A Little Bit Richer

This series is brought to you by L&G, helping you build a future that's A Little Bit Richer.

Iona Bain: Hello, I'm Iona Bain and welcome back to A Little Bit Richer, brought to you by Legal & General, the podcast designed to help you build a strong financial future. Now, when we talk about investing, most of us think about the stock market and whilst that is very important, there is another investment that could offer a strong return which enriches us in a different way and this is one many of us overlook and that is investing in ourselves because your sense of self- worth and your financial worth are more connected than you might think. Today I am joined by Amy Kean, founder of Good Shout, a learning and development company that helps people communicate with confidence. After being told her voice was too common and she lacked gravitas, Amy soon  realised that for many of us, allowing our unique and authentic voice to be heard is actually a strength.

Whilst many of us think the only way to earn more is to change jobs, Amy is going to share the ways we can invest in ourselves and increase our salary without quitting. Amy, welcome to the podcast.

Amy Kean: Thank you very much.

Iona Bain: Now to get us started, can you explain in 30 seconds or less, why it's important to invest in yourself and increase your value and salary without necessarily having to switch jobs? Are you ready?

Amy Kean: Yes.

Iona Bain: All right. Go.

Amy Kean: I'm going to talk about investing in your voice and why that's really important. I run a learning and development company called Good Shout and we help people enhance their voices, flex their voices. And I talk about something called voice equality a lot because it doesn't matter where you're from, your gender, your ethnicity. If you say the right thing at the right time to the right person in the right way, you can completely change your career and change the world.

Iona Bain: That was spot on.

Amy Kean: Yes.

Iona Bain: Nice work.

Amy Kean: Yes.

Iona Bain: That is a great start. Okay. I'm very, very intrigued now to hear about your personal story because this comes from a very personal place for you, doesn't it?

Amy Kean: It really does. And I think when you have an origin story, it makes talking about your job and your passion so much easier. I'm from Essex, from a place called Thurrock in Essex and has a certain stereotype, doesn't it? And I had an accent. You can still hear the twang now, can't you? But it used to be more pronounced. And when I left university, I was told by a recruitment consultant that my accent was too common to ever be around important people.

Iona Bain: Wow.

Amy Kean: And the really interesting thing, when you're fresh from university and a figure of authority says something like that to you, what do you do? You believe them because you have no other benchmarks, you have no other context. And since then and for many years, had a massive chip on my shoulder about how I sounded.

Iona Bain: And do you feel like that held you back in material terms?

Amy Kean: Absolutely. Because what it meant was that I shrunk. And when someone tells you you shouldn't be around important people, you don't hang around important people. All it takes is a few people to say a few things and it sticks in your head forever. It means that you believe that you deserve less. And for maybe the first five years of my career, and it's a 20- year career now, I absolutely believed all of those things, which meant that I didn't go for promotions. I didn't ask for more. I didn't believe that I should be the person speaking up in a room. When you're early in your career, it's really common to mistake criticism for truth. Just because someone has an opinion about you, it doesn't mean it's true. Your opinion of yourself is far more valuable, far more important, and that's what you have to work on.

Iona Bain: And do you think that this can apply to anybody regardless of where they come from or who they are? Because in essence, we all have a hangup. We all have something that maybe we were told when we were younger that has just preyed on our mind and maybe affected our self- belief in quite a deep way that we haven't even realised.

Amy Kean: You'd be hard to find anyone who doesn't have that voice in their heads. Actually, it's a myth that we have an inner monologue. In reality, we have an inner dialogue.

Iona Bain: Yes.

Amy Kean: So in our heads, yes, we have our own voice, of course. That's normally quite rational. It's normally quite a good person in there, but we also have the voices of everybody who's ever given us feedback in our lives, swirling around our heads like a sabotaging series, telling us stuff that's really unhelpful. Someone could have called you stupid once and that will become a hangup for life. And a lot of the work that I do is about helping people understand first of all that it's a dialogue. Second of all, a lot of those voices that you have in your head aren't real.

Iona Bain: So what's some of the things that people can do to invest in themselves and increase their value?

Amy Kean: Never stop learning is the first one. It's never been easier to learn anything you want. You have access to YouTube videos, social media. There's so many social media creators that genuinely teach amazing stuff. There's so many PhDs and academics in social media that are giving their knowledge away like water. Never stop learning but also make sure that you enjoy it. That's the thing, because of our schooling and because of so much work- based training, we've been taught not to enjoy learning like it's a necessary evil. You can love it. So find a subject that you could be passionate about and immerse yourself in it. My second piece of advice is to actually develop a perspective. I work with so many people who say they don't have opinions about stuff, about politics, about work, about cultural issues. If you develop a perspective, a really strong point of view, even if it's about just one subject, that's such an amazing differentiator.

 It's a really good way to help you stand out, get invited on podcasts. Developing a perspective isn't easy, but then all of a sudden, it means that you have a personal brand. It means that you have a thing that people come to you for. It means that you have a subject people associate you with. That's invaluable.

Iona Bain: How do you know when this learning and upskilling has been effective and has actually changed you as a person?

Amy Kean: Because it should. That should be the point of all learning that it makes you a better human in some way. At Good Shout we have a motto, which is we are all experiments. So every single one of us should consider ourselves to be a walking, talking, living, breathing, human experiment that wants to optimize, the ones to get better over time. And there's a quote from Alain de Botton where he says, " If you're not embarrassed by who you were 12 months ago, you're not learning enough."

Iona Bain: Wow.

Amy Kean: Love that. Constantly embarrassed by who I was 12 minutes ago, let alone 12 months ago. But at the beginning of any of our training, we always ask people to come up with a hypothesis about themselves. So what's your hypothesis about your capability that you want to test or enhance with this learning? And a hypothesis is something that you can prove or disprove or improve upon. You need to have that hypothesis so that you can understand that the learning has worked. For example, someone might come to one of our courses and say, " My hypothesis is that I talk a lot, but I don't think what I say ever really lands." That's an amazing hypothesis because you can test it, you can work on it, you can flex it. And by the end of the course, if you can prove that now you do have something to say and it is landing, that's when you know it's been a success.

Iona Bain: So have those metrics in place and then you can see whether you've achieved those metrics or not. What are some of the common blocks that stop people from levelling up in their career?

Amy Kean: Some people might say imposter syndrome. I have a hot take. I don't think imposter syndrome exists, which I'm still in the minority with that. But I think when you're feeling a bit fraudulent or you're feeling a bit out of your depth, it's probably related to your environment or the way that you've been scored or the words that you've heard as you've grown up. And there's many people who haven't been told when they were growing up, " You can be anything, you can change the world, you can be a CEO, you can run the country." There's so many people that weren't told that. When you're not told that, inevitably, you won't believe it.

 And so that's not imposter syndrome. That's just not having had the right support when you were at the start of your career. It's not having maybe had an education where you were led to believe that you could run the country. So I don't think we should blame ourselves. That's my point. I think we should understand that we are just the product of our entire histories. And if you can understand that, then you can absolutely understand your belief system and what you think you're capable of.

Iona Bain: I feel that I would relate to that because I have often said that I have imposter syndrome, but actually thinking about it more deeply, it's probably because I have associated my career path with somebody who looks different from me and has a different background from me. And that's why I feel at times like an imposter. But the truth is that anyone can do what I do so long as they put the work in and they're prepared to understand their subject inside out and that's what I've done. So what stops me from being able to claim this space as my own? Nothing.

Amy Kean: I love that. That's such an important message for so many people. You feel like an imposter often because you can't see anyone like you doing the same thing. That's not your fault. That's society's fault.

Iona Bain: You've got to go out there and be the change you want to see.

Amy Kean: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so one thing that I'm just desperate for people to not do is ever blame themselves for what people call limiting beliefs. It's absolutely not your fault, but of course they can be changed. I think true confidence comes from knowing your abilities, having confidence in your skills, having confidence in your knowledge. And when you can amass that, that's when you ask for a promotion. That's when you ask for more money, when you are utterly certain that you are brilliant at the job that you do. Learn as much as you possibly can, enhance your skills, enhance your abilities, because then it doesn't matter what anyone tells you, you're confident that you have the qualities and the traits and the skills to ask for more.

Iona Bain: Talk to us about the 7- 11 rule. How can this help us understand whether the feedback that we're guessing is valid or not?

Amy Kean: The 7- 11 rule, I think most people would be shocked when they hear what it is. In the first seven seconds that you meet someone or a first impression scenario, in that time, people will make 11 different judgements about you. They will judge your intelligence, what they think is your intelligence. They will judge what they think is your capability. The judgments get really niche. They'll also judge who they think you vote for, how educated they think you are, how kind you are, et cetera.

Iona Bain: Wow. I mean, those are some very deep judgements about somebody.

Amy Kean: In seven seconds. We're like terminators. We're like robots just scanning other people all day, every day and constantly making judgements. Even if we don't know that we're making those judgements, we are. And so that first seven seconds, it just shows how laden with bias everybody is. Some of us have to navigate that seven seconds more than others if you have an accent, for example. Your ethnicity is judged, your body is judged, what you're wearing is judged. So my advice is take control of that time as much as you possibly can. You don't have to fake it though and you don't have to walk into the room like this and pretend to be an excessively confident person, but you can be a bit more disciplined and you can try to anticipate how people might judge you. I'll give you an example. I work with so many people who in meetings will apologise before they say the thing they wanted to say.

Iona Bain: Right.

Amy Kean: For example, " Oh, this might be a stupid question, but..." Or they'll say, " Oh, I don't know if this is right, but..." And so their seven seconds is lost because they've apologised. They've undermined themself before they even got a chance to speak. And you can't control what people think about you, but you can control how people remember you and that is defined by whether you're apologizing for your existence or the words that you use or even something really simple as your body language. If you're not shrinking, if you're just showing that you're happy to be in the room, all of that stuff gets judged in the first seven seconds.

Iona Bain: That's so fascinating.

Amy Kean: A really interesting exercise and I'm not going to share the results. So this is an experiment that any of your listeners can try. Go to an AI tool, doesn't matter which one. One of the AI tools that generates images, increasingly, that's many of them, go to an AI tool and say, " Show me a picture of gravitas at work. Show me a photograph of executive presence at work," and see what the results are. And that will tell you everything you need to know about how we're trying to fake it and the traditional idea of authority versus how we need to redefine what authority means.

Iona Bain: Yeah, absolutely.

Amy Kean: I've really slowed down how I speak and I'm really conscious of the relationship between my brain and my mouth and that requires almost breaking yourself and breaking how you communicate so you can rethink it all over again, relearn it all over again. I pay real attention to the words that I use and in that way, I like to think I have a bit of control over how people remember me. That's the simplest way. It's just having more discipline with your communication.

Iona Bain: So people will be concerned about AI potentially taking over more and more aspects of their jobs. What can we do to use AI to our advantage?

Amy Kean: Never use AI to replace your voice. Please never use AI to replace your thoughts. That's the most critical thing. There was a study from the MIT that showed that if you only use AI to originate ideas, it does result in cognitive decline. Using AI as a learning buddy, however, so using the tool to test you, to challenge you, to try and catch you out with your thinking, this is how I use it. So I study constantly. I'm always learning. I use AI to test me and try and prove me wrong. That rather than replacing my thinking and causing any kind of cognitive decline is keeping me fresh. It's keeping me alert and able to argue and debate. That is a brilliant use of AI. If you tell it not to just agree with everything you say, which it can do, ask it to give you brutal feedback, ask it to actively challenge you. It's really quite useful.

Iona Bain: So as we're wrapping up today, what is the one quick win that people can be thinking about as they go away, make a cup of tea and wait for the kettle to boil in terms of helping them to develop their career.

Amy Kean: The first thing is to start thinking about how you speak. I know it sounds so simple. Start thinking about mindful speaking and you can do that sitting at your desk. You can do that talking to other people. There's a really fun game called Just A Minute. I don't know if you've heard of it. And all you have to do is talk for a minute uninterrupted about any kind of subject. It could be pizza. It could be dogs, whatever. But for that minute, you're not allowed to um, ah, repeat yourself, say like, which is another really common filler and just doing that exercise immediately encourages discipline in your communication. It's such a fun thing to play on your own or with friends. That, just that one thing, if you do it tomorrow, that will start to transform your voice, how you communicate.

Iona Bain: Fabulous advice. Thank you very much, Amy.

Amy Kean: Thank you.

Iona Bain: Well, that brings us to the end of this episode and we really hope it's been helpful and maybe inspired you to think about some new ways that you could be investing in yourself. And when you invest in you, everything else starts to grow. Next time we'll be talking to financial content creator, Sammie Ellard-King from Up the Gains about financial freedom and how we close that gap between where we currently are and where we want to be. This podcast is brought to you by L&G. If you want to help others get a little bit richer too, please share this episode with whoever you think would benefit from hearing it and you can keep up with the show on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram @legalandgeneral. And finally, if you've got a question or a topic that you would like answered on the show, please get in touch on our socials. We would absolutely love to hear from you.

Until next time, see you soon and thanks for listening.