Talk About Talk - Executive & Leadership Communication Skills

Executive presence, gender bias, and imposter syndrome collide for ambitious women trying to get ahead. If you’ve been interrupted mid-sentence, had your idea repeated back by a man, or been told to “take up more space,” you already know the double standard. In this live training, Dr. Andrea Wojnicki breaks down her leadership presence framework and provides 3 techniques to build your confidence and credibility, without changing who you are.

Join the Women’s Executive Presence & Personal Branding Masterclass-  starts Sept. 23, 2026. Sign up at https://talkabouttalk.com/fall26. 

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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 here at Talk About Talk, where I coach leaders and aspiring leaders to communicate with confidence and credibility so they can achieve their career goals.

Executive Presence for Women: Breaking Down Bias and Building Up Your Brand 

In this episode, you’re gonna hear a live training session that I ran focused on executive presence for women. I encourage you to stay tuned to the very end of the episode, where you’ll hear some brave women ask me some very intriguing and important questions with regards to their executive presence. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome, and kudos to you for kicking off this back end of 2026 by investing in yourself. There are always things that we can be doing in terms of our day-to-day job, and you’ve chosen to show up for an hour to invest in yourself, and I promise I’m gonna make this as productive as possible. I’m not gonna waste my time introducing myself.

If you wanna learn more about me, we’re probably connected on LinkedIn, and if we’re not, you can learn more about me there. But you can learn more about myself and Talk About Talk and everything we do at Talk About Talk if you just go to TalkAboutTalk.com. I always make it really easy for you with the URLs and the links.

Let’s get into this. I wanna start by saying, I was thinking about this as I was, I was pulling this material together. We ran a similar session to this in the spring, earlier this year, that was really successful. It was a little bit different. I think this one’s gonna be even better. It was a little bit different because we focused on five different ways of improving your executive presence, and in this session, I’m gonna double down on three.

You know what? Those of you who know me know I’m a big fan of the power of three. We’re gonna focus on three things, and the other thing that’s different about today’s live training session is that this is for women. And yes, it is different for women. I can tell you that based on the academic research, but also in the conversations that I have with folks.

I do coach men. Most of the audiences that I coach and where I do my speaking actually are mixed, but there is something magical that happens when women are together, and I always end up seeing a lot of head nodding. Like, “Yes, I’ve experienced this,” or, “I’ve wondered about that, and I’m not the only one,” right?

So if you’re here, I’m gonna guess that you are focused on self-improvement, that you are ambitious, and that you are maybe tired or frustrated with trying to establish executive presence for lots of reasons that we’re gonna get into. So you are here with a group that you have a lot in common with, and as I said, we’re gonna be super productive.

So I’m going to demystify for you or break down what executive presence is. Now, this is based on a lot of the reading, the writing, and the coaching that I do. I’ve created a definition and a framework of executive presence that I’m gonna share with you, and, in fact, a different term that I’m gonna, gonna encourage us to use, and this is what I presented in the spring.

It’s a nice framework where we can pick and choose where we wanna focus on the framework in terms of our skill development. So that’s where I’m gonna provide you as women with three specific suggestions for how you, as a woman in particular, can focus on improving and developing your executive presence based on this framework.

I’m also gonna share with you a program that I’m running starting in a couple weeks for women only, and then we’re gonna get into the favorite part of these sessions, I absolutely love them, the open Q&A. I can’t wait to hear your questions. So you’re welcome to put the questions in the chat, and I’ll also take them verbally if you want, if you wanna ask me.

I would love to answer the questions of the people that are here, okay? And I want you to be candid, and the more provocative and, I guess, authentic and true you can be in terms of these questions, the better. 

The Gender Bias Behind Executive Presence 

So Let’s back up a minute. Executive presence gets a lot of airtime. I have a lot of people who come to me directly, and they say, “You know, Andrea, I look around at the people who I’m, I’m gonna be frank, am competing against for promotion, and the ones that are, you know, maybe I’m a vice president, and I’m looking at the C-suite, and the folks that are there have about the same amount of technical expertise as I do, but the thing that distinguishes them is their exceptional communication skills and specifically their executive presence.”

And by the way, this holds for both men and women. But like I said, it is different for us women. So I’m gonna ask you to participate just a little bit here. You can raise either your physical hand like this or your virtual thumbs up or your hand. I’m gonna ask you three questions. The first question is: tell me if you have been interrupted in an important meeting or when you were trying to make what you thought was an important point, and you’re pretty sure that that interruption was at least partly based on your gender status.

I’m gonna say it definitely has happened to me. Okay. The other one that I hear from women a lot that I don’t hear from men– Actually, that’s not true. There are a few folks that I’ve coached who told me that, that this has happened to them, but it, it certainly is more common for women. How many of you have said something in a meeting that was met with mild interest, and then you hear some bro say the same thing and people, you know, physically turn towards him and, “Yes, that’s a great idea,” and you’re like, “What?

That’s what I just said.” I see a big thumbs up. Okay. By the way, this is a whole separate topic. Do you know what they call that? It’s bropropriation, as in appropriation, but it’s a bro who’s appropriating your comments. And there is power, by the way, in labeling this behavior because when you label it, you reify it, you make it real, right?

So next time you see it, maybe privately, uh, before you actually point your finger at someone and say, “Stop broappropriating,” but that, that is the label for that behavior, especially when they do it on purpose. Last question. How many of you- and I’m laughing at this because I know I’ve heard this so many times.

How many of you have been told that you need to take up more space or be less emotional or to be tougher or to lower your voice? In other words, you’ve been told, maybe indirectly, that you need to be more like a man. Definitely. Okay. Okay. So gender bias is real, and I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that.

And I’m gonna say, furthermore, consistent with what we’re talking about here today, gender bias makes it a lot tougher for us as women to establish executive presence. So I’m gonna share some slides with you here. Hang on. Okay, you’re in the right place. Executive presence for women, breaking down the bias and building up your brand.

So like I said, executive presence is different for women, and we’re gonna talk specifically about three ways that you can think about improving your executive presence, acknowledging some of the bias that we have, so you can build up a strong professional identity or personal brand. By the way, I have taught this framework that I’m about to present to you right now, two rooms full of women before, and the one regret that I had is that the specific skills that I focused on in those presentations weren’t always specific things that women may experience bias with.

So what’s new about this presentation here is the three skills that I’m gonna talk about in detail are ones where women experience these things differently.

From Executive Presence to Leadership Presence 

Okay. So when I think about executive presence, and this is a complaint that I hear from a lot of the women, the senior women that I coach, and some of the men.

We hear that we don’t really like this term. Why? Because it’s subjective, right? What is executive presence? People will literally say to me, “I know it when I see it. It has something to do with gravitas, but I’m not really sure exactly what it is.” The other complaint that some people have is that it could be construed as coded feedback for, “You don’t have the it factor, and you never will.”

I’ve heard something like that, similar to that, from a couple of different people, not just, you know, one or two people. So maybe it’s too subjective. Maybe it’s actually coded feedback for, “You don’t have the it factor.” And the third thing I’m gonna say is it can also be construed as being quite sexist.

So for a lot of us, when we think about executive presence, we think about the 1980s, 1990s era of the male blue pinstripe suit standing behind a podium, the command-and-control leadership style that was celebrated, right? I mean, Jack Welch wrote books about it, and now people are looking back going, “Oof, wow, that was a different world back then,” right?

So for all of these reasons, I’m gonna encourage you to not necessarily correct people when they say executive presence and not to dismiss the term, because it is a valid construct in terms of the traits or the presence that you need to establish when you’re a leader. I’m gonna encourage you instead to think about leader…

So if someone says executive presence, in your mind, I want you to think about leadership presence, right? We all wanna be a leader. And by the way, the other thing about executive presence, I forgot to say this, I coach a lot of healthcare leaders, so surgeons and physicians and, for example, hospital administrators who don’t consider themselves to be executives, but they are leaders, and all of the stuff applies to them in terms of their acceleration up the career ladder, right?

So leadership presence is something where I generally, I see a lot of nods from people, and based on my experience coaching hundreds and hundreds of folks thousands if you include the workshops. I’ve created a framework that I’m gonna share with you right now, and it’s a hierarchy, and we’re gonna start at the bottom with foundational communication skills.

So your foundational communication skills by foundational I don’t mean easy, but I mean this is the foundation. If you don’t have these critical communication skills, you’re, you’re not gonna progress in your career as quickly as you could. So this includes, you can see on the right there, things like formal presentations, precision listening, storytelling, negotiating, body language.

This is things like leading meetings effectively. This is things like introducing yourself with confidence and clarity. These are all foundational communication skills. And when I coach folks on these things, which I do in workshops and I do in one-on-one coaching and masterclasses, they often will say to me unprompted, “Andrea, you know what happened?

I started doing these things, these formal presentations, the precision, the listening, the storytelling, et cetera, and I felt an improvement in my confidence.” It’s almost like focusing on the skills distracts me from my nervousness, and I feel more confident because I know what I should be focusing on.

And I’m like, “Well, that’s interesting,” ’cause there are ways that we can directly improve your confidence, including things like talking to you about imposter syndrome, which by the way, we are going to do. We’re gonna talk about imposter syndrome, ’cause yes, it does affect women differently than men. And we can also think about adopting various tactics and mindsets that can improve your confidence, and different things work for different people.

I love doing workshops on this because I see people in the audience where things are like, “Well, that, that’s a great idea,” and other people are like, “I’ve tried that.” So different things work for different people, but the point is you can learn to become more confident, okay? So we work on confidence, and then what happens?

They proactively come to me, and they say, “Guess what? People are starting to comment on the fact that something’s different about me. People are responding to me differently in meetings.” And so this is like the manifestation of improved communication skills and confidence is credibility. So what do I mean by that?

I mean, people are leaning in to listen to you. People are taking you seriously. They’re probably not bro-propriating you. And we can also directly improve our credibility by doing things like thinking purposefully or strategically about controlling our narrative, doing things like demonstrating leadership, and, by that, I mean thinking about what your leadership, your unique leadership style is that works with your personality.

And also, there are different tactics that you can use beyond just being a boss, right? So things like establishing thought leadership, right? Or training and coaching people. These are all things, different ways that you can demonstrate leadership. And a big one here is establishing your personal brand or your professional identity.

This is a key way of improving your credibility. So you’ve gone from foundational communication skills to confidence to credibility that’s noticed by others, and then you hit the apex of this hierarchy, and that’s impact. And this is where I leave it to you to define this. There’s a little star there.

What is your goal? Is it to, um, you know, get promoted? Is it to not be talked over? Is it to be noticed? Is it for, to have people turn and nod their head at you? Is it to get a new job? Is it, you know, to secure a sale? Is it to win a, win a negotiation? Whatever it is, that top level is up to you. So I, I encourage you to think about this framework as a more sort of objective way to think about executive presence.

So executive presence is this nebulous, subjective, maybe sexist term, and when you hear it, I encourage you to just basically adopt this framework that I’m giving you. You can take a screenshot of it if you like. Think about my communication skills, my confidence, and my credibility, and how can I layer up on those things?

And I say layer up, and I, I do present it as a sequence from the bottom up. I don’t think you can achieve one layer without being great at the other. But I can tell you this, some of the most successful leaders, some of the most effective communicators that I coach, they’re seeking coaching and guidance on the bottom layer, right?

They’ll say, like, “I really need to step it up in terms of my presentation skills. I really need to step it up in terms of…” A big one that I hear is communicating with precision. And especially for women, I hear this request to focus on how to handle interruptions. So what I’ve pulled out here, which I think most of you haven’t seen if you’ve been in any of my live training sessions before, is three specific ways that we can focus on this leadership presence framework.

One thing on each of the three levels where we see a significant difference for how men versus women experience these things. Okay? So now I’m gonna take you through these three things. 

How to Handle Interruptions—and the Interrupter 

The first one, we’re gonna start at the bottom, is … I, I remember when I was creating this slide, I was like, how to handle interruptions.

Really, it’s how to handle the interrupter, right? Like, how do you say, “For God’s sake, stop interrupting me”? Right? You’re handling, like, the person. I see some smiles. I, I love the way this woman is, like, rolling her eyes, like, “Oh my God,” you know? Like, first of all, you interrupted me, and now you’re going off and taking credit for, for whatever I said.

So I’m gonna give you my quick coaching 101 on what you need to know about interrupting. The main headline is this: interrupting is all about power, period. So what does that mean? That means that we are used to hearing, and we actually witness and probably expect that people who have more power interrupt people that have less power.

So older people interrupt younger people. The boss interrupts the subordinate. And yes, the research shows men interrupt women. Men interrupt women more than men interrupt men and more than women interrupt women. So [00:18:00] okay, Andrea, I probably could have guessed that, but here’s the thing that I think is the power of this insight here I’m thinking about a very successful female leader who’s also a great communicator, and she and I were having a, like, a heated coaching session about interrupters, and she said her male boss was driving her crazy interrupting her.

And so, I let her rant, and then I said, “Here’s what you need to know. Interrupting is all about power.” And I said, “You know, in terms of our societal power norms, your boss has gender power, but he also has legitimate authority over you. So I want you to put the experience of being interrupted through this filter of, do other people, like she clearly noticed, right?

There was no question she noticed, and it was, like, really agitating her. She’s like, “I feel like screaming at him, but he’s my boss, and I can’t do that,” right? “So what do I do? Do I privately talk to him about it?” And I said, “You may be, based on the research, the only one in the room that notices it.” I wanna be perfectly clear here.

I’m not saying that interrupting people is okay, and when you have power, you should be interrupting. I’m telling you, based on our societal norms, the research shows that people may expect it. So I said to her, “You wanna keep in mind that he has the gender power. He also has the legitimate authority in terms of he’s higher than you in the corporate hierarchy.

People are not only not noticing it, they’re probably expecting it. It would be strange if a woman in a more junior position interrupted a male in a more senior position, if you get the idea.” And she said, “Okay, I need to think about this.” And I said If a peer was interrupting you, and particularly if a subordinate was interrupting you, you absolutely need to do something about it.

But I, I want you to first put it through the filter of, like, how egregious is this behavior? We gotta pick our battles, ladies, right? So a- again, I’m not advocating more powerful people to do that, but I’m, I’m just telling you to think about the dynamic in a little bit of a nuanced way. And so when we finished our coaching session, this woman summarized it beautifully.

She said, “You know what? That peer of mine who’s competing against me for a promotion, when he interrupts me, we’re gonna put an end to it. And subordinates who interrupt, I mean, they’re gonna, they’re gonna get the hand right in the face. Like, you do not interrupt me. But if my boss does it, like, it’s okay.”

And I said, “Yeah. So don’t stress out about it. It’s not making you look bad. People are not thinking that it’s, um… Yeah, it’s not, it’s not minimizing your authority or your credibility.” Okay? Now, the next question that I always get, and that I got from her, was, “What if it is a peer?” So I remember another woman who was on the senior leadership team of a big company here in Toronto, and she told me that she was– I think there were five people on the senior leadership team and she said one of them constantly interrupted her.

And I said, “Okay, I’ve got a framework. It’s a sequence of things that you need to do if someone’s constantly interrupting you.” The first time they interrupt you, you just, like, make a comment like, “Whoa,” you interrupt. You don’t need to make a big deal. It’s kinda casual, right? But you acknowledge it. And the second time they do it, this is what you do.

You put your hand up facing them, and you turn your body away from them and your eyes, right? So, what you’re doing is you’re directing everyone’s attention away- you’re, like, putting a physical wall with your hand between you and him, and you turn to the rest of the group, and then you say, “I’m gonna finish what I was saying.”

Don’t pause. Okay, if you pause, he’ll be like, “Oh, what?” No. So you say, “I’m gonna finish what I’m saying, and then I’m happy to hear what you have to say. As I was saying, la, la, la, la, la.” And you just– So you put your hand up, you turn your shoulders and your eyes away from the person. So you make eye contact with the other people in the room, and they will look at you, not him, okay?

And then you just keep talking, and you do not pause. That will take him down, and he’ll see. So you don’t do that the first time someone interrupts. The first time you, like I said, casually reference it. If this has become a repeated behavior, as it was for this woman who was on the senior leadership team, and you can practice doing this.

It’s hand, shoulders, and eyes. “Happy to hear what you have to say after I’m finished my thought,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do not pause, and keep talking, okay? So, the two key insights about how to handle interrupters. First, put it through the filter of is this egregious, or is this expected? And then you can decide how you wanna respond.

And then secondly, when it is repeated rude interrupting, first ca- reference it casually, and then go through the sequence of hand, shoulders, eyes, keep talking, don’t pause. And if he keeps talking when you’ve done that, it’s gonna make him look really bad, not you. Okay? I see some heads nodding. That makes me very happy.

All right. Back to our framework.

Turn Imposter Syndrome Into an Advantage 

We’re moving up now. How to leverage imposter syndrome. I am very, very passionate about this because I believe I know from the research and from coaching so many people about imposter syndrome. That this is true, and it can make a massive difference. So if you experience imposter syndrome, and by the way, the research shows that almost all of us do. Women maybe more so than men, and junior people more so than senior people, but all of us feel it.

So I wanna share with you some insights about why I want you to think about imposter– I say leverage your imposter syndrome. Yes, I mean think of it as a positive thing. “Andrea, are you crazy? All the, you know, Harvard Business Review articles about imposter syndrome are about how women need to get over it.

It’s called a syndrome, for goodness sake. It’s like a sickness, right?” Well, let me tell you a few things. Let me tell you a few things. Imposter syndrome is a term that was originally coined in 1978, so yes, decades and decades ago, by two female social psychologists in the US who were researching successful female executives.

Let me say that again. Successful female executives. So the first thing I want you to know is that successful people experience imposter syndrome. In this paper, if you wanna look it up, if you just Google, uh, imposter syndrome 1978 original research imposter phenomenon. They called it the imposter phenomenon, okay?

So successful women do experience it. And here’s what I want you to know: people who are sitting on their couch, not going for it, who are comfortable in their job, who aren’t pushing themselves, they are not experiencing imposter syndrome. The folks that experience imposter syndrome, I can tell you this, I get, um, consults on you know, there’s a button on my website, “Book Andrea for a consult,” and very often people will say, “I just got promoted. I used to be confident. All of a sudden, I’m– I sound like a blabbering idiot. I have huge imposter syndrome.” And I say, “Hang on a second. Congratulations on your new job, and the reason you’re experiencing imposter syndrome is because you’re pushing yourself, you’re ambitious, and you’re experiencing something new.”

When you feel that feeling, I don’t know, like, I, I feel it kind of like in my gut, in my chest; it’s like, ugh, you should be celebrating that because that means you’re pushing yourself and you’re growing and you’re improving and you’re ambitious. So this is a bit of a mindset change. Instead of thinking of it as something that hurts us, think of it as something to celebrate.

And speaking of how you’re labeling it, I told you that I do a lot of coaching with healthcare leaders, and they have validated that this is, in fact true. The only difference between anxiety and excitement is what you call it. In other words, when you feel that yucky feeling in your chest or in your belly, “Oh, no, I have imposter syndrome.”

No, no, no. Oh, it’s like, “Oh, yes, I’m excited. I’m learning new things. I’m trying new things.” So if you, if you can have the self-awareness and the mindfulness, I guess, to, to, to think about what actually is going on here and label it as excitement. And I do this when I go out in front of big crowds, sometimes, especially if I’m coaching something new, I’ll be like, “Okay, I don’t, I don’t know how this is gonna go.”

And then I’ll be like, “Oh, there’s that feeling. I’m excited.” So I, I call it like the spark of positive energy. It’s not like, “Oh, no,” and then you start ruminating and go down, spiraling down. Instead, be like, “Oh, there’s that spark of positive energy. Look at… I’m pushing myself. I’m ambitious. I’m growing.” This is how you leverage imposter syndrome, okay?

So know that the term was coined 25 years ago, over 25 years ago. Sorry, not 25 years ago, 45 years ago. Gosh, that’s good math. 45 years ago by these two female social psychologists, and it’s the women that they interviewed who were successful; all experienced it, so you are in good company, and it’s something that only people who are pushing themselves experience.

And your brain, you can label it as excitement instead of anxiety. You could think of it as playing a trick on your… You’re not playing a trick on yourself. You’re like, “There’s that feeling. How am I gonna choose to label it? I’m gonna choose to label it as excitement and ambition, and this is what I’m here for.

Let’s go.” So leverage your imposter syndrome. I can’t wait to hear the questions about this one when we do the Q&A. Okay. We’re working our way up the hierarchy here, and the last one is, I’m gonna say, probably of these three, the toughest to internalize or to leverage or to understand. But once you get this idea, this can be the most powerful.

This can be incredibly impactful on actually how you think about yourself and, of course, how you present yourself to other people. So I have this image here that I love of this woman who’s like, “No, let me tell you what I mean.” Like, right? You can see her body language. Her hands are like, “Yeah, no, this is what I mean.”

Control Your Narrative and Own Your Strengths 

You have the ability and the opportunity to share your story in a way that helps you or not. So I always say this to people, there are a million ways to tell a story, and there are a million– there are infinite ways, right? Ways of telling your own story. Why not tell your story in a way that serves you?

Okay, Andrea, that sounds good, but how… This is what I mean. This is a, this is a tough one to get. Let me give you a couple of examples. I was leading a session not unlike this. It was a lot bigger. There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in the audience, and at the end of the– it was on personal branding and confidence, and this brave woman raised her hand, and she said, “As you can tell by my accent, I’m an immigrant.

I am a lawyer in New York, and I’m tired of my brand being immigrant Andrea. You can tell by my accent that I am one, but I don’t want that to be my brand. I want my brand to be lawyer. So how do I change that? And I said to her, “Well, first of all, thank you for asking the question and for being so vulnerable.

And yes, I can detect from your accent that you are, you know, not from New York originally. It sounds like you might be from India. Is that right?” She said, “Yes, I was, uh, born in India. I went to school in India. I worked in India, and then I went to school in the UK, and I also worked there. And then I came to New York.

I passed the bar exam in the state of New York, and now I’m a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, and I want that to be my brand, not this immigrant story.” And I said, “Okay, you need to know s- a couple of things. First of all, we all have an accent. It’s just that your accent becomes more salient or more noticeable if it’s different from the people that you’re around.

So you’re now in downtown Manhattan, and people are noticing your accent.” And I said, “The thing about accents is, as long as you’re not making us work hard to understand you, it’s not a negative. And I think there’s an opportunity for you here to control your narrative and actually turn your accent from a liability into an asset.”

Power pause. And she was like, “Okay, how do I do that?” I said, “When you introduce yourself, you say, you know, ‘My name is… I’m a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, and as you can tell by my accent, I have global experience. I have lived and worked in three different continents, and I’m now working as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan.'”

Right? So you, you can actually control your narrative by naming it and explaining it on your terms. She was so ecstatic when I gave her this advice. Yeah, I love telling that story. It seems to resonate with a lot of people. But you can extrapolate beyond this, right? This is the power of especially turning that thing that you’re maybe not proud of or that you don’t wanna emphasize for whatever reason.

You know, and I hope that I helped her realize that her immigrant status is not a bad thing, and her accent certainly is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a positive. Another great example was, it also happened to be a lawyer, a woman that I was coaching who’s a senior lawyer at a corporate law firm, and she told me that she was going through a very, very nasty divorce.

She has two kids, and she said, “I’m really afraid that this is starting to impact my career. The people around me, the other senior partners, are thinking like, when they see me, it’s like this is part of my brand, that I’m suffering because…” And she’s like, “I have confided in a couple of my male colleagues about, you know, what my ex-husband has done or is doing or whatever.”

And as we were going along in our coaching program, I said to her, “Can I ask you a question?” “Yeah.” “It’s about your divorce, so it’s, it might be a little personal.” And she said, “Okay.” And I said, “But it’s related to how you’re being perceived at work. Are you feeling relieved at this point about getting away from your ex-husband and the divorce being kinda mostly over?”

And she said, “Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.” And I said, “Have you consciously thought about that or shared that with anyone?” And she said, “No.” I said, “Okay. Between now and our next coaching session, I want you to think about that yourself. I want you to really focus on this feeling of relief that you have.

But at least as importantly… Well, not at least as importantly. Also importantly, I want you to go out of your way to mention this in conversations. Probably not in big meetings, right? But if you’re having one-on-ones and, you know, you’re talking about the future of the firm or whatever it is, you can say, ‘I can take that on,’ and say, ‘I am so relieved that my divorce is over with.

I am ready to hit the ground running this quarter.'” Right? So just bring it up. And the next time I met with her in our next coaching session, she said, “Before we go into anything, Andrea, I just wanna say this line about feeling relieved,” she said, “First of all-” I feel it.” I said, “Yeah, that’s why– I, I sensed it.

That’s why I, I asked you.” She said, “But I– But labeling it and saying it.” And I’m like, “It’s called controlling your narrative.” And she goes, “Okay.” Controlling my narrative around what was going on with my divorce personally helped me. It was relieving to focus on the relief, right? And she goes, “And when I shared it with other people, I got head nods.

They were like, ‘Yeah, I can see that. Things have changed. Good for you.'” Right? And then it’s like chapter closed. So these are just a couple of examples of how you can control your narrative. The other way that I really encourage you to think about controlling your narrative is in terms of your self-introduction.

So if any of you have done any training with me before, you know that one of the big things that I push is developing a strong self-introduction, and this is not about memorizing a script. It’s about customizing what you’re gonna say to people, but understanding that your self-introduction is significant because it is the most direct way that you have of reinforcing your professional identity.

So you can control your narrative by using my three-point self-introduction framework: present, past, future. Present, who I am and what I do. Past tense, establish credibility by identifying one to three things that are relevant to the person that you’re introducing yourself to. And then step three, the one that most people forget, future tense.

Share something that you’re enthusiastic about, especially about in, in terms of introducing yourself to someone, focused on the other person. So if, if you’re looking for a new job, you could say, “My name is whatever. I currently work in a certain place, and my expertise and my industry expertise is this.

Previously, I…” You name a couple things and accomplishments, and you could say, “I’m happy to elaborate on that, of course, in, in the job interview.” You switch to future tense, and you say, “I just wanna say how excited I am about this opportunity ’cause I think I might be a great fit.” Right? You, you see how this present, past, future works really well, and you’re controlling your narrative.

You’re establishing your professional identity directly. These are your words from you about you. Okay? One last thing I wanna say about controlling your narrative, and this is a big one for women. The self-introduction is for everybody. The controlling your narrative, uh, it’s for everybody for sure. This last one, a lot of women that I talk to say, “I know I’m supposed to self-promote.

I know I’m supposed to talk about my strengths.” But I feel like I’m gonna sound arrogant. And for women, it is tough, right? Because we have this tightrope that we’re supposed to, we’re supposed to be confident, but not too confident, right? We’re supposed to be a strong leader, but n-not too strong, right? So it is a valid concern for women, and here’s what I have to say about that.

You need to talk about your unique strengths. If you are really clear on your unique strengths and you’re controlling a narrative around what you have to offer, what your value is, but it’s you’re not saying you’re good at everything, right? Arrogant people think they know everything. They think they’re good at everything.

People who have this beautiful level of ideal confidence are focused on their unique strengths, and that’s what I encourage you to do. And you can control the narrative around it. You could say things like when you raise your hand, “I don’t know about, you know, the private equity dynamics associated with this, but I can talk to you about the branding side,” and then you jump in, right?

You tell them, label for them what your expertise is. I’ve done this in meetings. I remember I was in, um, a board meeting at North York General Hospital. Some of you from Toronto know I was on the foundation board, and these guys were talking about their investment strategy for the, uh, the hospital endowment, and I heard them go off, and I was like, “What am I doing here?

I mean, I have a PhD in business, but come on.” And I raised my hand, and I said, “You know, based on my expertise and my background in branding and marketing, I think that we should also tell our donors that we are investing the endowment in things that are aligned with the hospital’s vision and values.” And everyone turned their chair and were like, “Oh.”

And you know, what I did with that comment was I contributed something valuable, which helped the group, but it also helped me personally ’cause I established why am I there. What is my value? I was controlling my narrative, okay? So there are many ways that you can do this. I want you to think about there are an infinite number of ways that you can talk about yourself.

You don’t need to share every thought. You can purposefully share your story in a way that serves you. All right. So we have worked our way up this, uh, leadership presence framework. And like I said, I chose three specific skills, how to handle interruptions or interrupters, how to leverage imposter syndrome, and how to control your narrative, just as three examples of the many, many different ways that you can focus on improving your communication skills, your 

In fact, the list can feel overwhelming, so what I’ve been doing this, uh, for several years now, and this fall, I’m gonna be introducing a program that’s just for women, where we’re gonna basically go through this leadership presence hierarchy in a six-week program for women only called Executive Presence & Personal Branding Masterclass: Build Your Brand, Communicate with Confidence, and Lead with Gravitas.

It starts in just a couple of weeks on September 23rd. I made it as easy as possible for you. If you go to talkabouttalk.com/fall26, or you can take a picture of this, um, QR code, it’ll take you to the landing page. Don’t worry, it’s not like a checkout page. It’s actually the page that shows you everything that you get in this masterclass, which I’m just gonna run through quickly here before we get to the Q&A.

So we are going to focus on establishing your personal brand or your professional identity, which is at the credibility level of the hierarchy. We are going to focus in every single session on introducing yourself with confidence. This is such an important skill. We are gonna specifically look at optimizing everyone in the masterclass’s, uh, LinkedIn profile.

We’re gonna talk a lot about beyond imposter syndrome and what we talked about here: specific confidence-building mindsets and tactics. And like I said before, not everything will work for every person, but we’re gonna go through enough of them that I know, I’m– I am confident that you will find some tactics and mindsets that work for you.

And we’re gonna learn to think about your credibility and your executive presence so that you can achieve your goals. And the way that we’re gonna do this is we have weekly live coaching sessions on Wednesdays at lunchtime. I have six-plus because we have six sessions scheduled. I also have some guest speakers who have offered to come in and do bonus training sessions, which are always amazing.

So it’s minimum of six live coaching sessions. You also get access to 10 instructional videos from me on personal branding. You get this fantastic workbook that becomes your playbook. We talk about this all the time. Print your workbook; it becomes your playbook for how you can establish executive presence in your brand.

And you also will participate in a private virtual group. I’m actually doing a sort of a masterclass right now, ’cause I, I’m writing a book, and I’m, um, in the masterclass that I’m in; it’s with a bunch of authors, and I’m really enjoying the private virtual group. So I know, I know these, uh, private virtual groups are really valuable and enjoyable.

And yes, I’m in the virtual group with you, so if you ask a question there, I will be answering it. And I know you’re wondering the price. So it’s the regular price is $1297, and until next Wednesday at midnight, that’s Eastern Time, so I guess eight days, you have to use the coupon code LIVE200 to save $200.

So your investment to everything in the masterclass that I just talked about, you know, I guarantee you will experience transformation in terms of your self-identity, your professional identity, and your executive presence for $1097. So if you wanna learn more, you can contact me through the website. You can find the information about the masterclass on the website.

You can also DM me on LinkedIn. And like I said, if you wanna use the QR code or just check out the landing page, it’s TalkAboutTalk.com/fall26. We have got, I think, nine or 10 people signed– women, I should say, not people, women signed up, and we’ll probably double that, but no more. So it is small group. And I’m gonna say one other thing about this. When I first launched these, I, I called them boot camps.

I switched them to masterclass. We started with four weeks. Now we made it six weeks, and they really are masterclasses. I did this partly because the price of private coaching is very, very expensive, and it’s a deterrent for some people, so this is a really good value for the six-week program. And I kind of thought of it as like a lower tier of coaching.

But in my experience, and based on what I’ve heard from the masterclass participants that I’ve coached, is that these masterclasses are, I would say, even more impactful. They can be even more impactful than private coaching because you’re learning not just from me, but you’re also hearing what the other women in the group are asking or saying, and we’re all smart enough to extrapolate, right?

Many of us went to business school. We did the case study method. When someone else asks a question, you’re smart enough to extrapolate if that means that for her, what would it mean for me? And then you get this like bonus reinforced learning. So if you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them.

Choose One or Two Skills to Strengthen Your Leadership Presence 

I just wanna do a quick review here of our leadership presence model, which I’m hoping you’ll consider to replace this otherwise maybe not ideal executive presence term, and thinking about it as your foundational communication skills, your confidence, your credibility.

My hope for you, based on what I just took you through, is that you’ll think of one or two things that you can work on that will help you improve your leadership presence. I know we went through a lot, and I’m, I can’t wait to hear your questions now. We went through a lot. If you can, maybe even, if you have a chance, write down or just put it in your phone one or two things that you wanna try and make a difference on and focus on those; that would be fantastic.

And I pause and ask you to do that because I am one of those coaches who’s not just here, you know, trying to sell my wares. I really do wanna make an impact on you. I wanna help you transform into the leader that you wanna be and that I want you to be. Okay?

Live Q&A: Career Transitions, Leadership Visibility, and Remote Presence 

So that, I think that’s it. Questions? Yes. I’m gonna look in the, uh, in the chat. But before I do that, does anyone here have any questions that they wanna ask? Marissa, hi. 

Marisia Campbell: Hi. Um, and I have to say the master class was awesome. I took it, but now that I’m going through transitions, I wanna take another one, so this is great to hear that you’re doing that, ’cause I think each time you go through transitions, right, you can learn something else.

And I guess my question goes around, like, all three really of the stages, and when you’re going through transitions and redefining yourself, what do you focus on first? You know? Because you’ve, you’ve had one set of skills, right? And y- you’ve taken yourself to on stage, but then now all of a sudden you’re making this big change in your life, and- Yeah … you’re redefining, like, your third chapter or whatever. Yeah. In my case, like, retired- Yeah … and then now starting a whole new career that’s using skills that I had, but, you know, also having to build new ones. 

AW: Yeah. Okay. Such a good question. Such a good question. And not just for the third chapter, right? So this, this kinda goes back to what I said about imposter syndrome. The only people that experience imposter syndrome are the ones that are pushing themselves, which means you’re evolving, which means you’re making things happen.

So if you’re going through a transition, it may be imposed on you, or you may be proactively seeking transformation. The big thing here is controlling your narrative, and there is a research paper writ- written may- maybe not surprisingly by a whole bunch of female academics at various business schools in the US where they looked at what distinguished successful women, and one of the things that really stood out for me in this paper was they didn’t use the term controlling their narrative, but they talked about creating a discourse.

You know, that, that’s another word for creating a narrative, right? Creating a discourse that made it sound as if their success is inevitable. So this is, like, not about be- being manipulative. This is about really understanding and believing that there are infinite ways of telling your story. You tell your story in a way that serves you.

So typically, people, if they say, “Tell me about your career and what your goals are,” they’ll be like, “I graduated in 1992, and then I worked at Kraft, and then I did my MBA, and then I…” And it’s like, “Da, da, da, da, da, da, da.” How is that helping you, right? Versus, “You know, throughout my career, I’m not surprised that I’m here coaching people on executive presence and personal branding because I have these skills and these interests I’ve always had on,” and then you name the things, right?

So you create the story in a way that makes it sound as if your current status and your future success are, I love this word, inevitable. I think without understanding someone’s specific context, it’s hard to kinda go beyond that. But, uh, eh, let me, let me try to summarize here. Don’t depend on your chronology.

So people, men and women, often default to chronology ’cause that’s the way our brains are wired, and that’s fine, but I think it’s a missed opportunity. What’s the real message that you want them to understand? You want them to understand that everything you’ve been doing for decades is pointing you towards this job that they’re gonna give you, right?

Or this promotion they’re gonna give you, or this whatever it is, and then you’re like, evidence A, evidence B, evidence C, right? And then, I ac- by the way, I accidentally did this when I was in my 20s. I was working at Kraft trying to get moved from sales to marketing, and I did this in my interviews. I was like, “I feel like I’ve been circling this.

I did this degree, and then I worked at Toys R Us, and then I worked at Kraft in sales, and I’m circling marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing. You gotta give me this chance.” And they were like, “That’s pretty compelling,” right? And then I ended up creating a career around marketing. So I mean, it was true.

That’s the other thing. I’m not, I’m not talking about or encouraging anyone to create falsehoods about themselves, right? That’s not what I’m saying here. Does that help, Marissa? 

MC: Oh, yeah. No. I, I love that, uh, a lot. That’s, yeah, the, the, it, I think the inevitable is the key, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, fantastic. It’s like I was meant to do this.

AW: Yeah. 

MC: Why was I meant to do this? 

AW: Yeah. Focus on that, not your whole life story. I was trying to avoid saying the word, but I’m just gonna say it. 

MC: Yeah. 

AW: Reverse engineer your success. Yeah. Were you thinking that? Yeah. Yeah. Julia, you have a question? 

Julia Rios: Yes, I do. Um, I, uh, also wanna start with I’m super excited for your upcoming book, and I’ve been listening to you for a while

AW: Thank you.

JR: And I really appreciate your guidance. I feel like I’ve grown a lot since I’ve been listening to you, so thank you so much for all of what you’re doing. Great. I do have a question. 

AW: Thank you, Julia. That means a lot. 

JR:  Of course. Oh, thank you. And so my question is about fighting the established mold. So I’m working in a very heavy, uh, men industry. 

AW: Yeah. 

JR:  And when you look at the corporate ladder or, um, organizational chart, you see, like, the traditional, um, middle-aged white men higher you go, right? So I am aspiring future leader, and I really believe there is a plenty of opportunity here just out of challenging and being a trailblazer.

I see it as a challenge for me, all right? So I really wanted to start with empowering other women. So I’m getting to the question right now with if there is a lack of challenge from, um, fellow women in, in organization, uh, and no authority given to them either. I want to empower them, and if you have any guidance how to do it without being pushy or without sounding like I know better.

AW: Do you mean as a mentor, Julia? Like, you want to encourage other women? Is that what you mean? 

JR: Yes. 

AW: It’s almost like you’re creating a narrative within the organization that women are capable. 

JR: Correct. 

AW: First of all, I love what you put in your Zoom name, aspiring future leader. Thanks. Um, I… One thing that you can do that’s actually really easy, and you can make it into a game, is, uh, you can go too far on this, but I’m guessing that it’s an extreme in the wrong direction right now. 

Asking people, so you do this yourself, talk about yourself as a leader, and use the word lead, led, leadership, leader in reference to yourself, and also in reference to other women, and then encourage them to do the same thing. So this is like a for a lot of people, right? So I remember I was coaching a guy actually in one of the boot camps that I was talking about.

It was a boot camp on job transition, and this guy was like, “Oh, I, I’m looking for a job in sales, la, la, la.” And I looked at his LinkedIn and I was like, “I don’t see the word sales anywhere.” And he’s like, “Oh my God,” right? And I was like, “Oops.” I, I feel like a lot of people do that with the term leader or leadership as well.

If you don’t call yourself a leader, no one’s gonna see you as a leader. And even if you’re not managing people, you’re probably leading projects, you’re probably leading meetings, and you can… And it’s not like you’re dropping a bomb, like I led that meeting. But you could say, “In that l- meeting that I led last week, la, la, la, la, la,” right?

And it’s, like, just these little prompts that you’re planting for people that you are a leader, that you have led, that you are leading. That’s, like, low-hanging fruit, Julia. 

JR: I love it for others because I’ve seen it for myself and obviously listening to your podcast. But seeing it as I can empower other women by actually changing their own narrative, um, because I empower them.

I give them the confidence they are leaders as well, and I want them to have that authority, and I can give it to them by simply using better choice of words, right? 

AW: Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. If you can do that, you’re magic, Julia. And it’s, it is easier than you, than you think. And many women don’t wanna do it still, but y- you do it yourself, role model it, and encourage other people to do it. Heather. 

Heather Mullen: Hello there.

AW: I can’t wait to hear your question. 

HM: Well, actually, I put it in the chat- oh… but then I thought I’d take the opportunity to actually voice it as well, which is that I would say traditional executive signals have changed. So how do you cultivate leadership presence in a business casual and increasingly remote work environment? Because I’ve heard you speak before about your appearance, and I hate the word gravitas. 

AW: Yeah. 

HM: And I, it just gives me, it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. 

AW: Yeah. 

HM: But I would like to have your, uh, thoughts on that. 

AW: One thing is coming to mind, Heather, that I have noticed with such consistency, it’s almost scary, and I challenge all of you who are curious about this to check as well.

Go to LinkedIn and go to the recent activity of the leaders that you admire, and if it’s not obvious, then click on comments. And the most impressive leaders that I coach spend a lot of their time online congratulating other people. They’re elevating others. So if you have such leadership presence that you are going out of your way to elevate others, I think you’re– it’s, it’s like you can think about your, you, you’re demonstrating the communication skills, definitely the confidence and the credibility that you’re encouraging others.

I feel like, kind of like what I said to Julia, this is like the low-hanging fruit. That is a tactical, easy, like check mark way that you can demonstrate leadership presence. And then when you’re in virtual meetings, like we are right now, doing the same thing. Like, what do we have to celebrate? You know, so and so, last week you launched that product.

I know that we met, not only met, but we did better than what we were targeting in terms of the volume or the date that we were supposed to, whatever it is. So you congratulate other people. When I’ve noticed this in the context of as a thought leader, the thought leaders that I admire the most are doing posts about other people’s books that they admire.

It’s like they have this confidence that they’re pointing to other people, right? So and I, and I– then I look at leaders in business, and they are constantly elevating people. I don’t know if you thought about that before, Heather. Does that resonate? 

HM: Yes, it does. No, it does. 

AW: Okay. There’s one other question.

Um, here’s what I’m gonna… Here, I, I know it’s 1:01, so we’re one minute over. I do respect your time. If you have to go, I totally understand. We’re gonna post this on YouTube, so you’re gonna be able to watch the whole thing. I’m also gonna take the time in LinkedIn to answer all of the questions that are in the chat.

I just want to answer, before we go, Mary Ann’s question. She’s a communication coach at a major business school where extroversion is the currency that gets people ahead there. I understand. I went to Harvard Business School. 50% of your grade is participation, right? And so all the extroverts were getting A+.

I got that. What approaches might you have for coaching introverts to keep their gifts and also get ahead? The reason I pulled this question out is I think that introverts get a bad rap, and I think they are underappreciated. I’m married to one. They are some of the smartest people. Some of them also are the best teachers and leaders and even presenters that you know, and this is the reason I pulled this question out is if you are an introvert and you maybe don’t speak or contribute quite your fair share.

If there’s four people in the room, you tend to speak less than 25% of the time. Here’s an opportunity for you to control your narrative. You raise your hand two-thirds of the way through the meeting, and you say I’m an introvert. I don’t speak very often, but let me tell you something, I’ve been listening deeply to everything that everyone has said.

Guaranteed what’s gonna happen: people are gonna turn their chairs towards you, and they’re gonna lean in. And then you say, “I have an observation that I wanna make,” or, “I have a big question here based on all of this synthesizing that I’ve been doing,” right? You tell them. You control the narrative around what your role is and what your strength is.

The best leaders aren’t doing all the talking, right? They’re doing the listening, and then they’re allocating resources. And if you can demonstrate that, you don’t need to be an extrovert to be successful. As an extreme extrovert, I will die on my sword for this, that introverts are underappreciated. Okay.

Thank you. I honestly wish we could go for… Thank you, Maryanne. I wish we could go on for another hour, truly, but I respect your time. And if you wanna connect with me through email, I’m andrea@talkabouttalk.com, or you can check me out on the website, TalkAboutTalk.com. Yes, I make it easy for you. And if any of you are interested in the masterclass, I would love to see you then.

Talk soon. Bye.

The post Executive Presence for Women (ep.221) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Wondering how to build your personal brand? Executive communication coach Andrea Wojnicki walks you through three exercises straight from her upcoming book to help you identify your own unique and valuable personal brand themes. Learn how to organize your strengths using the three Cs, clarify exactly how you make money, save money, solve a problem , and how skill stacking your abilities can make you distinctive.

CONNECT WITH ANDREA

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

RESOURCES MENTIONED

🧭 Take the Archetypes Quiz: TalkAboutTalk.com/ArchetypesQuiz

🎧 Episode 179 with Christina Wallace, The Portfolio Life and Your Personal Brand: TalkAboutTalk.com/Portfolio-Life-179

📖 The Portfolio Life, by Christina Wallace: https://amzn.to/4czgBFZ

TRANSCRIPTION:

Andrea Wojnicki: You are in for a treat with this episode. I am really excited about this one. It’s gonna be a short one, but I promise it will deliver impact. I’m gonna coach you through three brand-new exercises that I share with my executive coaching clients in private coaching and in workshops. These are exercises that will help you develop your own unique and valuable personal brand.

Sound good? Let’s go. I want you to think of this podcast episode as a private coaching session just between you and me. Are you ready to work on your personal brand? Then you are in exactly the right place. Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please, just call me Andrea.

For the next 15 minutes or so, you can consider me your personal executive communication coach. I coach ambitious leaders like you to communicate with confidence and credibility so you can achieve your career goals. You can learn more about Talk About Talk and everything that I do if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com.

You’ll see information about keynote speeches, corporate workshops, masterclasses, online courses, private coaching. It’s all there. There’s also plenty of free resources. So I encourage you to explore, and while you’re there, sign up for my free email newsletter. That’s more free coaching.

Okay, now I have something exciting to share. I am writing a book. This may or may not be news to you, but it’s not on the website yet, and it will be soon. It’s due to be published in 2027, and I have to tell you, it is way, way more work than I expected, but it’s also way more enjoyable. The title of the book is Let Me Introduce Yourself.

As you can probably guess from this title and from the topic of this podcast episode, the book is about how to introduce yourself with confidence and how to build a strong personal brand. Writing this book has pushed me to think in an even more disciplined way about how I coach people through this process.

And as I’ve been writing, a few things have bubbled up, you could say, and I just wanna share these things with you now. Three things, in fact. Today, I’m gonna walk you through all three, and I’m gonna coach you on how to use each one to help you identify and develop your own unique and valuable personal brand themes.

How to Identify Your Personal Brand Themes

First, though, I need to provide you with a little bit of context. When I work with these clients, these leaders, whether it’s one-on-one private coaching or in a group workshop, our goal is to build a succinct list of between 10 to 15 personal brand themes that are positive, unique, and resonant things about you that you wanna reinforce as part of your personal brand.

I use all kinds of exercises and prompts to help you build that list. And the most popular of these exercises is the Archetypes Quiz. If you go to talkabouttalk.com/archetypesquiz, you’ll find it there. It’s absolutely free, and it will help you identify which one of the 12 archetypes is your default. This output will give you confidence, focus, direction, and a real sense of identity, not to mention a whole new way to think about yourself and talk about yourself.

Okay, context is set. You now know that our goal is to come up with between 10 to 15 personal brand themes, and you know one way of doing so. It’s through the Archetypes Quiz. I’m gonna take you through three more. 

The Three Cs: Credentials, Character, and Context 

The first one I call the three Cs. As I was writing my book and describing this personal brand building process, something struck me.

The list of possible personal brand themes is so extensive, it’s actually exhausting. It can feel overwhelming. Think about it. We’re talking about your industry expertise, your functional expertise, your sector, your current title, your educational credentials, your past jobs, your archetype, your personality traits, especially where you’re off the charts, your leadership style, your geography, where you live and where you’re from, your hobbies, your family, and on and on.

You get the idea. Overwhelming, right? So when I was writing the book, I asked myself, “Is there a better way to organize all of this?” And that’s when I came up with the three Cs. The three Cs are credentials, character, and context. So here’s your exercise. Grab a piece of paper or open a document and write these three words across the top: credentials, character, and context.

Then, under each heading, brainstorm the positive, unique, and resonant things about you that belong there. Under credentials, you include things like your title, academic achievements, awards, certifications, past positions, and so on. Under character, you would include things like your archetype, which I just mentioned, and you can find a link to the quiz in the show notes.

You would also include your personality traits, your leadership style. You get the idea. These are your character traits. And then in the third column, under context, you put your family role, your stage of life, where you grew up, where you live now, your hobbies, and so on. Simply categorizing this previously overwhelming list can help you think more clearly and more strategically about which themes belong in your personal brand.

It might even surface something that you’d otherwise overlook. Okay, so that’s exercise one, the three Cs: credentials, character, and context. 

Make Money, Save Money, or Solve a Problem 

Moving on to exercise two. This exercise comes from a quote from a very good friend of mine named Sharon Ma Jin. You may have heard me mention her before. I’ve even had her on this podcast a few times.

She is a very successful executive recruiter, and we’ve worked together in workshops and coaching sessions to help people identify their professional identity and personal brand. And she is adamant about this, and I love her for it. Here’s her quote. Sharon says, “You need to know how you help a company make money, save money, or solve a problem.”

Say it with me. Make money, save money, solve a problem. Think about that. Here’s your exercise. Write those three phrases down. Then for each one, brainstorm the specific ways that you do this and include real examples and real experiences wherever you can. This exercise has a way of illuminating strengths and personal brand themes that people don’t even realize they had.

Okay, so that’s exercise two. Make money, save money, or solve a problem. Thank you, Sharon. Okay, we’re already onto the last one. We’ve covered the three Cs. Do you remember what they are? Credentials, character, and context. And we also covered Sharon’s suggestion of identifying how you help a company make money, save money, or solve a problem.

Skill Stacking: Find What Makes You Unique

And now onto the last exercise. I’m gonna be honest here, this one is my personal favorite. Have you ever heard of skill stacking or talent stacking? This concept is credited to Scott Adams. Yes, the Dilbert cartoonist. His idea is that you don’t need to be exceptional at any one thing. Instead, if you can combine two or three things where you’re, say, in the eightieth percentile or so, this combination will make you truly exceptional.

I like to think of this as a Venn diagram. Picture two or three circles, each representing your different skills. Where they overlap, that is uniquely you, and that is how you, my friend, are exceptional. I spoke about a related concept to this back in episode number one hundred and seventy-nine with Harvard Business School professor Christina Wallace.

Christina wrote a book called The Portfolio Life. I’ll leave links to that episode and her book in the show notes. Christina encourages us to create our own personal Venn diagram. Sound familiar? Consider three or so of your skills. Each of them is a circle, and where they overlap is magic. This is similar to skill stacking or talent stacking, isn’t it?

For Christina, her three circles are entertainment, technology, and business. Now, I have to say, there is nothing unusual about someone with business experience and expertise or someone with a tech background or someone in entertainment. But how many people do you know with all three? That is Christina’s sweet spot, and that is her brand.

For me, my circles are, I would say, marketing and branding is one, communication is one, and teaching and coaching is another. So now, when I work with clients who feel like their value proposition isn’t distinctive enough, like they’re just not unique enough to stand out and get noticed, skill stacking is the exercise that changes everything.

Think about the finance expert who’s an AI pioneer and also happens to be a genuinely collaborative leader. Or imagine an HR executive with an entrepreneurial mindset and a passion for data. When you combine these skills, suddenly you really see these people as unique. Do you see what I mean? So here’s the exercise I want you to try.

Identify your two to four unique skills. I’m gonna say target three. Make sure these are your distinct strengths and stack them. Then, craft a short phrase, even just a sentence, that captures the unique value at their intersection. That is your skill-stacking statement, and it might just become the cornerstone of your personal brand.

Your Personal Brand: Three Exercises to Try 

So there you have it. Three new exercises straight out of my upcoming book, Let Me Introduce Myself, to help you identify your personal brand themes. Let’s do a quick recap. One is the three Cs: credentials, character, and context. Organize this overwhelming list of themes into something meaningful. Two, make money, save money, or solve a problem.

Get crystal clear on the value that you bring. Thanks again, Sharon. And three, skill stacking or talent stacking. Find the magic at the intersection of what makes you you. Now, I’d love to know which of these three resonates most with you, and I have an ask. If this episode gave you even one useful insight, please share it with someone who could use it.

It could be a colleague, a friend, someone who’s navigating their career, or maybe they’re building their brand. Yes, I am asking you to talk about Talk About Talk. I had to say it. And if you haven’t left a rating or a review for Talk About Talk yet, now would be a great time. It takes you about 60 seconds, and it costs you nothing, and it makes an enormous difference in helping new listeners find this Talk About Talk show.

I gave you three exercises for your personal brand. I’m asking you for one review. Sounds like a fair trade, right? Okay, you got this. Thank you for listening, and talk soon.

The post 3 Ways to Identify YOUR SUPERPOWERS (ep.220) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Trust comes down to three pillars: logic, authenticity, and empathy. But when you’re under real pressure, one of those pillars usually starts to crack.

Leadership coach and bestselling author Anne Morriss joins Andrea to unpack the trust triangle and introduce two ideas every leader needs in their back pocket: your trust anchor (the pillar that holds firm no matter what) and your trust wobble (the one that slips the second things get hard). You’ll learn how to spot your own anchor and wobble, why this same pattern shows up in even the most accomplished leaders on the planet, and how knowing the difference can help you build trust faster and hold onto it longer.

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

CONNECT WITH ANNE

🌐 Website: AnneAndFrances.com

🔗 LinkedIn: Anne’s LinkedIn

🎙️ Anne’s Podcast, Fixable: Anne’s Podcast: Fixable

▶️ Anne’s TED Talk: Anne’s TED Talk

BOOKS MENTIONED

📖 Move Fast and Fix Things by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss: https://amzn.to/4wcl5JM

📖 Uncommon Service by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss: https://amzn.to/4wF8i3D

📖 Unleashed by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss: https://amzn.to/4ySGhqR

📖 The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Full-Engagement-Managing-Performance/dp/0743226755

TRANSCRIPTION

Anne Morriss: If I’m underslept or haven’t fed myself properly or under stress, I am more likely to wobble. And when I’m wobbly on authenticity, what will happen is a people-pleasing part of me will show up and tell you, Andrea, what you want to hear and not necessarily what I think, know, and believe. 

Andrea Wojnicki: That was entrepreneur and leadership coach Anne Morriss.

And if her name sounds familiar, it might be because she’s also the co-author of three books, one called Move Fast and Fix Things, one called Uncommon Service, and one called Unleashed. I am really excited to share with you my conversation with Anne. Amongst other things in this episode, you’re gonna learn the three-ingredient recipe for how you can establish trust.

Okay, so first of all, yes, of course it is a three-ingredient recipe. The power of three, right? And secondly, trust is critical. I realized that I really don’t use this term trust very often. Instead, I talk about personal branding and credibility, but these are all related terms, aren’t they? So if you wanna make an impact, and I know you do, then you need to establish trust.

In this episode, you’re going to learn the three pillars of trust, how to identify your trust wobble and your anchor, and a lot more. Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. 

Welcome to Talk About Talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please, just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach at Talk About Talk, where I help ambitious leaders and aspiring leaders to communicate with confidence and credibility so that you can get ahead in your career.

A quick note before we get started. If you wanna go deeper on improving your communication skills and your credibility at work, I encourage you to head to talkabouttalk.com. That’s where you’ll find lots of free resources, plus information about my keynotes, my corporate workshops, my master classes, my online courses, and lots more. It is all there. TalkAboutTalk.com.

About the Guest: Leadership Expert Anne Morriss

Okay, let me introduce today’s guest, and then we’re gonna get right into this power-packed interview. I encourage you to stay with us through the end, though, because as always, I’m gonna wrap up with three key learnings that I wanna reinforce for you. People tell me that they appreciate this. I get lots of emails saying this.

So basically, you do not need to take notes. Okay, let me back up. I came to know Anne Morriss through her partner, Frances Frei, an award-winning faculty member and exceptional teacher who generously mentored me when I was a student at Harvard Business School. So the three of us, Anne, Frances, and myself, we all share a passion for helping leaders communicate more effectively.

I was absolutely thrilled when Anne agreed to join me on this podcast. As I mentioned, Anne Morriss is an entrepreneur, a leadership coach, and an author. She’s also a TED speaker and the founder of the Leadership Consortium, a first-of-its-kind leadership accelerator that prepares emerging leaders for senior leadership.

Over the past 20 years, she has helped organizations around the world strengthen their leadership, culture, and transformational change. Here we go. Thank you very much, Anne, for being here today to talk to me and the Talk About Talk listeners about trust and communication. 

AM: Oh, Andrea, I’m so delighted to be here.

The Three Pillars of Trust: Logic, Authenticity, and Empathy 

AW: Let’s get right into this. Let’s talk about trust. I know that you and Frances say that trust is the foundation of leadership. Can you share with us what the three core components are of trust? 

AM: Yeah. It actually goes all the way back to Aristotle’s logos, pathos, ethos, which was a persuasion framework. So it will not surprise you that these ideas are very relevant to your mission on this podcast and in so much of your work, Andrea.

But the three component parts of trust are, I’ll go through them the way we often teach it, which is that I am more likely to trust you, Andrea, as a leader, if I believe you can do the job, if I think you’re competent at the wheel, if I think your reasoning and judgment are sound. It is not enough; I also have to believe that I’m interacting with a real version of you, so that your, you know, your thoughts, your feelings, your actions are all aligned.

We call that authenticity. It is still not enough. I also have to believe that you’re not just in it for you; you’re also in it for me. You’re also committed to my well-being, and you care about my interests and success, often in the job. When all three of, we call them the trust pillars, when all three of these trust pillars are sturdy and strong, trust is a very natural byproduct.

And by the way, this is all from the perspective of the other person. So I have to be convinced of your logic, authenticity, and empathy so that I can trust you. And as you said right at the top, it is very foundational. Leadership is a relational practice. We often forget that when we tell the story, you know, these great men and women stories of leaders.

We forget that it is fundamentally about having impact through other people. So that’s why this is just, this is so critical to anything you’re trying to accomplish as a leader. 

AW: So first of all, the power of three. Anyone who listens to the Talk About Talk podcast knows it. And actually, Aristotle, I was looking back at evidence of the power of three, and this is one of the things that comes up.\

What’s Your Trust Wobble—and Your Anchor? 

So logic, authenticity, and empathy. Can you comment on, as folks, you know, are climbing the corporate ladder, as their careers are progressing, they’re becoming more senior, they’re leading more people, where those wobbles in this triad might be more likely to happen? Or may- and maybe this is a different question, where they can be the most damaging or catastrophic in people’s quest to create, I guess, leadership presence or identity?

AM: Yeah, absolutely. We think about this question all the time. And as you suggest, so we use this word wobble to describe this other very stable pattern. So one stable pattern is, we call it the trust triangle. So logic, authenticity, empathy, you need all three. The other pattern we see, even among the most accomplished leaders, is that all of us lose trust some of the time.

And when that happens, it’s not that all three of these pillars collapse. One of them tends to get a little shaky. We call that your wobble. So that’s pattern one. And then the other pattern, the good– that’s the bad news. The good news is that one of them tends to be rock solid. So if I were to drag you out of bed, Andrea, at three in the morning, you would be logical or authentic or empathetic.

So we call that your anchor. So we’re constantly working with leaders on these two questions of how do you lean into and leverage your anchor, and how do you keep your eye on your wobble? So it is different for each of us. And it is tied more to personality, is just a layman’s way to think about it, than role.

What we do find, however, is that empathy wobblers, so that’s the language you use, I’m an empathy wobbler and an authenticity anchor, is a common leadership profile. That’s actually not my trust profile. I would tell you my trust pro- profile in a second. But we do find that empathy wobblers are disproportionately represented at the top of organizations.

AW: Do you think that that’s changing? ‘Cause I have this conversation a lot with folks that this, you know, think back to the Jack Welch era, right, compared to today. Do you feel like this might be changing in terms of the emphasis or significance? 

AM: Yeah, I think with the pattern we are seeing more than empathy wobbler.

So we, we are still finding empathy wobblers disproportionately represented at the top, and I think a longitudinal study of that I think is a really interesting question. What does seem to be reinforced in 2026 is that authenticity anchors are disproportionately succeeding and ascending the hierarchy in organizations.

So if that’s your anchor, then you have two wobbles to choose from, and I think we’re finding that profile of authenticity anchor, empathy wobbler to be pretty stable at the top of the hierarchy. 

Authenticity vs. Transparency: How Much Should Leaders Share? 

AW: So can you define what authenticity is? I just wrote a paper, and I write about this and think about this all the time.

What’s the difference between authenticity and transparency and being a professional, and how do you walk this line? I’d love to hear your take on that. 

AM: Yeah, so and I will use myself as an example. So I am an empathy anchor, authenticity wobbler. The way we define it, we are very practical people. When I say we, um, you know, my partner in all things, including my co-author, Francis Frei, who’s on the faculty at Harvard Business School.

So the way we define it is the alignment between, which is, uh, between what you say and what you do and what you think. And then we’ll sometimes throw in what you feel, because often in leadership roles, we forget about this powerful variable that is our emotions, the emotional experience of the people around us, the role we can play and to change both of those things, both what we’re feeling and what other people are feeling. But we talk about it in terms of the alignment. 

AW: Right. So alignment is different from full transparency, and I, I, I actually really like that term. I say, you know, this whole idea of sharing your whole self at work, the full transparency folks, I’m like, “I don’t share my full self anywhere,” and I don’t suggest that my clients do either.

You can be authentic to yourself without being fully transparent simply by filtering what parts of you you want to share, and I totally agree that this consistency and alignment is much more important, and I, I see how that ladders up to trust. 

AM: Yeah, I, I agree with you. Again, we’re practical people, so we’ll sometimes say 80% is plenty.

You know? 80% of any of us is plenty, probably tops out at 80%. But the metaphor I like is window, not a door. So what is the window that… of transparency that’s most useful to you and most useful to the people you’re leading? 100% transparency is not helpful in most cases. It just, it creates a lot of friction and noise and anxiety, and it’s not helping people make better decisions, including about their own lives.

So that’s part of your job as a leader is to curate information very thoughtfully, but you can, you have to continuously solve for that authenticity piece, or other people won’t be willing to be guided by you. And that’s really our, my favorite metric of leadership. When you boil it down, are other people willing to be guided by you?

Like, that’s what matters, and that’s why trust is so foundational and that’s why communication, which you focus on, Andrea, is so critical, because that is the way that you are engaging with these other people and influencing their discretionary behavior. 

AW: So I can see the significance of effective communication skills in all three of the pillars.

AM: Back to our friend Aristotle, it’s not surprising that I think actually all three of these are quite material to the challenge of communication. So I think about logic as content, as how we would traditionally think about content. Like what is the message? What are you trying to say? Is it persuasive? Is it rigorous?

Is the credit is the content effective? I think authenticity is, is voice. Like, does the messenger… If logic is message, now it’s about does the messenger match the message? And it is– I am increasingly, like, interested in and persuaded by how important that alignment m- has to be for, like, the story to land.

And then the last one, empathy, I think of in terms of mission. Like, when you walk into a room, are you there to perform? Are you there to get what you came for, which is affirmation from the crowd? Or are you there to be in service of your audience and give them a gift that they would not have otherwise received?

I think that is a very, also a very powerful variable in effective communication. 

AW: Definitely. But I was actually having this conversation this morning when I went for a walk with a girlfriend of mine who just got promoted into a big new position, and she’s meeting with the board chair, and she’s talking about what she’s gonna wear.

And she goes, “Well, the… I guess it doesn’t matter.” And I said, “Actually, it matters ’cause they’re gonna see you before they hear one word that comes out of your mouth.” And it’s not that we need to overemphasize this, but I said, “We are constantly checking each other out. We’re looking for signals of, do we trust the person?

Do we like the person? Are they capable?” And I realize now that I was, in a different way, kind of talking about exactly the same thing as the three pillars here. 

AM: Yeah. And it will have a huge impact on how she feels in the room, which arguably matters just as much. Like, is, you know, what is she putting on her body so that she can show up in the way that she wants to show up?

Personal Branding, Trust, and Leadership Influence 

AW: Yeah. And that, that’s a big theme of the personal branding work that I do. ‘Cause one of the big criticisms of personal branding in the context of establishing your professional identity at work is that you’re caring too much about what other people think. And then the epiphany that happens when I’m working with clients on developing their unique identity is that it, it elevates their internal confidence.

They feel validated, and their confidence grows. So I’d love to shift it to personal branding here. I see a very strong link between trust and establishing a strong personal brand. Do you agree? 

AM: Yes, 100%. I think it goes back to, like, what is a personal brand? And to me, it’s very connected to this metric, are other people willing to be guided by you?

Like, you, you want to show up in a way where you can be an influence on the way other people think, act, feel, behave. Ideally, in your absence eventually, but in the beginning, in your presence, and you need to live into a version of you- Yeah … that allows that exchange, that beautiful exchange to happen. Yeah.

Call it whatever you want. Um, but personal brand is certainly a good word for it. 

AW: Yeah. Yeah, personal branding may have a branding problem, but I agree, as long as we’re defining it purposefully. I say that personal branding is being yourself on purpose, and yourself, it’s your whole self, your true self, and your best self.

So you are filtering what parts of you you’re sharing, but it’s your best self. And I think the, um, the whole idea here that you mentioned the word alignment and consistency, I think that’s a huge part of personal branding, right? Yeah. So I’ve got a question for you: Do you think that leaders should encourage their folks to invest time and energy into developing their own personal brands?

And I’m asking this not facetiously. I’m not, I’m not trying to, whatever, get more coaching clients. I’m asking honestly. Many of the folks that I coach on communication skills will come up with a list of 10 or 12 topics that I’m gonna coach them on over the course of six months, including personal branding, and then when they share this list with their manager, their leader, they’ll say all the topics on the list are approved with the exception of personal branding.

I have some ideas about why that is, uh, and it could go back to the definition, but do you think generally leaders should encourage their folks to invest their time and effort into this? Or what, what’s your take on that? 

AM: Yeah. So I think I agree with your, uh, I don’t know if we… If, if it’s strong enough to be a premise, but your suggestion that personal branding might have a branding problem.

And I think part of it is when we hear that word, and that is no fault of the people who created the term; it’s a term of art, a very reasonable thing to call, like, this phenomenon. It reads as self-distracted. It reads as self-promotional versus, you know, how do I get better at advancing our shared mission?

Like, if we go back to our trust triangle, it raises questions about empathy. You know, it seems to be the phrase and the way people hear it; it sounds like, okay, authenticity, yes, and maybe, maybe a little logic, but the, like, where is e- you know, leadership is the practice of setting other people up for success.

So in the personal branding, like, universe, where is that part of the story, is where I come at this phrase. There are other things, but if we define it the way we just defined it, which is around, you know, being intentional about being the leader you wanna be in the moment, that to me is a critical part of effective leadership, and bringing intention to it is a very reasonable thing.

You know, you can call it executive presence. I have a very humble relationship with language in the sense of this stuff gets locked in and weaponized. And when that happens, like, move on to another term. Let’s just move on. As opposed to fi- dying on the hill of, like, “Oh, you’re getting it wrong.” I feel the same way about psychological safety.

The world’s very confused about what this means. I think we just need another term instead of like, spending so much energy fighting people on this is what we mean. 

AW: I am so with you on that. And in fact, e- even before I went into academia, I would be in meetings, you know, people would start talking about something, and then they’d get all riled up, and I’d be like, “Hang on a second. We need to define some terms here, or come up with better terms.” 

AM: Yeah. I think this kind of friction is an indicator that we need different language because I do think in the way the world hears this term, it’s missing a very critical part of leadership, which is that it’s not about you. It’s actually about the other people.

We use the metaphor of a mirror versus a window, and I spend a lot of time coaching people to move away from the mirror and look out of the window at the people you’re here to serve and the mission you’re trying to achieve. 

AW: So this conversation is reminding me of an experience I had recently. I was coaching 14 executives at a pharmaceutical company, and I did one-on-one coaching sessions with each of them, where we were identifying some of their personal brand themes.

And by personal brand themes, you can just think of it as the… It could be expertise or credentials or leadership styles that kind of define them, okay? They’re typically unique things about them. And so as we were creating this list of themes, I noticed that some of them, some of these pharmaceutical executives, most of whom had PhD degrees, they’re scientists, and they would very easily list their scientific and academic credentials, right?

So I feel like this is the logic foot on the, on the stool, okay? And some of them, they would just keep adding these things, right? And, and I said, “What about your leadership style? What about your default kind of social interaction? Are you a leader? Are you a follower? Are you a collaborator?” And then they’d be like, “Oh, I never really thought about that before.”

Whereas others were… It came naturally to them. Like, they would say their number one strength is their scientific background and their schooling, and then that in combination with their people leadership skills. And I think that this is actually a, a new lens for me to coach folks through this exercise.

It’s like, so when it comes to logic, substance, and style, what are your personal brand themes there? And then when it comes to empathy, this would be your interpersonal communication style, and then your authenticity. So what would that be if we’re thinking about personal brand themes? 

AM: So I’ll show you how my an- authenticity wobble shows up for me, and this might lead your beautiful mind somewhere interesting.

But, so for me, the exposure, and this is true for all wobbles, so if I’m underslept or haven’t fed myself properly or under stress, I am more likely to wobble. And when I’m wobbling on authenticity, what will happen is this, as a people-pleasing part of me will show up and tell you, Andrea, what you want to hear and not necessarily what I think, know, and believe.

And so your personal brand doesn’t happen in isolation. There’s no personal brand until other people come into the scene. So it is always about you in relationship to others. And so how does that other person experiencing me is the material question. And is what I am saying, doing, selling persuasive? You know, that feels like logic.

Is, like, do they think that I am telling them the truth instead of bull them is a very material personal brand question. You know, like it sometimes shows up in the workplace as, you know, like, it’s too salesy or, you know. It’s like, so that, to, to me, that’s where th- that all of those questions live. And then is it like, a- am I, as the person outside this, you know, this, this hu- this system of this human being, like, do they care about me?

And can I be persuasively convinced of that? And it feel, it, they all, those all three feel relevant, but quite separate to me. 

AW: I, I hear, you’re reminding me of another theme that, that people will represent themselves when they’re talking about themselves and their brand. They’ll talk about, like, “I’m a very direct person,” or they’ll say, “I’m really not direct.

I communicate implicitly to people,” right? So I feel like that belongs in there somewhere. This is fascinating. I love this idea of merging these frameworks that we’ve developed. 

AM: Yeah, someone who says they’re direct tends to be an authenticity anchor and an empathy wobble because they’re saying, “I’m direct,” and unspoken is regardless of the cost of that directness.

And so what, how, when we work with that person, we’ll often say, “Okay, like, how do you make sure that your empathy, you’re coming in hot,” right? Sometimes, ’cause that’s sometimes the goal of the triangle is that it’s balanced. So if you are gonna come in hot with a strong point of view and like calling it like it is, ’cause that’s the other story people like, then you have to make sure that your empathy is just as strong, that I understand as someone receiving your directness that you are doing it in service of something that we both care about, or you’re doing it to make me better, or you’re doing it for this thing that we both decided is important, this shared mission that we both signed up for.

So you might wanna dial it back a little bit, but the real solve for most people is to dial up the empathy, not dial back the authenticity. 

AW: Yeah. Generally, these are three things that we want to increase. Like, we wanna keep them all in a nice equilibrium, but we, the higher they all are together, the better.

High Standards, Deep Devotion: Leading Without Performing 

Yeah. Okay, so last question before we get into the three rapid-fire questions is, what advice would you give to emerging leaders, especially women and other underrepresented minorities who wanna build visibility and influence and this leadership presence? And to do so, how can they achieve this without feeling like they’re performing leadership, even when they have this beautiful triad that they’re aspiring to?

AM: It’s a very deep question. So for those of us who don’t fit the expectation of who we think is gonna be at the front of the room, the world has notes, right? 

AW: Oh, I love that, Anne. You are gonna be quoted on that. 

AM: Yeah. And so it can lead to a higher, like, self-distraction, self-consciousness, which is totally understandable.

But the mindset shift, the story shift is also counterintuitive, which is not like, oh, you know, our instinct, the spotlight is brighter, and so our instinct is to not it up. Sorry if this is a family show. Not screw it up, right? And then, and that, that can, like, pretty quickly tip over into perfectionism, so we’re not taking the risks we need to have the impact that we can have in advancing our career.

And so the mindset reset is often it’s not about me. It’s about this, this thing bigger than me and beyond me. Leadership is a team sport. The people who are most effective, even at the very top of organizations, they are not lonely at the top, right? They are deeply interconnected with the people around them, and they’re playing this leadership game as the team sport that it is.

So the work on that one is around like resisting the story that it is about you and that you are isolated in some way, and just, like, treating isolation as the enemy, playing leadership as a team sport, like, waking up every day, even though, even when the world wants you to look at yourself, like refu- like refusing to take the bait.

So I think that’s part one. And then when we look at the demographics around wobbles, if we are Xs in an organization of Ys, and that can mean a lot of things. It do- it’s not necessarily, like, visible demographic differences. It can also be, you know, like level of education or geography or, you know, it can be so many things.

Like, there’s so many of us walking around with this “I don’t belong” story that’s getting in the way of the impact we can have and the le- the leader we can be out in the world. So if you identify with, “I don’t belong,” for whatever reason, those of us who have that experience of being Xs in a, in an organization filled with Ys, we are more likely to wobble on authenticity.

And again, this is for very good reasons. We are more likely to have these people-pleasing habits because it is a safety tactic. It’s a security tactic ’cause, you know, we weren’t faster, fiercer. Like, back on the savanna, early Homo sapiens, we were not stronger, faster, fiercer. The thing that we were better at was working with each other.

We weren’t even smarter in the beginning. The thing that we were better at was collaboration. And so it was an existential threat. Like, we could not survive on our own. We had to survive in tribes. And so we have this very ancient cellular biological memory of that being a, a, a big problem for us to be separated from the herd in some way.

So I think all of that gets, gets swirled together for those of us who feel different in any way. And so bringing the same strategy. I mean, I have two sticky notes on my computer. One of them is tell the truth. Because if I’m not intentional, like, that’s the one that’s gonna slip. The other one is host the party, which is ’cause if we have this storyline that we don’t belong, we’re also less likely to properly take care of the people around us.

And that’s one of the advantages of these, of authenticity anchors, is it doesn’t occur to them to not host the party. Obviously, they’re hosting the party, right? So yeah, I mean, uh, you’re asking a very deep question. We could have another 30-minute conversation about it, but that’s my top-line response.

AW: I love your metaphors. And as you started answering that question, Anne, I was thinking about the tightrope metaphor that I hear almost every day from women saying, “If I show up and I’m too empathetic, kind, nurturing, they dismiss me. And then if I’m too focused on performance, the logic stuff, getting things done, the expertise, the maybe bit of command, leadership style, then they think I’m a jerk,” right?

And it’s, like, really impossible. And what I’m hear- The metaphor that I saw in my mind was you’re desperately trying to balance on this tightrope, and maybe what can kinda pull you up and help you with that balance is shifting the focus to the greater cause or to the other people around you. 

AM: I do think that’s the exit from this safe room that feels like a trap. I also think resisting the false trade-off of those two experiences is really important.

‘Cause what, when we, we, the most effective leaders we see are setting high standards. They’re making the expectations really clear, while also signaling their commitment and devotion to the people around them. So we call it high standards, deep devotion leadership, ’cause you can do both, and the most effective leaders do both.

AW: High standards, deep devotion. 

AM: Those are the two axes, and most of us spend most of our time, like, on the off-diagonal, thinking that we have to pick one or the other, when in fact, you can and should most of the time choose both. 

AW: So it reminds me of the lovable fools and competent jerks 2×2, right? Everyone thinks they’re in, on the offside, and we- you really wanna be in the top corner.

I was gonna say, I recently interviewed the recently retired CEO of McDonald’s Canada, and she was relentless about this, and she actually had this mantra that she used to say, which is, “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness.” She said, “W- I created this virtuous cycle of high performance,” because we were creating an environment of psychological safety, right?

Where people were coming up with new ideas. They were truly being themselves. They were admitting their mistakes. They were learning from them. We were learning fast. We were kind to each other, and then it, this flywheel started, and it’s like that. Yeah. Another metaphor. Gosh. 

AM: I love that phrase, uh, my kindness mistaken for weakness. I think Rihanna put it in a song. 

AW: Do you know who said it first, Anne? 

AM: No. Who said it first? 

AW: Al Capone. 

AM: No. 

AW: The mobster. 

AM: No way.

AW: Wow. He meant it in a very different way. Yeah. “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness, ’cause if you piss me off, I’ll kill you” is what he meant, right? Yeah. 

AM: Yeah, that follow-up sentence is, is, is, it’s a little brutal.

AW: There you go.

AM: Um, but that’s, that is so fun to know. Thank you for that fun fact. I grew up in Ohio, and I think Midwesterners in the US and Canadians, I think, have a little bit of advantage on this one because we can visualize it. I think we are more likely to grow up with role models, coaches, teachers, and parents who at least some of the time were in that upper right of, like, revealing high expectations without, like, without being an, to be, to just actually use…

I don’t know why I’m swearing like a sailor in front of you, Andrea, today. That was not my intention. 

AW: I was, uh- You sound like my 19-year-old son. 

AM: I was trying to be on such good behavior. 

AW: That’s funny. You’re being authentic. 

AM: Yeah. 

Wrap-Up & Rapid-Fire Questions 

AW: Okay. Speaking of authentic, let’s get on to the three rapid-fire questions. Are you ready?

Yeah. Okay. Question number one: Are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

AM: I am an extrovert. Your follow-up question, which is how does this affect your communication? This one is, uh, th- we could spend another 30 minutes on this, so I was really contemplating this. I think it’s not necessarily an advantage. I think that what’s helpful is it makes me more interested in my audience.

It makes it easier for me to connect to that mission orientation, being of service, bringing my audience a gift. All of that helps because I really like people, right? I like being around them. It does make me more distracted when the guy in row three is, like, on his iPhone instead of paying attention. So I am paying attention to the other humans around me, and sometimes that’s not helpful to me as a speaker or as a messenger.

The other thing I will say is some of the most effective speakers I know are introverts, and I think there is some advantage built into, I think, a couple of things, including– Well, and it depends on the, um, like, scale of the audience. But you put an introvert up, like in a stadium of thousands, okay, like, and there is an advantage in that dynamic somewhere that we can tease out in a follow-up conversation.

AW: Yeah. I think introverts, I’m also an off-the-charts extrovert, but I think introverts are underrated, and I know based on the research that they are, uh, typically exceptional listeners, which can make you a great presenter and communicator, right? Okay. That wasn’t very rapid fire, but it was awesome.

Question number two, what … I’m curious about this one, Anne. What are your communication pet peeves? 

AM: Talking down to your audience. 

AW: Yeah. Also using terms that aren’t well-defined? 

AM: No, no. Language is a living, breathing thing. Something that was well-defined and well understood 10 years ago is now not … I, I mean, I, I have two Gen Z kids, and nothing is more fun than them bringing new vocabulary home.

So I love how dynamic language is. I think this is the only communication sin. Really, the only communication sin is, is not treating your audience as, you know, sophisticated, complex human beings. 

AW: With respect. Agree. Yeah. Okay, last question. Is there a book or a podcast that you find yourself recommending lately?

AM: The work I’ve been talking about in the last 72 hours is the original peak performance work, which is Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr. Their kind of breakthrough book was The Power of Full Engagement, and they were the first to really make the case persuasively in a way that broke through into the business world, that high performance really is about managing energy and not time.

And I think there’s a lot of people, the world is moving fast, there’s a lot of uncertainty, there are a lot of forces acting upon us that are outside of our full control, and I think many people are trying to feel the illusion of control by working harder and working more, and it’s not working. 

AW: Yeah, it backfires.In fact, it backfires. 

AM: And so I think they have a lot of insight that is still very relevant today on an alternative way to live and to work. 

AW: Okay, I’m gonna put a link to that in the show notes. Now, before I let you go, do you have any last words, suggestions, advice for the Talk About Talk listeners on developing trust in their communication?

AM: We spent a lot of time on defining the terms. There is so much power in understanding your message so deeply that you can describe it simply And so actually taking the time, back to respecting your audience, taking the time to figure out, okay, though a lot of people are s- speak in a complicated way, like bringing a, the next level of intention to translate what I’m saying in a way that other people can really absorb.

I think that’s one. I’m gonna do two because I can’t resist. The other thing is just get, like, is just the power of, of reps and, like, practicing in low stakes environment before you walk into any high-stakes environment. No serious performer or comedian, w- you know, or like pick a performing art that is hard, that is about, that rests on communication.

So I go to comedy all the time because, I mean, it really is distilled down to, you know, the power of saying things to affect another human being. There’s no serious comedian on the planet that would ever go out on a stage that matter without working out their material in smaller rooms and on smaller stages.

And then we have this illusion that we’re gonna like make some slides and like run through them in the privacy of our own mind and then go and nail it in the room, you know, where our nervous system has no preparation for what we’re asking it to do. So deeply, simply, and get your reps in. That’s my, my final advice.

AW: I love it. Thank you so much, Anne, for sharing your frameworks and your coaching and your advice. Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation. 

AM: Very mutual, Andrea. Thank you for bringing me on the show. 

AW: Thanks again to Anne. I absolutely loved this conversation. I always enjoy speaking with people who challenge and expand my own thinking.

That’s part of why I love what I do, and this discussion certainly did that. As I promised, I’m now gonna leave you with my three biggest takeaways, the things that I want you to think about. Number one, trust is earned through three pillars, or dimensions, or ingredients. The three pillars are logic, authenticity, and empathy.

And Anne traces all three of these back to Aristotle. So logic is good judgment, authenticity is being real, and empathy is genuinely caring about other people’s success. As Anne said, when all three of these trust pillars are sturdy and strong, trust is a very natural byproduct. The second insight that I want to reinforce for you is that every leader has an anchor and a wobble.

All of us. And under stress, one pillar tends to get a little shaky. That is your wobble. One tends to stay rock solid. That’s your anchor. So Anne shared that her anchor is empathy, and her wobble is authenticity. For the record, mine are the opposite. My anchor is authenticity, and my wobble is empathy. Why is this important, and why should you diagnose your anchor and your wobble?

Well, this is really about self-awareness. Rather than trying to become perfect, understand where you’re naturally strongest and where you’re most likely to lose trust under pressure. How could this not help you show up and build trust, right? Okay, last, the third point that I want to reinforce for you is that leadership is not about performing.

It is about serving others. If you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite belong in the room, Anne’s advice is to shift your focus off of yourself and onto the people that you are there to serve. She said it best. She said, “For those of us who don’t fit the expectation of who we think is gonna be at the front of the room, the world has notes.”let m

I love that. The way through this is not perfectionism; it’s connection. Lead as a team sport, because it is one. I love this. There are so many quotable moments in this conversation with Anne. Another one that stayed with me is Anne’s description of the best leaders as combining high standards with deep devotion.

I think that is a beautiful reminder that kindness and accountability are not opposites, and that strong leaders consistently demonstrate both. Okay. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be very grateful if you’d leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help more listeners discover Talk About Talk.

And if someone on your team or maybe in your network is working on building trust and executive presence and their brand, and they’re looking to become a more influential communicator in their career, please send them this episode. I think they will thank you for that. And I thank you for listening.Talk soon.

The post Leadership & Communicating TRUST with Anne Morriss (ep.219) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Job loss, awkward boundaries, and the art of saying no without burning bridges. These are real Qs from listeners like you. Andrea takes the mic to answer communication and career questions with hard-hitting advice and tips you can use today.

We cover 5 questions:

1️⃣ How do you reposition your brand when people have already decided who you are?

2️⃣ What’s the best way to talk about getting fired or laid off?

3️⃣ How do you say no to a request without burning bridges?

4️⃣ How do you disagree with someone without sounding disagreeable?

5️⃣ Where’s the line between being authentic and being strategic?

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

TRANSCRIPTION

What’s the best way to frame a job transition that was not in your control? How can I say no to requests without hurting the relationship or collaboration opportunities in the future? Where is the line between being an authentic communicator and being a strategic communicator? I am very excited about this episode.

Five Communication Challenges Every Leader Faces 

I’m going to answer for you five real questions from a few of the incredible leaders that I coach. We’re gonna cover how to upgrade your reputation or your professional identity in the eyes of others that you’ve been working with for a long time. We’re also gonna cover how to talk about your career when you get laid off or even fired.

Then we’re gonna cover how to say no to requests without burning bridges and, similarly, how to disagree with others without sounding disagreeable. And last, we’re gonna cover the important question of how to navigate the fine line between authentic communication and strategic communication. 

Let’s do this. Let’s talk about talk. My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m an executive communication coach here at Talk About Talk, where I coach ambitious leaders and aspiring leaders to communicate with confidence and credibility so they can achieve their career goals. You can learn more about me and about what we do at Talk About Talk if you go to the website.

It’s TalkAboutTalk.com. I really hope you’ll check it out. We’ve got the archive of this podcast there, plus lots of free resources and information about the keynote speaking, the corporate workshops, the master classes, the online courses, and the private coaching that I do. Okay, let’s get into this.

How to Reinvent Your Professional Brand 

The first question that I’m gonna read for you is from a master class client of mine named Laureen. Laureen, thank you for your question. Here’s what she asked. She said, “Let’s say you’ve been in a business for a few years, and while you’re successful, you notice that your potential is being defined by a role that you were in when you first joined, or by a specialized skill set that you realize is actually limiting your future.

What is your advice for repositioning yourself or changing the perception of your brand with the people who have already decided where you fit and who you are?” Great question, Laureen. Thank you. This question is really about updating or upgrading your identity or your personal brand in the eyes of others.

It’s about reinvention. In my mind, you have three options here, Laureen. The first is to reinforce your new and improved identity every way you can. Create a list of the different ways that you can reinforce your new positioning. These can be direct or explicit, and you can directly use your words to tell people about your new skills, your new expertise, and your passions.

Of course, and you had to know this was coming, you can do this through your self-introduction. 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 when you introduce yourself, tell people what your expertise, your skills, and your passions are.

Use your filter and tell them what the words are. Be direct. You can also be a little bit less direct. Maybe you can start sharing information, re-sharing some articles that you might have read on LinkedIn or commenting on others. Make it clear that you have an interest, expertise, and a passion in this new area.

So it’s about consistently communicating directly and indirectly about this new expertise or level of skill that you have. That’s my first suggestion. My second suggestion, Laureen, is that you formalize your new skill set in some way that is formal. Like, for example, taking some training, earning some credentials, maybe even joining an association.

This is about formalizing your new skills. The third and last suggestion that I have for you is something that probably crossed your mind, and it’s to leave. So this would be the last resort, I’m gonna say. It seems rather dramatic, but sometimes the easiest way to change and improve your brand is to have some kind of significant catalyst, like leaving an organization and starting somewhere else. So those are my three answers for you, Laureen, and we’re gonna move on now. 

Framing a Job Transition with Confidence 

Question number two, this question is: Thinking about all of the recent layoffs across industries, people whose roles were impacted still face bias when they’re looking for a new job. Even when we know that mass layoffs were triggered by a volatile economy, over-hiring in tech, etc.

The question is, what’s the best way to frame a job transition that was not in your control? Another fantastic question. I really love this question. This is one of the most common questions that I get about how to create a narrative that is true and optimized, and the stakes are high. You’re looking for a new job.

Whether you were laid off or fired, your narrative is in your control. So my suggestion is that there are two things to think about. There’s the what and the how. Okay? So the what is labeling what happened, and then the how is how you communicate it. Let’s dig into these a little bit separately. First, the what.

Labeling what happened. While I am not a fan of scripts, this is where you can memorize a sentence or a phrase that is true, valid, and optimized for your context, and this will serve you well. You could label the departure in a way that is true. So if you were laid off, you could say that you were downsized, you could say that the role was eliminated as part of a restructuring, or you could say that the position, or maybe even the department, was cut.

On the other hand, if you were fired, my suggestion is keep it brief. You could say, “I was let go.” This is simple, neutral, and it doesn’t overexplain anything. Or you could say, “The expectations and my work style just were not aligned.” Even something like, “I can take ownership of some of it, and here’s what I would do differently.”

So there’s the labeling it. That’s the what. Now the how to communicate it. I do have a few general principles to share with you. First, keep it brief. Do not dwell. The longer you explain, the worse it sounds. One or two clean sentences at the most, and then pivot to what you’re looking for next.

Secondly, do not trash your employer. Never ever do this. Even if they were awful, it only reflects on you. And last, and this is big, focus on learning. This experience was a catalyst that really made me think about what my values are and what my skills are, and now I’m really excited about moving on to a new opportunity where I can really focus on these skills and passions of mine. You see how much better that sounds? So focus on your learning. Okay, let’s move on to question number three. 

How to Say No Without Burning Bridges 

Question number three is from Jennifer, a longtime client of mine that has actually become a friend. Jennifer asks, “How can I say no to requests without hurting the relationship or collaboration opportunities in the future?”

Great question, Jennifer. I have three specific suggestions for you. My first suggestion is to decline the request in terms of a boundary or a rule that you set for yourself. “I’m not doing that right now. I am focusing on this other thing.” As opposed to saying, for example, “Sorry, I have to say no because of,” and then filling in the line with whatever the excuse is.

This just begs for negotiation. And I’m gonna get a little bit personal here with this one. I have a lot of people who ask me for a lot of favors in my role as an executive communication coach, and I typically do say yes, but recently I’ve been writing a book. And so it’s actually pretty easy. I have this boundary or this rule of a certain number of hours that I need to spend every day and every week on my book, or I know that it’s not gonna get written.

And so I tell people, “I am declining all of whatever it is that they’re asking at this point because I’m singularly focusing on my book. This is what I have to do to get this out the door to the publisher on time. I’m really sorry.” So set a boundary or a rule for yourself and make it clear. That’s my first suggestion.

My second suggestion for you is to decline the task, not the person. So what does that mean? “That doesn’t work for me right now,” lands differently than, “I can’t help you.” The idea here is to keep the door open by making it clear that your no, your decline, is about the specific task, not about the person.

And then my third suggestion, Jennifer, is just to work on softening the blow. There are a few ways that you can do this. For example, you could offer to help the person with a small part of the task. Like if they ask you to create a document, maybe you could say, “I can’t create it, but I could review it for you after you’re done.”

You could also give them a timeline. You could say, “I am really gonna be hunkering down on my book until the end of October, so maybe you could circle back to me in November.” This is about softening the blow and making sure that they know that saying no today doesn’t mean no forever. I hope that helps, Jennifer.

How to Disagree Without Sounding Disagreeable 

Okay, moving on to the next question. Question number four. Whoo, this is going fast. All right. Vivian asks, “How can I disagree with others’ perspectives without sounding defensive and disagreeable?” I love this, Vivian. How do I disagree without sounding disagreeable? So this is when there may be a sense of conflict, and I have three suggestions for you.

The first is slow down, take a breath, and remind yourself to lead with curiosity, not correction. You’re not correcting the person; you’re simply curious. This is about taking advantage of a real power pause; a calm, measured pace signals confidence and credibility. You are in control of your emotions, and this pause is a habit that you can build up with practice.

Trust me, I’ve been doing this myself. The power pause is real. Put a smile on your face, maybe tilt your head, take a breath, and remind yourself, “I’m curious.” You can even nod when they start talking just to show that you are open-minded and listening. And remind yourself of your objective when you pause.

How much does this really matter? Does it matter if I agree or disagree? And then instead of saying, “I disagree,” say something like, “Help me understand your thinking on this.” This disarms the defensiveness before it even starts, both their defensiveness and yours. My second suggestion for you is to focus on the dynamic, not on the disagreement.

Or to put it another way, focus on the situation, not the person. This one is gold. You can signal that you are in problem-solving mode by starting by articulating what you agree with first. Take a step back and label it. Then find the sliver of truth in their view and say it out loud. And by the way, this is not weakness.

Rather, this is credibility. Let them know that you’ve heard them. Then chances are they’ll wanna hear you, too. This is about reciprocity. So that’s my second suggestion. Focus on the situation, not the person, and look for the commonality that you share before you go any further. My third and last suggestion is probably the easiest thing to do, and this is about watching your language.

So, for example, I encourage you to use first person. This is I language, even we language. Not second person, not you, not you’re wrong. Saying something like, “I see this differently,” that’s a position, right? You’re focusing on the situation. “You’re missing the point,” that’s an attack, a personal attack. One invites dialogue and the other invites a fight.

Secondly, I encourage you to avoid the but. Instead, you could do like improv actors and say, “Yes, and…” You could also just pause and make your point separately, like, “That’s a fair way to look at it. Here’s where I land differently.” So those are my three ways that you can disagree without sounding disagreeable.

Authentic vs. Strategic Communication 

Now let’s move on to the last question, question number five. This one is from Angela, and it is a fantastic question. This is why I saved it for last. The question is: Where is the line between being an authentic communicator and being a strategic communicator? How should we think about that balance, especially when the stakes are high?

The easiest way to answer this question is to define the words that we’re using here. The first word is authentic. Think of authenticity as being true, valid, and not misrepresenting yourself. The second term is strategic. I encourage you to think of being strategic as being disciplined, disciplined about what you say and how much you share.

Now, there’s a third term that I want to introduce here. Beyond authenticity and strategic, I want you to think about the word transparency. Transparency as in how much you filter. This goes back to strategic. You are strategically filtering how much you share. Here’s how I encourage you to think about this.

First, you are always authentic. In every context, you are valid and true, and you are not misrepresenting yourself. And secondly, you are strategically filtering what you share. You are self-aware enough to know what your thoughts and your feelings and your opinions are, but you are strategic about how much you are sharing.

You are never fully transparent. Angela, I hope that helps. This is really, really important. And again, I think it’s most easily understood by thinking about the definitions. What does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to be strategic? And what does it mean to be transparent? And understanding and distinguishing between those three terms.

Okay. That’s it for this Q&A episode. I want to say thank you very much to the five of you for asking such fantastic questions. And to you, the listener, I hope that you found this Q&A episode helpful. If yes, I’m gonna ask you to please leave us a rating or a review on whatever podcast platform you’re on.

This helps us be discovered by other listeners. Thank you so much for listening, and talk soon.

The post Q&A: Andrea Answers Clients’ QUESTIONS (ep.218) appeared first on Talk About Talk.

Career communication skills, interview mistakes, salary negotiation, and personal branding are all areas where small shifts create noticeable results. The frustrating part is that most people don’t know what they’re getting wrong, and by the time they figure it out, the job offer is already gone.

Emily Durham, known as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter-turned-career coach and author of Clock In: No BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career Without Losing Your Mind. She has spent years on the other side of the hiring table and brings that insider perspective to every piece of advice she gives.

You’ll learn why confident communicators slow down instead of speeding up; what 80% of interview candidates get wrong about how much to say; how to answer the strengths and weaknesses questions without sounding like everyone else; when to bring up salary before you even get on the phone; and why audacity is what executive presence is made of.

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

CONNECT WITH EMILY

🌐 Website: EmilyDurham.org

📸 Instagram: Instagram.com/Emily.The.Recruiter

RESOURCES

Emily’s book Clock In: No BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career Without Losing Your Mind – https://amzn.to/4gmfMTP

Emily’s podcast: Clock In – https://emilydurham.org/podcast

TRANSCRIPTION

Emily Durham: People I like super, super admire at work, they’re okay with silence. They don’t need to fill silence. They make an ask, and they sit there quietly. So learning how to slow down and be the person to sit in the quiet, like that’s the power move. 

Andrea Wojnicki: That was Emily Durham, also known as Emily the Recruiter and author of this book called Clock In: No BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career Without Losing Your Mind.

Don’t you love it? In this episode of the Talk About Talk podcast, we’re gonna talk about how to use your communication skills at work so you can get ahead in your career. After I introduce Emily, we’re gonna get right into the interview, and then at the end, as always, I’m gonna summarize with three main points that I wanna reinforce for you, so you do not need to take notes.

You’re welcome. Let’s do this. Let’s Talk About Talk. 

My name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki. Please just call me Andrea. I’m your communication coach. I founded Talk About Talk to help you and other leaders learn to communicate with confidence and credibility so you can get ahead in your career. You can learn more about what we do at Talk About Talk if you go to TalkAboutTalk.com. It’s all there.

About the Guest: Emily Durham (“Emily the Recruiter”) 

Okay, I’m gonna introduce Emily now. I’m gonna actually read her bio from the back of her book. Emily Durham, better known as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter turned career coach and content creator. On her popular social media accounts and her podcast called Clock In, she gives real-world advice to help people thrive in their careers. She lives in Toronto. Here we go. 

Thank you so much for being here today, Emily, to speak with me and the Talk About Talk listeners about how to communicate at work. 

ED: Thank you for having me. There’s one thing I’m excited to talk about, and it’s everything. I am so excited for us to jump into it all. So thank you for having me.

AW: My pleasure. I wanna start big picture, if you don’t mind, Emily. I know you have opinions and advice and suggestions for us in terms of job interviews and salary negotiations and being with difficult people, and all of these very specific things, but I wanna start broad. What do you think the most important communication skills are for us to acquire in terms of advancing our careers and succeeding at work?

Why Pacing, Pausing, and Precision Matter 

ED: It’s an incredible question. I really think the most important communication skills are the slightly counterintuitive ones, so pacing and then pausing. People talk about this all the time, but you can really tell how experienced someone is by how they are physically, like, you know, pacing out the words that they’re using.

So if you’re a super confident communicator, chances are you’re giving yourself the space to speak slowly, and that automatically communicates that sense of authority. But what you’ll really notice, at least the people I, like, super, super admire at work, they’re okay with silence. They don’t need to fill silence.

They make an ask, and they sit there quietly. So learning how to slow down and be the person to sit in the quiet, like, that’s the power move. 

AW: I agree. I agree, Emily. The power pause is powerful. And in my experience, interestingly, I would say the junior folks that come to me for communication skills coaching are really focused on speaking up.

They actually wanna fill the silence, right? And then as they become more senior, they’re asking for me advice on how to communicate with precision and brevity and clarity. It’s a real interesting transformation. So I think my next question for you is: what other communication skills do you see evolve as people become more senior, from being a junior to middle manager to a senior leader?

ED: It’s so interesting ’cause I think the more junior you are, naturally you feel like your place at work, or even in your personal life, is to prove that you know something. And we’ve all been there. You’re, like, 20 in a brand-new job, and it feels like you need to prove that you’ve earned your spot in this room.

So oftentimes the communication skills people are working on is the baseline, like how do I communicate what I’m working on? How do I make sure other people hear me, that they aren’t speaking over me? And all of that is really meaningful, but sometimes that trickles into us over-explaining, over-communicating to really assert that we deserve to be in the room.

But really, like echoing kind of your client and what you hear is the more senior someone gets, it becomes less about what to say and more about how to say it. ‘Cause at that point, you know what you’re supposed to say. People should know your worth. You know what you have to advocate for at work, but it’s more about how you’re communicating it.

Little things I think of, especially early in my career, the sorries before you ask a question, “Oh, sorry, can I do this?” It’s second nature. It feels like we’re just kind of cementing: do I deserve a seat at this table? 10 years into your career, 15 years in, I have no time for the sorries, but I want coaching on how to sound not like a great middle manager, but exactly like a great CEO, and being a bit more direct, having that same audacity the successful people do.

So I really see it shift from what to how the more you grow in your career, but we all inevitably have to go through that icky early phase of what the heck am I doing here? 

AW: I love the word audacity. You used the word; I love that word. That, that’s like synonymous with executive, this all elusive executive presence that so many folks are aspiring to.

But I wanna back up to even before you get the job, talking about the job interview. So I know a lot of people that come to you, and definitely people that come to me are seeking help; not everyone, but a significant proportion are seeking help when they are in job transition. So they’re either actively interviewing for jobs, or they’re planning to in the future.

How to Stand Out Without Talking Too Much 

Let’s start with what common mistakes do people make when they’re in this job interview process? 

ED: Oh my gosh. There’s quite a few, but the most common, which if I had to put a percentage to it, I’m talking 80% of interviews, the candidates either spoke too much or not enough. Which I know sounds like, you know, “How am I supposed to get it right?”

It’s actually pretty easy once you know what they’re looking for. When it comes to the early parts of the interview, you’re always going to be asked, “Introduce yourself. Why are you looking for this job? Talk to me about the icebreakers.” Where people go wrong is they feel the need to explain everything.

They’re thinking that this is a confessional instead of a sales pitch, and it’s a sales pitch. So when your answer is extending for any of your questions, whether it’s introductions or, like, the meat and potatoes, if it’s more than two minutes, people have tuned out. You’ve lost them. So keeping things more succinct, and it’s important to practice that.

We’re not inherently able to self-correct in those moments of anxiety. But the other part of it is you’re not saying enough. If someone asks you at the beginning of the interview, “How are you?” and your response is, “I’m good. You?” Well, you’re giving them nothing to work with. You’re not helping your case by creating a personable relationship with this individual interviewing you.

So it’s really about striking that balance, and it comes down to practice. So practicing answering questions on your own, recording yourself answering those common interview questions, even striking up small talk with a barista at your local coffee shop so you get into the habit of what crisp communication sounds and feels like.

I would say those are the big boys. Heavy on the talking too much, though. That happens all the time. 

AW: Yeah. So I learned when I was an undergraduate student from a career education session that I went to one of the career counselors told the audience, including myself, that the less you talk during an interview and the more airtime you give to the interviewer, the more likely you are to get the job.

So in my mind, I started playing this game, but I think it’s really important that people understand this might be true, but you can take it too far, right? Like, you don’t wanna be short, and you don’t wanna be, like, evasive, evading, not answering questions. So one line that I coach my clients on is I say, “You know, you’re asking me what are my strengths.

I’ve got this one, this one, and this one. I’m, I’m happy to elaborate on any of them. In summary, these are my three strengths.” Like, whatever the question is, the line that is magical is, “Happy to elaborate.” What do you think of that? 

ED: I like that a lot, ’cause I think a lot of people are scared, and what I hear so much from folks is they’re scared that if they don’t say everything up front, the next candidate who does is getting the job.

But I really think that’s where this mindset shift comes in. The interview isn’t exclusively about making sure you hit every single list of wishes on their job description. It’s about seeing, can I work with you? And we’ve all worked with someone who is really unclear with how they communicate or really long-winded, and those are hard people to work with.

That’s just the truth. So the communication is a skill in and of itself, so I love having that opener to say, you know, “If I need to go deeper on any of this, you let me know.” It also puts that recruiter in the driver’s seat, so they’ll tell you, “Hey, we gotta go left, we gotta go right,” instead of that just being the burden that you carry.

But it really is a middle road we have to walk. 

AW: So putting the interviewer in the driver’s seat, I love that because you’re communicating respect. Like, you are driving this interview. I’m happy to elaborate on any of these things, or y- of course, you can ask me other questions, right? And you’re being respectful, and you’re being very clear and direct about that.

So this question, though, about what are your strengths, I get a lot of questions, and I have opinions, but I would love to hear your guidance on the two questions that you’re sure to get. What are your strengths? And then also, what are your weaknesses or the things that you’re working on, right? If you can share with us your guidance on how to answer both of those questions, I know you’d be helping a lot of people.

ED: Of course. I will say, God, am I ever over these questions. Like, so 101. They’re really, really flat. I think if we could evolve into a world where we’re not asking these, the world would be maybe just 2% better. What I want to urge people not to do, please resist and fight that urge to go to your AI platform of choice and say, “How am I supposed to answer these questions?”

The problem with resumes today is everyone’s resume looks and sounds the same ’cause AI is writing it. So the resume inherently is starting to lose value. As people start to lean on AI for their interviews, the same thing’s going to happen. The best thing you can do is be you and stand out with your unique perspective, ’cause if you sound like Suzy and Bobby and Joe, well, then you’re not standing out.

So resist that urge. As far as the strengths go, don’t be scared to boast. You don’t need to use we language the entire time. You’re allowed to talk about you. If it feels uncomfortable, focus on a specific example. The best way to do this, look at the job description. What’s clearly one of the two or three core skills they’re looking for?

And say, if you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable, “You know, my peers have often applauded me on,” or, “I’ve really succeeded at work on these three.” So it kind of takes you out of the aren’t I fabulous and says, “Well, other people think I’m fabulous.” And then if you’re really nervous, give an example. Like, “Here’s a really great example of when this happened.”

On the weaknesses, God, I hate this question. I think the best formula for this is answering, like, semi-honestly with a solution. Don’t do the basic, “You know, I’m a perfectionist,” ’cause those are the things that everybody, like.

AW: That’s what AI will tell you. They’ll say either, “I’m a perfectionist,” or, “I’m a workaholic,” right?

ED: Yeah, or, “I care too much about my work.” Spare me, right? So be honest. For me, data and analytics is not something I’m naturally incredible at. That’s just the truth. It’s also the truth that it’s a very important part of the work that I do. So when I would answer these questions, I’m saying something like, “To be honest, data and analytics doesn’t come naturally to me, but here’s what I do to make sure I stay on top of it,” and then I share a win.

So you’re always sandwiching it with, “Here’s what I’m not naturally inclined at, here’s what I do to bridge the gap, and here’s proof that I’m really quite good at it instead.” 

AW: Beautiful. Okay. So let’s shift gears a little bit to salary negotiations, but starting in the context of in the job interview.

When should you bring it up if they haven’t? And when they do, what do you say? And maybe even, I know I’ve heard you talk about this when I saw you live, how do you prepare for this conversation and this topic on kinda this taboo topic of salary negotiations? 

Confident Salary Conversations Start with Preparation 

ED: Definitely, and I hate that it’s still so taboo.

I thought with us, you know, having so many conversations online about this, but there’s still fear, and it’s natural. The second you start job hunting or entertaining interviews, that’s a good time to benchmark what you’re worth. So you’re going to go to a website like PayScale or Glassdoor, just see what the general salary range is for your ideal job in your city specifically.

And then be honest with yourself. Where am I? Am I low, mid-band? It’s always a good idea whenever you’re moving roles that you should be getting a bump above 5%. That’s just my belief. Well above 5% on the base pay, ’cause oftentimes you can actually acquire a 5% bump if you stay in your job while maintaining job security.

So above that is what we’re targeting. You get to decide what that range is. As far as when you ask, I’m audacious. I think ask before you get on the phone, honey. Time is money. Why would I get on the phone for a job that I know doesn’t have budget? It’s okay for you to reach out and say, “Happy to chat.

Thanks for reaching out. Do you happen to have the range of salary for this position?” That’s a great place. But if you’re already on the phone and you want to proactively ask the recruiter, leave it for the end. Don’t say, you know, “What are you gonna pay me?” Keep it simple. “Have you guys landed on the salary range for this role?

Are you able to share?” Simple as that. Oftentimes, though, as we know, what happens is the recruiter ends up asking you, and you feel a little bit backed into a corner. You have two options. Option number one is you go to that recruiter and say, “Actually, are you able to share the range? I love just getting a flavor of that before I share my, my, uh, kind of desires.”

AW: Yeah. Or you can basically, I asked you first. 

ED: Yes. You sh- I’ll show you your, me, I’ll show … What was that, what’s that saying? I’ll show you mine- I’ll show you- … if you show 

AW: me yours. Yeah. 

ED: Like, that’s the only way. Or what you can offer is the lower end that you’re willing to accept. And the reason I like offering the lower end is you frame it like, based on where I’m at in my current role and external market, I’d be looking to start at a range somewhere near $80,000 a year.

The reason I like that is you’ve inflated your lower end, of course, but you’re able to bump it up as the process goes on. You’re not saying, oh, 80 to 90,000, ’cause now you’ve capped yourself. Um, but I’m a big believer in put it back on them. You’re trying to sell to me just as much as I’m trying to sell to you.

AW: I think that that’s so helpful. I know that the listeners who are on the job market or planning to be so will appreciate that very much. I love this idea of giving, like, a bottom line. Like, the lowest that I would consider, depending on the job, right? Like, you kinda leave it like, this depends on other parts of compensation, right?

What the benefits are, what the job description is, and on and on. This conversation is just beginning. Here’s kinda the bottom line. Um, I love that. 

ED: It just gives us flexibility. We just… Sometimes you need space, and the more you learn about a job, you’re like, “Whoa, this is way bigger than they said it was gonna be.”

Suddenly, December doesn’t seem fair. 

AW: So what about if you’re already employed, and it’s been a while, and maybe, I don’t know, you find out that a friend of yours who works for a different company doing a similar job is getting paid more. Whatever the catalyst is, how do you broach that with your current manager in your current job?

ED: It’s a really good idea to root these conversations in data, not necessarily personal experience. So I personally like to avoid saying, “This person said this,” or, “I know someone doing this.” Focus more on market data. Book a 15-minute meeting or tack this on to your one-on-one with your boss. You always start with thank yous.

“Thank you so much for the opportunity. I love growing here.” We butter them up, and then we have that direct call to action, which is, “I’ve loved how much my role has evolved,” or, “I’ve loved,” insert this thing you’ve loved about your job. Based on how much my job has expanded and the fact that the market has continued to inflate, is there an opportunity for us to look at my salary, and what would that process look like?”

The reason it works when you ask it as a question is it’s no longer this kind of demand. It’s collaborative. So your boss is buying in. They get to say, “Here’s the process. We get to do this.” Maybe the outcome is you need some more performance metrics to be hit, but now you’re having that conversation.

What I caution people, though, against is if you start hearing things like, “Yeah, you know, we’ll talk about it next review season, and th-,” and it’s starting to kind of be this thing that exists in a very distant and murky future, and it doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you’re not getting clarity, that’s often a sign you’re not gonna get what you deserve here.

Handling Toxic People Without Losing Your Professionalism 

AW: Hmm. So when we are at work, speaking of taboo topics, there inevitably there are people who are difficult people, whether it’s your manager or your peers. I’m curious, maybe you can start general and give some specific examples of when there’s someone at work who’s making things difficult for us; what do you suggest we do?

ED: Oh, as much as I would love to be like, “We’re gonna send them nasty letters to their home,” um, unfortunately, we do have to play within the rules. I like to anchor this in one very real truth that I will never forget my dad told me when I had a manager for years who must have aged me by 10. You know, happy people and people who are good at their jobs are not the people making your life hell, and that’s just the truth.

So really rooting yourself in that is a little bit more liberating. But if you’ve got a toxic coworker, it’s really different from a toxic boss. A toxic boss, I would argue, you can create boundaries around so that you have distance; you are practicing grounding exercises so you don’t let them drive you crazy.

But oftentimes you can’t change your boss, and your boss is your biggest advocate. So that’s one where we sometimes need to make the decision, can I live with this or can I not? When it comes to your peers, there’s a few little, like, tricks I enjoy keeping up my sleeve. The first is we never engage with gossip, ever.

Doesn’t matter how good it feels. If they’re gossiping with you at work, I promise they’re gossiping about you. So learning how to deflect with a positive gossip response is ideal. 

AW: I think it’s also easy to get sucked into gossiping about the person who’s toxic with other people, right? So because it’s validating, like, “I noticed this.

You noticed this, too?” Right? So I actually tell my clients to explicitly say if, especially if they’re escalating a situation that’s gone, like, past whatever the boundaries are, to say, “The purpose of this conversation is not to gossip. I’m validating. Have you noticed this? Thank you. End of discussion, ’cause I’m doing something about it,” right?

ED: Love that. Well, I think that’s the healthiest way to do it so that you don’t get caught in the loop of now you’re just on the other end. And I think what people sometimes don’t realize is regardless of why you’re in that cycle, if word gets back to HR or to leadership, you are still being seen as gossiping, regardless of whether or not you’re entitled to.

So I big cosign, big plus one. But even just the power of that, like, positive gossip response can shut things down when you’re a little uncomfy. Someone says, “Did you hear about Susie? She did blah, blah, blah.” You say, “Oh, no, I, I didn’t hear about that, but I did see her report, and it looked great.” Like, respond with something, “Oh, no, I, I don’t pay attention to that, but here’s this great thing that I did see,” is a great way to deflect and condition people out of behaving in this way with you.

But really, when it comes down to toxic people, it’s really about shutting down and not engaging. It’s about them saying that snarky comment. This might be argumentative, but I’m a big believer in just like letting them sit in it, sit in it. Or, “I don’t understand. What does that mean?” Like, “Explain to me what that means.”

And you really have to gauge how safe you feel based on your work environment, but it’s all about boundaries. I think you can work more with, uh, your coworkers. When it’s your boss, that’s a tough sell 

AW: That’s a tough one. But back to the sit in it, one of the best responses that I heard long before I was doing communication skills coaching, that someone told me that I tried, and it is just beautiful, is just ask the person to repeat themselves.

If they say something egregious, say, “Pardon me?” And it doesn’t have to be like, “What did you say?” Right? It could just be like, “Pardon?” 

ED: Pretend you didn’t hear. 

AW: And then when they, when they repeat themselves, and everyone turns their head and says, “What?” Right? Or they’ll say, “Oh, well, what I meant was,” right? And there you go. 

ED: And who knows? Yeah. We’re assuming benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was a poor choice of words. But sometimes just letting people know that you hear them, but that you’re above responding can be enough. And if it’s not, that’s when we start documenting, and that’s when we seek support.

Like, you are not meant to untoxicify the people around you, right? Sometimes we need to call in the big guns, which is, is getting that support which you deserve. 

AW: Yeah. I mean, we could, we could go on and on about this. I tell people, especially as they become more senior in their career, part of their job becomes dealing with difficult people.

When you’re more junior in your career, your boss is looking over your shoulder, right? Making sure that you are acquiring the technical skills, doing the right things, giving check marks, guiding you. If something or someone gets in your way, they’ll deal with it. As you get more senior, that becomes part of your job.

ED: You’re the protector, not the protected, and it’s… That- that’s a really big shift, and I think especially as women at work, there is a different layer of how you’re perceived the more senior you become, and the more effectively you communicate and show up for work. It’s… That’s a whole, that’s a whole other can of worms.

How Visibility and Likability Shape Career Growth 

AW: Well, let’s open the can of worms called personal branding, ’cause how you’re perceived at work is all about personal branding. I was thrilled when I heard you speak and when I looked at the table of contents of your book and read it, that you have a whole chapter dedicated to personal branding. And as I said before we pressed record, even more thrilled about your, like, yes, that is your personal brand.

Can you share with the listeners your take on personal branding when it comes to our careers, and I guess some of the best practices for how to effectively manage your personal brand? 

ED: I really see personal brand as something that has a bad brand. I think people hear personal branding and they think of a very dated career concept.

But the truth is, you know, if you think of having a personal brand or if you don’t think of having a personal brand, you still have a personal brand. Your personal brand is what people think of when they think of you. It’s really as simple as that, and it’s a combination of you being good at the work you do and how you make other people feel.

It’s really as simple as that. I don’t believe that you need to be the most innovative, sharpest, top-of-the-class individual, ’cause I’m not, in order to have an impactful personal brand. And really, if the secrets to work success, which in my perspective, these are the secrets, is likability and visibility.

How you get there is with a really good brand. And I think if you can focus on having a really high say to do ratio, meaning everything I say I’m going to deliver on, I do exactly how I said I would, and I really make you feel like you’re in the room when I talk to you, that’s really all you need to do, and it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

AW: Yeah. So you made this comment about, you know, personal branding may have a branding problem. Do you think that Generation Z or, like, the new generation is a little more open to it? ‘Cause I kinda get the impression in the folks that I’m talking to that personal branding brand is starting to evolve and improve, and people are talking about strategically managing their personal brand.

Do you see that? What, what do you see about, like, the generation differences? 

ED: I think the motivation behind personal branding is really different for Gen Z. I think Gen Z has really grown into a career without rose-colored glasses on. They are not disillusioned by the idea that working hard gets you the great lifetime career, that you’re, you know, it’s we operate within a meritocracy.

Like, they don’t exist within the same confines that millennials did really. And I think where Gen Z has a unique lens is they are interested in personal brand, but not just for their nine-to-five job. Where I see Gen Z’s careers evolving is kind of the polar opposite of where millennials did, where myself as a millennial, we were raised with, “You’re gonna have a great nine-to-five.

You’re gonna hustle.” There was this hustle culture. Whereas Gen Z has now shifted to say, “I don’t trust the nine-to-five job to fulfill all of my financial needs. I don’t trust they won’t lay me off, ’cause I’ve seen them do it. Instead, I’m gonna have more of a portfolio career,” meaning I’ve got my hands in a couple of pots.

And their brand is something that unites all of those. So I do see Gen Z investing heavy in their brand, for example, on socials, use of LinkedIn. There– I literally watched a Gen Z intern two days ago when I was having a meeting, um, at one of my offices, and I saw a Gen Z student walk in with a printed resume to go to the security desk and was like, “I’m gonna hand this in, ’cause no one’s responding to my emails.”

That’s a kickass personal brand. So I think they’re still engaged with branding, but their why is a little bit different. They’re just a fascinating generation. 

AW: They are. There is such hope for the future, I think. 

ED: I love them. Yeah. I love Gen Z so much. 

AW: Yeah, yeah. So we were talking before about being in job transition and interviewing and so on.

In terms of your personal brand, how can we talk about or I guess, narrate career transitions or, in particular, setbacks or gaps? How do we make that, turn that into part of our brand? 

ED: A lot of it is just understanding sales fundamentals. Uh, you know, you don’t go to McDonald’s and expect to hear them talk about the nutritional value of what you’re purchasing.

That’s not what you went to McDonald’s for. But if they started off by saying, “Well, we’re budget. You… We’re really good at this, but we’re not great on vitamin B and vitamin D and really high in saturated fat,” you might walk away being like, “I don’t wanna eat from these people.” But they’re packaging it as, “Oh my gosh, this is delicious.

What a treat. It’s quick, convenience.” You need to think of sales and marketing fundamentals as you think of yourself, and the fundamentals are you talk about the stuff you have, and you paint pictures around the stuff you don’t. So if you’re in career transition or you’ve had gaps on your resume, I’m a believer in lead with the stuff you have, the legacy work that has worked.

You can address very simply without apology what that gap is. I’m transitioning careers because I was laid off. I’ve been focused on family for the last little bit. And then include what you’ve learned. And in that process of, you know, family care, I became really incredible at my time management. It really put into perspective the work that matters for me.

That’s why I’m focusing on working at a company that gives back to their communities. Like, there’s always a spin. You just have to find your spin and get ahead of it before they can kind of paint their own negative picture based on bias. 

AW: I love it, Emily. So we create our narrative. We don’t let someone else create the narrative for us.

Confidence, Curiosity, and Communicating with Audacity 

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

ED: I would love nothing more. I’m so excited. 

AW: Okay. Question number one: are you an introvert or an extrovert? 

ED: Oh, I’m a big fat extrovert. Big fat extrovert. 

AW: Do you use that insight about yourself to manage your day or your week in any specific way? 

ED: I would say yes, but on a very subconscious level. It’s not until I, like, come home and talk to my partner, and he’s like, “You have been out 12 days in a row,” and I’m like, “Yeah, isn’t it great?” That I realize that this is just the routine that I’ve built. But work-wise, definitely. I make sure I have a meeting or something in person with people at least twice a week. Otherwise, I start to feel a little cuckoo. 

AW: Oh, I’m so with you. 

ED: Yeah. Are you the same, extrovert? 

AW: 100%. Really? And I’ve retaken the test. I’m still an off-the-charts extrovert. 

ED: I was gonna say, if I took the test one more time, they would be like, “We need something new. You are existing in a new, a new pathway.” 

AW: Yeah. That’s funny. Okay, question number two: what are your communication pet peeves? 

ED: Apologizing for taking up space, so lots of sorries, lots of I don’t knows, that self-deprecating language. Doesn’t peeve me as much as it just makes me sad. I want you to believe in yourself as much as you deserve. And this is maybe, like, a little bit of a hot take.

I think overactive listening is a communication thing that we need to take a peek at. When someone is so actively listening to the point where you have a hard time continuing to speak ’cause they’re like, “Mm-hmm, yep, oh, uh-huh,” and it’s so over-exaggerated. Of course, there’s layers to this and, A, we’re told that this is great communication, and B, how we define and reward communication is inherently rooted in bias.

But I think, like, you can really tell when someone’s been told, “You need to overpay attention and overly actively listen,” uh, that it actually feels a little bit disconnected. So that’s one that I always think keep an eye out for. Like, it’s, it’s okay for you not to be an overly active listener if that’s what’s authentic to you. That’s fine. 

AW: Well, speaking of authentic, I was just gonna say, you can, in an authentic and engaged way, truly deepen your listening, or you can try to inauthentically signal that you’re listening, and those are two very, very different things, right? 

ED: Yes. Like, are you trying to listen, or are you trying to make it look like you’re listening? Cause there’s a difference. 

AW: Exactly. Okay. Question number three: Is there a book or a podcast that you find yourself recommending lately? 

ED: You know what? I have one that I have been recommending. It is so offside from the world that I operate within, but I will tell you why I love it. The show, it’s a podcast, it’s called This Podcast Will Kill You, and it’s an epidemiology podcast, which is essentially the study of infectious disease.

I’ve been listening to these two fabulous doctors; they’re both named Erin, and they are infectious disease doctors. And they, in each episode, break down the history of given disease or vaccine and then talk about the mar- modern implications in the medicine space. And the reason I have been recommending it is, A, it’s freaking fascinating, and B, I think it’s such a great accidental story about innovation and how powerful accidents are.

Almost every single vaccine or medical breakthrough, to some extent, had some kind of unfortunate mishap that brought us there, whether it be it was intended for A and it was used for B, or it was supposed to launch here and it didn’t. And I think just the context of how many mistakes actually have landed us in meaningful positions, and the importance of educating ourselves on history and the way the world operates, and also celebrating two incredible women in STEM that host the show.

I freaking love it. I’ve been listening, I think, six-plus years. Oh, really? My most listened to by far. Oh my gosh, it is my most listened-to podcast by far. By far. Wow. Okay. It’s incredible. 

AW: I will put a link to that, uh, show in the show notes. Before I let you go, Emily, I just wanna know, do you have any last words for the Talk About Talk podcast listeners in terms of, I guess, optimizing their communication at work so that they can advance their careers?

ED: I would say, A, keep listening to this show because it’s a mini practice that you implement every single week that is essentially upskilling you while you’re living your life. But the biggest thing in the world is start learning to trust yourself, and it’s not always about saying the perfect thing. It’s trusting that you will say something.

Sometimes something is better than the perfect thing, and getting really bold with practicing striking up conversations with strangers and small talking in your personal life naturally extends into your professional life. So try to do one bold thing a week, whether it’s going on a friendship blind first date or chatting up that person at your local flower shop.

That can be really, really helpful for your career on a, a meaningful level. 

AW: I love it. Thank you so much, Emily, for sharing your time and your insights with me and the Talk About Talk listeners. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. 

ED: Thank you. 

Three Career Communication Lessons from Emily Durham 

AW: Isn’t she great? Emily, I just love your positive energy.

Okay. Now, as promised, and as always, I’m gonna summarize with three of the key learnings that I wanna reinforce for you, just briefly.

1. Slow Down and Embrace the Power Pause

The first one was Emily’s point about the power in your communication at work comes from pacing and pausing. Her point is that confident communicators speak slowly, and they tolerate silence. They don’t rush to fill the space. It’s true. The pause really is powerful, so think power pause.

2. Keep Your Interview Answers Concise

The second point is that when folks are answering questions in job interviews, the most common failure may be on length, either rambling and speaking for way too long or cutting yourself short, so then being evasive and not answering the question.

You wanna reach that happy medium, and my suggestion, and Emily agreed, is to provide a concise answer and then say, “Happy to elaborate.”

3. Lead with Audacity

The third point that I wanna reinforce with you is Emily’s word that I just love. The word is audacity. Audacity as in being direct. When I’m coaching folks, they often ask me how they can achieve the all-elusive executive presence.

When Emily used this word audacity, it crossed my mind that maybe this can inspire you to communicate with confidence, being a little bit more direct, and truly developing either leadership presence or executive presence. Maybe lean into this word. I’m gonna try and do the same. Let’s all try to be a little more audacious.

Okay. That’s it for this episode of the Talk About Talk podcast. I hope you enjoyed yourself and learned as much as I did. I also hope that you will subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you’re on. And if you have a moment, please leave us a rating or review so you can help us be discovered by more listeners.

Thanks again, and talk soon.

The post Emily the Recruiter on CLOCKING IN & Communicating at Work (ep. 217) appeared first on Talk About Talk.