163-SYB-Feminist-Approach.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
Curious what a feminist approach to public speaking is? Listen in for three ways you can do this. Now in this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast.
Carol Cox:
More and more women are making an impact by starting businesses, running for office and speaking up for what matters. With my background as a TV political analyst, entrepreneur and speaker, I interview and coach purpose driven women to shape their brands, grow their companies, and become recognized as influencers in their field. This is speaking your brand, your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience.
Carol Cox:
Welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you’re listening to this podcast, whether you’re brand new or you’ve been listening for a while, you’re most likely a woman entrepreneur who wants to speak for your business. You want to get brand awareness and lead generation. Perhaps you also want to get paid to speak and start pitching for bigger speaking opportunities, and you want to have an impact with your message on your audience. You want to improve your skills as a speaker as well as develop your confidence. As I’ve worked with nearly 200 women over the past few years, I’ve seen how the same things trip us up, as well as what liberates us, what liberates our voices, and what liberates our confidence. Now, I’ve been a self-proclaimed feminist since high school.
Carol Cox:
I actually remember running home one day. I don’t know what grade I was in, but sometime in high school, running home one day and telling my mom that I was a feminist. So I must have learned about it in school that day. And then I went on to get a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in women’s history and gender studies. So I’ve been steeped in this for 20, 25 years now. Yet until recently, I mean, very recently, I haven’t seen how feminism applies to how we show up as speakers. So in this episode, I’m sharing the beginnings of a feminist framework I’m developing around public speaking. Being a feminist speaker has nothing to do with your content. You don’t have to be talking about feminist theory or talking only to women. It’s about truly finding our voices as women that have been buried under the scripts we think we’re supposed to act from, and then making room for the voices that haven’t had opportunities to be heard. It’s about relationship and connection, equality and liberation. So in this episode, I’m going to share with you three ways you can start adopting a feminist approach to your speaking. Now, this episode goes with the episode I did last week with my other speaking coach, Diane Diaz. We talked about choosing women’s voices, and it also goes along with the challenge that we’re running right now in the month of March, to coincide with Women’s History Month.
Carol Cox:
If you’ve been participating in our challenge, thank you so much. It’s been really rewarding putting together the content and putting it out there and getting your feedback. Here’s an example of what some of the women have replied back to the emails they’ve been receiving, or on what we’ve been posting on social media. They’ve said, I’m loving this so much. Wow, I love this. Thanks for the work you’re doing. Loved, loved, loved this episode where you can see there’s a common theme. They’re in love. Someone else said this warm my heart. Thank you for supporting Bipoc. That’s black indigenous people of color visibility. Someone else posted. I’ve been listening to Carol’s podcast for a couple of months now, but wow, am I even more impressed with the woman she is because of this post. So that was a social media post I did with one of the days of the challenge. And then another woman wrote, Carol, I love all the work you’re doing, but this work is so courageous and strong and necessary. It shouldn’t be brave, it should be fairly matter of fact. But I think in our society it really is. And I am immensely grateful to you for it as a human and as a woman of color. So thank you all so much for the feedback that you’ve been giving us. It really helps us spur us on to do even more of these types of things.
Carol Cox:
Now, if you haven’t yet subscribed to the challenge, you can still do so. You can do so at any time. You’ll automatically get the seven day emails of the challenge. You can do that by going to speaking in your brand com slash challenge. Again, that’s speaking your brand.com/challenge or text the word speaking to 33777. This information is also in the show notes. So you can just click on the link in there. Once you sign up you’ll receive the first email and then an email every day for seven days with the different days of the challenge. So in this episode, I’m going to talk about these three ways that you can start applying a feminist approach to your public speaking now and then in a future episode, I’m going to dig more into the feminist framework I’m developing around the actual content and delivery of your message. Again, it doesn’t matter what your content is, it could have nothing to do with women. It doesn’t have to be women, only audiences. Instead, it’s a different way of looking at how we approach our public speaking, instead of the default way that most of us have been taught. So be sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss that future episode now. Let’s get on with the show. First, let’s talk about feminism and what it means now. Feminism got a bad rap back a couple of decades ago, where all of a sudden it fell out of favor.
Carol Cox:
No one wanted to be called a feminist. Younger generation didn’t want to be called feminist. I’ve never had a problem with the word myself, because what feminism means is equal rights, that all genders should have equal rights. That’s it. End of story. Period. Doesn’t seem very controversial to me. But of course, the other side patriarchy is going to find a way to fight back. And despite the gains that women have made and trust me, I appreciate all the gains that we’ve made over the past 50 years. 100 years, ten years, 20 years. It’s been incredible how we live our lives today as women is much, much better than our parents and our grandparents did, there’s no doubt about that. But we also have to realize that there is more work to be done. The 2016 presidential election here in the United States showed us that we still live in a gender and a racial hierarchy. What that means is that in a gender and racial hierarchy, men are above women. And some men in our case, in this society, white men are above all other men. And what patriarchy does is it prioritizes the masculine and reason over the feminine and emotion. Now, these are broad constructs. I’m not saying that all men are like this or all women are like this. This is rather what patriarchy does is it creates this binary, this very stark difference.
Carol Cox:
So feminism is not an issue about women versus men. It’s not for women only. Really. Feminism is about everyone having equal rights. And and according to Carol Gilligan in her books, two fantastic books that she’s written, and I’ll include the links to those in the show notes. She says that feminism is one of the great liberation movements of human history. It is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy. Let me say that again. Feminism is one of the great liberation movements of human history. It is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy. Patriarchy hierarchy is what causes the gender division and the racial division that we live in. For me, feminism is about detaching from these traditional models of masculine versus feminine reason versus emotion that doesn’t serve anyone, doesn’t serve women, and doesn’t serve men. It’s about making sure everyone has equal rights and an equal voice. Okay, so that’s the broad construct of how I would define feminism based on the works that I have read. Now, let’s talk about three ways you can start adopting a feminist approach to your public speaking. So these three ways are going to be individual collective and structural. Yes. I can’t help myself. Things come in threes. And uh, here’s a note for you speakers. It helps your audience also remember things when you do them in threes. And you make them simple to remember.
Carol Cox:
So we have individual collective and structural. If I had more time, I could probably make them an alliteration or an acronym. Send me an email or post on social media. If you think of a cool alliteration or acronym to replace the individual, collective and structural. But let’s go through those three now. So the first thing is individual. So an individual way you can start adopting a feminist approach to your public speaking is to claim your experience and your expertise. Claim your experience and expertise as a professional in your field and as a woman professional in your field. You have so much experience, so much wisdom and insights that you can tap into. And a lot of times we second guess ourselves. So we have a lot of imposter syndrome, self-doubt, that critical inner voice that can prevent us from putting ourselves out there, or from talking about what we really want to talk about. Have you ever attended an event, heard a speaker and thought I could give just as good as, if not a better presentation? Why am I not up there? Or have you ever shied away from submitting to speak at a conference, or pitching yourself for a bigger speaking engagement, or to do a paid workshop because you didn’t feel like you were expert enough? And I’ve heard recently, very recently, in the past week from several women that they’ve shied away from speaking at all, or from pitching to specific events and conferences because they didn’t think that they were good enough, that they didn’t have experience speaking, or that they didn’t think they were experts enough in their topic.
Carol Cox:
You don’t need to have a certain type of degree. You don’t need to have certain credentials or letters after your name. If you do, that’s fantastic. As a professional in your field, you have the experience, you have the expertise, and your audiences need to hear from you. You offer a different perspective, a unique perspective, something that they may have not heard before. And I’ve talked in previous episodes about the need to find your own unique content, not just content that is the same old, same old that everyone is. Eating out. Rather content that is specific to you based on your experience and your expertise. And then once you start developing your content, then pitching yourself to speak at events and conferences, pitching yourself to appear in the media. Learning to love our voices. Learning to listen to our own voices and listening means listening to our inner voice, but then also actually listening to ourselves. When we do speaking engagements or we do podcast interviews and learning to love the voices that we hear. And this is what we talked about in last week’s episode on choosing women’s voices, that because the default voice is male, it’s seen as the expert, the authority, the universal voice.
Carol Cox:
We tend to de-prioritize women’s voices, and we tend to hear women’s voices as not as expert, not as authoritative as more, uh, of that kind of shrill. Right? All the the critiques that especially women in politics get about how their voices sound is because we’re not used to hearing women’s voices, we’re not used to hearing our own voices. And we need to learn to love our voices and learn to love women’s voices. So that was the whole idea behind last week’s episode and the challenge that we’re running. So claim your experience and your expertise as a professional and as a woman professional in your field. The other aspect of the first way to adopt a feminist approach in public speaking is to challenge the status quo and challenge conventional wisdom with your content, with the message that you’re sharing. After all, if you think about feminism, it is a radical act. It’s a radical act in a patriarchal society to say that women should be equal to men, I know is that it sounds crazy for us to think that that is radical to to assume that women should be equal to men. But that is exactly what that means. And I know a lot of us, again, you know, harking back to what I said earlier about what feminism means, we don’t like to think of ourselves as living in a patriarchal society. After all, we’re running our businesses.
Carol Cox:
We have bank accounts, you know, a lot of us have. We’re the ones on the mortgage loan. We have credit. And, you know, we have freedom of movement and all these things. Yes, we absolutely have that. But then we look at who’s running our government, who’s running our politics, who’s running fortune 500 companies, who’s making decisions that affect millions and millions of people. And it’s mostly still men and it’s mostly still white men. So that’s what we are here to do as women is to challenge the status quo and challenge conventional wisdom. Why have women been silenced for millennia? Precisely because we challenged the status quo. Women’s voices and women’s stories have been categorized as destructive. But you know what? Yeah, we are destructive because we’re destroying the status quo to make our society and our politics and our businesses and our economy better for everyone. Challenging the status quo is how change happens. Now, let me give you some examples of some women speakers who have done this. First. Brene Brown, for those of you listening, I’m sure that you are familiar with Brene Brown. About ten years ago, she had her breakthrough TEDx talk where she talked about vulnerability and shame. It was truly a breakthrough and it was radical and it was revolutionary because Brene Brown lifted the veil of shame and made it okay for us to talk about shame. And she showed us, not just told us, but she showed us how to be both strong and vulnerable at the same time.
Carol Cox:
She challenged the status quo and she broke the rules. She broke the scripts that told us that we weren’t allowed both men and women. We weren’t allowed to be vulnerable and be real about what we were really going through. One of my TEDx clients, Tammy Lalli, she’s been on the podcast twice before, and I’ll include links to her episodes in the show notes. She did her TEDx talk in 2017 on the topic of money shame. Her talk was so impactful that it’s now had over 2 million views, which is unusual for a TEDx talk. But because she shared a very personal story, she was vulnerable. She was real. Here’s how she started her talk. She said, in order for me to speak with you today, I have to break the rules, to break the rules of family secrecy and perfection. So that’s how when we work together, how we framed her talk because she knew she was breaking the rules not only of her family, but really of society as a whole to talk about money, shame and how destructive it is to individuals, to families and to communities. Emma Gonzalez she was a student at Parkland High School when they had the mass shooting. When she spoke at the March for Our Lives rally shortly after that, she was emotional, she was raw. She was vulnerable.
Carol Cox:
She was real. She was willing to challenge. Status quo and break the rules. That said that a high school student wasn’t supposed to be that prominent, especially a woman high school student, a teenager taking that much of a public role. And I applaud her courage and bravery for doing so. Now, here’s an example of someone who I just read this article when I was preparing for this podcast episode, and I’ll include a link to the article in the show notes. She’s a political scientist named Rachel Bitecofer. Now, I’ve been as you know, I’ve been following politics and I’ve been in politics for over 15 years now. And most of the political pundits and political analysts, most of them that are quoted, most of them that go on TV, most of them that write articles or quoted in articles and in the New York Times and the Washington Post are men. She’s a woman now who’s come along. And when she did her political analysis for the 2018 Midtum elections about how the Democrats would do versus the Republicans in picking up House seats, her analysis was the most accurate leading up to the election compared to anyone else, including all of the men political analysts who were out there. And in this article, here’s how Rachel Bitecofer, the political scientist, how she describes what she’s doing with her political analysis. She says she is flipping giant paradigms of election theory upside down.
Carol Cox:
That’s exactly what I want you to do with your content. Challenge the status quo. Challenge conventional wisdom. Flip those paradigms upside down. And then she goes on to say, I’m arguing radical shit, okay? I just love that. Like she makes no bones about what she’s doing. But here’s where it gets really interesting. Then about halfway through the article, the the writer goes and talks to some of the male political analysts and about her theory compared to what they’re doing. And, oh boy, they mansplain her about how she is wrong, about how she’s not looking at X, y, and Z. And then the quotes show clearly how they’re doing this. And then she’s also criticized by these men for self-promotion, because when she came up with her theory and had been working, now, mind you, she has a PhD in political science, so she has the credentials. But then she took to Twitter back in 2018 and started talking about her analysis about how she was seeing the electorate, and because she used Twitter and she used it quite effectively. She’s now been criticized for self-promotion. You know, how rich is that? So these are some examples of challenging the status quo and how important it is, because it’s helping us to see things in new ways that we hadn’t previously. And that’s really the transformative process of creating your signature talk is it’s a transformative process for you, for your audience, and even for society as a whole.
Carol Cox:
So, okay, so that’s part one. That was the individual way. So claim your expertise and experience and challenge the status quo with your message. So the second one is collective. So collective. How can you approach how can you approach public speaking through a feminist lens collectively? Now what I just talked about with challenging the status quo, it can be scary to do this. We feel alone. We can feel unsafe. Whether it’s mentally, emotionally unsafe, we can even feel physically unsafe. So that’s why we need the support of others, of other women who understand what we’re going through. Being in community with other women has been one of the best things that has helped me to share what I want to share, knowing that I have other women, friends and colleagues, and even clients who understand what I’m doing and have my back. It’s a form of consciousness raising as well. Back in the 1970s, when the second wave feminists were getting more prominence, a lot of it came from consciousness raising, which just meant getting women together in small groups and recognizing that they all were facing similar things. Because when you’re just by yourself and something is going on, you wonder, well, is it just me? Maybe it’s just happening to me, maybe it’s just something that I’m doing. But when you start hearing the same stories from multiple women, you realized, oh, no, it’s not just me.
Carol Cox:
There’s a bigger issue going on here. And so this collective of the feminist approach to public speaking is find communities of women, both in your local area and online. So I’d like to do a balance of in-person, local as well as online. Find those communities of women, amplify other women’s voices, support other women who you see are challenging the status quo. Give them that support that they most likely need, and in return, you’ll get that for yourself as well. So that’s the second way to approach public speaking through a feminist lens is this idea of the collective, of being in community with other women, amplifying other women’s voices, and this, this form of consciousness raising. The third way is structural. So we talked about individual what you can do as an individual, what you can do collectively as a group of women. But then there are structural things that are going on. So this goes back to last week’s episode and the challenge that we’re running on choosing women’s voices that so many of the top ranked podcasts and movies and TV shows and news and media, they’re all run by men and they’re male voices that we’re hearing. So we want to be aware of the voices we’re listening to and make, and being more intentional about choosing women’s voices and choosing diverse women’s voices. So that’s part of it. The structural here is something very tangible that you can do.
Carol Cox:
And that I have started doing is including what’s called an inclusion rider with your speaking engagements. So in our master you’re speaking coaching call last week. Master Your Speaking is our flagship program with a group of a small group of women who go through with group coaching. Plus they get one on one coaching with me and with Diane to create their signature talk. So one of our group coaching calls last week, we were talking about speaking fees, how to do outreach, pitching strategies and how to approach sales conversations with event organizers. This is one of my favorite trainings because it really gets into the very tactical ways to do outreach and sales. But then we also talked about speaking contracts. So the standard stuff of what to include in speaking contracts, event details, payment terms, cancellation terms, things like that. And then I relate a story that had happened just that week. I had received a request to serve on a panel of women in marketing, and based on the email that I got and the other women who were being asked, I could tell that the panel was headed towards being all white women. So I, of course. So I replied and I thanked them for considering me and all of that. And then I added this paragraph. I said, I do have a requirement for being on a panel. You could call it an inclusion rider.
Carol Cox:
At least two of the panelists need to be women of color. If I’m taking a spot that would go to a woman of color, then I will gladly give up my spot. Now, this idea of an inclusion rider comes out of Hollywood, and I’ll include a link to an article that talks about it. So an inclusion rider is where the particular actor in that movie or that TV show requests that the cast and crew are diverse. So that’s what that inclusion rider is. Now notice that when I specified mine, I didn’t say one woman of color for the panel. I said at least two because this is not about finding one person to be a token representative. It’s about truly desiring to bring in voices to the conversation that don’t get heard often enough, and about creating an environment that is welcoming to all. And this goes to panels that are both men and women as well. I don’t think it’s good to have a panel of, say, four men and one woman. It really should be more balanced than that and more balanced not just with white men and women, but with with men and women of color as well, and other diverse groups. So if you are a man listening to this episode, first, thank you so much for listening. And you can adopt these feminist approaches to public speaking for yourself as well.
Carol Cox:
And so if you are asked to participate on a panel, you can include an inclusion rider as well, specifying that at least two of the panelists need to be women or women of color. And if you are a woman being asked to be on a panel or speaking at an event or conference, you can do this as well. Now, whether or not I end up being on this panel, my hope is that the organizer is now aware of the importance of intentionally seeking out diverse women’s voices. And also, I’m a big believer in abundance. There are plenty, plenty, plenty of speaking opportunities out there for me, and there are plenty of speaking opportunities out there for you. I believe that raising awareness is going to benefit all of us the more that we do so. So as a recap, those three ways that you can start applying a feminist approach to your public speaking now individual, collective and structural, the default will keep us where we’re at in a patriarchal, hierarchical society that does not support equality for women or for other groups who are not white men. And it takes effort to go beyond the default. So much easier just to say yes without thinking. So much easier just to not put ourselves out there, so much easier not to challenge the status quo, not to challenge conventional wisdom. But we are better than that. We know that as women entrepreneurs, as women leaders, that we want to make a difference, that we want to have an impact.
Carol Cox:
And I bet that if you’re listening to this podcast, and especially if you’ve been listening for a while, you want to do that as well. So if you haven’t yet signed up for our Choosing Women’s Voices challenge again, it’s not too late to do. You so you can sign up and you’ll just start the the email sequence right then. So you can go to speaking your Brand.com slash challenge to sign up. We have episodes coming up with some amazing women who will be talking about their experiences as women in their fields, and how they’ve approached their speaking, especially in male dominated industries. If you got value out of this episode, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or a colleague and also share it on social media so other people can find out about the Speaking in Your Brand podcast. And if you’re interested in joining us in our Master Your Speaking program, enrollment will be opening again soon. I absolutely love this program because of the combination of one on one coaching plus group coaching that you get. There’s nothing else like it out there. You can get on the interest list and submit your application by going to speaking your brand.com/mastery. Again, that’s speaking your brand.com/mastery. These links are in the show notes as well. I would love to hear from you there. And until next time thanks for listening.
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