The Unleash Your Presence podcast is designed to deliver insight to corporate leaders so they can communicate their messages clearly and effectively influence their audience, from the boardroom to live and virtual stages.
Kelly has spent more than 25 years in the business world and 20 years coaching and training in Ontology (the study of being).
She has a solid foundation of experience in sales, business development, leadership development and team alignment – and is passionately committed to the success and empowerment of her clients. Hear the original podcast here: https://pod.co/unleash-your-presence-podcast/episode-12-kelly-townsend
Welcome to the unleash your presence podcast where each week we interview experts who serve corporate leaders to provide the concise tangible insights to help you influence your audience and drive results through powerful communication. Our guest today is Kelly Townsend and having spent more than 25 years in the business world and 20 years coaching and training in ontology the study of being, Kelly Townsend has a solid foundation of experience and sales business development, leadership development and team alignment. She is passionately committed to the success and empowerment of her clients so welcome to our show today Kelly we’re glad to have you here. Thank you I really appreciate you inviting me.
So Kelly I am curious with your extensive background in business and leadership development from your perspective, what do you see as the biggest challenge that leaders face in their communication? Well there’s a few things that I see in that first of all a lot of people do not have confidence in their leaders the way they used to. So you can look at all different aspects of society and over the last 20 years people’s confidence in leadership has really diminished and declined. I think one of the things that leaders are dealing with is that people are not as trusting of their leaders as they used to be. This requires for leaders to really get interested in what is happening with their people; you know what’s important to them, what they’re dealing with and and bringing a very powerful listening to that.
Along those lines I was curious if there’s a specific tip that you could share with us that you would give to a leader at work who is looking to improve their communication? Well let’s see, a tip that I would give related to communication, and especially during these challenging times that it’s important to get what people are saying to you, what they’re concerned for, and what matters to them. Get their world so to speak. The way in which you do that is to recreate what people are saying without adding your judgments and your own justifications and reasons for why things are the way they are. It’s important to to really get people during these times. Recreating what they say is a valuable tool in getting what people say because you can’t be talking to yourself internally when people are talking to you. If you’re going to recreate exactly what they say, as they say. The other thing that I think another tip I would say as a leader is that you’re actually doing what you said you were going to do. I’m talking to you about the lack of trust that’s in the environment right now with leaders. It’s imperative. We think that there’s actually a crisis in leadership right now where leaders are not trusted and they need to do what they say they’re going to do. And if they’re not, they really need to be in communication about that. So how you build trust in your organization is by – we say having that foundation of your word matters. And your people need to see that your word matters.
Absolutely that’s a really great point and I am curious to know over the years in your work if there is a particular concept or book or a talk or program that’s left a lasting impact for you? Yeah I got very interested in ontology about 25 years ago. I did a weekend program but I think one of the one of the things that people are gonna see in the future that this gentleman Werner Erhard, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Werner Erhard, but he’s a philosopher of our time. One of the things about him that it’s been amazing is that he’s learned how this to really creating breakthrough results for themselves in their lives and I started studying his work that many years ago . It’s been amazing kind of the journey of studying him studying his work and seeing how it really makes a difference in people’s lives.
That’s amazing so Kelly what should I have asked you today that I didn’t that for people who are committed to being leaders that their access to being a great leader is actually being on the court inside of something that’s really important to them, something that matters to them something that requires them to be bigger than who they wound up being. And that there’s no right way to be a leader or wrong way to be a leader there’s just declaring yourself as a leader and then being willing to be an action as a leader.
That is a really great point. Thank you so much for sharing that and I understand that you also have a free resource that you would like to share some more about with our audience today so I’ll give you the floor to tell us a little bit more about that. When you had asked me about what really influences me, one of the influences that I really have enjoyed is Mike Jensen. He’s a Harvard emeritus and he wrote an article and lot of papers in this whole thing about looking at integrity not as a virtue phenomena but as a practical phenomenon.
To actually look at integrity in a way that people could see that see if if I think I have integrity or a you know or I must have integrity mostly people aren’t too open about where their integrity is out when it’s a virtue phenomenon. So he’s written this really great paper about really how performance and integrity go together. It’s a favorite article of mine. I like to share it with people when I do speaking engagements and I thought your readers would really get a lot of value out of it. Thank you so much and we will be sure to link that up in the show notes.
