Speaking and Communicating Podcast

I think leaders who rely on masking are really going to be in trouble as the workplace is changing because you can't live like that.

It's exhausting.

And the reliance on authority to get what you want done, or reliance on hierarchy, that's also not going to work for much longer.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

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

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And speaking of leadership, this exciting month of April, we have a special leadership series where every single guest will be a leadership coach, a leader in their own organization, and they will be helping us become better leaders ourselves.

And to top it off, we have three episodes per week instead of the usual two.

We will be publishing three episodes per week, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, instead of the usual two episodes a week in this special leadership series in April.

So stay tuned, become a better leader, and log on to Apple and Spotify to give us a rating and a review.

And let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with my guest today, Katherine Lazaruk, all the way from Canada.

She's here to talk to us about professional presence and how you can build a strong professional presence for success.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show.

Hi, Katherine.

Hi, Roberta.

It's really nice to be here today.

Welcome.

Where in Canada did you say you were?

I'm in Vancouver, which is on the west coast of Canada, almost down at the US border, actually.

We're quite close to the United States.

And did you grow up there?

No, I actually grew up in Prince George, and then I came to Vancouver to go to school for the opera, and I just never really left.

And the only other place I've lived for any length of time is San Francisco.

Lived there for a couple of summers while I was singing with an opera company down there in the summer.

You went to school for the opera?

Wow.

Yeah.

That's another discussion.

But yes, that was my...

You want to tell the story?

Please go ahead.

Like how I got where I am into professional presence?

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

When I first did my schooling, so I have degrees in voice performance for the opera and elementary education, because my parents are very practical people, and once I completed my music degree, they said, OK, now you need a real job.

So it's like, pick one.

And at that time, it's like education, law, nurse, a real job, quote unquote.

So I did my education degree, and then I was splitting my time between those two careers.

So I was freelancing professionally and teaching elementary music in the public school system.

And the farther along I got in both of those careers, the less I liked them, not because I didn't love teaching and not because I didn't love singing.

It was because both of the career paths that I had, they had quite narrow parameters.

And I'm not a very good small box person, but I didn't know that.

And it took me 12 years and a lung tumor to figure out that those were not the right paths for me.

So when I got diagnosed, I took medical leave, and then I started working with a coach to try to figure out what I was going to do, concentrated on my health.

And six months later, the tumor was gone, and I had a job doing corporate training at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is one of the big four accounting professional services firms.

And in between that time when I was working with the coach, we were talking like, what are you going to do when you grow up?

If it's not this, then what?

And I literally had a weird vision, and I've never had a vision like this before, and I had never had one since, really.

I was sitting across from him, and I literally had this vision, and it was the logo of the first company name I ever used, which was ICU in a circle, Times New Roman Font, silver lettering, purple background, very, very specific, and Image Consulting underneath it.

And then the first tagline, which was intensive care for your image.

And I just started to laugh.

I'm like, that's not a real job.

Like, who does that job?

And he said, that's a real job.

You could do that job.

And because there's no regulation in the industry, like you could hang your shingle out tomorrow and say, I'm an image consultant, and nobody would blink.

It's completely unregulated.

I thought, I look all right.

I've read some books.

I'll just get a website and some business cards and start practicing.

So that's what I did.

I don't recommend that approach to anybody now.

I'm like, if you want to do image consulting, please get some training, because it is a very intimate job, and it's a very psychological job.

So if you're not sensitive to that, you could really get yourself in trouble.

So make sure you get training.

So I did that, and I built my business up part time.

And then when my contract ended at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2009, in the middle of the recession, I'm like, well, this is a great time to go full time as an image consultant.

So I went to Toronto here in Canada, and I did my certifications in image and advanced image consulting.

And then the woman who ran the company that does that certification, she liked me, so I interned with her, and then she really liked me.

So she made me her Western candidate.

I taught consultants how to be consultants at Langara, which is a college here in Vancouver, and I had my private practice.

And then as my clients would go up the chain, they get promoted, they'd say, we want you to come and work with our executive teams, but we're tired of explaining to the people that write the checks that you're not really an image consultant.

Because the optics on image consultant are not always that great, right?

People think it's only fashion or style, and that is definitely...

Or you're an Instagram model.

Yeah, right?

Like the optics on it aren't great, especially sometimes for corporate work.

And so that's when I changed my business name to Lazaruk Consulting, and now I can do what I want.

Like I have lots of autonomy, and I can decide who I want to work with and why.

But my big passion now is really about getting women into senior leadership and more diverse populations into senior leadership faster, so that we can change what leadership looks like and have people who are more responsible stewards of power in positions of power.

Because right now we've seen what we've had, and it's not getting us to great places.

So I'm really interested in achieving gender parity in my lifetime and seeing more diverse people rise to leadership positions.

Which is what we're going to get into.

But let's go back to this image consulting.

So when a corporate, when a company says to you, please come and help us with that image, usually what do you do?

The work that I would do is actually along the lines of branding, but it was quite in depth.

So often it was an individual.

They're like, look, we would like this person to be in leadership.

Can you come and help them with their professional brand?

So we would look at the appearance.

You know, we are in a visual society a lot of the time, and people do think things about you when they meet you.

And you want to make sure your first impression and your lasting impression are congruent, and you can be successful in your role.

But we can also look at what are the behaviors that you're exhibiting.

How are you handling working in teams?

How are you speaking with people?

How are you communicating all the way across all parts of the organization?

How are you managing up?

How are you managing down?

How are you managing laterally?

Sometimes I would end up working with teams.

So recently, I just had a client in Dallas where they came to me and said, We're having an email problem.

We need an email workshop.

I was like, OK, sure, I can do an email workshop for you.

But really, as often is the case, when I got to the client, I realized this is not the problem.

The problem is your organizational structure is not clear.

People don't understand the chain of command.

They're cc-ing everybody and their dog on every email.

And people are not sure of what channel to use for what situation.

So every company now has Slack, and they have Teams, and they have email, and they have phone calls, and they have secure channels, and people didn't know.

So it was really about getting the team to know each other a little bit better and getting the organization settled.

And then the email issue was not a problem.

We did two days, and they got that all ironed out, and they saved about a quarter of a million dollars in the first three months just on person hours having to deal with emails.

So I really like to get into interesting problems.

Whereas before, when I was doing more image consulting, it was really appearance, behavior, communication, and now it's more about this in-depth, who are you as a person?

How are you working with others?

What's the real problem here?

Because the surface problem is never the problem.

Yeah, that is true.

Hence, we always talk about soft skills on the show.

It's never the optics.

There's something deep.

There's something underlying.

It's true.

And I think, too, what's happening now is there's this mix between individualism and collectivism.

And we need a good balance of both.

But our scale has gone so far to individualism that we're losing the fabric of connection with one another.

And we're losing our humanity a little bit in that respect.

And everybody's tired, burned out, triggered.

There's a lot of trauma coming to the surface for people.

And business hasn't necessarily fully adapted to that yet.

And they haven't adapted to people wanting to live their lives for themselves and not just for a paycheck.

So there's a lot of relational skills conversations that are coming up in my world now that weren't necessarily coming up at this deep level before.

Earlier, when we had a conversation, you said the books that were written 20 years ago about leadership are still regurgitating the same thing, and yet things have changed so much.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

Right, yeah.

So I'm writing my first business book.

When I was doing research for my book, when I looked at executive presence, which is a great catch-all term, what I noticed was the books that are being written now are the exact same books that were being written in 2003.

So the principles are not changing.

I think the issue is that we're changing business models right now.

The business model that we were in before is very hierarchical, it's authoritative, it's compartmentalized, and that worked for a long time because we were still really in the industrial age.

And in an industrial age, it makes total sense.

The same bolt, the same way, in the same place, same every time, you need people to act more like mechanized parts of a whole.

But now the model is more integrated, it's relational, it's whole, the hierarchies are flatter.

And so we need people to be much better at relating to one another and communicating and connecting with one another.

And we really need people who know themselves really well and who then are able to know others really well and who can hold space for when that complete self shows up at the office.

Before, so the people that were really successful in that hierarchy, those executive presence books from whenever till now, those will work, and those tricks do still work.

But there's still a very surface way of getting what you want.

For example, so they talk about confidence, they talk about gravitas, they talk about charisma, you know, those things, and they all have different definitions of them, but it's still quite subjective.

And those standards are inherently quite biased because we are operating in a cis white hetero patriarchy, a capitalist society, that's the world we're in.

So all those standards conform to those things.

So for anybody that's outside the spectrum, anybody who's a woman, anybody who's LGBTQ, IA+, anybody who's BIPOC, any of those other marginalized communities, don't get seen as leaders.

So you can put those tricks on, so you can speak low and slow, you can make sure your emails are very concise, be brief, be brilliant, be done.

One of my colleagues in the UK has great communication tips for that.

Do your slides a certain way when you're presenting.

Make sure you stand a certain way, like the power poses, Amy Cuddy on TED Talks.

All of those pieces are tricks to fit in to the system as it is now.

And my goal is to help people, okay, you can play that game, and once you're there, let's talk about how you're going to change the game.

Because companies are like, come and play in our sandbox.

Our sandbox is great.

And they get diverse populations in, which improve business outcomes, but then the diverse populations don't stay because it's uncomfortable.

And it's like, they don't need to change, you need to change.

You need to change the way your business is running so it's more comfortable for everybody at the table, not just white dudes.

And we have nothing against white dudes.

I love my old white guys.

Actually, I do love them, and I have a huge amount of empathy for all the people who were super successful in that model and don't know what to do now.

I was having a conversation with one of my CEOs a while ago.

He's like, why can't people just come to work and do the job and go home?

Just leave it at the door.

And I'm like, because that's not how the world is now.

People want to feel their feelings.

They want to be vulnerable.

They want to really connect with people.

They don't want to pretend.

They don't want to do that.

And just spend more time at work.

In the industrial age, it says 430, I leave.

We spend a lot more time at work.

You can't just numb our feelings for 12 hours.

No, and I really think that that's in the business world and in the world at large.

Numbing how we feel about things and not reacting to things is really what's gotten us into some of the messes that we're in.

Not just in our own lives, but in the larger political scene.

We're not outside of society.

We are society.

So if you want to change something, it starts with you.

Your listeners talking about their professional presence.

When you show up at the business, you really need to understand the game that you're playing, and you need to understand that you might be different, particularly if you're younger.

If you're like, well, millennials are kind of in the middle, but like, you know, Gen Z and some of the Gen Alpha people that are starting to kind of come up into the workforce.

Understand that you're in a time of transition, so it's going to feel bumpy.

Understand that.

Understand that here's a set of tricks that will work really well, and here's some ways that you might be able to change the game.

And I really think if some of your listeners are over 40, over 50, or even over 60, if you don't have a mentor under 30, you are missing out.

If your mentor is not under 30?

If you do not have a young mentor under 30, you are not going to stay relevant.

The information exchange on mentorship is no longer just one way from older to younger.

It has to go younger to older.

As you age, you need people younger to keep you in the loop.

With what's going on, especially with all the tech changes, with all the adaptability issues we deal with.

Yes.

And not just the tech changes, it's the relationship changes.

It's the feeling changes.

So I'm meeting like 20 year olds, 20 somethings.

They have really got their ish together when it comes to their emotional lives.

Like people are saying, oh, they're freaking out.

They're crying all the time.

They're emotional.

I'm like, yes, because they feel their feelings.

Yes, they need to learn how to be well regulated emotionally.

And that's good because you need your emotional life and your brain life, your mental life, to go together in business.

Because if you're cutting off your emotional life, you're missing out on a huge data set.

You're missing information if you're only working on your head.

That's not how the world works anymore.

So it's this integrated piece that older people are not getting.

They think it's bumpy because of the younger generation.

They need to change as much as the younger generation.

Like there needs to be a meeting in the middle somewhere there.

I strongly encourage people that are over 40, over 50, over 60, get yourself a mentor under 30.

That's a very great perspective.

We've never had someone say that before.

As you said earlier, it's about relationship building now.

It's people-centered.

Therefore, if you're going to build relationships with your team, the clients, you need to understand how they operate.

Absolutely, yes.

And the key to this too is one of my clients is she's 60.

So she's consulting now.

She's retired from her main career now.

She's doing consulting.

She is fantastic.

She's a really strong woman.

She's good looking.

She's got like lots of things going for her.

And one thing that's really challenging for her is the feelings, the emotional part of it.

And it's largely because she and other clients that I work with in that same age bracket don't know their own emotional landscape.

So they find it really hard to sit with people who have a rich emotional landscape and to sit with them in a work moment and say, OK, let's pay attention to this piece first.

Let's validate and talk about this feeling piece.

Then you co-regulate and then you get to the, now we need to get things done and here's how we're going to do it.

Isn't that the similar process you follow with your clients and potential people who are going to buy from you as well?

When you talk about the sales process, if you want to be successful in sales, don't you also first build the relationship, especially if it's going to be a long term.

You build the relationship, you get to know them, and then you pitch in and say, hey, here's what I'm selling.

Because to just come there and think, you know, these people have no feelings, they must just buy my product and leave.

That's not how that works.

No, and it's really interesting that you say that because I'm thinking of an incident.

So I was recently flying to San Francisco to work with a client, and I was sitting beside this lovely man.

We talked the whole way.

Great conversation.

We covered a lot of really interesting things.

He's working in a large company.

And it was a really fulfilling, like a satisfying conversation.

And he was talking, he had a business problem, and we were talking a little bit about it.

And then I said, you know, as we were coming down to the end of the flight, I said, you know, I can help you with that.

And then he sort of looked at me, he said, have you just been soliciting me as your client this whole time?

And I'm like, oh, no.

And I felt terrible.

Like, I thought, oh, you know what, that was a mistake.

Because maybe I can help him, but he didn't ask me.

But we were talking about it.

And so there's nothing wrong with me, like, advancing that.

Because, you know, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

But I really thought this guy was cool.

And we had this sort of really mutual interest in a lot of the same things.

And I did think later, I'm like, you know what?

It would have been interesting if I had just let it slide, like the slow down part, not be so quick to let somebody know you can help them.

Because it doesn't make any difference what you have to offer if they haven't asked you.

So you think you were wrong by offering that?

No, I don't think I was wrong for offering.

But in the back of my mind, I am thinking about what if I had done that differently in terms of building the relationship?

Just allowing that interaction to be an interaction and then see what the next step was.

But not to necessarily open the door in that way that quickly.

And it's possible he was joking, too.

He was really a funny guy.

So he might have been teasing me a little bit, which is great.

But it's just interesting.

It's about building relationships wherever you go.

And I think, too, people think they're not in relationship.

We tend to think of relationship only as romantic relationship.

I'm in a relationship.

But you're in relationship with your barista in the morning.

If they make you a delicious coffee and that makes you feel amazing, you're in a relationship with them.

You're in a relationship with the service rep on the phone.

We had a guy in yesterday to fix our faucet.

Our kitchen sink in our condo was not draining.

The pressure was not great.

You're having a relationship.

For the time that you're with that person, you are relating to them.

You're in relationship with them.

Relationship isn't always large scale.

Sometimes it can be very small scale, too.

People who eschew small talk, they're like, oh, I don't want to do that.

That's the little fabric that binds people together.

And that's a great place to practice your relational skills.

It can be kind of high stakes to practice it at work if you're new in a business.

But really, it's these tiny little interactions all the way along that help build the fabric of the relationship that you're working on together.

Absolutely.

And then when you say that embracing your whole self is a liberating experience.

It's so easy.

Okay, let me just back up there a second.

When you really accept yourself, when you really sink into all the good, all the bad, all the ugly, whatever, then you're not using all your energy to mask.

You're not using your energy to pretend to be someone you're not.

You just then get to focus all your energy on being who you are.

And it's my personal belief that nature doesn't make mistakes.

Whatever container you showed up here in the world in is the perfect container to do whatever you're meant to do on the planet.

And the sooner you make friends with your container, the easier your life is going to roll.

I'll give you an example.

When I was in the opera, I was dying to be like the third act diva, like the princess, the lead.

It's like, you know, like fainting on the couch.

And I am not.

I'm like Donkey and Shrek, right?

I'm a little short, I'm a little round, I'm a little off the cuff, right?

I'm kind of the huge comic group.

If anybody is listening, please know that Katherine is not accurate.

She looks really beautiful.

You know what I mean, right?

Like it's that idea of like, you're the comic sidekick.

And thank you.

Yes, I feel quite beautiful.

But again, it was finding my niche, right?

It was accepting that slight quirkiness.

It was accepting that I like to be over the line.

I'm a challenger.

So then I can't be upset when people challenge me.

But no one was hiring me in the opera to be the third act diva fainting on the couch because that's not who I am.

I'm the naughty chambermaid.

I'm the one that's getting people into trouble, you know, that's doing all that.

I'm not the leading character in that way.

And coming to terms with that was really tough because my ego is involved.

And I think that's a big problem, is people's egos get involved with the title that they're having, like they rely on authority to try to influence people, and that's only one element of influence.

They get kind of shirty with the people below them, below them, they're different people when they manage up versus managing down.

All that stuff, you really need to be congruent.

So when I think about creating your presence, it's really based on three things.

It's core, who you are at the center, who you are as a person, getting really familiar with that.

Because I think who you are at four is who you are at a hundred and four.

At the center, you don't change, but your layers will change.

You'll grow into things, you'll grow out of things, but who you are is really key to finding what you want to do in life.

So core is really important.

Then you need to be congruent.

So people, when they meet you and see you and speak to you, they need to know that whatever's on the inside is matched by whatever's on the outside.

I like it a little bit too, like being in an iPod or a stereo.

You can turn the volume up, and you can turn the volume down, but it's still the same piece of equipment.

So who you are in any given situation is who you are.

And people know who you are.

You're getting real.

You're real with them.

And it makes sense.

Like, for example, if you want to be in finance, which has certain rules about the way you show up to look like a banker, if you show up looking like a reiki practitioner with like flowing jewels and scars and things like that, some people are going to go like, well, I don't believe you're a very good banker.

Yeah, they're not going to buy that.

Yeah, you don't want people trying to figure you out that much.

I mean, there are some people, I have had clients in the past who like that.

They like being mysterious.

They like not making sense.

They want people to have to work to get to know them.

And that's fine.

That's a choice.

So the next piece of what I think the top three are, so core congruence.

And the third one is choice.

I used to say control because there are things you can control.

You can control the way you appear.

You can control the way you speak.

You can control what you believe.

You can control your thoughts.

But I actually think it's choice.

So you, knowing this information, can choose what to deploy when.

So if I'm going into a corporate networking function, for example, I'm more likely going to wear one of my suited pieces than it would be to wear something more casual.

Because I just know that visually someone's going to see me, and if I say to them, I'm an executive coach, they'll be like, yeah, you look like an executive presence coach, or you look like who you are.

Right?

Because the environment is saying we are having the kind of presence coaches in this space.

Yeah, it's interesting for me, because I struggle a little bit with people fitting into a box.

I always have.

And so I'm working with myself and working with clients to manage this transition from this is how it is, this is how we want it to be, how are we going to get there, but we can't get there if we don't have voices at the table that are trying to change the game.

And so that's my jam is trying to get people in who are humanizing, looking for different kinds of leadership and changing the game.

And I'm still going to play with wearing the fantastic suit, or I'm going to carry a designer bag or something if I'm in a place where that is important to people that are going to see me.

I'm not opposed to designer bags, but I'd rather go for function myself.

So that is the image, the look.

What about the inner, the soft skills personality?

I think one of the most important skills that anyone who wants to be a leader needs to develop internally is emotional regulation and emotional sensitivity, to not be triggered by things.

We all get triggered by stuff all the time, unless you're totally numbing your feelings, which lots of people do.

But if you're triggered by something, you need to be able to know, recognize, oh, I'm being triggered right now.

This has to do with something in my past.

There's stuff in the past that can affect how you are now.

My reaction is really strong or my reaction is appropriate.

Now what do I want to do?

And then act after that, like shortening the gap between the inciting incident, the trigger, and your response to it.

Following those three steps faster and faster is a great metric to follow.

Because sometimes you can get triggered by something, and then it takes a long time, or you react instantly, and then you go back and you're like, oh, I shouldn't have done that, right?

So this emotional regulation is hugely important.

Another really important thing to think about for people is to think about yourself as part of a system, because our whole world is systems based.

The entire planet is systems based.

Right.

So when people go too far to the individualistic, what's in it for me, and are always thinking from that agenda of what's in it for me, and not thinking about, oh, I can get my needs met and other people can get their needs met.

We're not living in a zero sum either or world.

We're living in an and world.

A win-win situation type of world.

Right, where it's like, I can express my needs, you can express your needs, and then we find out how to work those needs between us.

And that works in marriages, in work relationships, it works in friendships, it works in parent-child relationships.

We're all human beings, we all have needs, we all have feelings, we all have thoughts.

We're the same.

So the more that we can understand that for ourselves as leaders, here's typically what I think, here's what I typically do in a situation, here are the things that are going to trigger me, here's the places where I'm going to get emotional or flustered.

So I need to practice calming myself down, regulating myself so I can think clearly and act with integrity in any situation.

Oh, you know what else is really great for leaders?

Cultural sensitivity.

That's huge.

So many organizations are global now.

Yeah, right.

A lot of the things that people coach on in the North American cultural context, for example, probably your learners might know this already, but the idea of like eye contact, for example.

So in North American culture, it is polite to make eye contact with someone when you're talking to them because that signifies that you're listening.

In other cultures, it is incredibly rude to make eye contact with somebody, particularly if they have more authority than you do, right?

So there's a cultural sensitivity, and I think it's a cultural curiosity as well.

Like when someone comes, everybody's behavior makes sense to them.

On some level, everyone's behavior makes sense to them.

So if you're seeing someone's behavior that doesn't make sense to you and you think, well, that's crazy, think about the fact that their behavior makes sense to them.

So what is the most generous interpretation you could extend about why they might be behaving that way?

And then that opens the door for you to be able to work with them and get to a solution.

But if you don't have that curiosity, that cultural curiosity, if you don't have your emotional regulation handled, it's going to be really hard for you to get along in the world, and you're going to end up getting in your own way.

And I've seen that happen, where people just have this single-minded, individualistic what's in it for me.

They don't have any emotional regulation.

They don't have awareness of others.

They don't have any sensitivity, and they fail in today's society.

And it's sad, because they don't have to.

That is so true.

I spent the last decade teaching English in South Korea.

The cultural differences, especially if somebody is senior, like you said, first of all, we came there, and you think you're going to shake hands.

No, they bow.

And when somebody is senior, you don't look at them the way you look someone in the Western world in the eye.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Secondly, you don't challenge your senior.

Maybe it's changing now.

I don't know.

But you don't challenge your senior in the sense that if they say this is how it's going to be done, you don't come with a, in America, this is how we do it.

Because those teachers who came with that attitude, they didn't finish their 12-month contract.

Oh, no, not at all.

You know what I mean?

Because you can't expect to do things in South Korea the way they are done in America just so you are comfortable.

That's just not how that works.

That's right.

You know what?

That's a beautiful lead-in to the other thing that I didn't say earlier.

But I really think a key skill for a leader, or really anybody, is a willingness to be uncomfortable.

You have to be willing to sit in the discomfort of something, of you being wrong about something, of you not understanding something.

You have to be willing to be uncomfortable.

I think about travel, for example.

Our conference for AICI, which is the Association of Image Consultants International, our conference was in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

Beautiful place.

We went there to an all-inclusive resort.

Literally, I think all-inclusive resorts are like RV traveling, whereas your home is always with you and you're always comfortable.

You want to travel, but you don't really want to travel.

You want to travel, but you want to feel like you're at home.

And I think that was the experience.

Like, I get it.

It's very appealing to lay on the beach for a week and not have to think about anything.

But I think if you really want to make a change, and you want to be a leader, and you want to show up in your organization, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable and be able to say, I was wrong.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, thank you for telling me that.

Thank you for sharing that with me.

Thank you for educating me.

I really appreciate it, because you're not going to have all the perspectives all the time.

You only have one perspective, and it's limited by where you grew up, your culture, all the different things, your geography.

It's different.

And we always emphasize that leaders are not expected to know everything.

And it doesn't mean that not knowing everything means they're going to lose respect of their team, because I think that's where the fear is, of appearing as if you have all the answers so that you seem like you not only deserve to be in the position, but that your team must look at you a certain way.

The mask that you talked about earlier.

Yes.

Yeah.

Often people will put on a mask to pretend that they have it all under control, like they're building the walls.

They kind of armor up and have this corporate mask on.

And then behind the scenes, they might be a really different person.

And that's just fake.

Like people can spot fake.

They might not be completely aware of what's happening when they get someone who's a bit fake, but they'll know that there's something wrong.

There's that little bit of a radar.

It'll be like, something's not quite right here.

And I think leaders who rely on masking are really going to be in trouble as the workplace is changing.

They're going to be in so much trouble because you can't live like that.

It's exhausting, exhausting.

And the reliance, as I said earlier, on authority to get what you want done, a reliance on hierarchy, that's also not going to work for much longer.

It's definitely changing.

And then do you have any last words of wisdom for professionals who are seeking to be in leadership positions on how they can start working towards that professional presence?

Well, the first piece is to get to know yourself really, really well.

So do all the personality tests, go out and find out what you like.

If you need some help coaching, find a coach to help you do that.

Because all a coach is is an accelerant.

That's it.

So if you want to get there faster, a coach is the way to do that.

So really get to know yourself very, very well.

And really find out what environment you're going to fit in.

Because, for example, I am not great in a siloed environment.

So in a professional services firm where there's lots of rules, I'm bad at that.

I want to talk to everybody.

And I want to find out what all the stuff is going on.

And that's not my position.

And I shouldn't be doing that in the position that I'm in, right?

So get to know yourself really, really well.

And get to know the environments that work really well for you.

And talk to people who are in those leadership roles.

So for example, I generally work director level and higher to get people into those senior positions.

And my directors, I always say, look, you want to be a VP, get some relationships with VPs.

Start talking, say, hey, what was the transition like for you from director to VP?

Because it's a very different mindset.

Director is still pretty task-oriented as a role, whereas VP is more thought-oriented.

You're doing different things.

More strategic, yeah.

More strategic, that's right.

And it's okay that people aspire to be leaders.

It's also okay for people to find a level that really works for them and stay there.

So I talked to a client who is a senior associate in a law firm, and she loves the work.

She loves being a senior associate.

It's enough responsibility, but not too much.

The hours are good for her family.

She really enjoys digging in and helping the lead lawyer do their job.

She really loves it and has really had to work hard to resist the pressure to become a partner.

She doesn't want to do that, right?

So that's that piece about getting to know yourself that's really, really important.

And then start thinking about the environment and start thinking about how you can match who you are and the environments that you like to what it is you want to do.

And you'll be a lot more satisfied with your work.

So it all begins with self-awareness.

100%.

Sorry, get some therapy.

In the wise words of Katherine Lazaruk, the professional presence expert.

Thank you so much for being here today.

I enjoyed talking to you.

This has been fun.

You're so welcome.

I enjoyed chatting with you too.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

And before you go, where can we find you online so that we know where to find you?

You can connect with me directly at my website, which is lzrkconsulting.com, if you want to connect with me directly.

If you want to follow me on social, I'm on Instagram at Katherine Lazaruk, and I'm on LinkedIn as well.

So there's a number of different ways to get to me.

And if you want to get on the pre-order list for my book, then go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, and that's where all the information will be.

lzrkconsulting.com.

Katherine Lazaruk, thank you very much for being here today.

It's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

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