Welcome to the Telling of Story Podcast. I’m your host, Storyteller Jules, and along with my guests, it’s my endeavour to explore the art and science of storytelling, to attract, engage, and retain a business audience, and to unpack why it works for some, and not for the many that try.
[00:00:21] Listen in as Rosalind talks about sharing your message with stories.
[00:00:30] Rosalind: As soon as somebody says, once upon a time, We almost get sucked into the story and it’s because we’ve been sitting around campfires sharing information verbally for millennia. That’s our mode of, of communicating. Before we started writing things down, we shared everything through stories, stories and songs and poetry.
[00:00:46] It was all about that. So humans are very tuned into storytelling and it’s a fabulous, fabulous tool for getting any message across. A really good story will sell the message a lot more than logically trying to convince somebody of something.
Jewels: In this episode, I have the pleasure of talking with Rosalind Cardenal.
[00:01:05] When growing up, Roz could not decide if she wanted to be a librarian, a vet, or the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup. She achieved none of these goals, but a fascination with human behaviour and neuroscience led her to a career in organisational development specialising in improving business outcomes by developing individuals, teams and organisations.
[00:01:26] After more than 20 years in corporate human resources and organisational development roles, A successful battle with cancer gave Roz the nudge to take a passion For transforming leaders and improving how individuals and organizations cope with change in a new direction. Leaving her senior corporate role in 2012, Roz established her consulting business, shaping change to achieve her goals.
[00:01:51] Roz’s expertise spans strategic planning, leadership development, organizational culture, change management, emotional intelligence, and employee engagement. She is a multi award winning leadership mentor and coach. Roz is a keen writer, and in addition to her book, The Resilient Employee, and her own blog, she is featured regularly in Leaders in Hills.
[00:02:12] Thrive Global and People Development Magazine, amongst many others. Roz continues her commitment to growing empowered female leaders with the development of a Women’s Leaders Archetypes Assessment and Sovereign Women’s Model. The assessment has been taken by over 10, 000 women globally and is being described as women’s leaders as life changing.
[00:02:33] In 2022, Roz traveled to Washington DC to collect a World of Difference Award from the International Alliance for Women for this work. Ros, welcome to the show.
[00:02:45] Rosalind: Thank you. Great to be here.
[00:02:46] Jewels: Ros, firstly, before I get too far into it, take me back to your childhood and why didn’t you win the Melbourne Cup?
[00:02:53] Rosalind: I got too tall to be a jockey, unfortunately.
[00:02:56] I’m nearly 5 foot 10 and it’s one of those things where jockeys are tiny. So I had all the aspirations when I was a small child and I had horses all my life. No Melbourne Cup for me.
[00:03:05] Jewels: No Melbourne Cup and the vet didn’t pay out either. You obviously have a thing with horses and animals.
[00:03:11] Rosalind: Yes, look, I almost made it.
[00:03:13] It’s one of those things when I sat the university entrance exams back in the Must be in late eighties now, I missed out by about three points and I was absolutely devastated. That had been my sort of dream career, but you know, it is what it is.
[00:03:25] Jewels: So let’s roll forward a couple of decades and perhaps, and tell me about, I’m really interested in this women’s leaders archetypes and model assessment, what’s the driver for creating that?
[00:03:37] Where did, where did that come from?
[00:03:39] Rosalind: It started for me back in 2016. And I’ve been working with leaders for decades now, and I’m accredited in a lot of different psychometric tools. I think I’m, it’s over 25 different psychometrics now. And one of the things that became really obvious to me in working with senior leaders, both men and women, that male and female leadership styles are quite different.
[00:04:00] And women often run into problems in organizations because they’re trying to emulate male styles. And then it comes across as too aggressive, too bossy, too bitchy, all those labels that women tend to carry in organizations. And so I started to really dig into and explore the idea of what makes women’s leadership different.
[00:04:18] And, you know, it’s not to say one’s better than the other. We need both to be really successful, but what makes it different? And I started researching and talking to women and I ended up with a research base of about 500, I think 538 women who initially participated and they were from all over the world and I spoke to the most amazing people, you know, women running incredible businesses, women in senior leadership roles about women in leadership, and then I distilled it down into a model and started to test it.
[00:04:42] And in 2018, we released the first round of the assessment tool and refined it over the past few years. And like I said, or like you read out, I’ve had more than 10, 000 women take the assessment now. So we’ve got a nice big chunky body of research that we can use. We’ve got data we can use for benchmarking and so on.
[00:04:58] So it’s been a passion project, but it’s fun and I love it.
[00:05:02] Jewels: Tell me why it’s different. Why Mars and I know men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I think I got that right. But why is the leadership styles different? Why are they seen as different?
[00:05:14] Rosalind: If we go back and we look at, you know, tribal societies and First Nations communities and things like that, and the way they do leadership, there’s the distinct difference between the way that women and men naturally lead.
[00:05:24] So, for men, leadership is often really hierarchical, and it’s about strength, and it’s about, you know, who’s the best warrior or the best hunter or whatever, so it’s the strength that they bring. And in a, in some First Nations communities, the men manage everything that happens outside of the village, and the women manage everything that happens inside the village, for example.
[00:05:41] And women’s leadership tends to be based on nurturing and compassion, so women leaders step up because they’re a healer or a midwife, for example. looked at women led businesses, which often had only women employees, not by design, but just because that’s how it turned out. I found there was much less hierarchy.
[00:05:59] It was more a sort of, almost like a Venn diagram as opposed to a pyramid hierarchy that you see in a lot of organizations. And so that sort of really got me into this, you know, what is really different about it. And, you know, when we talk about the differences, you know, people say, look, we get it. We know that men are more sort of tactical and women are more compassionate, for example.
[00:06:15] And it goes back to basically, you know, who we are. Essentially, and modern organizations in the Western world, um, operate on a very male construct of leadership. So male leadership is what’s seen as valuable. So that idea of, you know, being a bit aggressive, being quite, you know, hierarchical, being quite strength focused, you know, that sort of drive is what’s valued in organizations.
[00:06:37] And interestingly enough, when I started to really look at it. The modern workplace was designed in the industrial revolution, which was about 250 years ago, when the people who went off to work were the men, the women weren’t there. So the modern workplace was designed by men for men. And it doesn’t necessarily suit women, which is part of the reason why women are so underrepresented at leadership levels in organizations and on boards and, you know, even in politics, for example, because, you know, things like, The, you know, working, you know, if we look at villages, for example, and tribes, women often are caring for multi generations, they’ve got children around them, they’ve got old people around them.
[00:07:14] So there’s a sort of sense of responsibility to the collective and in modern workplaces we’re told we have to go to work and leave our kids at home, you know, leave our kids with somebody else. So, it’s this real, it’s almost like we’ve lost the sense of what it is to be humans at work and kind of created a workplace which is quite artificial and doesn’t really suit us.
[00:07:34] And look, it doesn’t suit a lot of men too. I mean, there are a lot of men with caring responsibilities who would, you know, probably quite rather have more flexibility to help look after kids, for example, or their elderly parents. But it’s just not there at the moment in the way that we work.
[00:07:47] Jewels: Can you share or do you have an opinion on why it’s taking so long for this to change?
[00:07:53] I mean, yes, for 150 or 200 years, perhaps the workforce has been dominated by males, but for the last, hopefully, you know, sort of 50, I guess that started to shift. Why is it such a slow change to get women to those senior levels? Do you think?
[00:08:12] Rosalind: It’s very much about attitudes and thinking around the change.
[00:08:16] So what we found, look, COVID was a wonderful example. We went high and we worked flexibly. It worked. One of the, when COVID first happened, the main concerns I was hearing from senior leaders is how do we tell if people are working if we can’t see them? And it changed really quickly into actually people putting in and they’re working really long hours and they’re doing amazing work for us, even though we can’t see them.
[00:08:38] But then just as quickly, it shifted back again. And we’re hearing stories of senior leaders insisting that people come back to the workplace. It’s this drive to get back where I can see you and control you. And I think that’s the root of it is the need for control and for power and for status. It’s almost like if I’m a very important senior leader, it’s a bit like if a tree falls in the forest, can anyone hear it?
[00:08:59] If I’m really important, am I really important if nobody’s around to see me? I’m, I’m being a bit facetious, but that’s kind of almost how I see it is this, I need to have people around me, the trappings of success, the, the office, the car park under the building, the EA who brings me coffee, that kind of thing to demonstrate to the world that I’ve got that status and power.
[00:09:18] Jewels: And is that not present for females, that same desire? In
[00:09:22] Rosalind: some females, but when women, it tends to be expressed a little bit differently. So I find with women, the, the need for status and power is more about. for the good of the collective. It’s socialized power. It’s not to say that women can’t do the sort of personal power and status thing.
[00:09:37] We’ve certainly got examples of that and you can see it in some women leaders, but the ones that are most successful are the ones that do it in this sort of socialized way. Women who do it using that, again, that, model of male leadership that works for men are the ones that do get those labels. They come across as cold, as harsh, as aggressive, you know, the devil wears Prada is a classic movie about exactly that.
[00:09:59] Miranda in a devil wears Prada is not the kind of person you’d want to emulate hugely successful, but doing it by, you know, stomping all over people.
[00:10:07] Jewels: Can you talk to me a little bit about the archetypes that you’ve created from this model?
[00:10:13] Rosalind: There’s eight archetypes, there’s four empowered archetypes and there’s four shadow archetypes that come into play.
[00:10:20] The empowered archetypes, um, we’ve got the warrior, which is about setting goals, achieving things. It’s the work, basically, the getting things done. There’s the wise woman, which is about, that’s about power. That’s about how women use power in the workplace. And a lot of what we see is often that knowledge is power.
[00:10:38] Women who are in that wise woman archetype are often mentors and coaches and so, you know, they’re often working behind the scenes. And then we’ve got the tribe builder, which is about connection and bringing people together and creating communities. And sitting all over the top of that is the sovereign archetype, which is about our sense of self, our self esteem, our self worth.
[00:10:56] It’s being self actualized. And those are the empowered archetypes. Then you’ve got your shadow archetypes, which are the reflection of the archetypes when things are not going well for us. So when things aren’t going well, the warrior can slip into the tyrant, which is about perfectionism and imposter syndrome.
[00:11:12] So it’s this sense of being very driven and driving yourself very hard, but never feeling that you’re good enough and that your work isn’t going to be good enough. The wise woman slips into the lone wolf, which is where knowledge is power, and I start to hoard knowledge. So I won’t delegate, I won’t share, I won’t empower other people.
[00:11:28] I want to keep everything to myself because if I know something you don’t know, I can’t be replaced. I’m So I become irreplaceable through my knowledge. The tribe builder slips into the martyr, which is that people pleasing. This sense of what do I need to do? What do I need to say? How do I need to behave to make sure that you like me all of the time?
[00:11:47] And then finally, the hermit at the bottom of the diamond, there is the hermit is about when we’re in a space where things are really not going well for us, and it’s withdrawal from the world. It’s that sense of, you know, procrastination, putting things off, not dealing with people that you don’t want to deal with, you know, kind of hiding away in the hermit cave, I suppose.
[00:12:03] Jewels: And with these particular archetypes, are we labelled as one, or is it just different points in time we, we show these different traits?
[00:12:12] Rosalind: Different points in time. So essentially the, the, how the diamond splits are the empowered archetypes of when things are going really well for us. And we’re feeling at our best when we’re feeling, you know, empowered and self actualized, the shadow archetypes kick in when things, when we’re feeling under threat, when we’re not feeling particularly safe, when we’re feeling, you know, tired, stressed, overwhelmed.
[00:12:30] So people can shift between those two layers quite easily in terms of where people show up in the, you know, where they, the, the sovereign is kind of, Because it’s self esteem and self actualization, it sort of sits above everything else. And the other three archetypes underneath that, the, the warrior, the wise woman, and the tribe builder, are almost like situational styles that we can use the right style, at the right time, with the right people.
[00:12:52] Everybody does have a natural tendency towards one over the others, but they can, you know, use all three of them when they need to.
[00:13:00] Jewels: Is it a little bit like some of the other psychometric profiles where you tend to be really strong in one and that’s the, that’s the one that you tend to lead with and then the other ones can be quite difficult if you’re not that type of person?
[00:13:11] Is it, is it similar in that way?
[00:13:13] Rosalind: It can be. What I tend to find is there’s very much a task and people split in it. So the task is about the warrior, which is people who have a natural tendency to go to task before people will tend to use the warrior. If they’ve got a natural tendency for people before tasks, they’ll go to the tribe builder first.
[00:13:29] The wise woman is about power and influence. So, you know, people have got a natural inclination towards, you know, wanting to be influential will tend to be wise woman. So there’s a certain amount of nature in it and a certain amount of nurture.
[00:13:41] Jewels: Are these specific to women? Because I kind of see myself in some of these, some of that description.
[00:13:48] Rosalind: I designed these specifically for women. So when we look at the assessment, for example, the questions are actually focused on more feminine traits. Having people keep asking me, are you going to design this for men as well? Because it does resonate for men. And look, that may be a piece of work that I’ll get you down the track to actually look at it.
[00:14:04] I have had a couple of men do it just out of interest or, you know, it was free for a bit, and I did get men sneaking in and doing it. Not terribly many of them, but they have. And they’ve certainly said that it resonated for them as well. So, but it’s more about, you know, for me the focus is more about how I then use the model and the assessment tool to help empower women leaders to be at their best.
[00:14:24] Jewels: So tell me a little bit about the process of getting the assessment out there into the marketplace. You’ve said you’ve had 10, 000 plus people take the assessment, which is amazing. Well done. How do you get to 10, 000? Is that something that happened overnight? Did it go viral? Did you, you know, did it cost?
[00:14:41] How did you get there?
[00:14:42] Rosalind: It started out, so with that initial 538 women, I just simply reached out to people on LinkedIn. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So I said, look, I’m thinking about this thing. I’ve got a, the assessment at that stage was a PDF that they printed, hand wrote on and scanned and sent back to me.
[00:14:58] So it wasn’t automated in any way. And people shared it with their colleagues and their friends because it resonated so much. And I ended up with that initial 538 women, which. I don’t say all that going viral, but certainly in the sense of what I was trying to do, it was, it went big pretty quickly.
[00:15:12] Jewels: Very decent, yeah.
[00:15:13] Rosalind: And then those, those women were really great. They, I interviewed them, I ran follow up surveys, I collected data, I did a lot of Zoom calls with them, and I’ve got a big stash about, a foot thick, I suppose, of folders and bits and pieces that I’ve collected from the, from those interviews. And they were really instrumental in creating this.
[00:15:33] And then once we put the assessment online, it was free initially. And again, it, um, we did advertise for a little bit, ran a few ads back in the beginning when I sort of was trying to get to the first 2000. The lead cost was amazing. We were down to like under 30 cents a lead because people were so keen to do it.
[00:15:49] And then after that we shut the ads down and just let it kind of grow. By itself. So it went live in about 2016 and we got to 2023 and we had 10, 000 people. So it hasn’t been overnight, but it’s been a bit of a process, but I find people tend to share it with their colleagues and their friends because they get so much out of it.
[00:16:06] Jewels: So clearly it’s working or at least resonating for the people that are doing, which is fantastic. So a good product will sort of spread amongst the peers, which is a nice way to spread your message, right? And you’ve also won an award for it. Tell me a little bit about that.
[00:16:21] Rosalind: Well, it was quite phenomenal, actually.
[00:16:22] I was a bit blown away. It was the International Alliance for Women, and they give out what they call their World of Difference awards every year to men and women who have been making a difference to women’s, women’s empowerment globally. So got the call to say that I’d won an award and had to kind of drop everything and fly to Washington DC for four days.
[00:16:42] So it was a bit of a turnaround trip. on a plane, land in Washington, have a day of sightseeing, couple of awards things, fly home. But it was, it was a great honour. I was really thrilled to be in the company of the, the types of other women who’d won awards at the same time.
[00:16:58] Jewels: And were you nominated for that by somebody or?
[00:17:01] Rosalind: Yeah, a lady that I’ve known for a number of years now called Diane Thompson, and she works globally with women. She’s a retired business owner now, but used to own a business and basically spends a lot of time working in that women’s space. So it was, uh, again, a real honor that Diane thought highly enough of me to put the nomination forward.
[00:17:19] So
[00:17:19] Jewels: outside of the model, tell me a little bit about your business and your practice.
[00:17:24] Rosalind: I’ve worked in the organizational development space, so it’s, it’s pretty broad, strategy, culture, leadership development, executive coaching, and so on, but the main bulk of my work these days is if you put a park strategy, it’s more around the, how do we, how do we help businesses start to do things differently?
[00:17:44] It’s using neuroscience, using human instincts, using the knowledge of human behavior to help design. Workplaces and teams that are a fit for humans, rather than trying to squeeze the human into a box. It’s like, how do we create something that’s going to actually work for the humans in this team? So every, as people are individual, so are teams.
[00:18:04] You know, teams have this sort of individual vibe, this individual fit to them. So it’s rather than trying to make everything the same, it’s how do we actually change the practices to suit people, basically.
[00:18:13] Jewels: So you seem to have been specializing a lot on human behavior and what sort of drives that. Where does that come from?
[00:18:19] Is that something you studied early on or is it just a fascination that’s built up over the years?
[00:18:25] Rosalind: Yeah, it’s something that when I started working in the In the organizational development space, so probably not so much when I was in HR, but you know, D, it was really the key thing about employee engagement and culture and effective teams and things.
[00:18:39] It all comes down to human behavior, so I started really getting interested in that, and I’ve got a little. A lot of qualifications now around it, but some of the key things that I’ve really enjoyed and have been really fundamental to my practice has been the understanding of human instincts, which is how we behave instinctively as the human animal.
[00:18:56] And also neuroscience, like how does the brain respond? So those two pieces have been really fundamental.
[00:19:02] Jewels: I have a kind of a similar fascination. I mean, this is the telling of story podcast. And you know, a lot of the work that I do is around storytelling in business and how to communicate, right? What’s the communication cycle?
[00:19:14] What does that need to look like? And a lot of that for me, it starts with understanding the human behavior, understanding what it is that makes people tick and what it is that makes people pay attention or ignore you. Um, cause that’s a big part of storytelling, particularly in business. You know, we’re always trying to.
[00:19:32] To garner people’s attention. Tell me a little bit about what you’ve learned, perhaps over the years about communication styles and sort of how do you communicate with all these different archetypes around and, you know, in business in particular, when you’re often dealing with not just one person, but offering a number of decision makers.
[00:19:49] What’s your theory or what’s some of the learnings that you’ve understood around communication? What makes people tick and how do you actually get your message out there and how do you get your message across those kinds of things? Where, wherever you come or in that sort of direction,
[00:20:05] Rosalind: I’m accredited in learning styles.
[00:20:07] But before I touch on that, I want to circle back to storytelling because it literally changes our brain. You know, if we start to hear a story, we, it’s almost like we suspend disbelief. As soon as somebody says, once upon a time, we almost get sucked into the story. And it’s because we’ve been sitting around campfires, sharing information verbally for millennia.
[00:20:27] You know, that’s, that’s our mode of, of communicating. Before we started writing things down, we shared everything through stories. Stories and songs and poetry. It was all about that. So humans are very tuned into storytelling and it’s a fabulous, fabulous tool for getting any message across. A really good story will sell the message a lot more than logically trying to convince somebody of something.
[00:20:47] And if we look at learning styles, we sort of start with everybody needs context. They need why they need to understand why this is important, but it’s got to be important to me rather than, you know, I see organizations talk about what’s important to the organization and people at the end that I don’t care, really, what’s in it for me?
[00:21:05] Why do I need to connect with this? What’s the story that I need to hear in order to, for me to want to learn what you’re about to tell me, then we need to know what it is. So the, you know, the data and the facts. We then need to know how to apply that. What is it you want me to do? Give me a chance to try it out and experiment with it myself.
[00:21:21] And then finally, we’ve got to close that loop. Humans automatically go to, how can I enhance this? What can I do with it next? What’s the next step? So it’s, we kind of work around this loop of why is it important to me? What is it? How do I apply it? And how do I adapt it and do something different with it?
[00:21:36] Because we’re very curious, adaptive creatures. We like to do something and then change it, do something else with it. But the story is the bit that often gets missed in an organization. They kind of launch into here’s the facts, here’s the stuff, this is what we want you to do, go forth and do it without that context in the story.
[00:21:54] And I find that when I’m working with people around comms, that’s the bit that really we have to get stuck into first. What’s the story behind this? What’s a, how do you help people connect with the message so that it makes sense to them?
[00:22:05] Jewels: I’ve now been sort of on this path for a bit over a decade now.
[00:22:08] And when I first started talking about storytelling in business, I kind of got a few strange looks. Now, what, what do you mean, storytelling? Like, nobody wants to know my story. Um, it’s all about the business, right? Um, that in my world certainly is, is shifting. That sentiment is shifting. What are you seeing out in the marketplace?
[00:22:26] Are people sort of adapting to that or understanding that that now is somewhat of an important thing, or is it still a struggle to get people to sort of, you know, lose the technical jargon and focus in on the story itself and how that resonates?
[00:22:40] Rosalind: It depends on the industry, I think, that’s certainly my experience of it, but I think there’s a strong recognition now, particularly with the, with social media, the fact that, you know, you can get somebody who jumps on TikTok and just tells a story and it goes viral.
[00:22:56] And some of the really clever, you know, really short ads we’re seeing on social media for, you know, particularly coming into Christmas, we’re seeing a lot of Christmas type of ads that are telling a story really effectively. I think organizations and brands get it. It’s sometimes the people inside the organization that struggle with it, like leaders who struggle with it, particularly if storytelling is not their thing, it’s not their style.
[00:23:15] They kind of go, well, like you said, who wants to hear my story? It’s like, well, tell, tell the customer’s story. You know, pick out a story about a client or a customer and tell that if you’re uncomfortable with your own story.
[00:23:26] Jewels: I’ve, um, just in more recent times, I mean, my main focus was always about the customer and how does a brand or how does a business get to market and sort of increase their visibility in the marketplace, but I’ve started more in more recent times to sort of shift that to internal as well, because I think A lot of the sort of hiccups in organizations is when the internal communication starts to fail.
[00:23:51] So when executives aren’t able to express. Their story as to why something needs to happen and why it’s important to the business and, and to get everybody onto the same sort of page, if you like, uh, kind of tends to fall down if they, if they just follow the, you know, the original hierarchical model, where it’s like, do as I say, not as I do kind of thing, what are you seeing?
[00:24:12] Are you seeing people starting to shift with their internal communications and start to open up, particularly since COVID? I think that. To me, that opened up the, um, or dropped the kimono a little bit as well. So we started seeing into people’s homes. We started to see their kids in the background, the dogs in the background.
[00:24:29] We started to see their home offices. Sometimes it was a mess. Sometimes it was clean, you know, that kind of thing. I think the guard dropped a little bit through COVID, but are we starting to actually see that shift? In the management styles as well, where they’re not necessarily so, I guess, masked up and, you know, got their business face on all the time.
[00:24:50] Rosalind: We have, it’s drifting back the other way in some sectors and industries, but you’re right, it was COVID was the opportunity for us to, see the human in each other. You’re right. We saw people’s homes. If they were sitting at their kitchen bench, you saw what was behind them on the wall and stuck to the fridge, the kid’s drawings, you know, the weirdest animal I’ve seen on a zoom was an alpaca.
[00:25:11] Jewels: Oh wow. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. In the lounge room.
[00:25:15] Rosalind: No, no, just outside the window. I was running a program and we had about 20 people there and this Head kept going past in the background behind this woman. And it’s like, I don’t know what that is. It’s a very large dog or something. And I asked, and she said, Oh, it’s an alpaca.
[00:25:28] I’ll show you. And she picked a laptop up and put it off into the garden. And this is alpaca. It was great. I think COVID gave us that sense of people being human again. And, but storytelling in communication is a bit of an art. It’s one of those things that lots of people don’t do it because they’re uncomfortable about the story.
[00:25:47] They’re, it’s like, I don’t know how to tell it or I to start or I don’t know what story to choose. And when I’m working with people who are going to be working together as opposed to written communication, I often say to leaders, if you, if you don’t have a story or you’re uncomfortable with it, ask for the stories in the room, you know, who’s experienced this, who’s been through this before, who’s got a story and people will tell their own stories.
[00:26:09] And that is as good as you doing your own. In fact, in a lot of times it’s better. Yeah.
[00:26:12] Jewels: And so you, you’ve been in practice for a little while now for yourself. How do you get your story out? How do you get your message across?
[00:26:19] Rosalind: It’s look, a lot of it is. you know, spending time with people. That was something that went out the window during COVID was not being able to have the coffee chats anymore.
[00:26:27] So spending time with people, you know, I speak at events. I sort of, you know, we’ve got newsletters and we’ve got, you know, I write blogs, I write articles for other people. I do, you know, little snippets on that I put up on YouTube, that kind of thing. As business owners, you’ve got to be constantly communicating something because there’s, you know, there’s so many, the market’s saturated.
[00:26:46] There’s so many people out there doing stuff, you’ve got to do it too. And that’s one of the challenges for a lot of people in business, particularly really small businesses like mine, is when it’s relationship driven, you eventually run out of relationships. You know, you know everybody and it’s like, well, what happens next?
[00:27:00] You know, you’ve got to kind of start getting the message out there.
[00:27:03] Jewels: So tell me a little bit about how you balance it, like, do you have a writing day or do you do it when the mood strikes? How do you balance
[00:27:11] Rosalind: it? It’s usually inspiration. So I’ll have had a conversation with somebody or a coaching clients asked me a question that I think that’s actually a great question that everyone needs to know the answer to.
[00:27:21] So I’ll either jump on a zoom and record myself and just make a short video about it or I’ll write it into a blog or sometimes both depending on what it is. So it’s mainly for me and inspiration thing. I’m pretty lucky that I don’t run out of inspiration easily. So I’ve never had to sort of sit down and go, Oh, I don’t know what to say.
[00:27:37] It just kind of, you know, like I said, something will have happened. I’ll read an article or had a chat to somebody and it sparked something.
[00:27:43] Jewels: And is there any way to correlate? Some of that effort. So all the writing that you’ve been doing, you, you’ve written a book, you do keynote speaking, uh, you write blogs, you write articles on other people’s things.
[00:27:55] Can you correlate anything between some of that effort and the business? Maybe that’s come your way. Have you seen a direct connection or is it more a branding thing for you?
[00:28:06] Rosalind: No, there’s definitely a direct connection to writing between writing and business. So we’ve been getting, I can’t remember how long ago it was, it was a little while ago I wrote an article and we put together a brochure on unconscious bias and we actually pulled together a full book.
[00:28:19] web page, part of my website actually has some information on unconscious bias. And we’ve been getting, probably in the last three or four months, a lot of inquiries about unconscious bias training. So, you know, you can see your metrics on your website. You can see what articles people are looking at. And there is a correlation between that and what people ask for.
[00:28:35] We often get quite random approaches out of nowhere, where somebody will get in contact and say, we’d like to do strategic planning. And it turns out they saw something that I’d written or a video I’d made or something like that. So, um, look, I do it because I love it, but It’s, you can definitely say that there’s a link back to the business.
[00:28:54] Jewels: So in the perfect world, what would be the right balance for you as an organization from a communication outward sort of, you know, being in the market versus, you know, running the practice itself.
[00:29:04] Rosalind: I actually love doing both. I really enjoy writing. I really enjoy creating videos and creating, you know, content for people, but I also really enjoy helping organizations make an impact.
[00:29:16] So for me, it’s a really tough question. I wish there was two of me so I could do it 100 percent of the time twice.
[00:29:22] Jewels: That’s a good answer.
[00:29:23] Rosalind: You know, look, if I had to choose, I’d say that I probably, You know, it’s the consulting work that pays the bills basically. So I do more of that than I do writing, but I think in a perfect world, I’d probably do more content creation and a bit less in the business than I do now.
[00:29:37] Jewels: And what advice would you give to, you know, businesses similar to yours, where, who need to get out to market, maybe are a little bit afraid or just haven’t, uh, ventured that direction or don’t believe they have any stories to tell or not inspired, what would you say to them? Where would you, where would you start and how do you get, develop that skill and slash consistency and, and habit of doing so?
[00:30:00] Rosalind: You’ve got to start with something that you’re going to be relatively good at and enjoy. So if you hate being on video, then don’t force yourself to be on video because you get a lot of people who are like, I need to create video content. They procrastify. You know, they do the procrastifying and procrastinating because they don’t want to make the video and they never do it.
[00:30:19] You know, if you’re happier behind the camera, you know, right, or, you know, do audio or something like that, start with something. I’ve been really consistent with my content since 2012. Really long, rich blog history, which certainly, you know, creates good SEO and things like that. So you kind of got to start somewhere.
[00:30:37] And I always think of it is like I said, with my inspiration, I’ll think about it as if I’m talking to a client. So I’ve read an article, which I think one of my clients would love this. So I’ll distill the idea and make a quick video. And I always think when I’m writing and videoing, it’s I’m talking to one person and I often actually have that person in mind.
[00:30:55] So, Gillian, this is something I really think you need to hear, and then I’ll start the video and start.
[00:31:00] Jewels: Right. Yeah, that’s a nice approach. And what about frequency, consistency? What’s your view on how often you should be in the marketplace to keep a practice alive, keep it top of mind?
[00:31:11] Rosalind: I can only really speak for what’s worked for me, and for me, it’s a blog twice a month.
[00:31:18] I sometimes do three a month, it depends on what happens, but I try and do at least two a month. I used to do one a week, but then I sort of got to the point where I just simply don’t have time. Consistency is important. You’ve got to kind of be regularly sending things out. So for our email list, they get a newsletter once a month.
[00:31:34] They also get regular in between, you know, if something’s come up or we’ve got a program running or something like that. So we’re probably in people’s inboxes at least once a week, maybe even a bit more than that, depending on what we’re doing.
[00:31:45] Jewels: And what’s next for you and your practice? Where do you see the assessment going?
[00:31:49] Perhaps, where would you like to see the assessment going?
[00:31:51] Rosalind: I’ve actually started, I just finished a pilot program with other women who are getting accredited in the tool because it came out of a conversation I had with my financial advisor recently where he went, you’ve turned 55, you need to think about retirement.
[00:32:06] And I was like, oh gosh, you know, tap, tap, tap. And I thought, yeah, it’s going to happen. I’m going to have to retire at some point. And if I stop, the work stops. So that was a real, and I’ve had women ask over the years, can I get accredited? And I’d never sort of got. Around to what I guess and that really pushed me in the direction of developing an accreditation program.
[00:32:25] So we’ve just run the pilot. We’ve had 11 women go through who’ve then started to use it in their own businesses. And that’s where I really want to take this is to start accrediting other women to use the tool and empower other women, you know, because it’s a ripple effect. I can only do a little tiny bit myself and then ripple is everybody else.
[00:32:42] Jewels: Roz, I’ve enjoyed our conversation. Where can perhaps people find out a little bit about the assessment? Where can they find out a little bit more about you?
[00:32:50] Rosalind: Sure. You can find me at shapingchange. com. au or on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook. The archetypes has its own brand now, so it’s womensleaderarchetypes.
[00:33:01] com. au is the site for that.
[00:33:04] Jewels: I’ll put all of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I’ve enjoyed the chat.
[00:33:09] Rosalind: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[00:33:11] Jewels: Perfect. Thank you very much.
[00:33:15] I love the work Roz is doing to uncover what works for the modern workplace. The archetype’s assessment and model is worth checking out and reflecting on. I like how Roz uses inspiration from her day to share her story to communicate outward. Much love, chat soon.