How To Take Up Space And Become Unstoppable With Vanessa Collingridge
Research has shown that although half of audience members of academic seminars are women, for every question asked by a woman, men asked 2-3 times as many (Carter et al., 2018). This pattern extends into the workplace, with many women holding back their contributions in meetings. Could this fear of speaking out have an effect on our earning potential, the impact we have at work and how we’re perceived as leaders? The answer is ‘yes’…
This episode of The Wallet welcomes Dr Vanessa (‘Ness’) Collingridge, an award-winning TV and radio journalist and impact coach who is empowering women to quite literally use their voice, speak up and get comfortable taking up space.
Joined by Vestpod intern, Millie, Vanessa shares practical hacks that we can use to try and help amplify our voices; breathing techniques that can help calm our nerves in stressful situations; and the subtle changes that we can make to our body language in order to feel and appear more powerful.
Vanessa has boundless energy and is passionate about boosting the visibility of women, encouraging us all to ditch our “good girl” mentalities and, instead, strive to be seen and heard. 💕
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You can listen (43 min) and subscribe here:
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1. embrace your inner ‘bad girl’
Are you the one at work who offers to volunteer for everything, does overtime and fails to ask for extra pay?
Do you find it difficult to say ‘no’ when a colleague asks for help with work that is their responsibility no matter how busy your own work schedule?
Are you unable to offer true constructive feedback to your peers for fear that it might upset them or rock the boat?
If any of these questions resonated with you and your experience at work, it is highly likely that you are suffering from the ‘good girl’ phenomenon. In our formative years, we learn that there is this ‘good girl’ ideal: she is nice, quiet, pretty, accommodating, hard-working and, most importantly, she always puts others first. As we grow up, the consequences of the good girl phenomenon pervade all aspects of our lives from our work to our mental health to our relationships as we continuously seek to please, perform and prove ourselves to others. In fact, a study by Stanford University in 2018 reported that the most desirable adjectives to describe women were “compassionate, warm, cheerful, soft-spoken and loyal – the archetypal qualities of the good girl. When the same study participants were asked to rank desirable adjectives for men, “assertive, dominant and decisive” made the top of the list. From the results of this study, we can infer that women are rewarded when they are soft, self-sacrificing good girls, while men are praised when they assert their position. It therefore comes as no surprise, explains Ness, that as women who have been conditioned to work hard, keep their heads down and not speak up, we are too often discounted, overlooked and talked over at work.
Given that the guidelines are black and white for women – you either meet the good girl criteria or you are a ‘bad girl’ – Ness argues that becoming your authentic self and growing past your self-minimising behaviour is about embracing your inner ‘bad girl’: it is time that we “enable women to have the confidence and skills to step out of the shadows, to step into the limelight, and take up the space that we want them to do, that they want themselves to do and that society at large needs them to do”. Only once we have successfully achieved this will we edit women back into the picture and allow them to create impact. To this end, Ness leverages the motto: "STOP, THINK, ACT”. When we take a moment to stop and consider the gendered landscape, we permit ourselves to depersonalise the situation and recognise whether what we are doing is something that truly right for us or whether we are doing it to please others. Once we have recognised our own self-limiting good girl tendencies, we can identify what it is that we need to do achieve your goals and plan a course of action. This can mean developing introspective methods for identifying how societal messages are influencing our current action and redefining what success means to us. For example, if you are keeping yourself small in order to appear agreeable to others, it might be time to revaluate your current submissiveness in the context of what you want to achieve and become visible in order to align yourself with that goal. Ness recounts how she did just this, having spent years avoiding networking as a TV presenter which set her career back years. Some other bad girl hacks include, but are not limited to:
Asking for what you want and deserve at work: a study by the Harvard Business Review highlighted that only 7 percent of female MBA graduates attempted to negotiate their salary with their prospective employers, while 57 percent of their male counterparts did. When we acknowledge and voice our worth through negotiation, we challenge the societal, cultural and familial messages that good girls shouldn’t make demands.
Saying ‘no’: a series of studies conducted by Katherine O’Brien, a postdoctoral research associate at the Baylor School of Medicine, concluded that women find it harder than men to decline assignments that are not part of their remit. The inability to say ‘no’ can have hugely detrimental impacts on women’s mental health and increase the risk of burnout. So, next time someone approaches you asking for help, pause first and consider your capacity to balance your own commitments before accepting.
Speaking up: women must find their voice, share their opinions and ask questions if we are to tackle internalised gender role stereotypes about assertiveness and redress the balance in the workplace.
Focusing on being respected, not on being liked: as Margaret Thatcher once remarked, "If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing."
2. Connect with your audience
If we were to say, “you have a presentation tomorrow”, you should plan for what you are going to say, right? Wrong.
Ness stresses that using your voice to create the greatest impact is about adapting your message to what the audience needs to hear, not what you want to say. When we share ideas with impact, it is paramount to connect and resonate with our audience in order to get them on side. In her Impact Workship, Ness recounts the Monday meetings during the early years of her presenting career at ITV, in which the team would submit their ideas through a “WGAS” (who gives a ****) funnel - the underlying rationale being that just because you find a topic interesting doesn’t mean the audience will care: they will want to know how what you are saying impacts them.
So, how do you get to know your audience? The first thing to do is to spend time researching your audience ahead of the presentation, thinking about business context (the organisational dynamic of the workplace that you are speaking in); cultural context (the nuances of body language, tone of voice and dress specific to the region you are speaking in); and, finally, personal context (the audience’s age, gender, ethnicity and status within the company). This will, in turn, make you receptive to incorporating new information that comes up during the presentation since you have spent time thinking about your audience and can, therefore, quickly respond to updates accordingly.
You want to be in the same ‘tribe’ as the group you are addressing to convey a targeted, thoughtful and welcomed message. You must dress appropriately to join that ‘tribe’, dressing to your audience’s level or slightly above to promote your message. It is critical that you gear your presentation content to your audience’s understanding, experience and interests. Some of Ness’ expert content rules include:
Avoid using jargon - complicated language will only alienate your audience.
Use inclusive language (‘You’, ‘We’) - addressing your audience directly will help you to connect with them on a personal level.
Use everyday analogies - clarifying the unfamiliar is essential to keeping your audience engaged.
Make your subject immediate and personal - connecting to the here-and-now is conducive to building audience involvement.
Use emphasis for key points - well-placed emphasis will add clarity to your message.
Use rhetorical questions - rhetorical questions will help to solidify the structure of your presentation and allow you to connect with your audience.
3. the power of voice and body language
“What you want to do is occupy space - it’s back to this mantra of giving yourself permission to take up space. If you grow tall, open your arms a little bit, with nice open body language and open hand gestures, you immediately come across as somebody who is confident, relaxed and convincing. And if you are projecting those impressions, even if you don’t feel it, the audience tends to relax and then you think ‘this is going really well’ so you do become more confident, relaxed and convincing. It’s part of this beautiful virtuous circle”
From the moment we are seen and we open our mouths to speak we are judged. A series of experiments led by Princeton psychologists, Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, revealed that it takes just a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger from their face, body language and voice. Moreover, it was discovered that longer exposures do not significantly alter those first impressions, although they might serve to reinforce initial judgements. The first impressions we give have significant predictive capacity for many important characteristics, not just attractiveness. For example, the same research showed that people’s instant impressions based on voice and body language alone have the power to predict election outcomes for political candidates even before voters have knowledge of who the candidates are and what they stand for. We have also seen that voice and posture are reflective of social status. Research conducted by Cecilia Pemberton at the University of Southern Australia found that, since 1945, the ‘fundamental frequency’ of women’s voices have lowered from an average of 229 Hz to 206 Hz - an audible difference. Having controlled for any potential demographic factors, it was concluded that the drop in pitch was reflective of the rise of women to more prominent roles in society, leading women to adopt a deeper tone to project authority in the workplace. Given the importance of voice and body language, how can we leverage these factors to set ourselves up for success?
Ness stresses that we must become aware of our pitch, tone, inflection and quality of our articulation when we speak. Having the capacity to project a clear, powerful voice will create the perfect vehicle to get your message across, she argues. Non-verbal cues such as posture and gesture also play a key role in giving a positive first impression. By creating an awareness of how to use your voice and body language effectively, you will exercise control over how you present yourself and build up confidence in the process. In this episode of The Wallet, Ness shares some of her expert tips to gain influence through voice and body language.
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You can listen (43 min) and subscribe here:
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Resources:
You can follow and connect with Ness at:
Key written works:
‘Boudica: The Life of Britain’s Legendary Warrior Queen’
‘Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History’s Greatest Explorer’
We shared some resources in this episode. All the links are below:
Amy Cuddy Ted Talk: Your body language may shape who you are
Male CEOs with deep voices more likely to have market success: Huffington Post
