Author: Katy Goshtasbi

Are you skeptical deep down and wonder if your mindset really is the most important part of your professional (and personal) success—and failure? Do you often find yourself questioning what actions you need to take to bring in more money, be successful, and reduce your stress so you can sleep peacefully at night?

I had these two questions lurking in the back of my mind for a long time. I just ignored them. I knew my mindset was important, but I wasn’t convinced of the power of my mind to direct all my actions, behaviors, and outcomes.

It wasn’t until I experienced the NLP Master Practitioner’s Training that I became a real believer.

The journey began with curiosity. The training promised not just theoretical knowledge but practical tools to harness the power of the mind.

I was intrigued… Could this really be the key to unlocking my potential?

The culmination of the training was a powerful experience: breaking a wooden board with a single strike. This was not just a physical act but a metaphor for breaking through mental barriers, our obstacles that stood in the way of our goals.

As I stood there, board in place, a tiny doubt crept in. Could I really do this? But as I focused my mind, channeling all the techniques I had learned, something incredible happened. I broke the board with ease, and in that moment, I truly believed in the power of my mind. I could achieve anything.

The Power of Mindset

If you’re skeptical about the power of mindset like I was, I urge you to explore the power of your mind. The transformation I experienced was profound. Our mind is indeed the most powerful tool we possess. It can direct our actions, shape our behaviors, and determine our outcomes.

“This article was first published in the ABA Law Practice Division Webzine on July 15, 2024”.

Ask any lawyer what holds them back from certain of their career goals and successes and odds are their answer will have something to do with change. Specifically, their fears around the changes they would have to weather and deal with to get to those goals and successes. These fears and changes feel very real to us when we are faced with them.

In this article we will explore, and provide tools for, how your emotional intelligence is your biggest tool to managing changes, specifically dealing well with transitions in your legal career, practice and personal life as a human.

The Problem: What’s So Scary?

Emotional Intelligence (EI) refers to a distinct combination of emotional and social skills and competencies that influence our overall capability to cope effectively with the demands and pressures of work and life. In other words, how do you deal with stress, life’s obstacles, deadlines, decision-making, problem-solving, time management, reading the room and any other myriad life issues that have the potential to relate to, and influence, your success.

While your Intelligence Quotient (IQ) piques at 17 years of age, your EI grows as you age. There is no correlation between your IQ and EI. In other words, just because your IQ is high doesn’t guarantee your EI is as high, and vice versa.

EI is estimated to account for up to 45% of people’s success in life. When looking at successful leaders and lawyers globally, you’ll find they have in common extremely high EI. They don’t always show up as managing partners or CEOs. High EI leaders show up as leaders regardless of their positions.

In assessing EI in lawyers and other professionals, there are many factors to use. All these factors somehow have as the underlying premise, emotions.

Most of us tend to turn to the emotion of anger when we are frustrated by our practice. Yet, when there is anger, the real underlying emotion is generally fear.

Change brings on fear. It’s not just that you fear the actual event that brings on fear of change, though. For example, if you were offered a new office suite for free or a new, free, car, odds are you wouldn’t necessarily lead with a feeling of fear in getting a new office or car. You may be excited, happy or curious more than fearful.

What really drives this fear of change is fear of the unknown that an event triggers. After all, if there is a new event/undertaking in your life and practice, how can you predict the outcome and know what to expect? Often, you can’t. Thus, specifically, we fear the discomfort of having to sit with, and be around, ambiguity of an event that creates change. Ambiguity signals that we can’t be in control of the outcome. Lawyers run successful practices based on being in control of the outcomes as much as possible to serve clients well. No wonder changes and transitions induce fear.

According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word ambiguity is defined as “unclear or able to be understood in multiple ways.”

When you are facing any transitions in your career, or even personal life, such as growing the business by hiring more people, firing someone, changing firms, or even changing practice areas, there are a lot of unknowns, events, or variables that accompany the cycle of changes leading to transitions. These unknowns equate to unanswered questions, lack of clarity and many ways that things could turn out.

The bottom line is not knowing the final outcome feels fearful. You may feel you can’t control the outcome and that often produces anxiety and fear. Or maybe you really want a particular outcome and you fear the worst.

For example, take one of my clients. He worked for a particular firm in a particular practice area for fifteen years. For many reasons, including quality of life, he decided to change firms. This also meant moving himself and his family to a new city. This transition, while well-thought out by my client, still had many different possible outcomes. Yes, the move would happen. How would he like the new firm? How would he and his family like the new city? Would his practice thrive? Would the kids like their new school? The results could go infinite ways.

The Solution: Befriending Ambiguity

Emotionally intelligent, successful professionals embrace ambiguity and flow with life. Getting comfortable with ambiguity will allow you to weather any changes and transitions that help you grow your practice and career. As with anything in life, what you resist, persists. It’s not about you throwing your arms up in the air and resigning yourself to the unknown. It’s just the opposite, in fact. It’s about staying curious about the ambiguity and normalizing it for yourself.
Here are three tips on how to embrace ambiguity:

1. What’s the worst that can happen? Stop and consider, what really is the worst that can happen because of a change you are reckoning with? Besides the unknown and the discomfort of not feeling 100% in control, what really is the very worst that could happen if you ride it all out without knowing every variable along the way? If you do this exercise in earnest, you will likely come to see that the worst is something much smaller and more manageable than you fear.

2. What’s possible? A benefit of embracing ambiguity is you will be able to see the upshot. There’s a reason you decided to seek a change that involves transitions in your practice.–likely many reasons, in fact. Maybe you were just sick and tired of feeling “stuck” or maybe you just couldn’t take another day of the same old process or feeling. Stop and make a list of all the possibilities that can make your career more successful, and your life easier, too, by not resisting the change. List everything, even if it seems far-fetched and like a pipedream. Spending a few minutes making this list will allow you to see things from a new, more positive perspective. This could very well motivate you to innovate somehow in your practice and embrace the change and transitions.

3. What’s Your Advice? As counselors in law, we are supposed to be good at guiding our clients and advising them on the best legal strategies. Stop and consider, if you were counseling your own client on some version of this change and transition as it applied to them, what would you say? The perspective you choose to share with your clients, likely can apply to you just as well. Doing so will trigger a very common factor we measure to see how high someone’s EI is: empathy. Can you put yourself in another’s shoes and see another’s point of view? Can you then problem-solve and make sound decisions using emotions?

In conclusion, the world is full of ambiguity. Lawyers who are flexible, courageous and curious not only accept ambiguity as part of their practice growth and success, but they embrace this ambiguity. Doing so allows you to be able to emotionally overcome your fears surrounding changes that bring forth transitions.

Have you ever felt that ache in your back or pain in your shoulder, knee or foot and wondered to yourself where that came from all of a sudden? I know I have. It’s often just irritating and I push through it. Sometimes it’s too painful and I can’t push through the pain. Let’s discuss how the body stores trauma to let you know that you need healing and the power of somatic therapy to help you heal and feel good in your body.

Most of us believe that when our body is in pain, we have two choices: ignore the pain and keep on moving forward OR go see a doctor/self-medicate.

We rarely stop and think of another option that could have long-term benefits and relief.

I used to just ignore anything that hurt assuming it would go away on its own. Over the years, I wondered about the role of pharmaceuticals in our health. It felt like everyone was pushing a drug to mask our symptoms but never really addressing the actual cause of our physical and emotional distress/pain. A bandaid can only last so long. The wound is still there under the bandaid for most of us.

When I got diagnosed with breast cancer, I started to see a trend. Western medicine was wonderful and all about getting rid of the tumor. No one seemed to have time to ponder why I had gotten breast cancer when I had no family history and I was a very healthy person for all my life. Eastern medicine, on the other hand, stopped and reflected on the “why breast cancer” with the belief that my body was out of balance and trying to tell me to change a pattern so I could get relief long term. So I combined both eastern and western medicine and have been cancer-free and thriving for years now.

During this time, I really started to explore what my body was trying to tell me with the cancer. It was at this time I discovered somatic therapy. Somatic therapy is not new but it hasn’t gotten the same amount of attention as cognitive behavior therapy, which is talk therapy that engages the mind.

Over the years, somatic therapy has been gaining more attention. The book, The Body Keeps the Score, a New York Times bestseller, brought to light in 2015 how much the body keeps trauma trapped, thus impacting us on a cellular level. Harvard Health has written an article explaining somatic therapy, as well.

As Harvard Health explains, somatic therapy is, “a treatment focusing on the body and how emotions appear within the body….[because] our body holds and expresses experiences and emotions, and traumatic events or unresolved emotional issues can be ‘trapped’ inside”. These trapped events and trauma or emotions show up as aches and pains and perhaps even cancers.

Addressing our emotions seems to be the best tool we know in helping release the body and alleviate the resulting pain. Over the years, whether I’m addressing my own emotions or working through clients’ emotions in order to have an optimal Emotional Resonance Factor^®, I know the role this work has in generating healthy and successful brands – professionally and personally. Mental or physical pain does not allow anyone to bring their best self anywhere – work or home.

I have experienced a form of somatic therapy called The Rosen Method, which has been quite effective. Rosen is very popular in Europe and has yet to gain traction in the United States. From my own experience, during a Rosen session emotions are gently addressed as the practitioner focuses on muscle tension and breathing rhythms. All of this causes my body to release the trauma of memories and events, and thus releases the physical pain my body is using as a signal to tell me something is “off” and needs my attention.

What does this mean for you? Stop and ask yourself:

• How often do you get aches and pains in your body?
• Do they reoccur?
• How do you heal your body? Drugs or otherwise?
• When you get an ache, do you have any recall of an emotion attached to it? Does it show up at work during a particular conversation or big project?

The next time your body feels “off”, stop and take a deep breath and ask yourself some of these questions. The answers may surprise you and allow you to get some relief instantly.

Want to learn more about the role of your emotions and your body aches/pains in how you succeed personally and professionally? Join us for a one-day workshop, The Serenity Summit, to experience the techniques yourself and gain clarity, focus and balanced healing to eliminate your pain.

Sadly, transformational leadership has become a buzzword over the years.In my world, as a transformational leadership coach, it is anything but that. Let’s talk about what transformational leadership is and how to become a transformational leader, including characteristics of transformational leaders and how to be coached to become one.

What is Transformational Leadership

The dictionary defines transformation as “to change completely in composition, structure, or character.”

Transformation is not merely a change, as I see it. “Change” involves doing something differently. Maybe you get a different haircut or make the switch from drinking coffee to tea in the morning. Maybe you drive to work a different route. That’s a change. That’s an event.

Transformation is way bigger than change. It leaves you altered and never the same again after you’ve gone through the events/changes.

One of the biggest obstacles to transformation of any kind is the fear of never being the same. What if I don’t like who I have become? What if others don’t like me anymore? What if I’m really happy and successful? These are all thoughts that go through our minds unconsciously when we consider being our greatest selves.

Looking at the definition of “transformation”, to change completely your character may seem scary. On the other hand, to stay stagnate, stuck and perhaps feeling in limbo is the most scary thing in life, never reaching your full potential and learning what you are capable of in order to serve your purpose.

I often hear clients proclaiming, “I only get to do this once”, meaning they live only once. Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that this is the truth, that you only live once. What’s more scary: never knowing and growing because you’re too afraid to be better OR changing your character completely and being amazing?

Transformational Leadership is to change completely in character and thus, lead from a place of being transformed. Transformational leadership has many facets but mainly reflected by leaders who are able to accept change in a healthy way. These leaders are willing to take a risk in order to show up great. They are humble, grounded, clear, focused, and about the greater good and purpose. They show up for those they lead as inspirational and authentic, willing to give of themselves, while still striking harmony to take care of themselves, knowing they are the vessel to growth and progress in the world.

Benefits include the obvious and then some. These leaders may not be leading huge numbers of followers. That’s not the point.

However, these leaders very naturally find themselves at the helm of organizations, events, and their communities often. It’s as if followers gravitate towards the transformational leader’s ease and grace around who they are because others can sense their integrity and self-confidence.

How to Become A Transformational Leader

Transformational leadership calls for effectiveness in many areas. To be effective, these leaders collaborate and gain support with their decision-making skills, presenting well, being influential/impactful, creating diverse and healthier workplaces, building a team, selling well and dealing with changes/transitions effectively.

Coaching leaders on being transformational leaders, I’ve come to identify the top 3 characteristics of transformational leaders and the 3 pitfalls to watch out for so you can create shifts to speed up your journey to transformational leadership.

Top 3 Characteristics of Transformational Leaders:

Curiosity

Truly transformational leaders are curious. They have expansive views on life, oftentimes reflected as creativity in the arts or hobbies. Curiosity allows them to remain nonjudgmental, giving constructive feedback to those they lead with ease and grace. Being nonjudgmental allows them to remain neutral, enhancing their ability to lead with focus and clarity in crisis situations. Leading with focus and clarity through crisis means that their followers trust them to do what’s best for the greater good and organization.

Courage

Truly transformational leaders are courageous. I tell every one of my clients how proud I am of them and how much they inspire me because they were courageous enough to show up and get coaching in order to be even greater. These leaders may not be leading huge numbers of followers. But they are willing to look at what they do well and what they could do even better. They are willing to put it all on the line in order to never be the same again- but be better and on their way to amazing.

Often when I coach CEOs of major companies and senior executives in organizations, I am in awe of their ability to get real with me, letting go of pretenses to allow me to be a sounding board, confidante and support for them. Their ego is only going to hold them back – they know it and want better.

Humility

Courage and humility go hand in hand. When my clients let go of their egos and show up, these transformational leaders are humble. Humble does not mean they are modest. Modesty implies being mediocre. Transformational leaders know they are not mediocre, but great.

They don’t have to force their greatness down others’ throats, thereby allowing them to show up for their followers as humble. If you observe truly transformational leaders, they are great listeners with the capacity to stay silent naturally. They do not need so much attention all the time. They KNOW they are great, they don’t need constant validation of their greatness.

Top 3 Pitfalls To Avoid On Your Way to Being A Transformational Leader

In order to become a transformational leader, you have to be willing to be coached. Every great individual has a neutral, sincere, direct coach who holds the space for transformational leaders to be born. I can’t do this alone for my clients. You have to allow yourself to become a transformational leader.

Here’s what to avoid:

1. Refusing to see the world as expansive. Seeing everything through the lens of science and applying linear thinking is excellent for producing substantive work. I can attest to this notion. As a lawyer, my left, linear, analytical brain is great for substantive legal work. The same applies for engineering, medicine, research, etc. However, as a transformational leader, you must be able to see beyond what is proven and in front of you.

Some would call that vision. I often see it show up as vision plus faith. Nothing is black and white to transformational leaders. Take some time and get self-aware of how you view your world. Could you stand to see the bigger picture better? Do you limit yourself to what you know and is right in front of you? Or are you willing to go out on a limb and see beyond what is safe and true for you? When you do so, you will find others are inspired by you and want to follow you.

2. Being judgmental and hard on yourself. Being judgmental and hard on yourself is not only uncomfortable and self-defeating, but it doesn’t allow you to show up as a transformational leader. When you judge yourself harshly and exhibit so much perfectionism perhaps, as a result, you shut the door to curiosity, humility and courage.

Reflect and journal on how often you criticize and attack yourself. We all do it. The key is to see it so you can pick a different pattern of thinking and being on your way to becoming a transformational leader.

3. Reverting to your vices. We all have a vice–or two. While none of us is proud of our vices, when you accept your vices, you can choose to let go of your vice(s) on your intentional plan to become a transformational leader.

The trouble in letting go of our vices is that we often don’t see our vices as negative. For example, I LOVE dark chocolate. I also can easily go into self-criticism and self-blame. Combine these two vices together and I can become a hot mess and lose my transformational leadership abilities.

Eating dark chocolate and beating up on myself is no way to live, but that’s only true if I first stop and witness the negative impact of my vices. Dark chocolate and self-blame may seem fairly innocent. However, any vice that allows a pattern to keep occurring without you living your best life is just that- a vice that stands to take away your inner peace and ability to lead and inspire others.

Stop and consider: what are your vices? Be honest with yourself and list everything you can think of. Once you do, pick one vice and brainstorm how you can shift away from that pattern of behavior. What do you have to lose? What negative belief about yourself is that vice reinforcing? Who would you have to be to choose to let go of that vice and the patterns it creates in your life?

Transformational leadership isn’t just for others. It’s meant for you and me. It’s not something only politicians and those who are trained to lead exhibit. Oftentimes, it’s the exact opposite in fact. Everyone’s version of transformational leadership is different. That’s the beauty of it. Your contribution to your world as a transformational leader is unique and special. It’s all within your power. It doesn’t have to show up in huge ways to have impact and create a better world. I promise.

Need support on your journey to transformational leadership? I’m happy to support you. Schedule a one-on-one meeting with me and let’s discuss.

Being successful isn’t so much about what you do as much as it is about how you cooperate with the changes, twists and turns in your life. Let’s discuss how to work on yourself and grow as a person by developing your resilience characteristics. Specifically, I want to discuss why resilience is so important and the steps to get you to be more resilient and thereby, impactful in your world.

I was recently invited by the National Association of Women Judges to attend a day-long event at our local women’s detention facility. The day-long event included judges, lawyers, therapists and other experts to support incarcerated women who are preparing for re-entry into the world outside of the detention facility.

The day was inspirational, and I hope I was able to leave the attendees with ideas and thoughts to allow them to thrive once they return to their communities. The biggest takeaway and lesson for me was resiliency and the power of our minds to shape our experiences.

Resilience is defined as, “the capability to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties or to spring back.”

As I looked around at the female inmates, I felt some of them seemed to be doing better than others. There are many factors, but what stood out was the resilience some of them have.This resilience is shaped by their ability to use their mind and reframe adversity into something more useful, inspirational and motivating so they can keep going.

As I see it, this ability all comes down to skills development to grow as a person. The final goal is to have inner peace and bounce back and recover from any situation by maintaining our inner peace.

Characteristics of resilient people

If the definition of resilience is to bounce back and recover, then here are the characteristics of those who bounce back, recover and display resilience.

Confident

My formal research is around stress and self-confidence. I have found that resilient people are confident. They may not necessarily be confident in the final outcome of whatever is the object of their focus requiring resilience, but feeling confident allows them to stay focused, march forward and take action with a mindset that is free of fear and guilt and confusion.

Optimistic

Resilient people’s perspective on life has a neutral, if not favorable, point of view. Remaining hopeful and optimistic allows you to have a higher tendency to stay the course while being gentle and gracious.

Clear

Resilient people tend to have vision for their future and clarity regarding what they want in life. This allows them to stay focused on their goals and dreams and not stray off course and give up.

In service

Being resilient enables you to see your purpose in life more clearly and vice versa. At that point, you can’t help but be in service to others because community service is a natural and easy way of staying in service. Any time I do community service, I have a vantage point into other’s lives and struggles, which energizes me and keeps me resilient.

Steps to achieve resilience and increase your impact

1. Self-awareness: The first place to look is inward. Ask yourself, what’s your perception of yourself and how do you currently handle adversity? Why do you do so? What would you like to change about yourself and why? Are you replicating a pattern based on behavior you saw from your parents?

For instance, my mother had a tendency to break down every time there was an emergency. Seeing her react this way for so many years left me with the impression that a viable response to adversity is to break down and panic instead of bouncing back and moving forward with grace. I had to stay vigilant and self-aware to respond otherwise.

2. Reframe: Once you look inward, stop and assess each situation by doing a “reframe”. All this means is choosing a new perspective on your life and yourself.

For example, when I had breast cancer, I had a pity party for three weeks. Then I stopped and reframed my diagnosis. Instead of being a victim of breast cancer, I reframed it and said, “what am I supposed to learn from this experience? What is my body trying to tell me?”. This reframe helped me stay resilient, bounce back and take action from a grounded, centered, focused place.

3. Stay curious: Any time you need to reframe, choose to look at your predicament with curiosity. When you stay curious, you avoid judgment. Judgment is a huge culprit to you losing your resilience.

Take my example above. Instead of judging my breast cancer and thinking, “life’s not fair”, I stayed curious by asking, “what are my lessons here and how can I role-model getting through this with grace for others’ benefit, too?” This curiosity took the focus (and judgment) off of me and allowed me to keep moving forward.

4. Connection: While resilience is about you, it takes a village to support you. Having someone you can share your life challenges with is key. Having more than one person is even better. Just remember, it’s your life and you are sharing for comfort and support, not necessarily to be told what to do.

Resilience, just like anything else in life, is a journey and a process. Stay self-aware, be kind to yourself and use the tools here to guide your journey.

Need more support? It’s an individual, personal, intimate, cooperative experience and you deserve a guide who cares. Set up a Deep Dive Assessment and let’s see how I can support your journey.

“I thought I could ask for what I wanted, but I didn’t”. I hear this phrase often. It’s generally followed by another phrase like “why am I so scared to negotiate”?

Negotiating for anything in our lives is not always easy. Self-advocacy and speaking up for yourself may seem so….opportunistic and self-ish. There’s a certain amount of confidence and assuredness required to be an effective negotiator. I’ve discovered that the easiest way for you to claim your confidence in negotiating is to improve your communication skills, bar none. When your communication skills are optimal, then you’ll find you have higher confidence and improve your negotiation skills and abilities. This is true for business communication skills or personally, too.

COMMUNICATE MUCH?

As with anything else in life, if you find yourself less than optimal in communicating while negotiating, you’re likely an ineffective communicator elsewhere, too. Does that describe you?

Your first bit of self-work is to spend 7 consecutive days establishing your communication baseline. When you are at work, home or even at the grocery store, and you say, “apple”, do others hear “apple” or do they hear “orange”? Why? Can you even tell? What could you have done differently to ensure that your intent is projected well on your audience? Are your tone and actual words direct or brash?

HOW DO YOU ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT IN A NEGOTIATION?

Asking for, and communicating, what you want in a negotiation presupposes that you KNOW what you want. I’ve spent 14 years coaching exceptionally talented, successful, smart people who can’t communicate in a negotiation because they just don’t know what they want.

They may know what they need, including the final outcomes needed for a successful negotiation, but they do NOT know deep down what they, themselves, want out of the negotiation. Nor do they know where they excel so they can bring “it” to their communication and negotiation table.

To answer this question fully requires deep introspection into your soul and a digging and discernment for your brand. You want to claim your confidence and get more of what you think you deserve? Then it’s time for you to step up and be the brave person I know you are by tapping into your best self and expressing yourself authentically.

Here are some things to keep in mind and steps to follow:

1. Negotiation is merely two parties coming together to form a relationship, aiming for mutual benefit. If it’s not mutual, it’s not going to work. Look for mutuality instead of tapping out or digging in your heals.

2. What scares you most about negotiating: getting your way OR not getting your way? Spend some time really feeling into this question. I think you will be surprised by what you find. Most of us are way more scared of being powerful enough to get exactly what we want, than the inverse. This fear of getting it all scares us into submission and represses feelings of anger and hostility that show up somewhere else; leaving us feeling out of control.

3. What you really want boils down to knowing a few key things about yourself like: what are your natural talents, values, business skills, goals, life purpose and ability to imagine where you want to be in one, three, five and ten years to start. Each of these areas deserves your deep, long-term review.

4. What are your emotional tendencies in negotiations? What is NOT said is more important in negotiations than anyone wants to believe. Upwards of 75% of all communication is nonverbal. Emotional Resonance Factor® is critical to your ability to negotiate by nonverbal communication. I am talking about your overall vibe, including your gaze, gate, stance, facial expression and visual presence. Whatever emotions you are feeling, odds are strong that we can sense these emotions directly nonverbally, believe it or not. So a good tip is to remember, based on my formal research, if your bad stress is high then your confidence is low and you are likely not emotionally resonating with your audience.

5. Compensation bias is a very real fact, as is general implicit and explicit bias in life. You can’t outrun these biases. However, you can know your own propensity to be hurt and shut down when you encounter these biases. Over the years, coaching equal numbers of women and men professionals, I have found that both men and women lack confidence in communicating and negotiating. Men hide this lack of confidence better, showing confidence when it comes to negotiating and asking for what they want. Men seem to fake that confidence better and are thus more likely to be perceived as a brand of leadership material. What happens when you sense a bias? Do you shrink back? Why? Do you assume it’s all your problem? What if it’s the other party’s issue and not yours? Next time you sense a bias against you occurs, stop and ask your unconscious mind what the real fear is, changing course slowly to recognize that it’s most often not you, it’s the other party!

In summary, negotiating requires you to be willing to advocate for yourself by communicating what you want with confidence, ease and grace. There will always be things you could have done better. That’s for next time you communicate and negotiate. Not taking the chance in the present will always make you feel angry, like you failed because you didn’t at least speak up.

If you’d like my help with this subject, email me and let’s talk. No one can become an overnight expert at negotiating and communicating. You don’t have to rush it. But we all need support and tools to get us to our final goal with ease and grace.

One thing professionals have in common is their deep focus on their substantive knowledge and resulting work product. Unfortunately, your substantive knowledge and work product will only get you so far. I’m often asked to teach professionals how to be better presenters and public speakers.

Presentation skills are not just about your posture, voice tone and content. In this blog, I’ll discuss what makes for an effective presentation. Delivering a powerful and effective presentation is way more than you think…and your substantive knowledge and work product alone is not good enough anymore.

THE PROBLEM

As a professional, you are trained in school to be good at your substantive work. Odds are, your personality suits you to be a do good-er: creating content alone; reviewing contracts at your desk; drafting pleadings; developing, modifying and testing systems and processes, etc.

All of these things require you to tap into your left, linear brain and access what you learned in school. None of these things require you to really access your right, creative brain and interact or share WHO you are with the world. None of these things require you to inspire, lead or be memorable.

Yet you want to be promoted, recognized by your peers, heard and valued as a leader and legacy builder. But the old way of being good at what you do isn’t working anymore. So what do you do next?

REFRAME YOUR WORK

Your work product and skills are part of your career. That’s obvious. What you think is your “presentation” and public speaking skills and tools are not so obvious.

Anytime you speak in a meeting, to your peers, on a big stage or elsewhere the one true thing is that YOU show up. We are all paying attention to YOU firstly, not your content.

In order to allow your natural inner presenter and public speaker to shine, your presentation skills evolve from your ability to:

Know who you are – Not being a great presenter is a symptom of having low self-confidence. Having low self-confidence is about being unsure of who you are. Being unsure of who you are is solved by tapping into your inner wisdom and knowing of:

• What are your natural strengths and talents? The answer here boosts your ability to authentically build your natural strengths and talents that come easily to you into your presentations to the world.

• What is your real story? Where you came from is crucial to your successful ability to convey your message to your audience, whether you’re selling them your services or meeting with a client to deliver on your engagement. Unraveling and writing your real story (the good, the bad and the ugly) will allow you to find those patterns that hold you back, that keep you from shining in front of others. It also allows you to weave in who you are into every interaction with your audience, leaving them feeling closer to you and inspired by your leadership, formal or otherwise.

• How do others perceive you now? Why? What of this perception do you want to control and change as you step out into the world either to formally speak publicly or to present in front of your senior leadership team, management or clients?

• Your values. The term “values” is thrown around a lot. Values are the one true path for you to own your greatness. Once you know your values, everything else seems to fall into place. From this place, you will find the strength and power to present and speak to your audience. Your audience gets you, respects and admires you and engages with you at an entirely different, more effective level.

• Your energy. You have a certain amount of energy each day. With this energy, you take care of others and yourself and are able to perform your work. What energizes you and what drains you? Once you clearly identify the distinction between the two you are clearer on who you are and how you can bring your best self to your audience.

Communicate effectively – Once you have a good grip on who you are, in order to convey your message effectively to your audience with ease and grace you must master your best method of communication. Everyone has a different style and aptitude for communicating. Unearthing yours not only leaves you comfortable and able to influence and inspire others, it allows for easy conveyance of data and facts to your audience.

NEXT STEPS

So what’s next?

You need to decide what you want to do to change, grow and become a better presenter, including leaving a legacy others can use long after you’re gone. Not being able to decide what you need is a problem. How often are you faced with a decision, big or small, and you find yourself going back and forth? Lack of decision making is a big symptom of not knowing yourself, including your desires.

Only when you decide to move forward and get support can you combine your substantive knowledge with your presence and inspire, educate and leave a legacy that gets you promoted, hired, retained and noticed anywhere in a good way.

Looking to improve your presentation skills to the world, build a legacy and be an inspirational leader? Let’s talk. Everyone is different, and you deserve a customized and tailored approach. Schedule a Deep Dive Assessment with me and let’s discuss a plan together. Don’t wait to make this decision.