Communication Strategies for Women Leaders to Find Your Voice in the Boardroom - with Elizabeth Bachman

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:00  

Welcome to The Executive Coach for Moms Podcast where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host, Leanna Laskey McGrath, former tech exec turned full time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic and certified executive coach. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:27  

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm so excited to introduce today's guest. We have Elizabeth Bachman here, and let me tell you a little bit about Elizabeth before she jumps in. So Elizabeth is the go to person for advanced level training in speaking, presentation skills and leadership, with a lifetime spent perfecting the art of presenting, she helps high level clients show up as a leader who should be followed, promoted or hired, thus getting the recognition they deserve. A sought after speaker and strategist in Silicon Valley, nationally and internationally, Elizabeth works with leaders and influencers who need to become concise and compelling presenters. She helps them present as smart, down to earth, loose, friendly, even funny, and still be taken seriously. Elizabeth is the host of the International podcast Speakers Who Get Results, where she interviews experts on presentation skills, leadership, visibility and cross cultural communication. Having spent over 30 years directing such luminaries as Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo in more than 50 operas around the world, Elizabeth brings a wealth of tools to help business professionals become respected leaders and presenters fluent in five languages. She brings her global experience to her clients. Thank you so much for being here. Elizabeth, I'm so excited to talk with you.

Elizabeth Bachman  2:03  

Thank you, Leanna, it's very brave of you to tackle those foreign names. So.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  2:09  

I'm so happy you're here. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you. And as my listeners know, I always love to get to know the person who I'm talking to a little bit more before we jump in. So I would just love to hear from you in your words, your background a little bit. You know your story, what brought you to this work? You know what ignites you, what lights you up about this work? 

Elizabeth Bachman  2:33  

Well, what I'm doing now is really the culmination of four or five different careers. No one was ever talking about pivoting at the time, but I pivoted a bunch, but it's always around communication. So 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 damn bunny rabbit ever to grace the stage of the Hillside School. And I thought they like it. Okay, I'm gonna do this more. So I went on as an actor, and then realized in my 20s that I was actually a better director than I was an actor. In some ways, I'm a character actor in an ingenue body or I was in my 20s, no one would cast me as the ingenue anymore, but as a director, I could be all the parts. So that was really cool. I had a parallel interest in languages growing up, and my parents listened to the opera a lot. My parents loved classical music, so I was really primed to do opera. I thought I was going to be in theater, and then I realized that opera has it has music and theater and languages and travel, all the things that I love. And so I went on and I did that. I worked over 30 years from driving the truck and sweeping the stage, that really was my first job, to directing at the Metropolitan Opera with people like Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo and hundreds of others and internationally. And then I got to the point where I hit a glass ceiling. So I was one of the early female directors, and as a stage director, you're the one who's in charge of telling people, do you go right or left and stand up and sit down? That's that's the basic. But the important part is, what's our approach to this story when this story is so well known, what do you think the story should be about? How do I how do I make it makes sense for the artists and for the public in a way that really grasps them. And so I did that. 

Elizabeth Bachman  4:50  

I wanted to run an opera company, and I applied. Over the course of three or four years, I was pretty well known in the American opera industry, and I thought just doing a good job would be enough, which is a trap that many, many women fall into. I didn't realize that until later, but I for about three years, I applied every time an opening came up, and always on the short list, always number two or three, and always saw the job go to a man, and I did recognize that it was biased at that point, but I didn't figure out until I started doing the work that I'm doing now of executive coaching was that I wasn't marketing myself to the right people. Again, I thought just doing a good job would let me be rewarded. And this is a myth. Anybody who's still thinking that it's a myth, it works for a while. You get to go so far, but no further. So I also realized that my glass ceilings were internal as well as external. So I founded an opera company and ran a summer opera company in the Austrian Alps joint Austrian American production focused on helping young singers, giving young singers a chance. And we did 11 seasons. And by then, I'd been doing opera for about 30 years, and I was kind of burned out. I realized, you know, I was like, Okay, gonna do this again. And here's the same thing, and with the young voices, it's the same 20 Arias or so over and over. And I thought, if I don't stop now, I'm gonna lose the ability to be moved by the music. And you know, the arts are hard enough, so if you don't love it, you don't, you know, if it starts to be just a job, then it's time to get out, because it's too hard otherwise. 

Elizabeth Bachman  6:45  

Meanwhile, I'd been helping my friends who were giving speeches. You know, they would say, Hey, can you help me get this keynote ready? Or I have a panel appearance, or something like that. And so I went back to school working with trainers to learn how to be a coach, and wonderful people at Thrive Academy who helped me figure out how to package what I was doing into coaching. That's how I started doing the presentation skills training. I think of it actually as executive coaching, from what I've learned in business, watching from the outside in the, you know, the the functional, or less than functional, opera companies I was in, and also then becoming a boss myself, and making the mistakes. So, so I'm really here because I have made all the mistakes myself. So the reason why I go out and speak is because I hope that somebody listening is going to say, Oh, I can't do that, that's not going to help me, and maybe they can learn from some of the mistakes that I made. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  7:49  

Yeah.

Elizabeth Bachman  7:49  

To finish the story is that what I do now is apply all of that to helping women who have a seat at the table but still aren't being listened to, and it's really this current generation that's dealing with it. This is where, this is the whole push back against women's, women's empowerment and so forth. After the somebody called this the myth of the cowboy in the 1950s there are all these Westerns where it's always some wonderful white man who saves the day, and the women are in their place in the kitchen. What I want to do is help women get their voices heard in places of power, because we have seen over and over, especially in the last 10 years, that companies and organizations with women in upper management, women at the C suite, have a better return. They have better profits, better return on investment. When you have the diverse voices in leadership positions, it's better for everybody. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  8:55  

Absolutely.

Elizabeth Bachman  8:56  

It's just getting there. That's the challenge, and that is the problem that I solve. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  9:01  

Well, I think what's so interesting about your story, I love that you you talk about the glass ceiling, both internal and external. And I think it's important for us to recognize that it exists, that it's a real thing in the corporate world, externally, in our systems. And I think we should, you know, work to dismantle that, of course, and change that. You know, there's been progress made, and still much to go. And I think, you know, similarly, something that we probably both like to do is to say, Okay, well, it's probably not going to change tomorrow, so let's continue working on it, and also, let's work on those internal glass ceilings that you're talking about so that we can empower women to do what we can within the span of control that we have to succeed. I wrote that down whenever we first met the idea of getting women's voices heard in places of power. I think that's just so important. And then finally, in your story, the thing that I love is that you were like, no one's gonna hire me. Okay, fine, I'll just go create my own thing. Because I think that we see that happening so much now, where women are like, Okay, this doesn't fit for me. I don't want to work like that. They don't want to hire me, or I don't really want to, you know, have to adhere to those values that don't align with mine. So I'm just going to go create my own and then we see so many amazing companies and projects created in the world. So I would love to hear a little bit more about how you think about we know that external glass ceilings. How do you think about the internal glass ceiling? 

Elizabeth Bachman  10:41  

So there's a lot about out there, about leadership and empowerment. And I really work with the ones who are ambitious and who want to rise in an organization because of the impact they can make. You can see that and you know, and as the old saying is, the fish rots from a head. If the senior management is inept, corrupt, hiring their fraternity buddies instead of actually doing a search or things like that, then the company is going to suffer. It's just over and over and over again we've seen also like the problem of talent retention. One of the problems that I deal with a lot is senior women, who've got all this experience, and they're being asked to figure something out for the company, but they're not being listened to. A lot of it's the way they've been directed. And they finally said, Okay, I'm done. And they walk out and they walk away. I think the problem is that women don't feel heard, and men don't realize that the woman is still speaking. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  11:53  

Can you say more about that? 

Elizabeth Bachman  11:54  

The thing I hear the most when somebody calls me up, someone's been referred to me, and they call me up and they say, I'm so frustrated. Can you get them to listen to me? So I do a program called Lost in Translation, the communication breakdown that nobody talks about. And that's unofficially called why women think men don't listen and men think women never get to the point. There are these historical cliches that we get caught in. And I found that I don't think it's that binary. It's not just men don't listen to women and women don't never stop talking. I think it's a socialization thing, and it's a cliche that we've heard for centuries. One of the things that I've seen over and over is we're using the same words, but we're speaking two different languages. So this fascinates me. I've been living and working internationally since I was 17 years old, so this makes a lot of sense to me, and it's not just men and women, so I think of it more as the single focus thinkers and the multi focused thinkers. And the single focus thinkers are the people who do one thing at a time until it's done, and they're not going to go off on tangents and such, which is great, because that's how you get things done. Because Western business was built on these principles, and it also leads to, can lead to tunnel vision. Doesn't have to, but often leads to tunnel vision.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  13:28  

And maybe kind of like blinders.

Elizabeth Bachman  13:30  

Blinders, exactly. Yeah. Whereas you've got the multi focused thinkers who are traditionally women, historically women, but not always, there are lots of men who are multi focused thinkers. It's just, if you hear a man going on and on telling a really long story, people go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And let them finish. If a woman goes on and on, the reaction is, there. She goes, typical word salad. It can't possibly be anything useful, and she gets tuned out. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  13:59  

That's interesting.

Elizabeth Bachman  14:00  

If we think of it as two different languages, basically two different ways of thinking, but as it's expressed in a language, then you could actually start communicating. Say you've got so you've got men speaking Spanish and women speaking Italian. And if you don't speak Spanish, you could speak Italian to that person, but they'll understand it better if you get help, if you get someone like me to help you improve your presentation. So this is really the problem I solve, where the internal ceilings come and there are many of them, the internal glass ceilings are often about good girls don't brag. My mother used to say that to me, and took me a long time to learn how to celebrate what I was good at without bragging, but actually celebrating the fact that I was good at this I find that the disadvantage the women who are relational thinkers? That's a technical term. Is the relational thinkers. They are going to see the side issues that the tunnel vision, single focus thinkers don't see. The downside of the relational thinkers is if you see everything in relationship, then if somebody says no or challenges you, it feels personal. It feels like they hated the idea, when often it's just someone who's been raised as a little boy who was taught to fight for himself or to scrap. Often, what they're doing is they're trying to help by challenging and so let's say men and women, for simplicity sake, the man will challenge the woman's idea expecting her to defend it and refine it as she defends it. Competition instead of collaboration. They're both useful, and neither are completely the property of one gender or another, but it's often an assumption that gets us in trouble because you don't realize why they were so why someone's so annoyed. So that's one of the internal glass ceilings is somebody says no, and you step back and you stop talking instead of advocating for your idea. And yes, women's ideas do still get stolen. And that's a that's a whole other topic, but.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  16:21  

Yeah, been in corporate. I'm thinking about, how does this apply? Or, you know, where have I seen these kinds of things show up? And what I hear you saying is that there's an idea of, like, there's Bridgewater is, you know, company, huge, hedge fund. Their whole culture is based on, like an idea meritocracy, so the best idea wins. And I think a lot of organizations have, especially male dominated at the top organizations, like to kind of have that way of approaching things, where it's like the best idea wins. And I think that to your point, if you are having a relationship with your idea- 

Elizabeth Bachman  17:08  

Right, yes, it's your baby. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  17:10  

Yeah, it's like you're tying yourself to your idea in some way. And I think both men and women do that to an extent. But I think that you know, whenever someone really challenges it or shoots down your idea, I think of some of the women I coach, and you know, one in particular who was like, I don't want to work here anymore, because every time I present an idea, it just gets shot down, you know, and my boss doesn't even seem to really hear it. And so it's like kind of an attachment or a relationship with an idea, is that how you're describing it in different words? And I think I'm also curious about when you were you said you were an early female director, did you experience this? Is this something that you experienced yourself as a leader as well? 

Elizabeth Bachman  17:58  

I had to learn to be a leader. And I particularly when I founded the opera company, I had to learn to be a boss. Because one of the other things that women do, and this is, this is definitely gender related. It's not necessarily single or multi focused, is girls are taught not to ask directly, because it's an imposition. Don't ask someone for a favor. Don't ask someone to do something for you. Give, give, give, but never ask. And so many women growing up grow up hinting rather than asking. And I learned this from a relationship coach, because you find this often in marriages where the woman will say, gee, it would be great if someone would fix that dripping faucet. And if the man is single focused working on something else, working on a project. And she comes in and she says the faucet is dripping, he'll go, yeah, yeah, yeah, and not hear it. And then she's annoyed, and eventually she explodes, and he doesn't realize why she's annoyed. I saw this happen when I was a boss. I didn't realize that I should be I was supposed to be asking directly, until my assistant said, Just tell us. And inside, the little girl in me was going, what? It's okay. I thought it was rude to do that, but she said, Just tell us. Tell us be clear, which is a leadership thing that some people learn and some people don't. Fortunately, I learned it early on running a company, but I hereby apologize to all the people in my previous career who didn't know what I was talking about because I didn't understand I was okay to ask directly. 

Elizabeth Bachman  19:45  

Where this is a problem in business is when you've got a single, focused manager and a multi, focused thinker who wants to do something. So for instance, I started realize this about many years ago when my client Maria, she was frustrated, she was ready, actually ready to quit. She worked for a software company in Silicon Valley, and they had a big project coming up, and she thought I should be running this project. I think it would be great. So she wrote up a whole proposal and sent it to her boss, Jason, but she put in the subject line, here's something that will interest you. And Jason, who, of course, was getting 50 emails a day and he was working on other things. He said he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get to that. And of course, he forgot. So they've got Maria, who's sweating blood. She's chewing her nails and waiting to find out if she's going to get this promotion. And finally, after a week, she said, What did you think of the proposal I sent you? And Jason said, what proposal? And you know, she had such a nice person. She said, Oh, you know, I said, we'll send you an email. I will resend it. And stalked out of there, furious, went to talk to her female friends. And here's another thing that women do, men and women do. We reinforce the stereotype, and we don't realize we're doing it until you start noticing. So awareness is the first thing. Her female friend says, It's true he hates you, when actually he just plain didn't read it. Didn't know because she didn't ask clearly enough. And the thing is, with the single focus thinkers, you have to get their attention. If they're focused on something, and for me, if I am focused on something, and one of my one of my friends, comes up and mentions something, if I'm focused on something else, I'm not going to notice it. And then they say, Well, I told you two days ago, and I said you did? But if I was focused on something else, I would have said, yeah, yeah, yeah, and immediately forgotten, which is what happened with Jason. Maria was then reinforced by her friends that he hated her, which was why he'd ignored her proposal, and she was ready to quit. But one of the women knew me. She'd actually heard me speak, and said, Talk to Elizabeth first, and when we got together, we realized that she hadn't actually asked for the promotion. It hadn't been clear enough, and Jason just didn't hear her. I

Elizabeth Bachman  22:13  

 think of it like two different languages. You know? It's as if Jason spoke Spanish and Maria spoke Italian. If Maria would had spoken to him, knowing he spoke another language, she would have made sure that he understood, because she would have recognized it's a translation issue. And indeed, when she resubmitted it and say, I'd like to work on the new project, I forget what it was called, but you know, some big new thing they were doing, and here's what, here's what I want to do. And Jason read it and said, This is fabulous. I love it. Great. I'm going to put you in to run this new project. And so she got the promotion, she got the recognition, she got the raise, and she had been ready to walk away from all that because of a misunderstanding, and that's the part that breaks my heart, is that that's why my motto is getting women's voices heard in places of power, is sometimes it's about us getting out of our own way.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  23:15  

Yeah, I'm thinking about a book I read a long time ago by Linda Babcock called Women Don't Ask, and it was very much about how we very rarely asked, and it was mostly around for, you know, raises or negotiating salary, but how we don't tend to ask. And then when we do, how we have to be very clear about what we're asking. And I think going back to something you said earlier, about I just was working hard and expecting that my hard work would get noticed. And unfortunately, it doesn't always or usually work that way, and there does have to be a clear ask, a clear recognition of our own needs, and then clear communication of those needs if we want to get what we want. 

Elizabeth Bachman  24:07  

What makes sense to me about this theory is that if you think of it just a translation problem, it's not not on purpose. I mean, yes, there are going to be those who are going to try to shut you down on purpose, but if you just think of it as a translation problem, then nobody's at fault. It's just two different ways of speaking or listening. I was just at an event last week, or speaking at an event, and one of the women stood up and she said, my whole team are scientists, and they don't listen to me. They don't see the big picture that I see. I'm so frustrated. But if now that you say it's a translation issue, maybe I'm just not talking to them in a way that they can hear or to get their attention. Because the other thing with single focus thinkers is, if they're busy with something, you are always interrupting. So make an appointment. Come in and say. I need to talk to you for about 20 minutes. When's the time when we could do this? And then the great thing is that when you get them for that 20 minutes, they're ready to listen. Where this really matters in business is senior women who get fed up and quit frustrated. And these are the people that I mostly help because they're fed up, they're frustrated, and they don't realize that it's not personal most of the time. And, you know, and this is just the beginning. I mean, there's a whole I do a six month course on all of this, so and some people stay with me for a couple of years to deal with that. 

Elizabeth Bachman  25:35  

One thing I should say is, if you're a single focus person, or if you're a busy person, you know you're you're a manager, you're a director, you're a VP, something like that. And you have people on your team, male or female, who go on and on and on, telling these long stories. There's something you can do, because for relational thinkers, context is everything. So there, these are the people who then start, well, you know, two years ago, we started this out, and then the context really matters. And so if someone's trying to tell you that, and it's five minutes to five and you have to be out of the door at five, what you can say is you need to acknowledge them, the relational thinkers. They need to know they've been heard. It's to say, I really want to hear what you have to say. But unless the building's burning down, you know, I have a deadline, or I'm in the middle of trying, I'm trying to get this finished before five o'clock. Could you make an appointment? We'll talk about it tomorrow. I can give you my full attention. I really value you. I value what you have to say. I can't think about that now, because I'm in the middle of something. Could we please? And most of the time, I find if someone just tells me I'm Yes, I want to talk to you about but I can't think about it till after this project's out the door. Fine, you know, then I'll do something else and I'll talk to them later. 

Elizabeth Bachman  27:01  

So the multi focus thinkers also need to tell the single focus thinkers why it matters at the beginning. This is the other thing that people forget all the time. Is for instance, is it an update, or is this an action item? So I'm going to need you to advise me on this problem. Here's the problem, here's the short version. Now let me tell you why it matters how we got here. And you know, if somebody tells you this is an update on this project or this is an action item, it changes the way you listen. And many people are trained to offer a suggestion right away to try to fix it right away. So that's the other thing is, if you want to brainstorm with someone, tell them, could we brainstorm about this issue? Or I have certain friends with whom I can call up and say I have the beginnings of an idea, I haven't fleshed it out yet. Could we sort of toss it around a few times to figure out where we're going? Because then often, I don't know about you, but often the answer comes out of my mouth without my conscious brain being involved. Put things together. If we know it's a brainstorming session to help you refine an idea, you're going to listen differently. But if the default there are always people where the default is to fix it. I mean, there are people in my life who I start to tell a story, and they immediately tell me how to fix it. I said, I haven't finished talking. That's so frustrating. Let me finish. You know, then you just say, tell people how you need them to listen. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  28:43  

Yeah.

Elizabeth Bachman  28:43  

Sometimes it's just, could I just vent for a minute? I don't want a solution. I just need to get this out of my head and into the air. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  28:51  

Yeah. It's almost like your conversation needs to have, like, the subject line at the beginning of an email. You need to, like, start with that, yeah, like having flashbacks to seventh grade English with Mrs. Altimus, where it was like, write the intro paragraph, like, put the thesis statement there, like, right there, and then say the three points that you're gonna say, and then say each one with, you know, with the details, and then at the end, say your thesis again and the three points. And it's like, sometimes it's not, obviously not as structured in conversation, but if we can start with that thesis statement or that goal, or what or that need, like, be clear with ourselves about what we need out of this interaction, and then say it right up front, then maybe regardless of the type of thinker that this person is, whether they're single focused or multi focused, maybe that interaction can be more productive is kind of what was coming up for me.

Elizabeth Bachman  29:50  

Actually, that five point system I learned from my eighth grade English teacher. So thank you, Mrs. Curtis, wherever you are, it's actually. Actually, it's the structure that I start off with for a speech. Oh, interesting, if I'm consecutive speech, and it comes from Roman rhetoric, so we've been using it since the time of the Romans. So it works. It's a good place to start. It's not always, you don't always follow it, but it's a place to get things into a structure. One of the other things is a lot of our conversational habits come from how we grew up. You know, who did you grow up with? I have female friends who grew up with brothers who don't go off on tangents ever, because the only way they were able to be heard was if they were clear and specific and if they fought back, and then other people I know as a wonderful man I work with who's a client, who is the youngest in a family of sisters. So he listens to women, he uses charm to get what he needs, because he's used to being bossed around by four older sisters, and so he gets what he needs by charming them, and he had to learn how to actually be more forceful and more clear. The point is, it doesn't happen overnight. 

Elizabeth Bachman  31:10  

So where this matters is if you have an important conversation, everyday conversation, it you know it is what it is, and you find the people you can talk to when you have something important, that's when you want to stop and think. So a lot of the tips that I give as a presentation skills trainer, often, I will say, Okay, here's a quick and dirty patch. Here's something that you can just a hack, that you can little something to fix for an everyday thing, when you have a real presentation where you're going to present something important, that's when you invest in a trainer like me. That's when you invest in someone who can give you outside information and feedback, informed feedback. I do a lot of webinars, and I help a lot of my colleagues, where we show up for each other, and then we help each other and give them feedback. Sometimes I will say something that is so obvious to me that I forget to say it out loud. And so, because I know it, it's clear. And so there's they'll say, and what did you mean about that part? And I went, Oh, right, I should actually have to say what that's about. Everybody does that. So this is where you want to invest in someone like me, or, you know, someone who's really good at that sort of thing, who can train you to be clearer. And then, if there's a time where you want to just tell a long rambling story, do it with people who will appreciate a long rambling story.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  32:41  

Yeah, well, what other tips would you want to make sure that the listeners know about, especially before, whenever we talked about the multi focused thinkers, we were really talking about like, hey, that's moms, right? We are constantly thinking about 20 million things at the same time. And you know, what time do I need to pick up the kids, and what activities are happening tonight, and what proposals need to go out, and who do I need to check in with, and all the things that we are kind of juggling. But what other tips or tricks, you know, would you have for them? 

Elizabeth Bachman  33:20  

I think the key thing is awareness, to recognize when you're being single focused, when you're being multi focused. When are you being clear? When not? So a single, focused thinker really isn't going to notice the dirty socks on the floor. They're focused on something else. So the key is to start noticing when am I being direct and clear? When am I not? When do I go off on a tangent, and I've lost my audience? Because that's the other thing you know, if you're not clear, people are going to tune you out. And this is especially important when you're talking virtually, because if you're giving a presentation virtually, it's really easy for someone to shrink your picture down to a thumbnail and listen with half an ear while they're working on their emails on the other screen. It all happens all the time. This is why, if you're doing a keynote presentation where you really need a results, that's when you want to be an interesting speaker. That's when you want to work with someone like me who can take it from a boring data heavy into something that makes you go, wow, bravo. Gets their attention.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  34:28  

Yeah, well, so I just kind of want to summarize what we've said so far. What I've heard you saying is for women to set themselves up for success. Number one is to remember that it's not personal, that whenever someone challenges our idea or pushes back against something that we've said, it's usually, I should say, usually not personal, and often more of a translation issue than an interpersonal issue. Number two, ask for what you want. Don't hint about it. Just be clear about what we want. And communicating that three tell them why it matters at the beginning. So communicate the subject line, the thesis statement, the why it matters right off the bat, instead of waiting until the end to kind of like lead up to it. And number four, having some awareness about, you know, noticing when am I being really direct and clear, when am I not? When are people starting to tune out? And just starting to build that awareness. And I would also add, also, as a coach who works with high achieving women, also, let's not judge ourselves. It's not really going to help if we say, Oh, they tuned out. I'm such a terrible speaker. But maybe, oh, they tuned out, maybe I can get curious about what happened there, so that I can learn for the next time.

Elizabeth Bachman  35:49  

Was I speaking Italian to an audience of Spaniards, for instance.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  35:53  

Yes. And then just the reminder that it doesn't happen overnight. So anything else that you would want to add for our listeners?

Elizabeth Bachman  36:01  

Just the other thing is that, especially for women, you need your allies, you need your you need your cohorts, and you need the people you can work with. I run a series of masterminds called The Visible and Valued Masterminds, where we get together every two weeks for breakfast virtually, and we talk about what's going on, and there's a little bit of teaching, and then we discuss, what can we do, and how do I deal with this problem? So that's the other thing I would say, is public speaking is the best way to raise your visibility, make shows how valuable you are, and it helps if you're looking for a promotion or to be paid attention, one of the best ways to do that is to go out and speak and then have somebody else say, Wow, Leanna had such an interesting thing to say and have someone else recommend you, it sounds much better than to say, and I was brilliant, you know. So have the group that will work with you, work together with you to say, Don't chicken out. Do this. Do the speech.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  37:11  

Yeah. Oh, wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Elizabeth for being here and for sharing all of your wisdom. You have such an interesting background from the arts and opera and now in business, and I love hearing people's journeys and stories. I really appreciate you being here. Where can people find you and who would look for you? Tell us more about that. 

Elizabeth Bachman  37:35  

The best way to find me is you can find me on my website, which is elizabethbachman.com but actually I'm much more current on LinkedIn, so reach out to me on LinkedIn at Elizabeth with a Z say, Hey, I heard you on Leanna's podcast, and I'd be happy to chat with anybody who's got further questions that you know. I want to get more women's voices heard in places of power. So if somebody hears this and says, How do I do that? Talk to me, because that's my mission. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  38:03  

Love it, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here. Elizabeth. I really appreciate you, and thank you so much to everyone for listening in. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and we will see you all next week. Bye.

Leanna Laskey McGrath  38:21  

If you're loving what you're learning on this podcast, I'd love to invite you to check out The Executive Mom Reset. It's my six month coaching program for ambitious, success driven, career focused women who are ready to stop surviving and start thriving. Together, we'll tackle the stress, guilt and overwhelm that come with being a high achieving executive mom. You'll learn how to set boundaries, prioritize what truly matters, and build the confidence to show up powerfully at work, at home, and for yourself. Head on over to coachleanna.com right now to schedule a free discovery call. We'll spend an hour talking about where you are now, what you want to create, and how I can help you get there, because every woman deserves to live the life of her dreams. Let's create yours together.