Author: Katy Goshtasbi

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.

Do you remember that song by the Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations”? Turns out the Beach Boys were much more in tune to the reality of life than I ever gave them credit for. In this post, I will discuss why your Emotional Resonance Factor® strategy is your easy path to not feeling lonely and succeeding professionally and personally, too.

The Challenge: Isolation, Introverts and Loneliness

Over the years, I’ve been told by countless professionals who label themselves as introverts that they cannot get clients nor service clients well. They feel self-conscious, awkward, shy, scared, often saying that they don’t know what to do with their arms, don’t know what to say and on and on. The list is endless, real and so is their fear.

The pandemic has only made this problem worse. As a self-proclaimed extrovert, I even feel a bit awkward in social settings at times. That’s what sitting at home for 2+ years does for us all.

Along with social isolation, comes feelings of loneliness. Loneliness and the feeling of not being seen isn’t a new challenge for humans. I’ve personally grappled with feelings of not feeling worthy in my life more often than I care to admit- and it has nothing to do with the pandemic or being an introvert (I’m an extrovert, remember?).

Post-pandemic, many more of us are also showing up as extremely lonely, despite a busy schedule and lucrative careers. I know I do. I’ve often shared with colleagues that the practice of coaching and consulting is very lonely for me these days. I simply need more than Zoom meetings all day long. I miss the days of weekly travel to clients and regular keynote presentations and trainings. I miss people around me. I miss their energy, their presence and interacting with them verbally and nonverbally.

Loneliness has gotten to a point where the Surgeon General has issued an advisory regarding the problem and the healing effects of social connection and community.

The Solution: Emotional Resonance Building

The term resonance is defined as, a reinforcement of sound (as a musical tone) in a vibrating body or system caused by waves from another body vibrating at nearly the same rate.

In the field of science, resonance plays a very important part. Think physics, engineering and medicine.

If “resonance” means one object’s vibrational frequency due to exposure to a similar vibrational frequency by another source, then it must apply to humans. When one person vibrates or resonates at a particular frequency, then another person does the same.

I bet you have experienced this phenomenon. What happens when you are around nervous or anxious people? If you are anything like me, you want to turn and run away from anxious and nervous people because you start to feel nervous and anxious all of a sudden, too. That’s not in your head. It’s real.

Emotional resonance is a way of promoting well-being in humans AND allowing professionals (even introverts) to relate to other professionals, prospective clients and current clients.

Research on the brain shows that your brain is involved in how you emotionally resonate outward and how you are impacted by the “vibe” of another person. Specialized cells called mirror neurons become activated, not just when we act but when we see another person acting the same way as us. This is the reason why in the coaching world, we often teach clients to practice “mirroring” someone with whom they are trying to connect. It’s also referred to by some as entrainment, where your behavior is modified to be in rhythm with another.

If you can mirror another and feel their plight, then you are emotionally resonating with them. This ability to connect and mirror allows us to develop emotional empathy for one another. When you feel for someone else, they can feel it, too. They start to trust you more and more because they feel safe with you. You’re safe for the other person because you’re more like them than different. Likeness feels comfortable to humans.

This is the start to healthy relationships and well-being for all of us. This is also the start to professionals being able to show up and more naturally share their message, connect with prospective clients, colleagues and superiors.

My process of working with clients on emotional resonance has many steps and doesn’t produce results overnight. It’s tailor made to you and your strengths.

Want to learn more?

Sign up to take an EQ Assessment

Sign up for my intro to Emotional Resonance Factor® mini-course.

Sign up for my Deep Dive Assessment and let’s see how we can tailor it for you and your team.

Happier attorneys with better health are more confident, less likely to miss work or leave their job. Confident lawyers bring in better clients who stay longer and pay better.

Conversely, under-represented lawyers often feel left out and not valued, suffer from 41% more stress and lower self confidence. Lawyers with high stress are at greater risk of depression, self harm, attrition and likely to consider suicide 22% more.

Wellness, diversity and inclusion at your firm aren’t just a “good cause” or trendy buzzwords, but vital drivers of your firm’s viability and revenue growth. Period.

This isn’t often a consideration in the fast paced world of law firms. I should know. In my career as a lawyer, I worked in many fast paced legal environments. No one stopped to consider my health beyond getting the ergonomics of my office correct.

But what about my mental and physical health? And what about how I felt when I was the ONLY woman lawyer in the room about 85% of the time? I can tell you I often felt lonely, isolated, not seen nor heard. It impacted my billables and interactions. I tried desperately to fit in, choosing to wear pant suits and putting my hair in a bun, reading the sports pages so I could entertain our male clientele and so on.

This went on until the day my doctor told me that my stress was too high and that I needed to stop practicing law. Stop practicing? After putting myself through law school as a single woman, who would pay my bills?!

In the end, I did stop practicing law. I made the best decision for myself. Your employees and your health matter. Lawyers are not as easily replaceable as we’d like to think when we burn out. We often don’t talk about the pain and isolation and fears that plague us. We don’t want others to know or judge us.

You don’t have to give up revenues for health and diversity. There’s a harmony that can be struck easily. You just have to stop, assess your situation and ask for support.

“Generating more revenues and keeping your legal staff healthy and in place with a thriving and diverse culture is easier than you think.”

We all know how costly it is to a law firm when lawyers leave and need to be replaced. There are recruiting costs to find an adequate replacement and training costs once a new lawyer is hired.There are productivity costs when a lawyer’s workload may need to be redistributed among the remaining lawyers, which can result in decreased productivity and longer hours for everyone involved. This can also cause delays in delivering work to clients, which can damage the law firm’s reputation and result in lost business. Lastly, there is institutional knowledge loss which a lawyer takes with them when they leave a firm, making it more difficult for the remaining lawyers to serve clients effectively and efficiently.

Did you know?

• Associate attrition rates are close to 25%. Attrition of minority lawyers is at 34%.

• For every 20 lawyers hired in a firm, 15 lawyers leave within 6 years.

• Lawyers who reported high stress levels were 22 times more likely to experience thoughts of suicide than lawyers with low stress.

• Job stress costs U.S. employers more than USD 300 billion annually and may cause 120,000 excess deaths each year.

• Unhappy lawyers may stay at their firm, but work inefficiently and contribute to toxic cultures where the inefficiency spreads.

• Law firms can get “canceled” for lack of diversity, thereby losing business and clients and revenues.

• Underrepresented lawyers are likely to have more mental health disorders leading to alcohol abuse and anxiety, such as those who experience microaggressions.

Ready for Success?

Losing a lawyer can be a costly and disruptive experience for a law firm, both in terms of the direct costs associated with recruiting and training a new employee and the indirect costs associated with lost productivity, delays, and institutional knowledge loss. By investing in initiatives that promote diverse, healthy employee retention and engagement, law firms can reduce the likelihood of losing valuable employees and the costs associated with employee turnover, making life and practice much easier.

Here’s your easy 2-step solution:

1. Download this flier.

2. Meet and Plan: Every law firm and lawyer are unique and different. To get answers and a tailored plan just for your law firm, schedule a free Deep Dive Assessment with Katy and together we can get your law firm moving forward to success.

We have a real problem on our hands in the legal world and it’s not just about women lawyers leaving the practice of law.

As I was co-authoring the Wellness Study Report addressing the attrition crisis of women lawyers in a post-pandemic world, I had a realization.

I tend to look at life from a different perspective often. My perspective tends toward the bigger picture and underlying causes of unhappiness, unrest or strife. Over the years, I’ve done much research and work on the underlying causes of lack of diversity and gender inequality.

Our problems in the legal world around gender inequality and the attrition problems we face in practice is the cause of our inability to stop and see the bigger picture.

It’s not that lawyers, and people in general, don’t care about others, equality, etc. I’ve found it’s because we can’t seem to find, make, have time to see the bigger picture.

“That’s it?” you ask. That’s it. And that’s a big deal.

The legal profession is a noble one. We do so much good for our clients and justice. As lawyers, we are trained to see both sides of an argument, the gray areas and the greater implications for our clients.

We are also trained to rely on precedence. This reliance on prevailing law, tends to put us in a mindset that is focused on the past. It often leads us to have a mentality that hinders us because we are conditioned to use our reliance on the past to subconsciously believe, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”. This perspective does not allow us to always see the bigger picture necessarily.

Yet, how often do we each really step back and view diversity and gender equality from the bigger picture? Could it be that “it is broken” and we just don’t have the time to fix “it”?

How often do you step back and really stop and make time to think about what it would really mean to have an equal number of lawyers and staff that represented all walks of life, be that gender, race, beliefs, hair color, etc? How much of this is based on fear of not seeing the same type of people around us? Maybe it’s a thought of, “If you don’t look and act like me, maybe I’m not safe with you?” Safety is a real issue for all of us.

The solution is not just to “make time” or be a better lawyer and human. It’s to effectively step out of our left-brained, analytical mind, the one we use each day to be effective lawyers. Once we step out of linear, left-brained thinking, we are able to access our right-brain.

This right-brain is the part of us that allows for more expansive thinking and creativity, allowing for safety in our world. This is the part of us that clients count on for creative, ethical solutions, for dynamic interactions and effective communications. This is also the part of your brain that allows you to show up and be dynamic, captivating and work with less effort and with more ease and grace.

For our purposes here, accessing your right, creative brain allows you to suspend judgment and see others for the valuable, safe beings they are- no matter if they look like you or not.

Ready to get started? Stop and consider:

• How often do you allow yourself to have unstructured, creative time for thinking, planning and just being?

• Take 5 minutes each day to sit still and “daydream”. This is NOT a waste of time, but your opportunity to access your right, creative brain.

• Notice what comes up when you daydream? When I do so, I invariably always come up with creative ideas and solutions to a left-brain problem that I’ve been grappling with.

• What other outlets for creativity do you have? If none, why?

• What’s your perception of creativity? Is it just for children and those without legal careers? I had a successful lawyer client who came to me because she was feeling very disconnected from her practice and her life. It left her uneasy and anxious. I discovered she had been trained for many years as a classical violinist. She had stopped playing when she became a lawyer because she felt it wasn’t appropriate anymore. Through our work together she gave herself permission to own her creative side as a violinist. This process allowed her to enjoy her practice more, do her work with more ease and grace, feel more authentic AND embrace others for their differences more easily. If she could be herself, then she could allow others to be themselves, too.

Katy Goshtasbi is a securities lawyer, business development expert, coach, consultant and founder of Puris Consulting. She works law firms, lawyers, executives and organizations on mastering transitions/changes, finding their authentic voice/power to influence/inspire, improving mental & physical wellness/diversity and developing brands that get their message out effectively.

Like this post? Buy Me A Coffee.

Need collaboration and support with your brand, dealing with changes/transitions to grow your brand? Check out my services page.

Download my Top 5 Action Steps To Easily and Gracefully Master Change

If you read down this far, drop a comment below about whether my post above was helpful or not. I will send you a free gift that I am only giving out to a few people.