Effective leadership through the power of influence

Effective leadership through the power of influence with Kelly Dozois

Constructive influence, gender bias, and storytelling

I've got a great interview for you. It's all about influence and the power of storytelling. I'm interviewing my friend, Kelly Dozois. She is an absolute expert on the topic of influence as well as storytelling. The gender bias that exists out there in the workplace. For many years, she's been exploring the topic of how to communicate ideas in a way that leads others to support them. She has trained thousands of leaders on the skills to do this through her Influence Inside solution, which is one of the solutions that we offer at Advantage Performance Group. Kelly has continued to be fascinated by the topic, looking for ongoing opportunities to learn and share insights, tips, and strategies. She's been digging into the topics of gender bias and storytelling. We cover both of those topics as well as the overall subject of influence and why it's important in the corporate workspace in this interview.

I want to let you know that Kelly is one of our thought partners in our network at Advantage Performance Group, our sponsor company. Her program, Influence Inside, is something that I offer to my clients. After reading this, if you are interested in experiencing and working with Kelly to either implement the Influence Inside program or something more on storytelling or gender bias, all of her programs are highly valuable and popular. Reach out to me. Send me an email at AStorch@AdvantagePerformance.com or head on over to our sponsor website at AdvantagePerformance.com. Head over to Solutions. You can take a look at Influence Inside under Leadership. You can go to Free Resources and webinars, to see the webinar that Kelly did for us on influence through gender bias in the workplace. There are lots of free resources for you if you go to AdvantagePerformance.com. Without any further ado, here is my interview with Kelly Dozois on the power of influence.

---

I am with my friend, Kelly Dozois, who is an expert on influence, leadership, and storytelling. I'm excited to have her share some of that expertise with everyone. Kelly, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Andy.

It’s great to have you on. We've had the pleasure of working together over the last couple of years. I've gotten to know you and seen some of your work, especially in the areas of influence and leadership. We were together at a conference in Austin in March of 2020, right before we were told we were not allowed to go anywhere ever again. At least, not for a while. You showed us this new solution you have on storytelling, which is fantastic. I'm excited to dig into that stuff. We should start with a little bit of an intro of who you are and what you do.

Who am I? That’s a good question to be asking these days. Who are we? Where are we? What the heck is going on? First of all, I identify as a woman. I am a mother of two. I am a highly-educated female professional that's been in the work environment for a number of years. I got interested in the topic of influence around the year 2000 when I felt like I was failing in a job. I got intrigued by this question why. It was a job that I was technically skilled to do. I had the capabilities. I realized quickly that my challenge wasn't about my technical skill but about my ability. I was a young female professional, at the time, working with a group of predominantly men, for the most part. I found that it was more about my ability to get people to hear me and the ideas that I had to share and to take those seriously.

I got intrigued by influence then. I saw it as the journey of my development. I got passionate about it when I started my own business. I realized, after having worked on it with a lot of people who are truly experts in this topic of influence, that there are ways we can all get better at it. There are things that we can all do. It's a trainable and learnable skillset. It's not something that we're innately born with. That's what I've spent the bulk doing, leadership development around influence, and how you can be more influential with the people that you're trying to get to follow you and how you can do that in different contexts. That's a little bit about me. I've worked inside big companies and I've had my consulting firm for a while. I've had the enormous benefit of working with amazing companies globally. I get a lot of joy out of that. That's what I do.

That's awesome. I love that you started with who you are as a person, a woman, and a mother. I often do that, as well. I start by saying, “I'm a husband. I'm a father. I go with my purpose.” I love the story that you shared about how you got into this. A lot of times, we think of influence as trying to persuade people to do things for us and whatever. When you started out, it sounds like it was more about getting a seat at the table and getting attention in a challenging environment.

Constructive Influence

Completely. We all feel it. Everyone I work with seems to feel it. I know you've experienced a lot with the client work you've done. There are many people with innovative, brilliant ideas. We are not for lack of ideas. What we struggle with is how to get those ideas heard and operationalized. If you look at all the work going on around innovation, it's all about this at the heart of it. I believe this leadership is influence. Innovation is about influence. Change is about influence. You won't have any of that unless there's a core capability of influence. To me, it's a ubiquitous skill set that goes across so much. That's part of what makes me excited about it as a topic. If we get better at it, we can create some great change that's good for the whole. When we talk about influence, it's constructive influence.

I was going to ask you what your definition of influence is. As you say, constructive influence is different from when you're trying to persuade me with people for the wrong reasons. I remember we talked about that when we were going through your program.

[bctt tweet="Leadership, innovation, and change is about influence." via="no"]

What I've learned for myself and when I work with people, the biggest barrier that sometimes comes up is the word influence can trigger concepts like manipulation. The challenge is the same psychological principles that underpin constructive influence get used in manipulative ways. We define influence as the ability to present an idea that moves people in a direction. Your ability to present thoughts and ideas in a way that draws people toward you and toward the idea, that's what influence is. Constructive influence means that the idea is for the betterment of the whole. It's not self-serving, not just to get what you want. If that, in fact, is the goal, then that's not what we call constructive influence. We don't spend time on that. That's not the goal at all. That is, in general, how I look at it and how I work with people on it. Check the reason why you're trying to influence first and then, go forth.

You talk about influence being important in leadership, innovation, and all these different things for leaders, executives, and companies who are, essentially, trying to get things done through people. It seems obvious but why is influence important? Why should they be paying more attention to how influential they are or their ability to influence?

If you are working in a company and you didn't trust the person, find them to be competent, and believe they could take you in the direction, would you follow?

Probably not. I've been in that situation.

All we have to do is ask people what they need to be willing to follow someone. What do they need to be willing to be inspired to move in a direction? It will always be that there's somebody in charge that makes them feel that way and feel valued. One of the first researchers I worked with on this topic, which I also love as a human being, is Professor Jay Conger. He's at Claremont McKenna. He wrote a book years ago called Winning ‘Em Over: A New Model for Management in the Age of Persuasion. It's all about that time period where it was the beginning of away from command and control into more of a time when people had a choice. It wasn't just about telling them what to do. I always go back to him and the work that he did for that book as a great resource if people are ever wondering why you have to win people over versus telling them what to do. That's a good one to read.

Many people out there think whether it's as big as a company strategy or as micro as a simple project or task, that I need to tell people what to do. They're going to do it without wasting much time explaining why it's important to them or why they should care. When you sit back and think about it, “I don't want to do that stuff without being connected to the reason.” For many managers out there, that's the way they're operating.

I'd even add something to what you said. We teach influence and the four C's. One of them is the common ground. Building common ground with someone isn't about telling them. It's about asking, engaging, and involving. When you look at stories of leaders that are doing a great job on that or anyone for that matter, they always start with questions. They start by tapping into what's going on in employees’ minds. If you look at stories that happened with the pandemic situation, the CEOs were asking themselves, “What do my employees need? What do they want? How can I build that common ground with them?” Good influencers never start with “my idea.” They always start with, “What are the needs, wants, and desires of my stakeholder group? How can I connect my idea to what they need so that it's a win-win?”

I've been studying this and talking to people about this. It's great at all times, but especially during a crisis, to lead with empathy. “What do my people need? What's going on with them?” It’s leading with curiosity, asking questions, getting to know people on what's going on, thinking about what they might be going through instead of saying, “Get back to work.”

It’s focusing on the human being versus the task at hand. I've been talking to clients that are working virtually about the techniques and things that can be used to connect and influence people to want to get engaged on a topic. Even simple exercises help us connect in an empathetic human way. I’ll give you an example of a simple exercise. I'm going to give you an inanimate object. I want you to share with me the first memory or thing that comes to mind when I give you this inanimate object. Your inanimate object is a sailboat.

When I think of a sailboat, I think of my trip to Pennsylvania in 2019 when I went to visit my uncle up in the Philadelphia area. I was visiting for a couple of days. He took me sailing on a sailboat out on the huge lake and we had a great time.

The Power Of Influence: There are so many people with innovative and brilliant ideas. What we struggle with is how to get those ideas heard and operationalized.

Right there alone, in twenty seconds or less, I now have an understanding of you that I didn't have twenty seconds ago. What's interesting about this is that we talked about, in influence, your ability to speak in visual form, tell stories, and engage. I predict that if people are listening to you, their ears will pick up when you were talking about sailing with your uncle on a boat. That ability to see each other as human beings and connect with each other, especially in visual storytelling, is a simple way. You could build that into any virtual meeting. Go around and do the story of our inanimate objects. You’ll learn something new about the person.

I hadn't heard of that before. It's a cool exercise. You're saying to start the meeting with this exercise of picking an inanimate object, going around everybody, and sharing their first memory of that. The goal of that is for us to get to know each other better.

The way it's structured is you start one person, like you telling the sailboat story, and then you end your story with an inanimate object. You pass that inanimate object to the next person. You hear a series of stories based on different inanimate objects as you go around the group. One, it's dynamic because it engages people. You have to pay attention. You can't check out. Two, it's visual. People are immediately compelled to want to listen. Three, it's personal. There's nothing more powerful that builds trust than when we get to know the human being as a person. I've had people say, “I've worked with you for fifteen years and I never knew anything about you in that regard.” Anything that can connect emotionally, that's one of the four C’s of influences, is a good thing. There are ways in this virtual environment that doesn't take a lot of time. It takes a little bit of creative thought around, “How am I going to keep people connected and build that feeling of trust even when we do not see each other face-to-face?”

Let me get back to you. I’m going with the first inanimate object that comes into my head for some reason, which is a pickup truck.

What comes to mind for me is I learned how to drive on a Ford pickup truck. I distinctly remember when my father was teaching me. I was backing out of our driveway, hitting the mailbox on the way out of the driveway, and then stalling on a hill once because it was a stick shift. I was sitting there in tears, trying to figure out how to get the truck up the hill. I have vivid, both lovely and painful memories of pickup trucks.

There were not any pickup trucks in my family but my mom required that I learn how to drive a stick shift before I could get my driver's license. I had many of those painful and challenging moments but I’m grateful that they did that. I want to go back to the beginning of your story. You talked about part of this coming from being a woman in an environment surrounded by men. You did a webinar for us on gender bias. I know you've studied this a lot. This topic of influence, how does it differ for men and women? Should they or do they think about it differently or use it differently?

Influence And Gender Bias

It's a great question. I got interested in the slant of gender bias when I've been doing the Influence Inside program for a lot of years in companies. All of a sudden, I had a lot of questions popping up around how influence is different for women versus men. I started to dive into that and do a lot of research. I was shocked by what I found. I put myself through college. I worked hard. I had job opportunities. We were living in a meritocracy. Even though I had encountered gender bias at different points, I had chosen to deny or ignore it along the way. When I started to dive into this topic, I realized that it is a real fact. True gender equality globally is 257 years away. They're estimating that equal levels of men and women in leadership positions are at least 99 years away. It’s not in my lifetime that this is going to happen in North America. There are many other factors that play into it. That's related to gender bias as a focus.

What I got interested in is what our choices are. It's not if we're going to encounter gender bias. It's what do we choose to do when we encounter it. I'm a behavioral scientist by training. My belief is that it's one conversation, one person at a time. It's not just a female issue. We have to, as every gender in our society, build the skills to influence change around this. My focus on it is, “When you see it, what do you say?” When I did the session for you and Bennett at the great conference you put on, there were as many men in the session going, “What is it that we need to say and do when we see it?” Implicit bias, we don't see it in ourselves. That's why it's implicit.

Other people will see it. Other people will hear us say things that get interpreted and create a perception of someone. They have an opportunity to influence and help the person notice it or do different strategies. My focus is on what you do when you see it. How do you influence to change one person, one conversation at a time? It's something I'm passionate about. I'm doing a ton of development around it. I have two daughters who are both starting to emerge into the professional work world. Anything we can do to shrink that 257 and 99 years down is a good thing.

I agree completely as the father of a daughter myself. Let's shrink that down even more. Keep spreading the word. You mentioned helping people take some action on that. I'm glad you mentioned the Talent Development Think Tank. I forgot to mention that you led a session at our conference in January 2020. I did not get a chance to see it because I was running around as a conference host but I heard nothing but amazing things. It was one of the best, if not the best, session at the conference. Everybody was raving about it. We're excited to be having you come back to our next Talent Development Think Tank in January 2021.

[bctt tweet="True gender equality is 257 years away. We have to build the skills to influence change around this." via="no"]

We’re talking about this idea of behavior change and taking action. I know you're good friends with Brent Snow, who has a program called The Inclusive Leader on this subject. One of the things I've heard him say a couple of times, which resonated with me, is that a lot of times we do this training or whatever it is on gender bias or unconscious bias. All we're doing is making people aware that you have a bias but then we feel bad about it. What do you do about it because, whether we want to or not, we all have an implicit bias?

If we have a brain, we have a bias. Nobody is immune, that's for sure.

If we recognize any of the biases that might exist, what's the best thing for us to start doing to make a difference in the world?

Those are the questions and the path that I'm on. I’ve worked with a lot of thinking around this. Sometimes, there’s a judgment that people can pass around the choice we make and how we deal with, in particular, gender bias or gender stereotyping. My belief is that we all have to make choices based on our scenario and situation. It’s our influence versus status quo meaning. I can remember times in my career where being in denial about gender bias was the right thing to do or accepting it. We were noticing it, seeing it, and accepting it. There are times when you might choose a need to do that for various reasons. You'll often hear stories, especially about women in the work environment, where they have to keep their job. They don't want to risk losing their job. There's a lot of basic human security needs attached to whatever's going on.

There are opportunities where we have to influence change. When we influence change, we have it on a continuum. Ideally, you're focused on taking an empathetic approach. We recognize that we're all beautifully flawed human beings that aren't perfect, that have a lot of bias attached to us as it relates to gender. An empathetic response would be applying the four C's, the ability to know the person. Do you have enough trust with them to have a conversation and help them see what they might be saying and how that might be impacting, in a negative way, the perception of another person? You can apply that approach in an empathetic way.

The other choice and influence, by the way, that still is an important piece is what we call engage. Engage means to confront it. That's where you'll see a lot of big disruptive change happen. There are articles that are written about companies where they have to pay attention to some of the gender bias going on, otherwise, their brand will erode enormously in the marketplace. My belief is all of those responses are appropriate, given different situations. Each of us has to make a choice. What we focus on is that when you do have an opportunity to influence, have a response that can help people in an empathetic way, and see what's going on. How do you do that? Looking at all the mechanisms of everything, humor is a great way to help people see the implicit bias that they don't see. I don't know if that answers your question but I can go on and ramble for a while.

I'm sure you studied this a lot. Can you give me an example of the humor you mentioned?

I wish I could. This is part of what I'm trying to gather as scenarios. For anybody reading, let me know if you have great ideas on how to take a humorous response. I'm not great at it but I know it's effective. An example might be if we were in a meeting together, Andy. I feel like we know each other well enough. Let’s say you made a comment that perhaps I noticed had created not a positive perception about a woman in the room. I might be able to nudge you and make a joke or make light of it.

I'll give you another example. I saw this happen and thought it was smart. I was facilitating a session and I broke the class up into small groups like we usually do when we're in person. I noticed that in one small group, there are three men. There's a fourth person that's going to be joining the group that's a female. As the three men join together, I see them all give each other high fives. As the woman approaches the group, I notice that nobody gives her a high five. At that moment, there's a choice. She had a choice. She could either ignore it or go forth or she could say something. What she did, in a humorous way, was go, “Where's my high five?” That is an example, in my mind. People can accept humor much easier than they can accept a serious comment about their behavior.

Saying, “You guys are jerks for not high-fiving me,” can trigger everything down. If you make a joke about it, you could raise awareness and they go, “We forgot,” or whatever.

The Power Of Influence: Good influencers never start with their own idea. They always start with the needs of their stakeholder group and then connect their idea to what they need.

They can say, “Let me give you a high five.” The reality of how the world works is we have our in-groups and our out-groups. That's the way it is. We like people who are like us. We like people who believe what we believe. That is what we call similarity bias. It's real. When you're influencing, you can choose how you become a part of that in-group while maintaining who you are as a person and recognize that nobody's perfect. Everybody's got bias. How do you play within that reality? There are a lot of different choices that we can make.

You reminded me of something. As you said, we all have a bias. I try to be as open-minded and avoid or be aware of these things but we still do things all the time. There’s one thing that I had in my head when we were at the Talent Development Think Tank. I was introducing speakers and I heard someone else say something about this. I think it was another conference. Someone got called out because as a man, when introducing speakers and other men came up, would shake their hands. When a woman came up, they’d give them a hug. That's already a difference.

There's a whole thing in gender agentive versus soft behavior. The shaking of the hand is the position of power and strength. The hug is softer and weaker. I don't know if you're aware but probably one of the best articles I've read on this is the work Marc Benioff did at Salesforce around this. I think he wrote a book. I haven't read the book but there was a good article. It was all about comp, equality, which I thought was commendable. It took them three years to continue to go back. Every time they said it, they had to continue to reevaluate it because the bias was strong. That's why women still get paid 86% of every $1 a man gets paid. It's real. One of the examples he gave was that he realized he was demonstrating behaviors that were not supportive of treating every employee equally. That was the example. When he shared the stage and asked for presenters to come up, he'd shake the man's hand and hug the female presenter. That was one of the examples he gave.

I had that in the back of my head when we were at Think Tank.

Because of COVID, we're all going to do fist-bumping.

I’m easily converted to that because I'm a hugger. I'm not afraid to hug a man so I hug everybody, except for Josh Bersin. I didn't know him well enough to know if I could hug him. I would now. We’ve got a question on LinkedIn from our friend, Bennett Phillips, who said, “How do you influence someone on a radical idea, one that challenges convention?”

Build critical mass. That's the first thing that comes to mind is. When we work with people on influence, we always ask them, “Who's the key stakeholder?” If you get them bought in, they'll do your influence work for you. What I learned painfully early on is that it's not about yourself. It's not about your ability to be great at influence with everyone because that's not going to happen. There are some people that are able to influence highly effectively and there are others who will never influence for various reasons. How do you build critical mass? How do you start with identifying the rock? When you drop that rock in the smooth pond, it creates that kinetic energy. That kinetic influence energy is what starts to create people to follow. Find your key stakeholder or key rock and get them bought in. Let them do influence work for you.

That makes sense. You’ve got to get people on board to help you influence. We’ve got one other comment on LinkedIn from a woman named Anna Ray Quarter who says, “Two amazing folks right there.” Thank you, Anna Ray, for joining us, author and expert on books and writing.

I still need to write that book.

Influence And Storytelling

I was going to ask you about that. Speaking of books, I want to pivot to the last topic, which is storytelling. You've been doing a lot of work on this. How do we use influence and storytelling to get things done?

[bctt tweet="We all have a story to tell. Start telling yours and it will draw people in." via="no"]

In the influence approach of four C’s, being compelling is one of the C's. If you look at all the influencers out there that have been highly effective, they have had ways of speaking to their audiences in compelling ways. Storytelling is one of those tools. Similarly to influencing within realities of gender bias, we did a deep dive into influencing with a story. Storytelling is a great skill. It's a skill we can all learn. I always harken back to I've never felt like a natural storyteller. Some people grow up and they can tell stories easily. I’ve had to work at it. One of the stories I remember that inspired me to keep at it was having the chance to partner with Apple for years. I was able to work in the organization when Steve Jobs was still alive. He was amazing. He’s probably one of the most amazing CEOs that stories, visual speak, and speaking in ways that compelled worldwide audiences to buy into their products and services.

When I was working there and he was still alive, I asked the CFO, “Is he naturally good at this? Does he have to work at it?” I will never forget him laughing at me and saying, “You've got to be kidding. He does nothing for two weeks prior to a Macworld presentation than stand on the stage, rehearse, and recite every word, gesture, and movement.” Even though he showed up casual in the black turtleneck and jeans, which was his trademark outfit, there was nothing casual about his preparation. I got to see him a couple of times in internal comms meetings where he wasn't quite as good or polished. I realized that this is a skill that if we learn the recipe and practice, we can all get good at it. That's what we focus on in influencing with a story, giving people a simple framework. It's not complex. It's practicing and starting to get confident in our abilities that we all have to tell a story.

Humans have been transferring information and influencing people through a story for hundreds of generations, thousands of years.

We all have a story to tell. We all have multiple stories to tell. Sometimes, when we work with people, the hesitation in using stories stems from thoughts like, “Nobody cares. Nobody's going to want to listen.” The reality is that when someone starts to say, “Once upon a time,” it immediately draws us in. We get attention. I'll give you the quick science behind it because it's interesting. There's a neurological and chemical response that happens when we hear a story that is different than when we hear facts. There's a release of oxytocin, which is the happy hormone, the cuddle hormone. It gets us connected in a way that data in facts doesn't. Neurologically, we have to pay more attention when we hear a story. We're activating more parts of the brain, which is keeping people's attention. It's got a scientific basis for why it's powerful. Not just everybody's telling the story now, but it is the reason it works.

You can feel it. When you started telling me the story of learning to drive on your dad's pickup truck, I could feel like that was one of the most powerful parts of our conversation. It was just a story about driving a pickup truck but it pulled me in, as I'm sure it did other readers as well. That's why stories are important. Even in sales, storytelling is important. That's why Steve Jobs spent weeks practicing doing nothing else. It made the company billions of dollars.

The key with it is it is a skill that you want to hone and practice. There are things that you do that could make your story not come off. There are pitfalls you want to avoid. There's a structure you want to learn and there's practice.

For people reading, I want them to walk away with some value. What's 1 or 2 tips for me and others who might want to get better at storytelling?

The hero's journey in three acts is a simple structure. It’s also called a story spine. It goes, “Once upon a time this was happening,” life as it was. This inciting incident occurred that set you on a path that was different from what you were. That takes you into act two, where all your struggles and challenges are. You always want to build into your story what those challenges are. The more you can be transparent with how you were challenged, it empathetically draws the audience in. Everybody can relate to feeling challenges and struggles. At some point, there's the pinnacle climactic moment that happens that then sets you into the new state of noir, which is your act three. There's so much out there but I think a simple construct is definitely the hero's journey in three acts. If you start to think about how you can structure a story using that and practice it, we can all get good at it.

I was thinking about the classic structure of a story, the hero's journey. I learned this a while back, going through a program like this and then reinforced when I went through some of yours. We need not search far to find examples of this. Every great movie that you've ever seen follows a classic formula. I always think of Star Wars: A New Hope from 1978, down on the planet of Tatooine with Luke Skywalker, a lonely farm boy. He finds a droid that plays this video from Princess Leia. His aunt and uncle die and he goes off on this adventure.

He has to rescue Princess Leia. That's the big journey.

The Power Of Influence: All effective influencers have ways of speaking to their audiences in compelling ways. Storytelling is one of those ways.

They destroy the Death Star and save the galaxy. It comes to this climactic moment at the end, which the Jedi do and then they go off celebrating into the sunset.

You see it in every movie that's character-based. You can see the hero's journey and react. There are such great examples everywhere. There was this podcast I was listening to where there's this guy who's good at storytelling. The Moth is a good podcast if you want to hear people create stories. His point, which I thought was valid, is that he looks around at moments in his day that could be story moments and journals them. I thought, “That's a cool practice.” It helps us realize that sometimes we think these activities or things going on are boring when in reality, they're the basis of a good story. That’s something to think about.

Everything can be a story. The other things I took away from what the story you're telling about storytelling is one, go and grab some resources. Follow the classic story arc, the situation challenge, and climactic moment. Two, it's helpful to practice. The more we can practice storytelling, presenting, influencing, or whatever it may be, like anything else, the better we're going to get.

Completely because there's a difference. This is my story. I can tell a story that's, what I call, bland. I can work on that story and it starts to come alive. What makes a story come alive is putting in the detail of it. What did it smell like? What did it feel like? What were the details going on? That's what draws people in to be able to see themselves in the story and to be able to connect with what's going on emotionally. That ability to build in that detail comes with practicing it, fine-tuning it, and taking some effort.

We've got to wrap things up, Kelly. For anybody reading who's interested in this topic of gender bias, I mentioned that you did a webinar for us. That replay is up on our sponsor website at AdvantagePerformance.com. It's under Free Resources, Webinars. It might even be on the homepage. We do some together on influence. If anybody's interested in bringing the influence program to their organization, you can reach out to me directly or go to AdvantagePerformance.com. Under Leadership, there's some information about the Influence Inside program. Here’s my last question for you, Kelly. It’s specifically, for people who are working in talent development in companies that are looking for ways to either grow their influence, grow their career, or be more successful, what's one more piece of advice that you would give?

Are you talking about people in the talent development world in companies trying to build their influence capabilities?

Yeah, they're trying to improve their career. That’s your specialty.

That was me. When I worked in a multibillion-dollar company, I was in human resource development. That was the question I was asking. The thing I would recognize is that, especially if you're out there career-wise, we make a perception of someone within the first four minutes of interacting. There are many studies. We're making a perception of their competence, trustworthiness, socioeconomic level, and beliefs. We make up a story of someone within the first four minutes of interacting. I'm a big believer in being aware. Don't deny that that's happening. Be aware of it. Think about the perception you are trying to create in the eyes of the person that you are talking to related to whatever the career is you're exploring, especially if it's a new relationship. I think a lot about that. Don't underestimate the power of first impressions.

It's important. In the book that I've been writing, I talk about the importance of building a professional brand or a personal brand. Everybody has this brand, which is the perception people have of you. Whether you like it or not, it's there. Their perception is their reality. You can play the victim all day and say, “They think this or that, and it's not true.” It is true for them. The more you can do to influence people's perception of you, the more control you have over your brand. The more visibility you get, the more successful you can be in achieving whatever the career goals are that you have. Kelly, this has been fantastic. I'm glad I had you on. I'm looking forward to chatting more and doing some more work with you. Thank you for coming on the show.

Thanks for the time, Andy.

Take care.

Bye.

• Progress Coaching
• The Sales Difference
• The Progress Principle
• The Expertise Economy
• Kelly Palmer – Previous Episode
• TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com
• ProgressCoachingLeader.com
• Tim@ProgressCoachingLeader.com
• LinkedIn – Tim Hagen
• LinkedIn – Andy Storch
• iTunes – The Talent Develop Hot Seat Podcast
• AdvantagePerformance.com/trends