Speaking and Communicating Podcast

To make sure that there is diversity of personality types, so that everybody can do their part according to what interests them, what inspires them, what motivates them.

Welcome back to your Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I'm your host Roberta.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to iTunes and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Let's get communicating!

Communicating!

My guest today, hailing all the way from Down Under in Queensland, Australia, Leanne Wyvill is a Communications Confidence Trainer who has an Honest Degree in Theatre Studies and a Diploma in Communications.

Her mission is to help business teams work better together.

Good afternoon for you, Roberta.

Thank you very much for having me on your podcast.

Thank you for being here.

Welcome to the show.

And I know it's morning over there, so we hope we didn't wake you up too early.

No, it's fine.

And it's a beautiful autumn day here today.

That's awesome.

And tell us a little bit about yourself.

Roberta, I have been a Communication Confidence Trainer for the past 10 years, and I've drawn on my experience working in a lot of other industries and sectors.

So I've had executive roles working with scientists, with researchers, with medical professionals, nurses and allied health, and also in the secondary school sector.

So I've had the opportunity to observe a lot of different types of speaking situations and many different types of personalities and how they cope with speaking situations.

So when I was gifted a redundancy 10 years ago from my previous role, I decided to take this opportunity to share my expertise with a lot of people rather than just one more employer.

And so I set up presence communications and I have been working with individuals in a coaching capacity, but also with business teams.

I help them communicate better with each other and also with their business writing skills, their presentation skills, any sort of situation where they need to communicate their ideas more effectively.

When you were in the healthcare industry, what are some of the things that you noticed when it comes to communication?

What I noticed was language in that often, the doctor or the nurse would write something for a patient, not necessarily medical jargon, but even just using words like abdomen, do you have a pain in your abdomen?

Why not say, do you have a pain in your tummy?

Do you have a pain in your belly?

And then that makes it more accessible and more casual and friendlier for the patient when they're trying to read through an instruction booklet, for example.

I had the privilege to work with the Marta Health Services.

They're based on the Sisters of Mercy Philosophies here in Queensland.

And my particular portfolio was the Marta Mothers Hospital.

I had the opportunity to work with some amazing medical scientists and work with them during their medical breakthroughs and to be able to help them publicise those.

And something that I learnt there was very much about the team.

In healthcare settings, it is about the team.

The team has to work together for the benefit of the patient.

So if the team can't communicate, can't share a common language and common values, the patient is not going to benefit.

Talking about credentials, when you are in medical school or starting to be a nurse, obviously that's the jargon they use, the abdomen instead of the tummy.

When you get to a practical work situation, how easy it is to now separate and say, okay, yes, I needed to say that on the exam in order to get my degree, but now let me break it down in layman's terms for the patient to understand what I'm talking about.

I think that is a common thing that happens for anybody who has tertiary level training.

It happens in business as well as in health.

Sometimes what you don't learn when you're at university, regardless of what you're studying, is communication to people.

You learn communication about research and about science and about physiological things, but you don't necessarily learn about communication between people and all the nuances that go with that and the non-verbals.

What is great is that I think there is now more opportunity for people, for students to learn that as they're going through, but also coming back to this idea of teams.

And when I was at the Marta Mothers Hospital, I was considered part of the team.

I was the PR and communications person, but I was considered part of the team.

So part of my role on that team was to translate.

So even if the doctor or the nurse or the physiotherapist was using the big terms, my job was to then make that accessible.

So I had a role on the team to do that so that they didn't have to necessarily worry about that.

But in terms of communications with patients, it's not that I sat there with a patient while there's a consult, not that sort of thing at all.

That's certainly in the general materials to make people feel comfortable about coming to the health services that were being offered.

Very much indeed, because that's where the connection is lost.

Imagine when someone is giving a speech in public and they're talking to an audience and because they have all these credentials, they just talk in this jargon.

That's why we talk about tech and engineers so much.

Potential customers might not be so familiar with it, therefore translate it to terms that they understand so that they understand how it can benefit them.

Would you say that this is also a skill you need even in person to communicate in a way that the other person wants to be communicated to?

Absolutely.

It's recognizing the audience.

So whether it's business writing or public speaking is to recognize, to give some thought, to even just stop and take a few minutes to think about how this is being received.

Because we know with communication, it's sender, receiver and feedback loop, then there can be a little bit of noise in that.

So how can we cut through that noise and ensure that the reader gets the message or the listener gets the message that we're trying to get across?

So we've got to think about what's their situation?

Where are they at the moment?

What do they want?

And then we can adjust what we want to say to fit with what they want.

And when the audience hears that you've taken the trouble to say something that connects with them, it's using their language, or you are talking about them and their situation.

The audience is more open to that because we need the connection to be able to open up to new ideas.

And when someone acts as though they haven't taken a moment to think about us, we shut off because it's an exchange.

Why should I give you my time and my brain space when you're not even acknowledging me?

Yes, that's exactly how people feel.

Now let's talk about confidence.

You're a communication confidence trainer.

Why do so many of us struggle so much with confidence when communicating?

I think it comes back to something quite primitive.

It comes back to our fear of not being accepted.

Our fear that early, early, early times, that we had to stay together as a pack for survival.

When we're separated from the pack, like we are when we're on stage by ourselves, communicating, you know, sending out a message, or even if the focus is on us in a board meeting, we suddenly feel that we are on our own.

We experience sensations of fear, one, that we could be attacked, and secondly, we might be abandoned.

So that is often at the root of people's sense of confidence as whether or not to feel that they can push themselves out there and demonstrate their worthiness and demonstrate their strength, or whether they will shy away from it in the hope that nobody will notice.

Mm-hmm.

Back to the health industry again.

Did you notice if those who were in leadership positions had that confidence and that their leadership style or their communication style was different and that could be part of the reason that they were placed in those leadership positions?

I think as in a lot of industries, people are promoted up because of their technical capability and often you will find people who are not very effective communicators because they're so in their head and so passionate about what they're doing, they have blinkers on to notice how that makes other people feel.

And I did notice an interesting thing.

The Marder Health Services is made up of a number of different hospitals, Children's Hospital, Mother's Hospital, General Adult Hospital.

And even though my portfolio was the Marder Mothers Hospital, I would sometimes have to do some work in the Adults Hospital, what was then the Marder Children's Hospital.

And the doctors in those different hospitals were very different to work with.

And some of that was because I wasn't part of their team.

So I would notice that their communication wasn't as easy or as friendly as what it was in the team that I did work with.

And I think that's part of it too, is that when you are comfortable with the people you're communicating with, your confidence rises, you're building trust, and you feel that if you say something that you're not necessarily going to be shut down, or attacked or abandoned.

Again, this training is often not part of the general health training that's offered.

Fortunately, there are health services and hospitals that will offer that leadership communication training to their members of staff as they progress through their careers.

That's a plus because it's happening, but it doesn't happen at that early level.

I mean, we talk about a bedside manner.

I'm sure anyone listening today has had those experiences where we've had to work with a health professional.

You seem to treat us like a number rather than as a person.

It does happen, but I think sometimes too, the reason why that happens, there's a confidence level.

That person is feeling very confident that they know their stuff.

And so they're not concerned that you're going to question them.

And then when you question them, it throws them because they've lost some of their confidence because you've shown that you're confident about your health and about asking questions.

That does happen.

Yeah, it does actually in many different situations.

And then you studied theater studies.

I had a guest earlier who also has a master's in drama and she actually went to corporate training just like you.

So I was wondering, what is the connection between drama studies and actually moving to corporate training?

Well, I think there are a couple of things at play.

One is that when you have studied stagecraft, there's skills that you can use when you are doing your training.

Having your presence, projecting your voice, using gestures appropriately, using props, connecting with the audience.

So that's stagecraft skills.

You've got them.

The other thing is that when you are involved in drama and using the art of play and drama and scripts to communicate, it's because you have this desire to share complex concepts in a way that's accessible to your audience.

So there's that desire there to translate again, if you like, into a way that the audience can cope with.

So it might be complex emotions, complex relationships, complex historical events.

And so this desire to translate and share what you have interpreted from that complexity with an audience, combined with your stagecraft, gives you an excellent skill set for being a corporate trainer.

So it does really contribute to the kind of trainer and public speaker or presenter that you've become.

And would you like to talk to us to the idea that even if you leave, don't burn your bridges?

Yes, I think that is also again, a sign of a very good communicator is if you can say farewell in a way where you might still be spitting the lemon pips because you feel quite bitter about what's happened is to maintain your professionalism and think about how you want to be perceived and how you want people to remember you.

And to manage your behavior as best you can under those circumstances.

And having a great network, I think, is an important skill to do to build a network wherever you are, whatever it is you're doing, build that network because even if you don't need to call upon that network for yourself, you can help someone else by introducing them to people in your network.

I feel very strongly about building up networks, particularly for employers to give their employees, especially their younger employees, opportunities to build networks.

And it works the other way around as well.

If you don't get the job that you or the client that you are going for, if you have good relationships with people, they might recommend you to another organization that would need your services.

Absolutely, that does happen.

And it's about being out there to be known as a reliable source, whether it's a source of training, a source of information, a source of contacts, a source of redirection.

I think that is a quite valuable skill that any professional person should have and to welcome that.

When you have opportunities to network, whether it's online or whether it's in person, breathing the same air, is that that builds your confidence.

The more you network, the more opportunities you have to meet people and talk about what you do, find out what they do.

Networking experience really builds up your communication capability and your confidence.

Which is when we talk about public speaking and coaching you, we keep saying, just keep doing it.

The speech you made 10 years ago, you're gonna be a totally different person 10 years later.

I agree with you on that.

I encourage anyone that I'm working with, it's gotta be practical.

We can't just talk about what you're going to do with your presentation.

So someone might come to me and say, well, I've got to give this picture, I've got to give this presentation.

And part of every session, they're there doing the presentation, standing up.

Now, I once worked with a woman who was preparing a speech.

She knew that she was going to be on a fairly small stage with a handheld microphone.

So we practiced using a microphone, and she had a hairbrush.

And so we practice being careful with gestures, because if you throw the microphone away from your mouth, that's right.

So it is in the practice of doing it.

So even though we talked about what was going to be in her pitch, what she wanted to achieve, what she would say when we also practiced the posture, the use of the prop, the microphone, how she could use her gestures, how much turning she could do.

And that was all part of it.

Whereas when she first came to me, she thought that she was just going to get some help with reducing her 20 slide deck down to five.

We did so much more because you've got to practice what you're going to do so that you have a muscle memory.

A visualization exercise of how, when you are actually on stage, how this is all gonna pan out.

This is how I'm gonna be in front of my audience.

So you practice literally everything, not just the verbal part of the speech.

Absolutely.

And even things like practicing what you're going to wear.

I encourage people to do this because if you're suddenly going to start wearing high heels and you're not used to wearing high heels, you've gotta have a practice wearing those high heels if you're gonna be walking across the stage.

For women, if you've chosen a straight skirt, practice actually taking steps up because you might find that you've worn this lovely, tight, straight skirt, then you get to get on the podium and suddenly you can't get up on the steps because the skirt's so tight.

Is the material you've put on your body, is it scratchy?

Because if you're not feeling comfortable in the clothes you're wearing, you'll be distracted by that.

And if you're distracted, you're not focused on your audience and your audience is wondering, are they really here for me?

So even something like practicing what you're wearing is a good thing, it's all part of the practice.

Now let's talk about corporate training work that you do.

So you help teams work better together.

So what goes into teams working better together?

I come to team cohesion from the point of view of communication.

If the team doesn't understand each other and understand what matters to each other, then there's going to be resistance to trust.

So trust is really important for any team.

You think about the swift trust that's required at the scene of an accident.

Paramedics, police, firees, whoever come to that scene of the accident, they don't know each other necessarily.

They may not have ever worked together before, but they come together and work together and they trust each other to get the job done.

When you're in a team situation at work, particularly if you're working on a project team and you've got KPIs, you have to trust your colleagues to do their bit so that everybody achieves and the job is done well.

So establishing that trust can be hard when you don't understand what motivates the people on your team.

One of the programs that I run is the True Colors Personality Profiling Program.

I know it's quite popular in the States.

It's not as well known in Australia.

So I get a lot of inquiries that come through from people having done it in one job and then really excited, they wanna fight when they move on to another role, when they suddenly have a new team, they want to apply that same process to getting to know their team really quickly.

So in the True Colors Program, what you're looking at is understanding from your colleagues what matters to them.

So when you're frustrated that, you've got someone who never speaks up in a meeting and you're frustrated by that and you think they're snobby, they're so aloof and so you start to build an impression of them that's not necessarily true.

However, when you understand that person's motivations, what matters to them, when they are behaving like that, you can take a step back and go, okay, I get it.

I understand why they're like that.

I'm not gonna push it.

I'm not going to make demands.

So the core thing for team communication is to understand each other and also to have some then common language that you can use, have some rules of engagement that you agree to and having those common values.

All of that leads to trust.

When we trust our colleagues, we get on with our own job instead of worrying about what they're doing or what they're not doing.

And that is the best, most productive use of the team's time and energy.

Do you find that if teams are diverse, these challenges are bigger?

Understanding other team members becomes a bigger challenge?

I think that depends on the type of diversity.

I'll give you an example of a whole department.

There were 25 in the department.

This group, they sell insurance.

Their team was struggling to meet their monthly reporting.

And they had a number of issues that were then affecting the personal dynamics in the team.

We went through the True Colors program.

What we discovered was out of these 25 people, 20 of them were one particular personality type.

So what that happened was the person recruiting was recruiting more people just like him.

Well, that was great.

They had wonderful skills.

They were bringing the business in.

There weren't enough people on the team who were of other personality types.

So those couple of people who are of different personality types struggled.

They weren't heard.

They weren't understood.

And so they would often become stressed out because of the way the salespeople were throwing in the years or the paperwork from the business.

You know, all this is coming in, but the people in the admin team were barely coping because they were overwhelmed.

They weren't understood about what their needs were at work.

So diversity in teams, I would say is always a good thing, but the diversity of personality types have to make sure that there is diversity personality types so that everybody can do their part according to what interests them, what inspires them, what motivates them.

And when you have a team that's all one type, you get a group think.

You don't get an understanding of what matters to other people and those people can feel crushed.

Hmm, it's interesting, the personality diversities, the minute we hear diversity, we think, oh, different gender, different nationality, different ethnicity, different religion, not paying so much attention to the personality diversity.

I suppose that's my particular area for I focus on.

Coming back to those other types of diversity, again, I do believe because of our heritage, because of our biochemical makeup, male or female, or choices we're making about how we want to be perceived, all those things can contribute to how we interact with others.

We bring with us our values that may have been influenced by religion, by culture.

Because of that, we approach problems differently.

We see things differently.

So I do believe that diversity on a team is really important.

I don't know if you've heard of this phrase, pale, male, stale.

Pale, male, stale.

No, that's a first for me.

Okay, so pale, male, stale refers to when, particularly in a managerial executive level, it's all made up of these white men who are 40 plus, and they're making all the decisions for people who are not male, pale and stale.

So giving people opportunities to have a voice, to express how they perceive things, how they're looking at things, what they're bringing to the group in the way that they can solve a problem.

It's really important.

We want to avoid, whether it's pale, male, stale, or whether we want, you know, avoid too much complaints about teams where there's too much estrogen, too much testosterone, too much of something.

When you have those situations, if it's not balanced by diversity in personality or diversity in another way, then communication becomes very insular.

Everybody thinks the same, everybody talks the same.

And so when you have a problem to solve, you're not going to have an influx of new ideas and new approaches.

Okay, so those executives, they're there and they're there because the experience they've had finding the letter, so they are much needed there.

But at the same time, I don't know how it is in your household, you know how your kids are the ones showing you AI and GPD.

Are those executives open to the younger generation's ideas?

Because the younger generation brings in that skill, like I say, they are more tech savvy and they are more in touch with what's going on in the world so that we create a product that's gonna add value.

Are they open to that or are they still doing things their way?

I think smart leaders are open and smart leaders are self-aware.

When you're aware of your biases, when you are aware of your limitations and you accept them, then you can feel comfortable about bringing other people in who can supplement your expertise with their expertise, their interests and their knowledge.

But if you are not feeling confident in yourself, if you don't really have faith in your own capability, if you're not aware of how other people perceive you and how your behavior impacts on other people, if you don't have that awareness, you're going to keep blustering through.

When you have that awareness, it gives you permission to say, well, I've got this great strength.

These are what I bring to the table.

I don't have this.

We're going to need this.

So I will bring it in.

So I said, smart leaders will do that.

Self-aware smart leaders will do that.

Leanne, is there something you were hoping to share with us today that I haven't asked you yet?

That's a difficult question, Roberta, because this has been such an interesting conversation.

Not really sure, because it's not scripted, not sure where it was going to go.

Please share with us.

Tell us about your book.

Give us details, what got you authoring the book and also where we can find it online if we want to purchase it.

I have written and published a book called, Chicken In, Ditch the Nerves and Pitch the Power.

And people will say, chicken in?

That's a strange name for a book.

When I was running a presentation training session one time, I heard someone make this comment that said, I always chicken out.

When somebody has to do a presentation, I chicken out.

And I thought, well, how do we get people to chicken in?

I like that.

Hence the title for the book.

It's a handbook, it's very practical.

It's got lots of tips in it.

It's got over 150 tips that I have researched.

So it's evidence-based.

And also I have some contributors, some colleagues who have contributed to the book to give some practical tips of managing your nerves to build your confidence.

The book is available on my website, presencecommunications.com.au.

It is also available on Amazon.

And I would be happy to offer your podcast listeners a discount.

I can offer a discount on the hard copy.

Certainly I'll be offering a discount and the code for that discount will be ROB23.

ROB23.

Yes, put that in at the purchase time and I can send the hard copy book out.

It is also available on Amazon and there's a link to the book on Amazon on my website, which is, as I said, presencecommunications.com.au.

Thank you for the discount for our listeners, Leanne.

So the book is Chicken In by Leanne Wyvill.

It talks about how instead of chickening out, you can chicken in and stand in front of your audience and deliver your message.

Use the code ROB, which is short for Roberta, 23 in order to get a discount.

Thank you so much.

We appreciate that.

Please tell us again, your website.

presencecommunications.com.au, being in Australia.

That's the website.

I'm fairly active on LinkedIn.

I'm not as active on other social media sites.

The reason being is that most of my clients are on LinkedIn.

So that's where I go.

Makes perfect sense to us.

So presencecommunications.com.au, Leanne Wyvill.

Thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure having this conversation with you.

Thank you for coming to the show.

Thank you, Roberta.

I really enjoyed the line of inquiry that you've taken with this podcast.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

My absolute pleasure.

And your insights are very valuable.

Our listeners are really going to enjoy listening to your wisdom.

Thank you for that.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on iTunes and Spotify and stay tuned for more episodes to come.