What It Means to be Visible to Yourself and Others with Bibigi Haile: Podcast Ep. 321

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Fear of failure, fear of rejection, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, vulnerability hangovers, nerves.

All of these can cause us to be reluctant to be visible, to put ourselves out there.

I’ve certainly experienced all of these throughout my career.

Yet, I’ve also experienced the power and transformation that comes from being visible not only to others but also to myself.

My guest is Bibigi (Bibi) Haile who works with women to help them be visible.

We talk about:

  • What comes up for women when they think about being visible
  • Getting curious and living with the discomfort
  • Our examples of times when we didn’t want to be visible
  • What happens when we see other women punished for their visibility
  • Bibi’s recommendations

I know you’re going to be inspired by our conversation!

This is the third episode in our podcast series for Women’s History Month.

About My Guest: Bibigi Haile founded The Beauvoir Group to give women in middle and senior management roles the license to be Unapologetically Visible, make bold moves, and stop apologizing for what they want from their career. As a sought after keynote speaker and strategic advisor to women, Bibigi has rightfully owned spots on national stages sharing her approach to women’s visibility, imposter syndrome, and personal branding.

When she isn’t on stage, she’s still speaking – her podcast Speaking with Women invites

women to share their experience in the modern workplace. Bibigi is also and especially the mother of a wise 7-year-old, third culture kid, podcast and book nerd, and a running enthusiast.

About Us: The Speaking Your Brand podcast is hosted by Carol Cox. At Speaking Your Brand, we help women entrepreneurs and professionals clarify their brand message and story, create their signature talks, and develop their thought leadership platforms. Our mission is to get more women in positions of influence and power because it’s through women’s stories, voices, and visibility that we challenge the status quo and change existing systems. Check out our coaching programs at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com.

 


Links:

Show notes at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/321 

Bibigi’s website: https://thebeauvoirgroup.com/

Discover your Speaker Archetype by taking our free quiz at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/quiz/

Join our Thought Leader Academy: https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/academy/ 

Connect on LinkedIn:

Related Podcast Episodes:

321-SYB-Bibigi_Haile.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

321-SYB-Bibigi_Haile.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Carol Cox:
What does it mean to be visible to yourself and to others? You’re going to love my conversation with my guest, Hale on this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast. 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 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. Hi and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox. Being visible isn’t always easy. We can have fears of failure, fears of rejection, imposter syndrome, self-doubt, nervousness, vulnerability, hangovers. All of these things come up and they come up for me as well. That’s why I know you’re going to really appreciate my conversation today with my guest, Hale. We connected on LinkedIn because she is the host of her own podcast called Speaking with Women, which I am also on. And we did a podcast trade here so that I can have on to talk about her Zone of Genius, which is really helping women to dig into what it looks like to be visible, not only visible to other people, but to be visible to themselves. This episode is part of the series we’re doing in the month of March for Women’s History Month. Back two weeks ago, I did a solo episode on the three stages we go through as women when we use our voice. And then last week I had a conversation with my guest, Dr. Bebe Parrish, on the Iranian Women’s Revolution. You’ll definitely want to go back and listen to both of those episodes if you haven’t yet. Now let’s get on with the show. Welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast, Bebe. Thank you.

Speaker2:
Carol. I’m happy to be here.

Carol Cox:
I’m excited to have you on because we’re going to talk about being visible and especially as women, all of the different possibilities that come up with being visible, how we can put ourselves out there, but also some of the fears that arise from being visible and putting ourselves out there. And we know that for those of you listening who are public speakers or want to be public speakers want to be thought leaders, want to put your message out there, want to have a bigger impact. Being visible goes hand in hand with that. And so I invited Bebe on the podcast today because she does a lot of work around visibility, confidence, imposter syndrome and the fears that come up with the clients and the women that she works with. Bebe Can you tell us about your podcast and then also tell us about the work that you do with your clients?

Speaker2:
Yeah. So my podcast is called Speaking with Women, and it started actually as a pandemic baby. I had wanted to have a podcast for ever since. Actually, podcasting was a thing like ten, even more years ago. I’ve been a radio person and but I never dared, right? And then when the pandemic hit, I started having conversations with women would just send them an email on LinkedIn and be like, Oh, will you jump on Zoom with me and answer three questions around confidence? And so I did this with women all over the world, literally Australia, everywhere. And then when I came out of that exercise, I was like, Wait a minute, that’s my podcast. Why don’t I just put it out there? And so I did. And eventually I realized what a happy place it was for me. And then I started to think about, you know, ideas around visibility, branding, etcetera, do my own solo episodes. And, you know, the rest is history. And I hit 51 episodes last week, so I’m very, very excited. And the work that I do, I could give you a quick answer, which is I work with women in senior roles on their visibility, on being comfortable, putting themselves out there.

Speaker2:
That’s the very simple answer. The answer is a little longer is that I used to call myself a personal branding coach that resonated very much with women but didn’t resonate with me. I was like, There’s something missing. My clients are not getting to the point where they live their brand or they feel comfortable in their brand. There’s something missing. And then I realized that it was a lot bigger than a brand. It was about being comfortable, being seen, being comfortable, being visible, including being visible to yourself and being happy about what that means and welcoming and keeping yourself safe in that visibility. And so there were so many layers that I said, okay, personal branding is part of it. We, you know, I’m not going to take it out of the equation, but it’s only a part of it. It’s an asset in your visibility journey in practice. But it is not what I do. What I do is helping you step into the light is what I call it, Right? I see you. I reflected back to you and I help you step into the light so you can, you know, show the world how awesome you are.

Carol Cox:
Oh, that’s beautiful. And I love that that visual image that comes to mind. And also this idea of being visible not only to others, but also to oneself, to yourself. So let’s dive into that first. What does it look like to be visible to oneself and why is it hard for some of us to do that?

Speaker2:
So what it means to be visible to oneself is being comfortable exploring all the layers that we would rather not explore. I think we build a number of stories around ourselves. I am a person who does this. I am someone who is like that, that I’m not the type of person who. And what that does is it creates this sort of aura around us of a story of who we are. And the first step of visibility is asking questions about those stories. What if I wasn’t somebody who didn’t like being on social media? What if I wasn’t somebody who was humble? What if I was somebody who could say, I’m an expert at just playing around with those ideas? What if I was somebody who was curious or who could say no? And then living with the discomfort when you ask those questions? Because that’s what happens, right? Like, you ask those questions and you’re like, No, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not me, Right? We fall back on them. That’s not me. And what happens is when you start to get curious, the next step, you get uncomfortable. And the step after is the amount of self-compassion work you’re going to have to do to keep yourself safe in this new space that you’re at where there isn’t a set identity.

Speaker2:
There isn’t a set. I am someone who there is a flux and I’m like, Oh, there’s a flux. What does that mean? How do I present myself? What do I say to people? I’m so used to saying to people, I’m this, I’m that. I like this, I like that. So that’s the first step for me about being visible to yourself. And you discover so many cool things. You discover so many and some not so cool and you’re like, You know what? I don’t really like that about myself, but it’s okay. It’s part of the package. And so I think, you know, it’s a long answer, but I think that’s what being visible to ourselves is. And it’s about that permission, right? That first step of having the permission to be visible to yourself. Because otherwise you can’t be visible to the world. You can’t even write a LinkedIn profile because you’ll write it in the third person and you will start it by so-and-so is a demonstrated expert or is a demonstrated professional in blah blah blah the same profile as everybody else. Right.

Carol Cox:
All right. So I’m going to ask you what have you discovered about yourself as you’ve become more visible to yourself?

Speaker2:
So one of the things it’s funny that you would ask that question today, because I really had a flash yesterday, actually. I discovered that I had really good intuition, but that I was also very conflict averse. And so when I was working with a client, I usually had the intuition of what was going on and I wanted to push back on what I was being told. So the stories that I was being told, I was like, No, I don’t believe you because I was conflict averse. I would people please and avoid trusting my intuition. And so very recently I jumped and I pushed back because now I was trusting my intuition and I was trusting that it was coming from a place of love and a place of support for the women I was working with and that the conflict was okay. We were all going to be fine with the conflict. It wasn’t my conflict. It was a discomfort that was normal in this process. So it’s a step into being visible, right? Because I’m being visible and I’m losing my voice here. I’m being visible with my clients by pushing back on what I’m being told and by holding space for the discomfort both her and I are feeling because of me showing up and being visible in this thing that I discovered about myself.

Carol Cox:
That’s a really good example. And and I want to have us chat a little bit about these different ways of being visible. I think a lot of people assume when we talk about being visible, it means literally standing on a stage in front of hundreds or thousands of people, or maybe it is even putting putting yourself on video on on a social media platform and, and being that. But there are so many other ways that being visible comes into play. And think about, you know, your example was about intuition and being conflict averse with your clients. And think about I’ve talked about this on the podcast a couple times before is that obviously I’m a public speaker. I enjoy public speaking. I’ve been doing it since I was in high school, you know, all throughout my career. So I’m fine, you know, quote unquote, being visible, standing in front of an audience on stage. No problem with that. Yet I am extremely uncomfortable. You talked about walking, living with the discomfort, extremely uncomfortable with applause. At the end of my talk. I would rather just like run off the stage and pretend that it’s not happening, then to accept the applause. And so I have to, you know, think about probably it came from growing up as a child. I was the oldest. I did really well academically. I was always praised for good grades. So I felt like I like that was my identity. And maybe my younger siblings kind of didn’t get that same level of affirmation because I was so academically inclined and so almost like I’m I don’t want to show them up. So I feel like the applause is me. If I accept the applause is me showing them up.

Speaker2:
Yeah, that’s so that’s so interesting. So gay Hendricks talks about that in his book The Big Leap. He talks about that. Part of the risk that we’re taking is the risk that we’re going to make other others feel small. And it’s funny because when I was listening to your example, I was thinking, you know, a way of reframing it and I did this once with a client of mine is it’s not about me. It’s about them. I’m giving them the opportunity to show how much they enjoyed this and to show how much they’re like, Oh, this resonates with me, right? I had a client once who she reached out by email because she had been listening to my podcast and she said, Hey, I’d love to work with you. And I Googled her, and when I Googled her, I realized she was this amazing woman. And, you know, talk about imposter syndrome a lot, but I got hit by imposter syndrome from hell. And my question in my head was, what can I bring this woman? Like, why? Why would she want to work with me? And then the reframe was, Who am I to tell her that she doesn’t know what she wants? You know, same thing. Like, who am I to tell them not to show the sort of appreciation for what I just I just gave them. And that reframe was so useful to me. It didn’t stop me from being uncomfortable in my skin for a little bit, but it did help me to be like, You know what? This is not about you.

Carol Cox:
Yes, absolutely. And this is what I try to tell myself, is it is a value exchange between me and the audience as a speaker and the audience and that you’ve given them value and the applause is them giving you, recognizing that value back.

Speaker2:
Yeah, absolutely.

Carol Cox:
All right. So maybe let’s talk about some other ways that women struggle with being visible. So, you know, again, it can happen in ways that we may not even realize or recognize. What are some other things that you’ve come across or that you’ve worked with clients on?

Speaker2:
So the easiest ones are always about social media, right? Like and I want to talk about that really quickly because all of my clients, Carol, all of them will say, I’m sure this doesn’t happen with your other clients. But and so there is this deep discomfort with LinkedIn. There is this deep discomfort with putting content out there that they create. And it’s always couched as, you know, I’m humble, I it this is not about me like all of that. So that’s one piece and it’s a really big one. But I think other areas I’ll give you examples. I was having dinner with friends and one of the women at the table wanted water and she wanted room temperature water. She didn’t want ice water. She didn’t want water in a bottle. She wanted room temperature water. And around the table, people pooh poohed and they said, no, no, you know what? The the waitress has already brought the water like. And she didn’t insist for the water. And that’s being visible. Everybody else got what they wanted, but what she wanted wasn’t important enough for her to be visible. Another example is with boundaries.

Speaker2:
When the number of times you will ask someone, you will be asked something and you don’t want to do it or you can’t do it, or there is something that you want, but you feel like it might inconvenience the other person. And so you don’t step into the what you want, right? You’ll say, Well, what would you rather? But you know what you want. You just don’t want to be visible. Another example is in meetings at work when you’re called upon, and then the way that it comes out is with hedging words. I’m not sure this makes sense, but, you know, this might be silly, but I have this idea or your tone will be interrogative. And so what you’re doing with a tone like this or with these hedging words that I call is you’re not making yourself visible because you want to de-risk the interaction. You want to take risk out of it. You want the person not to feel like you’re taking too much space. You want the person not to feel like you’re better than them. You’re creating all of these risk management interactions which make you not visible.

Carol Cox:
And this idea of de-risking the situation and kind of mitigating the risk, I imagine that comes from fear of failure, fear of rejection in addition to fear of being visible.

Speaker2:
Fear of failure, feel of fear of rejection. So when I discovered this, it was a mind blowing, a ha moment for me, I think as women and I can’t speak to men’s experiences because I haven’t delved into it, but as women we see what happens to women who are visible. And even if they’re not women like us, even if they’re not women whose life stories look like ours, we take mental notes about what is safe and what is not safe. Right? If you raise your voice or if you’re watching the news and a woman raises her voice because something is important to her and everybody speaks above her, the notes that you take is that’s not a good idea. I need another strategy to be able to share what it is that I’m sharing. If you share something on LinkedIn and somebody comes in your in your either in your DMS or in your comments and says, that doesn’t make any sense. You’re conditioned to think that that person is right and so you should justify yourself to them, right? When you watch someone like Naomi Osaka, who sets a public boundary around what she needs for her mental health and everybody loses their minds, you take mental notes to say it is not safe for a woman to do that. When you see the Prime Minister of New Zealand who says, I’m going to step down because I need to step down and everybody loses their minds and then writes in national publications, can women have it all? We take mental notes about what is possible for us and how we should show up. So, yes, there is the perfectionism. There’s there are a lot of things we can talk about that are very gendered behaviors for a number of reasons, but there’s also the social context that tells us what we’re allowed to do and what we’re not. And we, like I said, we take mental notes.

Carol Cox:
Absolutely. I’m so glad that you mentioned this, because I completely agree with you. You know, I have a background in politics. I during election seasons, I’m a political analyst on the TV news. And so I’ve been doing this since 2005. And, you know, obviously, the political temperature has definitely gone up in the past handful of years compared to when I started in 2005, 2006. As far as like the polarization and just kind of like the the outrage and, you know, how people’s tempers, temperaments and, you know, there have been times where I’ve thought to myself, should I continue going on TV? Because sometimes it feels unsafe for me to do so because, you know, I’m I have you know, I’m not on to have strong political opinions. Like that’s the whole purpose of me doing of doing that. And I wonder, like sometimes, like, is it worth it to do it? Because I do see what happens to other women in the public eye. But this is exactly what our system this is how the system is designed to work is to make sure that women, quote unquote, stay in their place and don’t rock the boat and don’t challenge the status quo. And so what happens when a woman does that is that they are called out, demeaned, insulted, harassed and worse in order to send send that signal to other women.

Speaker2:
Absolutely. And it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. Because then it ends up working. And then the issue that we then have is you don’t want to be an activist every day of the week. Like, you know what I mean? Showing up shouldn’t have to be so hard. And so it becomes an exercise of energy management. And there was a woman who came on my on my podcast, Nadia. She was talking about that. She was talking about the fact that, you know what, you don’t need to fight all the time. You don’t need to be out there all the time. You get to choose if you’re going to speak up, you get to choose. If you’re going to answer someone in your comments, you get to choose how you want to show up. But the one thing I want to offer that we should think about is that when we exit those spaces, even though it’s risky for us, but when we exit them, others go into those spaces. And so again, a space like LinkedIn, you know, I use LinkedIn as a proxy. It’s really not about, Oh, we should be on social media, but LinkedIn is a really good proxy because it has all the things it has. It’s scary because it’s professional. It’s you can build a professional brand or a personal brand like LinkedIn has all the things. So it’s a really interesting proxy. But we can’t say that LinkedIn is a space for a certain type of man and a certain type of professional and want it to be different and then not be on it. We can’t. So we should respect our energy and we should keep ourselves safe. But part of the exercise has to be about being visible so that it becomes something that is not normal but easier.

Carol Cox:
Yeah, like claiming like claiming our space and our right to be there. Yeah. So, Bebe, let’s talk let’s talk more specifically about LinkedIn. That is my social media platform of choice. I like LinkedIn. That’s where I spend. I don’t actually don’t use any other social media platforms at this point besides LinkedIn. So what have you found has been helpful to the women that you’ve talked to, the women you’ve worked with who have been a little bit hesitant about putting themselves out there on LinkedIn? What have they been concerned about? I guess, like what types of content have they been concerned about putting themselves out there then How have you helped them to address that?

Speaker2:
So the biggest concern is around I’m not an expert, so how can I say these things? There are two types of posts that people are worried about. The expertise posts where you’re talking about something and most of the time they’re super experts. They’re not just experts, they’re super experts, right? So there’s the expertise post and then there is the personal post. This is another one that really freaks people out. And I always say it’s a continuum. You know, people will say, Oh, but you know, this has nothing to do. Like, it shouldn’t be about putting yourself out there. Um, but I’ll tell people to go and look at my profile. And I have a seven year old son, but I’d be very surprised if you could find his name on my and I speak about him on LinkedIn, but I will use his initials. There are no pictures of him. There is one. In all the time I’ve been in LinkedIn, there’s one and it’s because it’s a little bit blurry. So I respect my boundaries of privacy while still allowing people to get to know who I am. And so so those are the two that women have been afraid of. And so the. Way that I have proposed to move past that is twofold. Number one, start having interactions on LinkedIn with other people. If you’re not comfortable doing your own posts, go posts and comment on other people’s posts that are within your realm of expertise. Start having conversations because it takes away that stress of I’m posting something right? Like you just you get used to the platform. I’m doing this myself on on Instagram. I hate video. I mean, we’re on video now and I’m just like, I’m trying to I’m having a moment here, but I’m testing out Instagram, right? And so I say to women, just test out, go in the comments and do that.

Speaker2:
And then the other thing is starting to share in incremental pieces, right? It doesn’t have to be this big thing, just incremental pieces. Share an article, but share what you think about the article. Like my pet peeve is sharing articles without saying what you think about the article. Share it and then give some color on why you think what you’re sharing is important. So it’s really about being about taking baby steps. And actually the last piece is having a community that’s supporting you. So having women around you that will support your post. And I will admit to this day when there is an important post, I will text my girlfriend squad and be like, Hey, could you engage with my post? Because it’s like dying a slow death because you know what? It makes you feel safer. Even though we know that it’s not about the likes and there’s so much people who have bought from me, have quasi never liked my posts. It’s happening in the background, but at the beginning likes help our dopamine and they bring us back. So get the likes even if it’s from your girlfriend’s work. The system. If the system was created with likes and and little pings that will work, your dopamine work the system. That’s the advice I would give to get started. Because the truth is you cannot get something perfect happening in your head. It won’t happen. You have to go and do it and fail. Nobody cares that you fail. They’ll forget. Think about yourself scrolling. You know, when you scroll and you see someone say something like you’re like, I can’t believe you just said that. Do you remember three minutes later? No, it’s just a playground.

Carol Cox:
All right. So many good things. First, for those of you listening and Bibi, you’re gorgeous. And for those of you listening, you have to go look at. So the video we obviously this is, you know, podcast is primarily audio, but we do record video while we’re going. And so the video is on the show notes page for this episode. You can go see because Bibi has these incredible this incredible artwork, these two gorgeous paintings behind her that you have to go see as well as to see Bibi herself. Okay. So that was the first the first plug on the video. The second thing is, you know, thinking about LinkedIn and the expertise post and the personal post, and I and I completely hear you on that. As far as that’s where, you know, you see the woman you talk to primarily struggle. And it brought to mind that on a recent call for our Thought Leader Academy, we were talking about kind of using your voice and the weight of responsibility that can come with it and some of the fears that can come with using your voice. And and some of the women were talking about how they are a little bit hesitant to put their very strong opinions, you know, their thought leadership, their perspectives out there because of trolls, either trolls that are like real people, you know, like second degree connections or like real people on LinkedIn or just those are more like the trolls that are the spam Bots don’t really care about those, but the trolls who are quote unquote real people who are, you know, who come on, make comments because they like to poke, right? That’s what they’re really doing. They like to be disagreeable. But I know a lot of women are afraid of that happening to them and then how they should respond or, you know, and how it makes them feel. What do you say about that?

Speaker2:
People probably can’t see because they’re not seeing the video. But I was like, okay, I’ve got an answer for this. I got an answer. So the first thing I want to say is there is a continuum of trolling, and I’m not talking about the risky trolling. There was a book that was written. It’ll come back to me, but about the women in the digital space and about how they get trolled and can get to the level of, you know, your own personal being in danger. So there’s a continuum, and that’s not what I’m talking about. The garden variety trolling on LinkedIn. Here’s the thing When someone trolls you in your comment, their objective is like a schoolyard bully to get a rise out of you. That’s the only objective. And so when you don’t answer, what happens is you defeat their purpose. And now they’re all frustrated and really want to tell you a story. Carol, I’m so proud of myself. I’m actually bragging in this in this story. So I put up a post on LinkedIn. I don’t know what it was about, but it was an. Opinion post. And some guy came in my comments and talked about how I wasn’t making sense or. Something very disagreeable. And he was a first connection. So I was surprised. It’s like, don’t. And I checked his profile and I was like, I don’t know, how come? Why are you being disagreeable on my LinkedIn? And so I answered him and I said, And this was in the evening. And that’s important because stuff happened after I answered him, I said, Thank you so much for commenting on this because I keep telling women how being trolled is unpleasant but not dangerous and you’ve just proven it.

Speaker2:
So I’m going to also take a screenshot and use it for an upcoming conference to show how innocuous it is. And then I stopped answering and he lost his mind. He he replied and, you know, justified what he had said and then didn’t answer. So then he replied again. Then he deleted his first post. So if you now look at the sequence of of comments, what I said looks like it doesn’t make sense. And I was I was having a great time. I was looking at my phone and I was seeing him lose his mind and other people were commenting on what he said and I was answering them, but I wasn’t answering him. And eventually it just it just ended. He was the one who looked crazy. So the whole point of this story, other than self-congratulating myself, because I was I was so having so much fun, is that they know what they’re doing. They’re just bored and they’re just don’t like to see a woman taking a stand. Most of the time they know less about the subject than you do. And if you ignore them, the only thing that’s going to happen is the discomfort in your body that they’re on in your comment section. It’s going to feel uncomfortable, but you don’t need to do anything about that discomfort. Let them sit there and stew in their unpleasantness and you don’t have to do anything about it. And they’ll see you comment in other people and they’ll be like, Why isn’t she giving me attention? And they’ll probably answer other people in your comments. Other people in your comments will answer them, stay away from it and it’ll go away like a troll or a gremlin. They will go away.

Carol Cox:
It’ll be first. Yes. Congratulations. I love how you replied that you were going to use him as an example on a conference. I’m sure he was not expecting that at all. And it’s so true about just like, don’t give it fuel, don’t give it oxygen. And then a lot of times they’ll just they’ll lose interest and go to somewhere else instead where they can get a response. And the other thing I’ll say to the listeners that, you know, if it gets to the point where you just don’t want their comments on your post because it is just it’s just a distraction from your original message or it is getting to the point where it’s a little bit like just harassment, just delete it, really. It’s your, it’s your post. You can do whatever you want to with it.

Speaker2:
Yeah, it’s your real estate. Delete it. Yes.

Carol Cox:
Yeah. And try not to think too much about it because you know, as we know, like as humans, we have a negativity bias in our brains because that’s what keeps us safe, you know, from a survival standpoint. And so go like tell you keep telling yourself that like the reason this is sticking in my mind is because I have a negativity bias as a human. But I need to focus on all the good that comes out of what I share on LinkedIn or all the good that comes out of being visible and putting myself out there.

Speaker2:
Yeah, and taking risks like that is actually a practice because we can’t realize that it’s safe until we’ve done it and seen that it’s safe, right? Again, it’s not a process that’s going to happen in our heads. It’s going to happen through doing the tests and seeing, Oh, this isn’t so bad. I know when I ignore him, he goes away. And I think part of what we’re afraid of is people are going to see him say that and they’re going to think I said something stupid. But most of the time people think, what a jerk.

Carol Cox:
Exactly.

Speaker2:
And so just seeing that that is happening and also referring to ourselves, would you ever think that someone is something because there was a negative comment in there in on their LinkedIn? You wouldn’t why don’t you give that same grace to your audience that they can see this person is unpleasant and they’re not going to think you’re saying something unintelligent, which is what we’re afraid of.

Carol Cox:
Absolutely. All right. So for those of you listening, keep putting your stuff out, your content out there, don’t mind the trolls. Just either ignore them or delete them whatever suits you and know that the work that you’re putting out there is really important not only for your the, your audience who who sees it, reads it, watches it, listens to it so that they can learn from you. You know, like think like see like three benefits. Number one, your audience learns from you because you are putting your content out there. The second thing is that you are developing that muscle yourself of being visible and putting your content out there. And the third thing like we talked about earlier, is that you’re providing that example for other women so that they too can put themselves out there because they see you doing it. And so the more of us, I believe do it, then the more women will also be inclined to do that. And we can we can take that claim, that space that we deserve.

Speaker2:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, if we want to create other spaces, great. And that’s part of the conversation. But we should be able to be in these spaces to take up space and to have conversations in the way that feel good for us and safe for us.

Carol Cox:
Phoebe, thank you so much for this conversation. I have really enjoyed it. Where is the best place for listeners to connect with you? Obviously LinkedIn is one of them. I’ll make sure to include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. And also, okay, so tell us again the name of your podcast and your website.

Speaker2:
My podcast is called Speaking with Women the Web. Site is the Beauvoir Group.com. And yes, please find me on LinkedIn. I spent too much time there, but I enjoy meeting people on LinkedIn.

Carol Cox:
And I enjoy your posts, so please keep keep posting them there. Bebe Thank you so much for coming on the Speaking Your Brand podcast.

Speaker2:
Thank you.

Carol Cox:
Wasn’t that a powerful conversation? If you’ve been reluctant to put yourself out there, I hope that this inspired you to do so, and if you have been putting yourself out there, I hope this inspired you to do so in an even bigger way. Make sure to connect with both me and on LinkedIn. The links to our profiles are in the show notes. We’ll be wrapping up the series for Women’s History Month next week, talking about changing the image women have of themselves. You won’t want to miss that episode until next time. Thanks for listening.

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