Welcome to the new manager podcast. I'm your host, Kim nickel. Hello, and welcome. I'm glad you're here, and I hope you're doing well as we get started. I want you to know. I am taking new clients, so if you want to work with me one-on-one, go to my website, or go into the show notes and schedule time to talk with me. So we can get a sense of where you're at, where you want to be and how I can help you to get there. Now, I want to start today.
Also, with a celebration One of my clients has been making incredible progress and specifically. There were three things that she wanted to work on when she reached out to me. Number one, she wanted to become a more confident leader. Number two, she wanted to know how to set boundaries and communicate them clearly. And number three, she wanted to learn how to have a healthy work-life balance and I'm really proud of her for all the work
that she's been doing on these. And she recently shared with me that coaching she said, has already changed my life for the better because of it. I had the tools and confidence to stand up for myself and my co-workers and improve a very toxic and abusive work environment. This change has now allowed me to work on improving my work, life balance and spend time doing things that I loved that.
I had stopped because of work, and I love this because I think it also, Oh, really illustrates how connected, all the parts of our life are, you know, for dealing with a work environment that is really not good for us. Of course, work-life balance is going to suffer. Of course, that might challenge our confidence that might challenge our boundaries. Like, there's so many ways that all of The Elements of Life, all connect, whether that's in your personal life or your work life.
So, I find that If you're wanting to develop your abilities and your skills as a manager, it starts first with recognizing that you are a human. And being a human means, there's going to be some human stuff, like emotions, and beliefs, and fears, and desires, and the stories that you tell yourself about who you are and about how the world works and how all that fits together.
The more you start to understand that and raise your awareness around It the more effectively you can address all of the changes with work and so, you know, whether you are a brand new manager or if you've been managing people for a decade but you've just never paused to reflect on some of these other questions. Like that's why we're all here. Like that's what this podcast is about. And it's interesting to like the client. I was telling you about just a moment ago, she's fairly new in
her career. And has just started managing people like had a big project and just had her first official team that she had to onboard and manage and guide.
But I also have clients who are in more senior positions and are simply now, you know, all of the things that they were able to kind of avoid working on it was like, I don't have to work on the communications part or the confidence part because I can just be a really powerful Powerful work horse and let the work speak for itself, like, at some point. I think we all realize, oh, being a really powerful Workhorse that is not a path to a sustainable enjoyable career,
right? Like, yes, I value being a hard worker, but I am also a strategic thinker and I don't want to spend all of my work life doing one kind of hard work. I actually want to do something different. I want to do more strategic level thinking and planning, and so that then requires that we start to understand. Well, let's talk about confidence. Let's talk about communication skills. Let's talk about how to speak up for yourself and that actually brings us to the main topic I
wanted to address today. Which is speaking up, we talked about this a little bit in the past, in the episode, about advocacy feedback and boundaries because those Those are all different situations or skills that require speaking up. But more recently, I've really been appreciating it. As I've seen my clients begin to find their own authentic confidence, and their own kind of sense of courage.
And purpose, if you're a person who grew up with the thought of speaking up, only causes trouble like the best. To get through. This is to just like, keep your head down. Work hard, don't say anything. Okay. Number one, please have zero guilt or anxiety about that. That is a very legitimate coping
strategy. And depending on the environment that you are in, whether that was your home, or your school, or your town, or whatever, whatever you define that as that skill of being able to decide, I am not going to speak up. That would not be a good choice for me right now. That is legitimate like that is a coping strategy. That is a survival strategy that has served you. Well, but we come to a place where we realize, I want some more options. What if I do want to speak up?
How can I get out of my own way? How can I overcome the fear? The worry? And the things that my clients tell me, it's the fear of, well, how can I speak up? What if I'm wrong? I don't know. That I have perfect information and I don't know if it's worth it to say something until I have all my ducks in a row. So, that's one. The other is, what will people think we'll this somehow reflect badly.
Will people retaliate either, officially or subtly, you know, will there be some kind of bad consequence? Well, something bad happen if I speak up. Sometimes it's simply the fear of Confrontation, if I I speak up, they will be uncomfortable. I will be uncomfortable, it will be awkward. It will be difficult. I just want to avoid that because it feels so terrible. So it becomes really interesting when we start to question, okay?
Like, why are you not speaking up, and what specific situations are, you noticing? This is happening and what is the alternative if you were to speak up and say, Thing, what would be the reason why, what would be the purpose behind it? And one of the ways we can get over, our fear is, when we connect to our sense of purpose, to our sense of why this matters, even though I feel nervous, even though I'm scared,
I might do a wrong. Even though I am worried that they might think something bad about me if I speak up. If we know why it matters this matters so much. It matters more that I speak up. Then I keep my silence in this situation and part of what you develop to through the course of your career, is you begin to develop the skill of discernment. And this goes into both, you know how your judgment comes into play, which is directly related to the way that you're thinking too.
Strategic thinking, how can I best address this? What would be the purpose of speaking up and sometimes actually let me give you a specific example. So a year or two ago, I was working with a company and we had a meeting set up with a vendor, a potential vendor, and the vendor was in education company and they had were affiliated with a big well-known University. And we were considering partnering with them to bring in some of their content to some of the employees.
And one of the things I noticed was there was very little diversity in their teaching faculty and staff that the people who are teaching and in this expert position, they kind of all looked the same and I know that for the company that I was in. We have a very diverse and a
very Global employee base. So one of my concerns was, you know, I don't know how resonant, how effective it will be to have such a, to have a teaching staff and faculty that really doesn't appear to reflect kind of who we are, as a company and the diversity of experience. And, you know, like just the global presence that we had within our employee base. And when we add this meeting with a vendor, I felt a little uncomfortable as I was thinking in my mind.
I kind of want to say something about this. I know that the vendor probably can't change anything because, you know, they're teaching staff is whoever they are they probably won't change it just because I say something about it but what I decided in that moment was I thought, you know, I think this is worth it. It's worth the discomfort even They probably can't change anything.
Because what I want to do is I number one, I want to give a voice to a gap that I see if we're considering hiring them to be of service to our employees. And yet, I'm sensing, there could be a gap between, you know, who our employees are and who the teaching staff is. I want a name that and I also want to be willing to stand as a row. Role model for the other people that were in that meeting to Simply name, the issue raised, the concern, give voice to it.
And not from a place of, you know, feeling like the, the service provider was, you know, not good enough.
But just saying, hey, you know, one thing I'm noticing is this, and I simply have some concerns because of X, Y, and Z, and sometimes, when we speak up, especially when we're doing it on. Half of others, when we understand, you know, the ultimate picture here is I really simply want to stand by the values that we say that, we hold as an organization and I see something, I don't know if other people see it. So I will give a voice to it.
That's an example of speaking up, not because you need other people to change things, but because you simply want to direct some attention, Ian to something of value. And I think this is one of the reasons why, like, it's actually very interesting and it can also sometimes very feel scary.
If you are a bit like an underrepresented person along, any identity, access in your organization and that includes, you know, whether you're a parent or not working with people who are parents, that includes your gender, your race, your ethnic background, Around you know, where if you grew up in the country or in the city if you are multilingual like there's so many different dimensions across which we experience a sense of identity and either connection or sense
of disconnection belonging or questioning if we belong. And what that means though, is that the lens that you look through that is informed by your lived. Perience as a human just because of who you are, you bring value? By the way, you see things, you might see things that somebody else doesn't see at all because that just hasn't been their experience so they don't they don't see it. I'm also just remembering there was this happens, a lot in
advertising. I feel like we hear these stories or an ad comes out and everyone says, they really Put that out there like did they not know that that was like the terrible or not? Realistic. And I'm thinking specifically there, I guess there was an ad in the last. I don't know, maybe the last six months or so I don't even remember what the company was. But it was for some kind of audio equipment like earbuds.
And they had this ad where there was a woman who put on her head set and went running at night in the like in the place where she lived and everyone was saying You must not have Have any women on your campaign team? Because, you know, a woman running alone at night with headphones on like, no way way too dangerous. You need to be aware of your surroundings all the time and it just really highlighted like, oh, right. If they haven't had that experience, it might not have occurred to them.
That that was a thing. So, coming back to this topic of speaking up, remembering that you bring value because of who you are the lived. Once you've had in the world means that you will see things that other people might not see. And, So speaking up can be important simply to give voice to something, you see that other people may not see, and when you give voice to it, then they can see it too. And then we can decide what we want to do with that.
Now, the other thing of course, when you speak up, it actually makes it possible for amazing things to happen to you. Like, When you speak up and you say, well, I really want to get promoted. What is the path towards getting there, or who I really am interested in what's happening on that side of the business. How can I learn more about that side of the business as you speak up?
It makes it easier for other people to know what you're interested in, what your ambition is, what your trajectory is, what you want to be growing towards like what your growth Edge is. It lets people know what you're interested in, which makes it easier for them to line you up with some of those opportunities that you might not know about. So speaking up, you know, makes it easier for wonderful things
to happen for you. Now sometimes you will speak up and nothing will happen and it will feel very frustrating, you'll think, but hey, I spoke up. I said the thing, why is nothing changing? But you know what? You just learned is you learned something. Being more about where you work, you might have had this idea that well you know I don't speak up so you know I guess nothing can change and then when you do speak up, if nothing continues to change.
I think you follow me. Nothing happens, you think? But I spoke up. Why is nothing happening? Well, what has happened is you have gained more courage. You are exercising a new skill and you are learning something about where you work. And then you To ask yourself, how do I feel about that? Do I want to continue to stay or working at this place? Where when I speak up and I, you know, talk about getting a promotion or I talked about, we
say, our values are this. And yet our business practices are that how do those things go together? I really want to understand like if nothing changes. You've now learned something about the environment that you work in that maybe you didn't see clearly before.
And what's amazing is that you start to also, Bring the sense of confidence and the sense of you know, people talk about executive presence, it's kind of a weird topic but the way I've best found to understand it and to explain and teach it.
It's what happens when you feel on the inside of yourself like you're a worthy person with important perspectives and valuable contributions and you're here to take up space, you don't have to take a, you know, like an aggressive amount of space but just you want to show up Your full-size, you're not making yourself smaller because you're feeling small, like, you're just showing up full-sized and you're feeling really comfortable with that and then people say, oh, executive
presence. So that's gonna be a whole other episode, a whole other topic. So here's what I want to start to leave you with when you think about speaking up, there are three things to consider number one. What do you want to say that? Can be literally the Words, what are the words I want to say? How do I, what do I want to say? Like what are the words? What do I want to say? And then number two, it's how you say it, how will I say this?
That means both the emotion that energy, the body language. How do you feel on the inside of yourself? When you say it, do you want to say it just to one person or? Is this something that you want to say that, the All Hands are in a group setting? The, how, how are you going to say it? And then, the third part is, All of your thoughts and feelings about what's going to happen. So, before you say anything, you already have a very active story in your mind about what will happen.
If you say something and very often, we go into a catastrophe. We imagine all of the terrible things that will happen or we go into. Well, nothing will happen. So, we go into Despair. And when we think about the despair, we think about the context. ' we tend to just back away and hold ourselves in silence. So we want to get some clarity about. Well what are all your thoughts about the reaction about what might happen and then we can start to untangle what of those
fears can we plan to address? One of those? Fears are actually not that important and we can also look at what's the benefit or the payoff, what will this enable to happen? Right? Like we just want to explore it a little bit more fully. So when you start speaking up on my gosh, I'll just share to like so many things can happen. You can heal relationships.
One of my clients says, you know, now that I am speaking up, she says I am healing intergenerational trauma in my family line, because I come from a family where the women don't speak up. We just suck it up, we bear it. And, you know, we carry this burden and she said, recently, she just realized I like when I speak up about my boundaries, when I speak up about what I want, when I speak up when
things just don't feel right? She said I am healing intergenerational trauma in my family, it stops with me and it just it was like oh my God. Yes. Like that's what we do when we speak up regardless of what happens on the other side, it also allows you to invite people to connect with you. It invites a greater
collaboration. It in Great invites more trust, it invites more transparency, it really is like opening a door to so much possibility because you're now giving yourself permission to get out of your own way. Take up a bit more space, say something. And then like step into that world. The world were, you are the person who speaks up. So, thank you so much for listening. I am so glad that you're here. Here.
I hope you take something from this podcast, use it in a powerful and compassionate way in your own life and I will talk to you next time. Hey before you go if you like this podcast, please leave a review. Tell me why you listen and what has helped you? Thanks so much. I'll see you next time.