This is a story about courage, self-reliance, and how it’s possible to build a career in defiance of societal norms. Societal norms are nothing to celebrate because they exclude most people from participating in them. Honestly, most societal norms exist because they benefit a privileged few and in a professional context, privileged people benefit from systems of patronage. In systems of patronage, privileged people grant each other positions of power, and then they go on to make decisions throughout the course of their careers that uphold societal norms because they serve the privileged, and they grip so hard onto that privilege because it’s so comfy cozy to hold. Societal norms are not only exclusive and in most cases racist, classist, sexist, and capitalistic, they’re also boring. In this episode, I’m talking to Vivian Kay, an entrepreneur who has started and scaled two six-figure ventures and one seven-figure venture despite the societal norms that exist to work against her, including but not limited to white supremacy and racism. If you’re listening to this episode and you’re in a job that you think you have to do, to keep up the status quo and problematic societal norms, I want you to pay close attention to how Vivian approaches entrepreneurship with a sense of curiosity and a personal commitment to self-reliance and resourcefulness. I think you’re really going to love this episode. Let’s talk to Vivian.

Women Talk Shop

030: Vivian Kay & Trusting Yourself to Defy Societal Norms

This is a story about why we need to flip the script on personal coaching, LIFE COACHING, so it earns the respect it deserves. My guest today is really special to me because she’s truly helped me, on a very personal level, through some of the many challenges I’ve faced as an inexperienced and naive self-employed woman. My guest today is Stephanie Rourke Jackson, an IPSAT certified life and leadership coach who is also one of the warmest and most genuine women I know. What I want you to really hear in this episode is how life coaching is structured and deeply personal when you work with someone who is trained, qualified, and accredited in coaching. The coaching marketplace is really, really saturated with untrained, unqualified, and non-accredited coaches who may be great cheerleaders and hype beasts, but not as well prepared to heal the traumas that lay beneath the surface and present as imposter syndrome and fear of failure. In my opinion, Stephanie and her style of coaching is the standard worth investing in. And life coaching is an investment. But the return on investment is massive if you work with the right person who can help you reap incredible results. In this episode, you’re going to hear about the true benefits of life coaching and why this particular form of therapy should be normalized and destigmatized as a frivolous, unnecessary expense — especially for ambitious businesswomen. Let’s talk to Stephanie.

029: Stephanie Rourke-Jackson & Normalizing Performance Coaching

This is a story about how a sense of belonging heals the wounds of loneliness for women. Loneliness is a human condition that has existed forever. But, if you’re an analyst of social, challenge, and change like me, you may have discovered that feelings of loneliness are increasing rapidly, a result of many factors that are different for everyone. I struggled with a serious bout of loneliness that lasted about two years, my first two years of self-employment, and feeling so lonely made it extremely difficult for me to focus on anything else. Loneliness made me behave in ways that didn’t align with my true self; I stopped seeing friends, I stopped taking care of myself, I stopped doing things that bring me joy, and I became really snappy and defensive when people tried to come into my life. I was really hurting so in many ways, I think my loneliness led to depression and for two years I didn’t know how to get out of it. In this episode, I’m talking with Rebecca Gill, an extremely warm and compassionate woman with a portfolio career. She runs a business called Shop Thing, which is an incredibly smart retail service that sends personalized sale items to your phone via video, check it out at shopthing.com, and Rebecca also runs Her People, which is like a new-age community centre for women who are struggling with loneliness, like I was. Let’s talk to Rebecca.

028: Rebecca Gill & Healing The Wounds of Loneliness For Women

This is a story about how the recruitment industry is broken in Canada and in desperate need of an overhaul. In Canada, it seems like it’s nearly impossible to get the attention of a recruiter and even more difficult to hold their attention long enough to benefit from their help. In this country, for some reason, the recruitment industry is not the tie that binds qualified candidates and talent-hungry employers. From the candidate side, recruiters seem more like elusive lovers who seduce but loathe to enter into relationships. My guest today is an English woman living in Canada and has struggled with getting the attention of recruiters for over a year and a half since immigrating here with her husband. Nicola Lockwood-Hall came to Canada with an exceptional resume. She studied Law at Oxford University and got her MBA at Cambridge. She practiced corporate law for six years before becoming a senior consultant at Ernst & Young and then moved on to lead Talent & Organizational Effectiveness for LexisNexis. Then, she became a very successful self-employed consultant in South Africa, working with global organizations who deeply valued her expertise, before coming to Canada...where she couldn’t even get a return phone call from a recruiter much less a coffee meeting or referral for a position far too junior for her level of experience. The part of this story that irks me the most is how many times Nicola has been declined for an interview because of her lack of Canadian experience. For a country that markets itself as diverse and democratic and welcoming to all, this is one hell of misrepresentation of our supposed values. Let’s talk to Nicola.

027: Nicola Lockwood-Hall & Reforming Recruiting in Canada

This is an episode about the true value of personal branding with visual communication, and you’re in for a treat because I’m talking with the veritable leader of personal branding and personal style, Monique Bryan. Before we get into the episode, I want you to open up your Instagram app right now and follow @moniquebryan_co because, not only does Monique do daily lives and give away a ton of free information, also has a uniquely special energy that can brighten your day, any day. You’re going to hear a conversation about personal branding that is going to shift your mindset on the importance of personal style as an expression of who you are within the context of work. And this is really important — personal branding with personal style isn’t a frivolous expense or use of time, it’s a critical factor in how people perceive you. And if you’re a professional woman, whether you’re an employee or an entrepreneur, how people perceive you has a direct impact on your opportunities. They are directly correlated. And do you want to know what the most surprising thing is about personal branding with personal style? That we most often don’t represent ourselves well with our personal style, because we typically don’t think very strategically about the clothes we wear and what they say about us. Most of the time, we’re just trying to get clothes on our bodies and get out the door. Monique has built an incredibly successful business as a personal branding consultant for coaches, speakers and business owners, and today you’re going to hear the details of what her work entails, and the true value of leveraging personal style as a business tool. Let’s talk to Monique.

026: Monique Bryan & Personal Branding With Personal Style

This is a story about using your transferable skills to go for it anyway — when you don’t really know what you’re doing. I would estimate that over half the clients I work with on career branding are senior-level managers who want to change industries but they’re not sure how to do it, or if they even can. I know that you totally can change industries if you want to, and you can also change job types — in fact, you can do whatever you want if you allow yourself to think creatively about all the different ways that your skills can be applied. That’s the first step. The second step is changing your mindset around change being a dangerous and risky pursuit to become more flexible. In this episode, I’m talking with Laura Bryce, co-owner of Dresst.ca, a Canadian clothing rental brand that Laura and her partner, Kelly Pigeon, started after 10 years building a career in an entirely different industry. Kelly and Laura didn’t just change jobs and industries, they changed job types too, from employment to entrepreneurship, with a gut feeling and loads of gumption. Most of the conversations I hear about women entrepreneurship are sugar-coated and gloss over the strategic thinking involved in building a business. I’m excited to have Laura on the show because she does a really good job of explaining the step-by-step process she and Kelly took to build Dresst.ca to become a successful brand in Canada by not working hard to reinvent the wheel. Let’s talk to Laura.

025: Laura Bryce & Changing Everything With Transferable Skills

This is a story about reframing the recruiter-candidate relationship to become significantly more personal and supportive. How many nightmare stories have you heard about ridiculously bad experiences with recruiters who don’t reply to emails, have no critical feedback to offer on your CV, and seem all too willing to just leave you to look for new career opportunities by yourself? There are exceptions to the rule, of course, and today I’m talking with Maria Meally who is one very notable exception, and I’m so eager for you to meet her. Maria is the owner of Theory Y Search, a recruitment agency for the financial services industry in New York and Toronto. She’s from Ireland, moved to Toronto and lived here for 7 years, and then recently relocated to Brooklyn, where she lives today. What she does so differently is take into account how critical it is for her to form meaningful relationships with her candidates and her clients because recruiting really is a business founded upon relationships, but very few recruiters invest in them. And I just don’t get why not! Neither does Maria, which is why she operates her business differently. Working with her is like getting a therapist, a recruiter, and a life coach in one. I am so passionate about this topic and I think it’s so overdue for the recruitment industry, particularly in Canada, to be disrupted by recruiters who think differently about their work, play the long game and are fiercely committed to relationships and supporting the self-esteem of their clients through the job search process. Let’s talk to Maria.

024: Maria Meally & Enriching The Recruiter-Candidate Relationship

This is a really special episode because it’s the first international episode of Women Talk Shop! Today, I’m talking with Kate Surala and Sarah Wagner, the co-authors of a new book called Unleash Today, a non-fiction book that empowers young women to unleash their full potential in the workplace. Today we’re talking about the little things that add up to make a huge, negative impact on our self-esteem in the workplace. Women tend to overcompensate for our relative inexperience as professionals by working doubly hard and thinking we need to do more, be more, and take on more than men in order to prove ourselves. And, when we aren’t PERFECT at work, or we don’t perform PERFECTLY every day, we shame ourselves and minimize the good work we have done, and all the things we are capable of, as forms of punishment that prove our low self-esteem justifiable. In other words, we look for confirmation bias that we’re not good enough yet, so we need to work harder. This is a pretty thick conversation that ultimately relays back to the importance of self-promotion so sit back and enjoy the conversation with Kate and Sarah, and please share this episode with a friend who you think is way more impressive than she gives herself credit for. Let’s talk to Sarah and Kate.  

023: Kate & Sarah & Releasing Their New Book, Unleash Today

This is a story about the value of investing in relationships and being a genuinely kind business woman EVEN when you’re in a powerful position, and especially when you’re in a power position. There’s a common stereotype of women who have successfully climbed to the top of a corporate business ladder — that they’re ice cold and driven exclusively to perform, and have little time for niceties and kindness towards the less powerful people who surround them. This stereotype is sexist and meaningless. It’s not justifiable to judge a woman who isn’t motivated to nurture her work friendships or be affectionate towards her colleagues. However, the value of nurturing our work friendships isn’t so that we can easily use people to get what we want but rather so that we can better ourselves with the help of others — not to climb higher but to perform better... as the best version of ourselves. My guest today is Katie Green, the CEO of August Strategy, a strategic communications and brand development company, and former senior director of global communications at ALDO Group. Katie has built an incredibly successful career for herself and has always led with kindness and invested in her relationships. Katie and I went to the University of Ottawa together and were both in the same communications program, so I’ve seen her grow from our lecture halls to becoming a global communications leader, and in my opinion, she’s always been the standard to strive for in terms of how she conducts herself as both a good person and an incredibly smart businesswoman. If you tend to shy away from work relationships, or aren’t really sure how nurturing your network can pay you back in spades, this episode is for you. Let’s talk to Katie.

022: Katie Green & The Value of Friendly Leadership

This episode is about how self-esteem and resilience intersect with failure in business. You’ve heard me say it before but I’ll declare it again: business is in fact very personal, and I think that business growth and success are only possible once failure has occurred and our feelings of self-worth and self-esteem have been challenged so many times that failure becomes normal, and expected. It’s at the point, and only at that point, when failure feels normal, that we can acknowledge it and make the decision to get on with business anyway. That’s how we build resilience and our self-esteem authentically, over time and with failure. In this episode, I’m talking with Joanna Track, the founder and executive publisher of Bullet Daily Media Group which publishes The Bullet, and NewsworthyCo Inc., which offers “editorial as a service” to organizations around the world. Joanne was also the founder of Sweet Spot and eLuxe here in Canada. She’s a brilliant businesswoman with incredible foresight for future trends in media and commerce. She’s also experienced her fair share of failure and feelings of self-doubt, which I think are likely contributing factors to her continued success in building her third successful venture. Let’s talk to Joanna:

021: Joanna Track & Finding Self-Esteem in “Failure”

This is a story about following your gut instinct and forging a career with your natural gift as the guiding light. My guest today is Jam Gamble, a connector of people, ideas and energy, and one of the best public speakers I’ve ever witnessed, both on Instagram and in real life. Jam is the founder of Slay The Mic, an incredibly successful coaching program that helps people grow from anxious to perfectly comfortable using their voice and becoming confident public speakers. How many people do you know who are nervous about public speaking? It’s more rare to know people who are comfortable with public speaking so that’ll give you an idea of why Jam’s program is so damn popular. In this episode, you’re going to hear Jam tell her story about how she tried forgetting about her love for public speaking, and pursue a career that was more along the lines of “the right thing to do” and better satisfied the people around her in society. She tried to do the right thing and walk a straight line but her gut instinct wouldn’t quiet down and ultimately motivated Jam to do her own thing, which has really paid off in the end. Most of us dream about having our careers and our passions align, but few of us actually take the leap and make it happen for ourselves. We’re scared! I get it; being scared makes sense when there’s so much damn pressure in society to conform. But Jam’s a really strong example of a woman who followed her gut instinct and forged a thriving career for herself in the new economy, online. Let’s talk to Jam.

020: Jam Gamble & Forging A Career With Your Natural Gift

This is a story about the art of self-promotion at every age and stage of entrepreneurship. Do you ever fall into the trap of thinking that you’re too late to try something if you didn’t do it first, or a long time ago before anybody else started doing it? If you have perfectionist tendencies, I would put money on a bet that you think you need to do something first and better than everyone else if you’re going to do it all. This entire season is about the art of self-promotion among professional women and today I’m speaking with someone who has already been running a successful communications company for a long time. She’s not a new entrepreneur, she’s a seasoned and established business owner with a full staff, a long list of devoted clients, and hard-earned confidence. Andrea is a really successful communicator who has earned her keep by promoting other people and their accomplishments her entire career but she never really thought about doing the same for herself until recently, when her mindset shifted and everything changed. If you think it’s too late to start promoting yourself and that other people would think it was strange if you starting sharing your accomplishments now, I’m happy to introduce you to Andrea Lekushoff who just started promoting herself and her business now, after decades of being in service to others and just deciding one day that it was her time to shine. Keep listening to hear how Andrea has grown her business and changed how people perceive HER after years of having an established reputation already, only to make it even better. Let’s talk to Andrea.

019: Andrea Lekushoff & Embracing Self-Promotion (It’s Never Too Late!)

This is a story about just how personal business is for women. I could have never guessed that being an entrepreneur would be so difficult because the difficulties aren’t always predictable. Things like how to write a really great proposal, then sell the proposal and turn it into a legally binding contract, then create an invoice and set up automatic payments, and how to accept credit card payments — these are some of the things that add up to make entrepreneurship really challenging for a newbie. We all have different experiences but many of us think it’s only ourselves who don’t know how to perform the functions of business and everybody else has it all figured out. If we don’t speak openly about the challenges we face with one another, we risk becoming isolated and suffering in silence when we could be learning skills from other women who have faced our challenges before and are totally willing to lend a helping hand. Today, I’m speaking with Dayna Lapkovsky who started frank, a community coaching program for Canadian women to learn and teach skills and ask for help with our barriers to success. Frank offers non-traditional networking in a way that suits the nature of women, to be communicative and collaborative. Frank is based in Montreal and offers women across Canada the opportunity to tackle what’s at hand with an action plan and the help of an expert facilitator. The thing I love about frank the most, and kudos to Dayna for building frank this way, is how it offers women the opportunity to hear an outsider’s perspective on problem-solving because sometimes we just need somebody to tell us what to do because they know best. *Important: We recorded this interview earlier this year before lockdown and Boycott Facebook, so if you love what you hear and you want to learn more about frank’s fall and winter programs, make sure you visit frank-talk.com. Let’s talk to Dayna.

018: Dayna Lapkovsky & Group Coaching For Frank Advice

This is a story about how your effective self-promotion can create and attract totally unexpected opportunities for your career. I’ve talked about the importance of self-promotion a lot on this podcast and I still think it’s the single most important skill for professional women to hone. Effective self-promotion isn’t going on and on about how amazing and special we are but rather the art of communicating what we do, why we love to do it, and what we are really interested in doing next. In this episode, I’m talking to Amrita Gurney, the VP of Marketing at CrowdRiff, a 6-year-old tech company in Toronto that works with travel and tourism brands, a highly visible public speaker on women in technology, and recently, an angel investor. While we were working together to produce this episode, Amrita shared with me that because she is a woman of colour, she spent much of her life feeling like she didn’t fit in, especially in the tech workplace. She didn’t have leaders that looked like her, and her personal strengths — being a sensitive, empathetic, creative, and expressive woman — were not valued in the first decade of her career. She experienced misogyny, racism, and a lot of gender bias. Today, Amrita’s aim is to help more brown women, and all women from underrepresented communities, have easier access to angel investment opportunities and also to see themselves as people who can be angel investors too. For her, the transformation happened once she started promoting herself and advocating for the changes she wanted to see in tech by public speaking. The more she promoted herself, the more public speaking opportunities she attracted, and the more frequently she began to give voice to women of colour in technology. And that, my friends, is how it’s done. Let’s talk to Amrita.

017: Amrita Gurney & Advocating For Change Through Self-Promotion

Everyone who hears this podcast should walk away with a much, much clearer understanding of how to write a resume, why certain things are more important than others, what information is critical to include and also what information can be left off your resume, and also how your resume functions as just one tool in a holistic professional portfolio, albeit an important one and, dare I say it, a necessary evil. Key Takeaways: Your resume is like your defence attorney. It exists to make a strong case for why you’re a powerful candidate. The strongest case will be made with quantifiable evidence that communicates your ability to move the needle forward for a company. The first page of your resume should include a really clever and concise candidate summary that reads like the back cover of a novel to give the reader a clear idea of everything you bring to the table in 15 seconds or less. The first page of your resume should also have a list of key skills that align with the keywords on the job description for the position you are applying for. You can find the keywords by reading the job description with a critical eye. The second page of your resume should list your professional experience, educational background, and continuing education. Your resume should be sent in a word document, not a PDF, and the content should be typed in a single column to read top-to-bottom. ATS hates text boxes, extra columns, and unnecessary information. You want to keep it tight. Finally, you don’t need to include your references, your hobbies, or anything else on your resume because all of those things can be shared with the other marketing tools that comprise a polished professional portfolio, and I’ll be talking all about those in upcoming episodes in this series.

015: How to Write a Resume

Women Talk Shop is the best podcast for changing how we think and talk about work. Host Rebecca Perrin uses life coaching models and positive thoughtwork to help change your mindset about your potential and power to take control of your career. Together we will discover the right words to articulate what we do for work, find the courage to self-promote with supreme confidence, learn the most powerful new job hunt strategies, and completely fix our career mindsets to become less fear-based and more empowered.

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Women Talk Shop

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