New year, new you. But what does that actually mean?

Dr. Andrea Wojnicki makes it clear: it’s not about reinventing yourself or becoming someone you’re not. It’s about rediscovering your strengths, elevating your best self, and defining a professional identity that helps you achieve your career goals in 2026 and beyond.

In this episode, Andrea shares a powerful personal brand training session that walks you through three critical questions designed to reveal what your authentic professional brand should be. You’ll explore what you’re most proud of from 2025, your biggest career accomplishment from the last decade, and what you truly want to accomplish moving forward.

Andrea also shares three definitions of personal branding that will inspire and guide you, plus her proven Present-Past-Future self-introduction framework that helps you present yourself with confidence and impact in any professional setting.

The episode also includes a live Q&A where Andrea tackles tough questions about ageism in the workplace, how to introduce yourself in sales calls, navigating social media versus in-person communication, and more.

If you’re ready to present your true best self and not the version your boss thinks you should be, this episode is for you.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

Andrea Wojnicki: Happy New Year, and welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. Let’s do this. 

Let’s Talk About Talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach here at Talk About Talk, where I coach ambitious professionals to communicate with confidence and credibility so they can achieve their career goals in 2026 and beyond.

Earlier this year, I hosted a live training event called New Year, New You personal brand training. In this session, we covered all sorts of definitions and activities and exercises, and three questions that I ask myself and that I encourage you to ask yourself to help you develop your ideal, positive personal brand in 2026 and beyond.

Are you ready? Here we go. I wanna start by saying truly how much I was thinking about this as I was getting ready, how much I think about respect that you’ve taken time out of. I know no matter what you do, you have a busy schedule, you have lots to do, and this time of year. It’s like it gets all bottled up and then boom, first week of January, you’re back at it and you’re taking an hour of your time to spend with me.

I feel honored. I feel privileged about that, but I also, I already have a lot of respect for you, whether I know you or not, for taking this time to invest in yourself. So I promise you, in the next hour, I’m gonna share with you some things where my intent is to provide you with some real impact in how to help you develop your.

Ideal personal brand, or what we’re calling in this context here are professional identity. Okay?

So it’s a new year and a new you and I was, I was also thinking about this a lot. New Year, new you. I do not mean reinventing you and turning you into something that you are not already. I’m talking maybe about rediscovering something about you that you haven’t been thinking about in the way that you maybe should.

I am talking about. Really elevating your best self, okay? So that you are as happy. And as successful as you can possibly be. So we’re not talking about your needs, the things that your boss is telling you that you need to work on. We’re actually thinking about the opposite. We’re thinking about your strengths and your skills and your expertise and how to share those things with the world, and actually for how you can think about those things more yourself.

I am not gonna waste your time. We’ve got a lot to get through here. I am very ambitious, I’m gonna say that in terms of what we’re gonna generally and in this hour in terms of what we’re gonna get through. So I’m not gonna waste my time. I’ve been to some of these events where people spend 15 minutes introducing themselves.

I am not gonna do that. I’m gonna say, many of you already know me on LinkedIn. If you don’t, you can check me out on LinkedIn. Um, I’m Andrea Wa there, but probably what might be more helpful is if you go to the talkabouttalk.com website, and you can learn all about me there, including the podcast.

I have a biweekly podcast on Apple, on Spotify. We have a YouTube channel now where all the episodes are there and all of the. Past live trainings that we’ve done like this one are there. So you can, there’s lots of resources. And one resource in particular that I wanna draw your attention to is my biweekly email newsletter.

So every two weeks, if you sign up, you get an email from me, and it’s an update with me. And my objective with this email is basically to provide you with free communication skills coaching. So I coach ambitious executives, I’m guessing like yourself, who have establish some level of technical expertise, and you’re looking to step it up in terms of your career and maybe in terms of your life.

And you’ve identified communication skills rightly as one of the things that can really help you get there. So in that newsletter, which I hope you’ll sign up for, you can get free coaching from me there and keep updated on everything that’s going on in the talk about talk world. Okay. What I want you to do now in the next 55 minutes, we’re gonna think of this as a, not just a training session, but a real-time coaching session where you’re gonna make some traction and make some progress in terms of not just thinking about, but actually writing down what your ideal brand is.

So if you have a piece of paper and a pen or a notebook or something like that, please get those out. And if you don’t. You can write it in your phone. Some people like to write notes in their phone. Write it on another device. You can also rewatch this video later on YouTube, and it’ll also be posted on LinkedIn.

Okay? So get your paper and pen ready. I’m gonna take you through four things. For those of you who know me. You’ll be like, what? It’s not three. I know. I told you I was really ambitious. It’s a new year. Four things. The first thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna ask you three. Really important questions, and I want you to write your answers down, so that’s why you need a piece of paper and a pen.

Okay, so first thing is three questions. The second thing is going to be three definitions of personal branding, but that’s also gonna help you inspire and define your brand. Okay? Then I’m going to share with you a three-point self-introduction framework, and I know from the folks in the audience for a few of you, this is gonna be a refresher.

You’ve seen it before, but we’re gonna be looking at it through a new lens. Then I’m gonna share with you three reasons why this work is so important and how you can do it. And then we’re gonna get into a q and a. So in the Q & A, for those of you who know me, you know that I love an open q and a where I have no idea what you’re gonna ask me.

So I always make time for that at the end, if you have questions, you can save them for when we do the live q and a, or you can put them in the chat. So I’m gonna be looking for people who are raising their hands first, and then we’ll go into the chat for, um. 

Okay, so let’s get into this. I don’t have slides for this part.

I will when we get into the definitions and everything, but we’re gonna start now by me asking you, and I’ve asked myself these questions, by the way, three really important questions that can inform what your personal brand should be, and it might surprise you what these questions are. It might not. But regardless, I think these are questions that we don’t ask ourselves often enough, and if you really double down on the answers for these, you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.

Okay? The first question is this. What are you most proud of that you accomplished? That’s a very general term, right? Accomplished. 25. So before you answer that, I just wanna say we in this session, in this one-hour session, are focusing on your professional identity. And many of us, I hope, have personal accomplishments that they’re really proud of.

So, for our context here, let’s keep it in the context of your career. It could be a skill that you learned. It could be a leadership skill. It could like, it could be a soft skill or a hard skill, right? And the soft skills often are related to ourselves personally as well. Like you could say, I really worked on my listening, or I really worked on not using filler words.

And this is professional and personal, but I want, if you said like, I’m really proud of, you know, having my oldest child graduate and go off to college, that’s an amazing accomplishment, and you should definitely be celebrating that. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about personal or professional accomplishments. 

So again, it could be a skill, it could be an award that you won, something that you got a big check mark on. It could be something that maybe at the beginning of 2025, you and your boss decided that it was something you needed to work on, and then at the end of the year, you were told that you made great strides.

It could be that. I want you to write that down. That’s the first question. Okay. You can, of course, continue to refine your answer to these questions, but that’s number one. The second question is, I want you to just pull the lens way back. What is the thing that you are most proud of in terms of your career in the last 10 years?

So I was gonna say five years, and then I thought, I know from myself and from some other people that I coach that things may have happened five or six or seven. It doesn’t really matter. It’s like recent history in the last 10 years. What are you really proud of in your career? Again, it could be you learned a hard skill.

It could be you launched a new product. It could be that you made a career change. It could be that you earned a degree or other credentials. By the way, you’re allowed to answer with more than one thing, but you need to have at least one thing that you’re really proud of from the last 10 years. Okay? Now, at this point, when I’m coaching folks one-on-one, I often get this comment from people they say, I find this really hard to answer, Andrea, because I spend so much of my time thinking about what I need to work on.

My weaknesses or my developmental areas. So that’s what’s really special about this work. On personal branding, we purposely focus on the positive, unique, and relevant things that you wanna reinforce. And of course, you need to work on your development areas, but we rarely double down on our strengths and our accomplishments.

So that’s where I wanted to kick this off. So you’ve got your, hopefully. Answer number to question number two, which is what is the accomplishment or the skill that you are most proud of from the last 10 years? Okay. Now you’re probably wondering what the next question is. Is it gonna be like the last 25 years?

I know some of you probably aren’t even 25 years old. No, that’s not where we’re headed. The third question is something that I know personally and from coaching hundreds and hundreds of folks can be very, very illuminating. And the question is this, what compliments have you received that mean the most to you?

So for some of you, you might be like, oh, I know what it is right away. For most of you, you probably don’t. So here’s the thing, when we. Receive compliments from people. We light up, we feel happy, we feel validated. We feel appreciated. We feel like we are successful at something, right? So we might be told that we are smart, or we might be told that we’re attractive, or we might be told that we are a kind person.

If you had to choose out of those, which one, it’s not that they’re not all fantastic, of course they are, but which one is the most meaningful? Which one lights you up? I can tell you the compliment that I’ve received a couple times in the last, I don’t know, six, eight months from my clients that really lights me up is they’ll say to me, Andrea, you have incredible listening powers when we’re in these coaching sessions.

You really listen to what I’m saying, and then you’re able to interpret what I’m saying and then articulate it in a way that I’ve never thought of it before, but it’s true to me. And that just shows that you’re really listening. And when my clients tell me that I light up because I’m, I’m like, well, I wasn’t actually listening on purpose.

I was just really trying to understand them so I could help them articulate their brand. And when they say that I’ve done that, I light up. So what compliment have you received? That lights you up. And this is really important for your brand because these compliments and your responses to them are telling you something, perhaps about where you should be focusing more.

So the fact that this lights me up really to me, reinforces that I’m doing the right thing with my career and coaching people. Because if the compliment is that I’m. Making an impact on my clients, and that’s what lights me up, then that’s exactly what I should be doing. So again, I’m sharing my first-person story here, hopefully to inspire you to think about when have you felt that way when someone made a specific compliment to you that really lit you up?

If you’re not sure about what this compliment is, the other thing that you could do is I have an archetypes quiz on my website. It’s talkabouttalk.com/. Archetypes quiz, and if you take the quiz, you’ll get an email back that tells you what your archetype is. So when I take this quiz, it tells me that my archetype is magician and someone who leads people through transformation, and I’m like, that maps perfectly to the compliment that lights me up.

It’s not a coincidence. Right? So the answer to this question, what lights you up in terms of a compliment and what your archetype is? Probably, there’s probably a very direct link there. There should be a very direct link there. So I guess my challenge to you is to answer that question first. To the best of your ability.

And then if you wanna, the quiz is free, by the way. When you take the quiz, you can see whether it valid and what I hear from people, they, you know, guess what their archetype might be. Or they, they think about what the compliments are and when they get the answer back from the quiz, the results of the quiz, if they align with what they.

Thought before it’s great. It’s very validating, and sometimes they don’t. It’s a little bit different, but then they see the archetype, and they’re like, but actually that’s really true. And it this helps you feel seen and this your archetype can help inform what is unique about your brand that you should be reinforcing.

So the archetypes all talk about a PO one of 12 positive personas that, um. Is like a universal pattern that people will understand and that you can use to reinforce your strengths. Okay, so we’ve got, hopefully, you’ve written down three answers to three questions that I asked. What are you most proud of from 2025 in terms of your career?

What are you most proud of from the last 10 years, and what compliment lights you up the most? I kind of feel like I may have opened a big can of worms here because you’re like, okay, this, this feels good. It’s all positive, Andrea, but what am I gonna do with it? I’m gonna take you through some definitions and an exercise, uh, uh, self-introduction framework, and some benefits of personal branding now, and I’m gonna be referencing back to these questions and your answers to these questions to help you sort of make sense of how you can leverage them.

So, by the way, your answers to these questions should be evolving all the time. I, I encourage you to ask yourself these questions the next time someone compliments yourself. I hope you have a new lens on that compliment, and you think compliments are nice. How does this one rank in all of the compliments that I’ve received?

Is it a just nice to hear or is it like telling me something? My response to it? Is it telling me something that I should be paying attention to in terms of my brand, how I’m being perceived by other,s and how, what I wanna be thinking about myself. Okay. I wish I could read what all of you wrote down so badly.

All right. Here we are. New year. New. Yes. By the way, I’m wearing the same blouse I was, I was like it, looking at what to wear today, and I’m like, I should just wear the same thing that I’m wearing on the, um, on the poster for this event. 

Okay, so the first question is, what is a personal brand? I’m gonna start by telling you what it is not.

So my guess is that, well, I hope that you are not in the camp of folks out there, and there are plenty of these folks who think that personal branding is about turning you into social media influencer or monetizing your brand, Andrea, encouraging you to quit your job. So because you’re, you’re feeling empowered to go out there and become this big, you know, influencer, celebrity that is not, that is not what we were talking about here.

Okay? We are talking about identifying, as I said before. The positive, unique, and relevant traits about you that you wanna reinforce. You can think of your personal brand in the same way that marketers, brand marketers, think about product brands, right? Like you’re selling a box of Tide, you’re selling, uh, I don’t know, an AI software platform or whatever you’re selling.

You think about what are the unique characteristics of this product that I want people to know. It’s exactly the same. Almost exactly the same with people. With people. It evolves, though, right? Because the world changes. We grow, our family changes, our careers change. But you can think of it as your reputation or your identity.

Over the years I’ve used, as I’ve been coaching folks, I’ve been using different definitions of personal branding and, uh, the one that I think is the most well known is this one from Jeff Bezos. If you haven’t heard it, you, I’m, this is probably a reminder for most of you, any article that I have read in the last, at least five years on personal branding, almost always within the first three paragraphs this comes up, Jeff Bezos says, your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

So I want you to add, this is a real coaching session here, okay? I want you to ask yourself. The important stakeholders in your career. It could be your boss and your boss’s boss who look after succession planning. It could be your clients, your customers, or your consumers. It could be your colleagues at work.

It probably is your colleagues at work, no matter what. It could be your people that you’re negotiating with. It could be investors. If you are an entrepreneur, these important stakeholders, what are they? Saying and actually thinking about you when you’re not in the room. So imagine you just met with them and you leave.

What’s their impression of you? Or if I just ask them right now, or if you could read their mind and your name comes to mind, what are they thinking and saying about you? That’s your brand. Now, here’s where a lot of people say, oh Andrea, it is not good. That is not like it. I mean, it’s fine, but it’s not what I want people to think about me.

And I say, that’s great. That’s why we’re doing this work. But if you’re gonna be. You know, if you’re really gonna make an impact here with your brand, you gotta start with what people are already thinking and saying about you, and also thinking about what you wanna reinforce. So now I want you to go back to the three questions also and ask yourself, do these people know about these good things that I’ve accomplished in the last year, in the last 10 years?

Is there a way without bragging or being awkward about it, that they, that this can come up in conversation. Should it be on my LinkedIn profile? Are they aware of these compliments that other people are giving me that are lighting me up? Did are they aware of these things? These are important questions to ask yourself.

Okay, so this is, this is. Very helpful. This is actually an exercise that I do take folks through when I’m coaching them in masterclasses and one-on-one coaching. It’s very helpful. Um, and I brought this up when. Two years ago, I interviewed the marketing guru, Seth Godin, who’s written many, many, many, many books.

Uh, depending on how you count them, it’s either 20 something or 80 something. Um, and he also ran the podcasting fellowship that I did, uh, six and a half years ago. So I asked him if I could interview him. He said, sure. And it was. Fascinating conversation. Let me tell you, this guy thinks like no one, like I knew when I logged on, this is not gonna be a normal interview.

And I also said to myself, I’ve listened to many of the other folks that have interviewed him on podcasts. I’m gonna ask him questions that my audience wants to know. So we started talking about personal branding, of course, and he said, oh, people think my brand is my orange glasses that I wear, but that’s not my brand, that’s just my logo.

And I was like. Oh goodness. We’re not gonna go down that rabbit hole. That’s just, that’s not helpful. And I said, Seth, how do you think about your brand? And this is what he said, this is gold. He said, my brand is what people think I’m gonna do next. Let that sink in for a minute. Think about the folks that I just listed, right?

The boss’s boss, your colleagues, your clients, your customers, your negotiating partner, your investors, these important stakeholders who have impact on your career. What do they think you’re going to do next? Okay? At least as importantly, what do you want to do next? So this is the next thing I want you to write down.

What do you want to accomplish in your career? In 2026 and maybe beyond, do these people think it’s likely? So let me tell you one of the things that I am most proud of in 2025, it took a lot of work, and I am really proud of it, but it’s just opening a whole other, a whole other line of projects that I’m working on now is I signed a book deal, right?

So, if my brand is what people think I’m going to do next, the important question for me to ask myself is, do people think I am going to write a book that is worth reading? Right? And if they do, that’s fantastic. If they don’t, what can I do to make sure that I’m evolving my reputation or my brand so that that is the case?

So when Seth Godin shared this definition with me, I was like. Oh my gosh. And we talked about it for a while, and then when I finished the interview, I pulled out a piece of paper sitting where I am right now. I drew a line down the middle, and I was like, what are my goals? Do people think it’s possible?

And I gave myself a score, and then I was like, how can I make people believe that this is gonna happen? Because when they believe it’s gonna happen, it’s gonna be even more successful, and it’s also more likely that I’m gonna do it. So I want you to do the same thing. What do you want to accomplish? And do other people think you are gonna do that, or that it’s conceivable or perceivable that you’re gonna do that. 

And if they are great and if they’re not aligned, then you have some work to do. But this is work that is, I was gonna say, it’s not, it’s not easy work, of course. It’s not easy work, but it’s really, really important work. Okay. Alright. So we have these two definitions of personal branding from these two.

Very smart, very successful, very well-meaning people, and these definitions are getting a lot of traction. The thing that bothers me about these definitions is that there’s no agency associated with them. So what do I mean by that? By agency, I mean we have no influence or control. It’s just what are people saying and thinking about us, and what do they think we’re gonna do next?

So what am I gonna do about it? So here’s my definition now that I use it’s personal branding is about being yourself on purpose. And there’s really two parts of this definition that I want you to really understand here. It’s being yourself, and by yourself, I mean your true self. You’re not acting like somebody else.

Your whole self. So yes, we’re talking about your professional identity, but you are also maybe a husband or a wife, or a parent, a sister or a brother, or a friend, or an athlete or a musician. Like these other things that are not directly related to your professional identity, they are related to your professional identity, right?

So it is your whole self. It is your best self. So I’m asking these questions at the beginning of this session in terms of the things that you’re most proud of. I want you to start to focus more on your strengths, your accomplishments, and your skills. How can you leverage those things? Make sure you’re in opportunities where you can demonstrate those things.

Make sure you’re reinforcing them. One of the interviewees that I had in my podcast last year said it so well. She said, people are afraid to share their accomplishments and their skills. And she said, I think of it more as like a service that you’re doing for the people that you’re working for. They hired you to do a job.

You need to tell them what you do best. Think about it. If you know what your skills are and you share that with the people that you’re working with, then you’re gonna be doing your best work, and they’re gonna be getting the most out of you. So personal branding is about being yourself, your whole self, your true self, and your best self.

You got that whole self. True self and best self. It’s not that you’re ignoring your weaknesses and areas of opportunity, but that’s not what you’re emphasizing when you’re introducing yourself and you’re interacting at work. Right. And then the second part of this definition is on purpose, and I have it in capitals because that is what we’re literally, maybe not literally physically.

This is what we’re physically doing right now. We are unapologetically, strategically. Taking the time and making the effort to purposefully present ourselves in a true and effective way to others and to ourselves so that we can be our happiest and most successful self. That sounds good, right? I have this on purpose thing.

I put it in caps. I emphasize it as much as I can. It’s like I hope I’m turning a light bulb on for you that most of us go through our careers doing kind of what we wanna do and a lot of what other people expect us to do, and introducing ourselves without really thinking about it. What we’re saying about ourselves.

If you put a little bit of effort into identifying what your strengths are. What you love to do, what you’re good at, what your accomplishments are, and how to share that with the world and reinforce it even with yourself. This work, you know, I’m a communication coach, and my background is marketing and it’s all, you know, it’s all about like amplifying your message.

Recently, I’ve been thinking more and more and more about like this whole idea of self-identity and your professional identity and your personal brand. It affects you as much as it affects everyone else. I mean, not just because of the impact and what happens, but actually how you think about yourself.

So this is my definition, and personal branding is about being yourself on purpose, and what, so what this definition adds here, like I said, is agency. You can make a difference in over to Jeff Bezos, what people are saying and thinking about you. You can make a difference in as Seth Godin says what people think you’re going to do next.

You can do that. And it starts by taking an inventory of the things that you love to do, that you’re good at, the compliments that mean the most to you, the accomplishments that you’re most proud of. Okay, so you see how this circles back to the three questions that I asked you at the beginning. If you wanna take a screenshot of this page, by the way, you’re absolutely more than welcome to.

And again, it’ll be posted on, on YouTube if you wanna reference it there. And we’ll also be posting it on LinkedIn. My challenge here, if you want to think about these three definitions, is to. Like I said, do the mental exercise of answering the three of them for yourself, and also maybe thinking about where can you get the most traction.

If you look at each of the three of them, some people say, like Andrea, I agree with your definition, but Jeff Bezos, that’s the one that really matters to me, ’cause I’m trying to convince my boss that I deserve promotion. So I want, when I’m not in the room, I want ’em to tell everyone that I need to get promoted.

I’m like, bingo. That’s the definition you need to be focusing on, then. Right? So think about. Maybe which of the three is most relevant for you today, and maybe in 2026. 

Okay. Now we are gonna move on to the three-point self-introduction framework. So some of you have seen this before, and if you have, I’m going to be.

Asking you to think about it just a little bit differently in terms of integrating the three questions that I asked you at the very beginning. For the rest of you, I just wanna share a couple things. So, your self introduction, both personally and professionally, by the way, is the most direct way that you have to reinforce your brand.

Think about it. Your self-introduction is your words from you about you. You’re sharing with the world, and they’reyour  words. It’s not just, oh, Andrea’s, you know, got books behind her. It’s like this implicit thing. No, no, no. These are words about you that you’re sharing. So about four years ago I did an episode on how to introduce yourself.

And it very quickly became the top Talk About Talk podcast episode of all. It actually remains number one of 203 episodes as of, uh, this week. And. I wrote up, I wrote it up, and I sent it into Harvard Business Review in 2022, and in 2023, it was one of the three most downloaded articles of the year on the hbr.org website.

So this topic gets a lot of traction, and the self-introduction framework works. That’s why this article was so popular. I’m gonna share it with you now. And by the way, it is so easy that you do not even need to take notes. It’s just three things you start with present. 

So this is the way many people start their self-introduction, by the way, hi, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where I have a podcast, and I coach ambitious executives to be successful in their careers by focusing on their personal brands and their communication skills. So you see what I did there? It’s my name, my title, my company, my What I Do.

If you’ve done the work on your personal branding, you can also. Talk about, um, maybe what your unique leadership style is, what differentiates you compared to other people. Um, but at least it is your name and what you do. Okay? So I, I told you I was gonna be linking this back to the three questions in terms of your present.

If there’s something that you have accomplished, and maybe you have a new title or you have a new skill, you can talk about this in the present tense now, right? My name is whatever. I’m a chief technology officer at a BC tech company, and what differentiates me compared to other technology experts or leaders is my ability to do this.

And I’ve recently, uh, developed a skill with AI, whatever it is, right? So you’re talking about yourself in the present tense. This is really important. You wanna anchor yourself introduction in who you are and what you do very often people will say. We’ll be going around the table. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?

And people will start with the past, and they’ll share this kind of default, boring chronology. I’m exaggerating here, but I graduated in 2002 with a commerce degree, and then I went and worked at this company and then I, and it’s like what? Start with who you are and what you do. This is the most important thing, by the way, if you’re unemployed.

I coach plenty of people that are in job transition and they say, how do I do that if I’m in job transition? You introduce yourself and you share what your expertise is, right? My name is Jane Smith. I am a finance and marketing expert, blah, blah, blah, right? You just, you get right into your expertise and you tell them your industry expertise or your functional expertise.

Okay? So that’s step one. Present tense. Step two is past tense. So, here in a professional context is where you establish credibility. You, depending on the context, you might share one or two or three things. I say less is more. We all, including myself, get tempted to share too much information. You don’t wanna talk more than the person before you.

You wanna speak slightly less in your self-introduction than the person who introduced themselves before you. But here’s where you can say, guess what? The answer to the, the questions that I asked you, at least question one and two, you could say I’m something I’m really proud of in the last year that I accomplished is blah, blah, blah.

By the way. Telling people that you’re really proud of something, as long as you don’t do it all the time, like, I’m proud of this, I’m proud of that. I’m proud of this. I’m proud. Of course, that’s not what I’m talking about, but saying, you know what? I’m actually really proud of the fact, like I told you at the beginning, I’m really proud when my clients tell me that I am an exceptional listener.

I hope you don’t take that as me being arrogant. It’s like one thing. So arrogant. People are defensive. They can do no wrong. They’re good at everything, right? Telling someone one thing that you’re proud of does not make you arrogant. In fact, you should practice. Telling people what you’re proud of. So here is where you could say, in the past 10 years, one of the most significant things in my career is that I accomplished a transition from blah, blah, blah to blah, blah, blah.

Or I earned this degree. So this is where you talk about the thing from question number two, the thing that you’re proud of for the last 10 years, and then you can say, in the last year. In 2025, the accomplishment that I’m most proud of is this. And you’re telling people what your value is, what your expertise is, what your skills are, and remember what I said before.

This is actually providing a service to others so that they can get value out of you. Okay, so you could talk about your past credentials, accomplishments, things that you, you know, new products that you launched, big projects that you led, or projects that you participated in. Maybe it’s your business results from 2025 or from the last five years, whatever it is.

So this second step is establishing credibility. That’s how I want you to think about it. Okay? Now, many people, in fact, I’m gonna say. Most people, a significant majority of people, end their self-introduction here. They’re like, my name is blah, blah, blah. This is what I do. Previously I worked at this other company, la, la, la.

And then it kind of fades off. Then the next person goes, are you done? Okay, my turn, blah, blah. Right? That’s how it goes. Sound familiar? The research shows that if you can share something. Positive and enthusiastic that things will go your way. So I first learned this from a negotiation expert who I interviewed.

She was doing her PhD research on negotiations emotions, and she found this insight about the emotion of enthusiasm. And when you share enthusiasm, the negotiation is more likely to go your way. So I went into Google Scholar, and I started looking at all the research on enthusiasm. It turns out in the teaching context, people learn more when you’re enthusiastic.

In the job application process, the job applicant who is more enthusiastic, is more likely to get the job. In a sales context, the salesperson who is more enthusiastic is more likely to close a sale, and on and on and on. So here’s the magic in your self-introduction. Instead of ending it with this awkward like, and that’s me.

Add one simple sentence about something that you’re looking forward to and say it with enthusiasm. It could be generally about like in 2026. I’m really excited, you know, to be in this new role, or I’m really excited to work with you all. Ideally, when you’re introducing yourself, this three-point self-introduction framework is not a script.

It’s purposely just three words, present, past, and future, and you fill in the blanks and you always customize it and personalize it for the person that you’re introducing yourself to. For example, in step three, this future step, you will turn to the person, look them in the eye and say, I’m really looking forward to getting to know you better, or, I’m really looking forward to working with you, or I’m really looking forward to like, as a client, serving your needs, whatever on this account.

So, turn it back to them with a smile on your face and enthusiasm. And I have so many stories from podcast listeners and people who have read this article who told me they get caught off guard and asked to introduce themselves. So one of my clients, his name’s Mike, he is a very very successful wealth advisor, and I was coaching him a couple years ago, and he told me that on some Saturday, he was, uh, at the golf course, and one of his very wealthy clients ran into him and said, Hey Mike, nice to see you.

Happy Saturday. Oh, by the way, this is my buddy that I was telling you about and he’s looking for a wealth advisor. And Mike was like, oh, come on. It’s my Saturday. I don’t wanna have to sell myself. And then he thought, self-introduction framework. He said, Hey, yeah, my name’s Mike, and I’ve been a wealth advisor.

I used to live in Toronto. I moved my family over, blah, blah, blah. And then he goes, he shifted to past, and he said, I’ve been doing this for X number of years. He added a few things for credential and then future. He said, I don’t know if you, if you live around here, but maybe next week we can connect. And the guy said, sure.

And five days later, he had a new client, and I was like, oh. So Mike, do I get the commission check? Anyway, he said, Andrea, you saved me. Because he goes, my mind was in a fog. I was trying to drink my coffee. It was Saturday morning, and I just thought, present past future. And he goes, it actually resulted in me signing on a client.

So your self-introduction is not always gonna be this impactful, but I’m telling you sometimes it will be when you walk into a job interview and they say, tell us about yourself. Are you kidding? The way you answer that question determines whether you make it to the next round of interviews. Let’s be serious here, right?

This framework works for that. So present, past, future. Now, I want you to think about your answers to the three questions, the compliments and the things that light you up, and how the compliments that light you up and your accomplishments from 20, 25 and 10 years before. How can you work these in without, you don’t have to say I’m particularly proud of, although I, I would suggest maybe you could once, right?

How do you include positive, unique, and relevant things about yourself in each of these three steps? Here’s the word that I was telling someone yesterday. I’m, I used to say, introduce yourself with confidence. Now I’m saying introduce yourself with purpose. This is an opportunity for you to really reinforce your professional identity in a positive way that’s gonna impact how other people think about you.

Okay, now we’re gonna move into. Three benefits of building your brand. And again, I’m gonna map this back to you, and you can continue to take notes here. But these are three, yes, I’m a huge fan. In case you didn’t get the memo of the Power of three, but perhaps not, coincidentally, there are three things that I see and hear all the time from people about the benefits of doing this work, about being yourself, your true self, your whole self, and your best self on purpose.

Okay? The first thing is when you do this work. You have the ability to control your narrative. Have you ever noticed that sometimes people will talk about you, and you’re like, ah, that’s not quite right. Or something comes outta your mouth, and you’re like, ah, you know, that’s true, but it’s not the best thing that I would’ve said about myself.

When you’ve done this work, you are controlling the words that people use to describe you and how you even think about yourself. You’re not leaving it to chance, and I, I say this to my clients all the time. You can be a very strong B plus, maybe even an A if you don’t do this work, but if you really wanna knock it outta the park, you’re gonna take the time to really define yourself, your true self, your best self, and your whole self purposefully.

And then you’re going to use those words to control the narrative. The best example that I have of this is well. Best. I said that so emphatically, didn’t I? I think it’s one of the best stories that I have to illustrate this. I was doing live coaching session very similar to this, and a brave woman raised her hand, and she said, I have a question for you, Andrea.

As you can tell by my accent, I’m an Indian immigrant, and I live in the States. I’m a lawye,r and I want my brand to be lawyer, not immigrant. How do I control the narrative around that? And so. I said to her, tell me about yourself, like where do you work? What kind of law? And every, and as she, as she was speaking, I was listening to her accent, and then I, I said to her, so your accent is definitely decipherable.

You didn’t have to tell me that you were from India. I could have guessed, but your English is clear. I’m not working hard to understand you. And you know, the research shows that when you have an accent, people might click in that you have an accent, but then as long as you don’t make them work to understand you, it’s fine.

It’s not a negative thing, so I wouldn’t worry about it. In fact, you’re thinking of it as a liability. Let’s turn your accent into an asset. And she said, okay, how do I do that? I said, you control the narrative around your accent. You could literally say to people, yes, literally, literally say to people, as you can tell by my accent, I am from India.

I have global experience. I have lived and worked in India, and there was one other country, and now the United States. I passed the bar exam in New York, and I’m now a corporate lawyer. I work as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan. And I said, boom, like your accent is actually evidence. And so you are controlling a narrative.

So here’s where if you have something about yourself that you aren’t. Maybe that you’re trying to hide like her, she’s trying to hide her accent. You can create a narrative around that thing. Don’t let other people create the narrative for you. I said, you don’t need to correct people if they call you an immigrant, but you can tell them what it means, right?

When they say, oh, are you an immigrant? You could say, I’ve lived and worked in three different countries, and I’m a corporate lawyer now in Manhattan, where I leverage that global experience. Boom, drop the mic. Right? You control the narrative. Okay? The second benefit is that working on your brand provides you with direction and focus.

So, as I said before, arrogant people think they’re fantastic at everything. I asked you a really, really hard question about what compliments mean the most to you. That answer, I hope, provides you with direction and focus. It doesn’t mean you never work on anything that’s not related to that compliment, goodness knows, but it means I hope that you have the opportunity to raise your hand enthusiastically and volunteer for any kind of project or work that relates to that compliment where you can really flourish. 

Okay. So you can see how building your brand provides you with direction and focus. I hear this from my clients all the time. They’re like, I dunno if I should be doing this or that, or this or that. And then we create this list of themes about them that they know are positive, unique, and relevant to them, and then it provides them with direction and focus.

The third and last benefit is the one that. I think is the most significant. I wanna really be clear about this, and the reason I keep bringing this up is I get this question often, like frequently all the time. I’m afraid that it’s one thing to write down these things that I’m proud of and these compliments that light me up, but to actually talk about them, and I say, you are not saying that you are good at everything.

You are taking the time on purpose. Remember to identify your unique strengths and skills, and there’s nothing arrogant about that. So, identifying the unique things about you that differentiate you compared to everybody else who does what you do. Differentiates you compared to your coworkers, your competitors, maybe even compared to your family and friends.

This is gonna boost your confidence. And one of the reasons I love what I do so much is that I am focused on the positive, right? I help people think about this strangely. They’re at work, and they’re thinking about their weaknesses and what they need to work on and their skill deficiencies, and I’m like, hang on a second.

What about your strengths? Think about the people you know who are. The most genuinely confident, not arrogant, genuinely confident, and happy and successful in their careers. They are the ones that have doubled down on their unique strengths, right? So that could be you. These are the three benefits of building your brand.

It helps you. You can see how they’re kind of intertwined. They’re integrated, but they’re importantly distinct. You’re controlling your narrative. You’re thinking about the words, and you’re reinforcing them with purpose. I’m not saying you’re great at everything. You’re providing yourself with direction and focus, and you’re elevating your confidence because you’ve taken the time to think about these positive accomplishments.

The two first two questions and compliments that you get from people, and this is sure to boost your confidence. So that is the main material I guess, that I wanted to cover with this. We’ve covered a lot already. We’ve got three big questions if you wanna send them to me, by the way, on LinkedIn, I, I would love to see what some of them are, three definitions of personal branding to get you thinking about them more deeply.

The three point self introduction. Remember, present, past, future, it’s not chronological, and the three benefits of building your brand. So if I were you. I would be thinking, thank you. This is helpful. I feel empowered, but now what? 

So onto my favorite part of the session, the q and a. First thing before I look in the chat, what brave soul here has a question for me.

I would love to hear a question. I know you’ve got questions. 

Theo: All right, I’ll go. 

AW:  Oh, Theo. Amazing. 

Theo: I’m afraid you’ll cold-call someone. So I am curious how you think differently about the future piece and the present. Well, actually, the whole introduction piece, when you’re talking about people who are either currently employed, transitioning, or coming back to employment after a long time out of the workforce.

Yeah. I’m curious, like for people who are not 25 on this call. 

W: Thank you Theo. Amazing. This is a common question that I get and I think it’s really important. I think if you are gainfully employed, it’s kind of obvious, right? Like present tense is who I am and what I do. Past tense is, you know, the things.

Remember, you’re customizing it for the people in the room, right? So you’re thinking, if you’re introducing yourself to a new project team, like what do they need to know about me that I’ve done that’s gonna help me establish credibility, right? And then future is, I’m looking forward to working with you.

If you’re in a job interview, I think the best way to answer this might be to just make some scenarios up, right? If you’re in a job interview. You go in and they very often purposely ask you, tell me about yourself. And you don’t know how long to talk, and you don’t even know what the structure is. Yes, you do.

It’s present, past,and  future. Hi, my name is Andrea. I am a, or my name is Theo. I am a blah, blah, blah, industry, blah, blah, blah. Function expert. I am. You’re still present tense, right? I am excited to learn about this position, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you say, I’m gonna tell you three things about my experience and my skills.

There are many things, many things that I could share with you, but, um, in terms of, you know, sharing things about myself, there are three things. Again, I told you I’m the, I’m a big fan of the power of three, the benefit of saying. At that point, I’m gonna share three things, is they’re not gonna be like, how long is she gonna keep talking?

And then you say, the first thing is I have extensive expertise in blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And then you say, the second thing is, one of the things that I’m most proud of in my career is this. And the third thing that I wanna say is maybe something that’s directly related to the company that you’re interviewing with.

Right. And then you say, so those are just three things, and I’m happy to elaborate on those three things. And on any other questions that you have, and then they’re gonna think that you’re just gonna end there, and you say, but I just wanna conclude by saying I’m really excited. You see what I did there?

That’s enthusiasm. I’m really excited to learn from you more about this company and more about this role because, based on what I know, I think I’m gonna be a great fit. Boom. That’s. Okay. And if you’re, say in a networking meeting, you’re either thinking about leaving your company or you’ve already lef,t and you’re doing, you know, the classic networking call, uh, or you’re at a networking event, and it’s like, let’s go around and introduce ourselves.

That’s not when you’re gonna say three big thing,s and you’re gonna take the mic for that long. But think about what do you wanna be remembered for with the people that are here, right? So you could say, my name is Jane Smith, and I don’t know sales and. Retail sales expert and in technology, blah, blah, whatever it is, right?

So you tell them what, tell them so that when they hear about a job in that area, they’re gonna think of you, right? And then you could say, I’m currently seeking a new job in this area. I have 25 years of experience in things that are gonna really help me succeed. And I’m really excited to get to know all of you better.

Right? So you, you, you shorten it. You make sure you’re really clear and I do a lot of work with an executive recruiter, and she said after these networking events, you literally remember if they’re lucky, one thing about each person that you met. So make sure the stuff that comes outta your mouth about you is what you want them to remember.

Does that help, Theo? I’m guessing you have more specific questions. 

Theo: No, that’s amazing. 

AW: Okay, good. 

Theo: Like to get push on that a little. Thanks. 

AW: Yeah, you’re welcome. My pleasure. So Blake has a question in a sales call, would it be better to skip the future remarks and just speak on present and past Blake?

Excellent question. No, the future can be one. In fact, most of the time it’s one sentence. So if you’re, for example, you have a call with aa prospective client, and as I do right with my coaching clients, and I’ll say, why don’t you introduce yourself and then I’ll introduce myself. I would never skip the future thing.

I’m like, I would love to help you. I even say to people in this call, I’m not gonna hold back. I’m gonna, I’m gonna share with you whatever coaching advice that I have for you, but I’m really looking forward to getting to know you better. Right? So just say one thing. I’m really glad to meet you, or I’m really looking forward to this, or I’m excited about this, or I’m enthusiastic about this.

It could be about the person. Ideally. Actually, it is about the person, but sometimes if, if that doesn’t feel quite right, you can make it. The comment about yourself in general, you could say, and I’m really excited about 2026. I feel like, you know, we’ve turned a chapter or whatever, or despite what’s going on in the world, I am really excited about what we’re doing here at work.

I hear people saying that a lot right now. Okay. Anyone that wants to raise their hand in this group, I’m gonna answer it first, but otherwise I’m, I’m staying in the chat. Sydney Ann asked to piggyback Blake’s question. In public speaking, we’re taught to establish credibility. Yes. Recency bias and primacy bias.

However, in social media, it’s preferred to begin with the hook solving the audience problem. Oh, okay. Sydnee, that’s fantastic. I actually learned this from Sarah Blakely. I did the Sarah Blakely. You know the Spanx billionaire entrepreneur. She has a masterclass where she talks about problem-solving. How you did it, like what the details are.

And then step four of the sales pitch is the ask. Right? But you start with the what’s their problem? Same thing on social media. I tell my team this too, when we’re working on my social media posts, it’s not, guess what, Andrea did today? No. It’s actually talking to them about what matters to them. I think for the self-introduction framework, it’s really about.

Finding opportunities to use the framework, but you’re not shifting the attention to yourself all the time. In other words, I’m not saying that all social media posts should be present, past future, I’m not saying that at all. And if you’re doing the sales pitch, I hope you first have the opportunity to ask the other person, introduce themselves, and you’re introducing yourself.

And then I, I totally agree with you, Sydnee. You start with the other person. You do not want to be. One of these myopic, selfish people who’s always talking about themselves. By the way, did you notice I did not really introduce myself here in this session? I just said, if you want more information about me, here’s where you can go that’s on purpose, because I want this to be about you.

So Sydnee, there’s an example, right? You don’t wanna be the person that talks longer than everybody else, and you don’t wanna be the person that everybody thinks is like self-absorbed. So you speak not as long as everybody else. You make sure that the other, like this morning I had a coaching call with someone that I, I’ve been coaching for about six months and he’s like, how was your holiday?

And I was like, you go first. Right? Like it’s not all about you. I think Sydnee, the fact that you’re asking that question tells me that you know that. So that’s fantastic. Okay, I’m gonna take one more question. Are there any live questions? Otherwise, I’m gonna go to Jennifer’s question. How do you recommend navigating age bias in high-stakes stakeholder meetings, particularly when they appear younger than you are or actually are early career, while still signaling authority and competence in rooms where age is often equated with credibility?

So I get, um. I think it was about a year and a half ago, because I remember it was in the summer. Yeah, it was about a year and a half ago. I was getting this question a lot. I think there was an article that came out in the New York Times about ageism. Ageism is real. So I am 55. I’m gonna tell you that right now I’m 55, and I would say I started feeling ageism probably at around 50.

I think it depends on your industry. In some, I talk to 40-year-olds who tell me that they feel like a grandparent, like the wise old grandparent in the office. So it really depends on what industry you’re in, but ageism is real. It is a bias. It apparently is an illegal bias, but it is a bias that definitely exists.

So how do you present yourself as having the expertise and maybe years, maybe decades of expertise without having the negative impact of ageism and this sounds really simple, but if you can present yourself in a way where you have energy, then your age. Probably doesn’t matter. It actually, it’s not just energy, right?

It’s energy and like current insights. This is an extreme example. If your email is AOL or even Yahoo, I’m gonna say it, as opposed to, you know, a more modern email provider, if you are constantly talking about your grandkids or your listing, and I don’t mean necessarily on your CV or on your LinkedIn, but you’re like.

Articulating when I, you know, when I graduated from high school in 1985, and people, you’re, you’re prompting people to do the math, so don’t prompt people to do the math. Do present yourself with energy and in like youthful energy, right? People that are, you see kids running around. I sometimes if I’m walking down the sidewalk and I see a family and it’s like the two adults are like this, and the kids are like running around, right?

So have that, you have youthful energy, and you’re current. And then my big thing is like I just told you, I’m 55. Unless you have reason to believe that your actual age is really gonna hurt you, you don’t need to necessarily tell them your age, but you can reference that I clearly, the elephant in the room here is that I’m older than everybody else, but you know what?

I have a lot of experience that I’m, I would, and wisdom that I would, the word wisdom will help a lot that I’m happy to share. I think as I’m saying that, it really does, as I said, the beginning, depend on the context of your industry and the audience of people that you’re talking to. I hope that helps.

It’s a great question, Jennifer. I do have a podcast episode on ageism that I will, when I post this on LinkedIn, I’ll put a, a link to that episode. So I wanna say thank you. I wanna start actually, by saying Happy New Year again. We can say that at least for this week, right? Happy New Year. Again, thank you so much for being here for this session.

I loved your questions, and I hope you found the information that I shared with you on personal branding. To be helpful. It’s a new year. It’s a new you. That doesn’t mean you’re reinventing yourself again. It does mean that you are presenting your true best self. And I want you to really think about your answers, especially to the first three questions that I asked you at the beginning.

Thank you so much. Bye.

The post New Year, New You… REALLY?!? Personal Brand Training (ep.204) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Your work doesn’t speak for itself. If you’re a woman leader who works hard but feels invisible when promotions are discussed, this episode is for you.

Dr. Andrea Wojnicki delivers a powerful training on personal branding specifically designed for women. You will learn the three ways that branding is different for women, why “my work speaks for itself” is holding you back, and exactly what to do about it.

This isn’t about becoming a social media influencer. This is about taking strategic control of your professional identity so the right people know your value, your expertise, and what you bring to the table.

Andrea shares the PUR framework (Positive, Unique, Relevant), real stories from women who transformed their careers by focusing on what makes them unique, and practical communication strategies you can use immediately.

If you’re ready to stop being overlooked and start being recognized for the leader you are, this episode will show you how.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

Andrea Wojnicki: Being yourself on purpose. I have this in capital letters because that’s what we’re doing here right now. We are unapologetically in a disciplined and strategic way, thinking about what we’re communicating about ourselves, and then communicating it in this strategic way. Well, hello there. I am really excited about this episode.

You’re about to hear or watch a recording if you’re on YouTube of a one-hour live training that I did recently called Personal Branding for Women Leaders. If you’re a long-time listener to the Talk About Talk podcast, you’ll notice that this one is just a little bit different. If this is your first time listening to the Talk About Talk podcast, then I have to say this is an outstanding place to start, and I should probably start by introducing myself.

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach here at Talk About Talk where I coach ambitious professionals and executives like you to communicate with confidence and clarity so you can achieve your career goals. If you check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website, you’ll find information there about all the services we provide, including private coaching, masterclasses, corporate workshops, and on-demand courses.

There are also lots of free resources that you can download there, and my free communication skills-focused email newsletter, you can check it all out at TalkAboutTalk.com. Let’s get into the episode.

As I said, this one is a little bit different from what we usually do. First of all, this episode is a recording of a live training session that I led a while ago. If you can watch this episode on YouTube, then you’ll be able to not only hear me, but you’ll also see my slides, and I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of this, regardless, even if you’re just listening.

The second way that this episode is different is that the topic is targeted to females. To women leaders. You’re about to learn three ways to define your personal brand, three ways. It is different for women, and three ways that you can start to build your own personal brand immediately. You’ll also hear the Q&A at the end, and this is my favorite part of these live sessions.

You’re gonna hear some very insightful questions from a few audience members, including a question from an entrepreneur who I had no idea was in the audience and whose products I’ve used for decades, which was actually really cool. Alright. Here we go. If you are here, I’m gonna guess that you are either curious or maybe you’re beyond curious and you’re ready to start establishing your strong personal brand, or your professional identity, as I call it.

And you probably also know, as I certainly do, that it is a little bit different for women. I’m gonna say that it is a little bit different for women. I’m gonna say it’s, we have some unique challenges. Some of these challenges are imposed on us from society and culture, and some of them are things that we do to ourselves.

So we’re gonna talk about those things explicitly. But the fact that you’re here, I think we are a fantastic tribe. I’m gonna say that if you’re here, probably like me, you’re not giving up. You’re not. I’m gonna just let it happen. You’re gonna make it happen. So kudos to you. We are gonna cover lots in the next hour.

If you follow me on LinkedIn, or if you listen to the podcast, or you subscribe to the newsletter, you’re gonna know one thing about me, which is I’m really big on the power of three. I’m really big on the power three. So I’m gonna take you through three ways to think about your brand, and then I’m gonna take you through three ways that branding is different for women.

Then I’m gonna take you through my top three suggestions. So I was thinking, given this audience of women only, what are my top three suggestions? Given these definitions and given the ways that branding is different for women, my three suggestions for what you can do starting right now to start developing your ideal personal brand or professional identity. 

So we’re gonna cover those three things, and then I’m gonna open it up to the Q&A. And as I said, you can put the questions in the chat. I’ve got Priscilla here who’s helping us out and to moderate me some of the questions. Or you can also raise your virtual hand at the end.

I don’t wanna spend too much time introducing myself, but I just wanna say briefly, for those of you who I do know, it’s wonderful to see you again. And for those of you who I haven’t met, thank you and welcome. 

So I wanna start by sharing with you what branding is not in my mind. One thing that I know from reading and thinking and podcasting and interviewing people and on and on about a focused on personal branding. One thing that I know for sure that’s true is that many people have different ideas about what we’re talking about here. So I have had clients who want me to help them establish their personal brand, and we set up a coaching program, and they go back to their boss, and they’re like, here’s the list of topics that Andrea’s gonna take me through that we’re gonna cover in the coaching sessions.

And one of the 10 topics is personal branding. And sometimes this has happened a few times. Their manager will say, yes, yes, yes, yes. No, no personal branding. So why is that? They think that I am going to try to turn them into a social media influencer, so they quit their job or monetize their brand. And I’m here to say that is not what I’m talking about.

Although if you really wanted to, you could. But I think about branding differently. I think of it as your identity or your reputation. This is basically taking the strategic principles that we know as brand managers. As I was at Kraft, a brand manager has a creative brief, a strategic brief that they share with their agency to come up with their packaging and their advertising and their promotions, and their positioning.

And all of the elements of that brief are. How we can think about ourselves in terms of your values, in terms of what makes you unique relative to your competitors, if you wanna use the same vocabulary, right? All of these things we can think about strategically in terms of ourselves. 

I’m gonna share with you a couple of definitions. The first one is a definition that, if you’ve done any reading on personal branding, you’ve probably come across this before. It’s Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon. He famously said, your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. And this quote has become synonymous with personal branding work, just about any article, as I said that you’ve ever read in the first couple of paragraphs.

This is what comes up, and this is the definition that I actually use with my clients for a couple of years. So I would ask them. What are people thinking and saying about you when you’re not in the room? And now I’m actually asking you this in real time, right here and right now. What are the important stakeholders in your career?

So it could be your boss and your boss’s boss are meeting to talk about succession planning, and your name comes up in conversation. What are they thinking and saying about you? That’s your brand. Now, most people will freak out. They’ll be like, oh, oh, I think they think this. I think I want to be seen as this, and there’s a bit of a disconnect.

That’s okay. That’s why we’re here. We’ve got some work to do. But this is a really valuable mental exercise. What are people thinking and saying about you when you’re not in the room? And the important stakeholders, again, it could be your boss, it could be clients. If you’re an entrepreneur, it could be clients, it could be your staff.

It could be your team that you’re working with. It could be if you’re an entrepreneur, maybe it’s investors. What are the important stakeholders thinking and saying about you when you’re not there? So this was my definition for. Years. This is the exercise that I would take my coaching clients through.

And a couple years ago, or about a year and a half ago, I had the great fortune of interviewing Seth Godin for the podcast. And Seth, I did his podcasting fellowship, his inaugural podcasting fellowship, way back about six or seven years ago. So I emailed him, asked if I could interview him. We had this fantastic conversation.

I definitely went off script. I wasn’t just talking to him about his books. I really wanted to hear his take on personal branding, and I asked him, I said, Seth. How do you think about your brand? And we got into this conversation about his quirky, like he wears these plastic orange glasses, actually similar to mine, these plastic glasses.

And he said, some people say, that’s my brand, but that’s not my brand. That’s my logo. And I was like, we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole. I think that is part of your brand, how you show up, right? Renee, how you show up is part of your brand, but really, Seth, how do you think about your brand? And then he delivered this gold.

He said, Your brand is what people think you’re gonna do next. So he said, Andrea, my brand. What people think I’m going to do next. I was like, this is next level. This is next level. So we have Jeff Bezos. Your brand is what people think about you when you think and say about you when you’re not in the room.

You can also think of it as what people think you’re gonna do next. I actually think this is a little bit more powerful, right? It’s more impactful. So I ask you now. I encourage you now to do exactly what I did when I got off this interview with Seth Godin. I took out a sheet of paper sitting where I am right now.

I drew a line down the middle of it, and I said, what do people think I’m gonna do next? Like, what are the big career, I guess, guideposts, the impressive things, the accomplishments that I’m gonna have over the next five or 10 years? What do they think? And then, actually, what are my goals? So I encourage you to do the same thing in one column.

Write down the things that you want to accomplish. For me, I wanna write a book. I wanna be on the TED stage, I wanna be a bestseller. I’ve got lofty goals. What do people think is possible? And then the magic happens when you merge these two lists, right? This is the magic of personal branding, but it doesn’t come without effort.

And when I think about these two ways that these two smart men talk about branding, I give them credit. These are helpful exercises, but to me, they lack one thing. They lack agency. What do I mean by that? Your brand is what people think you’re gonna do next. It’s like, well, so what can I do about it? Right?

Or your brand is what people are thinking and saying about you when you’re not there. Well, okay, so how do I influence what my boss is saying about me in that room where they’re talking about succession planning? So I created a different definition that, as I said, includes agency, and it’s this personal branding is about being yourself on purpose. 

So there are two elements here that are really important for you to consider being yourself. You. Your true self, your authentic self. Yes, I said the A word, your authentic self. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re sharing everything with everyone. As Seth Golden would say, Andrea, I don’t care if your cat is puking over there or that you’re barely got here on time.

You show up as a professional. So it’s being yourself, your true self, your authentic self, and your best self. There are a million ways to tell the same story. So tell your story in a way that serves you, show up as your true self and your best self. And then, so that’s part of it, being yourself on purpose.

I have this in capital letters because that’s what we’re doing here right now. We are unapologetically in a disciplined and strategic way, thinking about. What we’re communicating about ourselves and then communicating it in this strategic way. So the big difference between how most coaches will coach you on creating a strong brand versus what I do is you can think of it as two steps.

Step one is creating or articulating your brand. Who am I? What do I stand for? What are my unique strengths? Expertise. I see people writing notes. I’m so happy when people write notes. What are my unique strengths, my expertise, my skills, my passions? So that’s step one. 

And then step two is communicating it. Communicating it on LinkedIn, communicating it in how you introduce yourself, communicating it in your corporate bio, communicating it. What’s behind you? I have my books, I have my degree, I have my plants. Right? Like, what do you have all? Communicating it in how you dress, communicating it in what drink, what drink you bring into the meeting, right?

If you, if someone brings in, I don’t know, a coffee, a beer, a water, a cola, you’re signaling something about yourself. So, being yourself on purpose. First, thinking about who you are articulating and identifying, and focusing on your unique brand. And step two is the communication step. The big difference again is that I spend much more time guaranteed than most people do on step one.

This is the thing. Garbage in, garbage out, quality in, quality out. If you spend the time creating a list of your unique strengths. Really internalizing them and thinking about how you’re gonna narrate them and how you’re gonna reinforce them. The communication step is so much easier. It’s so much easier.

Okay, so we’ve got these three definitions, and I’ve spoken with. You know many people I’ve run corporate workshops where I put the slide up, and I ask people to raise their hand and tell me which definition resonates for them. I wouldn’t be sharing each of these three definitions if I didn’t think they were valuable.

I think these are all very effective ways, and I encourage you to think of all three of them. Ask yourself, what are people thinking and saying about you when you’re not in the room? Maybe you’re like, oh, they’re thinking and saying kind of what I want. Fine. Move on to the next definition. Or if it’s not what you want, then start thinking about correcting that.

Right? And then secondly, what do they think you’re gonna do next? If these are not aligned with your goals, then you need to start communicating things about yourself so that the list of aspirations versus what people think, as I said, merges. And then lastly, this definition that I share with my enthusiastic thumbs up.

Being yourself, your true, authentic, whole self. I’m gonna add one other thing there. We are always, this drives me crazy when people say, well, I have my work identity and then I have my personal identity, and I’m really two different people. I’m like. That must be really, really hard. That must actually be exhausting.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you were always the same person? Like, truly, if you’re always the same person, but you filter, this is like, I call it the F word of personal branding filter. You filter what parts of your identity you are gonna share with the world, depending on who you’re talking to and the context.

So I didn’t share with you that I’m a painter. I didn’t share with you that I’m obsessed with the color turquoise. I didn’t share with you that I have three children that are absolutely ginormous. They’re all very tall. Okay? Those are parts of my identity. In other contexts, I might share those things, right?

If I’m going to an art gallery with a friend, I’m, I would, of course, they would know that I paint and I would talk about that, but, so you are always your whole true self, but you filter what you share. This comes up, by the way, a lot. For women in the context of being a mother. I hear this. Uh, I just got the shivers because I was remembering back in, during COVID, I was doing some workshops for newly promoted partners at one of the consulting firms around the world.

And this wonderful, young, incredibly intelligent, high-achieving, ambitious woman in China said to me, I just got promoted. I was in the room at the table with the partners, and I said something about one of my kids. Everybody went silent and they all looked at me and she said, I was like, and then later on I noticed someone else said something about their kids and she said it was like, and I said, listen, when you’re senior enough in your organization and you are gonna be, look at how young you are and what you’ve achieved, you can create a culture where everyone can talk about that stuff.

In the meantime, you filter what you talk about to accomplish your goals. Given the context, given the people that you’re with in the moment, you filter what parts of your identity, doesn’t mean you’re not a great mom just because you’re not talking about your kids in that context. In fact, you may be a better mom because you’re doing better at work, right?

So we filter. You are always the same person, and you’re doing so strategically in a disciplined way and unapologetically, and I know that that unapologetic part can be difficult, particularly for women. 

So at this point, I’m gonna move on now to three ways that branding is different for women. And I’m gonna say that I could have put so much here.

So I decided to narrow it down to, given the power of three, I’m gonna narrow it down to three. And the first one is related to society, you all. And I have very little, if any, control over the second and third one; we can control. Okay. And I hope that that inspires you. So we do have some control. That’s I guess, one of the main takeaways from today.

The first one, of course, is societal stereotypes and the culture that we live in and the research. I’m familiar with the research. I have some of the books up here. The academic research shows that women are expected to be. Warm, communal, maternal service-oriented, right? Versus leaders are expected to be authoritarian, and sometimes people would say like the opposite end of the spectrum of all of those traits.

And so, there are things that happen therefore, that are outside of your control because you are a woman. People will stereotype you, and you probably embody some of these stereotypes. So what happens? Women get interrupted so much research. Men interrupt women, women interrupt women. Women do not interrupt men, like it’s crazy.

It’s so imbalanced. We get interrupted, and when we do say something. Sometimes our comments are attributed to others. Has this ever happened to you? You say something in a meeting, and somebody says, um, so I have a thought, blah, blah, blah. They repeat what you said in different words, and then people go, great idea.

You’re like, what? Just I see people nodding. What just happened? So our, so we get interrupted. Our ideas are attributed to others. They carry less weight. Maybe, I don’t know. Anyone else have any ideas? Some dude says something, and it’s like gold, right? One other thing that happens is the type of feedback.

So I learned this really directly when I was a professor at the University of Toronto, a female faculty member warned me the first time I ever got, you know, that at the end of the class, they give all the students an evaluation sheet. Used to be pen and paper. It’s probably online now, but anyway, and scale of one to seven, how effective is this?

And then they go into the comments, she said. So the scale of one to seven is, is probably fair. Although there is a main effect of gender. Men get rated higher. By the way, pregnant women. Get rated lower than non-pregnant women. And I found, I actually hid my pregnancy one time when I was teaching ’cause I wanted to see what would happen, and then the next whatever.

So the feedbac,k though, the words in the evaluation form are very different for women, and this may happen in your formal evaluations that you get with your employer, right? They talk to you about your style. They talk to you about you should be more confident, you should improve stakeholder analysis, you should, whatever.

It’s very sort of vague style personality feedback versus for men, it’s. Great job achieving this thing, and you didn’t, you missed this one, but we understand why, because you had these things, and it’s like, what? So they get feedback that’s more tangible, and we get feedback. That’s more, and maybe this goes back to all of the stereotypes.

So the point here is we are walking a tightrope based on society and culture, where we’re trying to balance, if it’s possible, how we project our strengths. And our authority and our expertise, while also being communal and maternal, if you wanna use that word. Or at least, let’s call it having strong people skills.

Right. And it’s like the more you do one, it seems like there’s a paper that one of my colleagues at the University of Toronto wrote when she was at Harvard Business School called Competent Jerks and Lovable Fools and Who Gets Promoted. And it’s basically the idea is at work, you’re one or the other.

You’re like a really nice woman who’s a fool, or you’re a competent jerk. And by the way, the competent jerks do better. Right? And so this is really hard for women. I co-authored a paper with Dr. Amy Diehl. She and one other co-author wrote a book called The Sixth Glass Walls. It’s, you know, in addition to the glass ceiling.

The glass cliff. There are all these walls that we can find ourselves walking into that limit our career progression. And she and I coauthored a paper for Fast Company, where we talked. The paper was called Stop Telling Women to Lead Like a Man. So in fact, being aggressive or being authoritative or really mastering self-emotion or avoiding weak language.

Like these are all things that women are told that men seem to do naturally. And our point was maybe somewhere in between what women are naturally doing and what men are doing, maybe somewhere in between is actually the magic place. So again, this is a tightrope. It’s really hard. I’m gonna say this. This is almost an impossible task to overcome societal stereotypes.

But, we also do things that hurt us, like suffering from imposter syndrome. So I wanna share something with you about imposter syndrome. So first a definition and then a little bit of background. So, imposter syndrome is this feeling that most of us have, that we will be found out and people will realize that we’ve been promoted beyond our ability and we don’t belong in the room.

We don’t belong on stage, or we don’t belong behind the microphone. Right? So this term imposter syndrome was actually coined in 1978 by two female social psychologists in the US, and they were doing research on successful women. Let me say that again. The research was on successful women, and they interviewed them in depth, and they were trying to figure out what do these women all have in common that differentiates them from less successful women, and maybe that differentiates them from men.

One of the themes that came out really strongly that ended up being kind of the pinnacle of the careers of these two social psychologists was, they called it imposter phenomenon. And it was this feeling, like I just described, of being found out, I don’t deserve to be here. I’m like, I’m the one lucky person who got in somehow, and maybe I’m gonna get kicked out.

They identified this theme, and then they compared it to women who were less successful, and they realized actually it doesn’t differentiate them. They feel that way, too. And then they also researched men. Guess what? Men actually have imposter syndrome as well, and there’s been tons of research.

Basically, everyone experiences imposter syndrome. If you don’t, then you’re probably veering on the side of being arrogant. Imposter syndrome is really common. You can work to overcome it. So I’m gonna say this, it’s not your fault that you are experiencing imposter syndrome, and I, I have to say, the research shows that men experience it too.

But men don’t come to me saying, can you help me overcome imposter syndrome? They’re like, can you help me communicate with precision or can you help me with my formal presentation skills? Women are like, I know I have imposter syndrome, and I know you can help me. Here’s the thing. You can work on your confidence.

Confidence can be learned. Just ask Tina Fey. She talks about impostor syndrome all the time. And look at her. She’s a rockstar. Just ask Natalie Portman, the Oscar-winning actress. She went back to Harvard to deliver her the graduation speech, and she was quoted in the newspaper saying like, I look around at these smart kids.

I don’t belong here. I don’t know. Excuse me. First of all, you graduated from the school. Secondly, you wouldn’t want an Oscar. You’re very inspiring and capable, and ambitious. You definitely belong here. We all experience imposter syndrome. The issue with it is that it’ll prevent you from speaking up and stepping up.

You need to speak up, and you need to step up if you’re gonna be successful, and you can control this; you can work on your confidence. And this relates to the speaking up point, relates to the third way that I think branding is different for women, and it’s, I have this in quote, my work speaks for itself.

I hear this. Over and over and over again from my clients, including very successful clients. I’m coaching right now a woman, she’s an assistant general counsel at a massive global technology firm. She’s like second in line in the law department, in the legal department, and she’s been there for I think 12 years.

She hired me to help her establish her brand, her strong professional identity, and to elevate her confidence and her credibility, her executive presence, you could say, because she was given the feedback that she’s great at doing the work, but people don’t know who she is and what she does. There was one of these succession planning meetings.

She told me this when we first met, where her boss went in to advocate for her for a promotion. Like three of the people in the room said, oh, I didn’t even know she was in legal. Who is that again? And she came back to her, and she said, you have a branding problem. Like you need to be establishing who you are and what your value is and what you do so early.

It’s not our fault that this happens. By the way, and this is what I said to her early in your career, so actually before your career started, when you were at school, your teacher told you what to do. You did the work, you got an a. You applied to the universities. You did your best. You got into a great school.

She got her law degree. She started at the law firm, right? She’s ling. She’s doing what the partners are telling her to do. Patting her on the head. Good girl. You’re doing what you can. Here’s the thing. When you hit mid-career and senior career, there’s no one looking after your over your shoulders to give you the check marks.

It’s your job to make sure that you speak up for your work. Your work does not speak for itself. And so I know a lot of you, a lot of men and women, but especially women, it seems like we are apprehensive about talking about the value of our contribution and our expertise and our work. And I say this arrogant, people think they’re great at everything.

They think they know everything, and they’ll take credit for anything. Perfectly confident. People who have a strong brand are very specific about the value that they provide in the organization, what their expertise is, what their skills are, and they’re not afraid of talking about it. In fact, you can even say the words, I have to say, I’m particularly proud of how I led this team to achieve whatever the goal was, right?

You can call it out. You can say, I’m not into bragging. If you wanna be perfectly explicit, I’m not into bragging, but I am really proud of what the team under my leadership accomplished this year. Look at, here’s where our goals the, this is the final metrics. We knocked it outta the park. I heard a guy, a tech dude say once, if you don’t talk about your work, you might as well not do it.

So this is a little bit different from imposter syndrome, right? Imposter syndrome is feeling like you don’t belong there, and not speaking up, and not raising your hand to volunteer to do the work. This third one is you’re actually doing the work, but you’re not talking about it. And this goes back to, remember I said the process is step one, articulating your strengths, your skills, your expertise.

And step two is the talking. So being clear and focused about what your brand is, what your value is, what your accomplishments are, and then it makes the talking part, the communicating part so much easier. Okay. So we have these three ways. That branding is different for women, and so I don’t want you to be like, okay, this is depressing.

Cause we have society stereotypes against us. We have this imposter syndrome, which is fair game given how we were raised. And I literally said this to the assistant general counsel that I was coaching. I’m not gonna say her real name, say it’s Susan. I said, good girl, Susan, you’ve been doing your hard work for 12 years.

And she goes, that’s pretty much what my boss said. He’s like, you’re great, but you need. To be clear on what your value is, and not just sit down. And so I purposely chose this image of this woman burning the midnight oil. You will not once you hit middle management. I see this again and again. The hard work is not gonna help you knock it outta the park if you wanna knock it outta the park. You need to learn to talk about your values and your identity. 

All right, so I’ve got three ways that these are the top three things that come to mind that I would do if I were you given. The societal dynamics given our typical female beliefs and behaviors, here are three things that I would do. The first one, when people get this, makes a massive, massive difference.

So the criteria for the traits and the skills end up in your personal brand, the list of, I’m gonna say up to 15 things that you share about yourself on a regular basis. Implicitly and explicitly the criteria is that these things are positive, unique, and relevant. Positive, PUR, positive, unique, and relevant.

But if I had to choose just one criteria, it’s this one unique. If you can double down on your unique skills, you will be happier and more successful than you ever would’ve been. So if there’s one thing that I wanna leave you with, it is this. And I can tell you, I’m thinking of all of the senior executives that I’ve coached before.

This is the one that makes the biggest difference, and it seems to make a big difference, especially for women. There was a vice president of human resources that I was working with. She was on the job market. She. Happily. Well, she was employed, not happily, but she was employed. She said, I’m ready to be a Chief Human Resources Officer, A-C-H-R-O.

So she said, I’ve let my network know, and I’ve been going to several interviews. I’ve done maybe six interviews, and she said, Andrea, I’m not getting called back. For any second round interviews, and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. It must be communication skills, so I need to hire you to help me. And I said, okay.

So I said, let’s first focus on developing your brand, and then we’ll talk about your job interview answering and communication skills. So in one of our first sessions, I said to her, What is your unique strength that’s gonna make you a great CHRO? And she said something like, Well, I think they’re looking for someone who obviously has the technical human resources skills and expertise, but also who’s a real team person.

A team leader with strong EQ and people skills. And I was like, did she not hear my question? So I asked her again, and she kind of answered it the same way. And then I said to her, you’re not answering the question. What makes you unique? And she kind of like had a little bit of a meltdown she goes. Call it an epiphany.

She said, Oh my God, I have been answering the questions in these interviews in a way where it’s pretty clear that I’m guessing what they want to hear as opposed to truly presenting who I am. And I said, okay, so let me ask you again, what makes you unique? And she goes, actually, it’s my people skills.

People love working for me. My boss told me I can make my people do just about anything. And I was like. That is gold. That is gold. That’s the thing that you know people say about you, that you know is true. It’s positive, unique, and relevant. So the rest is history. She went to her next interview. Her confidence was heightened.

She felt focused on her unique brand proposition, and she got the job as a C-H-R-O. So this is gold. Focus on what makes you unique. Stop trying to guess. Of course, you have to meet minimum standards for all the criteria that they’re looking for promotion for investment, for getting a new job, but focus on what makes you unique.

You’ll be happier, and you’ll be more successful. It’s a big speak for your work and control your narrative. So this really addresses one of the points that I made on the previous slide, where your work doesn’t speak for yourself. You must speak for your work. Don’t assume that people know what you did. Don’t hesitate to use the word lead leader led leadership.

It’s shocking to me how many leaders and aspiring leaders are not controlling the narrative. They’ll say to me privately. I led this initiative where, you know, we doubled our revenue, or we doubled our profitability, whatever it is. And then I looked at their LinkedIn profile, and I’m like, first of all, I don’t see that accomplishment there.

But more importantly, where’s the word leader? Oh, this is a big one. Control the narrative. Instead of saying, so tell me what you do. And you say, Oh, my name is Jane Smith. I work at x, Y, Z company in this department. I’ve been here for 10 years. So what? You could say in the last 10 years I worked from being like a mid-level analyst to joining the C-suite, where I’ve worked in three different functions, and I now have a fantastic overview, and last year we blah, blah, blah.

Like talk about the so what, control your narrative, every word, every phrase, every sentence that comes out of your mouth. And maybe if you’ve done the work in listing what your personal brand themes are, you can challenge yourself to mention some of those things. Particularly when you’re introducing yourself.

So this comes up if you’re sharing your career narrative. If you’re sharing your career narrative, why don’t you tell me a bit about your career history? Most people think that means, okay, I graduated from my Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1997, and then I did this, and I worked here for so many years, and then I did my MBA.

No, no, no. Unless there’s a reason why you wanna share it chronologically. Why don’t you tell the person the highlights? Like, I’ve lived in three countries, I’m a global leader. I’ve lived and worked in three countries. My superpower is this, and I did this at this company and this company and this company, right?

So, share your career journey with purpose. That’s one thing. The other thing you can do here is introduce yourself with purpose. If you’ve followed my work, Priscilla will put the links in the show notes. If you followed my work, I’m really big on introducing yourself using the three-point self-introduction, present, past, future, in all three of those steps.

Use intentionality, narrate the benefit to you of what you’re sharing. Present tense. I’m a blah, blah, blah. My expertise and skill is this, right? So start it with that past tense. Previously, I tell them what you did. Tell them what your accomplishments. Again, depending on the context and the person, you are establishing credibility.

You’re choosing what you share. This is, remember I said the definition is? Be yourself on purpose. This is the on purpose part. You’re being very conscious, and then the future is something enthusiastic about what’s to come, what your goals are, so whether you’re introducing yourself, whether you’re sharing your career journey, whether you’re meeting someone at a networking event, whether you’re.

Updating your LinkedIn profile, speak for your work, and control your narrative. It’s about self-awareness. It’s about being conscious and not just like trying to get the mic, like it’s my turn to introduce myself, blah, blah, blah. Next, no. Next time someone says, Let’s go around the table and introduce yourself.

I really hope that you will think this is the best opportunity that I have to reinforce my strong personal brand. Look forward to your self-introduction. All right. The third thing that I encourage you to do to develop a strong personal brand is to network and build relationships. And so this is really taking the step two.

Remember, I said step one is articulating. Step two is communicating. If you have lots of people in your network. Yes, sure. This does include LinkedIn followers, but it also includes just getting out there, like you see this lovely woman who’s smiling at a networking event, right? It’s getting in front of people and telling them what you do, and I decided to capitalize the word relationships here.

Very purposely. I know that you’re probably, if you’re like most people, thinking networking, ugh, I hate it. I hate networking. That’s because you’re probably thinking of networking as being selfish and self-serving. I encourage you to think of networking as establishing meaningful relationships, and how do you do that?

You do that by providing value to others. Think about. Sharing information with people, sharing your personal brand, your expertise, your skills with other people in a way that will help them think about connecting your network with other people in your network. Right? You are adding value, and you are strengthening relationships.

That’s all networking is. Networking is not going to event showing up, passing out your business cards and shaking paws. No. It’s actually establishing relationships. And by the way, when you go to that networking event. Circle back to every single person that you met. Otherwise, you might as well not have met them.

It’s the same way that if you do the work and you don’t talk about it, you might as well not have done it. If you go to a networking event and you meet someone and you never follow up, you might as well have not met them. You might as well have not gone to the event. Right? 

So these are three ways that you can develop a strong brand and when I look at this list, I’m like, I feel very passionately that these three things will get you a lot of traction in developing your brand. Focusing on member positive, unique, and relevant, especially unique things. Speaking up for your work, being very purposeful about that, and choosing the words. 

Use the word lead. Please use the word lead, and if you have global experience. Stop trying to hide. I talk with clients about this all the time. Stop trying to hide your accent. Your accent is evidence of your global experience. So introduce yourself as someone who has international or global experience and let your accent be evidence of that.

And of course, networking and building relationships. But there’s a lot to do in each of these three things, and I know a lot of people feel overwhelmed. And before I open it up for questions, I just wanna say, if you wanna learn more about me and what I do, you can go to talk about talk.com. I think we’re all connected on LinkedIn, and I encourage you to check out the podcast.

I’m on all of the podcast platforms, Apple, Spotify, and on and on and on. And now we’re also on. YouTube, so you can watch m,e and I’ve done some pretty cool interviews where you can actually see what the guest looks like and see me interview them. It’s actually a lot of fun, so I hope you’ll check that out as well and subscribe on YouTube.

So now I’m gonna go open it up for questions and the women that are here right now get first dibs. I have a question. Oh, yay Fatima. Yay. 

Fatima Lusito: So I wanna ask a question about, I used to work in the corporate space, but one of the things that I would say U is unique or that I love about is bringing fun into the work that I do, and fulfillment is really, really important.

So, is there any suggestions or thoughts about how you do that in a way, because the corporate side is, it could be a different feel, how you incorporate that, and that, you know, if you have a personality that you wanna bring fun into what you’re doing and how you’re supporting your clients.

AW: I think Fatima one of the most effective ways establishing a strong personal brand is taking something that someone might think is a negative and turning it into a positive. So this is really being yourself on purpose. You are the one who wants to make work fun. Hang on a second. Work is hard, right? We’re supposed to be suffering and not having fun, and I feel like you can create a narrative around that where you actually call it out.

I mean, there’s even cliches around this, right? Like, we spend so much time at our at work, we might as well enjoy what it is. And you could say that, well, like, that’s the cliche. But I actually really, truly believe that we will not only just enjoy ourselves more, but will actually be more productive if we enjoy coming into work.

So I am the boss, I am the manager. I am the leader. Use, use the L word. I am the leader who is relentlessly focused on achieving our business objectives. And making sure that we all have fun when we’re here. And then you tell them how you do that. Well, because we have a mandatory offsite and you better smile and laugh when you’re there, right?

You could make jokes about actually evaluating people on whether they’re having fun and whether they’re contributing to a fun culture. And by the way, I’m also gonna say this is like a fantastic platform for the most senior leader, right? 

Like, I’m seeing a CEO who has this? Brand of relentlessly focused on meeting OB business objectives and creating a culture that, I encourage you to use the word culture because I’m not sure what level you are, but if you’re leading any kind of team, you could even say my team culture is the most fun of any culture, any team in the organization. And then as you ascend to the most senior leadership, you could say, this is the company that people wanna work at.

Because yes, we are accomplishing our business objectives, but we’re also having fun. And you have a big smile on your face, and it’s unique, it’s positive, unique, and relevant. Okay. Who else has a question? Mabel’s labels. Oh gosh. We have so many Mabel’s Labels in our house. 

Mabel’s Labels Inc.: Oh, do you? I’m so glad. Sorry. It’s my work-from-home day, so I’m wearing my second city.

When you mentioned Toronto, I’m like, what? I’m, yeah. Yeah. Um, so I just wanted to maybe clarify, I’m not sure if I kind of missed it. It was back near the beginning when you were talking about filters and, I mean, maybe, I guess ’cause I think for my brand, my personal brand, you know, I really try to use to elevate my business brand Mabel’s labels, right?

So my customer’s moms, so like one of my personal branding goals, which is. Easy is just to be relatable, ’cause I have six kids and it’s a shit show and whatever and you know, so do all my customers. Like, it’s just, I, my personal brand is like also trying to get through the day without smelling like baby vomit kind of thing.

Right. My kids are big now, but you know what I’m saying. So I mean, I bring in, like obviously, I guess I just think maybe you can talk a little bit more about knowing who’s in the room, who your customer is, who you’re speaking to, because for me, I don’t wanna filter out that messy crap. That’s what they like.

AWi: Right? So I think that your story here, by the way, this is an incredible company. I know you’re very successful. So my kids are. 17, 18 and 22, we have in our front hall, like a little plastic bag full of Wojnicki stickers. Yeah. From your company. Um, you can label everything courtesy of Mabel. So you’ve identified your, your primary target market and it’s like you are one of them actually.

You’re one of them on steroids. You have six kids and whatever, and you’re also doing the full-time work thing. And so I think that’s very smart. But this is a great example I’m gonna say of where you’re filtering. What parts of your brand you’re sharing. If you were at a stage where you’re looking for investors and you go into a room, frankly, whether there’s women there or not, having baby vomit on you should not be the first thing that comes out.

‘Cause you’re filtering for the things that are gonna help you establish credibility with those people. It doesn’t mean you’re not a great mom; it doesn’t mean you vanished from motherhood to businesswoman. It means you’re showing up as. A working mom who has it together, right? And so the other parts of your brand, Julie, will be being a hard worker, able to transition, solving problems, leading teams, inspiring people, and resonating with clients.

All of these things, like I tell people, to come up with a list of about 15 themes that includes your current employer and your current title. The industry expertise you have the functional expertise, you have your leadership style, your formal credentials, the school that you went to, whatever other credentials that you have, awards that you’ve won, huge things that you’ve created or accomplished geography. 

So for some people, it’s like born and bred in Toronto, but I love to travel. Or it could be, you know, I’ve lived and worked in three different continents, and I love traveling. Whatever the geography is your family is for everybody. Young, old male, female. Your family role, like I, I say this, whether you say I’m a cat mom to two really lucky cats, or whether you say I’m the mom of six hooligans ranging in age from blah, blah, blah to blah, blah, blah, right?

We all have some kind of family role. It could be that you’re in the sandwich generation. I know a lot of my peers are talking about their very aging parents and their crazy teenagers or young 20-somethings. That’s another whole other thing. Thing. Right? So all of these elements are part of your brand, and you never are gonna share all 15 of these things ’cause people would say you’re crazy.

It also includes your personal hobbies. What do you do? I don’t know, Julie, after. What time are they in bed after 1130 at night, and maybe on the weekends when you’re not doing Mabel’s Labels. Right. So all of those things are part of your brand. And I mean, if you’re pitching to investors, you would tell them, part of our story that it makes us resonate so well with our customers is the fact that we are the target market.

Right? I am a mom, and I do. So that’s how it would come up as opposed to you grabbing a mic and sharing what happened in your house this morning. Right. Does that help? Okay, I got a thumbs up. Who else has a question? 

Anne Grason: Hi, Andrea. I’m so sorry I came in late. I was on a call that just wouldn’t end. So I’ll listen to the recording later.

But comes to imposter syndrome, and you may have already covered this. Do you think that affects everybody or primarily women? What’s your point of view on that? 

AW: So the research shows that it affects everyone. I like. I’ve done a bit of a deep dive here because I would say second to personal branding, the most common questions or focuses that I get for workshops and coaching is on confidence.

Confidence and overcoming imposter syndrome, really. So I’ve done a deep dive in the research on it. I can tell you a coupleof  things. I can tell you that the. Tide has shifted a little bit on imposter syndrome. There’s a recent, within the last maybe four years, HBR article where they talk about stop blaming women for having imposter syndrome and start changing the culture so they don’t feel this sense of inadequacy.

And the other thing is it’s not just women. It’s not just unsuccessful women, it’s also successful women. It’s also men that have it. I can tell you anecdotally. Men are not coming to me saying, I need help with my confidence to the extent that women are. I can also tell you, there is beautiful research that I stumbled across this past summer that says, here’s the sentence, I memorized it.

Self-concept clarity builds self-esteem. When I read that sentence, I was like, yes, this is what I see. This is what I see with my clients. Self-concept clarity is. Building your strong, unique, personal brand, self-concept, clarity, build self-esteem. That’s social psychology. Talk for overcoming imposter syndrome and communicating with confidence, right?

So I think, an important thing for me to highlight when you do the work on articulating your unique strengths and passions and skills, your confidence generally will be boosted, and when your confidence is boosted. You have credibility. We don’t listen to people, we don’t believe people, we don’t follow people who aren’t confident.

If you’re confident, though, people are gonna say, Oh, she seems to know what she’s talking about. I’m gonna think about what they’re saying. Maybe you know some of the things that I was talking about before, where people talk over you, or they interrupt you. These things, you can dampen them by. Asserting and clarifying who you are and what your value is. Yeah, so Sorry Anne. I went on, I went on a little bit of a rant there. 

Yeah. It’s, it’s a, it’s golden. It’s gold. It’s what I was, um, I was. I was outside on my deck in, it was like July, and I read the sentence and I stood up and I did a dance. I was like, yes, yes, yes. That’s it.

Self-concept, clarity builds self-esteem. Bam. That’s what I’m here for. Yeah, that’s, that’s the link between confidence and branding. So actually I think that’s a great place to end. I wanna say thank you so much for being here. I hope that you got some valuable insights. I hope you are thinking about your brand differently, whether it’s what people are saying about you, when you’re not in the room, what people think you’re gonna do next, or.

Hopefully, being yourself on purpose, being unapologetic, being strategic, being disciplined, taking a little bit of time, I’m telling you a little bit of time thinking about this stuff will take you a long way.

If you wanna learn more, go to TalkAboutTalk.com and in the top there’s like a little search, whatever magnifying glass you can just enter personal branding or personal brand and a lot of the resources will come up, the masterclasses, but also the podcast episodes and newsletters and on and on, so we can continue the conversation there or on LinkedIn. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Talk soon.

The post Personal Branding for WOMEN Leaders (ep.203) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

When it comes to networking, your strongest professional relationships are the ones you build long before you expect to need them. Learn from 3 accomplished leaders who know how the ripple effect works in real life.

You will hear insights from BARON MANETT, Founder and Chief Experience Officer at PSBX, SHELAGH PAUL, Head of Global Communications at OMERS, and THE HONOURABLE DAVID TSUBOUCHI, former Ontario Cabinet Minister. They all contributed to the book “The Ripple Effect: Networking for Success,” and in this episode, they share personal stories about connection, reciprocity, and the habits that help the right people stay in your orbit.

This conversation will help you rethink your approach to networking. You will learn how to make a clear and respectful ask, how to stay relevant without being transactional, how to recognize valuable peers early in your career, and how consistent behaviour builds a reputation that others trust.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

Baron Manett

Shelagh Paul

The Honourable David Tsubouchi

📚 Books:

🎧 Podcasts:

Shelagh Paul: You don’t know the diamonds that are all around you in your own peer set right now. 

David Tsubouchi: When you’re helping others, they remember that, and they remember you.

Baron Manett: To make it work in true networking, somebody has to pick up the phone.

Andrea Wojnicki: Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast, where you’ll learn the communication skills so that you can communicate with confidence, credibility, and achieve your career goals.

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and I’m your executive communication coach. Just call me Andrea. Please check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website to learn more about all the services that we offer at Talk About Talk, including private coaching, corporate workshops and online courses.

And don’t forget to hit subscribe, so you’ll never miss a new podcast episode.

Today we’re talking about networking specifically what you need to do to create the network that you need later by taking action today. I have to admit, I was a little bit nervous about this episode because it’s the first time that I’ve interviewed three guests at once. Yes, the power of three me plus three. But it went really well, and I hope you agree. 

All three of these guests contributed to a book on networking called The Ripple Effect: Networking for Success. You’re gonna hear from my friend Baron Manett. He’s my favorite classmate from our MBA program. He wrote a chapter called Curious, Grateful, and People First, Networking for Future Leaders. Baron is a leading Canadian brand strategist, a marketing professor, and the founder of Per Se brand experience. 

Then there’s Shelagh Paul, author of the chapter entitled The People on the Bus. Yes. Shelagh is a master of the metaphor, and she is also the global lead at Omers of Communications. Yes, communications. I think I have a new friend. 

And finally, David Tsubouchi. David’s the co-editor of this book that we’re referencing, The Ripple Effect Networking for Success, which was published in 2025. David’s chapter is entitled, be a Giver, not a Taker. I love this. He’s an accomplished leader, a former Canadian cabinet minister, and an author whose insights on generosity and connection are nothing less than inspiring.

Okay, let’s get into this. As a communication coach, I know that often people feel icky about networking, but when you’re purposeful about networking, and you make an effort. That effort can go a long way, and this conversation will provide you with many suggestions for how to make that happen. Here we go.

Thank you so much, David, Shelagh, and Baron for being here today to talk to us about networking and the ripple effect. Let’s start with a big picture. The book title, the Ripple Effect, and Networking for Success. I would say that this is an evocative title. It’s a beautiful metaphor. David, can you share with us what inspired you to create this collection and to use this title?

DT: I’m gonna start you off in a different direction. That wasn’t the original title that I submitted. Uh, the original title I submitted was. The no *hole rule. And, uh, the publisher reminded me that, uh, we, we have Simon Schuster distribute this in the United States, and that probably wouldn’t be a good thing to have as a title.

And he was quite right because we were lucky enough to get book list, which makes recommendations, the libraries in the United States to recommend a book for the libraries down there. So it was a wise decision. So, as you know, I mean, the ripple effect, you know, one small ripple can create. Figure waves.

Uh, and sometimes it’s a matter of time. I mean, networking is not something that happens overnight. It’s about creating relationships. And all of us will say the same thing. Uh, it’s a common thing throughout the book that the ripple effect, uh, is about quality, not quantity. It’s about having that circle of integrity around you.

It’s like having the culture, you know, organizations have to have a good culture to be successful. The same thing with the, with, uh, your network. 

AW: Exactly. It’s the quality of relationships, not the quantity of relationships. And I was gonna say the term network is itself almost like, well, it’s not a network, it’s describing what it is.

And I love this image of. The ripple effect, like a drop of water and how it ripples out. And it grows not just in quantity, but in quality. So networking starts with the first step, right? The drop of water. 

Baron, in your chapter in the book, you talk about how you reached out to David you years ago, and you were, I’m gonna say a little bit nervous or anxious about doing so.

Can you tell us that story and then talk generally about how we should write that first email. I get this question all the time from my clients. They’re like, it’s just awkward. How do you do that? 

BM: It’s a great question. It’s so great to be, uh, back on the podcast, and thanks for having us. You know, I think back on it ’cause it was approximately 20 plus years ago when I first really heard of this guy, David Tsubouchi.

And I was, uh, I thought I was a kind of high Roland in advertising creative person, and I had a great idea, long story short, an idea around poker, and I thought it would be just as simple. To just, I sold it to our awesome client. It turned out to, you know, be a big program, and I just thought I’d go down to the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, like a driver’s license kind of thing.

And I just get a license. And I walked in, I said, I’m just here for my license, for my poker tournament. And the outspoken clerk behind the counter says, you whatcha talking about, you can’t have that. And then, who are you? I was like, whatcha talking about? I just give it, go ahead. Just how much is it?

It’s illegal. I go, well, that’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard. I go, who came up with that law? And she goes, listen, if you don’t like it, don’t complain to me. Call David Tsubouchi ’cause he wrote the law. And I went home, and I went back to the office. I looked it up, and he is right, some guy named David Tsubouchi.

And so I got his number, luckily. And I called them. And here’s what’s really interesting, right? Because I talk to a lot of young people who are afraid to make the call, and I totally get that. I was afraid to make the call. So I didn’t just call the honorable David Tsubouchi government minister. I did a little bit of research.

What was his purview where, you know, what was he focused on? I obviously could not talk to him on his peer level at the time, but I was hoping I could at least find common grounds of themes. And one of them was around innovation. You know, Mr. Tsubouchi liked to do things first, so did I. Common ground, even though we are different ages.

But to make it work in true networking, somebody has to pick up the phone, right? Somebody has to say yes. I hear a lot of people complaining, oh, my kids are networking all they can, and I believe them. Are they as prepared as possible? But are we being good partners on the other side? If David doesn’t pick up the phone, if David doesn’t say yes to me, none of this book, none of this story happens for me.

Right. So it’s a two-way street. It’s a value exchange. So thank goodness David was open-minded enough to realize that it’s not just one level. We, and now 20 plus years later, I’m trying to pay him back and so many other people by picking up the phone and saying yes. And you know, we can’t just lecture people to call into the air.

So it was a great lesson for me early to come prepared. And it’s not a one-way ask ever.

AW: I love that it’s not a one-way ask, and also this point about preparation. I’ve heard from some other wise folks that you wanna make it really easy for the other person to help you, but you also wanna make it. Clear that you’re not wasting their time.

And I can imagine, I think I knew you back then, Baron. You’re a keen young whipper snapper, and I bet you immediately impressed him, but he didn’t have to pick up the phone.

DT: Let me interject here if I could. You know, it’s how you ask to, I mean, look at all of us on this call, get all kinds of requests to meet and to talk to all kinds of people all the time.

You know, when Baron called me, I didn’t know Baron from anybody else, and I just liked the tone of his voice and the way he was talking, and it wasn’t someone who was reaching out and saying, I need this from you, or whatever it is. Uh, we just had a good conversation to begin with and, you know, it’s like having a, not coming out and asking right away.

But creating the interest on having a relationship with somebody else. And as you know, by now, because you know, Baron, I mean he’s very personable and, uh, he kind of sucked me in. 

AW: So yeah, that’s Baron’s superpower. That’s Baron’s superpower. But you’re reminding me, David, of the other thing that he said was that he identified something that the two of you have in common, right?

Your quest for innovation, creativity being the first one. That’s brilliant. I talk about how this is like accelerating the relationship trajectory when you mention anything like, oh, you worked with so and so, or, oh, you’re focused on this, or whatever it is, your leadership style. Me too, whatever it is. Absolutely brilliant. 

So Shelagh, I wanna get you in here. You talk in your chapter about how. The early bird gets the cake, and I absolutely love this. I love this. It’s powerful. Can you share exactly what you mean by this in the context of networking and what advice you have for listeners, many who have maybe early in their career, or even if you’re not early in your career.

How does this early bird gets the cake fit in here? 

SP: Thanks, Andrea. And thank you for having, uh, me join this great group on this topic. Might that chapter or might that part of my chapter? The point was start networking before you need something. So, exactly what David just said, if you have identified someone that you might share an interest, you might really appreciate their perspective on something.

That’s the best way in. So for me, it’s what about that person’s perspective on something might help me grow my own perspective on something. So I’m not asking you for an introduction, I’m not asking you for anything other than a conversation. Uh, and I think that’s the best way, and I think this insight for me happened in.

I was looking back on some of the things that worked out in the best possible ways. So I was dumped into a committee, uh, in 2010, auto change, uh, when I was in the insurance business. And it was a group of people that I just found bright, fascinating, interesting. And I thought, I gotta get to know these people.

I wasn’t going into it because I wanted to network with them. I just really, truly wanted to learn from them. And so doing it early and getting the cake, uh, is, has got a tie into our actual story, but I’ll leave that for now. It’s networking when there’s nothing at stake, and that’s all there really is to it.

So those people in that group, in that particular story, have all gone on, and I won’t name them to do spectacular things. And we are peers. So it wasn’t again that I think when some people think about networking, they’re like, I need someone that’s maybe more senior than me, or someone that can help open a door for me.

And that is a certain type of networking. But for this, I was talking about you don’t know the diamonds that are all around you in your own peer set right now. Pay attention to those two, pick the right ones, pay attention to those two because you dunno what doors that might be opened for you 20 years later.

AW: I love that. And I heard you say Shelagh. I’m not just in there to network, like, it’s like, it’s almost like it’s a dirty word, right? I get this question all the time, or this response when I talk about networking, which is like, ugh.] And you’re saying get to know people before you need to. 

SP: Exactly. The last part of your question was about early-stage career versus maybe someone more seasoned.

Hmm. And I would say early in your career, there are lots of opportunities. Get away from your desk or whatever you’re doing. Try to find other groups of people with like interests. Like Baron was saying, people that you can connect with. If you’re at a big company, they usually have employee resource groups.

There’s lots of opportunities to connect with people outside of your actual job and someone more seasoned. Think about it when you’re at a table, and you’re about to debate or try to decide something together. How much fun, easier, more respectful. Will it be if you’ve already built the relationship with them before you get to the situation where you need to actually navigate a, a solution together?

DT: Shelagh’s a hundred percent. Right? And, I get asked an awful lot by people, how do you meet people above your pay grade? The easiest example I can give is politics, and I don’t care if you’re what party you’re with, but if you have volunteer for a political party. You think about other people are volunteering, and a lot of the people volunteering are very important people, and they see you then as a colleague, not someone who wants something from them, but someone in a common cause.

And, you know, you got a chance. I mean, I inadvertently fell into politics and meeting people as a raw kid out of law school. And all of a sudden I’m rubbing shoulders with like Mel Lastman, who’s the mayor of North York at the time, cabinet ministers, and obviously, it’s not most kid. I didn’t know anything.

And, but here you get a chance to meet people way above, and you don’t need, and Shelagh’s right? You’re meeting people now as a volunteer. You’re not asking them for anything. But you know, later in life, that kind of connection. Really, really resonates because. They know you as something else other than something who wants, someone wants something.

They have that camaraderie with you. So I think Shelagh’s a hundred percent right on this because you meet people, but have a genuine interest on what you’re doing and the commonality, whatever the cause is. I mean, don’t be a, you know, a mercenary going in there. You gotta be, someone really cares what’s going on. 

AW: Oh. As you were speaking there, I was, I kept thinking about personal branding, right? So, I’m a little bit obsessed with the topic of personal branding. It’s like you establish what you have in common with a person, but you also make it clear what value you add, what expertise you have, your unique brand, and then magical things will happen.

But you’re not coming in to Shelagh’s point. You’re not coming in with the ask; you’re coming in with the let’s collaborate. Let’s get to know each other. Let’s establish a relationship, and I think a lot of people feel like they don’t know how to do that because ultimately, like, why am I going to this networking event?

Ultimately, maybe it’s to somehow accelerate my career progression and they feel selfish, and they feel salesy and they’ll, they feel icky. So I’m wondering what your take is on this, Baron, in your chapter, I have a quote here. You said, gone are the days of aggressive sales pitches. Pushing your agenda at networking events, right?

Like the, Hey, nice to meet you. Guess what I do? People wanna help and be helped is what you said. 

How exactly do we do this? I mean, it’s one thing to say that we all nod our heads. How do you actually do that?

BM: I think, none of us have time to be sold to. And I think if I’m gonna have value to or add value to interrupt someone’s time if they don’t know me, or to engage someone who does know me and take up their time, how can I be helpful?

How can I provide utility? And that might not be what I’m selling at the time. That might be somebody I know or experience that I can share, but I think being helpful. Has relevance, and I think we only have time for relevance now, and we don’t have time for sales pitches. That’s how I feel when people connect, meet with me, and I tell them what I try and bring to my contacts and conversations.

AW: So I’m gonna interrupt this interview and challenge the listeners to do something right now. Think about who has helped you in your career, and think about how that happened, and think about how you think about that person. In terms of in your network, what role they play versus like LinkedIn, every time I log into LinkedIn, someone has sent me a connection request, and then boom, sales pitch selling me something, selling me something.

Andrea, can I send you a video? Andrea, la la la. I’m like, didn’t ask to be sold to. I thought we were connecting. This is not connecting. Right. It’s become. Well, it’s gone from the networking events, right? The classic cocktail party to now happening on LinkedIn. Uh, I would say an accelerated time, and I love your point, Baron.

It’s not what am I selling? It’s how am I helping for value?

BM: I mean, and just to go back to something David said before, right when I first met David, we of course, career-wise, no parody. Uh, the same today, right? But what David let me do was to his point about volunteerism, he had a couple programs. He said, Hey, do you want to help, you know, with your talent set?

And he let me be in the room. He let me be around the table. He let me learn how to be in the room and then when to talk and when to not talk. And I think more as leaders now, we need to be, remind ourselves of that young people need to be in the room. Right? And the same time, younger professionals, if you are gonna be in the room.

You gotta earn the room. It’s a two-way street, right? A lot of people I talk to want the ball, and then they don’t know what to do with. It was fine, but just speak up. So nobody has to be perfect, but with opportunity comes responsibility, I think. 

SP: You know, and you’re going to an event, you’re, you’re gonna be somewhere where you know, you.

I might wanna have a conversation with someone. I hope that’s everywhere, but I have a couple of back-pocket questions. Just ones that you know, and because I’ll say one of the networking events we were at for this book, a young professional came up to me and said, you’re really approachable, but I have such a hard time, you know, just coming over and starting to talk to someone.

I said, well, how hard was it? So you just did it? So let’s just take that step by step. I mean, the ask was so specific. We ended up having a 20-minute conversation. We’re now connected on LinkedIn, blah blah. So and so. If he came back to me and asked me another question, I’d be all in answering it. So rather.

General like you can you, again, you can smell who said it. I can smell it a mile away. When there’s an attempt to sort of flatter your career and get specific is my point. Like, ask a question and you’re gonna get a way better return on value 

AW: And you can get meta. So I know you’re big on communications Shelagh, as well, and just calling out the awkwardness of the event can actually be the icebreaker of the conversation, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So, we’ve been talking about the in-person networking event and a little bit about networking in the digital era. And I know that, um, all of us here have. Done all of the above, right? We’ve gone to those conferences, and you go, and you fill your glass, and then you turn around and you look at the swarm of strangers that you’ve never met.

And maybe if you’re an extrovert, you’re excited, and if you’re an introvert, you’re horrified, but you go in and you network versus what’s going on on LinkedIn. I’m wondering if you have any advice for  professionals who are young and old again, who are looking to establish a stronger network and meaningful relationships when most of the interactions that they’re experiencing may maybe because they’re working from home or at least they’re hybrid when most of it’s virtual. Anyone can jump in on this one, 

SP: I think for there’s no one-size-fits-all all. So the only advice I would give in that space is figure out how to be authentic. Online, in a teams chat, in a room, whatever, people can smell through non-authentic connections. So practice. Like show some people what, like this is what I, how I might start a conversation on LinkedIn,

What’s your reaction to that? And, so for people that already know you and trust you and know that your intent is good, they’ll likely say, you know what? That’s,  I wouldn’t answer that. If I got that, here’s what I might do. And then I think again. We asked this question about sort of in person in the office versus on screen, and we all learned how to create relationships on screen.

It’s not impossible. I still in the camp where it’s better in person, but I think again, if you can show a little soul is what I call it, it’s a little more interesting through screen than not. 

AW: I have a quick anecdote that I wanna share that you just reminded me of. Shelagh during one of my kids was in college, and there was parents’ weekend, which obviously didn’t happen ’cause we were being confined to our houses.

So they had a Zoom call with like 50 parents or it was open, but there were like 50 parents on the screen. And I had my name Andrea Wojnicki Talk About Talk on the bottom of my screen. And someone sent me an email, and she said, I’m in the Zoom with you. I just googled Talk About Aalk. Looks like you have a very cool company.

Can we set up a meeting and chat? And I was like. Wow, this is happening virtually, and I became great friends with this woman. She’s also an entrepreneur. She lives in Silicon Valley. Like you can do it online. You can use the chat, use private chat, use the public chat, put your LinkedIn profile right in the chat so other people can connect with you.

What other advice do you have for making this happen in a virtual context? Anyone else? 

DT: Well, you know what, uh, I’ll just tell you about Murray Simpson. Murray’s one of our writers, and I didn’t know who Murray was, and he connected with me through LinkedIn, and then like I get a lot of requests to meet, uh, and I can’t do all of them obviously, but.

The way he asked me, like, Baron, he said, you know, eventually we, he said, you know, could I, could you meet with him and give him a little bit of advice on his company? So I looked him up and I actually, I looked up some of the people who were supporting him, which I, I need one half, which helped out. And I said, well, I’m going downtown for a meeting down at the, uh, at Elmers.

Uh, I’ll give you half an hour, you know, in the evening. Have a coffee with me and we ended up talking for three and a half hours. Wow. And we just connected on, like, I talk to Murray now three times a week. He’s like, Baron’s age too. So he is a, you know, we’re a different generation, but we connected on so many different levels, and now we do a lot of stuff together, and here’s somebody I didn’t know at all, and through LinkedIn and connected to.

And of course, I guess what you have to say sometimes is, uh, you can make that connection on, on, on, through. Remotely. But ultimately I think your personality and who you are really closes the sale, 

AW: Your personality and being, as we said at the very beginning, authentic and focused on the other person, as opposed to, and it sounds, I was gonna say, David, your story, it sounds like it was a virtual relationship.

That’s in person, and now it’s hybrid, right? To use the vocabulary that we’re using. 

Okay. I’ve got two more questions for you before we move to the rapid-fire questions, if that’s okay. The first one is regarding follow-ups and thank you notes. I mean, it’s probably a sexist cliche, but your mom always told you to send thank you notes and follow up.

Right? But what are your thoughts on this in the context of networking? 

BM: It’s a passion area for me. I actually just got my new thank-you note. It’s the first gift I got when I started, right before I started my career. Every young person I’ve met with in my career, I suggest a thank you note because, as a marketer, it is the biggest bang for your buck as a marketer.

If you think about it, the price of a stamp. Talking about paper envelope, handwritten analog, and it’s delivered to your audience. I’ve received 14 thank-you notes in my career from young people. I do about 75 to 101 oh ones a year. I’ve hired half of those thank-you note writers. And the other half, I found jobs, if you wanna break through.

It’s the easiest way in the world, and it’s so thoughtful, and it’s a lost art. 

SP: I would say in addition to what Baron’s just said, I think you have to train yourself to be appreciative, and that sounds really weird, I know that, but if it’s transactional, it’s like I just had a meeting and now I need to send a thank you note.

At least you’re gonna do it. But sometimes it can feel like a chore, or I’m not really sure what I’m gonna say. I think what I found is I had to sort of change my whole, I am an appreciative, grateful person to begin with, but I’m like, how do I get in the habit of every day looking for things I appreciate?

And that’s something I talk about in the book, and it’s different from a gratitude journal. It’s not the things I’m grateful for in life, of which sunlight streaming through right now. It’s a kind word from somebody in the office. It’s the crunchiness of a fresh apple. It’s something that’s brought me pure joy, and so I do five things I appreciate in the last 24 hours.

Every single morning. I force myself to write those down. And then I’m not allowed to repeat anything. My dog would be on the list every time if I did. So I have to look for things to be appreciative about and what that’s done, and I didn’t realize it was gonna happen. It’s now two years in that I’ve been doing this, is I look for things to be appreciative about, whether it’s a conversation.

With somebody, a hap, you know, a happenstance meeting in the kitchen, something that one of my teammates says to me that really touches me and I make sure they know. I say, thank you because you made my list today. You made me happy. You made me just a pure spark of joy. And that practice has made me more likely to do exactly what Baron just said to do, which is write a thank-you note.

Let someone know what they did that was meaningful for me. 

DT: Shelagh, that makes you more attractive to everyone else as well. That positivity just attracts people to you. And I think that’s what people need to understand. Look, I can tell you a quick story here. I’m working at home just before Christmas, a few years ago, and I got the FM radio on, listen to the local FM station.

And they had these two ladies come on, uh, talking about this women’s shelter. Locally, and I really liked them. I just listened to ’em. These things, the house was sincere, and they’re trying to raise $500 in an hour. So about 15 minutes before the program ended, I called them and said, how you doing?

Said, we’re doing pretty good. We raised the $200. And I thought, well, geez. So I said, I’ll give you the $300. And so I gave him the $300. Then I get a beautiful note from these people and I thought, well that’s kind of nice now because of the note they sent me, my wife and I are that, that’s our major charity we support out here now.

And, but it’s because they were thoughtful enough to send me a note, and I really appreciate it. It’s a small gesture, but boy, we remember these things as Bar said. 

AW: That’s a such a beautiful story, David, that really. Illustrates the point that I sometimes share with people, which is if you don’t follow up after you meet with someone, you may as well have not made the connection at all.

Right? It’s closing the loop and the thank you note is a beautiful reminder and your reinforcing how important or how grateful you are. I wanted to ask you, Shelagh, do people know about your practice of writing down the five things every day. 

SP: I tell people now, um, I try to inspire other people to do it because I, I honestly think it changed my outlook on life doing this.

So, um, I just am a happier person, but I was unhappy before. But it’s just, you know, looking for things that make you smile. And it was actually in a podcast I listened to. A couple of years back, and again, they sort of unpacked the difference between gratitude and appreciation, and I thought appreciation is just way easier.

It’s way on. It’s on the fly for things to make you happy, not for things to argue about. It’s. A ripple effect, literally. 

AW: So one of the, my past, uh, podcast guest experts is Michele Bailey, who wrote a book called The Currency of Gratitude, and she talks about these benefits of sending a thank you.

You’re closing the loop, you’re reinforcing the relationship, you’re demonstrating your values and your personality. There’s like no downside. In fact, there’s like a whole positive ripple. So, here is the last question that I wanna ask before we get to the three rapid fire question, is that I’m hoping that this podcast episode, this conversation itself will be a ripple and if someone listening, an individual listener takes action after hearing this episode, what is the one thing that you hope they’ll do?

This is your opportunity for a very brief last word, or I’ll give you a sentence. Okay. About what you hope people will do differently after listening to this Baron? Yeah, 

BM: And that’s a great question. I would hope that I’m gonna do a two-parter. One is that maybe we’ve made it a little less scary to reach out to that person you wanna reach out to.

And two, reach out with purpose, right? So the biggest gift you can give is someone’s is your time. If you’re gonna ask for that gift. The least we can do is say thank you about the gift, right? So that’s the full circle. I love what you’re talking about here. So can say thank you in a number of ways you can make donations.

You can tell people how great people are, but the least you can do is say thank you. And it’s so inexpensive. And sadly, right now, a very easy way to look like the tallest, most wonderful person in the room. So I think. Don’t be afraid. ’cause you’ll be surprised how many people will say yes and pick up the phone and don’t ignore the amount of work it is for someone to make time for you, ’cause it’s extremely valuable. Okay. Shelagh? 

SP: I would say flip the script. Get out of this. I mean, it sounds strange for someone who’s written a chapter on networking, forget about networking. Try and get. Your own instinct, your own internal muscle around building human connection, every opportunity you get.

So again, it’s not to Baron’s point, it doesn’t have to be a scary thing if you are just focused on expanding your community in the moments where you’re not actually even trying to build a network, just think about it differently. You need to change the I have to, to, I want to. You’re not gonna be successful.

AW: That’s powerful. And before you need it, to your previous point, David.

DT: You know, I talk to a lot of senior executives, and they have trouble networking, too. And one of the things I say to them is mentor. Because mentoring’s a two-way street. And it’s interesting how many people over the years I’ve, I’ve mentored, and years later they’ve become very successful and they always ask me if they can help me out.

I’m not really after anything right now. I’m doing too much stuff right now. But it’s interesting when you’re helping others, they remember that. Remember you first of all, anytime they more need more advice or help with something or new, new project. So it’s a two-way street and I think it’s being always, again, as we talked earlier on, it’s better to give than receive and to have that degree of POS positivity in what you do.

AW: Fantastic. Okay. Are the three of you ready for the three? Gosh, I love this. The power of three everywhere. The three rapid-fire questions. We are gonna make this rapid fire. Okay. The first question, I think it was Baron or maybe David, who already kind of answered this on behalf of the group, but the first question is, are you an introvert or an extrovert? David? 

DT: Uh, introvert. 

AW: Shelagh 

SP: Introvert or Gambivert. Apparently, there’s a new category, introverts that like socializing. That’s me. So, uh, or extrovert that are, or more thoughtful, but I’m more the introvert who likes socializing. 

BM: Okay. Baron introvert. I wanna be alone with my thoughts. Really? Okay. Yeah. I thought I knew you, Baron.

Wow. If I have a preference, I love people. I just love them over there. Yeah. 

AW: Okay. I know this is rapid fire, but I just wanna say, Shelagh, I didn’t wanna, um, trivialize your answer. I ask introvert or extrovert to be provocative. The truth is most of us are ambiverts. We need social time to fill us up, and we also need solitude to fill us up.

DT: So, I’m a professional likes being alone in this farm. Yeah. 

AW: Nice. Okay, next question. I actually can’t wait to hear this. I’m gonna ask this in reverse order. What. Is or are your communication pet peeves? What infuriates you about the way other people communicate? Baron? 

BM: People who spell names wrong.

AW: Ooh. Too many R’s and not 

BM: enough T’s. Right? You know, I know it’s not the easiest name, but I didn’t ask you to reach out, so just spellcheck. That’s all just details. Those things I find silly. And the no thank you is, uh, I think intolerable obviously. I’m on the record. 

AW: Can you, sorry. I know this is rapid fire. What do you mean the don’t thank you.  

BM: You gotta say thank you afterwards, after a phone call. I’m not saying, Hey, thank you. Don’t say, yeah, that’s, that’s a no-go for me. Okay, Shelagh, 

SP: I’m just gonna tack on Aarons, and then I’ll answer the question. I have two first names, right? So. And Paul, please trust that I know the order to put them in, and do not send me a message to Paul because I get it all the time because it’s a more familiar name, like.

Have a look at how, what the person’s LinkedIn profile is. The chances are if they’ve got this far in life, they don’t have their name in the wrong order. So that would be, that would be my ask is don’t call me Paul. My communication, uh, pet peeve is actually an evident lack of curiosity. Someone is speaking to you, and they’re just speaking to get their point across, or they just wanna be told what it is you need from them or, and you know, if you’re as a communicator, if you are not curious, you are not thinking about what your audience is thinking about. And so in, in terms of growing communicators, I love stumbling across curious people, and that’s what we need more of. 

AW: Amazing. David. 

DT: Yeah. I hate it when people don’t say what they’re after. I’ve got a great interesting idea for you.

I mean, tell me what do you want my help with to begin with? Secondly, I hate lazy people, so, you know, like. Someone who on LinkedIn will say to me, what do you do? My history is on my profile. Just read the stupid thing. And that automatically just, you know, thinking, well, I’m gonna delete that. 

AW: Yeah. Oh, I’m with you. The stupid questions that people try to open with on LinkedIn, it’s like, come on, it’s all there. I’d love to hear more about what you do as you look at my profile. 

Okay. Question number three. Is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending lately? Shelagh. Diary of a CEO. Oh yeah, I was just listening to it in the car.

SP: So I, again, there’s a, I, this is rapid fire, so I won’t get into the tons of examples that I had that are so relevant to the conversation we’re having. But there was an episode on the small things and being able to remember the small things about people, and it’s a really interesting differentiation that I don’t think I’d put my mind to.

Before, so not just their name, what they do, whatever else, but a year later, you remember their child’s name, or you remember something about the story that they told you. And most people have to write that down. So that’s again, being intentional. If you meet someone, try to remember the small details, ’cause you will stand out if you can do that. 

AW: Yes, people are. Really flattered when you remember personal things about them. I know speaking from experience, being on both sides of that equation, I think Diary of a CEO is really popular, and I just thought about this today when I was listening to the podcast.

It is today’s Tim Ferriss podcast. ‘Cause Tim Ferriss used to interview really successful people and try to pull in like what are the skills that we can learn? And I think Diary of CEOs doing the same thing. Baron, is there a podcast or a book that you find yourself recommending? 

BM: Yes, both actually. Uh, the book I’m loving right now is a book called The Four Cs, the Four Conversations by Blair Ends, who I think is the best writer of developing how to sell expertise.

Certs just amazingly smart. And then the podcast I’m listening to is a marketing podcast Right now, best story wins. The podcast. Podcast. So just talk to me every week how, uh, different brand leaders come on and break down their challenges. Uh, yeah, motivating, motivating for somebody in my profession.

AW: Fantastic. I’m gonna leave links to those in the show notes. And David, 

DT: A book I got years ago when I was in the board of, uh, Tet before, uh, uh, it was bought up by Omar years ago. The CEO give everyone on board a, a copy of Who Moved My Cheese and the simple book about. Learning a lesson from everything you go through, whether it’s positive or negative.

And that’s very important for all of us. And Baron and I, oh, before the pandemic, were asked to talk to a, a big pharmaceutical company on our greatest failures because I’ve learned more lessons from my greatest failures, and I’ve had some spectacular ones than I have about successes. And so the I idea of all this is maintain that positivity. Learn from everything you undergo. 

AW: Be humble. Right. Okay. I’m gonna leave links to the books and the podcast that you mentioned in the show notes. I’m also going to leave links to your LinkedIn profiles and any other connections that you wanna leave with the listeners. And I just wanna end by saying thank you so much, all three of you, for sharing your unique perspectives on the ripple effect Networking for success. Thank you, David. Thank you, Shelagh. Thank you, Baron.

What a great conversation. I love that. Okay, here are my top three takeaways from Baron, Shelagh, and David. First, start networking long before you need something. As Shelagh says, the early bird gets the cake. I love the metaphors. Shelagh, reach out early. When you’re simply curious or maybe when you’re grateful, not just when you need a favor.

Second, remember, no one wants to be sold to. Let me say that again. Nobody wants to be sold to you can do better. So approach people with curiosity and authenticity. As Baron suggested. A great way to start is by saying, I’m not asking you for anything other than a conversation. Love it. Okay. Third, say thank you.

Close the loop. Communicate gratitude. A small gesture of appreciation, like a quick note or a message, can make a lasting impression. Gratitude builds trust and strengthens relationships. And that’s it. Please take a moment to subscribe, to talk about, talk on whatever app you’re listening to, or maybe you’re watching us on YouTube.

Click subscribe or follow. Thanks for listening and talk soon.

The post The RIPPLE Effect: NETWORKING for Success with Baron Manett, Shelagh Paul, and David Tsubouchi (ep.202) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Your out-of-office email response is an easy and effective way to communicate who you are as a leader.

In this short episode, communication coach Dr. Andrea Wojnicki explains how to craft your OOO email response to reinforce your professional identity. You’ll also learn the four do’s and don’ts: be specific about dates and coverage, be consistent while you’re away, show personality without sarcasm, and don’t overshare.

Listen for practical examples you can copy in minutes and start using today.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

Andrea Wojnicki: An out-of-office message might seem trivial, but it can be a powerful way to reinforce your personal brand if you take advantage of the opportunity. 

Well. It’s the holiday season. First, there’s American Thanksgiving, and then the December craziness starts. We’ve got Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, the winter solstice, and of course, New Year’s Eve.

I hope you’re able to take some time away from work to refresh and rejuvenate, and be with family and friends. I also hope you’re able to manage your out-of-office status. Have you ever considered that your out-of-office email responder is an opportunity for you to communicate and reinforce your professional identity and your leadership status?

Listen. I know you’re really busy, especially this time of year, so here’s my promise to you. In this short episode, you’re gonna learn some ideas that will help you easily elevate your personal brand, all while you’re physically away from the office. Let’s do this. Let’s do this. Let’s Talk About Talk.

Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. If you’re a longtime listener, welcome back, and thank you for listening. If you’re a new listener, let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach here at Talk About Talk, where I coach ambitious professionals like you so you can communicate with confidence and ultimately achieve your career goals.

You can learn more about everything we do at Talk About Talk, including private coaching, masterclasses, and corporate workshops, if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com, and there are plenty of free resources for you there as well. Alright, let’s get into this.

Like I said, I know you’re busy always, but especially this time of year, and if you’re like most people, you don’t give a second thought to your out of office status, out of sight, out of mind. Well, not quite. Here’s the big insight. Spending a little bit of time managing your out-of-office status can go a long way in reinforcing your professional identity.

Let’s talk first about making some tweaks to your out-of-office email responder, and then I’m gonna take you through four dos and don’ts about how to manage your time away. Okay. First, your email responder. This is also relevant for Slack or Teams or whatever messaging platform you use. If there’s an opportunity for you to customize your message, that’s what we’re talking about here.

Your out-of-office response can communicate so much about your leadership style. I would call this an under-leveraged communication opportunity where it’s really so easy for you to reinforce your brand. This insight originally came up for me in a recent private coaching session that I had with a brilliant client.

We were talking about the touch points that shape our professional identity, and she mentioned how she saw a very thoughtful out-of-office reply, and it made her pause and think. This really says something about who they are as a leader. And you know what? She’s right. An out-of-office message might seem trivial, but it can be a powerful way to reinforce your personal brand if you take advantage of the opportunity.

Partly, I think, because people aren’t expecting it, we kind of expect the generic email, I’m away, and my response will be delayed. I’ll get back to you after I return. Hmm. This is a missed opportunity. So here’s what I do instead. First. Identify what part of your personal brand or your professional identity that you wanna emphasize.

Do you wanna emphasize your thought leadership? Your people leadership, your strategic thinking. Maybe you wanna role model boundary setting for your internal team, or maybe you want to empower them while you’re away. 

This first step is critical. Ask yourself, what’s the one message that you wanna reinforce?

And then once you’ve identified this main theme, go into your email settings and craft your out-of-office responder accordingly. Make sure you reinforce that theme that you chose. Here are some examples. If you are an empowering leader, you might say something like, I’m out of the office, but my team’s got this.

If you’re a strategic thinker, you might add a comment about taking time to reflect, refocus, and strategize. If you’re a boundary-setting leader, you could say, I’m offline modeling boundaries and making space for the big stuff. And if you’re a thought leader, you could say. In the meantime, while you’re waiting for my response, here’s an article or a link to a podcast episode that I think you’re gonna find helpful.

You get the point. Just adding one sentence can have a big impact. I hope this inspires you to think more strategically about reinforcing your leadership style, or you could say your professional identity, through your out-of-office response. 

And now I wanna follow up with a few do’s and don’ts. I hope you’ll consider these four pointers when you’re writing your out-of-office email responder and as you’re managing your time away. Yes, there are four more than just the power of three. 

The first one is do be specific about the dates that you’re gonna be gone. And the coverage that you’ve set up, share the date that you’re gonna return, and name the person to contact with urgent needs. And here’s a bonus tip: don’t be tempted to overpromise regarding when you’ll be able to respond.

If you’re coming back on January 2nd, don’t promise a response on that day. You know, it’s always more overwhelming when you get back than you anticipated. Am I right? So don’t over promise, rather under promise and overdeliver. This isn’t just about communication skills; this is life advice. Okay? 

My second suggestion is to be clear about coverage and be consistent. If you’ve identified someone who’s looking after urgent things when you’re away, then go and let them do their job. I know, trust me, it’s tempting to jump in and help out, but imagine how this feels to the person you’ve designated to step in for you. They can feel frustrated if your out-of-office responder says that you’re away, but you’re still actively communicating with them and managing through things.

It’s also confusing to everyone. You work with your team and your customers, or your clients. So be clear about coverage and responsibilities, and then follow through and be consistent. So now we’ve covered the first two pointers. One. Do be specific about the dates that you’re gone and the coverage that you’ve set up. And two, be clear about the coverage and be consistent. 

Number three. Show some personality. You could add a joke or something that’s relevant to your firm or your brand, but do be careful. Don’t assume that people will get your sarcasm or your quirky sense of humor. Remember, your out-of-office response goes to everyone, including prospective clients, customers, and people that you haven’t met yet.

My suggestion is that you write your out of office responder with some personality, and then ask yourself, if someone read this who didn’t know me, would they be offended? Would they be confused? If yes, then edit it. Remember, sarcasm never does well in an email. Okay? 

Now, the last, the fourth pointer, do not overshare. Sure, a little personality is great, but the reader does not need to read your full vacation itinerary, and you don’t wanna come across as bragging. I’m off on my private jet to the Riviera, where we’re meeting some friends on their yacht. Ugh, do not do that. And also with regards to oversharing, including your full itinerary, could pose a security risk.

Oh, Andrea’s whole family is away and her house is empty until January 2nd. Excellent. Let’s plan the heist now. No, no, no, no. Okay, so these are my four pointers for you. One, do be specific about the dates that you’ll be gone and the coverage that you’ve set up. Two, be clear about that coverage and be consistent. Three, show some personality, and four, do not overshare. 

I hope that this brief episode has inspired you to customize your out-of-office email responder in a way that will benefit you. Here’s the thing. The most effective leaders out there communicate with clarity and intention, even when they’re not at their desks.

Your team is watching your colleagues, and customers do notice. This is your chance to model behavior, demonstrate credibility, and yes, show a little personality. So take a few minutes to craft something that reinforces your leadership style. Then your email response can do the work for you while you’re off enjoying your time with family and friends.

And speaking of family and friends, please forward this episode. It’s Talk About Talk episode number 201. Share it with your family and friends who might find it helpful. And now I hope you go off and enjoy your time away. Talk soon.

The post How to Craft an Out-of-Office Message That Reinforces Your Leadership Brand (ep. 201) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

What makes the most successful leaders stand out? The way they communicate.

In this special 200th episode, communication coach Dr. Andrea Wojnicki shares the three ways that leaders communicate differently based on years of executive coaching, workshops, and research.

You’ll learn how to:

Andrea also reveals the Top 3 most downloaded Talk About Talk episodes of all time, each one packed with tools to boost your communication confidence and impact.

If you’re serious about leadership, this episode will show you exactly how to elevate your presence and influence through communication.

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

Ep.169: Communicate with Confidence: 

Ep.154: 5 Quick Fixes to Improve Your Communication: 

Ep.170: Introductions – How to Introduce Yourself: 

Andrea Wojnicki: Successful leaders are focused on intent and precision in their communication. By intent, I mean that successful leaders don’t just speak to fill the air. Every word, question, and story has a purpose, whether it’s to inspire, clarify, or align. 

Well, hello there. I have an announcement. Talk About Talk is 200. This is our 200th episode. Several people have asked me how we’ll commemorate this 200th episode. Yes, this is a big deal. Andrea, will you list your top 10 episodes to date, maybe your top 10 learnings, or Andrea, we know you’re a big fan of the Power of three. Will you list your top three episodes? Sure, I can do that, but I can also do even better.

In this short episode, you’re gonna learn how the most successful leaders communicate differently than everyone else. Over the last several years, I’ve coached hundreds and hundreds of executives, thousands. If you count the folks in the communication skills workshops that I’ve led. And based on my years of coaching ambitious executives, plus the podcast interviews and my research, I have some unique insight into what distinguishes the most successful leaders from everyone else.

These are the insights that you wanna hear. If you are hungry to become one of these successful leaders. So I’m gonna share with you three ways that your communication must evolve if you plan to ascend to a position of leadership. And yes, of course, I’ll also share the top three Talk About Talk episodes of all time.

Are you ready? Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. If you’re a regular talk about talk listener, welcome back, and thank you for listening. If you’re a new listener, welcome. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, please. Just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, and if you’re ambitious and keen to improve your communication skills to help you achieve your career goals, well, you are in the right place.

And whether you’re a longtime listener or a first-time listener, I encourage you to check out the TalkAboutTalk.com website, where you can learn more about what we do here at Talk About Talk, including corporate workshops, private coaching, and online courses. And a free weekly communication skills newsletter. You can learn more on the website.

Okay. As I said, people have been asking me for a while now, for several months, how we will commemorate this 200th episode. Yes, it is an important milestone, and to be honest, I have to say I am very proud. And I have this idea that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for a while. It’s this idea of focusing on how successful leaders communicate differently than everyone else.

This is a topic that I don’t really hear a lot about. I don’t hear other people talking about it, but it’s critical, really. If you’re a middle or a senior manager, actually, whatever level you’re at. If you’re ambitious and you wanna become a leader with strong communication skills, what would you be doing differently?

Today, I mean differently from the junior folks and even differently from the other middle and senior level folks who aren’t quite as successful. I can tell you exactly what you’d be doing differently. So I encourage you to sit back and take this in as a private coaching session. Listen to my three suggestions, evaluate them for yourself, and decide where you can get some traction in your quest to become seen as a successful leader.

Alright, here goes the first way that successful leaders communicate differently from everyone else: Instead of focusing on speaking up in meetings and filling the air, you focus on communicating with intent and precision. Let me tell you how this first became apparent to me. I noticed that many of the more junior folks in my corporate workshops would share their struggles to speak up in meetings.

And let me tell you so. I can relate. I remember when I was in my twenties, a recent business school graduate, sitting around the boardroom table with my boss and her boss and his boss, and I was so focused on speaking up and saying the right thing. I remember making a rule for myself that I had to speak up at least once in every meeting.

I also volunteered to give formal presentations whenever the opportunity arose. It was all about speaking up and getting airtime. Have you ever noticed, though, that successful leaders never struggle with this idea of speaking up? In fact, in my experience in coaching, it seems like it’s quite the opposite.

Successful leaders are focused on intent and precision in their communication. By intent, I mean that successful leaders don’t just speak to fill the air. Every word, question, and story has a purpose, whether it’s to inspire, clarify, or align. And by precision, I mean both brevity and clarity. I almost never hear more junior folks or less successful folks asking me about communicating with precision.

But almost all the senior and successful folks highlight this as a key area where they wanna focus. Communicating with precision is a skill that they know they must attain. Now, before I get to the next point, I just wanna make something perfectly clear here. If you’re a junior person and you’re still earning your stripes, you’re still demonstrating the technical expertise, and you haven’t yet established your leadership brand, then by all means speak up.

But if you’re in a formal leadership position in an organization, then I encourage you to shift your focus to communicating with intent and precision. So that’s the first thing. Successful leaders are less focused on speaking up and more focused on communicating with intent and precision. 

The second way that successful leaders communicate differently than everyone else is their next-level listening. More junior people and maybe also the less successful senior folks. They might listen intently to their boss, but it’s only to know what their boss is looking for. They might also listen passively in meetings, politely waiting for their turn to talk. Meanwhile, successful leaders listen to understand, not to respond.

They listen deeply for insights. They reflect back on what they hear, and they ask clarifying questions. The successful leaders I coach fully understand that they do not know it all. They understand that they have to listen deeply to their team members so that they can be well-informed and informed enough to make important decisions. So that’s the second thing. Let’s call it next-level listening. 

The third and last way that successful leaders communicate differently from everyone else is their ability to project confidence and credibility without arrogance. I’ve noticed a real pattern here when it comes to seniority and confidence.

The more junior, early-career folks are typically focused on boosting their confidence. They talk about suffering from imposter syndrome, which, by the way is not a bad thing. This relates to the confidence of speaking up, doesn’t it? Which I just mentioned early in our careers we’re more likely to feel anxious and nervous.

We know that building confidence is key. I rarely hear this from more senior folks, and particularly from these successful leaders. It’s like over the course of our careers, we evolve from anxious and nervous to more confident and sure. Some people tip the scales, and they become arrogant. These arrogant folks are the close-minded ones who think they know everything.

But in my experience, this is rare. I can count the arrogant folks that I’ve coached. On one hand, interestingly, these three or four people all knew they were perceived as arrogant, but they deny it. Andrea, my boss, said that I can come across as arrogant, but really, I’m not arrogant. Okay, so here’s the thing to test.

If you’re arrogant, if you worry that you might come across as arrogant. Then in all likelihood you’re not. It’s those folks who don’t worry about arrogance, who are arrogant, and if you’ve been told that you come across as arrogant, then, like I said, you probably are one thing I know for sure. Confidence is key to credible leadership.

We are inspired to follow the confident, credible folks. I like to think of it as a continuum. On one end, we have paralyzing anxiety, the nervous folks. That is not good. On the other extreme, we have the arrogant folks. Also not good. In the middle, though, we have this beautiful equilibrium of perfect confidence.

This is where successful leaders sit. And do you know what their secret is? What is it that keeps them at this perfect equilibrium? Not nervous and anxious, and not arrogant. It’s their growth mindset. Their focus on learning. If you’re focused on growing and learning, your anxiety will dissipate. And if you’re growing and you’re open-minded, you’re definitely not arrogant.

So if you struggle with confidence, no matter what level or stage you are in your career, I encourage you to shift your mindset to focus on growing and learning. This means seeking feedback, truly listening, seeking growth and improvement. Ultimately, this can be what propels you to successful leader status, and that’s the third and last way that successful leaders communicate differently from everyone else.

We covered three, of course. Three. Do you remember what they are? The three ways that successful leaders communicate differently than everyone else are: number one. Instead of focusing on speaking up in meetings and filling the air, successful leaders communicate with intent and precision. Two successful leaders are next-level listeners instead of passively listening.

They listen to truly understand. And three successful leaders project confidence and credibility, and they maintain that beautiful equilibrium in terms of their confidence through what their growth mindset. Now that I’ve identified these ways that successful leaders communicate differently than everyone else, I see evidence in all three of them all the time.

So I thought I had to share them with you. My challenge to you is to evaluate yourself on these three dimensions and identify where you can focus so you can get yourself one step closer to successful leader status. 

In case you’re wondering what the top three most downloaded episodes are of the 200, talk about talk episodes released to date.

I’m really excited to share them with you now. Number three is called. Communicate with Confidence. Part I, preparing to communicate with confidence. It’s episode number 169. In this episode, I share strategies to help you prepare for those anxiety-inducing scenarios like giving a speech or leading a big meeting.

I also share some of my own disasters on stage, and I think that might be one reason why that episode is so popular. The second most downloaded episode of all time is episode 154, called Five Quick Fixes to Improve Your Communication. Yes, it’s five, not just three. And yes, there’s a quick payout for listening to this one.

I cover five things you can do that will make a big difference in your communication. The number one most downloaded talk about talk episode of all Time is an early episode that quickly became and remains the most downloaded episode. I’ve also rereleased this episode a few times, most recently as episode 170, 1-7-0, so you don’t need to scroll all the way down to the early episodes.

This episode is called Introductions. How to Introduce Yourself. Why is this one so popular? Well, a few reasons. First of all, I know most of us feel some anxiety regarding our self-introduction, and with good reason. First impressions are important. This three-point framework that you’ll learn in this episode is easy to remember.

It’s customizable in any context, and most importantly. It works. I hope you’ll listen to all three of these popular episodes. I’ll leave the titles and the episode numbers for these top three episodes at the top of the show notes so you can easily access them and listen to them. If you haven’t done so already, and whether you’re listening on Spotify or Apple, or maybe you’re watching Talk About Talk on YouTube.

Please subscribe when you hit subscribe. It helps us get traction, and it helps you make sure that you don’t miss an episode. And that’s it for Talk About Talk episode number 200. Thanks again for listening. I hope you continue to find this podcast helpful in your quest to improve your communication skills and accelerate your career. Here’s to the next 200 episodes. Talk soon.

The post Top 3 Communication Skills of Exceptional Leaders (ep. 200) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

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.