Talk About Talk - Executive & Leadership Communication Skills

Leadership blockers, hidden beliefs, and the stories we tell ourselves, these are the forces quietly shaping how you lead, and most leaders never examine them.

Executive coach and author Muriel M. Wilkins joins Andrea to discuss her new book, Leadership Unblocked, and the seven hidden beliefs that can sabotage even the most successful leaders:

I need to be involved

I know I’m right

I cannot make a mistake

I need it done now

If I can do it, you can do it

I can’t say no

I don’t belong here

You will learn the difference between habitual behaviors and the beliefs driving them, why self-awareness is the first step to unblocking yourself, and the three questions to ask whenever you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or like things are harder than they should be. Muriel also opens up about her own experience with toxic productivity and what it took to loosen her grip on an identity that was no longer serving her.

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CONNECT WITH MURIEL

🔗  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/murielwilkins/

🌐 Website: https://www.murielwilkins.com/

📖 Read Leadership Unblocked: https://amzn.to/3Ro0hQB

🎧 Listen to Muriel’s podcast, Coaching Real Leaders: CoachingRealLeaders.com

📖 Own the Room by Amy Jen Su and Muriel M. Wilkins – https://amzn.to/4datrLD

TRANSCRIPTION

Muriel M. Wilkins: So many things are out of our control, and it’s okay. That’s life. You know, that’s life. I can’t drive the weather story today, you know? But I can drive the story I tell myself about the weather. That’s the difference, and how I drive that story about the weather will change how I experience it without the weather changing.

Andrea Wojnicki: That was Muriel Wilkins, author of Leadership Unblocked. I recently attended a book talk where I saw Muriel talk about her new book, and I decided right there and then that I need to get her on the Talk About Talk podcast. Her book is called Leadership Unblocked. In this book, she shares seven hidden blockers or hidden beliefs that can sabotage your success as a leader.

In the conversation that you’re about to hear, you’re gonna learn how to identify your blockers and what to do about them. 

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

Let me introduce myself. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and I’m an executive communication coach here at Talk About Talk. I coach ambitious leaders and aspiring leaders to communicate with confidence and credibility so they can make an impact and achieve their career goals.

Please check out the website at talkabouttalk.com to learn more about everything we do. That’s TalkAboutTalk.com.

The Hidden Beliefs That Sabotage Leadership Success 

Before we get into the interview with Muriel, I want to share the seven blockers with you. So here’s what I want you to do. If you can, close your eyes. Not if you’re driving, obviously, or even if you’re walking, but the point is, I encourage you to take a breath and focus. I’m gonna read the seven blockers.

These are beliefs that you might have, and some of them might be strong beliefs, and some might be things that come up for you a lot. So as I read them, I want you to compare them to each other and ask yourself, “Does this resonate for me?” I can tell you for myself that many of these blockers personally resonate.

Okay. The first blocker is, I need to be involved. Number two: I know I’m right. Number three: I cannot make a mistake. Number four: I need it done now. Number five: If I can do it, you can do it. Number six: I can’t say no. And number seven: I don’t belong here. That’s it. That’s the seven. You can find them listed in the show notes. I encourage you to take a look at them there. 

About the Guest: Executive Coach and Leadership Expert Muriel Wilkins 

Now, let me introduce Muriel. Muriel M. Wilkins is the founder and CEO of the leadership advisory firm Paravis Partners. She’s a sought-after, trusted advisor and executive coach to high-performing C-suite and senior executives who turn to her for help in navigating their most complex challenges with clarity and confidence.

She’s the co-author of another book called Own the Room, and now the more recently published Leadership Unblocked. She holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Here’s Muriel. Thank you, Muriel, so much for being here to talk with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about Leadership Unblocked.

MW: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here with you. 

Why Successful Behaviors Can Become Leadership Liabilities 

AW: So as I was reading your book and listening to you speak, it occurred to me that each of these blockers can be seen as strengths, but also as weaknesses or as blocks. So right out of the gates, I want to ask you what I think might be a tough question. How can an individual, a leader, tell the difference between what might be a useful habit for them in the past that’s helped them succeed and a belief that has now become a liability or a blocker?

MW: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think that’s the question, right? You have to first pause and ask yourself, “Is this being helpful to me in this context, or is it hindering me?” That’s how you figure it out. But in order to be able to figure that out, you have to be aware of what these beliefs might be. And I do think there’s a difference between, you know, habitual beliefs and habitual behaviors.

Most of us tend to focus on habitual behaviors, which is what we do. So if I interrupt, for example, that is a behavior, it’s an action, and it might be quite habitual. But what drives that behavior is a belief. Underlying it is a belief. So in order to even change, uh, or move on, or adapt from a habitual behavior that might not be serving you well, you would be well-served to look at what is the belief that might be driving it, and that, in fact, what is probably a habitual belief that I wouldn’t say is a liability, it’s just more that it’s not helping you in this particular moment.

AW: So let’s use that one as an example. Imagine, and I coach plenty of folks that tell me that they really want to cut down on interrupting, especially when they are promoted into the most senior leadership positions. They want to make sure that their team feels safe to share their ideas, and they’re not going to be cut off by their boss, and so on.

So imagine you have a behavior like interrupting that you want to change. You start to ask yourself What belief is causing me to do this? Can you kinda peel the onion on what that would look like? 

MW: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so when I coach clients, and they are like, “Yeah, I kinda would need to tone it down with the interrupting,” maybe that came up in their feedback, it’s something that they wanna change.

Also, I’ll say like, think about, you know, the last time that you interrupted in a meeting, what was going through your mind at that time, right? Like, what were you thinking or assuming either about yourself or the other person or about the situation? And it might take, you know, more to kinda like peel the onion around that, but eventually they typically get to something like, “Well, I already knew what the answer was,” right?

“So why did we need to keep going around and around and around? I know what the answer is.” Or it might be, “I just need it to get done.” And so there’s a level of urgency that they are prioritizing over the conversation. So that saying, “I need it done now,” which is one of the seven hidden blockers and beliefs that I explore in the book, and the other is, “I know the answer” or “I know I’m right,” those are beliefs.

They’re the narrative that we tell ourselves about the situation that at times are helpful. You know, there are times when you have to say, “I, I know the answer. Let’s go.” And then there are other times where it runs counter to what you’re trying to do, i.e., if you’re trying to build a conversation where everyone else is speaking up and you kind of want them to come up the ans- with the answer, well, then having in the back of your mind, “I know the answer.

I know the answer. I know the answer,” and leading with that doesn’t necessarily help. So this is much more around what are the beliefs that you’re leading with, rather than, you know, you shouldn’t have these beliefs ever. 

AW: So as you’re describing that, Muriel, I was thinking two things. I was thinking this takes an exceptional level of self-awareness, right?

Thinking almost like premeditating what the words are gonna be or what the behavioral response is gonna be, and then forcing yourself to pause and think about what’s motivating it. That takes incredible self-control and self-awareness. The other thing that I’m thinking, I’ve got the list of the seven blockers in front of me, and when you read them on a piece of paper, you kinda think, “Yeah, okay.”

But when I hear you describe them, and certainly when I read them in the book, I was like, “Oh, she’s talking to me.” Ah. ‘Cause I know all of those things I do and have done. 

MW: As do I. 

The Seven Patterns That Keep Leaders Stuck 

AW: Yeah. So even the way you’ve worded them, like I know they come from your real experience in coaching individual executives.

So, of the seven, what are the two or three most common hidden blockers that you see? Yeah, the ones that most people probably experience and should tone down 

MW: To be honest, like, uh, uh, the seven are the ones that are most common in my experience, right? I looked at a sample of 300 leaders that I had worked with over the span of the past 20 years, cross-sectors, cross-gender, cross a lot of things, and tried to identify, number one, where were there common beliefs that got in the way of these leaders being able to lead in a sustainable way, lead at scale, or lead in a way that didn’t really drive a lot of the frustration and complexity that they were feeling.

And so the number one question was, were there any commonalities? And what I found is, yes, there were commonalities. And then I looked at, okay, well, which ones are the most popular ones? Which ones tend to come up more frequently? And the seven that I offer are the ones. Now, I did not rank them based on the seven.

I will say that folks sort of see themselves similar to the way that you have, that there’s a number of them that resonate, you know, f- with them. I think that, you know, certainly the one that seems most familiar to people is the, “I need it done now,” right? Because they’re constantly feeling this level of urgency, this level of needing to be productive, and essentially is what leads to really feeling burnout, right?

I think these days, ’cause it’s all very contextual, often. So these days, what I’m finding a lot of is, you know, people are experiencing or, or calling what they’re experiencing, you know, complex. Like, if I read one more post where it’s like dealing with complexity and uncertainty. 

AW: Yeah. What’s not complex or uncertain?

MW: Exactly, and complex is as complex as we make it. You know, I mean, that’s the way I think about it. And so in with that ecosystem and the way that sort of people are experiencing a lot of things right now, everything from the economy to geopolitical to AI, right? It just feels like, “Oh my God, this is overwhelming.”

What I’m finding is that the belief of “I can’t make a mistake” is coming up a lot, right? So when we’re faced with uncertainty, the belief of “I can’t make a mistake” actually pops its head up for very good reason. It’s trying to protect us, and it doesn’t necessarily serve us when you’re in a leadership capacity because part of what you’re doing as leading is trying to move forward in the face of uncertainty.

So it’s all very contextual. Uh, bringing it back to your original question, it’d be hard for me to say these are them because it’s very dynamic based on what you’re facing, the situation, the people, and even the macro context. 

How “I Can’t Make a Mistake” Creates Analysis Paralysis 

AW: So that’s fair. And my next question was going to be which one or more of these do folks struggle with when they’ve identified it?

But you were just talking about in the context when the stakes are high, which seems to be always nowadays, right? The I can’t make a mistake. I can just imagine listeners being like, “Yeah, like every day, every decision that I make, I can’t make a mistake.” And so let’s just drill down on that one for a minute.

What do the behaviors look like that come out of “I can’t make a mistake”? 

MW: Oh, boy. So, lack of making decisions, okay? Procrastinating, a level of perfectionism, meaning to the nth degree of trying to get things right, trying to gather information, and becoming caught up in analysis paralysis, creating bottlenecks, and really just moving initiatives forward.

What else do you want? I mean, those are the symptoms, and we’ve all experienced them, either ourselves or at the, you know, the mercy of being led or with peers who are experiencing this, or sometimes even direct reports, right? Those are the ones that tend to come up. 

AW: So imagine I am or you are this leader.

You know the stakes are high. You know you have a tendency to be blocked by, “I need to get it right. I need to make the perfect decision every time.” You know that that may lead to analysis paralysis. How do you get out of that box? 

MW: Yeah, I mean, the first is deciding, do you want a different outcome, right?

Because if you’re happy in analysis paralysis, then go forward, right? Keep believing, “I can’t make a mistake.” It’s serving you very well because it’s meeting your desired outcome. If your desired outcome if a client comes to me, or I’m working with somebody, and they’re like, “I really wanna be able to drive this to the end zone, this project that we have, or this decision that we need to make, and I feel like I can’t make a mistake,” those two don’t add up.

They’re not in alignment. The belief is not in alignment with the direct outcome, with the desired outcome. So how do you work through that? The first part is identifying, are the assumptions that I’m making about myself, about others, about the situation. In this case, it’s this, maybe the situation, I can’t make a mistake about the situation, to what extent is that getting in the way of the desired outcome of the goal, right?

And if it is hindering it, then you have to identify, okay, that’s the unblocking piece of it. How do I reframe the belief so that it is more aligned or increases the probability that I get to that goal, which is around making the decision? And so maybe the reframe is something like, “I’m trying to make the most efficient decision possible,” right?

Our goal is efficiency, not failure-proof. Or we will make a decision based on mistakes that we could live with, right? What is the level of risk associated? You know, We can’t make mistakes on things that are high risk, and we have wiggle room on things that are lower risk, and that’s what’s driving us.

So you could pick a plethora of reframes, and it’s very important that I don’t feed my clients what the reframe is. They need to own it because it has to be real for them, and it’s not something that they make up. But it’s something that they can hold while understanding that there might be other situations where the I can’t make a mistake belief is absolutely on point, right?

I mean, if you’re a surgeon, I want you to have the belief I can’t make a mistake. You know?

I mean, yes. Um, and I also don’t want you if, you know, depending on the type of surgeon you are, if I’m lying there on the table and it’s an emergency, at some point you’ve gotta put a stake in the ground around what are you doing, right? You can’t get into analysis paralysis either. So it’s both/and around those beliefs, and that really is the key.

The key is understanding that it’s not black or white. It’s not like I have to operate in this narrow set of beliefs. It’s understanding that there’s a whole range of them, and your ability to deal with more complex situations is when you can have both be true at the same time. I can’t make a mistake, and I have to move forward, so what’s the path for that?

Questions That Help You Reframe Limiting Beliefs 

AW: Yeah. So I guess, thinking about these blockers can feel overwhelming, but you’re offering, first of all, a categorization of the blockers, and if someone chooses to be self-aware enough to question their behaviors and then question their underlying assumptions, what the blockers might be in the context.

So this is the other thing, right? Like, it’s drilling down or focusing and then expanding their view to, okay, what’s going on in this context? Are we really under the gun, or is it okay for us to wait another week to make this decision? So it’s about self-awareness. It’s being acutely aware of the environment and the context, and wow.

MW: Yeah. I mean, in a way, like, I think that this is what being mindful is. 

AW: Right. 

MW: Right? 

AW: And strategic. 

MW: I also think- 

AW: And strategic, 

MW: Yeah … and strategic. Here’s the thing. We do it all… You t- you brought up the word strategic, and we do it all the time when it comes to our businesses and organizations, right? Right.

Every year, we go through, or whatever, every couple years, we go through a strategic planning process, and we ask ourselves, “What do we believe about this organization, where it’s going, the economy?” Those are all assumptions. They’re beliefs. They might be informed beliefs, but they are beliefs, and if you change the assumption, then it might change what your strategy is, right?

It might change what your business model ends up being and what actions you take as an organization. So the same thing holds true for us as individuals. We know how to do it. We just don’t apply it to ourselves. And so in a sense, like, what I see with the leaders I work with is once they understand the model and that they actually are applying it in other places, and it’s a matter of applying it for themselves, it’s actually not that overwhelming.

And they actually then see the power in it, that it helps facilitate a lot of the difficulties that they go through. It enables them to flow with the challenges that they face with a lot more ease rather than, you know, this angst and this frustration and this stress, and as you said, this feeling overwhelmedness.

I think in a big piece of this, and it’s why I ended up writing the book, what I have found is that, you know, and I work with people who are really high performers, very successful. Quite frankly, they wouldn’t need to do anything differently, and they’d be fine, but they’re just feeling this level of stress and angst and frustration, again, this weight that they’re carrying.

And what I find is that when I talk to them about this or when I coach them through this, it’s not even they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I could never do this.” It’s more that, “Oh, I didn’t even know that was at my disposal.” Right? Like, “I didn’t even recognize this was a tool for me. I was stopping at my actions. I really wasn’t questioning the internal operating system.”

And so even once they discover it, they’re like, “Oh, here is another asset that I can leverage that was really just something that was untested,” and they weren’t even aware that it was there. 

AW: So it’s empowering. I love it. You’ve turned what they’re thinking is a liability in terms of their behavior or the weightiness of the context i- into something that’s more empowering. And again, I think the categorization of the blockers is it unleashes the opportunity. 

MW: Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I mean, and that’s the whole point, right? Like, I was like, if I can give people a little… You know, it’s like if you go to a restaurant, and if they don’t show you a menu. 

AW: Yeah.

MW: And they’re like, “Well, what do you want?” Yeah. You’re like, “Well, I don’t- Yeah … I don’t really know.” Yeah. “I don’t even know what’s available to me.” And so the seven was more to say, “Hey, here, here is your menu,” but the work actually is in getting into the practice of identifying them for your own when you are in situations where you feel stuck or when you’re going into a high-stakes situation.

You don’t need to do this all the time. And know that it’s at your disposal if something is high stakes, if you’re feeling stuck, if you’re feeling like things are harder than what they ought to be, which is typically the case with my clients. Then it’s like, okay, like, take a couple minutes to think through how you’re thinking about this, rather than go straight to, “What do I do?”

AW: Right. And this is like a Framework or a recipe that can empower. I’m thinking when I do workshops on dealing with difficult people or in particularly challenging context, and I have this, like, escalation sequence and, and people come out of th- those workshops or those sessions saying, “I feel so empowered now and such a reduced level of stress because I have a playbook.”

So that’s really what this… It’s almost like a playbook. When things are feeling weighty, or you’re stuck, take a moment, take a breath, ask yourself, “What am I doing, and why am I doing it, and which of these seven may inform?” 

MW: Even at the most basic level, like I’m a big tell me one thing that you can do, right?

At the basic level, if the only thing you did is ask yourself these three questions when you’re feeling stuck, or when you’re feeling challenged, or when you just feel that dissonance, like, “Ugh, this isn’t going the way that I think it should be going.” If you just ask yourself, what is it that I’m assuming about myself in this situation?

What is it that I’m assuming about the other or others, if there are other people involved? What is it that I’m assuming about the situation or about the context? That’s even just a start. That is what increases the, like, “Oh, I become aware even of these thoughts.” And then over time, then you can go on to step number two, which is in what way are those assumptions actually helping me right now, or are they hindering me?

And what that does, you know, I love that you used the word empowering, is gives you a choice. Then you can make a choice, like I said before. If the I can’t make a mistake belief is helping you, right, you love staying in analysis paralysis, then go for it. You don’t need to change a thing, right? But if it’s not, then you have choice, and that’s what we all want. You know, that’s what agency is. 

Are You Driving the Story—or Is the Story Driving You? 

AW: So in a lot of my work, Muriel, I’m focusing on communication skills, but specifically helping people get clarity on their personal brand or their professional identity. Not their personal brand like social media influencer, but more on what is my specific professional identity.

And when I looked at these blockers, I was thinking some of them might become associated with, or they might be associated with a, like, a part of my identity. Like, I am a perfectionist, or I am the one that gets things done, right? Or she’s, she’s the pace-setting leader. So, do you have any comments about how these blockers may be tied to identity?

MW: Oh my gosh. How much time do we have? They, they are so tied to identity, right? In what way? They are tied to identity because the reason why these beliefs are even around, and even why, say, hidden, okay, they’re kinda lurking, not in a negative way. They’re lurking because they have actually served you. It’s what have helped you be successful.

And so to me, when I think about identity, identity is actually made up of anything that you are attached to, okay? If somebody were to ask me, “Well, what’s your identity?” I mean, as I mature, I think, I am loosening my grip on identity, right? But if I were to really s- or I, I don’t hold it tightly. I know what my identity is.

I understand that I have to define it for others for them to understand. But for myself, like back in the day, if I were like, “This is what I identify with,” it’s because I have this attachment to it, and what is that attachment for? That attachment is because it’s what has helped me be successful in the context that I was in.

So let’s put that in practical terms. I’ll use myself for an example, right? Like, one of the hidden blockers that I’ve had to work with for myself, and it pops up every now and then, it popped up last week, actually, but I was very aware of it, is the I need it done now, okay? Now, why is that one of my hidden blockers?

Well, for a very long period of time, I was rewarded for how fast I could get things done at a great capacity. Like, literally my superpower, my identity, right, my personal brand was I could crank through things and do them well. 

AW: I think you shared this at Rotman, right? 

MW: I had this, like, capacity to just crank through things, and I thought everybody else was like this.

And so, you know, I remember one person was like, “No, girl, that’s you.” Right? Like, “That is your superpower.” So as a superpower, I identified with it very strongly, and it became part of my operating model, and then it was hard to let go of it because it’s what had made me a part of what had made me successful, right?

Made me feel worthy, made me feel needed, made me feel safe, right? If I could get things done, then I would feel okay. But then there became a point where it didn’t serve me, okay? In terms of the impact that it would have on other people that I worked with, the impact that it would have even on my own sense of how I felt because the frustration when things weren’t getting done on my time.

And so when it started becoming toxic productivity, then it wasn’t serving the folks that I was leading or myself well. And so part of it is detaching, not so much from the belief, quite frankly, but detaching from the story that we have about the belief, which is the identity, right? And the story I had was, “I will only be successful if I get things done right away, urgently,” which is why the, “I need it done now” was sort of leading my life in so many ways.

AW: So in my work, I talk a lot about feeling empowered to control your narrative, and I wonder if you experienced that when you went through this evolution, if you wanna call it that, from being the person that gets it done and gets it done fast to being the person who’s creating a bigger impact, for example.

And were you consciously creating a narrative, like, to yourself in terms of your self-talk, but also in terms of with others, sharing, like, what you represent, what your identity is, what your brand is? 

MW: Yeah, I mean, I think the number one story that I had to change was not to other people, it was to myself.

Right? And that didn’t happen, you know, overnight. It’s still happening. I, I believe that you’re always… You know, this is my own opinion, but I think part of life is continuing to shape what your story is, you know? And understand that it’s a story, so it can be shaped. And I think the flip was, you know, for me, is don’t let the story drive you.

Let you drive the story. And that’s the difference. And, it’s that moment of being able to catch yourself, is the story driving me, or am I driving the story? Because I can drive the story, you know? And it doesn’t solve the world’s problems. It doesn’t solve, you know, change everything else around you.

The workload did not go away, right? But the way that I experienced the workload and the way I experienced myself changed, which then creates a different type of leadership approach and way of being in those work situations, right? So fundamentally, I think when you are a leader, and even beyond leading, quite frankly, you have an opportunity to drive the story about yourself.

But too many people focus on what is the story that I’m saying about myself out there, and they’re not focused on what is the story they’re saying about themselves to themselves every single day. So start with you. Start with you. Um, and that’s always, to me, the basic before you start thinking about what’s the story out there.

AW: Mariel, you just dropped, like, three bombs that are gonna end up in my book. Ugh. I was like, “Keep going, girl.” 

MW: Oh my God. Oh, I love it. 

AW: The story doesn’t drive you drive the story. Oh my God. I am- 

MW: Yeah, I mean, look, it’s one of the few things we have in our control. Like, so many things are out of our control, and it’s okay.

That’s life. You know? That’s life. I can’t drive the weather story today, you know? But I can drive the story I tell myself about the weather. That’s the difference, okay? And how I drive that story about the weather will change how I experience it, without the weather changing. 

AW: That’s right. So it’s just simply taking control of the things that you can.

MW: Taking control and taking responsibility. And from my perspective, I feel like that is the thin line between approaching things in a mature way versus not. You know, I’m not talking about maturity in terms of do you tell bad jokes, do you da da da da. I’m talking about maturity in terms of your ability to deal with the complexity and the uncertainty and the lack of control that we do have out there by taking more control, simplifying, and responsibility for the way that you experience it.

Because if you can do that, then others will experience you differently as well. 

AW: Oh, so well put. And that goes right back to the what are your assumptions about yourself? What are your assumptions about the other person? What are your assumptions about the context? Having the self-control, the self-regulation, the self-awareness to stop in the moment and ask yourself those questions.

I… Muriel, this, this is absolutely gold. I wanna remind the listeners that in the show notes for this episode, we’ve listed the seven blockers and also a link to your book, and I strongly encourage all leaders and aspiring leaders to read this book. 

Agency, Self-Awareness, and Leading with Intention 

Can I ask you the three rapid-fire questions now? 

MW: Sure. Absolutely. I’m ready. 

AW: First question, I’m actually not sure what you’re gonna say here. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

MW: I am an introvert. 

AW: Oh, are you? 

MW: I am. I am. I, um, you know, although I have my thing about introvert, extrovert, and ’cause I actually think they’re learned behaviors versus identities. I, I don’t think they’re identities.

I think they are learned behaviors. So I have learned to extrovert, but I have very strong introvert energy in terms of where I feel, where I have preference in terms of how I interact with others, and where I get my energy from. 

AW: Okay. Got it. So in other words, you’re great on stage, you’re fine behind a mic, but you refuel in solitude?

MW: Absolutely. Absolutely. I refuel in solitude or in very small numbers, and large numbers are in controlled spaces. There’s a level of control, which, you know, again, there’s… and you hear me sort of hesitating around this ’cause I think I’ve loosened my grip around introversion, extroversion, and I actually feel right now I have range between the two pretty fluidly.

But what it took was, uh, unpacking some of the stories I was telling myself, and in what way was I fulfilling some needs by trying to create this, like, introversion, extroversion, right? And so that’s why I think once I was able to understand those and loosen the grip a little bit, then it, I kinda created more fluidity between the two.

AW: So I do ask the question as a dichotomy to be provocative. The truth is, it’s a continuum, and most of us are in the middle as an ambivert. But it’s always fascinating to hear people’s take on it. So the next question is, what are your communication pet peeves? What drives you crazy? 

MW: What really drives me crazy, I have to be honest, is when somebody makes believe that they’re listening to you and interested in what you’re saying, and it’s very clear that they’re not, uh, because their whole body language is either moving on to the next thing or they recenter the conversation on themselves very, very quickly.

And so it’s not even about the interest. I just find that, you know, conversation, communication is one of the very few real points of connection that we have with other people in terms of it being, and an opportunity for it to be bidirectional. And so when I find that you have this opportunity to actually connect over dialogue and conversation and communication, and it ends up being very unilateral, that’s a bit of a pet peeve for me.

I hold communication with a high degree of responsibility and stewardship, and so when I find that others aren’t doing the same… I’m okay with others not doing the same actually, if that’s their intent. It’s more when it’s veiled, like, “No, actually I’m really interested,” and I’m like, “No, you’re not.” 

AW: I feel like this could be a whole other conversation.

So I say there’s actually four levels of listening. Most people say it’s passive versus active, and I say there’s not listening at all. That’s like when someone says Muriel? And you go, “What?” Like you weren’t listening, right? So that’s not listening. And then there’s passive listening, which I think is what you’re describing.

It’s pretending to listen, but you’re really not. You’re thinking about what you wanna say and how you’re gonna get your point in. There’s active listening, which is checking out the person’s body language and their tone and listening to the message, and then there’s this generative listening, which actually takes a lot of focus.

It can be exhausting, but it’s when you really… So this is what the level that I think I listen at when I’m interviewing someone, ’cause I’m really listening to their words, and I think that I, like I’m searching for the question that I can ask them. And I know effective leaders are often at this collaborative or generative level.

But the reason I’m sharing this model with you is I tell my clients that it’s not that your goal is to always be at that level. Your objective is to be conscious or self-aware of where you are on that hierarchy and why. 

MW: And then just be, just have alignment. I mean, really what I’m getting at is my pet peeve is the lack of alignment, right?

Like, I don’t have a problem with people not listening at that highest order. Just don’t make believe that you are, but where you actually want to be is passive, right? So I know for me, if I want to listen to somebody, like at a higher level than passive, and I’m doing something, I’m, you know, texting. You know, my kids always say, “Mommy, why can’t you, like, listen and text at the same time?”

I’m like, “I just can’t.” But I will say, “Give me a second ’cause I want to be able to pay full attention to you. Give me a second to let me finish this.” And then there are people, quite frankly, I mean, to be honest, I don’t want to listen to them, you know? And I’ll be like, “Mm, okay, we’re going to have a real quick transactional conversation,” and then I’m moving on.

But I’m not going to sit here and try to like, “No, please, I want to hear. I want to set up,” or I want, you know, “Give me 30 minutes of your time or an hour where we can get together.” Mm-mm. Nope. Just tell me what you need. Let’s make it transactional, and that’s it. And it’s okay. So be clear about what it is that you want, and then act accordingly.

AW: You sound very self-aware, Muriel. Okay, the third and last question is, is there a podcast and/or a book that you find yourself recommending a lot lately, other than yours, which I’m recommending? 

MW: You know, I mean, I’ll, I’ll say sort of a podcast that I listen to on repeat pretty much, like if you were to look at my Spotify or Apple iTunes and see which one…

iTunes, I’ve just dated myself. Um, see which podcast is sort of top for like my repeat, it’s Esther Perel’s, You Know, Where Shall We Begin? Because I was inspired by that podcast when I started my podcast, Coaching Real Leaders, where I do live coaching sessions. And I just find that, first of all, I’m a little bit of a, what do I like to say?

I like to like listen in on other people’s conversations. Maybe I’m nosy. I love reality TV. I’m a voyeur. I’ve always had been. I’d get in trouble when I was younger ’cause I was nosy, but I’m like, “No, I’m just curious.” 

AW: Okay, there you go. You’re controlling the narrative. I’m not nosy. I’m curious. 

MW: It’s a thin line. It’s a thin line. And more importantly, I find that I’m intrigued by the relational aspects and what I pick up from her conversations and how that carries over into the workplace. And so it’s just a, you know, I, I, I enjoy it. I enjoy her line of questioning. I enjoy people’s stories. I love hearing about people’s stories, and so I will find myself oftentimes, like, clicking a share link and sending it to a friend or sometimes even, you know, a colleague or somebody that I coach. Yeah. 

AW: Yeah, me too. Me too. Esther is so wise. Isn’t she just so wise? So thank you for sharing your wise words, Muriel. I wanna ask you if you have any last advice that you wanna share with people about leadership unblocked and the seven blockers. 

MW: Look, I think we talked about it a little bit, but I think people have way more in control than they give themselves credit for, and that they realize.

And when you can recognize that, a large part of that starts with the story that you tell yourself about yourself. It kind of unblocks you from, uh, staying stuck and s- feeling like you’re not empowered and feeling like you don’t have choice, and moves you to a place where you have more agency around not only how you wanna lead, but also how you wanna live.

AW: Beautifully put. It’s empowering. We do have agency. Thank you so much, Muriel. I think I can’t wait to go through this book again. I’m gonna read it again. 

MW: And I can’t wait to go through your book. 

AW: Yeah. Well, that’ll be a year from now. But thank you so much for your time. I just wanna say thank you so much, Muriel, for sharing your time and your insights with the Talk About Talk listeners and me. It was even more fun than I expected. Thank you. 

MW: Thank you. Thank you so much.

The post LEADERSHIP Unblocked: The 7 Beliefs Sabotaging Your Abilities with Muriel Wilkins (ep. 214) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

What if the biggest limit on your leadership isn’t your skills or your strategy…  but how you THINK?

Harvard Business School emeritus professor Gerald Zaltman joins Andrea to discuss his latest book, Dare to Think Differently, and the six research-based techniques that help you tap into the creative power of your subconscious mind.

Gerald’s work spans cognitive neuroscience, art therapy, and linguistics. His insights are as relevant for leaders navigating complex decisions as they are for anyone trying to have a real conversation across a divide.

We cover the six qualities of an open mind, including serious playfulness, befriending ignorance, and asking the right discovery questions, plus why imagination may be the most underused leadership skill, and how humility, courage, and discipline work together to make real thinking possible.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/

✉️ Andrea’s Email Newsletter: https://www.talkabouttalk.com/newsletter/

🟣 Talk About Talk on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/talk-about-talk-communication-skills-training/id1447267503

🟢 Talk About Talk on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3afgjXuYZPmNAfIrbn8zXn?si=9ebfc87768524369

📺 Talk About Talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@talkabouttalkyoutube

6 WAYS TO THINK DIFFERENTLY

 Serious playfulness.

 Befriending ignorance.

 Asking the right discovery questions.

 Chasing your curiosity.

 Panoramic thinking.

 Using the “voyager outlook.”

CONNECT WITH GERALD

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerald-zaltman-112634162/

📖 Read Dare to Think Differently: https://amzn.to/4emjID5

BOOKED MENTIONED

📖  Consilience by Edward O. Wilson – https://amzn.to/49vQPRq

📖  An Immense World by Ed Yong – https://amzn.to/42z9054

TRANSCRIPTION

Gerald Zaltman: An adaptive mindset means you have to be willing to reflect on how you’re thinking and assess its suitability to the current situation, and that’s what I mean by an open mind. 

Andrea Wojnicki: That was Harvard Business School Emeritus Professor Gerald Zaltman. I am really excited about this episode. The truth is, I’m excited about every episode of Talk About Talk for a variety of reasons.

For this episode in particular, I’m excited to introduce you to one of my favorite people on this planet. If you haven’t met him before, Gerald Zaltman is one of the wisest and most generous folks that you will ever meet. I’m sure you’ll agree after you’re done listening to this episode. 

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and I’m your executive communication coach. My goal with this podcast is to coach you to improve your confidence and your credibility at work so you can achieve your career goals. You can learn more about me and what we do at TalkAboutTalk if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com.

Daring to Think Differently in a Rapidly Changing World 

Okay. As a leader, you may have noticed how open-mindedness creates exceptional decision-making, but how exactly do you ensure that you have an open mind? Great question. This episode is gonna challenge you to think about how you think. It will encourage you to think twice about your own thought patterns, about your assumptions, about your biases.

This episode may even dare you to think differently, which happens to be the name of Gerald’s latest book, Dare to Think Differently. When I learned recently that Gerald was writing another book, I scooped it up right away, devoured it, and then I contacted him to set up an interview, and here we are, finally.

Instead of summarizing this episode with three insights like I typically do at the end, instead, I’m gonna challenge you to consider each of the six research-based techniques that will help you tap into the creative power of the subconscious. Yes, there are six. In our conversation, Gerald and I go through each of these six, and you can also reference them in the Talk About Talk podcast show notes on whatever podcast platform you’re on.

Again, my challenge to you is to consider which one or two of these six techniques you’re gonna commit to try experimenting with to cultivate your own open mind. 

About the Guest: Harvard Professor and Thinking Expert Gerald Zaltman 

Let me tell you a little bit about Gerald now, and then we’ll get into this. Gerry, or Gerald Zaltman, is an emeritus professor at the Harvard Business School.

Decades ago, I had the great privilege of learning directly from him in seminars, and then he served on my dissertation committee. Gerald also served as an executive committee member of Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. You’re gonna see that this is a theme with Gerald, interfaculty, cross-disciplinary thinking.

Over his career, Gerald pioneered the use of tools and insights from cognitive neuroscience, art therapy, and linguistics to understand subconscious customer thoughts and feelings. He’s a co-founder and senior partner in the research-based consulting firm of Olson Zaltman Associates, or OZA, whose clients include some of the world’s most respected firms and brands.

Here we go. Thank you so much, Gerald, for joining us here today to talk with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about thinking about our thinking. 

GZ: Well, I’m delighted to be here, and I’ve been looking forward to this, uh, ever since you raised the possibility. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations, in particular your questions. They always make me think and often differently as well. 

AW: Thank you so much for saying that, Gerald. That really means a lot. Okay, here’s the first question. It’s really the origin story for the book. What made you want to write this book? What was the problem that you are trying to solve? Is it related to AI? Is it related to the polarization of our society? What’s the origin story here? 

GZ: The book was conceived after I had been spending a lot of time investigating why it is that people, even within the same family, same workspace, people who would otherwise be very close friends or had been close friends, suddenly found themselves not talking with one another or speaking to one another.

And that’s because certain topics, uh, arose that were highly politicized. And to hold a contrary position or even a position that you’re actively thinking about was received as a very concerning character flaw by others. And I was experiencing that toward others, even in my family, you know. And we were becoming what I, I thought of as a family of strangers, just socially.

There were certain topics that were off limits, and they were growing in number, and the consequences of putting them within the limits of a conversation were increasingly painful. And as I was working on that, I wrote a, a paper on that. I realized that ultimately, what I was addressing there are contrasting, even clashing, not thinking styles, but clashing thoughts.

And I felt that there was some other problem operating. And the problem that I found operating to produce that was also the problem I was finding in companies with executives, that there were pockets of thinking that were considered, and, and ways of thinking that were considered, in effect, sacred, and that needed some investigation.

And so I decided to follow my favorite tool, the one that I find suits me best when I’m pondering, trying to understand the origins and nature of a problem, and that was with ZMet. And I began, uh, with a team of people doing ZMet interviews with executives on how they approach messy or difficult problems, which were the ones that were often very divisive within a firm.

And eventually, I thought, since I’m working so hard on this, I might as well turn it into a book, which I find a very effective device for disciplining yourself and forcing yourself to understand what you don’t yet understand, to identify that. So that’s kind of a long story to the origins of the book, but that’s pretty much how it began.

AW: I remember having conversations in your office, Gerald, about the fact that you would encourage me to think about something and then not worry if I can’t solve it, and walk away and work on other things, and my brain would be non-consciously focusing on whatever that problem was. And also, directly related to what you just said, you encouraged me to write as a way of thinking.

Don’t wait until you have all the answers to start writing, and I found that to be so true, especially now I’m writing a book and I’m introducing the readers to some processes that I coach people on, and actually, as I’m writing the book, I’m coming up with better processes, right? 

GZ: The book is better because of my having that very same style of writing. It’s a way of interrogating yourself, and you can be unforgiving and not suffer as a result. So just a very productive, uh, device. 

AW: So it’s about being open-minded. Back to the executives that you mentioned you’re thinking about, uh, when you were doing the ZMed as well. You’re, you said it was a problem you first noticed with your family, and then business executives were also experiencing the same thing, or you diagnosed the same thing.

And in my experience, executives and leaders often believe that they already are good thinkers. And actually, in fact, many of them are what we would call, like, good thinkers, smart people. I realize I’m opening a can of worms here, Gerald. 

Open-Mindedness Requires Rethinking Your Own Thinking 

GZ: I think most people are pretty good thinkers. I mean, most of, most people have. They’re not in jail, they’re not having problems with drugs or, you know, whatever.

They’re navigating a complicated world successfully, and actually more than that. They’re often making major contributions. So the thinking is fine. The problem is the environment in which their thinking no longer is. If you go to the… Or let me back up a step. Thinking is something that is highly personal.

I mean, it’s an expression of who you are. You don’t think of it always in that way, but it is. So when I get that criticism for something I’ve written, you know, I do take it personally. I also know enough to realize I shouldn’t, and probably a lot of other people would have the same response, so I’ll act on that feedback.

But the difficulty is that if you read the World Economic Forum’s publications, is the world is changing rapidly. The environment in which we practice our thinking is not stable. It’s changing at a very high rate. The different sectors where this change takes place are connected, so it’s kind of like COVID, you know?

It can spread. A problem in agriculture can, uh, have a major impact on transportation or broadcast media. It’s just a networked world, and it’s a rapidly changing world. And we consequently need to have an adaptive mindset to adjust our thinking in that world. An adaptive mindset means you have to be willing to reflect on how you’re thinking and assess its suitability to the current situation, and that’s what I mean by an open mind.

Am I thinking properly for this context? And often the answer is no, or some change is needed, and you have to improve how you think. But you’ve got to be willing to not treat your default thinking process as sacred. It’s not. The world doesn’t care much about that, and that’s not gonna change to protect my sacred way of thinking.

That’s what I mean, you have to be open-minded. You have to be willing to think about your own thinking, not to mention someone else’s. 

AW: So as I was preparing for this interview, Jerry, I was thinking about the context of AI and how myself and a lot of my clients are trying to use AI to, actually, to improve our thinking, but just generally to improve our communication, using it as a, a productive tool.

And yet, myself and most of the people that I talk to don’t wanna use it to generate ideas before they’ve generated their own ideas, at least because they don’t want it to bias their thinking. That’s exactly one of the thoughts that I, that I had. It’s like AI will bias our thinking. And then it did occur to me as I was going through your book, that our own brains are biased, right?

And so this is more than just having a growth mindset. This is about really being conscious of how we’re thinking in the context.

GZ: I think it’s strange. Bias gets a bad reputation. You know, there are clearly instances where that’s deserved, but in most cases, you can’t get by without bias. Bias is what makes you unique and uniquely successful in a particular category of issues.

You don’t wanna give those up, and you can afford to be biased if you’re always willing to assess your own thinking and whether or not a certain preference in thinking has outlived its usefulness. But to know what you were saying, it was today, and I’m trying to think of the source. I put it aside to read this evening, and  I’ll look for it and send it to you.

But it was an evaluation of executives in terms of how good they were or how effective they are in being a partner to AI, a collaborator where they have… And they had these criteria for assessing a really good collaborator. And most of the executives, no matter what the level was, scored rather poorly on this evaluation.

They’re not good partners with AI, which is just a very interesting, uh, commentary on how effective we are in using whatever it is that AI might be able to give us. 

AW: So, back to the, the benefits of, uh, these executives and leaders thinking about their thinking, right? Understanding maybe what their default patterns are and the risks of not doing so, which we can also get into.

I would love it, Gerald, if you could briefly list and summarize the six specific ways that you outline in your book, the specific qualities of an open mind, because I feel like this is gonna help us get some traction here. People say, ” Okay, it’s more than just having an open mind. What is it really?” 

The Research Behind Open-Minded Thinking 

GZ: Not everyone practiced all six of those, but across a set of interviews, all six came up, each about as prominent as the other in total, and they also exist not in a sequence.

And this is where writing a book is very frustrating because a book is linear, and these qualities of mind are anything but linear. It is a system. But nevertheless, I’ll start with, uh, the first one, which is serious playfulness. Many decisions, uh, really have serious consequences, not just in profit sense, but, you know, human impact.

And that can cause people to be fairly reluctant to be bold, to take bold action, because there’s a number of people, and you don’t maybe know who will be hurt, could be hurt in some fashion. But that somberness, especially if it is concerned with meeting my profit goals or sales goals for the period that can really inhibit you, it, from trying something different, thinking differently, and acting differently.

So you need to introduce a kind of playfulness. And I have to admit, and I won’t spend this much time on the others, but I have to admit, that was a sober experience for me as a young man. I was working on some consumer economics, it, uh, teaching tools for high school students, and there was a school for the blind and the visually impaired nearby where I was working on this project, and they had expressed an interest to have someone come over and use the teaching module that I was developing for their students.

And that was great. I went over for two days, spent two days, and I was thinking I was probably selected because I’m so empathetic. I can relate to people and understand, you know. So I mean, I was getting kind of a big head. And within the first half hour, um, of my glowing about my empathic abilities, someone came into the meeting with a blindfold and asked me if I would mind being blindfolded.

And I remember thinking I would mind. You know, I get claustrophobia. I don’t… But of course, I said, “No, you know, you can do it.” And I was blindfolded for two hours, and we continued the discussion. I had to navigate my way to the cafeteria and around to the restroom, all of that stuff within two hours.

And after two hours, the blindfold was removed. And I, I learned later that two hours is about the period of time a sighted person can be suddenly blindfolded without freaking out. And I could get that, but it had such a huge impact on me in terms of expanding my capacity to empathize, to identify with the students and the staff in that program.

I consider that act, that putting a blindfold on a visitor or consultant, to be an act of playfulness. It was a way of introducing an element in a safe way that I needed to have exposure to, but in a controlled, you know, reasonable dose. And that has always stuck with me. So I was delighted when I saw this quality appearing so often and, uh, just spontaneously with, uh, executives.

AW: Can you share any other examples that come to mind, Jerry, of, um, executives who benefited from serious playfulness? I’m curious. Is it typically role-playing? 

GZ: It should be role-playing. My favorite personally is in a classroom or in a business meeting to have… This is when I try to teach people about mental models, and you have this construct connecting to that construct, and people are sitting there get, you know, shaking their head, they understand what the constructs are.

Until you say, “Okay, you are going to be the variable or construct extravagant, and you over here are going to be the construct, uh, frugal,” which happen to be connected. They interact. And I said, “Go ahead and have a go.” And I’ll usually appoint someone to take notes, to monitor and interpret what’s going on.

But the frugal and extravagant need to have a conversation. They do in real life in our heads as we go through that. That is a very effective device for having people understand there’s a lot more richness to the ideas that we have than what might be on a questionnaire or in an interview. That is the– Especially as these ideas share differences and similarities.

W: Yeah. So much of our thinking is just surface-level, right? Serious playfulness is one way to get deeper. I guess all of these qualities are, though. 

GZ: And it’s not that you have to have an immediate change as a result of the intervention or that exercise. It’s more just to kinda get people to realize there’s more in their mind, that even they are…

Or more in other people’s minds than they allow for. I also like to make use of what I call the clairvoyant and, uh, wizard. You might have gone through that where I have people role-play each of those. Oh, that’s an effective device. Just trying to think of some other, you know, other easy, easy examples that people can imitate.

AW: So Gerald, one thing that I’m thinking here is that this is like next level, uh, adoption of various roles that sometimes people assign in meetings. Like, you be the devil’s advocate, you be the customer advocate. This is like next level of that, right? 

GZ: Right. You wanna push them a little bit beyond that so their own thinking has to imagine, and I can’t understate the role of imagination in all of this.

And once you unleash the power of imagining, which I define as picturing that which is missing, you unlock a whole lot of good things. Imagination is probably the most frequent term in the book. I distinguish it from creativity also. 

Why Creativity Begins with Curiosity, Playfulness, and Not Knowing 

AW: So we’ve got serious playfulness, and this next one I feel like is, it may be a trigger for a lot of executives who may describe themselves and be described as others as someone who has authority and insight. The second technique for adopting an open mind is befriending ignorance. 

GZ: That’s possibly the toughest one. I, I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we could rank these that would be the toughest one because, well, for the obvious reason. You, you’re being paid because you know something, uh, I mean, to put it in a somewhat exaggerated way.

But have you ever seen… I thought about this the other day. I’ve never seen on a resume expertise in befriending ignorance. I mean, that’s probably the last thing you would ever list as an attribute, a quality. And it’s probably the first thing you’d notice if you were reviewing a resume, and I’ll wager your curiosity would go through the roof, and you’d wanna have that person in to do that.

But in any event, ignorance is something bad. I mean, the label, you’re ignorant, or that’s ignorant, is about as pejorative as you can get in the, in the scheme of things. But where else do new ideas come from? I’m trying to think of some major innovation that didn’t have its origin in things that weren’t known.

And if you’re going to be imaginative, it’s a term we throw around a lot, but if you’re going to be imaginative, and you think of it as picturing that which is missing, it really is picturing that of which you are ignorant. Uh, you don’t know it exists, or maybe no one else does. 

AW: It, uh, reminds me of when you were training me on the ZMET technique, simply instead of asking a scripted question or assuming that I knew something and trying to lead the conversation, the technique of repeating the word– the person’s words back to them, encouraging them to elaborate, that I think that may be a way of befriending ignorance.

GZ: You know, I mean, it certainly is a way of defining the interviewer’s ignorance because you don’t really know what the person means by guilt, or fun. Those things have so many different meanings, and that’s a good way to get them to handle your or, you know, my ignorance. 

AW: But that is different from – I have the list in front of me on my screen here.

The next quality of an open mind is asking the right discovery question. So repeating the person’s words back to them is a discovery question, but that’s not what you mean by that, right? 

GZ: I hadn’t thought about that, actually. I think that would be a discovery, uh, question because you’re discovering or asking them to help you discover what they mean, and that helps them discover what they really mean by that term.

AW: That’s true. 

The Power of Better Questions and Chasing Curiosity 

GZ: This is actually one of the most fascinating… I owe someone a chapter on this. Where do questions come from? Well, they come from what you don’t know, which is a good starting point. But I can’t find anything in the literature that talks about the cognitive origin of questions, where they– Literally, what’s the neuropathology of, uh, of a question.

We know a lot about answers, but not a lot about questions. And breakthrough questions are questions that historically, a good friend of mine is working on this,  a colleague is pointing out, is in science, the person who comes up with a breakthrough question, a powerful question that threatens to, you know, could change a whole field, is generally ostracized in various ways, some conspicuous, some not.

And for a while, people who were advocating what turned out to be breakthrough questions have a difficult social life and professional life. But where do your questions come from? We know about answers, but it’s hard to justify, hard to come up with a history of a question. And yet, without them, you won’t have answers. You can’t have an answer. 

AW: We hear when people are talking about a phenomenon where there’s some skill or expertise associated with it that like, “I’m so ignorant about this that I don’t even know what questions to ask,” right? 

GZ: Yeah. That’s a good phrase. I mean a good observation. I mean, not having a question is sort of the worst case of being ignorant.

AW: So, I’m thinking about the context, Gerald, of innovation here, right? And how the incumbent, who you would’ve assumed would’ve come up with an innovation, often doesn’t because they’re not, I’m gonna use the word biased again, I’m not sure that’s the right word, but they’re biased by what they’ve already done and what they already know, versus this brand new company comes in and they’re solving for something else.

They’re asking different questions, and then that innovation catapults the existing innovation from the incumbent company that everybody thought was on, on a trajectory of a success, right? 

GZ: I think a question is a focusing device, and it’s a way of determining where your resources should be allocated to answer this question.

And here’s where these things become synergistic, because you wouldn’t have a question if there was an answer readily available. And so a question is at the same time not only a neat device for focusing where you’re going to go, but it’s also an acknowledgement of what you don’t know and what your colleagues or others don’t know.

So it’s a very powerful device. I think other things being equal, which they aren’t, I would always prefer a really solid question to a really solid answer because the solid question has potential. A solid answer- However important it is, has a more preordained or future is not as interesting as an unaddressed question.

AW: I feel like this is one of the qualities that you’ve outlined here. Uh, they’re all relevant, but I feel like leaders and business executives maybe can particularly get traction on this one, asking the right discovery questions, right? Like we, we hear this sort of cliche advice that as you become more senior, you should be listening more and talking less and asking questions.

So before we go to the next one, I just wanna ask you if you can elaborate a little bit, Gerald, on what do you mean by the right discovery questions? Is there, is there, I don’t know, like some sort of list of criteria of what makes a discovery question correct or right? 

GZ: I don’t think there is an arbitrary set of criteria or an even a single criterion that makes it right.

But the right question is not the wrong question. It’s the question that survives all the wrong ones, uh, and remains on the table. And so it’s the question that is evaluated in terms of whether its potential answer or answers, even if those are not clear, but you imagine this is where, again, imagination comes in.

Yeah. This question, if we pursued it, there are many more opportunities, as I would view it. You know, the different answers that might come in, a richer context to play in than is another question. And so I say that’s the right question, but it’s also right in another way, and that is it has to have a caffeine element.

It has to wake people up, and it has to be a question that makes everyone think, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And that is, I think, a constructive wake-up call to, to everyone who thinks that way. I often have, you know, had that experience with colleagues. They’ll have a question, and that’s, “Damn, I should have thought of that myself, and I didn’t. Why not?” I think there’s a, there’s this element that makes it right socially or communally in a sense. 

AW: So simply put, it could be that the right discovery questions are the ones that make an impact, where impact is defined as making… I love, I love your caffeine-charged, uh, metaphor there, Gerald, but it’s about making people think differently and think about something in a new way.

GZ: Yeah. 

AW: Is thinking differently. 

GZ: It, it, um… That’s right. It’s a surprise, actually. 

AW: Yeah. 

GZ: Um, right. That’s why I attach the word discovery to it. 

AW: So the next quality of an open mind is chasing your curiosity. I know none of the words here are accidental, so why are we chasing our curiosity, and how is that different from befriending ignorance?

GZ: Remember, these are, um, a system of things. They’re more than cousins to one another. They’re siblings in effect, and it’s hard to have one without the other is one of the big lessons that I learned from these interviews. But curiosity is actually on the decline in the United States, at least. I’ve seen published reports that measures curiosity, and that’s, uh, something that, that is apparently declining, and the decline begins somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade, according to some sources.

So it occurs fairly early in life, and regardless of when it occurs, there’s a social contagion for it. And I worry about that, that colleagues aren’t sufficiently curious. There are times when I think I’m not, you know, sufficiently curious. I read very broadly, and I get frustrated, but I don’t pursue every lead I can’t that I find interesting.

But chasing curiosity, it is meant to convey the fact that it’s elusive. It escapes us, and it’s partly because we don’t want to admit we don’t know the thing that we’re now curious about or that we don’t know how to interrogate with a question. Curiosity, if we ever caught the creature, what, what do we do with it?

And that’s another problem. But I think curiosity, I think of it, I don’t know if I use this phrase in the book, but it’s the itch that you have to scratch, and it’s something that’s in a s- like that, it’s fairly visceral. You’ve got to feel it in a visceral way that would make you want to pursue it when everyone else is telling you that’s a dead end, it’s a blind alley, it’s, you know, that’s not something that a junior faculty member or an assistant branch manager would do or propose, and so forth.

All those things are encouraging people to stay put, not to be pursuing their curiosity. 

AW: You’re reminding me, Gerald, of an interview that I recently conducted with Michelle Budria, who started working the front cash at McDonald’s and worked her way up to CEO of McDonald’s Canada, and she worked in different countries in all different functions.

But she shared with me some of what the factors that she believes built her success, and one of them was an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking her managers, “Why are they doing this this way? Why aren’t they doing it that way?” And she said at one point, one of her managers actually said, “Fine, I’m gonna give you this project.

Run with it and show us.” And so she had, and has still, a genuine curiosity. She’s constantly looking for feedback, but also external to what she’s doing. She’s curious about why things run the way they run, why they are doing things the way they’re doing them, and this fueled her success. Yeah. Yeah. You’re not surprised.

GZ: Yeah. Yeah, that’s… And chasing it, it also has, you have this relationship with it whereby it’s a bit elusive, maybe very elusive, but it’s yours to chase. You’re responsible. You’ve gotta catch it, and you don’t know even what it’s going to be, you know, when you finally get to it or catch up with it. You know, so there’s a relationship that takes a, a kind of, uh, dedication and a sort of mental endurance to– the conditioning to go after.

AW: So, back to the point I made before about the every word here matters, it’s not an accident that it’s chasing your curiosity, not just chasing curiosity for the sake of curiosity’s sake. 

GZ: Uh, yeah. Actually, just to kind of underscore that, I don’t wanna be chasing someone else’s curiosity. I wanna be chasing mine.

I’m gonna run faster. I’m gonna feel better catching it if I, you know, if I can catch up with it. Being told what to do is something I’ve always resisted. 

Panoramic Thinking: Seeing Connections Others Miss 

AW: Okay, the next quality of an open mind is… Well, like you said, they’re all related. Uh, and I do want you to share why there’s an octopus on the front of the book, which relates to how these qualities are all related to each other. But can you describe panoramic thinking? 

GZ: Yeah. There’s another word for it that doesn’t quite work for me, and that is multidisciplinary, and that has some obvious meanings and, you know, it’s, and it’s structured in an academic sort of way. But panoramic thinking is more than being multidisciplinary. It’s looking in diverse and seemingly unrelated fields that no one has ever thought would converge.

My best current example, recent example, of all things, there is a phenomena out in space, very distant space, with this kind of like a cloud of things that they can’t quite capture or they couldn’t quite capture. And now, in a way which I’ve not yet found out, someone figured out that there was something in the design, nature’s design of the eye of a lobster, that provided a solution so that they found a camera that could take a picture there.

And someone saw that the cloudy situation that, that was giving them trouble, part of what they also wanted to study, was comparable to the cloudy situation lobsters find themselves in two hundred feet or a hundred feet deep in the water, the deep water lobsters. And that the solution that nature provided with their vision may have relevance for that other one. That’s the last thing I would have, you know, thought about, but that’s panoramic thinking. 

[00:40:31] AW: I remember when I was your student, Gerald, and you encouraged me to read in depth the academic research on gift giving, ’cause I was studying word of mouth and why people give recommendations or warnings about products and services that they’d experienced to their friends and family, and how to think about it, and kind of what mechanisms were at work.

And you suggested along this vein of panoramic thinking. Now, certainly it’s not like interstellar phenomenon, and you know, the lobster’s eye, but the insights from the research that I did on gift giving certainly illuminated the phenomenon of word of mouth. So why, why do we give, how do we give, how do we feel about it when someone rejects our word of mouth, or they tell us that we’re not right? All of these things made a big difference in my understanding of the phenomenon. 

GZ: If you were to look in the bibliography of Dare to Think Differently, and just kind of run down, looking at the titles of journals and books that are used to elaborate on or justify or give evidence for what managers are doing, you’ll find that there’s a very broad and extensive academic literature supporting what these guys were discovering on their own.

And I used it to kind of give the managers, you know, a little more grounding and validation for what they were sharing with me. But they didn’t know that. They don’t know that. But take a look at the bibliography. You know, you’ll see it. 

AW: I have, and I will look again. Speaking of bibliographies, this reminds me of another book that I read when I was taking one of your classes when I was a doctoral student, Gerald, and that was the book Consilience. Do you remember that? 

GZ: It was E. O. Wilson, right? That’s right. 

AW: E.  O. Wilson. Yeah. 

GZ: Yeah. 

AW: And I think that book, the, the thesis of that book is about panoramic thinking. Would you agree? 

GZ: Absolutely. Yeah. 

AW: Yeah. See, you made a, you made a huge impact on me, Gerald. You, you definitely impacted how I think. Okay, the sixth and last quality of an open mind is, and again, I wanna remind everyone that these are in no particular order, right? They’re certainly not a sequence, but the last one we’re talking about here is using a voyager outlook. 

GZ: That’s, um, kind of my way of, of framing ambiguity, and you can see how it would fit with the others. But what’s a, what is a voyager? And I’m thinking of a voyager more in the, like the fifteenth, sixteenth century, even earlier than that, the Norsemen, and so forth.

There is a willingness to go out to the unknown, to space that they’re ignorant about. I mean, the maps all had, at that time, in the early, early days, there be monsters. You know, there was a line drawn, and after that, no one knew what was there, but they, you know, guessed that there’d be monsters out there.

I think managers, executives, but not them alone, really don’t like ambiguity, and I’ll comment on intelligence in a second. And, I don’t blame them. I don’t want to have something… We can all empathize with that. But if you’re not chasing curiosity into the unknown, if you’re not discovering what you don’t know, that is literally how you define the unknown, the lobster eye, for example, you’re gonna get stuck.

And you’re just not gonna grow as a person or as a company. And I talk about it, my alternative to that was embracing ambiguity. That’s like, you know, embracing a leper. People wouldn’t– people were reluctant to do that. But it takes that kind of spirit to do all the other qualities in the, uh, of an open mind.

AW: So I love that you re-framed or chose a term for this last quality of an open mind to make it sound more positive, like something we can strive for as opposed to something that we’re avoiding, right? Using a voyager outlook is something we would strive for versus we would avoid ambiguity. And you use the word spirit.

So, back to something you said at the beginning, executives wanna be seen as intelligent, right? They wanna be seen as having insight, authority, and experience. And yet, at the same time, befriending ignorance, asking questions, chasing their curiosity, using panoramic thinking, and thinking like a voyager. Uh, this seems like it could be contradicting.

I know it doesn’t have to be, but if, if you could share some, I think, advice, yes, Jerry, prescription for these leaders on how to think differently and benefit from this way of thinking in a way that isn’t gonna sacrifice their credibility. 

GZ: You know, after I developed Z Met, I encountered or discovered why it works.

It wasn’t beforehand. It’s, uh, even to this day, new things are coming to my mind to show that it has even more support as a basic method. But I, in moments of honesty, I, I didn’t know all that when I was, yeah, developing it. But one of the things that’s very important, every manager shares with all the staff that they work with, senior to them, junior to them, is that the mind works on the basis of analogy.

And there are excellent treatises on this, you know, by really thoughtful people, that memory itself is organized analogically. We have memory files of potential analogous things to use when we encounter, uh, ambiguity, or we encounter something we don’t know, we can retrieve. What’s it like? I mean, that’s the first– You have three questions.

What is it? What is it like? That’s when you begin to make progress. It’s maybe it’s like a lobster. I don’t know. Making that up. And then what of it? What do you do with it? But what’s it like? It’s a fundamental question when we’re making sense of a problem. Where else have we seen it? And so on. And I think that if a manager sort of not just worries about what something is and what do you do about it, but understands first what is it like, where else has this happened, they’ll come up with many more solutions or things to adapt or alter.

And that’s where metaphor comes in, because metaphor is really the language of analogies, analogical thinking. And so I think they should leverage what they have naturally, which is the ability to think in terms of analogy. And a lot of problems will look a lot more trackable and solvable if they indulge in that.

And that’s a kind of a natural thing, and they can leverage their colleagues and help them get them to participate. That’s a big lesson, and I think that intelligence is the ability to make sense of ambiguity. It’s not a paper-and-pencil test. It’s, uh, the ability to clarify what is amiss, you know, chaos. And using analogy is what a wise person does. 

AW: So I’m trying to read the minds of the listeners here, and I can imagine they’re thinking that this is very compelling thesis, and I want to dare myself to think differently. So what are some specific, I was gonna say almost physical things? So asking questions seems like the low-hanging fruit.

What are some things that they can do themselves, and also to encourage people in their organization so that they can really get some scale on the benefits of thinking differently? 

GZ: I think I would resort to finding examples of serious play. A play gives everyone a degree of license that they don’t ordinarily have, and that’s very free, uh, and important, but is serious.

You know, there’s a problem to be solved, and that’s where the clairvoyant and the wizard come in And I would ask first, I use those guys all the time, what would I have to fix? That’s the wizard. You know, if we went down this road, the clairvoyant is someone who sees the future. Okay, what do I anticipate is going to happen?

And the two guys get together, people get together. There’s an issue of gender with that. I use it with my MBA class a lot. A clairvoyant apparently has feminine qualities and a wizard, masculine qualities. 

AW: That’s also true of a lot of archetypes, right? 

GZ: Uh, but I would, I would make serious use of those characters and other devices for serious play, ro- you know, role-playing.

Humility, Courage, and Discipline: Final Lessons on Thinking Differently 

AW: Okay. You know, I’m gonna try this even within Talk About Talk, a very small organization. I’m gonna try serious playfulness, assigning the wizard and the clairvoyant, and we’ll see what happens. I’ll report back to you. Can I ask you the three rapid-fire questions now, Sherry? 

GZ: Okay. 

AW: I know I’ve asked you these questions before in the past when I interviewed you. We’ll see if it’s changed. Question number one: Are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

GZ: Uh, introvert. 

AW: Do you know what you said one time when I asked you that question? You said, “Can I just be a vert?” Okay. You’re an introvert. 

GZ: It shows you how, it shows you how retiring I am. 

AW: Yeah. 

GZ: Yeah. 

AW: It’s supposed to be rapid fire, Andrea. Okay. Okay, question number two: What are your communication pet peeves? 

GZ: A dry mouth, looking out at an audience if I’m the communicator. I, I really don’t like those situations. A third would be, I guess, I’m not very forgiving for someone who can’t hold my attention.

So if I leave a speaking engagement, and I have a lot of ideas to pursue, it’s usually because I wasn’t paying attention or they didn’t hold my attention, not that they gave it to me, so that’s not a good sign. 

AW: I remember, I know this is not very rapid fire, but I do remember in your office we were talking about how some of the academic presentations that you and I attended together weren’t always that interesting.

You told me, or you encouraged me to watch their presentation techniques, their communication, uh, and maybe learn that if I wasn’t gonna learn the material that they were presenting. Okay, question number three: I’m really curious about this one, given how broadly and extensively you read. Is there a book that you’ve read or a podcast that you’ve listened to that you find yourself recommending a lot lately?

GZ: Yes. There is. Ed Yong, and it’s all about other forms of life here on Earth and how amazingly sophisticated they are and how extraordinarily developed one or another is with various senses and other capacities, and it’s a very humbling read. I think humans are really pretty impoverished in a sensory sense compared to almost any of these creatures.

He goes through spiders, frogs, and bats. It’s become a classic book, I think. 

AW: I will definitely read it based on that recommendation, Sherry. And it reminds me of, I think, a theme of this conversation, which is really about humility. I’m curious if you agree with that, and maybe you can share your, your final thoughts with the Talk About Talk listeners about daring themselves to think differently.

GZ: You’ll see in the book frequently I’ll mention together the need for humility. That is always the first one. The courage, courage is another one, and discipline. It’s hard work. It takes discipline. It requires being bold, you know, being censored in some sense in various ways, making other people uncomfortable, not deliberately, but just inadvertently.

And humility, which is you have to see yourself as someone with so much to learn. There’s no space for arrogance. 

AW: I love that. It’s a beautiful place to end, Gerald. Especially listeners know that I’m a huge fan of the power of three. So, in addition to all of the inspiring insights that you shared, I guess if we can all take away an even increased respect for humility, courage, and discipline, and doing our best to succeed on all of those dimensions. Thank you so much, Gerald. I really enjoyed this conversation

The post Dare to THINK DIFFERENTLY with Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman (ep. 213) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Are your presentations always falling flat?

I’m breaking down the 7 most common presentation mistakes leaders make and exactly what to do instead.

Whether you’re presenting to your board, your team, or a room full of strangers, these mistakes are probably showing up in your work right now. The good news? Every single one of them is fixable.

We cover everything from the prep mistakes that undermine your message before you even open your mouth, to the delivery habits that quietly erode your authority on stage. Including what to do when someone asks you a question you can’t answer.

If you want to walk into your next presentation with more confidence, more clarity, and more impact, you need to avoid these mistakes.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

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TRANSCRIPTION

Andrea Wojnicki:

Your audience is probably full of busy people with many, many distractions in their heads. If you can get them to pay attention and internalize one main message, then that is a huge accomplishment. How are your presentation skills? In this episode, you’re going to learn the top seven presentation mistakes, and importantly, specific advice on how you can avoid or correct these mistakes so you can deliver truly impactful presentations at work.

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where I coach ambitious leaders and aspiring leaders to communicate with confidence and credibility so you can achieve your career goals.

You can learn more about what we do at Talk About Talk if you go to talkabouttalk.com. You’ll find plenty of free resources there, plus information about my keynote speaking, corporate workshops, small group master classes, online courses, and more. I also have a free biweekly email newsletter where you can sign up to get free communication skills coaching from me every two weeks in your inbox.

Okay, let’s get into this.

Mistakes #1 and #2: No Roadmap and No Audience Insight 

The top seven presentation mistakes and how to correct these mistakes to ensure that you deliver impactful presentations at work. Mistake number one is not providing a roadmap. Have you ever been sitting in a meeting or maybe in an audience when someone stands up to give a presentation and they start talking, and you have absolutely no idea where they’re headed?

That is what I’m talking about here. Big mistake. Have you ever pressed play on a podcast episode without knowing what it’s about? No way. Exactly. Instead, here’s what you should do. Start with the headline, then tell them what you’re gonna present. Here’s the thing about business communication that we all need to remember, and this goes beyond presentations.

Even in things like commenting in a meeting or even writing emails, suspense is way overrated in business communication. You need to get to the point. You need to start with the headline. In the context of a presentation, provide a roadmap. For example, you could say, “I’m gonna summarize our Q2 financials and then highlight three key insights that we need to focus on to improve our results in Q3.”

Or you could say something like, “I’m gonna share with you seven common presentation mistakes and tips for what you can do instead.” Do you see what I did there? Do you get the idea? Sharing your headline and then providing a roadmap helps your audience understand why they should pay attention. It also shows respect for your audience, which leads me to the second mistake.

Mistake number two is not understanding your audience. By now, we all know that understanding your audience is critical to capturing their attention. Maybe you’re teaching a workshop, so you ask the workshop organizer, “Who’s gonna be in the audience? How many people will be in the room? What career stage are they at?

Are they junior, mid-career, or are they senior leaders, or is it a mix? How old are they? Does this audience skew male or skew female, or is it mixed?” Here’s the thing about this list. These are demographics, and that’s table stakes. You need to go deep on your audience if you wanna make an impact. Do they care about your topic?

How much do they know about your topic? What do they care about? The more you know about what they know and what they care about, the more your message will resonate. Beyond these psychographic dimensions, it’ll also help if you understand exactly what’s going on in the moment for these people in your audience.

What time of day is your presentation? Are they hungry? Are they tired? Will they be rushing in after fighting in morning rush hour traffic? Or are you presenting at 11:30 AM, when all they can think about is what they’re having for lunch? The other question is, who’s presenting before you, and what’s happening after your time on the agenda?

You get the idea. The more you understand about your audience, yes, their demographics, but also what they know, what they care about, and how they’re feeling in the context of your presentation, this will all help you immensely. Okay. So we’ve covered mistake number one, not providing a roadmap or context for your audience, and mistake number two, not understanding your audience.

Mistakes #3 and #4: Trying to Say Too Much and Being Generic 

Mistake number three is trying to say too much. Instead, you need to focus. Focus on one key point. Your audience is probably full of busy people with many, many distractions in their heads. If you can get them to pay attention and internalize one main message, then that is a huge accomplishment. So ask yourself, “What’s my one main point here?”

And then focus all your content around that one point. This is also a great way to help you recover if you lose your place in the presentation. Just remind yourself of your one main point. And if you happen to be one of those people who tends to ramble on and go off topic, I have an insight to share with you.

In my experience, folks who ramble and go off topic are typically very generous They’re the ones who want their audience to know everything that’s going on inside their head, and truly, this generosity is a lovely motivation. But if you really want to be a generous presenter, you do the work of focusing your main message and the main learning instead of imposing that work on your audience. That is how you make an impact. 

Okay, moving along. Mistake number four is being generic. Think of this mistake as sharing the presentation that anyone could give. Here’s the test. Could your presentation be delivered by anyone if they had the script? If yes, you need to personalize it. You need to customize the content so that you are the only one who could give this presentation, or at least you’re the one who could best deliver it.

Here’s your question: What insight or perspective can I uniquely share here? Most of the folks that I coach who are preparing for significant presentations haven’t even thought of this before, but this insight can truly take your presentation to the next level. Ask yourself, “What can only I add to this topic or this presentation that no one else can?”

Make it personal. When you customize your talk in this way, you’re actually accomplishing two things. One, you’re making it more interesting and impactful, and two, you’re also gonna boost your confidence. Okay, moving on. We’ve covered four mistakes so far. The first mistake is not providing a roadmap. The second mistake is not understanding your audience.

The third mistake is trying to say too much or not focusing your point. The fourth mistake is being generic and not customizing or personalizing your presentation. 

Mistakes #5 and #6: Reading Your Script and Going Overtime 

Mistake number five is reading. Yes, as in reading your script. This is a very easy one to fix. Never ever under any circumstances do you bring your script on stage.

Okay, maybe if you’re a celebrity presenter or a politician and you’re delivering an important speech, and you have two teleprompters, but otherwise, do not bring your script on stage. Why? Because in all likelihood, you’re gonna end up reading it. Depending on the context, you can certainly bring up a note card that outlines your main points in case you lose your place, but do not read your typed-out script, and don’t bring it on stage with you.

And related to this point, do not read your slides. Got it? No scripts on stage. Next mistake. Mistake number six is going into overtime. If you’re giving a forty-five-minute speech, you need to rehearse it until you can nail it in forty-four minutes. If you’re delivering a TED Talk, you’ve got exactly eighteen minutes.

Going over time is disrespectful, and it implies lack of preparation. Back to my point about generosity. It might be the case that you’re just trying to be generous and share as much information as you can, but that’s no excuse here. You need to be focused, and you need to respect the timeline. A few months ago, I was asked to deliver a keynote at a conference, and I was given twenty minutes to deliver what the organizers had seen me deliver previously in one hour.

So I focused on the script, and I practiced it beginning to end. The first time it took forty minutes. The second time it took thirty minutes. And the third time it was just under twenty minutes. I knew exactly what I could say and what I needed to cut. And when I went on stage, guess what happened? Muscle memory kicked in, and I was able to deliver it within the short twenty minutes. Do not go into overtime. 

Mistake #7 and Final Recap: Navigating Q&A with Confidence 

Now, the last common mistake that people make when they’re delivering presentations is in the context of the Q&A. This is the question and answer period that sometimes happens at the end. What do you do when someone asks you a question, and you don’t have an answer? The common advice here is to respectfully say, “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you.”

And here’s the thing: that’s fine, but I have a much better suggestion. Before you get out on stage or in front of the room, remind yourself of your expertise. You do not know everything, but you do have unique insights and experiences. You do have unique and valuable knowledge and expertise. It’s inevitable that someone will ask you a question that you don’t have an answer for.

Instead of responding with the cliché, “I’ll look into it and get back to you,” we hear this all the time, right? Consider this instead to be your chance to reinforce your unique expertise or your personal brand. Instead, try something like, “That is an insightful question, something I haven’t considered before.

Based on my expertise, based on what I do know, here’s what I’d say.” And then you tell them, based on your experience and your expertise, what your opinion is or what your perspective is. And depending on the context, you might also follow up with, “And I’m gonna do some research and find the answer to this question and confirm with you as soon as possible.”

But sometimes your perspective on something, given your unique experience and expertise, is all you need. Okay. That’s it. Those are the seven common mistakes that I see people making when they’re preparing and delivering impactful presentations. You may have noticed that the first four mistakes, numbers one through four, are all related to preparation, things that you can fix when you’re preparing, and number five, six, and seven are about your delivery. Okay, so you’re planning your presentation.

Mistake number one is not providing a roadmap at the beginning for your audience, not telling them why they should pay attention. Mistake number two is not understanding your audience in depth, not going beyond simple demographics. Number three is not focusing your main point, not being generous by doing the hard work yourself, of clarifying your main point instead of imposing that work on your audience.

Number four is not customizing or personalizing your presentation. In other words, being generic. Now you’re on stage. You’re delivering the presentation. Mistake number five is reading your script. Do not bring your script on stage. Number six is going into overtime, not respecting others’ time. And number seven is handling tough questions with, “I’ll find an answer and get back to you,” not grounding your answer in your unique expertise and experience.

You can find a summary of these seven mistakes on your device in the show notes for this episode. Take a look and review them there. And whatever platform you’re listening on, I encourage you to hit subscribe so you can continue to improve your communication skills. Thank you for listening to Talk About Talk, and talk soon.

The post The Top 7 Presentation Mistakes Leaders Make (ep. 212) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

How much should you share at work? How personal can you get?  What’s ok and what’s off-limits? This question of what to reveal at work is exactly what Harvard Business School Professor Leslie John addresses in her book Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing. Listen to learn the psychology behind why we conceal, a practical framework for deciding when to reveal, and what to do if you find yourself crying in a meeting.

We also talk about emotional literacy and what it means that so many high-achieving people, Leslie included, struggle to answer the question “how do you feel?”

If you’ve ever defaulted to “I’m fine” when you’re not, this episode is worth your time.

BOOKS MENTIONED

📖 Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing by Leslie John — https://amzn.to/4mG1kqR

📖 Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson — https://amzn.to/4tmJVG2

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🌐 Website: https://talkabouttalk.com/

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📺 Talk About Talk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@talkabouttalkyoutube

CONNECT WITH LESLIE 

🌐 Website: https://www.lesliekjohn.com/

📝Her Quiz: https://www.lesliekjohn.com/quiz

TRANSCRIPTION

Leslie John: It feels like overcommunicating, but it’s just communicating like you’re gonna feel like you’re overcommunicating, but turns out people can’t read your mind and your motivations. And so if you don’t tell them, then they’re gonna like make these all kinds of inferences that probably aren’t right. 

Andrea Wojnicki: If you’ve ever grappled with whether you should say something personal or not at work, or maybe you mention something personal or revealing that you regret saying, well, you’re not alone. 

About the Guest: Leslie John, Harvard Business School Professor and Author of Revealing

That was Harvard Business School Professor Leslie John. Professor John recently published a book called Revealing Her Award-Winning research appears in top academic journals and the media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. Like me, professor John was born and raised in Canada, and here’s an interesting fact about Professor John that does not come up in the interview before entering academia, she was an internationally trained ballet dancer. Yes, you heard that right. She was a ballet dancer. 

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki, and I’m an executive coach at Talk About Talk. Please just call me Andrea. I’m here to help you learn to communicate with confidence and credibility. To learn more about Talk About Talk and what I do, please click on the links in the show description.

And don’t forget to hit subscribe. You can also go to TalkAboutTalk.com where you’ll find lots of resources and see all the different ways that you can learn to boost your own communication skills. Just go to talk about talk.com. Now, let’s jump right into my conversation with Professor Leslie John.

In this conversation that you’re about to hear. You are gonna learn why we might have a bias to omit or not reveal things, a framework for how we should think about whether to reveal or conceal, and what to do if you find yourself shedding a tear at work. Thank you so much, Leslie, for being with us here today at Talk About Talk to talk about revealing and oversharing.

LJ: Thanks so much for having me. 

Why “How Are You?” Is Harder Than It Sounds

AW: So, as I was reading your book, something occurred to me, Leslie, I was thinking that one of the big questions that I try to help my clients answer is when they’re asked the question, tell me about yourself. For you, I don’t know if you agree with this, but for you, I was thinking maybe the big question is how are you 

LJ: To an extent, it’s how are you? You know, it’s interesting because I do think that in order to answer that question, like it seems like a very simple question, but. As I learned more about it than about myself as I wrote the book, actually, I realized that it actually requires some emotional literacy, and I realized that sometimes the issue isn’t, when someone doesn’t answer, doesn’t reveal, doesn’t say how they are, sometimes it’s not just the superficial.

Like not answering. It’s actually often much deeper is they don’t even know how they’re, and I say this because this is what happened to me because I was talking to my therapist, I don’t even know what I was fetching about, but I kept saying like how other people felt or what I thought. And he said, well, how do you feel?

How do you feel? And he kept saying, how do you feel? I’m like. I until finally I said, what is a feeling? And then he, I know. So it seems so simple, but like I, I realized, I’m like, I don’t even know. I’m not naming feelings. I don’t know what a feeling is. And then he gave me this tool called, it’s an emotions wheel that helps you kind of articulate what you’re feeling so you can say it. 

It helps you expand your emotional vocabulary. I actually have one in my book. It’s a, I made my own because all of the ones I was finding were like too complicated for me. I needed that much remedial help, so I made an even simpler one. But yeah, this question of like, how are you, it can be a lot, a lot more complex than you think, and it can expose that you don’t actually really understand yourself, at least in my case. 

AW: Yeah. So yesterday I was, um, in an executive education program where an emotional intelligence academic was actually talking about that wheel. So I know, I know exactly what you’re talking about, and thank you for simplifying it because it can be overwhelming.

But what I’m hearing here is that if someone asks how you are, maybe one of the reasons that we kind of go on autopilot and say, fine. That’s the default answer. I’m fine. How are you? Or, I’m good. How are you? You’ll hear people say, maybe part of the reason that we answer that isn’t just because we don’t wanna reveal so much about ourselves.

It’s actually because we don’t even know ourselves. 

LJ: Exactly. Exactly. That’s what I discovered, and that was wild. I’m like, I’m 45 years old, and I don’t know the, I need a freaking feelings wheel. Like it’s wild. But I mean, I think like. You know, different generations have honored different things. And my parents generation, it’s like IQ or bust.

Um, I don’t even know how much my mom believes in psychology, even. It’s funny because, um. One of my jokes, or I don’t know, quips about parenting is that every parent screws up their kids. The goal is to screw them up in a different way than how you are screwed up. 

AW: That resonates Leslie. Yeah, that resonates.

LJ: And so, so for me, like with my kids, I’m always asking them like, how do you feel? How do you feel? And I’m sure I’m screwing them up in other ways, but. By God, they will know their feeling and they’re so, one night my kid said he was three when he said this, he said, mama. I love you, but sometimes I don’t like you. And I’m like, that’s, yeah. I read amazing read that’s in your book. It’s amazing. Like.

AW: Yeah. 

LJ: I could not, I only like just started being able to do that. 

AW: That’s very cool. 

LJ: Or they’ll say, I’m feeling frustrated. I’m like, what? 

AW: You’re talking about your feelings? 

LJ: I know. And then I’m like, great, great. Like, I’m like celebrating their frustration. I’m not happy. You’re frustrated. Just the fact that you know what it is. 

AW: So they’re very lucky. I’m gonna say to who’s attuned to that. And maybe they will grow up to be the senior leaders who are not only sharing their emotions in a productive way, but also encouraging their teams, too.

Crying at Work: Risk, Perception, and Controlling the Narrative

Towards the end of your book, you talk about, um, leadership and how emotions and revealing and oversharing shows up in the work context. Um, and at the end, I’m just staying on this topic of emotions. I get asked about this all the time, Leslie, like people will say, I’ve welled up, and people can see that I’m about to cry.

Or they’ll say like, no, I was a blubbering mess. Or they’ll say, under no circumstances. Will I shed a tear at work, even if I am like whatever it is, exhausted and overwhelmed, or whatever it is? So what’s your take on that? 

LJ: Oh yeah. I’ve got a lot of takes. So I guess I get why people are like, under no circumstance, I will.

I show that I’m crying, or want to cry, or feel like crying. I get it because. There is research on this, and as you probably would expect, especially when women cry at work, they, the risk is that they’re viewed as like hysterical and overly emotional and not like it kind of erodes your credibility or your perceived competence, right?

Which is not good. So that concern is valid. So the way I think about it though, if you do have to cry, like cry. Um, you know, great if you can do it in, in private, but if you can’t, and sometimes you can’t, then the really important thing is to own it and to say why you’re crying like that can salvage your reputation.

I know. So, because as you know, in the book, I had an epic crying episode where I was a pretty junior academic at the time, and I was giving a talk at. University of get-go if I want to mask the name. That’s funny. Uh, which has a reputation for being jerks to the, uh, speakers, especially female. Like it’s just a toxic environment.

So I gave a talk there. When I was starting out and I had like prepped everything, I was like, they’re hard question, so I was extra, extra ready? And then in the talk, yeah, were asking me hard questions. Asking them in a really nasty way. They were being belligerent; they were interrupting me. They were, um, being loud.

They were not accepting a perfectly reasonable answer. So, like they were being behaviorally obnoxious and asking hard questions. So those kind of couple things. And I was crying because they were just being a-holes, because they were being bullies. They were being mean. And you know, when you’re like, okay, like you’re like, okay, I can do this.

But then he just ke there’s just this onslaught. It just kept, kept, and then I just, I’m like, I couldn’t control it anymore. And just the dams open, and it was ugly cry. It was like, it was the blubbering version that you mentioned, and so I couldn’t hide it. And so. What I decided to do in that moment, I said, I thought, well, it can’t get worse than this.

Maybe I can just lecture them on why they suck, like why they’re so nasty. And more importantly, and substantively, why I’m crying and why I’m not crying, ’cause I thought from their perspective, they may think I’m crying ’cause you’re asking me hard questions. And that’s very undermining of my credibility.

And so I wanted to kind of set the record straight, and so I just stopped the talk as I’m like, and I said, I want you to know. Why I’m crying and why I’m not crying. And then I said, I’m crying because what I just said right now to you, like I gave all the examples of how they were being obnoxious. And, um, I think that that’s a way of saving it because you tie it to something that’s not, it’s not that you’re like easily.

It’s not overly emotional; you’re just like, it’s legitimate. And the fact that you then are able to speak about your feelings and talk about them also models a certain maturity and a certain miss stability, even though you’re like, you, like you don’t feel stable. Um, that was like an extreme version, but I think less extreme versions.

And there have been studies on this where like if you are crying at work, if you cry about something, if you link it to your passion for the work, if you say, I’m crying because I’m so passionate, ‘ because I care so much about getting it right, then it doesn’t erode your competence. The other thing I think that’s interesting is if, especially like if you’re a leader, like first of all, leaders have a lot more latitude because they already have high status, they already have respect.

So they’ve got kind of a nice like competence capital, like they’ve got this like bank, and so they have a little more leeway such that you know, if something horrible happens. In the world that is relevant to your work, your employees, and you don’t well up, you like suppress welling up. You just look like a monster, right?

Like we’ve seen examples of CEOs that are like. Like, I’m thinking this was a while ago, but like the United CEO, Oscar Munoz will no longer CEO because of this. When the person was like dragged off the flight, and when he’s addressing afterwards, he’s just like, oh, this was unfortunate. Like there was no feeling in it.

Like that’s crazy. Like you need to show some feeling like, so when it’s expected and you don’t do it. It’s actually very undermining, I think, especially as a leader.

Why Sharing Is an Underrated Leadership Tool 

AW: Okay. I wanna, I wanna get into that as a leader, because you have the sentence that I’ve read, which is sharing is potentially the most overlooked leadership tool.

I wanna go down that, but first I wanna close the loop on what I would call in my work with my clients, Leslie, I call it. Creating or controlling a narrative around Yeah. What’s going on completely. Because there’s completely a million ways to tell the same story. Right. 

LJ: So, yeah. 

AW: Yes. I see you nodding. So, yeah. Is another way to say what Yeah. What you’re suggesting. Yes. 

LJ: Yes. Control the narrative. Exactly. Yeah. Control it. Yeah. Because if you don’t, other people are gonna do it, and so literally you’re controlling the narrative. Yeah. 

AW: I think that controlling the narrative is also a hugely underleveraged skill that eople have like at all levels, but particularly ambitious folks who are looking to get ahead. And then people are like, well, why did that happen? Or why is that person doing that? Or Why is that person crying? Or why are they so upset? And then you tell them. You tell them, I am really upset right now because our entire team spent so much time on this and were really disappointed.

And I think, you know, and then you create the narrative around it as opposed to look at how pissed off she is. 

LJ: Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so much of this like, it feels like overcommunicating, but it’s just communicating like you’re gonna feel like you’re overcommunicating, but turns out people can’t read your mind and your motivations.

And so if you don’t tell them, then they’re gonna like make these all kinds of inferences that probably aren’t right. In fact, that’s another construct that I find fascinating that I encountered as I wrote the book, was mind reading expectations, how it’s a trait. You know, we, psychologists love measuring individual traits, and there’s a trait called mind-reading expectations, which is the extent to which you kind of naturally implicitly expect that your partners or your colleagues or your friends should just know what you’re thinking and feeling, which, when I say it so bluntly, it sounds.

Of course that’s ridiculous. But yet so many of us have this implicit belief. I have it. I took the scale my, it’s on my website. You can take it yourself. I took the scale myself, and I realized I have this off the charts, but it’s been so helpful knowing that about myself, ’cause now like I realized, oh, I have to tell my husband that I slept badly and so I’m moody today.

Like he can’t read my mind. Um, so it, it often feels like over-communicating, but then once you realize, oh yeah, they, they don’t know what’s going on in my head. I just have to tell them. And. Controlling the narrative is super important. I was just advising, um, anec ed participant about this is super common.

Lots of times executives come to our programs, and they, you know, they’ll be like a, the, the focus, like a month-long program and they’ll be like transitioning. They wanna use it as a jumping point to like a new career or moving within their organization. And, um, and so I work like one of the. People I was just talking to, I was like, well, what’s your story?

What’s your story when you go to a new employer? What’s your story? Because you’ve got a gap in your resume now. And like, what’s your story? And he started saying like, well, you know, private equity bought us. And then they found out I was redundant, and I’m like. Okay, what’s another story? And like the thing is, it’s like there’s lots and lots of different stories.

You just have like they have, it has to be true, but there’s lots of different true stories. Pick the one that’s a strength, or like what my publicist said in coaching me for the book, my book publicity. The question, why did you write the book? Shaylyn, my publicist, said there are many answers to that question.

Only one or two are actually interesting. So really like think like, choose your story intentionally. 

AW: Yeah, there’s a million ways to tell the same story, even a million ways that are true. So tell your story in a way that serves you. 

LJ: Exactly, yes.

AW: We are aligned on that. Okay. Okay. Let’s move to this idea about sharing being an overlooked leadership tool.

LJ: Ah, yeah. 

AW: What do you mean by this? 

LJ: So I mean that leaders act as if they need to project strength, confidence, invincibility, and perfection. Not that they were just had to change their shirt when they left the house ’cause there’s burp stuff on it. Like they can’t say that that’s how they act. And yet again and again in research, we have found that when leaders reveal a little bit. Not a lot. 

It’s not like exposing all of your flaws, but some of them in a metered way, it actually makes their teams trust them more. It makes their teams more motivated, and it doesn’t undermine their credibility, the leader’s credibility at all. 

AW: So why is this? Is this because we trust people when we know them better?

Or like what is it about them? Or is the revealing like a signal of I trust you so I’m gonna share, and therefore you should, it’s both. 

LJ: All of these things. Yeah, it’s so, it’s super fundamental where like when I say something personal to you, something a little sensitive, like let’s say in the workplace, if I was a leader, if I said I’m working on my time management skills.

That’s what I’m talking about here. I’m not saying like I’m a like pathologically messy person, which is true, like outside of this window, it’s like a disaster. You’re not saying that. You’re saying like, I’m working on my time management skills. When I say that there’s risk to it, there’s social risk ’cause it’s sensitive.

And so the act of doing that. Literally, I’m showing you, I trust you because I’m doing it by doing it. I’m implicitly saying, I trust you not to make a fool outta me. Right? And so when I show I trust you, it makes you trust me back. And that’s like the spark of like collaborations, of friendships, of intimacy, and so on, is that mutual trust.

And so in the workplace, when a leader does this, so the the extra thing that’s going on, though, there’s other things too, which is that like leaders. They can be intimidating. They can be aloof. Like, even if their personalities aren’t that way, the fact that they’re high status and that they control resources that they have power is intimidating to people.

And so when you share a little bit of what you’re working on, it humanizes you and it warms you up, and it makes people trust and like you. So you already have competence. But to be trustworthy, to be really an admired person, it’s not enough to be perceived as competent. You also have to be beloved.

Which is, which is warmth, and basically revealing is a way to show that you’re warm too. 

AW: Exactly. Okay. So imagine that there’s a successful leader out there listening to us right now, Leslie, and they’re like, okay, I wanna try this. What are some things that they can do that aren’t gonna, that aren’t gonna sound like they’re coming outta left field.

Like, what the heck did this person just listen to a podcast or read a book? Like something that would sound like, how would you get started in doing this? 

LJ: One area is. In the context of if lots of people do 360 feedback. So if you’re trying to get honest feedback from your teams, a typical thing that people will do, leaders will do, is they’ll say, they’ll basically be like, please tell me the honest truth.

I can take it. I respect you. It’s anonymous. Blah blah. That doesn’t work. You know, just assuring someone that I can take it like makes me actually think you can’t take it. So, but what does work, and this is research outta Wharton, they actually did a study with leaders where they randomized half of the leaders to just do that, the normal, and the other half, they got them to share a little bit of something they’re working on.

I’m working on time management, I’m working on organizational skills. Sometimes I feel a bit nervous public speaking these things. Mild, but work-related weaknesses. So when the leaders did that, the feedback they got was way more helpful. Like, people were actually comfortable giving them honest, helpful, constructive feedback.

So that’s one thing that you can do immediately in that context. There’s other opportunities, like are you thinking of like kind of rapport building? 

AW: So, implicit in your answer there, something, and maybe this is a bias of mine, but I think I also hear this from the folks that I coach, is that what could be overshared or revealed?

They’re thinking about personal things, not professional, and your answer was about sharing workplace-focused or more professional-oriented vulnerabilities. So I think that that in itself is a point, right? Like if you’re not comfortable sharing something personal meaning, like from your personal life, how can you be vulnerable about your, maybe it’s something that you’re particularly worried about at work, or a skill that you’re developing at work, even that is considered revealing.

LJ: Totally. That’s so interesting because, um, my, because I, it shows how like weird I am or something that, that, to me, revealing a weakness in a workplace is like more revealing than saying like. Something super personal about myself. Um, like that, I peed my pants on stage. Like that’s, but I realized that I’m abnormal.

So I love the way you framed that, that like, if you don’t wanna do the risky thing of sharing something personal, you can do the less risky thing or more like. Context appropriate, like less weird from what the colleague, what your, your direct reports are gonna hear. Yeah. Share a work-related week is, and, and, or like, um, you know, oh, my handwriting is so messy.

I hate that. I’m trying to make it better. Like you, like a foible. Even you think of the like Pratt fall effect in psychology of like, somebody spills a bit of coffee on themselves, and it makes them endearing and people like them for it. It’s kind of similar to that. Makes you more likable. I mean, almost anything personal that’s somewhat sensitive that you share will make you come across as more likable, as more warm. The exception there is sharing things about like unethical behavior. So best not to do that in the first place. 

AW: If you’re revealing a character flaw that is, you know. Not something you’re working on necessarily. It’s like, okay. 

LJ: Right, right. But, but even still, it’s interesting because it’s like relative to what? Well, if someone asks you what’s the worst grade you’ve ever gotten, like in a job interview, and the answer is F and you say, I’m gonna answering that question, you will be viewed with contempt relative to if you just say, yeah, I got an F.

So sometimes like, admit, not that that’s immoral, but that’s like quite negative, right? I mean, even immoral things. We’ve tried it with immoral things too, and it’s re it’s the, the comparator is important too, right? Saying something that you’ve done that’s bad. Have you ever filed a false insurance claim?

Yeah, I’ve done that all the time versus, versus, have you ever false decided to follow the false insurance claim? I’m not answering that question. Right. That’s so much worse. Neither of them is like optimal at all. I wouldn’t, um, you know, but that was a series of thought experiments to really push it and be like conspicuously withholding is so bad that it’s actually better to admit to bad things.

The Reveal vs. Conceal Framework—and Our Omission Bias

AW: Okay. So this is a beautiful transition to omission bias. Can you talk about, describe the two by two with the reveal, don’t reveal, and the pros and cons, and how and why there this pattern exists where we have this omission bias. I love this. 

LJ: Oh, thanks. Yeah. This is kind of the North star of the book, which is, you know, how to make better disclosure decisions because on the whole, my view is that.

We don’t disclose nearly enough. Like we’re way too scared of TMI, and we’re not scared enough about TLI, too little information. We didn’t even have a word for it until me.TLI is, I think T-L-I, T-L-I is a way bigger issue, but yeah, TMI, we still, TMI can be problematic. So, how do you decide, how do you adjudicate these decisions better?

Like, do you tell your boss you have ADHD? Well, you might get accommodation, but they could discriminate against you. Do you, another example would be, suppose like you came up with this, some idea for like a new product or some innovative sourcing supply chain or whatever the idea is, and it took a team to bring it to life, but you, it was your idea and you hear your colleague say to the boss, oh yeah, it was a team idea, teamwork.

A part of you dies inside ’cause you’re like, I love my team, but it was my idea. And so like, what do you do? Do you, how do you even make that decision? Like, do you speak up or not? Well, when I ask people to consider these types of dilemmas, the number one thing they think about their mind immediately goes to the risks of revealing.

So, it’ll be an awkward conversation. They’re gonna hate me. I’m gonna come across as petty and needy, like risks of revealing, and those are valid. Those are real risks of revealing. But the problem is, this is so crazy again and again in my research. Like people do not come up with the other. There’s four things.

It’s a two by two, right? We love two by twos. At HBS, we love two-by-twos in our MBA lives. So this is just one quadrant of risks of revealing what else is there? There is the risk of not revealing. There is the benefit of revealing and there’s the benefit of not revealing. So it’s a risk. Risk, reward, reveal, don’t reveal.

It’s a two by two. And what the omission bias tells us is that the omission bias means that we’re kind of really, um, very, very sensitive to bad things that happen in the wake of things we did. So when disclosure terms, that means we really beat ourselves up for unfortunate things that we shouldn’t have said.

Regrettable disclosures. Okay. That’s because that’s a sin of commission. On the other hand, not revealing something we should have revealed, like praising a colleague who we think is amazing, withholding praise, or, um, not telling our crush, not having the guts to tell our crush in college that we love them, like not disclosing.

That’s a sin of omission, and we’re not so worried about those sins of omission. We don’t beat ourselves up over not having taken. Important actions. Right? Even saying that is confusing cognitively, right? But yet sins of commission, bad things we did, blurting something, and seeing to people cringe. That’s aish sin of commiss.

We’re really sensitive to it. By contrast, not revealing. Something that we should have is a sin of omission and a kind of, we don’t even code it as a sin off and we don’t even realize it. Because it’s like missed opportunities are the Yeah. Right. ‘Cause you didn’t know anything north salient. Right. Right.

You didn’t, you didn’t do anything. Yeah. Yeah. And so one of the things I’ve started doing in my life is just trying to gain a more appreciation for the opportunities to share because of omission bias. It’s so insidious that it causes us to not even. Realize the opportunities that we have to share. So like I started doing these things that I call disclosure audits where I’d like go through the day and I would, um, so I’d, ’cause I’m a nerd, I’m gonna do some quick data collection here.

I would go through the day and I’d have, I’d have a sheet. Okay. The sheet says it’s a tally. It says, said unsaid. And because so much of. The things I don’t even consider revealing, it’ll become clear. Uh, just a two-minute exercise here. So I wake up in the morning, typical boring day. I wake up in the morning, I roll over in bed.

I say, good morning, Collie to my husband. What I don’t say is I slept like crap. When I don’t sleep well, can’t regulate my emotions, I’m gonna need kid gloves. I don’t say any of that. It doesn’t, it doesn’t occur to me to say it. We’re standing in the bathroom, brushing our teeth. I think to myself, I feel older than I thought I would at this age.

And then I’m like, wait, is that a zit? I’m 45. How come I still have acne? I don’t say any of this. And so we haven’t even gotten to breakfast, and I’m five to one. Five onsets, one said. And the point isn’t that like, I mean, in this case, I think I should have said all of those things, but you know, I get to my office later in the day, my assistant asks, how are you?

I say, I’m great. What I don’t say is, I’m overwhelmed. I’m exhausted. I got a big presentation. I don’t say that. I think that’s fine. Like. The point isn’t just for all the unsaid things to be said, you don’t want that. I don’t want that. The point is like, ’cause sometimes we withhold for good reasons.

Sometimes we don’t have time, or we’re being thoughtful, or there are status imbalances that would make it unkind to share. But so often we don’t even appreciate these as opportunities. We don’t code them as decisions. We just default to silence. But they are decisions and I. We should treat them as such and consider revealing more in all of those.

The ones I wrote down, I think I should have said, because like talking about my body to my husband, like that’s a source of intimacy. How you actually feel about yourself and knowing that your partner knows how you feel is like the source of intimacy. Feeling known for who you are is like probably the most powerful source of intimacy.

So I’m blabbing on, but um, can you tell I feel passionately, but so that omission bias makes us, we don’t even realize it. So I’ve been trying to kind of like. I realize these things, and then once you realize you have way more opportunities, then you can do the matrix, the two by two and start. And with the thing about the like, oh, should I say something about this person who didn’t credit my idea?

Immediately? We know the risks, but if I then get you to go further and say, okay, those are valid. What are some risks of not revealing? You might say, well, hmm, I’ll ruminate, and I’ll brood, and when I brood it, passive aggression maybe seeps out, and maybe I’ll, maybe that will be bad for our relationship.

When you start to see, oh, there’s risks in the other way. If I could figure out how to say it to the person, which is a whole other topic, is like, how to say hard things. But we can do, there’s good science on that. So suppose we, we figure out how to say it. If I say it, then that person will know me, that I care about ideas, and ideas matter, and maybe I’ll respect before that.

So that’s kind of how I think about these decisions now. 

AW: So you’re reminding me, Leslie, recently I had a conversation with a friend, a neighbor who is in his fifties, and he, for the first time is bike riding. And he signed up to do this, like really like endurance ride. And he’s like, am I crazy? And I said to him, we don’t regret.

We do. We regret what we don’t do, and I feel like we can also say we don’t regret what we say as much as we maybe regret what we don’t say. 

LJ: It’s so right. It is, but it’s weird. It’s a little bit tricky because in the short run. We like immediately after we say something a little edgy or we do something we maybe shouldn’t have, we feel regret over the thing we did.

We, and right afterwards, we feel more regret over sins of commission, regrettable things we did than things that we did not say that we should have. But over time, it completely flips over time, and that’s the important thing that you’re highlighting. Over time, you end up regretting. You’re like, whatever.

I made some silly joke that doesn’t matter. What I really regret is I didn’t tell my first love how I really felt, and now I don’t have them anymore. The first chapter tells a story. I mean, they’re lucky tho those two people because they ended up reuniting. But so often I think that’s so relatable to people and to me, one of the things that just really blew my mind when I was doing research for the book was the, I mean, this is Tom Gil’s work on regret, but it’s also.

In a parallel universe, a woman by the name of Brony Ware found this as well. So she’s a palliative care nurse, and so she spent many, many hours with people in their final moments, and she started kind of grouping together the things people say they regret. And four out of the five top regrets are regrets of things they did not do.

And number three is directly about not sharing. Its number three is I wish I had shared my feelings more. 

AW: I mean, just read that chapter, and you will be revealing more. So Leslie, I wanna talk to you a little bit about personalities. So, in your book you talk about the revealers who may err on the side of TMI and maybe concealers who err on the side of TLI, and the assumptions that we make about the types of people who share and don’t share.

Can you summarize for us? I guess what the mistake is, the mistake and assumption that we make, and what the data actually shows you. 

LJ: Yes. So when I ask people, what personality trait do you think is most associated with revealers? People say extroversion, but that’s what I call the extroversion illusion, because I tested this for the, because this research didn’t exist.

So I’m like, oh, I’m gonna figure this out. And it turns out that. Extroversion is not related to whether you’re a revealer or a concealer, which actually kind of makes sense when you think about it, because extroverts they’re talkative, they’re bubbly, they’re positive affect, they’re outgoing, but like.

Like, decibels doesn’t mean depth, you know, it doesn’t necessarily mean, and then when I started thinking like one of my best friends is a hardcore extrovert, like so much so that I’m such a social loafer in situations with her because she just does all the talking and I can just like hang back. Um, and she, she says, says this public, like she struggles with vulnerability so.

By contrast, I’m kind of more introverted, I’ve become more extroverted, but I’m more introverted, and I’m very reveal. So the one trait that is very strongly predictive of. Being comfortable opening up is agreeableness. Agreeableness plays along well with others, kind of easygoing. And the reason is because a central facet of agreeableness is trusting others.

People who are agreeable, just super trusting, which is me, like I’m. It’s burned me before. I mean it’s, but I, I still would rather be more trusting than less trusting. Um, so it’s agreeableness that is predictive of being revealing. 

AW: So when I read that, I was like, that makes so much sense. The agreeable folks assume the best in others and therefore maybe the risk of omission.

For them is not as high as it would be for people that are low on agreeableness. I love that point. I think so. So folks out there, if you’ve taken the big five a personality test, think about your level of agreeableness on that scale and then ask yourself whether that maybe correlates with your propensity to reveal. 

LJ: Yeah. 

AW: And you have a quiz on your website, don’t you, Leslie? 

LJ: I do. Yeah. I was just gonna say, yeah, so there’s a mind-reading quiz, and there’s a, um, like do you have a revealing personality quiz so you can, you can test yourself. 

AW: Okay, awesome. I’ll put the links to all of that, plus the diagram of the two by two and more in the show notes for people to access. 

Rapid-Fire Questions and Final Reflections on Revealing

Are you ready for the three rapid-fire questions? 

LJ: Yes. I feel unprepared, but let’s, maybe it’ll be even better. 

AW: Well, guess what? I think you’ve already answered the first one, so this will be really rapid, but the first question is. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? 

LJ: Oh, introvert. Which is surprising, but I do think that I have, I know that I’ve become more extroverted, which I’m happy about.

’cause extroverts are happier. And I think honestly the re, I know this is rapid fire. Sorry. The reason I’m more extroverted is because of kids. Like they force me to push. ‘Cause you know, you go to social events, you hang out with other moms like you. And then I realized, oh, people are, I kind of like people. I kind of like talking to people. 

AW: Nice. I wasn’t expecting, I wasn’t expecting a one word answer from a psychologist on that question. Don’t worry. Okay. This one, I have no idea what you’re gonna say. What is your communication pet peeve? What drives you crazy that other people do? 

LJ: Oh, I have so many of them talking too much. Talking too much is a big pet peeve. ’cause I’m thinking of my workplace and people that in meetings they just talk too much, and they may tend to be of a certain gender more likely than others. That drives me crazy when people, it’s fine to be talkative if you have substance. Another communication pet peeve is, um, not being grateful.

Not saying thank you. Not saying please, like I am like with my kids. I’m like, what was that? What do you, I guess, 

AW: Yeah. 

LJ: That’s maybe how I’m screwing them up. They have to be like, they’re so polite.

AW:  I put the fear, you know, what I do with my kids is I just say, my kids are a little older than yours. I just say, you’re welcome.

And then I walk. I’m like, I’m not gonna keep asking you to say thank you. We’re past that point, but I am gonna use my manners and say, you’re welcome. That’s awesome. It’s a little passive-aggressive. Okay. A little question number. Question number three. Is there a book other than yours and a podcast other than mine that you find yourself recommending to people lately?

LJ: Okay. A book. Yes. I love so many books. So the book I’m gonna recommend is right here, but it’s a little revealing. It’s sitting here. This is the book. I have never felt so heard in my life. The book, I don’t even, I feel bad saying the name out loud. Should I say it? 

AW: You definitely should. 

LJ: Okay. The book is called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. That’s what it’s called.

AW: Is Your Mom Terrible Podcast episode. 

LJ: I hope not. Um, 

AW: Well, she doesn’t believe in psychology. You said that at the very beginning.

LJ: Yeah, I mean, like, I love, I, okay now I have to say, which is true. And now it’s just gonna sound disingenuous ’cause, but literally the book is sitting right here, so I’m like, I have, I can’t not, um, no, I think she’d be like, well you, she has. I have the book.

’cause it’s, I’m just, I’m a psychologist. I’m, it’s literature. I’m learning. I like to learn. Like, I don’t, I don’t think she would, um. Ize it like that. I’ve actually had this conversation with my brother because they were coming over, and I’m like, oh shit, I gotta hide the book. And will’s like, no, no, no. You don’t have to hide the book.

She’s not gonna internalize it. You may wanna cut this, but, um, but I, uh, but I, you know, and this is like, I would not be where I am in my life without my parents. Like they’ve just given me. So, like, I just live a charmed life and I’m, I’m, I’m truly. Super, super grateful. 

AW: And both can be true. 

LJ: Both can  be true.

Yeah, exactly right. Both can be, and you know, I’m writing the book was the best therapy for me. Like I really, as you know, in chapter three, like there was a really big thing that I had kept from my mother, and it was like this distance between us, and then we talked about it, and now like our relationship is even stronger.

Like, I feel like also it’s helped me to maybe grow up a bit and realize, you know, when you’re a child, your parents are perfect. And now finally that I’m in my forties, I’m like, oh, they have strengths and weaknesses, just like everyone. And I don’t fall. Like they’re just human, and they’re, we, they’re ama, their strengths are just so amazing.

AW: Oh, that’s nice. That’s nice. So, for the record I did, and I might be in the minority here, I did not see it coming, that you were describing your first person story. You were like, by now you’ve probably realized it was me. I’m like, what? 

LJ: That’s so funny. 

AW: I didn’t know, and I even knew, I even knew before I picked up your book that there was gonna be a story that demonstrates the power of revealing.

Like, I even knew that going into the book. 

LJ: How did you, I guess maybe someone told you or something. 

AW: I think it’s, it was in the, um. The HBS alumni bulletin summary. Oh, okay,

LJ: Okay.

AW:  That makes sense. It’s like you, you share something in the book that demonstrates the power, whatever. Yeah. So I was like, oh.

Anyway. Um, yeah. Yeah. So what about a pod? Is there a podcast that you.

LJ: Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry. Podcast. I mean, there’s just so many. I’m trying to think of, I’m looking at my phone at what my fate, what the ones I’ve been listening to lately. I mean, I know this isn’t a very original one, but I really. Love the Mel Robbins show.

I love it because she has taught me so much by listening to it about how to communicate. Like there’s a lot of things that she does that I as a scientist can’t, won’t do. Like the number one thing, like, 

AW: I’m glad to hear you say that because a lot of people reject her podcast because of that. So I’m surprised to hear that you like it, but I think you’re right.

LJ: Right? Like if you, if you like put it in perspective. It’s so good and I just like be talking about my book with the media world where people are great communicators. I’ve realized how much in a bubble I am in academia and how much we suck at communicating. Like try to read a journal article, right? Like they’re ill incomprehensible.

Which is so ironic ’cause it’s like we’re doing all this new, finding new things, but nobody knows what we’re finding and so. I just think that all scientists should take a lesson from, whether it’s Mel Robbins or not to be like hyperbole, but like. Communicate extremely clearly what the key thing is. And um, so I like it for that reason.

But I agree like it’s jumping the shark if I would do that, like that’s totally jumping the shark, but there’s so much that I’ve learned from it. 

AW: Oh, I love that. I feel like that was a little bit revealing. It’s a little bit risky as an academic to say that. 

LJ: Yeah, I guess it is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, 

AW: Yeah. But you created a narrative around it.

That is very valid. So look at, look at how meta this has become, which often happens. I wanna say thank you so much, Leslie, for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation and I have a copy of your book right behind me, and I hope that either when I come to Boston or you come to Toronto, that you can sign this for me. I can’t, I can’t wait for that. 

LJ: And I can’t wait for you to sign your book to me when you, when it comes out. I can’t wait to read it. It’s gonna be so good. 

AW: I would love that too. Trust me. So. Is there any last advice you wanna share with the talk about, talk listeners, these ambitious professionals about the power of revealing?

LJ: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s that revealing is a skill. We often, sometimes we think of it as we’re either good or bad at it, but I really think it’s a skill. We, weirdly, we’re never taught it, but like any skill, you know, we can get better at it. With practice, with experimentation, with reflection. And I guess what I would say there is.

I always encourage people to like try sharing more, trying a little bit more, not a like, not dumping yourself, but like a little bit more and see what happens. And also it’s a bit of a gift to occasionally feel the TMI sting because if you never feel it, you’re not doing it enough, you’re not going far enough.

So celebrate it when you hit that. And then dial it back a bit, but it’s, that’s part of the learning, I think. 

AW: Fantastic advice. Thank you so much, Leslie.

Your 3 Key Takeaways on Revealing at Work

Thanks again to Professor Leslie John. Now as always, I wanna summarize with three key learnings that I hope you take away from this episode. Just briefly. Number one, I want you to think. Revealing and deciding about what to reveal at work as a skill that you can develop. Simply listening to this episode gave you some insights and frameworks to help you do so.

This is a skill that you can learn. Number two is our propensity to have an omission bias. I want you to really think about the two by two. Maybe take out a piece of paper and write this out right now. A simple two by two. So a box with a vertical line and a horizontal line through it. And on one dimension you have reveal or not reveal.

In other words, reveal or conceal. And on the other dimension, you have the pros and the cons, or the benefits and the disadvantages. The bias that we have that Professor Leslie John highlighted is the omission bias. So we have a propensity to believe that the cons or the disadvantages associated with revealing something are higher than they actually are very often there are more benefits. To revealing things than not. So the next time you’re actually considering consciously whether to share something or not, you can pull out a piece of paper, draw this two by two, and really think carefully about what the benefits and the disadvantages are of revealing versus concealing.

The third and last thing that I wanna reinforce with you is that. If and when you’re deciding that you wanna reveal more at work, there are really two ways that you can think about this. This came through in the conversation. I thought this was fascinating. So what you decide to reveal could be in a personal context or in a professional context.

So that’s it for this episode. I hope we’ve helped you think a little bit differently about revealing and oversharing at work. Talk soon.

The post Oversharing: “Revealing” with Harvard Business School Professor Leslie John (ep.211) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Have you ever been told you need to work on your “executive presence” and walked away thinking, what does that even mean?

In this Talk About Talk episode, you’re getting a front-row seat to one of Dr. Andrea Wojnicki’s live training sessions. Andrea reframes the way we think about executive presence, calling it what it really is: leadership presence, and shares five concrete strategies to help you build it.

You’ll also hear live Q&A from the audience on everything from dressing for presence, to navigating small talk in a high-stakes geopolitical moment, to showing up credibly across cultures.

Executive Presence 2.0 by Sylvia Ann Hewlett – https://amzn.to/4bGiZex

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

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TRANSCRIPTION

Andrea Wojnicki: Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

Welcome to the Talk About Talk podcast. 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 professionals to improve their communication. So you can achieve your career goals. 

Rethinking Executive Presence: From Vague Feedback to Actionable Skills

This episode is a little bit different from most. You’re gonna hear a live training session that I ran recently, focused on leadership presence and executive presence. In this episode, you’re gonna learn my framework for leadership presence, and you’re gonna hear five different strategy that you can choose to adopt to help you boost your leadership presence.

You’ll also hear live questions from the audience for this session. I hope you enjoy it. Here we go.

Welcome everyone. We are here today to talk about executive presence. So if you’re here, I’m guessing that either. You are a very ambitious person who has looked around at the folks around you that are knocking it outta the park in terms of their career. And you’re like, what is different about them? And I have people who come to me, and they’re like, it’s communication, but it’s more than communication, Andrea. It’s their executive presence. 

So that might be you, or you may have been told by someone, maybe a mentor, or maybe even your boss. It might have come up in your annual review that you need to work on developing your executive presence. I hear this a lot from folks. So the good news is I do a lot of thinking, writing, and coaching about executive presence.

I’m gonna be encouraging you in the next hour to start to think about executive presence in a little bit of a different way, but a way where you can get traction. So here’s my promise to you. I’m gonna share with you a framework for how you can think about this sometimes nebulous topic or vague topic, you could say in a way that can really help you get traction in developing your executive presence.

And I’m also gonna share with you, I’m a, for those of you who know me, I’m a big fan of the power of three, but I’m actually gonna share with you five different strategies or tactics that can help you establish this elusive executive presence. And so my challenge to you is to identify which one or two of these five that I’m sharing with you that you can adopt for yourself.

So consistent with being, you know, focused on the power of three, we’re really gonna go through three things. First of all, we’re gonna talk about what executive presence is, and this is where I think I might surprise some of you with how I think about defining executive presence. The second thing. I’m gonna share with you the five different ways of establishing executive presence.

And the third thing is, I’m gonna share with you an opportunity for you to work with me. It’s a program that I have to help people establish their executive presence and beyond, and then we’re gonna open it up for an open q and a, which is truly, it’s become my favorite part of doing these live coaching sessions.

What Is Executive Presence—and Why It Feels So Vague

So, as I said, some people. Are sent to me by their boss to work on their executive presence, and some people proactively come to me. And interestingly, something that I’ve noticed, and I’ve been reading a little bit about this lately, many people are not a big fan of the term executive presence. And there may be a couple reasons for this.

The one that I think is very valid is that executive presence seems very subjective, right? It’s like you know it when you see it, but how do you actually define it? And in fact, some people have told me, and I think that this is a very eloquent way of putting it, that being told that you need to develop your executive presence can sound like vague coded feedback.

That means you don’t have the it factor and you probably never will. I’ve heard those exact words from a couple of my clients, and they’re like, Andrea, I need to figure this out. And I’m like. It can be subjective, but we’re gonna turn it into something that’s a little bit more tangible or quantifiable, like real skills spec.

We’re gonna specify, forget this vagueness, forget this coded feedback. We’re gonna make it into something that where you can get some traction. So when I ask people to define what they think it means, usually what comes up is something around gravitas. And inspiring people. So it’s a combination, often of gravitas, which I would say is a synonym for confidence as an executive, right, and inspiring people.

And I would push back on that definition. I would say that sounds a little bit like a definition of effective leadership in general. There is a book, which I have over here by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, that is one of the best books I’ve read on executive presence, and she recently republished it. It’s called EP, as in Executive Presence 2.0, and she says there are three ingredients based on her research in what comprise executive presence.

It is  in fact, number one is gravitas. Number two is communication skills, and number three is what she calls how you show up. So your physical presence, and it’s kind of in that order, right? So if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna do one thing, it’s establishing gravitas, and then it’s communication skills, and then it’s how you show up.

When I read this book, I thought to myself, for those I see some people in the room here that I’ve coached before. You probably know that I coach people on all of these topics. I would consider gravitas and confidence to be. A communication skill. Of course, communication skills are communication skills, and how you show up is certainly a communication skill.

So I say great executive presence is all about communication. So that’s why we’re here, and that’s why I’m here to coach you. I wanna read to you the definition from Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book about what she says executive presence is, it’s something to think about here. She says, executive presence is typically perceived as consisting of three elements in descending order of importance, gravitas, skillful communication.

The right appearance having, and she tells a story about showing up for her first job, interview out of college, dressed completely wrong, and how she attributes that to the fact that she didn’t get the job. So a lot of people say, well, how I dress doesn’t matter. It matters. People see you often before they hear a word that comes outta your mouth.

So I would say that this is a great start, but based on my years of coaching. Hundreds of ambitious professionals, leaders, and aspiring professionals and leaders. I’ve noticed a trend, and I’m gonna share a framework with you. I’m also gonna encourage you to think about this executive presence in a different way.

So I’m gonna start sharing my screen here. I want you to rethink executive presence. Because of the issues that I said before that it may be vague coded feedback. Some people also say when they think of executive presence, they think of like an old school 1990s. Dictatorship, authoritarian style male in a standing behind a podium, in a blue pinstripe suit.

I know some of you, I see some names where we were hanging out in those days, and that was what an effective leader with executive presence looked like. Okay? 

From Executive Presence to Leadership Presence

So I’m encouraging us now to rethink this and maybe call it. Leadership presence, and I would say leadership presence, ’cause that’s really what we’re aspiring to, right?

Leadership presence is the ability to establish credibility and create impact. So you’re doing things, you can see there’s this upward arrow, right? You are doing all the things. Maybe some of the things that Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the author of, of EP 2.0, all of the things that she talked about will help you establish credibility so that you can create impact. 

And by the way, what is impact? I turn the question back to you. What is your goal? Are you looking to get promoted? Are you looking to get a new job? Are you looking to be heard in meetings? I hear this all the time. I don’t say a lot in meetings, Andrea, and when I do, people ignore me, and then someone else will say something similar, and they’ll get all the attention.

I literally had this conversation last night in a coaching session. So impact can be big or small, right? Being heard, it can be having people congratulate you after you give a formal presentation. It can be a new job, it can be a promotion, it can be any of these things. The impact is what you want. And then how are you gonna get there?

Well, there’s, you can see there’s a few steps here, but you’re not gonna get there unless you have credibility in the eyes of others. Okay. So I am encouraging us to define a new term and maybe forego this executive presence term, which has some baggage, and instead call it leadership presence. 

Five Ways to Build Leadership Presence (Where to Focus First)

Okay, so now I’m gonna share with you five ways to work your way up this hierarchy or this pyramid.

Like I said, I’m a big fan of the power of three, but we have an hour together, so I’m, I’m gonna share five with you. The first is, you know, I’m a communication coach, and I would say making sure that you’re never gonna have credibility if you’re not an effective communicator, right? It’s as simple as that.

And so by foundational communication skills, by the way, I do not mean the basics. I don’t mean easy things. I mean foundational communication skills, like being a really effective formal presenter. Learning how to lead meetings that are really impactful. I’m talking about listening skills and not just shifting from what a lot of people default to, which is passive to active listening.

There are many, many ways that you can focus on your foundational communication skills. And by the way, the most. Successful senior folks that I coach are constantly upgrading their foundational communication skills. I’m not sure if foundational is the right word, ’cause I don’t want people to think it means like basic things that you get outta the way.

They’re things that are the foundation of how you present yourself. And so three great examples are introducing yourself with confidence, listening, as I mentioned, and formal presentation skills. For those of you who haven’t heard or learned myself, introduction framework, I just wanna say this. Your self-introduction is the most direct way that you have to reinforce your professional identity.

These are your words from you about you. So it is well worth your time to learn how to introduce yourself with confidence. And this does not mean learning a script that you memorize and rehearse and then spit out why? Because it sounds rehearsed. Because it is, and it’s not customized for your audience.

So instead, I encourage you to learn my framework, and I think someone’s gonna put it in the chat so you can read the article if you like it. There’s an HBR article from 2020 that I had published with this framework, and in 2023 is one of the three most downloaded articles at hbr.org. The framework is really easy.

You don’t even need to take notes to remember it. It’s three things, present, past, future. So who are you, what do you do, and where do you do it? Hi, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at talk about Talk Boom, who you are and what you do. And if you’re between jobs, you could say, my expertise is in the finance industry or in the pharmaceutical industry.

And I’m a finance expert, right? So you could clarify what your industry or functional and or functional expertise is. So that’s step one. Present past tense. Here’s where in a professional context, you establish credibility, so you could. Mention previous jobs. You could mention a project that you just finished.

You could mention an award that you won. You could mention your credentials, your university degrees, whatever this is. You choose, depending on the context, one, two, or three things to help you establish your credibility. And again, it’s not a script. You’re choosing the things that are relevant. 

So if I’m pitching to an HR leader who’s thinking about bringing me in to do some coaching or workshops for the folks on their team. I will tell them about how I earned my doctorate from Harvard Business School, where my research focused on exactly what I’m coaching you on. It was interpersonal communication and consumer psychology.

I would mention that I used to teach at the University of Toronto in the MBA program, or whatever I thought was relevant for that person. Right. So you establish. Credibility with the past tense, and then you shift to the future. This is easy, and it’s often forgotten, but it’s like the icing on the cake.

One or two sentences where you demonstrate enthusiasm about the future. Like, I’m really excited to help all of you establish executive presence or leadership presence so your careers can skyrocket. Ideally, you make it about the other person, what you’re excited about for them. Okay, so introducing yourself with confidence.

You just had a quick coaching session there. The three-point framework. It’s present. Past future. It’s not chronological. You start with, you anchor yourself with the present, who you are, and what you do. You establish credibility by talking about the past, and then you move to the future, and you talk about how enthusiastic you are about the future.

This is a foundational communication skill. I encourage you to try this framework if you haven’t already, as soon as possible, and it’ll become a life skill. The next time someone says, let’s go around the table or around the screen and introduce ourselves, you’ll probably do what I do and go, oh gosh. And then you’ll say, ah, I have a framework, and you’re gonna nail it. 

So there’s introducing yourself with confidence. There’s listening beyond. Just act passive to active. Let’s seek really collaborative listening where you believe that you have insights. The other person has insights, and if you listen carefully to together, you’re gonna come up with something amazing. So pushing your listening to be at a new level.

By the way, I always say this when I coach people on listening. You can’t be listening at this ultra high level all the time. It is exhausting. It’s really about self-awareness. So I’m in this training session right now with Andrea. I think I’m gonna be actively listening. I’m not gonna be this collaborative level.

I’m gonna be active later on. When you’re in a meeting, and it’s something that you already know everything about, you might slip into passive listening, which is where you’re kind of pretending to listen. Maybe you’re writing a few notes just to keep yourself awake. Being conscious of what level of listening you’re at, I think is actually a superpower.

Again, it’s about self-awareness and then formal presentation skills. The one thing I would say in terms of how to get better at formal presentation skills is practice. Just do it every chance. You get leading meetings, doing formal presentations, doing informal presentations. The more you do it, the easier it gets and the more fun it gets. 

I’m gonna say I have some horror stories that some of you, I know, some of you have heard, but I decided that was not acceptable, and so I started practicing, and now I do love it. I even have a podcast, so obviously I love formal presentations. Okay, so that’s the first way to establish your leadership presence is work.

And these are just three. I’m gonna give you three for each of the five, three ways. So, three ways to improve your foundational communication skills, introducing yourself effectively and boosting your listening formal presentation skills. Okay. The second way to establish leadership presence is to communicate with precision.

Now, I would say that precision counts as a foundational communication skill, but I, when I was pulling this together for us today, I wanted to pull this one out because of this very interesting insight. I think it’s interesting folks that are more junior in their career often come to me. Saying, Andrea, I have imposter syndrome, and I need some help speaking up.

It’s like they want to speak more. And then the more senior and successful folks that I coach actually say the opposite. They’re like, Andrea, I ramble sometimes, and I need you to help me communicate with precision. I wanna speak less, but with more impact. So I have this pair of scissors here. This is about brevity, so taking up less airtime.

And clarity, so making sure that you are really clear. So I of course have three suggestions for how you can do that. The first one that I always say, when people come to me seeking precision in their communication, this is the most important thing you can do. Speak in headlines. Use headlines. What does that mean?

That means when you send an email, sure. Your first sentence might be, I hope you had a great weekend, but your second sentence should be, the purpose of this email is, or I’m sending you this recommendation and the, you know, the accompanying evidence or whatever it is, like you tell them what you’re going to tell them.

I recently came up with this kind of saying that I have to explain this, which is if you’re writing a screenplay or you’re writing a novel, suspense is great, but suspense is not an effective strategy in business. Do not rely on suspense. Instead, tell them what you’re gonna tell them right away. So speak in headlines.

The second thing here is the power of three. If you know me, if you’ve listened to my podcast, if you’ve seen my posts on LinkedIn, if you know me at all, you know that I’m a huge fan of the power of three. I even have three kids and the power of three is actually grounded in science. So three is, I hope your default whenever you’re wondering how many, why?

Because three is balanced. Think about a tripod, right? You need three legs or a stool with three legs. It’s balanced. Three is enough that it sounds like a trend. So it’s substantial or substantive, but it’s not overwhelming. And three is easily memorized. It’s memorable or easy to recall. Remember, in the self-introduction framework, it’s three steps, not an accident.

Whenever I ask myself, how many, whatever should I include, I always say three. And if three is not enough, make it three groups of three. So I’m writing a book right now about some of the material that you’re hearing today, and I have three parts: part one, part two, and part three. And each of them has three chapters.

So use the power of three. This will help you in communicating with precision because you’ll tell people with your headline, here’s my recommendation, and then you’ll say, there are many reasons why this is the right way to go. Why? This is my recommendation. I’m gonna share with you three reasons as soon as you tell them that you’re anchoring the people that are listening in.

Basically, how long you’re gonna talk. And then you say, the first thing is blah, blah, blah. The second thing is the blah, blah, blah. And imagine if you hadn’t told them that you were going to use the power of three, and you just started listing things. After two people start to go, how much longer is she gonna keep talking?

Right? So tell people it’s the power of three. Follow the power of three, and then you can restate what the three things are. Okay. The last way that I’m gonna suggest that you communicate with precision is what I call tracking the ratio. So what do I mean by this? I mean tracking the ratio of the airtime that you’re taking up in a meeting.

So far, I’ve taken up 100% of the airtime, not including the chat, thankfully, in this meeting, but typically, if you were in a meeting with three other people, so there’s four of you, I encourage you, no matter what level you’re at, to say what would be my fair share of the airtime? It would be 25% if there’s four of us.

And then say, typically, do I speak too much or not enough? If you don’t speak enough, try to take up 25% of the airtime. If you’re the leader, you should probably be speaking less, so you should say, I wanna keep it down. And also, this is really important. If you are a leader and you are demonstrating leadership presence, you are tracking the ratio of everyone in the meeting that you’re leading.

And if someone’s not speaking up. You can very gracefully encourage them to do so by saying something like, Jane, I noticed you haven’t said anything yet, and I also know that you have a great expertise and background in whatever the area is. I’d be really interested to hear what you have to say, and then just go quiet, and the person will feel flattered because you authentically flattered them about their expertise, and they’ll pipe in.

So track the ratio, whether you speak not enough or too much, and if you’re a leader, track the ratio of everyone in the room and make sure that all of the people in the room are meeting participants, not just meeting attendees, right? If someone’s sitting there and they’re not saying a word and you really don’t need them to say a word, then I say they shouldn’t even be in the meeting anyway.

You can send them the minutes later, right? Okay. So that’s the second of five ways to establish leadership presence. The third is communicating with confidence. So. Remember, in my definition of leadership presence, it’s establishing credibility so you can create an impact. How do you establish credibility?

A big factor in driving credibility is your confidence. It’s how you feel and how other people are perceiving you. So I like to think of confidence really, and this is how I always talk about a confidence in terms of three things, imposter syndrome, confidence boosting tactics. Then mindset. So the first thing I say here is lean into imposter syndrome.

There’s so much research about imposter syndrome and the thing that may surprise all of you is even in the original research, this term was coined based on research on successful people. Successful people feel imposter syndrome. So lean into it. And furthermore, if you’re not feeling imposter syndrome, one of two things is probably true.

Either you’re arrogant. You’re done learning. And probably not. There aren’t that many arrogant people, so I’m gonna say, or more likely, you’re not pushing yourself. So I get a lot of calls from folks who have just got a big promotion and then their confidence plummets, and they’re like, Andrea, I need help.

I don’t know why, but I’m feeling this imposter syndrome. And then they tell me that they just got this big promotion into a different area. And I say. Your imposter syndrome is because you’re pushing yourself to learn new things. You should celebrate that. So lean into imposter syndrome instead of that.

When you feel that icky feeling, I feel it in my chest, like adrenaline, right? I feel like someone kind of punched me in the chest instead. And when I feel that instead of thinking, oh gosh, I have imposter syndrome and letting myself go into a downward spiral, I say. You know what? That’s the spark of positive energy that I need to shine in this workshop that I’m coaching right now.

And successful people put themselves in situations where there are high stakes. So, imposter syndrome is a good thing. Then the next two are the tactics and mindsets that different things work for different people. But the one thing you need to know as you’re experimenting with different ways of improving your confidence is that confidence can be learned.

Trust me, I have epically failed in the confidence department and been able to build my confidence based on using some of these tactics. So in terms of tactics, I would say things like being expansive. I’m holding my arms out here, being expansive, confident people take up space. So whether you’re seated around the boardroom table or standing in front of a room, remind yourself that confident people take up space.

And the two illustrations of that kind of prove this one is think about Trump. I’m not gonna get political here, but think about pictures of Trump in the Oval Office, right? He’s manspreading. I see photos all the time. He’s got his arms out, he’s got his legs out. He is taking up space. Now, I don’t know that he’s doing it on purpose, but he’s showing that he is confident and credible in that room.

So that’s one example. And the other example that I think of is remember when you were back in college or high school, and the teacher would ask a question, and then they’d turn around and look. And if you didn’t know what the answer was, you’d try to make yourself really small. Right? We kind of hide versus if you knew the answer, you’d be like, oh, oh.

At least some people would, right? So those are great examples of how we make ourselves small when we don’t wanna be seen, and how we make ourselves expansive. So the tactic of making yourself expansive is a big one. Slowing down your breathing is such a simple and hugely effective way of boosting your confidence.

I’ve read this research in detail, and here’s the insight. If you slow your exhale in particular, your brain says. Hang on a second. I’m not gasping for air. Everything must be okay. And then your blood chemistry will actually change. Your stress hormones will stop being produced, and you’ll feel less stressed out.

So if you’re up on stage and you feel this shot of adrenaline, it’s not like you’re gonna be heavy breathing into the microphone. However, you can quietly slow your exhale knowing that that will boost your confidence. And then there are confidence-boosting mindsets. Things like really focusing on learning.

If you are, so I’m not talking about this, I’m gonna say it. Stupid advice that we often hear, like there’s no such thing as failure. Only learning. Come on, you can fail. But if you are genuinely, authentically focused on learning all the time, especially in these high-stakes contexts, you really can’t fail.

In fact, the story of your epic failure, like the one of me failing when I was on stage, can become part of your story and catapult you into future success. So one of the mindsets that I encourage people is really think about a growth mindset. Really learning into that, leaning into that lifelong learning mindset.

And another mindset that I know works really well is focusing on your personal brand. Your unique strengths focusing on your superpowers. So in the research on social psychology, they talk about global self-esteem. So generally, how confident are you? And then they talk about domain-specific self-esteem.

So my question for you is, and you might wanna write this down right now, in what areas do I feel confident? Where do I know I have skills, expertise, and passion that adds value in my organization or in my career? If you focus on these things, your confidence will be elevated, and the research shows that when you focus on your domain-specific expertise, your self-esteem in those areas goes up, and then your global self-esteem also goes up.

So, I mean, this is a lot of social psychology talk for. Focusing on your superpowers before you go out on stage, remind yourself of what you’re good at. So I remember many years ago, for the first time, I was getting in front of a room with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, and I really didn’t, it was an open q and a.

I didn’t really know what was gonna happen, and I was nervous about the open q and a in particular. And I said to myself, Andrea. You have academic credentials in branding and marketing. You’ve spent your career in branding and marketing. You’ve coached all these people, you’ve done these workshops.

You don’t know everything, but you are an expert in personal branding. So anything that they ask you, either you’re gonna have an answer for, or it’s gonna be something that you should learn anyway. Right? And then I went out there. So remind yourself of what your unique superpowers are. That’s a very powerful, uh, mindset.

Okay. Moving on to the fourth way to establish leadership presence is exactly what I was just talking about. It’s developing your personal brand. So there are several things that you can do. If you follow me, you know that I’m talking about this all the time. Why? People tell me that this work is some of the most impactful work that they’ve done in elevating their confidence and also in developing their career.

So, as I said at the beginning, your self-introduction is the most direct way that you have to reinforce your personal brand. I cannot overstate how important it is to be comfortable and confident in your self-introduction, focusing on your unique strengths, like I just said. My saying here is unique is better than better.

Instead of trying to figure out what everyone in your organization or in an industry is expecting you to do or to call your strengths, ask yourself what your unique strengths are. Unique is better than better. The people around you who are knocking it out of the park. Undoubtedly are focused on their unique strengths.

Okay? And then once you’ve identified what those unique strengths are, then you shift to communication. This is where in person and virtually, so like in your LinkedIn profile or whatever social media you’re on, in your email signature. When you are in virtual meetings like we’re in right now, so in person and virtually, and then.

Explicitly, so using words and also implicitly how you show up the whatever you have in your background. It’s no mistake that I have the corner of my university degree over here. I have some plants. I have my color-coded bookshelf. I have more books here, not an accident. I’m trying to reinforce my brand.

Okay, so consistently reinforcing the unique strengths. There’s so much more that I could share with you about personal branding, and I’m happy to answer more about that in the q and a, but that’s the fourth way to establish leadership presence. And now we’re on to the last one, which is demonstrating leadership.

So I don’t mean exactly demonstrating leadership presence. There are slightly different things. I mean, demonstrating leadership, and I use these words because these are the words that my clients tell me. They meet me for a consult, and they say, Andrea. My boss says that technically I have the skills and I’m ready to be promoted and I need to start demonstrating leadership.

Those are like the exact words that I hear a lot, and this could be like from a junior position to a middle position, middle to senior, it happens at all levels. I need to demonstrate leadership, and again, this could come across as like vague coded feedback. And many people also say, especially if they’re earlier in their career, they’re like, it’s impossible for me to demonstrate leadership because I’m not the boss of anyone, or I’m only the boss of four people, and they want me to demonstrate that I can manage a group of 25 or more.

How am I supposed to do that? So here’s what I remind you. Is that there are many, many ways that you can demonstrate leadership. So the obvious one is leading people, and if you don’t have a team that’s reporting to you, you can still informally mentor other people and you could even formally coach people by setting up training programs or whatever.

So, yes. People. Leadership is a big part of demonstrating leadership, but there’s also a couple of other things here. I have proactive leadership, strategic leadership, and thought leadership. So pro what is pro, what do I mean by proactive? Well, leaders lead, right? We’re not talking about following, we’re talking about leading.

So when was the last time you had a proactive thought. I’m guessing it happens all the time. Shared it with the group and did something about it. I’m talking about being super proactive. Leaders lead. When you do that, you are demonstrating leadership, right? Strategic leadership. So I often think about, I used to work at Kraft Foods and Marketing, and I remember sometimes I’d be in these big meetings where we were brainstorming something or trying to decide on advertising campaign, which campaign we were gonna go with.

Something like that. Somewhat things would, the conversation would go off track, and then after a certain amount of time, some very smart person who I would say was demonstrating leadership would raise their hand and say, we’re going off track. Let’s shift back to focusing on our strategy. Remember the brand strategy?

Whatever it was, let’s focus on what our priorities are instead of getting distracted. And I remember whenever someone said something like that, I’d always think, gosh, that person is so smart. What a great leader. So when you’re presenting your thoughts and when you’re in discussions with others, when.

Encouraging focus and being sort of principled, like what is the brand strategy? What have we decided the core principles or ideas are that we’re gonna be pursuing this year? Being grounded in your firm’s objectives, whatever they label them will help people, will encourage people to think of you as a leader, and then this one is often forgotten.

Thought leadership. So, is there something that you have expertise on? It could be something technical, it could be a leadership style. It could be something that’s related to your industry or your function where you can share either in person, like verbally, or in writing. You could write papers, or you could post it on LinkedIn.

Right? Thought leadership. Private and public. Thought leadership is definitely, I mean, that’s what it’s called. Thought. Leadership. The point here is demonstrating leadership beyond people. Leadership, proactively being strategic, and using thought leadership. Okay, so. Here is the list of five ways. I mean, there are many more, but these are five ways that I would say are very common gaps that people can get a lot of traction in your foundational communication skills.

Like I said, communicating with precision, boosting your confidence, developing your brand, and demonstrating leadership 

Choosing Your Focus: Don’t Try to Do All Five

So this list may seem overwhelming. Again, what I encourage you to do is to identify which one or two, I think more than two is probably too many. Identify which one or two you wanna commit to yourself that you’re gonna focus on.

I think of these in terms of what I call the leadership presence framework. So I shared a little bit of this with you in one of the earlier slides. Impact is at the top, right? This is your goal, and it again, it could be big or small. How are you gonna get there? By establishing credibility on the first two steps.

This is what I notice when I’m coaching people. We work on their foundational communication skills, and they tell me, Andrea. By working on my self-introduction, by working on my listening, by working on my formal presentation skills, and on and on, I feel my confidence boosted, right? And then when their confidence is boosted, this feeling that they have other people tell them like, what’s going on with you?

Like all of a sudden, you have this credible presence in meetings, and then that’s when they can make an impact. This is the framework that I encourage you to, you’re welcome to take a screenshot if you like. I encourage you to think about this. And then I, I have these kind of rectangle, whatever the, are those trapezoids, whatever the shape is called, I need to figure that out.

You can put all sorts of communication skills there. And then the interesting part here, I think, is that you can build confidence by improving your foundational communication skills, but you can also do it. By overcoming imposter syndrome and also by using the confidence-boosting mindsets and tactics that I shared, and more.

And then when that happens, your credibility’s boosted. And when your credibility gets boosted, then you can make an impact. But you can also, in a focused way, improve your credibility by thinking about the different ways of demonstrating leadership. By developing your personal brand and by doing all sorts of things.

By the way, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s definition, remember the third part? It was gravitas, communication, and how you show up. The, how you show up belongs right there in the credibility, right? Like, do you look like a leader? So this is a framework that you can probably tell by my tone of voice I am so excited about because I think it gives people a framework where I know it does, because I’ve, I’ve been using it in, in my private coaching and, uh, workshops.

It gives people, I guess, like a framework for them to think about where there may be some gaps for them, where they can get some traction and start to develop this leadership presence. So I’m excited to share with you that next month, starting in the third week of April, I have an executive presence and personal branding masterclass.

Now I’m calling it executive presence because that’s the term that people are mostly using, but in this masterclass, it’s six weeks long. We are gonna talk about the framework, how it’s leadership presence, and we’re gonna work our way up. Up the framework. So I’m just gonna share two slides with you about this, and then I’m gonna open it up for q and a.

If you wanna learn more, if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com/april2026, there’s detailed information about what’s included and everything, but here’s what you get. There are six live coaching sessions on Wednesdays starting at noon. You also will be included in a private virtual group where only the masterclass folks will be there.

The group will probably be. 10 to 15 folks or so. So it’s enough that there’s gonna be people there that you’re gonna learn from and make some fantastic connections. But there’s also a lot of individual customized one-on-one coaching. So we have this virtual private group. I’m in the group as well, and asking questions and answering questions there.

So that’s on 24/7. For the six weeks, you also get a comprehensive workbook that basically becomes your playbook for developing. Leadership presence or executive presence, and your personal brand, and you also get access to a recently re-released and hugely improved online course on personal branding. So the content that I had from the course that I introduced four or five years ago was great, but the production value wasn’t, and we recently improved the production value of that.

So that’s the program that I’m excited about. 

Wrap-Up & Live Q&A: Applying Leadership Presence in the Real World

But now I would love to answer any questions that you have. So, questions about executive presence, about leadership presence, about the five ways that I shared with you, shared that I encourage you to improve your leadership presence. Any questions about the masterclass as well?

I’m happy to answer. 

Christie: I can ask you a quick question, I guess. 

AW: Hello? Is it Hey, Christie?

C: It’s Christie. Yeah, 

AW: I, how did I know that? 

C: Because we’ve chatted briefly before. 

AW: Yeah. Nice to see you, Christie. 

C: Nice to see you. Are those situations where you’re doing a presentation, and you’re showing up in executive presence, do you have like awardrobe guide or do you have like go-to places or is it just like suit navy? Like how, how deep do you go on that? Because it does impact perception, right? 

AW: It does. I’m glad you asked. Okay, so, oh gosh. There’s, there’s actually so many things that I can say. If one thing that a lot of people don’t know, if you are virtual, go with solids, not prints because they pixelate and they can be distracting.

So that’s one thing. So I have a photographer that I absolutely love. So she’s taken all the photos that are in my social media posts and on my website, and I brought like my favorite turquoise and white hounds tooth blazer. And she was like. I was like, it’s my favorite. It’s my signature blazer. She said, no, no, it, it’s gonna be pixelated.

That’s not what you want. She said, you can wear it when you meet someone for lunch or if you’re in front of a group, but don’t wear it for photos or anything that’s online. That’s a big one. The other thing that I can tell you is if you don’t have any idea what to wear, no. That blue is most people’s favorite color.

Or how do you, how do you say that? Right? Blue is the color more than other that people favor. Right? 

C: So that was a tongue twister. Yeah. 

AW: Blues. Blue’s a good one. I would say that the other thing that comes up a lot is formality, and I just wrote a LinkedIn newsletter on this and I say, I encourage you to dress up.

And by up I do not mean more formally. I mean, look at the people. Who are up from you, who are above you, who to whom you aspire to their position, how are they dressing? And you wanna be yourself, of course, but think about what they’re wearing. I’ve started to wear like a turquoise blazer with a t-shirt and jeans or pants with really cool Adidas running shoes. I have turquoise run. I have two pairs of turquoise running shoes. Um, so you can actually have fun, and I get comments on ’em like, oh my God, love your shoes. Right? So I’ve just started doing that. You don’t have to dress up formally, but dress up like the people that you admire.

And then in terms of being in front of people, Christie, I would say the most important thing truly is that you feel comfortable and elevated. So comfortable. Like, you know, if you have a like I have a blazer, actually it’s on the couch that I’m pointing to it over there in my room. It’s like a bit tight in my shoulders.

Like I would never wear it if I was standing in front of a room because if I, as soon as I point up, it’s gonna be like pulling. So you wanna be like comfortable, but you also wanna feel elevated. Like, if it’s a big deal, you wanna show up in a way that you feel good. The old saying, when you look good, you feel good.

When you feel good, you look good, and then you do good. Like, that’s the idea. Do you have any other specific questions, Christie, about that? 

C: I totally agree on the, the being comfortable. I do think it shows up, and I do agree because I’m an on the marketing side of things. So we do that from a brand and thought leadership perspective, so that’s great.

And context matters, right? Like dressing up in who you’re in front of and who you’re talking to. I don’t know. I think it would also like, I like that. Like make it your own. 

AW: Yeah. 

Christie: Because if you’re not authentic, I guess that must show too, right? 

AW: Yeah. Yeah. So I encourage you all to think about what your thing is for how you show up.

So it could, for me, it’s a color, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a I, by the way, I met a woman at a conference and she, she had an orange jacket, an orange person. I said, oh, I love your orange. She said, I wear orange all the time. It’s like my go-to, no one wears orange, so I, it makes me memorable. And I was like, good for you.

Uh, so it could be a color, it could be that you always wear a great scarf or you’re really into, even, even today, ties maybe not done up all the way. I, I know some guys that it could be. Your socks, or you could really be into shoes or may, a lot of people are really into running shoes. Right? And by the way, it can change over time too.

It’s not like you’re, I say turquoise, so it has, for me, I always loved turquoise. I used to be a figure skater, and I, I, my dresses were always turquoise, everything. My houses turquoise. But for most people, it’ll evolve over time. Pick a thing. I remember, I used to be on a board of a hospital, and one of the guys on the board, he was known as having great hair and.

Really crisp white shirts like, like they all looked brand new, right? That was like his thing. It said a lot. It said a lot. He was, he also worked in quality control, and I was like, okay, he’s got the hair, and he’s got the shirt. Right? So, is there a way you can reinforce your brand by how you show up in terms of how you dress?

Try and think about what your thing might be. Your thing might even be your stature, right? Like I’m super, not me, but someone’s like super tall or I know some people that are. Are like five feet tall and they create a narrative around themselves as like, you’ll know me when you see me. I’m like a big ball of energy, but I’m tiny in stature.

And I’ll be like, okay. And then it’s like, oh, there she is. Right? So that is included as part of how you show up. Anyone else have any questions they wanna ask me out loud? 

Heather: Hi, I have a question. My name is Heather. I’m looking for the raise hand emoji, but I can’t find it on the screen. So my question is, once you have communicated and you have introduced yourself appropriately, what about the dead air?

Like, the small talk? I mean, you mentioned at the beginning, like I, I’m not sure, maybe that’s another podcast or another area, but. What do you talk about in this day and age and in this situation where geopolitical, you know, fever is at an all-time high. What can you actually talk about? It used the weather used to be safe, and now with climate change, that’s not safe.

AW: Yeah, that’s true. 

H: What, what do you talk about? 

AW: It’s such a cliche, isn’t it, to talk about the weather, but the weather is often newsworthy these days. I am not a big fan of these kind of rehearsed. Small talk prompts like, so what have you done lately that really lit up your world? Or you know, tell me about the best place you visited in the last year. I, I think asking those kind of random questions that you could ask anyone is, it seems a bit trite to me and, I know I appreciate it when people are doing it because they’re trying to fill the conversation void. But instead, I would look at the person and. Ask them something about the here and now.

Like literally, if you’re at a conference and you meet someone, you could say, what’s your connection to the conference? Are you a speaker? Do you know the speaker? Are you a sponsor? What? Whatever. Right? So ask them about them. Ask them. So how did you get here? Did you take an Uber or did you drive? Right?

So, asking the person about them, and then the conversation will flow people. Love talking. I know you all know this. People love talking about themselves. So instead of asking these kind of generic questions, I would think like, what is context and person relevant? And then ask ’em a question based on that, like here and now with this person. I hope that helps. 

H: Yeah, thank you. 

AW: Yeah. Who else has a question? 

Lally: Andrea. Hi. I have a question. 

AW: Hello. 

L: I work with people all around the world, obviously mostly remotely. What considerations should I have or anyone in this obviously room have when it comes to establishing executive presence or leadership presence when you’re working with other cultures?

AW: Yeah. This is something that I’ve started to think about more and more, and I’m gonna say this is not my expertise. I. Think it takes beautiful empathy and self-awareness to know what your culture, it could be like your country or even your corporate or your industry industries have culture, right?

Companies have culture. Countries have cultures. Religions have cultures. So ask yourself, what cultures am I a part of, and what are we known for, right? So if you are from, I’m gonna say Texas versus. Montana, right? There are differences in how people communicate, and so just being aware of that, and you could even call it out.

You could say, I know not everybody is, so I’m from Canada, and I’m a female, so people would assume that I am soft spoken. I’m not. So I could comment on that. I could make that like I’m probably not a typical female Canadian. I’m a little bit more outgoing. I’m definitely an extrovert. Right. And then you’re like, so you’re acknowledging differences.

The big thing, Lally, that I would say is especially when you know there are distinctions in culture, again, whether it’s a corporate culture or a country culture, whatever it is, industry culture, being explicit about it and sharing that you are open and that you respect other perspectives can go a long way.

And even when you do that. You can mess up. I have messed up, right? People will say, well, you’re teaching this and that. That doesn’t really work in my company culture, whatever. Or you said this, and that’s offensive. I was in New Mexico about a month and a half ago, and I whistled like I do this all the time when I’m in work.

I did this when I was in the MBA program teaching in the MBA program, and when I do live workshops after people are in breakout groups, I will whistle, and I did it twice and the second time I did it, this guy in the front row. Had tears rolling down his face and he was like extremely sensitive to sound.

And then I obviously, I saw what was going on, so I didn’t whistle anymore. And then I went up to him and he said, I know you didn’t do that on purpose, but please. And I said, I am so, so sorry. Like, I violated something for him that was like physically he couldn’t handle it. So it’s a little bit different from culture, but my point is, if you mess up address it and you don’t need to dwell on it, right? Like, you don’t need to call the person out. Don’t dwell on it, but apologize and make sure that you’re course correcting. 

L: Thank you very much. 

AW: Yeah, 

L: This is very helpful. 

AW: Michelle Brown asked for any more tips on how to effectively introduce yourself? So I’m gonna say.

This three-point framework, which I, I believe is in the chat. It’s also if you go to the Talk About Talk podcast, whether you’re in, uh, YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, if you scroll down, I have rereleased the episode on how to introduce yourself. Many times it’s always a top episode for downloads.

Learning this self-introduction framework is actually a life skill beyond the, let’s go around the table, or around the room or around the screen and introduce ourselves. You can use this framework anytime. Someone says, tell me about yourself. Imagine you walk into a job interview, and the first question is, maybe you’re just meeting with a, it’s a preliminary meeting with a recruiter.

Tell me about yourself. You’re like, oh boy, like where do I start? And then just use the framework. Okay. You can also use this framework, present past, future in your LinkedIn profile, in your About section. Your about section should be written in first person. My name is Andrea. I, you don’t have to say your name, but you could say, I am an executive communication coach.

I am a, whatever your title is at organization, where I, my leadership style is so you’re present, present, present, and then you can shift to the past. Before I held this position, I worked, whatever. You don’t wanna necessarily, this is a tip by the way. I would say it’s not a mistake, but it is a missed opportunity.

When you’re talking about your past, be it in your about section or be it in your self-introduction, if even if someone asks you about your career journey, you don’t have to default to chronology. The number of times people say, when I say to them, I used to, in my podcast, I used to say, why don’t you, why don’t we start by you introducing yourself to the audience?

And then they’d be like, well, I graduated from university in 1997, and then my first role. And I’m like, oh boy, here we go. Right? Like, sorry, I didn’t ask you for your Epic bio. So instead, think about. Two or three things that are relevant, right? So my passion and my expertise is this thing, and I used it when I had this role, and I had this role, and this is what I learned, and my leadership style is blah, blah, blah.

And that leadership style was cultivated from years of doing this and this, right? So don’t necessarily default to chronology again. It’s not that it’s a mistake. Our brains, they kind of default to chronology right in your self-introduction. Instead, think about what are your unique strengths that you wanna share, and then tell the story about the past to reinforce those things.

I hope that helps. Okay. Um, do, oh, Magdalena. Your question is so timely. She says, do these principles also apply outside of corporate IE if you are a business owner? So I used to talk about coaching executives. All the time, right? Yes. I’m an executive communication coach. I’ve recently started to change to say, professionals and leaders.

You’ll probably hear those words coming outta my mouth more often. These skills apply whether you are an entrepreneur, whether you are working in healthcare like you’re a physician or a hospital administrator. These people that I coach, actually a lot of healthcare leaders, and they will say to me, I don’t consider myself an executive, but I see the stuff that you’re coaching people on, and that’s what I need to advance my career.

So it’s, yes, the answer is yes, it is absolutely relevant, and it will help you Magdalena, establish credibility with your staff, with your partners that you have. I’m sure you have partners that you’re collaborating with, and with your clients or your customers as well. So the answer is a big fat yes on that one.

Um, Cesar or Cesar, I’m not sure how you say your name. Leadership is influence. Nothing more, nothing less. John Maxwell. Love it. And to have the influence, you have to have credibility. So I’m just gonna say thank you so much for being so active in the chat and here with your questions. I’ve really enjoyed it, as you can probably tell.

And if you wanna connect with me, my email, I’m gonna give you my email. It’s andrea@talkabouttalk.com. If you aren’t already connected with me on LinkedIn, please do. I’m on LinkedIn almost every day. I actually love it. I just went on vacation. I forced myself not to look at LinkedIn for a whole week. It was really hard.

You can find me on LinkedIn again. You can find out more about what I do at TalkAboutTalk.com. And if you’re interested in the masterclass, it’s TalkAboutTalk.com/april2026. So I tried to make it as easy as possible for you. I would love to hear from you and you can connect with me in any of those ways, and I hope you have a great rest of your week.

Bye.

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