Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I've interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. To join me in the future, then please do drop me a line to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk That's S-E-E Change Happenn dot Co dot UK. Of course, you catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places.

So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is episode 105 with the title Voice for Change and I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Fiona Brennan Scott. Fiona is a trainer, coach, speaker and author of Breathtaking Communication. When I asked Fiona to describe her superpower, she said she can identify the strengths people have with their engagement skills and key changes that will be transformative. Hello, Fiona, welcome to the show.

Hello, Joanne, and thank you for having me here.

Absolute pleasure. So, Fiona, voice for change, how does that resonate with you?

I love the description. Thank you very much. I say in my book that our voice has got a voice with a small v and a capital v, because the small voice is the physical thing, what's made in our voice box. But voice with a capital v is our identity. It's who we are. It's what differentiates us from all other living creatures, because we get to use words and language to express ourselves and put ourselves out there in the room.

Oh, that's beautiful. I think that's really beautiful. I can relate. So much voice is so much more than just the noise and the sound and the waves that resonates in our ear. As you say, the identity expresses our happiness, our sadness, our passion, whatever it may be. I think that's truly beautiful.

It also helps explain why there is so much fear around public speaking, because to put our identity out into a space is an extremely vulnerable act and we take speaking for granted because we've been talking all our lives and we think everyone should be able to do it. But actually, to stand up and speak is sharing our story, our thoughts, our feelings with the world, and to be rejected, to be dismissed is an extremely painful act. So when I work with the client, I hold the preciousness of that identity and seek to honour it in my work with them. So I consider it a very. It's almost emotionally surgical to do that work and to help them have the courage to grow and change and dare to achieve their. To accomplish their full.

Because when you are public speaking or standing up in front of a group, whether you're a leader, briefing the team, state of the nation talk, or leading a project, whatever it may be, or professionally speaking, you are effectively putting yourself out there. Your ideas and people are going to judge you. We're very judgmental species, aren't we? How you look, how you sound, let alone way we think and what we're telling people. There's a whole judgement there. And if you're not used to that, that fear, and it's a real fear, isn't it? That of being judged or rejected, that all comes into this public speaking error, doesn't it?

Yes. And my mission is to level the playing field, because there's only a small, select group of people, particularly in the UK, that are stepping up and speaking out, especially in government. And what if we could level the playing field and give everyone the courage, whether it's gender, race, whatever identity group they belong to, to be heard and not fear the rejection? I think we would have a true democracy where we would have people representing us who are good people.

That's an interesting saying. Talk about good people. Are people fundamentally good or bad? I think there's a perception that people are fundamentally bad or out for themselves. But studies I've seen show that people inherently believe they are good people. Everyone believes they're a good person from their own perspective. No one wake up and say, I'm an evil person, would they? They all believe they have a perspective, that they're doing good for some reason.

I think it's about capacity. I think we have the capacity for both. And we're shaped by our environment, by who loved us and how we were loved or didn't love us. And so there's so many internal. There are so many external factors that influence who we become. And good or bad can be very moral judgments, so they're not necessarily helpful. Yeah.

So when you're working with your clients and your coaching, what are the key challenges? I mean, we talked about this, overcoming the fear, but what are the key things that hold people back fundamentally in their communications and their engagement styles?

It's such a wide variety. Joe. I'm very fortunate to work with a very diverse group of people. And if I think about the last couple of years, often it can be accents where people feel that they're not heard because of their accent. And interestingly enough, the people that really need the help aren't in the room because that's about audience perception and often about audience education. So it can be about giving the person the confidence to challenge people who aren't listening and to set people up for good listening and to challenge where people are discriminating. And you can't do that without confidence and without the affirmation that I often give people to celebrate their accent and understand that it's very much a part of their identity to get back to what we opened with. It's also across the board.

I would say one of the main challenges, about 80% of my client base are in STEM science, technology, engineering, medical, manufacturing, accountancy. And they have gravitated towards what they love, whether it's figures, engineering, scientific stuff, and they've become really good at that. They've studied it, they are subject matter experts. But actually, as they are promoted and I work with either current or aspiring leaders, they find that their main job is now not about the thing that they studied, but about leading people who are doing that and they realise they don't have those communication skills to effectively engage their audience, their stakeholders, whoever that is, whether it's a conference, whether it's a meeting room and putting a presentation together and delivering that is something that terrifies them. And I think it's almost worse for someone who's a subject matter expert because they've become really comfortable and really confident in that expertise and now they're feeling incompetent because they're not getting their message across. So most of my audience, most of my clients need the tools and techniques to close the gap between being competent, being very competent in their field and being confident at communicating that.

Yeah, because there's a huge gap between knowing your stuff and being able to communicate that in a way where people can understand it, resonate with it, take something away from it, take action themselves.

Yes. And interestingly enough, the people I don't draw as clients is the people who lack self awareness, because there are an awful lot of people out there who aren't aware that they're not good at that. And sadly, they're in front of meeting rooms and audiences because of their expertise, but they're not effectively communicating and it becomes the job of the audience to decipher and interpret the key message. And that can be quite exhausting if the person speaking isn't making it easy for them.

Yeah, you got to be able to turn complex information into bite sized chunks that I always say that a Daily Mail reader could understand. The average age, or I believe a Daily Mail reader's reading age is about eleven or twelve years old. So you got to try and remove the buzzwords remove the acronyms. And again, you talk about the self awareness. If you're not aware that you are falling into lingo and jargon and assuming a level of knowledge, then that's where you leave people behind. You're not always speaking to your peers, you're speaking to educate, or speaking to get a thought across. Yeah, I find that hugely challenging.

It's about so much more than the words, though, Joe, because a lot of how we communicate is about our body language, about making eye contact. It's a dance between the audience and us, where only one party is speaking, but we can listen and watch and have that conversation with our audience through our engagement and picking up on their body language and their facial expression, but also having body language and facial expression of our own that we are perfectly capable of doing in a one to one. But when we get to stand in front of an audience, something happens and we do unnatural things with our body and voice. So I would say that those words are important. They are essential. The arc of our talk, the use of stories and data effectively is very important. But our body language and our tone of voice, how we modulate our voice is key in terms of that engagement and that dance. It's the rhythm, it's the texture, it's everything else above and beyond the words themselves.

Yeah, it's how you make people feel, isn't it? We always say this adage, people remember the facts and figures, but they always remember how you made them feel. And it is. It's about generating that connection, that engagement, that emotion, all those kind of things is a well known phrase. Facts don't change people. I can tell you all this data, I can tell you not to smoke, I can tell you not to drink, I can tell you not to drive too fast, and you'll just dismiss that and go, yeah, but I can rationalise that I'm safe, it'll be okay for me. But until you get the feeling of those figures and the impact it can have on you, you'll never take action. And that's, I think, what academics and people are trying to communicate, big ticket things like the government and all this, they've got to find that a feeling, haven't they?

Yes. To quote Simon Sinek, emotion trumps reason, and that happens every time. And in terms of the work that I do, a lot of my clients will be very cerebral. And when we're very cerebral, our voice is in the upper resonators. And if we're not vocally connected with our gut and our breath isn't connected with our gut. We're not going to connect with the gut of our audience, which sounds a bit hideous, but basically the gut is the emotional centre of the body. So we have millions of neurons in our brain, but we have hundreds of thousands of neurons in our gut. And getting the breath so that we're emotionally connected and our words are emotionally connected means that we can really engage our audience.

And that below the waterline work is very much foundational in terms of what I do with every client. So we can all do the. Well, we can read about and do work on presentation and hair and makeup and all the outward. Not trivia, but it's external, it's above the waterline. But the real work happens below the waterline. The foundation work, the posture, the breathing, the vocal control, breath control and being truly engaged with yourself. I like to use an analogy of a cello or a double bass. If we were to say that playing a cello is about the strings and the bow, that's only half the story.

The real story is the craftsman who hollowed out that wood, who created an instrument that resonates. And when the bow strikes the strings, that whole instrument resonates and beautiful sound fills the space and our body has that capacity.

I just related to the story. You're saying there. I went to see the film the colour purple yesterday, the modern one, again, Steven Spielberg was involved with it. And I could spend all day talking to you about racism. I could spend all day talking to you about patriarchy and misogynistic behaviour and how black women are doubly oppressed through racism and through oppression, through misogyny. I could tell you that all day and it would not resonate. You go, yeah, whatever this film, it took me on this journey. I went through anger, I went through pains, compassion, happiness, joy, hope, disillusionment.

Hopes and dreams were dashed and then rebuilt. I was taken through all these emotions, through story, through music, through engagement. And at the end of it, I came out and go, I now understand racism. I now understand into the intersection of misogyny against black women in a way that I had never been able to describe it before. And I will now hold that with me for the rest of my life, because I've really engaged with it. So the power of that story and that journey it took me on transcended two basic facts. That's all it was. And it explained that to me in a nutshell, in a way, that I was crying at the end.

I was absolutely crying my eyes out. It was so engaging. So you're right, it is around how do we communicate a simple or one thing or two things that you need to get across in a way that people can resonate with that and take it away and take action.

Yes. And I had a very interesting conversation around story with someone in the last year who looked at me and said, you like to tell a story, don't you? And sadly it was a criticism, not a compliment. And I thought about it and a month later we had another conversation in which I'd been at this meeting and I decided to just say very, very little and to see what that played out like and just observe. And afterwards the person said, oh, quite a patronising person said, you did so well. And I said, well, I actually had a think about what you said and the challenge for me and in terms of inclusion, Joe, I'm the only non english, non privileged christian person in the group, so I'm different on three levels. And although I am relatively privileged and I said, you know, I had to think about what you said about stories and the problem is I'm irish and irish people love a good story. And she oh, ok. And I said, and the other problem is I'm a.

You know, Jesus was the best storyteller. He just told the best stories ever. So I guess culturally and in terms of my faith, I'm just addicted to stories and I really like them. But it was just so interesting to think how othering people can be done in such a subtle way. But actually we need to embrace our story. We need to embrace who we are and realise that it's okay to be who we are and to live that.

I used to run an it company and I was always using analogies, metaphors, stories, whatever it is, to illustrate points. And my ops director came up to me, said, I love when you say that. It's so colourful. I can picture that in my mind, the way you explain that with this metaphor, this story, I never realised I did it. But the more I think about it is because I think very visually, I think in pictures, I think in not just pictures, full action movie in my head, I can play out an entire day ahead of me, imagining the entire day and putting everything in boxes and from the right from packing my handbag to putting my coat on so I can go through this checklist and I can do all this through a story in my head. People talk about memory, these people who have huge memories, they invent a story around to remember things. I create a story in advance of what I'm going to be doing and I act out that story for the day and amend it as I go. So when I'm thinking about recalling information, I've always associated with a story.

A feeling, a metaphor. Something's in there. So when that feeling pops into my head, I've got access to that story. And it comes straight out as my way of translating my brain storage out to the world through this story that I've told. I may not remember the exact words, but I remember the story around it. And then the words pop out. So I think, for me, it's something I never realised I did until now. As a professional speaker, I'm on stage and someone asks me a question or something have happened, or I'll suddenly say something and then ping.

A story pops into my head. And suddenly the story gets woven into what I'm saying out of nowhere. And people always say, wow, I loved how you wove stories into that all the way through, because it makes it so much more interesting, doesn't it?

A story is a very economical way of communicating. I mean, poetry is the ultimate economy, but it can be obscure and it can take time to unpack. So a story is a beautiful in between way of economising. If you think about you going to see the colour purple in 2 hours, you understood a lifetime and generations of problem in one evening. So it is incredibly powerful. And don't get me wrong, I do get people who love that storytelling side of me. But it was interesting to watch it in the exception rather than the rule, where somebody didn't really appreciate that.

I get it completely. I used to run it companies. I've been in it, well, probably five, six of my life, if you like. My adult life, that's my career. So I've got very used to being very black and white, very on off, very binary about things. Work doesn't work. I was an electronics engineer. It either worked or it didn't work.

So you get used to speaking to people in that sort of language. And then when someone can't see the fault in a circuit, because they haven't be able to divide the circuit in two and work out whether the fault is left or right, of where you've divided it, and then you do left and right again, left and right again, till you get down to a few millimetres wide. And it has to be in that line. So I think very clearly about half splitting and narrowing things down. But that doesn't work for people who don't have that logic. So you have to be able to step back and tell the story around it. Okay, we haven't got a picture, but we got sound. I can hear you, but I can't see you.

That must mean there's something wrong with the vision. Okay, so what's wrong with the vision? So we can ignore everything to do with sound. We just look at the vision. So you have to just describe it differently and tell that story. It's a real challenge to say you work with people who are leaders and experts in their field, but not necessarily develop their communication style and skills and voice, if you like.

Yes, and they are. I'm so fortunate that I've worked with fabulous people over 23, going on 24 years and such a wide variety of disciplines, and even getting to help people with wedding speeches. Joe, which is a lot of.

Did. My daughter got married two years ago and I had to write her speech and I wasn't too daunted as a professional speaker, but I was kind of more daunted the fact that everyone knew I was a professional speaker. So I had to be doubly good and humorous, entertaining, not too embarrassing, taking it to the edge, not over the edge. There's a whole lot of dynamics in there, isn't that? You got to play with.

There's a double whammy, because one of the toughest audiences is the audience that has known you all your life or who knows you personally. So you had the double whammy because you had that, plus the fact that people had very high expectations. And I think that is one of the problems with public speaking, which I've touched on already, is that people think, if I can talk, or even if you're very talkative, you must be able to speak, but there's quite a difference. And, in fact, in some ways, introverts make better actors because they're better at inhabiting a character, because they're used to seeming less in public, because there's a lot that's going on beneath the surface, whereas an extrovert has to, and I speak as an extreme extrovert, has to shelve a lot of themselves and a lot of what people see first before they become someone else.

Yeah, I've noticed that on chat shows. I'm a big fan of the Graham Norton Friday night show on the BBC in the UK, and you see famous actors. Tom Cruise, I think, is a great example that I always think about where you put him on a sofa and you start to have a conversation with him and he doesn't seem to have anything about him. You suddenly realise that everything you think or you know about Tom Cruise is actually a Persona of a character he plays. And when you see these people off script just being themselves, many people don't necessarily live up to that belief you have of them for the characters they play. I always think about some of the actors, and I'm the same. I'm a raging introvert, really. Even though people would say I disguise it well.

I really want to hide after events. I want to get out there, do my stuff and run away. I don't seek the limelight in that way, but I can put myself into that zone and act in an extroverted way or an outgoing way or an engaging way. I think you say it's a myth that everybody who gets on stage is an extrovert. A lot of us, the cohort, professional speakers, I know there's many of us who sort of all hide in the corner after us going, thank God that's over. Can we go home now? It's a real challenge, isn't it, to put yourself out there, give a part of you. That's what you do. I will say I'm ripping a part of me out of my chest and giving it to the audience.

And if I don't come off stage absolutely exhausted and given everything, I can't hold something back from the audience because that's selfish. I got to give everything I've got. It really drains you after a performance. So huge respect to actors or people who do stage shows day in, day out, doing two performances a day. And that must be really exhausting to give that part of you all the time.

Yes, it is. And I think I also feel more exhausted afterwards. I'm always pumped up and excited beforehand, and afterwards I feel quite drained. One of the biggest challenges I have is that my superpower, to use the word you used at the start, is enabling and empowering other people to shine. So my preference is to be a director in a person's life rather than to be the actor myself. So getting up on a stage and doing a keynote for me is a challenge because I'm talking about the thing that I want to help other people to do, but being that person myself. So it's quite a contradiction, really. And because I'm an extrovert, people don't find it quite difficult to believe and understand that that's a reality.

But it is. It's so rewarding. For instance, David Duffett, who won last year's speaker factor, I had coached him and just the joy of watching him up there doing his thing and being brilliant. And the year before with Hilary Briggs, exactly the same. Just the joy of seeing them accomplish their potential and smash it and go. I was a part of that. I helped release.

Well done.

Those exquisite abilities. That's my job.

Well done. They both did a fantastic job. I mean, if anyone listening that's not aware, we're both members of the professional speaking association and we have an annual competition for emerging speakers called speaker factor. And it's all about people who are stepping out their comfort zone to deliver a five minute talk on stage in front of their peers and being judged and marked on various criteria. Engagement, stagecraft, all those things are part of it. So, yeah, it's a daunting task. I've taken part in it many years ago. I did really badly at the time, but, yeah, it is a trial in front of your peers, isn't it? And a real character building exercise.

Yes. And the economy required to say something really impactful in five minutes is a huge challenge. 20 minutes is easy, but five minutes, that's hard, that's tough.

I did my initial kind of evolution at toastmasters, and Toastmasters was always about the five minute talk, how to get in, come up with three points, close it, summarise and get out before the red light came on. It was always drummed into me. So, as you say, five minutes can be easy. 15 minutes is kind of that middle ground where you got loads to say, but you haven't got too much. You haven't got too much time. I find that if I'm not careful, 45 minutes to an hour is like, push the button, I'm in flow and it just comes out now. So, yeah, 45 minutes to an hour is easier. But, yeah, 15 minutes, 1015 minutes is that middle ground where it's kind of.

I haven't got time to explore all this. I've got to really kind of summarise my point down here.

So the ted 18 minutes is perfect. That's the sweet spot. So one of the things I do, which a lot of people probably don't know, is that I preach. I don't like the word preaching. It sounds very preachy, but I do that. It's a talk at a church from time to time, about every six weeks, and I aim for 15 minutes so that it's 18 minutes, which is probably something I could pass on to your listeners, is that you need to allow 20 minutes, 20% of your time, to be empty in your practise, because when you get in front of a live audience and you're doing that beautiful dance with them, your pace, your pause, the dynamic of how you speak changes and if you've been given a set amount of time and you haven't allowed 20% for that, you're going to run over. And it's exquisite to have the relaxation of that capacity to just go with it and make it this communication in front of your audience and with your audience. Because there are few things worse in public speaking than someone who rushes to say all they have to say in the hope that they get their message across and say everything they want to say in the time they've been allowed, when in fact, it should never be about that.

Because as an audience, our processing speed hasn't changed. With technology, we may be able to do everything faster, but we still process and absorb information at a certain rate. And if the speaker doesn't deliver at that rate, we're going to lose them.

Yeah, I sometimes find. But I'm on stage and I'm. I don't know, in the middle, at some point in the talk, I could feel myself wanting to close at some point. Maybe it's the audience, maybe I feel like I've given them enough at this point and I've got them engaged and I think, well, hang on a minute, if I go around that cycle again and introduce another topic, they're not ready for that. I think you just get that feeling sometimes. You think, actually, now is a good time to close this and re summarise, go to Q A and not overlabel it, isn't it? Label it. And I think I found that over the time. I was doing a talk in Newcastle a few years ago and I had.

I reckon I was probably a third of the way. No, two thirds of the way through the slides. And I thought, no, that's enough, that's enough. I know what slides come in next and I just treated it as a conclusion. And so I re summarised and said, right, let's get A-Q-A. You've been a fantastic audience and nobody knows what you're going to say next. Nobody knows what you're going to do, what slides are missing. So you just go to close and you can do that whenever you want and don't be afraid.

And as you say, people try to.

Cram too much in.

That's beautiful, Jo, because that sounds to me like you were connected with your emotional core, where you had this instinct, and you were also tuned into the room and you were tuned in to the emotional response and the connection with your audience that brought you to that place. And so you had the courage to be unselfish and to bring things to a close, and no one is going to criticise you for being too short. I've never heard it happen. And also the Q A is a gift to the audience because you know that everything you say at that point is going to be specifically addressing an area of interest for some of the audience. And I believe in doing the same. I think an extended Q A is always a delight because it becomes that conversation and it has that dynamic and it changes things up. And when you know your subject, your topic, when you are an expert, you know that nobody can ask you a question that you can't answer. And actually, if they do, you're absolutely delighted because it's a learning opportunity and you can say, I haven't been asked that before and I haven't even thought about it.

I'm going to go and find that out and come back to you. Or you just think on the spot and come up with an idea and then say, what are your thoughts? Have you ever thought anything about that? So that's a delight. I don't know if you're familiar with my book, but I'm also a trained time to certified coach. So I trained in time to think about six years ago. And the strength of time to think is very much about presence and listening. And I've written a chapter in the book called consider creating a thinking environment. So what if as a speaker, we created a thinking environment where the ten components of a thinking environment are present? So an environment of encouragement, a place where we acknowledge feelings, a place where place matters, and places about how we show up in our appearance that says to the other person, you matter, but also a place that acknowledges the challenges that the environment might present to the people there. A place where there's diversity and equality, a place where there's ease and attention and appreciation and the other components that I won't rattle off.

But what a dynamic environment if we can create a thinking environment where people are learning. I mean, why wouldn't you do that?

Yeah, the word that's jumped into my head as you're talking there is rumination, the ability for people to ruminate on what you just said. You have to build in pauses or moments of reflection, rhetorical questions, whatever it may be, and allow it to sit with the audience. And you as a speaker have to be comfortable with that silence, or have to be comfortable with holding that stage, allowing people to ruminate on that before moving on to the next point or segueing, bringing that with you. I think we want to just hit people sometimes like we're banging people we're driving content. Next slide. Next slide. Next slide. But the ability to pause, reflect, scan the room, just watch people's reactions.

You can see people nod or making notes. So it's allowing people to do that without bombarding them. And I think what you said there is the key. There is. It's almost like virtual listening. You're not actually listening to what they're saying, but you're trying to listen to what they're thinking and where they are with you, so that you're judging how you're delivering by whether they're ready for more. I think that's part of it as well, isn't it?

Yes. One of my favourite quotes is during the pause, the meaning goes on. And that was shared with me by Joan See, my first drama teacher in South Africa. And last year I heard a quote from Dubusi which says, the music is what happens between the notes. And I think that concept of silence and time to think, time to process is just exquisite because it shows respect for our audience, doesn't it? Gives them time to consider. That's powerful.

Yeah. I remember seeing a professional speaker at one of the speaking events and she stood up. She gave us, I think it was 40, 45 minutes talk. At the end of it, I thought to myself, she's only actually really told us one thing. And see, took a whole 45 minutes to talk about that one thing. And it's beautiful because it was presented from different angles. There were stories, there was whys in there. It wasn't overly complex.

It would just take away this one thing about how people interact. And it was such a simple thing and it wasn't overly complicated, but I had time to explore that from multiple different angles. And I thought it was a real good example of not trying to do ten things. Just get that one point, land it well, weave in all the aspects to it. But that's your takeaway, that one thing. Oh, that's brilliant. So you can do it.

I've also been known, when I've done a talk at church, to finish up a few minutes early and just say, I'm just going to allow a few minutes. I've even asked a musician to just gently play the guitar for a few minutes, to allow people sit with their thoughts and make a note or draw a picture. And that feels right. Sometimes it's almost like having a bubble bath with a message, where you get to sit and soak and enjoy and appreciate and make it your own. And I think that's where the respect comes in, is because you're delivering a message, but your audience needs to make it their own and apply it to themselves. And one of the things I say to my clients is, start with the end in mind. Start with your audience. What do you want them to think, feel and do as a result of your message? How do you want them to respond? And if you keep that front and centre from the very moment you've been asked to deliver that talk, you won't lose your audience and you will gain their respect and you will impart something of value.

And time is so precious. It's the only thing that's finite in terms of currency. If you're going to take 20 minutes or 45 minutes of people's time, make it worthwhile, add value to their lives.

Yeah, I do use, think, feel and do. Those are the key things for me. And also focusing on the takeaways. Think, feel and do. But also, what's the real nub or the essence of why I'm here? And write the talk, or think about the talk backwards for the moment, people leave. Where do you want them to be? Recognise that they're busy people, that if they're not careful, they'll move on to the next thing immediately. And then whatever you've said will go straight out of their head. So you got to try and leave them really clear instructions.

I want you to write this down, or if you take nothing else away from today's talk, take this away. So you got to find that essence of the thing you want it to remember. And, yeah, it's a skill to think that way. And often you start at the beginning or the PowerPoint slide or all the information you want to give them without distilling it down to those that nub or the real crux of it.

And also the opposite can happen because sometimes we can extrapolate where one word or one phrase the speaker says sends us off on a tangent because of the place we're at in our lives or what we're experiencing, we can go off on our own tangent, but actually the speaker has facilitated that. So it's not holding on too tightly to the impact that we're going to have, but actually having an idea of the impact we're hoping to have with our audience.

Yeah. And I think some of that you get from networking with the audience. After you, you listen to the feedback or people always want to say, oh, wow, I loved you. That was brilliant. I really love the way you said this, or this bit stands out for me and you come away going, wow, I didn't realise that bit was the impactful bit, then you realise that when people keep telling you the same thing, or that bit, that bit, it's like, right, I have to remember that chord and put that in every tune sort of thing. It's there, isn't it?

Isn't that the power of inclusion, though? When we're inclusion, we give people permission to do that as a speaker because we've recognised upfront the diversity and equality of our audience. And I love the time to think. Definition of equality. It's that even if we have different roles, more senior, more junior, even if we're different ages and have different life experiences, when it comes to our thinking, we are equal and equally, and what we have, our thoughts are equally valuable.

Yeah, I talk a lot about that and around perspective and opinions, and we all have a perspective, we all have an opinion, we don't have to be right or wrong, we just have to have our view of the world. And recognising that other people have their own view of the world, their own perspectives, their own opinions, is healthy. And I think we too often want to clash on arguing about outcomes rather than perspectives. If we can understand why someone thinks something or how someone came to that conclusion, or their lived experience that led them down that path, isn't that enriching to learn about people in that way?

Yes. And if we embrace difference, we will spend as much time as possible around people who think differently to us and who are as different as us as possible, because that's the only way we're going to grow.

Yeah. I did a talk the other day in London to a group of marketing professionals and I was talking to one of the delegates at the end. He was a man, he was kind of in his probably late 50s, but he said to me, how. How do I have conversations with people who are. Who are different? I'd be really worried about offending somebody. I'd be really worried about drawing attention to an attribute in the example he gave is, what if someone in the audience I was having a conversation with only had one arm? What do I do? Do I go and say, sorry about your arm or happened to your arm? I said, well, actually, why don't you have a conversation as if they had two arms or if they had no arms, whatever it may be, have a conversation as a human being. And then if that person wants to share with you about their arm, they will. If they don't, then it's actually about your curiosity, not about them.

It's all about you. So you got to separate your curiosity and what gain do they get out of this by explaining their life to someone who is curious? So I said, you just got to have conversations, and if you have that emotional intelligence and that cultural intelligence and compassion, then you'll be able to have better conversations. But to focus on an attribute of somebody and want to be curious about it is quite insulting. It's almost like it just reduces them to that one thing. Without seeing that, you could spend all day talking to Stephen Hawkin about his wheelchair and his voice synthesis, or you could talk to him about the planets and his theory of the universe. He'd much rather talk about the universe than his emotion neurone disease. So, yeah, it's kind of working where people are in that conversation, isn't it?

That's beautiful. Yes, absolutely.

You're supposed to say something else there so I could keep the podcast going. I've never hit dead end of this podcast.

Remember my quote during the pause, the thinking goes on, because I know it doesn't work that well for a podcast. But in terms of a conversation, it's always good to be comfortable with silence. And I think that's something that people are very uncomfortable with generally, because we live in a society of interruption, don't we?

I'm just practising the silence.

Your sound has gone, jo.

Oh, I can hear myself. You can't hear me. Oh dear. We're practising silence even more now. I'm going to tell you a story, see if you can get back to this. And one of the things I find is that when we're listening is kind of an underrated skill. And I think what happens is when we're communicating, we're often communicating to change someone's view or to tell them our view or our perspective. How many conversations do you have that don't involve telling somebody what you think, oh, I love this chicken.

Did you see that on telly or that film I saw the other day? Or. The conversations we have tend to be about telling somebody else our opinion. And what happens then is whoever's on the other end of that conversations tend to react with, well, my view is, or app didn't like that. Or no, actually, I prefer the salmon. I've had the chicken. We get into this debate and it becomes a perspective thing, and we often want to fix people. If you tell me that you're not feeling great today, you've had a bit of a tough day, you were running late. I'll start talking to you about time management, or how can I help? Or can we back the pressure off.

So we always want to fix. So I tell you something, you either want to argue back with me or I want to fix you. But we never hold that space for just listening and letting it ruminate and just hearing people. You don't need fixing. You just want someone to listen and maybe smile, maybe turn the head, tilt their head slightly, maybe give you a virtual hug, whatever it may be. But you don't need me to fix you.

When I transitioned from being a speech and drama teacher to a voice and speech coach, I looked for the least prescriptive coaching methodology, and I found it in time to think. And that what you've just talked about describes why I chose it, because it was about listening not to understand, listening not to respond, but listening to ignite. And so the opening question in time to think is, what would you like to think about, and what are your thoughts? And the principle of time to think is that you're listening generatively to see where the person's thinking will go and trust where their thinking will go. But one of the aspects of contracting is I will not interrupt you, even in silence, because sometimes we do some of our best thinking in silence, and I will not give you my perspective unless you ask for it. And this acknowledges the fact that we are the authors of our own best solutions, that I can have ideas, I can have suggestions, but actually, you have got the best possible solutions and perspectives and ideas, because yours are going to come out of your life, experience, your perspective, your world, and you have the solution. And all you really need is someone to hold the space while you discover that. And we spend so little time ruminating, to use the beautiful word you use earlier, to think, to explore. And there's something generative about doing that with another person.

When someone listens and holds the space for us, it becomes very creative and generative in a way that if we're on our own, we're not as good, I guess we're not as self compassionate as the patience and compassion another person can show when they're holding that space for us. And it's absolutely exquisite what happens in those space.

Someone shared a technique with me that they use, or they'd heard used in a company, and it's called rubber ducking. So the concept is that you can solve most of your problems just by saying them out loud and expressing them, so they become out of your head. You formulate them into thoughts that come out of your voice, out of your mouth. So the concept of rubber ducking is this organisation had this rule. You weren't allowed to ask for help on a technical challenge or whatever the problem was, unless you talk to the rubber duck first. So around the office, they put rubber ducks. Everyone used to bring their own little bath time rubber duck in different characters and whatever, they put them out in the office and you'd see people going up and standing in front of the duck, having a conversation with it. And then most of them go, solved it got light bulb moment.

They're going to sit down and get on with it. And sometimes when you're talking to someone who's just listening, it's that active thought and I think I do these listening exercises in one of my workshops where you have five minutes each and you're not had to say anything apart from thank you. Please tell me more. That's your only response if they freeze or stop. And what you end up doing is you end up going very superficial, and then you start going deeper and deeper with each iteration where you got to try and think of something else. Then more thoughts pop into your head. So by the end of five minutes, you've really gone deep on this. And just allowing someone to just do that without feeling, oh, that's the uncomfortable silence, or, I need to fix you, or I need to solve that problem.

Just. Thank you. Tell me more. Thank you. Tell me more. And you just bring it out and you bring it out at the end of it. The feedback I get is, wow, that was so cathartic. That was wow.

I've never gone that deep. Wow. Never thought about that terms. And when things will pop into my head that I'd never thought about before. So again, not having to respond or not needing someone to respond allows you to do that rubber ducking, if you like, and just talk to the ether and just keep going. It's like that next 5 miles on the treadmill. The next 5 miles are the ones you don't want to do, but suddenly you get to end if you go, wow, that was so productive.

You just reminded me of a habit I have. So I've been married for going on for 32 years to the same husband, and I often solve problems just by saying aloud. You can just start saying them aloud and I solve them. So he's my rubber duck. You've just made me realise I'm married to a rubber duck. But it also reminds me of, and I don't know who the author of this is, but the five levels of why. So if you ask why five times, you'll get to the truth. So if someone says, I'm sorry, I was late I missed the bus.

Why did you miss the bus? Oh, because my breakfast conversation ran over. Why did your breakfast conversation? And then you get to the truth. And when I started studying time to think, I was reminded of that. But it's far gentler, because five levels of why can sound a little bit like an interrogation.

Yeah, it can. Simon Sinek's book start with a why, isn't it? Is it Simon Sinek? Yes, that's all about the why. And I challenge people when I talk about diversity. Inclusion is you've got to have your own why. Why does it really matter to you to think more diversity, more inclusively? Why does it matter? Because if you don't understand your why, it will be inauthentic, it will be superficial, it won't be sustainable. So you've got to try and get it embedded into your core about why you believe something. I think encouraging people to think deeply about that is important. And I use Chat GPT and one of the prompts I have is use the five wise method to take an idea and then drill down each one until you get to the essence of it right at the end.

And it's a very good technique, as you say, to drill down to ideate. We can use problem agitate solution as another one, feed that into Chat GPT and it comes up with that sort of thought process. But I use the five whys to try and drill down to the nub of it.

So, in terms of why is inclusivity and diversity important? When I pivoted from being a speech and drama teacher to a voice and speech coach, I expected everyone on Harwell campus. I lived down the road in Harwell village to be my client because they're all in science, technology, engineering, some manufacturing. And it took me five years to get my first client on there. And I also thought I'd have a majority of females, because there is a lack of female representation in senior leadership and 80% of my clients in the first two years were white males. I'd always had people coming to me, even when I was a speech and drama teacher, through word of mouth. But when I started just doing that, I was delighted that I had clients, but disappointed about their profile, because I thought, I'm not reaching the people that really need the help. And obviously the people coming to me do need the help and I'm giving it to them. But actually, where is the diversity? And I really didn't know what to do about it, but I must have started doing something right.

And I think it's how I showed up on my social media, and in networking I mostly use LinkedIn and I do a lot of networking because within two years I started measuring. I looked again. I don't like to measure, it's not really my strength. And I relooked at my client base and realised I had one more female client than I had male clients. And I was getting a range of diversity that I hadn't before. And I do think it seeps out through your skin and how you speak and people start hearing something that makes them feel like your door is open to them. But I don't know quite what it is now.

I think it's all part of your personal brand, for want of a better phrase. I saw someone the other day talking about their chakra. It's all about that inner energy that you have and that alignment, how it resonates, how people feel that you're their kind of person, whatever it may be.

There'S a connection, possibly values. And in values of lockdown, Michelle Mills Porter was very good at helping me identify my core values. And through that I was able to put my values on my website. And I imagine that also was helpful. But I honestly don't think you can fake it, because I don't think you can either. I don't know what I did.

I think those values are important. The authentic. You can't just put something on the website. I want to be this, I want to be that people can smell out in authenticity. So it has to be a core of you who you are, your core values, your drivers, your mantras. And people have to say that about you as well. So it's not just what you say about yourself, it's what other people say about you. And I talk about this when we're talking about employers and recruitment marketing and their branding and stuff.

Are you trying to recruit people who into an organisation that you want to be, or are you trying to recruit people in an organisation that you are? So it's really important to try and have that alignment between who you are and what you say you are and fix that first and not try and be inauthentic about it, and then kid people in and go, actually, this is not the place I thought it was. You've lied to me. And then you just walk out the back door. So, yeah, it's about being very open. So the people you are dealing with, the people you are engaging with, are the people who want to engage with you because they align with you.

And that comes down to that below the waterline stuff. One of my favourite quotations is from the little prince by Anton de Santo Zupare. And a fox says to the little prince, what is essential is invisible to the eye, and that's about authenticity and about caring deeply about what other people may never see.

Yeah, there's another quote which I thought, I didn't know if you were going to go that way, but don't get upset with a lion for eating the antelope, it's what lions do. You can blame the lion for being a lion, but it's what it does. We try and blame people for who they are and sometimes it's just their behaviour and you can't change their behaviour, so you have to sort of mitigate it or understand it. And I think sometimes we get very upset when people aren't behaving in the same alignment as I am or we are, or the way we think. You just say, well, I can't rewrite your rule set for you, I just have to hang out with other antelope. It's fine, I'm cool with that.

Yes. It reminds me of. Did you see the crying game when it came out in cinemas in the. It's an incredible film. I don't know how it would be now, more than 20 years, it must be 30 years later. But the crying game. Forrest Whitaker is the main actor and he tells a story of a frog and a scorpion and they need to get across a river and the scorpion can't swim, and he asks the frog to carry him on his back and he says, you'll sting me. And he says, no, I won't, I promise.

And they're going across the river and at some stage, or maybe they're just on the other side, or they've just landed, the scorpion stings the frog and as he's dying, the frog says, why did you do that? And he said, it's my nature, it's what I do. I have never forgotten.

Very profound.

Very profound. But you have no, it's a very south african expression to go, you have to. But I highly recommend the crying game. I actually do want to see what it's like today and I can't say why, because it'll be a spoiler if I were to, but a very remarkable film and everyone in the cinema gasped at the exact same moment, which is why it was a wonderful.

You got me intrigued. Now I'm going to have to find it somewhere. I may have seen it. That was 45 years ago, wasn't it? 80s? It's really scary.

No, it must have been in the 90s because I saw it with Andrew when we were either dating or married.

We got married in 87, so 37 years this year.

Oh, wow. No, 1992.

Your daughter was born. Fantastic. Fiona, it's been amazing. We could rabbit on and chat all day. I'm sure we could. It's been fascinating. We've had a great chat before we went live and we're having a great chat now and I can carry on. But how can people get in touch with you? It's LinkedIn website, your book.

Tell us how we can find you.

Sure. So, yes, I am active on LinkedIn because I made up my surname. I am the only Fiona Brennan Scott on LinkedIn, so very easy to find. My website is bespoken.org Uk. My number is 778-085-6043 and my book is breathtaking communication. It's available, you can get a signed copy from me or you can listen on audible, where I read the book. It's also available on Kindle and from Amazon. Breathtaking communication with breathtaking as one word, which isn't a fantastic spelling, but it just looked better.

And I'm a fan of Gerd Manley Hopkins, who was very good at making up words that didn't exist because they just sounded right.

Yes. And you then know that you own that word and if anyone else uses it, they know they took it from you. So I'm a great believer in creating your own language, as long as you explain it, obviously. So thank you.

It's a pleasure. And thank you so much for your invitation. It's been a joy speaking with you, as always.

Thank you. Obviously, a huge thank you to you, the listener you've tuned in, you got this far. I'm really proud of you. Thank you. If you're not already subscribed, then please do subscribe to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites podcast. That's B-I-T-E-S. If you're loving what you're hearing, and I hope you are, please tell your friends and colleagues. Share the love.

I've got loads of other guests lined up over the next few weeks and months, and I'm sure you'll be equally inspired by them. And of course, if you'd like to be a guest yourself, if you're listening to this or you have any feedback, then please drop me a line to jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. Tell us how we can do better, if we can. Finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood. It's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.