Convincing Executives to Embrace Thought Leadership

Struggling to make your thought leadership content truly stand out and resonate with your audience? In this episode, Katy Howell and executive leadership coach Karen Cuthbert tackle the pressing challenge of why only 15% of decision-makers rate thought leadership as excellent, despite 73% of buyers placing more trust in it than traditional marketing. Join us for a captivating discussion packed with actionable insights and strategies to break through the noise, build trust, and create impactful content that drives success. Don’t miss out on unlocking the true potential of your thought leadership. Watch the entire video here.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to today’s podcast! Katy Howell dives into the world of thought leadership and its impact on social media. She’s joined by Karen Cuthbert, an executive leadership coach. Together, they’ll explore why only 15% of decision-makers rate thought leadership as excellent. And why 73% of buyers trust it more than traditional marketing. You’ll hear practical strategies to overcome common barriers, build trust, and create quality content that resonates.

• Hello, hello, welcome on what was a very sunny Thursday. And today, we have an amazing session because we’re going to have a talk about thought leadership and how we can lead from the front. I’m Katy Howell, and I’m joined by the amazing Karen Cuthbert, an expert in coaching leaders to find their voice and help amplify influence. So, the plan over the next 45 minutes is to equip you with strategies so that you can start to activate thought leadership and get the right kind of potential out of your executives or yourselves. But before I start, Karen, tell us a little bit more about yourself.

• Thank you, Katy. Thanks for having me. Such a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to sharing some of the coaching insights that I’ve learned over the years. So yeah, my name is Karen Cuthbert, known to some as coach Karen. I’m the founder of Runway Coaching. So, it’s an executive coaching business, and it specialises in supporting business leaders to achieve and maintain take-off in their business and their careers. My main area of expertise is in helping leaders engage in the right way, with all the right people. So that’s their stakeholders. And we do this by making the most of their amazing minds. And you’ll hear me use that phrase a bit through the recall. In my professional life, I’ve worked in a number of FTSE 100 banks, and one of the big four management consultancies. And then when I think back there came a point a few years ago, when to be honest, Katy, I was struggling, I was struggling, balancing the demands of a very challenging personal life, with my work life. And eventually, after probably a bit too much time, but eventually I sought help. And that came in the form of coaching.

• So, you know, what did that look like? I met up with a coach one-on-one, and we had a session every fortnight for an hour. He gave me his undivided attention, which was great, because how often do you get that? And he guided me by asking powerful pitching questions. He got me thinking, thinking about things that I’d never pause to take into account about my mindset, what I’m feeling my behaviour, my actions. And I learned more in that time in those sessions about myself and my mindset than I had at any point in my life before. So really, in terms of my background, that coaching experience, that’s what left me feeling fully equipped to get out there and realise my own potential. And now it’s because I believe in that power of coaching, not just for myself, but for everyone out there. That’s why I went on to study as a transformational coach. And I became an ICF-accredited professional coach after that. And now I want to share with you a statistic is that, okay? I want to really drive home why this all matters to me. And it’s about all of our potential, realising our potential. And the statistic that I heard recently that really made it clear in my mind why we’ve got to act on our potential it was this, it was that each and every one of us had a one, just one in 400 trillion chance of being born. Now let just let that thing sink in one in 400 trillion chance of being born. And now, the scientists apparently have crunched the numbers on it and that gives pretty slim odds of being here today. So that is a great opportunity that we need to realise, and I’m thinking, you know, that could be a very wild assumption. I don’t know the validity of it. However, it’s a really great reminder of just how incredible we all are. That combination has unique skills and experience. And of course, those amazing minds that I will keep talking about. And all of this. This is why I’m so passionate about coaching. So, I help people in the corporate world in business to unlock their own potential and that of their teams as well. And that’s what brings me here today.

• Fantastic. And it’s an interesting combination, this live because we’re a social media marketing company. Why would we want to talk to a coach? Other than on an individual basis, of course. But why would we want you to talk to us and talk to our viewers? Well, one of the reasons is that over the last six months, almost a year thought leadership has risen in popularity, in terms of marketing tactics, things that will help us get closer to our customers. But there’s a really big one this, nearly all the leaders that I speak to, or anyone who wants to do this are terrified, are concerned, and have really personal reasons why they’re really uncomfortable, and being a thought leader is a bit ick. I feel that this is a great space for coaching to kind of fit, not only because we need to help build the confidence of our leaders to be able to go out and talk more about the things that they’re passionate about. However, when Edelman did a survey, they found that only 15% of decision-makers rate most thought leadership as very good or excellent. So, it shows that there’s this massive opportunity for improvement. But the question is, how do we improve? How do we get better at thought leadership? And part of that I feel is about understanding ourselves, and what we stand for. Just to kick off, I think it’s very crucial for a number of people I’ve spoken to, that we understand how we build foundational confidence and thought potential for thought leaders because that is probably what I see as the biggest challenge.

• Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. Let’s just pause for a moment and think about what does confidence even mean. Confidence in my interpretation, comes about as a result of a belief in oneself. So, in coaching, from a coaching perspective, we work a lot with helping people understand their thoughts and their beliefs, there’s actually a really great model that comes from the field of cognitive behavioural psychology. It explains how our thoughts and beliefs are directly related to the emotions and feelings that we then as a result, experience, which in turn, then impact how we behave, and our actions. And that gives us the results we get. So, there’s a little sort of domino effect chain reaction going on between those elements. When we think about confidence and the importance of confidence, if what you’ve just shared with us is true, if decision-makers are not seeing the quality of thought leadership that they would hope for, which is in that domino effect, that’s the end result, then we need to work back and think. Okay, what’s the behaviour, the activity that’s happening, or maybe not happening, that’s giving that result? What sits beneath that? This is where I get into the deep coaching work with my clients. So, if someone has a challenge, where they either can’t get round to doing thought leadership, because they don’t feel they have the time or they feel paralysed they don’t feel capable of doing it, or they’re doing it, but maybe it’s not to the quality that they would have hoped. So, all these reasons resulting in that may be less effective for thought leadership results, we work back and we say okay, what are those feelings? And what are those very important, thoughts and beliefs that are underlying those feelings that are causing this chain reaction? And that’s where the magic happens finding out in the deep work. Yeah.

• Do you know that since you’ve made me think now, which is that in a way, the lack of confidence means there’s often a lack, of getting it right when you do thought leadership? So, it’s kind of like the Chicken and egg, you know, you’re not going to feel great if you don’t get a very good response. But you’re not getting a good response because you’re not really going all the way because you’re nervous about it. So yeah, I think really, really interesting. And yeah, cool. Cool.

• It’s like a feedback loop. It’s a cycle. It’s self-reinforcing. This is because if what you believe you’re so if you have a limiting belief that you’ve got that inner critic voice telling you, I’m no good at this, then what you turn out maybe isn’t going to be your best work, then it doesn’t get the reactions that you need. Whereas if you have the confidence, and you’re putting good quality work out, you’re getting the praise for that. That feedback loop is feeding back into the competence at the start. And I think that’s what you were getting at.

• Yes, indeed. And I think it’s really important because so why bother with Thought Leadership? Isn’t it easier just to step away, but the reality is that 73% of buying decision-makers, trust thought leadership more than traditional marketing. And this is really key. We are buying from real people, whether it’s B2B or even consumers these days. And I feel that quite often marketeers want their companies, their leaders to do thought leadership, but struggle to motivate their thought leaders. So, what I want is some advice from you, which is as a marketeer, how do we motivate and encourage, you know, for our leaders to be more active in thought leadership?

• That’s a really great question. I think the best way for me to answer this is to imagine Katy, that you are the marketer, and I’m your coach. So, I’m imagining that you’ve come to me with this challenge, and you, for example, you’ve got a business leader, let’s say, my background was in risk management when I was in corporate. So, you’ve got the chief risk officer, you’re working in an organisation, and you’re really keen for him to share some of his knowledge out there on your social media account, to be able to show the world you know, what a great job you’re all doing. And you come to me, and you said, you know, I need to motivate Tom our CRO to do more and get more involved in thought leadership. I would start with that before we even consider any interaction between you and Tom. But before we think about how you’re going to maybe encourage more activity in the thought leadership space, we would start with looking at your goal, specifically what you’re trying to achieve. And this is what I mentioned to you before we started, I’ve got some very old-fashioned sheets here that I’m going to try and hold up in a moment. I’m going to delve into my coaching toolkit quite often in our conversation. And I like to imagine this as now when I was growing up, my dad had one of those really heavy-set toolboxes with those big clunky lids. And it has all the tools that we ever needed to fix stuff like hammers, drills, and screwdrivers, it was all in there. That was in the days when we used to fix things and not just buy a new version. I have a metaphorical toolkit that I have had with me, actually over the year, all the way through my career. But now I host a lot of coaching frameworks and models that I like to share with people. So the first one is one that you may have heard of before. And it’s called the SMART Goal Setting framework. So, I’m going to hold this up. This is really old-fashioned on this piece of paper. We could have done a fancier thing. But if people have heard of it, great. If you haven’t heard of SMART goal setting, I’m going to take the sheet down but the acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time-bound. So, what I’d say to you in our coaching conversation, Katy, if you want to motivate your business leaders to engage in thought leadership, you’ve got to be super clear on your goal of what you want to achieve with this. So, it’s no point there’s no point rocking up to speak to Tom the CRO and saying, Look, Tom, I I’ve noticed you’re not really engaging on our LinkedIn account. I would love you to start posting something. What he needs to understand is some more specifics. So, if I were coaching you, we would work to achieve a SMART goal that would tick the criteria of the SMART framework that you would be very specific about. So, it might be something that starts by the end of this calendar year, I want to have secured a commitment from Tom as CRO, to deliver at least six monthly posts or blogs on our LinkedIn website. And I will do this by ensuring I have a monthly one-to-one session with him to discuss and support that. There will be a kick-off session to discuss the requirements before then. So, what that gives you is a foundation from which to work so that when you’re looking at how well or not you’re doing on motivating Tom to achieve your goal, you can refer back to your SMART goal and see how you’ve progressed. Are you hitting the number of blog posts? Are you hitting it in the timeframe? Have you secured his commitment?

• Yeah, that makes perfect sense, because half the time you’re just in a way because thought leadership feels like it belongs with the leaders, we can be nonspecific about what we actually need. And I think that really is a bit of a challenge, I can see that a few people are beginning to ask questions. And please keep asking questions and contributing, I’ll start reading them out in about five or 10 minutes.

• I was just going to add a little more to the answer there. So, we would absolutely start with defining a very clear goal. But that’s not the end of the story. Because then you’re sat there with your goal, I think it’s happened. There are a number of other stages we would go through. And we don’t have the time on this call to go into all the depth of that. But we would move on after defining the goal into looking at the reality of what has happened for you, Katy as the marketer, in terms of the interaction you’ve had with Tom already. So, you would understand, you know, relative to the goal, have you already spoken about it? Or you might tell me, actually, Tom only joined six months ago, and we haven’t sat down at all for a face-to-face. So, we’re getting some background, we’re understanding why you find yourself in the position you’re in at this point. And then that lends itself to then moving into looking at what are some options for you to then motivate and interact with Tom to achieve your goal, we would co-create those. So that’s not a ready-made list that I would read off to you. That is, I would facilitate your thinking on in the context of your work, how what would be a realistic and achievable way forward. And then the last stage, the fourth stage is defining an action plan. What are the specific steps you’re going to take Katy after our conversation to make this a reality? And what we’ve just gone through there, if anyone was picking up on it, we’ve gone through four stages there. And this is another one of my models. So, I’m digging into my toolbox. Again, it’s called the GROW Model. And if you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a way of structuring your thinking. So, if you find yourself uncertain of how to proceed with a challenge, the GROW Model stages being you define your goal, you look at the reality of what’s happened up until now, how you’re feeling about it, what thoughts you’ve got, you then move into defining some options. And you come up with a way forward and action plans. So, it’s quite useful, we may come back to the structure again to help answer some of the other scenarios that come up.

• So, we’ve already got questions. The important opinion is actually from William, right, which I’m just going to try and put up on screen because I think I’ll read it out. Not every leader is a thought leader and there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes, absolutely agree. Not every leader is a thought leader. Most people follow to be a thought leader you have to have leading thoughts, yes, you have to have opinions, you have to know your onions. And you need to be authentic and original, and we’ll come on to some bits around authenticity and vulnerability. More thought leadership comes from many different sources in the business and I know we’re using the term leadership but it could be executive, it tends to be slightly more senior people, but subject matter experts don’t necessarily have to be leaders, but they’re often some of our most passionate, vocal, amazing, knowledgeable people that we want to shine. So, using the term leaders a little bit, yeah. And not everybody is one. So totally agree with you. So, more questions are coming in, which is fantastic. Thank you keep them coming. But I just want to get a little bit further because not everybody is a thought leader, but the people I tend to speak to, the really smart, clever, people, have lots of opinions, they’re happy to chat to you over a coffee still get very nervous. And we’ve talked about confidence. But are there other challenges that you see as a coach that we need to think about addressing in terms of how they position themselves as thought leaders?

• Yeah, and I think if we’re thinking about maybe concerns, barriers to allowing them to position as thought leaders, there are a few camps that people generally fall into. And if I’m thinking about internal mindset blocks that are most common, when you’ve already named the first one, which is absolutely maybe a lack of confidence, then there are those who this is also an extremely common one that I hear that just feel too busy and complete lack of time to, you know, busy in the day job, people working, you know, late sometimes into the evening, where are they going to fit in, coming up with thought leadership content, so that, that that’s one that’s very common. And finally, the third one that I see, most often, people who say, it’s not my role, it’s not my responsibility, because no one’s ever come to them and explained how their expertise and their experience their skill set can be usefully used. And so that, yeah, those are three of the errors that tend to come up most often.

• Yeah, and I think there’s a little bit of fear. And there’s also if you’re, the bigger the organisation, the more you need to get buy-in right at the top to allow sometimes the subject matter experts or departmental leaders to be able to take the next step. So, there’s sometimes a little bit of, dare I say, politics to get around, which can make it a bit challenging, but it’s worth it. Again, the Edelman report states that 86% of decision-makers are more receptive to sales outreach when it’s preceded by strong thought leadership. So, in a way, you know, sort of building on what William said is you have to have strong opinions, you have to take a stand on critical issues, you have to be a thought leader. How do you help not only build confidence but also give your senior executives a chance to be able to formulate in their heads? You know, and have confidence and conviction and the assertiveness to go out and say that more publicly?

• Yeah. I mean, you mentioned assertiveness, and that’s one of those words that can sometimes come across to people in different ways, doesn’t it? So that can be a block in itself. If you ask someone to be more assertive, they can think well actually, that’s not my style. That’s not how I work. Assertiveness, or you know, all these things. I view it as a skill. Okay, so this is really important from a coaching perspective. And I’m a huge fan of an American author called Carol Dweck, who has written extensively about growth mindset. Is this something Katy, that you’re familiar with, Carol Dweck?

• No, you might put a note in there about it. Yeah, that’s fantastic.

• The reason I mention it, at this point when we’re considering you know, how could a leader a subject matter expert, be held helped to develop a skill like assertiveness? The most important thing to start with which Carol Dweck writes extensively about is that these skills are not innate. They are things that can be developed and grown over time with the right effort and practices put into place. So, I think the other thing that is ringing in my head, and I want to say out loud is that whenever I coach someone, the first criteria for pitching is that they have to want to change. So, there’s no point in someone wheeling a colleague up to me and saying, they do the work on them, and they not wanting to change. So, in the scenario you’ve given here in developing assertiveness, you can’t make someone develop in a way that they don’t want to or that they’re not interested, you have to be in the right mindset to want change to begin with. And then from there, if we think of this as skill development, we do go back to one of the tools I mentioned earlier, we go back to the GROW Model, and we would step through so in a coaching conversation, I would be placing questions very carefully, to enable you to understand what’s the vision for developing this skill, set of assertiveness? What’s it going to give you? What does it need to give you then from there, we would look at we’ll go to the second phase, they are the reality in GROW of what’s happened, what are your current strengths, because actually spent space coaching is very, very positive, and realising that we’ve all got a foundation strength space to work on and build on. So, look at okay, so you maybe feel at this point, you said you want to reach certain goals with your assertiveness, and we would make them smart goals. So, we would be really specific, how will you know that you’ve achieved it? Well, I’ll have been able to do X number of live interviews, and I’ve been able to produce a certain frequency of social media engagement. So, you’ll be able to tick back to your goal. But when we’re looking at the reality of where you are now, we want to understand what’s been stopping you from doing that already. So, we can delve into the depths of you know, back to those, those beliefs and thoughts, those emotions, what might have been holding you back, they could very well be external. You mentioned politics and organisational politics, they could be external things as well. And that can still be coached on because there are things that you can do and corrective action you can take to look at how you can remove those barriers. But if we’re talking about internal mindset, looking at the reality of also what is the gap between that goal and where you are now? What do you need to practice? And what do you need? What knowledge do you need to develop to be able to fill that gap? That’s when we then move into the options, you look at what works for you, because you, you might be the kind of person that even with coaching, support, training, or public speaking, maybe that’s not your bag, maybe you’re happier, writing an article every so often, or maybe on social media, maybe. So, you’ve got to find what feels right for you, and then come up with those steps that you’re going to take and stay accountable to your coach and be able to monitor what happens in between. And it’s, again, that’s the feedback loop. So, take action, but always looking to see what the results I’m getting, and then through real self-awareness, be able to look at how can I refine what I’m doing. So, it’s not a one-stop shop? It’s continually looking at how can I improve on where I am.

• Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a really interesting thing because it then cycles back to why are we doing this now I know why the market wants to do this, which is we are in need of quality content that speaks to our buyers, that builds a profile and personality for our brand. That’s what thought leadership is, you know, it’s got its feet firmly planted in supporting us with that quality content. But on a personal level, there’s also a growing need in the 21st century for us to have a profile as we move towards more senior positions. And that then kind of brings me to Polly is has also put out a really interesting question which I just want to add a couple of jumps to, so she has said it takes quite a lot of vulnerability and courage to be bold on social media with Thought Leadership. How do you overcome this and how do you let go of other people’s judgement for you? This also plays into balancing how personal you need to be, versus how professional and this is, I get asked this so many times because, you know, there are some people who are very open, and we’ll talk about their mental health and blah, blah, blah, they’re kids and everything else. For many people, that’s not a place they want to go. So they feel that they’re not being authentic to them, but that isn’t true. So, maybe to help others like Dipali, and people like me, to be honest. How do you get through that vulnerability that you’ve, you know, that you’re really very exposed? When you go out there? And how do you deal with other people’s judgement, whether that’s internal judgement with people thinking that you’re, you know, egotistical or external judgement, from comments, which, in particular, particularly women get quite a lot of, which are really hard to take?

• Yeah, it’s a really great point. And actually, as you were just reading that out, it is something which I’ve had to address myself, just in terms of how, you know, what do you share? How much do you share of yourself? I’m thinking back to a webinar I did a few years ago, around personal branding. And I remember there was one slide that showed a picture of an iceberg. So, the iceberg just a small amount, I think it was 10% of the iceberg jutting out of the water. So a really small amount, the rest is all hidden beneath the waterline and what that represented was that of ourselves, there’s only actually a really small amount of ourselves that is visible to others, a lot of the internal beliefs and our values, our values can be, you know, shown in our actions and how, you know, what we say, but a lot of our internal profile is kept to ourselves. And I think what I’m hearing and what you’ve described that feeling of vulnerability, and, and sharing what can be quite personal with a very public audience, it can take a lot of courage, what I work with my clients on, and this is a great starting place for any coaching engagement. And I actually went with my first coach all those years ago, I remember, it was the exercise that I did with him that really turned the light on for me. It’s what really got me interested in how my mind works. And it’s a very simple exercise. And it’s called the core values exercise. Up until that point for me, I had never been asked, what are your values? I had no idea what the guy was talking about. And if I said to you, Katy, do you know what your values are? Yeah, so you’ve done the work. But it’s very easy to get wiped away in life and never paused and thought, you know, what’s important to me, both in my personal life, but also in my work life, what could I not do without, and if I were absent, I wouldn’t feel fulfilled in what I’m doing. So, to the point of balancing your vulnerability and how much you’re going to decide to share, when you put thought leadership content out there, I think you need to maybe do some reflection on your core values of what’s important to you. Because, if you use those core values, I’d like to think of them as a North Star. They’re what helps you navigate in making decisions. So, if you’re trying to decide what you feel comfortable writing about, or speaking about, if you’re really passionate about something, then we could look at how doing your thought leadership around that could actually ease the discomfort. And for me, I’m happy to share my top three core values. They are respect, then followed by personal growth. And finally creativity and personal growth. One is why I was delighted when you asked me to be here today because it’s about personal growth. For me, it’s for everyone. This is an opportunity for people to realise that there are ways that we can manage our mindset, and we can make it more comfortable to do what we want to do.

• Yeah, absolutely. And I think, yes, I was lucky enough to do and there’s a lovely question again talking about the importance of personal branding. And I think if you start with your values, it works minor kindness as other people being kind to me or me being kind to people because I think it matters in this horrific world we live in speaking up. After all, I feel that I need to speak up for other people because I’m bold and brash and can do it, and curiosity, because I always want to know how it works, basically, and I know these things about me because they fit me. And it’s taken me a while to distil them. But exactly that. And I think, when we talk a lot about personal branding, it kind of gets a bit clouded by this sort of idea that we’re a celebrity and that people really care what we have for breakfast. And, you know, no, no, no, don’t. Don’t think of it like that. Think of it as setting out the guardrails for what you will comfortably talk about. So, I will talk about being a woman of colour very comfortably, and I will chat about that quite loudly. But I don’t talk so much about my children, you know, I will on a one-to-one, but in a public arena, I tend not to that they live their own lives, I don’t want to get in their way. And there’s another question from Laura, that I will read out because this is now taking us in a slightly different direction. I quite like this. So, what are your opinions on having executive leadership share LinkedIn articles? Or having their own newsletter? Is this the best execution of top-down? Or is this better through the advocates who are more customer-client-facing every day? And in a way, this is kind of artificial, because once you have your thought leadership, it’s all about the content. Yes, they should be publishing thought leadership from their own profiles, but they can also write blogs, you can also pay behind their own profiles to bring it back into the circle of your company page. But yes, you’re effectively raising their profile, because that is raising the company’s profile by association. In other words, you’re celebrating your employees. And yes, your advocates can start to celebrate them too, by liking them, sharing them, etc. But one of the things that we do quite a lot of with our clients, is we video our thought leaders and you think, you know, I know that there are plenty of thought leaders that cringe at the idea of being on screen. But actually, there are tactics you can use, which is, first of all, understand the themes that you’re going to be talking about, make it very clear, share that information with them upfront in the same way as I did, I did review Karen, and I shared with you what we’ve done. So, take the fear out of it, and then run them as an interview style that stops that wooden, I’m here to talk about cloud computing type thing. People speak like that. But you know what I mean. And I think it really is about genuinely building up a rapport. So, they forget that the camera is there. And if you can do that, what happens is the real shine in their eyes appears and off, and they get very enthusiastic about their subject matter. It is part of how you can help them grow within the business, but more importantly, how you can begin to talk about some of your products and features and all sorts of things that you support and service in a much more human manner. Because now it’s being it’s someone who really cares that that’s talking about it. But one further question which was asked ages ago, and I’ve only just spotted it. I do apologise. And this is from Elena, saying many executives struggle to articulate their ideas for social media. Can you share practical steps to help them build that clarity, that confidence we talked about competence but clarity in their thought leadership journey. I think this is really interesting because thought leaders are also people who are really at the top of their game and can also have very scattergun minds that trip all over the place so keeping to working out with some clarity what you’re going to be known for, established for it’s really hard. How do you help folk that really need to hone down on leadership?

• There’s some really fun techniques that come to mind. So, again, back to the toolkit that I use time and time again, there’s a just thinking which would be most appropriate. So, there’s an area of practice called neurolinguistic programming. And it’s an area that I’m not deeply versed in. However, I have been fortunate enough to be taught a number of tools that fall within this field of personal growth. Some of the things that come to mind to help with this challenge would be using visualisation as an exercise. So, I think sometimes some of these practices, they’re very alien to the corporate world. And you might get people maybe the first time they engage in a practice, like visualisation, they may feel a little bit weary and, and I’ve seen after the first time people coming back to session saying, can we do that again, that was so impactful for me. So, what I mean by visualisation would be. So is it actually being facilitated, to imagine, so I would facilitate, a that’s a process of my client, the leader, the executive, being able to imagine they have achieved what they’re trying to achieve. So, if it were creating a piece of thought leadership, and how it’s received, we go into great detail of, you know, they can see the day when they’ve published and they’re seeing all the feedback coming back in and it’s amazing. And I’m not a neuroscientist, I think you know, someone who is, but what that does, so scientifically, it’s been proven that using these kinds of techniques, gives your brain a mental dress rehearsal of what you’re going to do. And your brain doesn’t understand the difference between that dress rehearsal and reality. And so, when you come to step through the stages of actually planning and doing the work to get the end result, the thought leadership, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to be able to, both in terms of your confidence, but also the quality of your work, because you’ve, you’ve already in your subconscious, you’ve already done it. And so, things like that if people are interested in delving into this area anymore, I would say, if you were speaking to me as your coach or looking at up online, you’d be looking at things like exercises like future pacing, which is where you imagine that future goes, everything’s happened, you’ve been successful, and you work back in stages, stopping off periodically between that future date and the current date, to examine, you know, what have you done in that, in that stage before achieving the goal? How did it feel? What were you doing? What does it look like, since it’s all the dress rehearsal? So that’s really powerful. There is one other tool, which I mentioned called perceptual positioning. And this is really useful when maybe someone is stuck for perspective and ideas. So, the perceptual positioning exercise, features the coach, facilitating a conversation with the other person, firstly, in the first person as themselves, but then the coach would invite that other person to imagine that they are assuming the role of someone else. And that someone else someone significant, who can give perspective on the challenge. It could be someone that they know someone, they work with a friend or family member, it could be someone from history, it could be anyone, but what your brain is doing, then it’s happening again to the subconscious. And it’s throwing out ideas and suggestions that if you just sat there on your own, you may never have come up with. So that’s the second phase. The third phase of perceptual positioning is that the coach will ask the individual to imagine that they were a fly on the wall, listening to all of that dialogue before it is sort of a global perspective. And to look at some of the themes that are coming out what would a fly on the wall reflect on what they’d heard, both from the individual first person but also from that person that’s been invited in that other character. They’ve invited him to give perspective. You wrap all that up, and you’ve got a real goodie bag of insight perspectives that can then be used to create content.

• Yeah, spot on is absolutely fantastic because it is the biggest challenge is to draw it as the market is drawing the stuff out of out of your leaders or your executives. In fact, one of the things tricks we use behind that, which is very, very similar, is going back to our buyers, finding out what their pain points are, and then presenting the pain point back at the thought leader and saying, Well, you know, the biggest challenge is legacy systems. This is what they’re fighting with. How would you address that if you were just chatting to them? And what happens is they’ll go through the gamut. And, it’s a bit like talking therapy, isn’t it? Well, yeah, they go through the whole thing and then begin to realise that there are patterns and correlations and that they begin to see the shape of what they’re talking about. So, there’s lots of little bits, you know, it’s as hard for those being involved in the process of coaching, or marketing as it is for the thought leader. And if you really want it to work, you will have to work together, not throw it over the fence at them and hope like hell they’ll just get on with it.

• These things happen, they have to be a partnership, it’s you have to have a safe space, in which both the person facilitating and the recipient feel comfortable enough to share and explore. There’s the trust and credibility built up there. And yeah, your partner. It’s not one person telling or directing the whole piece.

• Yeah, we’ve got one last question before we wrap up. So, we are running a little bit behind. And it’s probably one for me, actually, from Tom, who says in terms of social, how do we encourage senior stakeholders to take part? From low engagement, organic engagement can take a long time to grow. Yes, it can. Patience is a virtue. But, it can be very difficult to keep motivation going. Part of it, I always think is setting expectations, which is letting them know that it will take time. And also get into batch-producing content. So, there’s a lot going up from before the motivation begins to wane. And the final one is put paid behind it to help them out. If they haven’t got a lot of followers make life easy for them. I’m sure others will think of many more. But those are off the top of my head. Listen, Karen, you have I could talk to your pages about the practical advice, as maybe think about things in different ways in which we could talk to some of our clients and our thought leaders within those clients to get more out of them. It really is very clear how coaching can give a definition and understanding of your own values and understanding of what you can talk about, and how to build your confidence and be vulnerable. And understand who you are as you go out to your potential customers, partners, and employees. Thank you very much, Karen. Really appreciate this. So, we’ll sign off for now. There will be another LinkedIn live from immediate future next month, and I’ll let you know about that. But in the meantime, please keep dropping in the comments. If you want to get in touch with Karen, she’s our speaker on this and you can find her LinkedIn profile and direct messages there. I’ll respond to all the questions that we’ve had after the event, and I’m sure Karen can join in with anybody who wants to have further conversations. So, thank you for tuning in. And we’ll see you again next month.

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