shy, which is different from being an introvert. People always say that to me. I’m my best one-on-one, like in a podcast. I’m best when I’m speaking to thousands of people, ’cause it’s not, I’m at my most self-conscious when I am talking to a small group, like 10 people. But I definitely am an introvert. An introvert, an extrovert is more about how you, recharge yourself.

And I recharge myself by being alone. And that has had a huge impact on my networking. I have to be much more conscious. But, somebody said this to me. One of the women I interviewed for Schmooze she said, introverts are not introverted in their area of expertise. And so I’m less of an introvert now than I was when I worked on Wall Street because I’m all into schmooze and I love what I’m talking about, and I love what I’m doing, which is why I don’t come across as an introvert now. And I probably did on Wall Street ’cause I was much, I wasn’t in my zone, and now I’m in my zone. 

AW: Oh yes. That’s a great way of putting it. I can see you’re in your zone. Okay, second question. What are your communication pet peeves, things that really annoy you? 

SL: You know what? I don’t think I have one. I don’t think I have one. I was a communications grad on a major undergrad, and I am a voracious reader. Yeah, I don’t think I have a communications pet peeve. I can’t think of one. 

AW: So you’re the second person recently that I’ve interviewed that said that, and I have to say, I admire the fact that you don’t get annoyed.

SL: Yeah, I really don’t. I’ll read somebody’s LinkedIn post and I’ve said, oh, it would’ve been more effective if she did this, and this. But it doesn’t annoy me. and again, I think it comes from being in my zone. ’cause now I’m open to pretty much anything. I’m like, this is interesting.

That’s interesting. I’m curious about that. So I don’t really, the only thing I think that bothers me is the lack of communication. So, my husband is never on LinkedIn, and I’m like, dude, he’s getting ready to retire. I’m like, if you want to do something different, you gotta put yourself out there. And my pet peeve would probably only be the lack of communication.

Like my husband’s not on any social media at all. And I’m like, if you are trying to start a new chapter in your life, pick up your LinkedIn messages. You know what I mean? And I think that. is more of oh, frustration to me than, some stumbling in communication. 

AW: Okay. third and last rapid fire question, is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending to other people lately?

SL: Yeah, so a couple, and now that I have been on yours, I will be recommending this ’cause I know you’re a communication expert, which so many people need. There’s a book called F*** Being Humble, and she came and talked to the Schmooze community. It’s Stefanie Sword Williams, and it’s about self-promotion and how self-promotion is not a dirty word.

Another one is The Lost Art of Connecting, and that’s Susan McPherson. She did a, also did a Schmooze session, probably a few weeks ago. So those two, one of the ones that I like and it has to do, more about building a business, is falling in love with the problem, not the solution. So in other words.

And it can relate to helping people. It’s about, you know what, let me see what they need. If you approach networking from, how can I help you? Would it be helpful if I connected you to this? You’re falling in love with the person’s problem and offering them a solution. And so that book was more about building a business, but I absolutely loved it. And I go back to it over and over again with my business. Am I falling in love with my solution rather than is this solution helpful to people who are members of Schmooze? 

AW: Okay. I’m gonna put links to those books in the show notes. I’m gonna ask you one last question, Shelly. Is there anything, any suggestions or advice you wanna leave with the talk about, talk listeners related to? I guess succeeding in their networking. 

SL: I would just say, even though I’m shy. Social media has made, look, even an introvert can hit click, and so the introverts among us, social media is a gift because you really don’t have to be out there at 10 events a month. You really just have to focus on being visible on LinkedIn.

Now, it’s very helpful if you’re out there visible in person as well, but even I can hit click. And so that’s one of the reasons that one of the things that’s helped me to get into my zone. And so what I would say to people is just get out there, and if I can do it, and in addition to be shy and being shy and introvert, I’m also a little bit socially awkward.

I would rather have my nose buried in a book somewhere than to be doing anything. That’s my a book in the beach is like my ultimate, that’s how I recharge myself. But if I can get out here and do it and learn to enjoy it, I think other people can as well. I’m about as far, I’m not totally on the introvert spectrum, but I’m certainly like on the introvert, introverted, more introverted than extroverted, and even introverts can do this.

And I guess one last thing. If somebody commented on one of my posts, if you’re not doing this, you’re gambling with your career. You gotta, you have to, you can’t just put your head down and work if you’re not doing this. There is going to come a point, like it came with me, where I needed a network and I didn’t have one.

I got laid off four times on Wall Street. The first three times people found me, there was no LinkedIn. They called people who knew me, and they sought me out and made me job offers the fourth time after working from home for eight years. My phone did not ring. And so you wanna get on this before you need it.

You wanna dig the well before you need the water. And so not only can introverts do it, and I think the, a large, the majority of the world identifies as being an introvert, whether that’s true or not, but you have to do it because if you don’t do it, there’s gonna come a time when you’re gonna need that network.

This world is changing so rapidly and so fast. The people who work in the federal government who thought they had a job for life turns out they didn’t have a job for life. It’s really critical, and you can get a lot of joy out. It don’t think of it as building contacts.

Think of it as relationships. And so not only will you enjoy meeting other people, but build that network before you need it ‘cause at some point, if you don’t need it, your kid don’t need it, your spouse will need it. Do it. 

AW: Wonderful advice. Shelly, I wanna say thank you. It was so enjoyable to hang out with you here and to have this conversation one-on-one. I hope we can do it again. Thank you. 

SL: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

AW: Isn’t Shelly fantastic? I encourage you to follow Shelly on LinkedIn if you’re not following her already. And now I’m gonna share three key learnings that I wanna reinforce for you.

First, pick a lane. And be visible. Shelly’s suggestion is that you decide on your niche, the thing that you want to be known for, then stay in your lane.

This is about consistency and then visibility. So get out there to live events, write articles, give presentations, and online share your insights on social media. If you’re not comfortable creating your own thought leadership, then you can repost others with your comments. So that’s the first point. Pick a lane and be visible.

The second point that I wanna reinforce is the difference between men and women that Shelly outlined in terms of how they network. She mentioned three things. Men have no issue with being transactional. Meanwhile, many women are focused on creating relationships and friendships. Of course, relationships and friendships are good, but sometimes we need to be reminded that it’s okay to be transactional. Shelly highlighted how women often assume that their work speaks for itself. As we said, this can be dangerous. Oftentimes, if you don’t speak for your work, you might as well have not done it. The third point about gender differences is that, as Shelly says.

All roads lead to mom. This can make networking even more challenging. I hope this one is changing. So these gender differences in networking are the second thing that I wanted to reinforce with you.

The third point is that the fortune is in the follow-up. Shelly highlighted a few times how important it is to close the loop with new contacts and also to stay fresh in the minds of your existing network.

This relates back to the point about visibility. She talked about using small and big events. As a catalyst to follow up with your network, meeting new people. Connect on LinkedIn and close the loop. Read a great article. Share it with your comments. Interviewed for a podcast or an article. Share this with your network.

That’s it for the three key learnings. One, pick a lane and be visible. Two gender differences in networking, and three, the fortune is in the follow-up. Got it. Again, I encourage you to connect with Shelly on LinkedIn. As I mentioned, Shelly and her work with Schmooze. Make LinkedIn a better place. And while you’re there, connect with me too.

Thanks for listening and talk soon.

The post The #1 NETWORKING Mistake Smart Professionals Make—and How to Fix It with Shelly Lombard (ep.192) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

What is your body saying when you’re not speaking, and how could it be holding you back? In this episode, world-renowned body language expert Mark Bowden explains how nonverbal signals impact trust, credibility, and executive presence. Discover how our brains instinctively scan for safety cues, and why understanding body language is critical for anyone who leads, presents, or communicates under pressure.

“What instantly comes to your mind when you see me cross my arms?”

Andrea Wojnicki – Talk About Talk:

Mark Bowden:

AW:

MB:

AW: Mark Bowden is a world-renowned body language expert, and he’s been on my radar for a while. When we finally connected for this interview, we discovered that we live and work near each other. What a coincidence! We both share a passion for helping others communicate more effectively.

But I have to say: Mark blew my mind.

This conversation took twists and turns I didn’t see coming. So buckle up. You’re about to learn a ton about body language, perception, credibility, and so much more.

Welcome to the Talk About Talk Podcast!

In this episode, you’ll hear my conversation with body language expert, keynote speaker, and bestselling author Mark Bowden. You’ll learn the one key thing you need to focus on to instantly improve your body language, and your communication overall. You’ll also gain insight into how our motivations, including our primal survival instincts, shape our perceptions of others, especially when it comes to interpreting body language. And finally, we’ll bust a few body language myths that you’ve probably accepted as truth…until now.

If you’re a returning listener, welcome back. I’m so glad you’re here. And if you’re new to Talk About Talk, welcome! Please subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice (Apple, Spotify, or YouTube), where you can actually see me and Mark in action. Subscribing ensures you never miss an episode and that you receive ongoing communication coaching from me every two weeks.

We cover topics like:

You can also find free learning resources, coaching services, and more on the Talk About Talk website: talkabouttalk.com.

First, I’ll introduce Mark, then we’ll dive into our interview. Afterward, I’ll summarize with three key learnings that I hope you’ll take away. You don’t need to take notes. Just keep doing whatever you’re doing: walking, driving, lounging on the couch. I’ve got you covered. And of course, you can always reference the show notes in your podcast app for more details.

Mark Bowden is a globally recognized authority on body language. He’s been named the No. 1 Body Language Professional in the world multiple times by Global Gurus.

His unique GesturePlane™ system of nonverbal communication empowers audiences to use body language to stand out, build trust, and gain credibility.

Mark is the founder of TRUTHPLANE®, a communication training company that serves major organizations including Zoom, Shopify, Real Madrid, Toyota, the U.S. Army, and NATO. He’s also worked with G7 prime ministers and business leaders worldwide.

He’s a bestselling author, a popular instructor in Canada’s top-ranked EMBA program at the Kellogg-Schulich School of Business, and the current President of the National Communication Coach Association of Canada.

You might’ve seen Mark on the Dr. Phil Show, CNN, CBS, or Global News, or watched his TEDx talk, “The Importance of Being In-Authentic,” which has reached tens of millions of viewers. He’s also a co-host of the YouTube hit The Behavior Panel, which has garnered more than 75 million views.

Thank you so much for being here today, Mark, to talk with me, and the Talk About Talk listeners, about body language.

MB:

AW:

MB:

Well, we could come up with all kinds of explanations that aren’t really true. But the reality is, we form (and continue to form) judgments based mostly on how people behave in front of us. What their face is doing. What their body is doing. What their hands are doing. How they’re dressed. The environment they’re in.

We judge partly by vocal tone, but we barely judge each other on what’s actually said. In fact, we often just make up what we think someone said based on how they behaved. So if you change, or more importantly, choose, your behaviors, you stand a much better chance of shaping how someone judges you. That influences how they interpret what you’ve said and even what they imagine you said.

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

My clients say the same thing. As soon as we talk about body language, especially when they’re on stage or leading a meeting, it’s like, “Where do I look? What do I do with my hands?” So what should executives prioritize when it comes to body language and being perceived as credible leaders?

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

When you’re under pressure and still use open-palm gestures at navel height, you create what I call a “cascade effect.” It triggers certain behaviors in your audience, and those behaviors influence the rest of the room.

AW:

MB:

But it’s not just the hands. The navel area represents the body’s center of gravity. It reveals your true intention. People say, “Watch their feet.” No, watch where their center of gravity is going. If the torso doesn’t move, the feet don’t matter.

This area here (your stomach, your navel) is incredibly vulnerable. We haven’t evolved to have ribs protecting it all the way down. Why? Because our ancestors needed to be able to duck, run, and twist quickly to survive. If we had a rigid ribcage extending all the way down, our agility would be compromised.

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

That’s why I created a simple three-point scan:

Now I’ll say “Open palms at navel height.” What do you think about that framework?

MB:

That’s why I try to get clients down to just one behavior. When they’re under pressure, dealing with a big presentation or unexpected scrutiny, they can’t manage everything. So I say, “Just do the one thing that will create a cascade effect.”

Forget what you’re feeling. I don’t care if you’re scared or confident. It’s not about you, it’s about the audience. We’re trying to change their minds. That’s the hardest thing in the world to do.

So I tell clients: open-palm gestures at navel height. They’ll ask, “Should I make eye contact?” Don’t worry, it will fall into place.

This moment is extraordinary. You’re in an extraordinary situation. Ordinary behaviors, what feels natural or “authentic,” won’t cut it. Authenticity is about survival. It’s designed to keep you where you are, safe and small. But you’re not trying to be small, you’re leading. You need extraordinary behaviors for an extraordinary moment. And yes, it will feel odd. Do it anyway. Do it on purpose.

AW:

MB:

We’d have to travel to meet. That’s time and money. We’d have to find a venue. That’s even more risk, logistics, insurance, and a physical audience. There’s a reason insurers require waivers for live events, it’s risky.

Now compare that to this. What’s the risk assessment here?

AW:

MB:

If you met me in person, you’d think, “Wow, Mark’s amazing!” Why? Because you would’ve invested time and energy. Your brain would say, “This must be valuable, why else would I have spent all this effort?”

So here in this low-cost environment, I need to raise the perceived value. I do that by making this conversation feel more alive. More animated. I need to give your brain the sense of social risk, like we’re breathing the same air, even though we’re not.

AW:

MB:

But humans are visual. Some people claim they’re more auditory or tactile, but look at how much brainpower is dedicated to vision. Evolution figured out that sight is our best survival tool. So most of our attention goes to what people are doing, not how they sound.

Now, the sound part of the brain doesn’t like to make stuff up. Unlike vision, where your brain fills in the blanks, hearing is more binary. That’s why you’ll crash your car if you talk on a phone while driving. The low audio quality forces your brain to work harder on decoding sound, stealing resources from vision. Your peripheral vision narrows, and you don’t see danger coming.

AW:

MB:

So when I’m on a video call or a podcast, I’m really trying to animate the frame. I’ve got 30 frames per second. If I’m not using them, I may as well send a still image. But I’m not doing that. I’m sending a moving image, one that wakes up your brain.

I’ll often break the frame slightly to get your attention. You’ll notice I use baton gestures, too. These gestures match the rhythm of my speech. They help you not only hear the cadence, but also see it.

That helps the Broca’s area of your brain (where speech processing happens) get more confident that it’s predicting me correctly. Because really, you don’t hear what I’m saying; you predict it. Then based on whether your prediction matches, you feel like, “Oh, I understand Mark!”

AW:

MB:

But the moment those guesses stop working, your brain says, “I don’t get it.” First, it’ll assume the world is wrong, or that other people are wrong. If that doesn’t hold, the brain gets discouraged and says, “I don’t understand the universe anymore.” That’s because it’s not working from knowledge, it’s operating from predictions.

AW:

MB:

Our brains are pattern recognition machines. They spot patterns, and they like consistency. But when that pattern gets disrupted, the brain wakes up and re-evaluates.

If the new pattern is subtle or consistent, the brain keeps its judgment. But when it meets the “min spec” (the minimum specification needed to change its mind) it does. It flips.

So, when you’re trying to change a first impression, the key is understanding what that minimum trigger is. What’s the hair-trigger that shifts their perception?

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

Now, why do people automatically assume crossed arms mean someone’s “closed off”? Why make that judgment?

AW:

MB:

That’s why open palm gestures work so well. They give your audience enough information to make a safe, positive assumption. Crossed arms do the opposite.

So when I cross my arms, your brain reassesses. It goes: “I don’t know what that means. It’s a big enough shift to warrant re-evaluation, but I don’t have enough info.” So, instinctively, the brain defaults to negative: “Mark is bored, angry, or defiant.”

But maybe I’m just thinking. Or I’m cold. Or I’m trying to reduce neural load to help with decision-making.

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

The more information you provide, the better people behave. Their judgments are more accurate, and they’re less likely to spiral into fear or doubt.

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

If someone crosses their arms and you do the same? Now you’re both closed off. You lean back, they lean back, you spiral downward. Instead, only mirror the behaviors you want to see more of.

AW:

MB:

Here’s another take: All body language is either a response to power or a display of power.

AW:

MB:

Every movement you make is about power. Recognizing this helps you decode behavior more effectively.

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

People will tell you: Our brains love answering hierarchical, evaluative questions. It’s hardwired.

AW:

Okay. Ready for rapid-fire?

MB:

AW:

MB:

AW:

MB:

But ask me about food? Pet peeves galore!

AW:

MB:

AW:

AW:

MB:

Well, that was a fascinating conversation, wasn’t it?

I didn’t expect we’d end up discussing our evolutionary path from ground-dwelling mammals to upright hominids on the African plains, but I’m so glad we did. That’s why I love bringing expert guests on the podcast. We get to learn together.

Now, let me reinforce the three key takeaways from my conversation with Mark Bowden:

Mark strongly emphasized this single technique. If you want to appear credible, trustworthy, and influential, use open palm gestures at navel height. This is your center of gravity. It’s also a vulnerable area. By exposing it, you signal trust and reduce perceived risk.

We instinctively scan our environment for threats, and we default to negative interpretations when information is missing. As communicators, and especially as leaders, we must recognize this and over-communicate clarity and safety, both verbally and nonverbally.

First, crossed arms don’t always mean defensiveness. They can indicate thoughtfulness, comfort, or even that you’re cold. Second, don’t mirror others’ body language indiscriminately. Only mirror behaviors that you want to reinforce. Otherwise, you risk reinforcing negativity or detachment.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review on your podcast app, and don’t forget to hit subscribe so you can continue improving your communication skills with Talk About Talk.

Thanks again to Mark Bowden.

And thank YOU for listening.

Talk soon!

The post BODY LANGUAGE, a Matter of Survival – with Expert Mark Bowden (ep.191) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Feeling like a fraud? You’re not alone. In this episode, Dr. Andrea Wojnicki and Kim Meninger explore the roots of imposter syndrome and share actionable strategies to move through it with courage, clarity, and impact. Learn how to lead more inclusive meetings, build authentic confidence, and reframe self-promotion as a meaningful contribution.

Self-promotion, when approached strategically, is a service…to others and to ourselves. Nobody is hired just to fill headcount; they’re brought on because of their unique combination of skills, strengths, and capabilities. If you don’t share what you know and what you can do, it becomes harder for others to leverage your strengths. That creates inefficiencies and redundancies.

Thinking of self-promotion as an act of service allows us to reframe what might otherwise feel selfish or boastful. Instead of asking, “How can I tell everyone how great I am?” consider asking, “How can I help?”

Meet my new friend, Kim Meninger. Kim is an expert on imposter syndrome. In this episode, you’re going to hear our conversation (yes, conversation, not interview) about this powerful and often misunderstood topic. We take turns asking questions, building on each other’s ideas, and sharing practical strategies.

You’ll learn new mindsets and actionable tactics to help you combat imposter syndrome and communicate with confidence. These are tools you can start using right away. Ready?

Welcome to Ep.190 of the Talk About Talk Podcast

Yes, we’re getting close to 200 episodes, and you know there’s going to be a party! If you’re not already subscribed, please hit that follow button on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. You can also watch full episodes on YouTube.

In case we haven’t met, I’m Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, but please, call me Andrea. I’m the founder of Talk About Talk, where I serve as your executive communication coach. Through private coaching, workshops, and keynotes, I help ambitious executives master formal presentations, establish executive presence, build personal brands, and yes, overcome imposter syndrome.

If you want to stay up to date with my latest tools and coaching insights, go to TalkAboutTalk.com and subscribe to my newsletter.

Andrea Wojnicki (AW):

AW:

Kim Meninger (KM):

AW:

KM:

AW:

AW:

KM:

AW:

Framing Self-Promotion as a Service

AW:

KM:

AW:

KM:

AW:

Final Thoughts on Imposter Syndrome

KM:

Rapid Fire Q&A

AW:

KM:

AW:

KM:

AW:

KM:

Andrea’s Top 3 Takeaways from Kim

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who might benefit. Thank you for listening, and as always, talk soon!

The post New Strategies to Overcome IMPOSTER SYNDROME with Kim Meninger (ep.190) appeared first on Talk About Talk.