Career Growth Advice from Elizabeth Bachman, Career Development Leader | Career Tips for Women in Career Development

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 48
Featuring Elizabeth Bachman

Episode Title: #48 Career Podcast Featuring Elizabeth Bachman, the go-to person for advanced level training in Speaking, Presentation Skills, Sales and Leadership – Women In Business

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Elizabeth Bachman



Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the To Be Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you. Encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.

Hello there. Today we've got a great show for you. I am thrilled to have Elizabeth Bachman here. Elizabeth is the go-to person for advanced level training in speaking, presentation skills, sales, and leadership. With a lifetime spent perfecting the art of presenting, she helps high-level clients master a message that brings the funding they need, the allies they want, and the recognition they deserve. Elizabeth is the host of Speakers Who Get Results podcast, where she interviews experts on presentation skills, leadership, visibility, and cross-cultural communications. Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining us.

Elizabeth Bachman (Guest): Mary, I'm thrilled. I'm delighted we made this work.

Mary Killelea: I know. We've been working on it right before the holidays and then after, so we're all set for today. Well, let's dive in. Let's hear about your career.

Elizabeth Bachman: Well, as you read in my bio, I am a presentation skills trainer, and I'm really here because I've made all the mistakes. So my mission really is to help get more women's voices out there into the world and to really help women be heard. What I do mostly is I work with high-level women, especially in tech and law, to help them be taken seriously, be heard, become more visible and more valued. And I learned that because I have my own experience with glass ceilings. I started as an actor at the age of five. So basically, I like to think that I've been dedicated to the art of great communication since I first walked on stage at the age of five. And afterwards, I heard my mom say that I was the best goddamn bunny rabbit ever to grace the stage of the Hillside School. And I was hooked. I went from acting to directing to directing opera singers, and then to running an opera company over the course of 30 years. And now what I do is I leverage the skills that I learned in the opera business and in running a company to help women be heard. A lot of it translates. What I discovered was that the skills you need to sell a product or a service or within a company, the skills you need to sell an idea are pretty much the same skills you need to sell a song. And the difference is just vocabulary. So, it was learning the vocabulary and realizing, oh, it's not all that different.

Mary Killelea: So how did you develop strategic empathy through your own experiences?

Elizabeth Bachman: Well, strategic empathy is my copyrighted technique for putting yourself in the shoes of your listeners is how can you empathize with what they're going through? What problem do they have that made them show up? And then hopefully you have the solution to the problem. So you have to address what it is that's bothering people. The pain points, if you will, you come from a marketing background. So, you understand that's basic marketing, telling people how you're going to solve the problem is the key. Doing it strategically on behalf of your career is the part that I have put together that I don't see a lot of other people doing. There are a lot of people who talk about how to be a great presenter. There are a lot of people who talk about how to navigate your career. What I do is combine the two and various other things so that planning your strategy and then using presentation skills to get the results you want can actually get you past that glass ceiling.

Mary Killelea: What I hear you saying, and I found to be true, is that a lot of career women don't have a strategy when it comes to their career. They just kind of progress. And while that's great, and progression is always wonderful, but to be in charge of your own career, driving it, knowing where you want to get to, and having the tools to get there is to me the optimum way to go.

Elizabeth Bachman: The thing is to be proactive about it. What I find, so many women especially, and I was one of them, are much happier sitting back and waiting to be recognized. Waiting to be recognized for the good work you're doing. And that's what happened to me in the opera. I thought, well, if I just did a really good job and was really well known by my peers, that would allow me to, that would get me the job I wanted. And that was when I wanted to run an opera company. I knew that early on. The artists that I worked with kept saying, absolutely, go ahead, you'd be great. Any company you run, I'll be there. What I didn't understand at that point was that I had to market myself to the people who were actually making the decisions. I had to reach out of my comfort zone and ask. And so even though I applied and I was regularly on the short list for the course of about four years, over and over, I would be on the short list. And over and over, I would see the job go to a man. Not always someone who was as qualified as I was.

I didn't figure out until much later that I should have been marketing myself to the board of directors. It was a combination of not knowing the right people. So, the board of directors who actually choose to choose the head of an opera company and the other unconscious bias that I recognized, but I didn't know how to manage in those days, is that when you're worried about money and nonprofits are always worried about money, especially on nonprofit arts, they're always worried about money. When you're worried about money, the tendency is to trust a man before you trust a woman. And that's a very old cultural bias.

Mary Killelea: Definitely an old mindset. So when we talk about that skip level opportunity to get exposure, some corporations embrace that and allow that to happen. But when you have to take it upon yourself, many times women feel like, oh, I have to follow the chain of command. I give it to my boss and then my boss shares it and she tends to look good, or he tends to look good leveraging my work and I don't get the visibility that I want. What are some tips for people in that situation? Either they're too worried to speak up because they don't want to upset their boss, or they just don't know how to navigate that.

Elizabeth Bachman: Well, one of the things I've been working with my clients a lot these days is how do you communicate the value of things not going wrong? How can you be noticed for doing everything right? And what I believe one of the best things is it's called seeding. That's another marketing term that you know, I know, where you drop little bits of an idea. What I encourage people to do is, first of all, track your successes and really do it weekly if you can. Get an accountability partner, make sure there's someone who says, yes, that's an accomplishment, don't take it for granted. So that you track it every week. What are the things you're grateful for? What are the things that went right? What are the things that didn't go right? But you can figure out how to deal with them. Keep a list of that and then communicate that with your the next level up. Because then when it comes around comes time for bonuses, you have a record of the things that you have done.

The other thing you can do is make little 30 second stories to say, remember back in June when we were having this problem and I knew somebody who could fix it and look at this, we're in such a better place now because of that thing or I thought such and so we have a wonderful team and then the team accomplished it. But you've got to drop in the piece about I thought we could do this and sure enough it solved the problem. Another way to think of that is think about horror stories. Keep an eye on the media and when you see something going wrong with another company, you can also say, I'm so glad we have this part under control because oh, those poor people over at widget company X, widget and co, they're having a really hard time. Fortunately, we've solved this. We know how to deal with it and just remind people what might have happened if you had not been there.

Mary Killelea: And that's great advice because I think so many of us when we are good at what we do, we take it for granted because it comes somewhat natural to us. And then when something's not broken, it doesn't get any attention. So, I love the idea and tips there.

Elizabeth Bachman: The other part of this is women, especially when you think about single-focused people and multifocused people, this is a huge part of the work I do is that single-focused people are people who are really there. They've got one target and they work on one thing at a time. It's often men but not always. There are plenty of times when I'm single-focused and the multifocused people are traditionally the “feminine viewpoint” where you can see lots of things happening at once. The problem comes when multifocused people try to talk to single-focused people and tell them five things at once. And the single-focused people really can only do one thing at a time. It's great because that's how you get things done. But it's also a way that single-focused people miss. They miss challenges. They miss problems that the multifocused people will see. How we focus on that and talk about that is a way of collecting your materials, collecting your stories, telling your stories, and then at an appropriate time, you can tell your single-focused manager, your single-focused boss. The other key part is when you're talking about your single-focused boss, the other key part is don't just walk in and say can I talk to you. You make an appointment because with a single-focused person, you are always interrupting. They're doing one thing at a time.

Mary Killelea: What have you learned from 30 years of working in other languages that helps you in your work?

Elizabeth Bachman: Your delivery style, the way you speak, speaking clearly, enunciating is important. And nowadays, we're in a very international business world. So the chances are very good that the people who are listening to you, say you're speaking English, English may be your second or third language. So you have to make sure you're pronouncing things correctly. And for your audience, it may be the second or third language for them. So speaking clearly, and I learned that from 30 years of working with international opera singers and in many countries, how to slow down and speak clearly. Where people get in trouble, male and female, is if they get nervous, they start talking really fast. I think especially if you're doing a presentation, I like to think about it as the equivalent to a magazine article. You're going to have a little blurb at the top that tells what it's about, why to pay attention. And then you have paragraphs. Well, if you're speaking, you want to stop at the end of a sentence, stop at the end of an idea, and give your listeners a moment to take it in. And then you have a subheading in an article, in a speech, in a presentation, when you need to finish one talking point and then tell us that you're coming to the next talking point.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, timing is very important. And I know when people do get nervous, I hear it all the time. They do speed up. What about the voice, like women who talk really high or young women who might have younger voices? Is there any advice you have for women to be taken more seriously? Especially through like phone conferences?

Elizabeth Bachman: One thing is to beware of uptalk. If you're going to end your sentence with a question, that immediately depositions you. It positions as someone who's unsure of herself. And it basically throws away the power of the sentence. That's one thing. Pitching your voice a little lower. If you have a high voice, having a high voice is lovely. But we have a cultural expectation that authority comes with lower voices. And that comes from centuries and centuries of male dominated business. And it's still very much a cultural expectation. We are not out of those woods yet. So, pitching your voice a little lower and ending your sentences at a lower pitch instead of with a question mark.

Mary Killelea: Those are great tips. Have you had challenges over the years where you've had self doubt and you had that internal voice saying you couldn't do something, but yet you knew you could. How did you overcome the self doubt?

Elizabeth Bachman: Oh, self doubt. I have it all the time. The voices in your head. I don't know about you. I hate those. I know. I have a choir. I have a lot of them sound like my mom. I love my mom, but she was really good at telling me all the things I was doing wrong. So, the key is to get out of your own head. What I find is most of the time when people have nerves, have stage fright, if you will, they're thinking the voices say they are going to think you're stupid. They're going to think you're not going to, you're going to look stupid in front of these people. And they're going to think you're stupid. They're going to think you're stupid. They're people. It's all about what you think they're going to think. But the truth is you can't know what they're thinking. I mean, the fact that they showed up to listen to you means they hope you have an answer to their problem. Make it about them. Again, try to get out of your own head and put yourself in the shoes of the listener. Put yourself in the listener's position. How can I serve you?

One of the things I love about being a presenter is that it's a way of servant, it's a kind of servant leadership is that if you are giving a presentation, if you're giving good information, that is a service. That's a gift. And that means that your expertise is a gift. So if you think of yourself as giving this information rather than, oh, I need to get approval from them. This is especially important in job interviews or promotion interviews. If you walk in thinking, oh, no, I'm going to take something from them by asking them to pay me as opposed to I am bringing them my skill and expertise, which is going to solve the problem. Therefore, I'm giving them a gift. If you come in with that attitude and say, what do you need? How can I support you? I'm excited to do this. And yes, I can solve your problem. That's how you get the promotion. That's how you get the job.

Mary Killelea: Is there any physical things that you can do to your body before doing a presentation that sometimes helps calm you or bring more self-confidence?

Elizabeth Bachman: Yes, absolutely. There's a classic story of standing like Wonder Woman. What I like to do is before I go online or before I walk into a room or on a stage, I will stand backstage and send my energy out to invite them into my space. The other important thing is if you're like me and you tend to be talking right up until the last minute, chatting right until the last minute, make sure that you stop before it's time for you to speak and just have a quiet moment where you are grounded, where you can connect to the earth and quiet your brain before you start your presentation. If you're online or if it's virtual, if it's live, whatever it is, that's always a good thing. Sometimes in networking events, I will ask someone to remind me. Say you want to make sure you go to the bathroom and just to go and stand close the stall door and stand there and breathe. Make sure you have that quiet moment. Then you can present with so much more authority and charisma because you are grounded. You're coming from a place of strength.

Mary Killelea: Love it. Great advice. What is one of the biggest self-sabotaging behaviors you see with some of the women that you've worked with?

Elizabeth Bachman: Not stepping forward, not asking to say, not raising your hand to say, I have something to say. The other thing that I have found has been incredibly helpful for my clients is to make sure that you are speaking outside the company as well as inside the company. Make a name for yourself in your industry by sharing your expertise. Do a presentation at an industry group. Speak on a conference. Speak on a panel. There's a whole art to speaking on a panel. Speak on a podcast because having that recognition outside your company will get you more recognition inside the company where if someone who hasn't seen you every day says to your manager, wow, Mary did the most amazing speech at our conference. I can't tell you how many clients I've had who've done a presentation and then they've come back and someone in the office, maybe even the receptionist said, wow, I didn't know you knew all of that. It's a two-track system, making yourself visible and valued within the company and visible and valued within your industry.

Mary Killelea: Absolutely. Let's talk about your podcast.

Elizabeth Bachman: Speakers Who Get Results.

Mary Killelea: Tell me about the audience, what someone who tunes in can learn from you, how often you are publishing.

Elizabeth Bachman: We publish once a week. That's great. Almost every week. I also do a Facebook Live every Wednesday at 9 a.m. Pacific, which is 6 p.m. in Europe and all the time zones in between. Often, I will have guests on the Facebook Live or I will give a short preview, a short tip, something that's easy to remember. Speakers Who Get Results is about leadership, visibility, communication challenges, and the international challenges. One of the great things about being a podcast host is I can ask smart people to come in and then I get to learn a lot.

Mary Killelea: You see what I do?

Elizabeth Bachman: Exactly. I get to learn a lot by asking people who have information that I want to learn. They say, oh, let me come and interview you.

Mary Killelea: That's wonderful. When you reflect back on your career, what are you most proud of?

Elizabeth Bachman: That I kept going. And when things fell apart, I picked myself up and reinvented myself. Being a presentation skills trainer for high level women in tech and law, I think this is career number four, maybe it's career number five. And that I learned it's possible to change.

Mary Killelea: If you could tell your 20 year old self anything, what would you tell them?

Elizabeth Bachman: Ask for more money. Learn to ask for the money. That took me an embarrassingly long time to learn.

Mary Killelea: Do you have a tip for asking for more money?

Elizabeth Bachman: Practice. Practice the conversation. Get a friend to practice with you, especially someone who can say, yes, you are worth this. And ask for nowadays, we can see what the salary ranges are. Ask for the highest end. Ask for what you are worth. People will take you more seriously. If you say, I am worth six figures instead of five figures, people get affected by that.

Mary Killelea: Great advice. All right. Last question. What does to be bolder mean to you?

Elizabeth Bachman: To stretch, to reach for something outside your comfort zone. For me, I have coaches and accountability partners to help me with this because I like my comfort zone. In some ways, I'm like a cat who's happiest curled up on the sofa, not moving. So I have people around me who push me. And I've learned that, that I need that sort of push. Once I've been pushed to stretch, I find I can grow into it. But I know that I need help to stretch and to be bolder. And so I ask for help.

Mary Killelea: That's fantastic. It has been such a joy to have you on the show. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Elizabeth Bachman: Thank you, Mary.

Mary Killelea: Where can someone get in touch with you?

Elizabeth Bachman: If you're curious about presentation skills, you could try my quiz. It's just a free assessment for four minutes at speakforresultsquiz.com. And that's where you can see where your presentation skills are strong and where perhaps a little more support could get you the results you want and the recognition that you deserve.

Mary Killelea: Excellent. Thank you so much. I will also include your LinkedIn on the show notes. So thanks again.

Elizabeth Bachman: Thank you, Mary.

Mary Killelea: Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. If you liked our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out our website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number 2, little b, bolder.com.