Unlocking your potential

In this episode, Simon and Laura are joined by Alex O’Rourke, co-founder of Locksmith and experienced marketer. Together, they explore the challenges and strategies of self-promotion and navigating societal barriers as a woman in the workplace.

Alex shares her knowledge as a transformational life coach and delves into issues including the importance of creating a personal narrative. 

With insights into the DISC profiling tool and personal anecdotes about overcoming professional hurdles, she offers valuable guidance on how individuals can successfully self-promote for personal and professional growth. 

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This is an 18Sixty production for The Forge.

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Transcript

Simon: Hi, I’m Simon Garnett.

Laura: And I’m Laura Halliday.

Simon: And this is the Persuasion Game, the Forge’s podcast all about the art of persuasion. Each episode we connect with marketers, business leaders and beyond to learn how they use persuasion to influence their consumers, convince their stakeholders and drive their business forward.

Simon: Hello Laura.

Laura: Hi Simon, lovely to see you again. Lovely to see you. But let’s cut to the chase — how do you feel about self-promotion?

Simon: So are you asking me to talk about modesty and why I’m so good at it?

Laura: Well, this is a very interesting topic isn’t it, because we — like the majority of our listeners — are likely to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how we promote products, how we promote our clients’ products. But actually promoting ourselves gives us the enormous ick.

Simon: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. I think it’s one of the ironies that our industry tends to gravitate towards those insecure overachievers, where every project is an opportunity either for validation or, sadly quite often, a bit of self-flagellation and doubt about one’s own ability and competence.

Laura: Absolutely. And this is true for everyone but especially for women. There was a study that found 59% of women in the UK feel uncomfortable with self-promotion – I actually think they got the digits the wrong way round on that one — compared to 41% of men. Arguably they got them the wrong way around there too. The truth is that people buy people. So how do we, without veering into arrogance,  persuade people to buy into us and the message we want to convey?

Simon: And to help us take a deeper dive into this, we’re joined today by Alex Orock, who has spent so much of her career dedicated to uplifting women and championing gender equality. She’s a marketing powerhouse with over 23 years of experience across multinationals, SMEs and startups. She built a stellar career at Camelot and Diageo, where our paths actually crossed, and is the Innovation Lead at Fever-Tree. Alex now channels her expertise into empowering women through Locksmith, the company she co-founded. With a passion for nurturing female talent, Alex is dedicated to coaching and developing women to achieve their brilliant best. Welcome Alex.

Alex: Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Laura: Let’s talk a little bit upfront about your very interesting career path. How did you find yourself in this brave new world of Locksmith?

Alex: So the brave new world of Locksmith has been about four and a half years now. Locksmith is a marketing capability and coaching business. But before I set up Locksmith, I was working client side and I was a marketeer for probably 23 years actually. I spent ten really interesting years at Camelot learning from the best, mainly about marketing communications, I did some innovation there as well. And then I moved to Diageo, and the latter half of my time at Diageo I moved into an innovation role and was Innovation Director for Europe, working again on a whole host of wonderful brands.

Simon: And now you’re working on something quite different as a proposition. Tell us a bit about Locksmith.

Alex: We are a marketing capability and coaching business. When Chris, my co-founder, and I were client side as marketing leaders, we always found that you can’t deliver marketing greatness unless you’ve got a brilliant team behind you. And our favourite thing was growing the people in our team. So we set up Locksmith to do exactly that — the thing that we love most: to grow the people behind the brands. And that’s what we do today.

Simon: So Alex, that thought of growing people is fascinating because obviously part of that is just learning the skills, but there’s a bigger dimension to that around engineering belief and helping that team think that they’re capable and getting over some of those barriers. Can you talk to us a little bit about how you engage with some of those deeper motivations that may be impacting the way we behave and how we go about doing our job?

Alex: Yeah, so I’m also a trained transformational life coach and what that training helped me do was exactly as you said Simon — go a little bit deeper and unpick the surface stuff and really understand why people think what they do, because very rarely do we get that far into it.

So I guess my work splits into two themes. As a transformational life coach, I help people grow on a one-to-one basis and I do a lot of work with women in particular to help them be brilliant, and that does involve some really deep-rooted work around what makes you tick. But on the other side, I do a lot of training with larger groups on more practical stuff — the marketing training — but that also requires them to shift the way they think and behave. The whole concept of behaviour and behaviour change is integral to marketing, and any marketer needs to understand that. So it’s our job as marketing trainers to teach people how that works so they can put that it into play themselves.

Simon: That’s fascinating because I think you’re right — that is the definition of marketing, isn’t it? It’s changing behaviour in favour of your brand or category. Yet I’m guessing that from your own experience you would suggest that we’re not always terribly good at applying that to ourselves.

Alex: No, we probably aren’t a lot of the time. We don’t take the time to stop and think about ourselves because we put ourselves at the bottom of a priority list, or we don’t carve out time for our own self-development or self-reflection. And it does require you to do that. If you’re thinking about marketing at work and your consumer, you spend hours and hours understanding your consumer and what makes them tick — I wonder how many of us spend the same amount of time understanding ourselves and what makes us tick. I would venture probably not many of us.

Laura: Do you think specifically women have particular issues in finding self-promotion difficult? Or is it the self-reflection piece — what do you think is the particular challenge for women?

Alex: For women I find it’s very often a confidence issue. And there’s a lot racked up in confidence — it’s a word that means different things to different people, but for me confidence is having self-belief, it’s about being resilient, it’s about bouncing back, it’s not being scared to take risks. And I do see a lot of women struggling with that at various points in their caree, in fact I struggled with it myself.

And there are lots of endemic reasons that stem back to how girls are encouraged to be at school. They’re always encouraged to be quiet, well-behaved and heads down, whereas boys are just accepted to be boisterous, noisy and a bit disruptive. And very often those behaviours get taken through into adulthood and it’s what you see play out in an office environment, where women often take the back seat and men don’t.

But it’s also lots of other things, lots of girls drop out of sport and team sports in particular, and that’s where a lot of positive behaviours are learned: things like competition, risk-taking, dealing with loss, resilience. And that follows through into adulthood as well. So very often you see women starting their career without as much self-belief, self-reliance, confidence and resilience — and that does play out, unless you’re able to correct it or unless you’re in an environment that recognises that and makes sure that everybody is heard.

Laura: So thinking about your personal story, about where you had to overcome your own hesitations — what can you think of?

Alex: I’ve had a lot in the course of my career and I think it’s really important to talk about this, because going back to the point about social media and painting brilliant pictures — it’s not been easy. In my late twenties I was plagued with a huge lack of confidence and self-belief, and that really hindered me. Then in my mid-thirties when I had my children, I really struggled with the juggle and this belief that I should be able to do everything well, and just felt like I was failing miserably. In my later thirties I really struggled with work politics, cutting through and self-promoting in the way that I needed to in the environment I was in.

And then in my early forties, I was one of very few women on a leadership team in a very male-dominated environment, and that was probably the most difficult time for me. Because I’d spent a couple of years going in feeling really confident in my early forties, but then I was in an environment where I was questioned, not listened to, talked over, not invited into forums — and I felt incredibly excluded, very lonely in that environment, and I started to question my own abilities. Why wasn’t I being involved and asked? Why weren’t people listening to me? A couple of years of that really ebbs away at even the most confident person.

And I ended up being made redundant, very out of the blue, after a couple of years, and it absolutely knocked me for six. My confidence was through the floor. And whilst of course with hindsight it was a good thing to have happened, it never feels like that at the time. I was at rock bottom, having spent two years being gradually undermined, despite being someone who generally has good levels of confidence these days. That was a particularly difficult time for me.

Simon: And what was the journey like to get back from there Alex? Who did you turn to, what kind of conversations were you having, what helped you regain some of that belief and confidence?

Alex: I think it’s fair to say it took me a good few weeks of just feeling sorry for myself. I think sometimes you just need to crawl into that pain cave and embrace it. I took a few weeks just to bolster myself until I felt ready to think about the future.

And then I did what I teach everyone else to do, I went back to my personal basics. I actually remember doing a really uplifting exercise in my dining room where I put lots of posters up around the room and mind-mapped all the things that I loved, all the things I was good at, all the things I enjoyed. And then I had to think about — what do I want to do? If I could create a role from scratch, what would it look like, what would I be doing?

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I love, what I’m good at, what I need from a business and from the people around me, and then a little bit of a visualisation about what that would look like. Rather than remembering all the difficult stuff and listening to the negative voices, I went back and looked at the evidence of what I had delivered and realised that actually, yeah, I am bloody good and I’ve done some really good stuff. And I got myself back on my horse when it comes to self-belief.

And then it also really helped me on a practical level, because I was able to write down all the things I loved and was looking for in my next role. I didn’t know what that role was — there wasn’t anything that sprang to mind — but I just went out and had lots of curious conversations with people, because I was very clear on what I love when I’m at my best and what I enjoyed doing. I was also very clear on what I don’t want to do — the environments that don’t suit me, the things I absolutely won’t compromise on now. And with those two things hand in hand, it’s very easy to go out and have conversations with people and say “this is what I want, this is what I don’t want — how can you help, what are your ideas?”

Simon: I’d love to talk about that a little more in terms of the narratives and the stories. It sounds to me like almost what you did was strip out everything else — the voices, other people’s narratives — and went back to your own narrative and what was it about you that you could control, rather than being influenced by other people and trying to make sense of things which we’re inevitably incredibly limited about, because we just don’t live anyone else’s reality.

Alex: You have to come back in those moments to what you can control. You can’t control what other people think of you, you can’t control what they’re doing, but you can control your reaction to it and you can control what you do in that moment. And my choice was to go back and do some really deep self-reflection. I think at any time it pays off, but when you’re in a dark place, to be able to do that is a really therapeutic exercise.

Laura: So thinking about some of those self-reflection tools Alex — I know you’re a big proponent of DISC, which is something I’ve talked to a lot of people about. I’ve had a lot of fun guessing people’s class — I’m quite good at it actually! But maybe you can tell everyone a little bit about how it works and how it serves you in your Locksmith experiences.

Alex: So for those who don’t know what DISC is — it’s a behavioural profiling tool that assesses people’s behavioural and communication styles. You can use it in lots of different ways, but first and foremost it’s just a great way of understanding how other people tick. I’m sure we’ve all been in situations where you’ve been talking to somebody and you just don’t understand why they’re not getting it. There’s a brilliant book called Surrounded by Idiots which I think encapsulates that thought entirely — you can be sat around listening to people thinking “what planet are they on?” And it will essentially boil down to the fact that everybody has different preferences in the way that they communicate. It’s not just about being introverted and extroverted, although that’s part of it, but there are lots of different dimensions to this tool.

It profiles every individual and gives you a unique view of how you like to communicate, but then you can also use that to help understand others better as well. So you can have an individual profile where you get to understand your strengths, your spikes, your preferences — so that you can really focus on making your strengths stronger. The DISC profiles are a great way of highlighting the blind spots too. But then you can use them as a team, and see how your preferences differ across the team, help you understand one another much better, help you leverage your total skills as a team. I use it on a day-to-day level — even with my family, with my husband. We argue far less now that we understand each other’s DISC profiles.

Laura: Can you give us an example of where that has worked well for you? I get the impression you and Chris work in complementary ways on that front — how would two people who are seemingly very different work together harmoniously?

Alex: So I am very high yellow — which means very high energy, full of ideas, full of enthusiasm, very extrovert, getting my energy from being around others and being in ideas phase an awful lot. Chris on the other hand is very blue — very in the detail, very organised, likes to know exactly what is happening and when, and is just a fantastic deliverer. So we complement each other because I’m very high energy and have lots of ideas, whereas he makes sure all those ideas happen and are executed brilliantly.

So there’s a great compliment there. But what that can also mean is that if I’m getting too yellow he finds it very frustrating, or if he’s trying to drag me too far into the detail I find that very frustrating. So when we do find each other bristling — which isn’t very often — it can normally be explained using our DISC profiles and understanding if we’re leaning into one of our behavioural preferences too much or too little, and that’s rubbing each other up the wrong way. But normally it actually really helps us leverage our strengths even more.

 I do wish I had done DISC profiling for myself and my husband before we renovated our house — it would have saved us a whole lot of arguments. It’s about the only thing we’ve ever argued over, and it was all entirely explainable by our DISC profiles.

Simon: Yeah. I think Kathy — my wife — would definitely agree with that, although I’m not sure she’d say it makes it any better. My desire to just start random DIY jobs and then get bored and move off… but anyway, enough of that!

Laura: So that’s all extremely fascinating Alex. To the point we’ve made — it’s personally and professionally relevant — I want to just zone in on that professional piece and think about what if you’re in an environment where people do have very different behaviours to you, and perhaps you’re working for the same goal but you feel like you’re not cutting through. What kind of tips do you give people to use self-reflection as a way of persuading and promoting yourself?

Alex: Unless you spend the time to truly understand what is going on for the other people in that dynamic, you won’t be able to change their behaviour or influence them. Because being able to influence people relies entirely on understanding what buttons to push or what levers to pull — and you won’t get that unless you understand what’s going on in their world, what matters to them and what pushes their buttons.

Because it might be a style thing. Going back to behavioural preferences — if you’ve got a room full of people who are quite reserved, very detail-orientated and just want to get stuff done and drive ahead, and you’re somebody who wants to talk, discuss ideas and stay in that lovely ideas space, then they’re going to be very frustrated with you and they’re not going to want to engage. Sometimes it’s about style and DISC can help you pull that out. But sometimes it’s even deeper than that — sometimes it’s a fundamental misalignment of beliefs, and that goes deeper and that’s where you need to have a genuinely open conversation with somebody.

Simon: I want to just talk about this challenge around self-promotion — a word that lots of us find very difficult. What’s the relationship between self-promotion and self-worth, perceptions of self-worth?

Alex: I think it’s almost starting the other way around — I think you have to have a degree of self-worth to be comfortable with self-promotion, because it’s very difficult to promote yourself if you don’t actually believe in yourself. And that’s where self-belief and self-worth comes in.

But I think also there’s this sense that for a lot of people, blowing your own trumpet is very uncomfortable. The sad fact is that unless you do, it’s unlikely others will. You might be very lucky at points in your career where you have a very vocal sponsor or a line manager who takes the time to come and understand what you’re doing. But a good friend of mine, Gill Whitty-Collins, who’s written a brilliant book about gender equality called Why Men Win at Work, talks about this idea of the Umbrella Theory. She says that many women — although it doesn’t have to be women, it’s anyone lacking in confidence — will sit under their umbrella, work really really hard and just assume that hard work will get them the recognition they need. But the sad reality is that isn’t always the case.

Unless whoever is sat on top of your umbrella — your boss, your line manager, the leaders in the business — can see what’s going on underneath it, you won’t get the recognition in its entirety. So if they’re not coming down under your umbrella — and the chances are they probably aren’t — you need to make sure that you’re coming out from under it and showcasing what you are doing. It’s just being very practical about the fact that you’ve worked hard and you want people to see what you’re doing. And I think when you understand that concept and the reality of the world that we’re operating in, it can give you a little bit more impetus to do something about it. And like anything, it’s always uncomfortable at first but the more you do it the easier it becomes.

Laura: It’s interesting that this is all happening at a time where there are a lot of different conversations about styles of leadership – politically, globally, culturally. We see a move towards servant leadership, but then we also see that kind of strongman 1980s command-and-control style which is still very endemic. I’m interested to know what you think needs to happen within corporate cultures for leaders — different styles of leaders who aren’t necessarily comfortable with coming out and being this is how I’m doing this— what would you like to see change?

Alex: Well I’ll question that back to you Laura if I may, actually

Laura: do I want to see change Simon?

Alex: But hearing you say that — I do think leaders need to be comfortable with being very clear and confident with their vision and what they want to happen. Good leadership is about being very clear about what you want to happen. The way in which you deliver your outcomes and empower people to deliver that is where leadership style comes in. So whether you’re a directive, authoritative leader telling people how you want it to get done, or you’re a more inspiring, empowering leader creating a team and a vision and getting them to lead that for you. I don’t think it changes the fact that as a leader you need to set a clear vision and direction. The leadership style as to how you do that is different

And actually it’s been proved that one of the biggest drivers of successful leadership is high EQ — emotional quotient, or emotional intelligence. And it’s that style of leadership that has now been scientifically proved to be the most effective. My belief is that that is where effective leadership sits.

Simon: One of the things I’m always fascinated about is language. And it strikes me that throughout our conversation, the stories you’re telling, the anecdotes you’ve heard the feedback you’re getting from the people you work with.  Quite often a lot of the language feels quite binary and quite extreme — “I’m not boastful, I’m not blowing my own trumpet, I don’t want to be loud, saying look at me.” I’m fascinated about how you go about confronting some of those, particularly when you’re talking about constructing your own narrative. My guess is quite a lot of the time our narrative is quite dominated either by binary black and white language, or quite often by what it’s not — what we’re not — rather than necessarily what we are. Do you have any tips about how we can use language to our advantage in writing that narrative, rather than letting it hinder us and hold us back?

Alex: I wonder if there are two parts to that Simon. There’s a bit about language, which I’ll come on to because I agree it’s incredibly powerful — how you talk to yourself is just one of the biggest defining ways that you can build confidence. But the assumptions and narratives you’re talking about there are the limiting beliefs that we all have — the voices in our heads, the things that say “I can’t do that, I’m not good enough, that’s not for me,” we all have them. And they’re really damaging because we don’t realise we have them. Often they’re so ingrained and deep-rooted that they appear without us even thinking about it. And it’s very difficult to shift those, but it can absolutely be done.

It comes back again to taking a step back, doing a bit of self-reflection, getting some feedback, and often working with somebody who can challenge you, challenge your assumptions, call them out and work them through. And very often you’ll find that they aren’t founded on evidence at all. Thoughts aren’t facts. If you go back to the facts, look for evidence to disprove some of your unhelpful narratives or prove out some of your more helpful hypotheses — that’s how you go about shifting those limiting beliefs and replacing them with more helpful narratives. But it’s not easy, and often you do need a little bit of help to do it, but it’s entirely possible.

So language is extremely important — and the type of language we use not only says an awful lot to other people who hear it, but it also reflects back on ourselves. We will believe what we are saying. One of the things I often say to my coachees is “you talk to yourself as if you were talking to your best friend – would you say that to your best friend?” If not, don’t say it to yourself. Kind, thoughtful, helpful, constructive language to yourself, and then the way you talk outwardly will come across far more confidently as well.

Laura: What about people who are facing unexpected transitions? I see a lot on LinkedIn about people saying the freelance world is very challenging, or they thought they had a job and they don’t have a job. What kind of manifesto would you be encouraging?

Alex: So first and foremost, make sure you have your manifesto. Know what your point of view is, what you stand for, what your personal brand is, what your elevator pitch is. But then, ask for help. And it’s very difficult for a lot of people to ask for help. I’ve had to learn to ask for help more recently and I can tell you it’s absolutely game-changing. And what I’ve realised and what I knew deep down anyway, is that people love helping people. So pick up the phone, have the conversation, make the ask. Ask for the introduction, ask for the coffee, whatever it might be. Ask for help. And don’t put too much pressure on yourself because it is difficult. I’m a firm believer in what goes around comes around, and I think if you’ve helped others in your time, the help will come for you as well.

Simon: What a brilliant way to end it on a podcast all about persuasion, that actually one of the biggest things to do is ask for help. Alex, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your wisdom and insight today.

Alex: My pleasure, I’ve loved it. Thank you both.

Laura: Thank you Alex, it’s great.

Simon: So Laura, a lot to reflect on there. What’s stuck with you?

Laura: I think what was really interesting was — we all know people who’ve done their job for such a long time that they can get really focused on their KPIs and what they’re not good at. And actually, thinking not only about your strengths but about what is your narrative of yourself — the self you want to put into the world of work, the future you want to create for yourself — and just really having that as a story, the same way that you would create a story for a brand, felt like a really interesting way of reframing confidence. It’s almost like a creative act — something you’ve made — rather than just talking the big I am. And I thought that was a really great unlock, especially for women who perhaps are less comfortable with shouting from the rooftops about everything they’ve ever achieved. It’s all about that relevant story of the future you want.

Simon: I think that’s definitely right. Because confidence is so fragile, it’s so easy to be eroded, that actually having a story for yourself that you can go back to — that you can remind yourself of when you have those knocks — it’s incredibly powerful. I know for myself that if something has gone wrong and I’ve had that little knock of confidence, I always go back to a reminder that I say, which is that nine times out of ten we don’t do bad work. It’s almost always a lack of alignment over expectations: someone thinks we’re doing one thing, we think we’re doing something else. And having that story, that narrative that I can go back to, to help me get myself back on track and build that confidence up — that’s something I find incredibly useful.

Laura: Thanks for listening. If you’d love to hear more from marketers, entrepreneurs and business leaders about how to use the art of persuasion to drive your business forward, make sure you’re following the podcast in your favourite podcast app.

Simon: And just one last ask from us — this is a new podcast and we’d love it if you could be persuaded to help us spread the word by telling somebody else about it, leaving us a review, or even better sharing an episode on socials. Search for The Forge on LinkedIn.