Mastering Authentic Communication A Conversation with Gina Balarin

To feel 100 percent confident the first time we do it. It’s human nature. We’ve been taught from a very young age to have a better version of ourselves in any context. And I think the same applies with language, grammar, etc. We are humans. We have our ups and our downs, our highs and our lows. That’s what being human means.

That’s what communicating differently means. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the people behind Podcasts Done For You, because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and check out Podcasts Done For You as well in the show notes.

Now, Let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites. And this time my guest speaking is something that she’s very familiar with and something that she’s going to help a lot of people with in this particular discussion. Gina, welcome to Biz Bites. Thank you so much for having me, Anthony.

It’s a pleasure to be with you and to all our listeners out there, I’m hoping you’re having a great communication experience, but by the end of this, hopefully you will. Absolutely. So Gina, why don’t you just give us a little bit of a background as to who you are and what you’re about? I’m Gina Ballerin, often known as Gina Ballerina, not because of my background in performance and on being on the stage indeed as a ballerina and amongst other things, but because I actually am so passionate.

about helping people communicate that it shines through my personality. For many years, I’ve been in marketing communications, and that means I have a depth of breadth of understanding of how people communicate in the corporate world. But I’ve been behind the scenes for a long time, not just creating events and preparing people to be on stage, but also writing.

So when CEO’s voice, It actually goes all the way through that experience. I can write ghost writing, thought leadership. That is in fact the words of a CEO because they talk to me and I make what they say sound amazing. But more importantly, I can make people feel amazing. So when they’re standing on a stage, when they’re writing something for a page, when they’re preparing to be on a screen, they have that inner sense of confidence and conviction.

That deep passion, knowing that what they’re saying isn’t just influential. It is also meaningful. I’ve spent a lifetime holding this craft and that’s why I get so excited when I can see people changing their perspective and changing their ability to be amazing on the screen, stage, and page. I love this because this is so in my area, right?

That it’s I’m all about particularly the voice and and appearing in podcasts, of course, but it’s it amazes me having spoken to so many people, how often people are so confident in a one on one scenario when about what their expertise is and what they’re saying. But the minute you say, You’re going to be on stage.

There’s a microphone. There’s a camera. Suddenly everything just switches off. That’s absolutely true. I think it’s natural for us to be afraid. In fact, fear of public speaking is one of the biggest human fears, bizarrely. It’s. Not surprising that people are afraid in a different context, but it’s also a question of transferable skills.

I may have spent many years in front of an audience, indeed on a stage in front of a camera on TV, on podcasts, on audio, on the radio, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not afraid every time I step into a new context. And so what’s often helpful, especially with the C level executive work that I do is to help people understand that you have the ability to know Who you are, what you’re talking about and how to connect with an audience.

But as soon as you context switch, it’s difficult to remember all of those tips and all of those things that you’ve learned. Unless you’ve experienced that. And let’s face it, no matter how good and amazing we are at the thing we do, in a different context, it’s often hard to feel a hundred percent confident the first time we do it.

It’s human nature. It isn’t it? But it’s, but by the same token I often struggle with this, and that’s one of the things is we all have our own sort of superpowers and things. And so for me, I’ve been behind a microphone for as long as I can remember. And this comes relatively easily for me, but it fascinates me.

And I’ve had this experience. I’ll relay this to you, and I won’t give away which organization it was. It was from, but I remember specifically working with a COO who was incredibly knowledgeable about what was happening in the organization. And there was an opportunity. to speak on a radio program.

And he wanted that opportunity, even though the CEO had been traditionally the one that had done it for this particular occasion, we said, let him do it. And he did it. And he was so terrible that he just said to me, never, ever let me do that ever again. And it was funny because. It just some, something just happened and it just sounded terrible.

And I guess that’s the fear of a lot of people, isn’t it? That, that it’s, that you don’t convey your expertise in the right possible way. And I think I should preface it by saying appearing in an interview. On a radio station or a TV station is a very different beast to a podcast to appearing on a stage to appear, whether it’s a conference or whether it’s a video production, because in an interview scenario, particularly on in the media, you don’t have much control over what’s going to be asked and the timeframes.

Yeah, that’s very true. I think we all have inner gremlins and sometimes they manifest themselves outwardly. The question really is to be prepared. How prepared was your COO when he stepped out on stage? Or, sorry, when he stepped out in front of a a microphone and on radio? Was it actually that he didn’t really know what to get into or were the questions genuinely hard?

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Was it actually that he didn’t really know what to get into? Or were the questions genuinely hard? I think in this particular case, he was over prepared. And He just wanted to give too much information, but really didn’t give it in a conversational way. We’re having a friendly chat and we’re talking, knowing full well that people are listening, but we’re not really paying attention to the fact that people are listening in that we’re having a conversation.

The problem that I think that he had that many have is that there’s suddenly going, Oh my goodness, there’s hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people listening, and I have to give so much information in one go. And suddenly all the tone of his voice was lost. It was very monotone. It was just, it was fairly horrendous.

One of my favorite groups of people to work with is the knowledge expert. The person who has the curse of knowledge because they can’t unknow what they already know, but they don’t necessarily understand that the rest of the world isn’t as smart or as knowledgeable about their particular subject matter as they are.

If I work with deep knowledge experts, The thing that we have to actually untrain them to do is to be over prepared. One of my favorite moments is when they go, Oh, I’ve got another X many hours to do, and I’ll tell them, Stop. Just stop. You are as prepared as you need to be. Don’t spend another eight hours on this.

Go have a weekend. Spend time with your kids. Play a game. Watch some sports. Get outside. And more importantly, Find something that gives you a sense of calm. Now I work with two different groups of people. Generally, the first one is overprepared. That tends to be as you said, chief operating officers, a chief financial officers, chief technical officers, people who have a lot of knowledge and want to share as much of it as possible, but often forget that not everyone is as.

Eager to understand that level of information as they are. The second group of people I work with are those who are naturally charismatic. Who stand up on stage and can do it off the cuff and who don’t need a huge amount of preparation. And their challenge is they often struggle to stick to a script.

They can’t remember what they were going to say. It’s brilliant in the moment, but they have no idea. What is actually going to come out and they often tend to struggle to stick to time as well. And both of those are wonderful challenges. But what’s really exciting is when I get to work with an organization that I can actually coach and teach those different groups of people, either individually or in combination.

Something magical happens when you get a group of people together who know, and trust each other from an organization who are working together for a bigger purpose. So if you’re preparing an event, for example, and you’ve got a whole bunch of people standing up on stage and they know what the event agenda is, but they’re not necessarily sure how they’re going to mingle in and out of each other’s speeches, or they just want to get the best out of each other.

I love being able to share that broader vision with them and then work with each of them individually to enhance their strengths and diminish their. Challenges, but also for them to be able to help each other because often when you do it in a group setting, they can identify, Oh, yes, he does that. But maybe I do that too.

And then the coaching almost takes on a life of its own. It’s not just in the moment that we’re speaking together. It becomes part of their extended knowledge and personal development. And they help each other do that. It’s extremely exciting. It’s amazing, isn’t it too? Because it’s that communication within an organization that starts to improve and then also improves externally as well, because it’s.

It’s amazing how often people get frustrated by poor communication within an organization. And that, there’s this excessive amount of meetings that happen. And know someone who I go to a meeting with and he has this burning need to recap, but the recap can take 20 minutes.

And it’s just exhausting because for the life of us, we can’t stop him. And it’s a really difficult thing to do because it is an art form to say look, these are the things, or should have read beforehand. These are the things that we need to focus in on. And it’s how much quicker could meetings be just as a result of this kind of work?

Yeah, definitely. Being able to communicate the right length, the right tone, the right volume. It is, in fact, an art form. The beautiful thing is when communication is done right. It enhances not only our daily lives, but our work lives, our professional lives, even our futures. And it’s funny how suddenly understanding something that you didn’t understand before can shift not just the way you speak, but it can shift the way other people hear you.

And people often forget that communication is not a one way thing. You don’t just talk out into the ether. If a message is not received, then it is a failure. And despite being a bit of a communication expert myself, I know I’ve spent the last 25 years with my husband trying to perfect the art of giving and receiving communication.

And let’s just put it this way. It’s still a work in progress. Constant work in progress, my side, that’s It’s actually quite amazing, really, whether it’s in a work or personal environment, how sometimes you can be hearing, you hear one thing and the other person or other people hear something completely different to the way you’ve interpreted it.

And particularly when you’re talking about this day and age, where we’re navigating, political correctness and new terminology that’s come in it’s a lot harder to navigate that and actually get the message across in the right way and understand what people are talking about. I think if you take it back to the Wilbur Schramm model of communication, which is the sender, the receiver, the noise, and the idea that you’ve got two different groups of people talking, we can’t fundamentally know what goes on in people’s heads on the other side.

And so as the communication models evolved over time, people started asking for feedback. And that feedback isn’t just about, did I do this work well? What should I do differently? It can actually be. Did you hear me or what did you hear? And so Habi has actually started doing that with me. Gina, what do you think I said?

And I’ll repeat what I think you said. And he’ll say, no, that’s not what I actually said. And I’ll go, what did you say? And he goes you weren’t listening, were you? Anyone who’s ever had a challenge with this past can identify this kind of conversation. But it is helpful when you’re listening to an intense communication to do that recap in a short, succinct way, but more importantly, in a way that adds value to the world of those we’re speaking to.

Yeah. And I think. It’s being able to summarize things is an art form within itself, right? And it’s and often, as I said before, you can have these long diatribes and you just want to get to the main points. So you’re waiting for that summary at the end to really recap and make sure that, okay, what I’ve actually heard and the crucial bits that I’ve heard is this and this.

Don’t we all have technology can, that can do that for us now? Like why do humans even bother to recap? We could just read the meeting notes. And it is a big, and that’s an interesting area, isn’t it? This whole AI development. And it’s something, I’ve talked a lot about with with thought leaders, because AI does, there are some great things about AI and exactly what you said, being able to summarize a meeting and give you some key.

Points and being able to recap things and even being able to go and ask at some stage, Gina talked about X, where was that? And so it can go back into the conversation and find X and tell you, which is great. All of those things are wonderful, but it’s still how you interpret it. And what’s actually for.

Your own involvement, but it’s also the auth in authentic nature of the communication as well, where I think that sometimes people are using not just summaries, but using opportunities to write content and to create new things that are based on an AI going out into the universe and gathering stuff rather than taking it from them as being the source.

There’s a couple of points on that. AI has its pros and its cons, obviously being able to summarize information that’s in the public domain is both a pro and a con. You can, however, train your own bot to learn from your voice, from your experience, from your context, so that it sounds more like you. I was fascinated towards the end of the year to get a summary tool that summarized all my LinkedIn posts.

And it pulled them together and obviously it could pull the data together. It’s how many posts did you do? How many likes and responses and engagements did you have? But it also pulled together the themes of the content that I’d written. Just as an experiment, it was between Christmas and new year. I wasn’t really in the mood for writing anything at the time.

I thought I’d just publish it exactly as it was. And it sounded. Similar to me, but not close enough. And I think the challenge that a lot of people have with using AI is that they think once they’ve trained it to speak like them, that it sounds like them in perpetuity. And this is the risk. It sounded better than me, so I left it, but every bot sounds better than every human that they do because it’s learned the grammar rules and the rules of.

Put an inverters comment, good communication. The challenge is that everyone starts to sound the same. Absolutely. It’s why I love this medium of podcasting so much more because this is genuine and authentic. People can see that we’re having a, an actual conversation if they’re watching the video, but it’s certainly from listening to the audio.

It’s not something that you can program and the imperfections are also important. I know a lot of people like. Taking out ums and ahs or little things like that, or tiny little mistakes. Or can I say that again? But actually, that’s more interesting because it means that it is genuine and authentic.

Whereas when it’s overly polished, I found myself, I was writing an article earlier today for LinkedIn. And one of the things that you do is you’re automatically getting notified to correct some of the grammar. And so yes, so I had structured a sentence in a particular way. Oh, no, you should structure it, flip it around and do this.

Okay. Yeah, that sounds familiar. Yep. I’ve done that. And so that’s great. But you’re right. It’s a much more polished version. And that’s one of the things that, I love, and I totally admire people that write books, but the thing about books is they’ve been through a gazillion different edits and it’s not the same as the audio version of it.

Absolutely, and I love you to tell us a bit more about your book and the process of the difference between the book and what you, and how you actually talk about it. I’m one of those writers who writes like I talk and who talks like I write. So if you open a page at random and read it out, it’ll be.

Ideas exist all over our business in the heads of unique individuals who I like to call idea generators. Now that sounds like Gina, doesn’t it? Yes. I’d be curious to know if a bot that I trained would be able to sound like Gina. And I think we’ve been taught from a very young age to have a better version of ourselves in any context.

And I think the same applies with language, grammar, etc. An English teacher would give you a grade, for a reason, you have to be grammatically correct, you have to have the right spelling, you have to have the right structure, and tone, and style, and so on. But that means that right is not the same as real.

So yes, I had a few editors that worked with me on this to get it to life, but it was more about making sure that the logic was there, the structure was there, and I didn’t go Completely overboard with commas, which fair warning, I do tend to go a little bit overboard with commas, but that they didn’t take out me and that is the element that I think all humans should strive for in a context of putting a senior executive in a public forum, whether that’s on radio, on television, on the stage, I think a lot of people are on the side of trying to be what they think of as a perfect version of themselves, but that is not them.

That is. Something else, my favorite element of coaching is being able to help people feel comfortable with the beauty of themselves that they’ve often feel they had to hide from the rest of the world. And to me, authenticity is about what happens when you cut yourself down the middle and what falls out is more of you.

It means stripping away the masks, which can often be a deeply uncomfortable process. If I can, for a minute, talk about authenticity, I’d love to. Please. I have a beautiful analogy for what authenticity means to me. Imagine a piñata, one of those toys that you suspend from a ceiling and you smash it with a stick and then it crashes and a whole bunch of things fall out.

Now imagine that piñata was made of chocolate. Now the idea behind a piñata is that the piñata is cardboard, it smashes, you throw it away. But as humans, we are ourselves. So you can’t throw us away. A lot of people put a mask on the outside that is different to what they are like on the inside. To me, authenticity is a chocolate piñata and when you smash it, what falls out is more chocolate.

It’s a different kind of chocolate. It might be a smooth, thick, oozy, rich caramel. It might be slightly bitter and dark. It might have a little bit too much alcohol at the center sometimes. But a good chocolate is just a different variety of you. And so if we can bring the different parts of ourselves to bear, when we’re communicating with people, we can choose whether we want to have a little bit more darkness or a little bit more richness in the way we speak.

Being able to have mastery over that gives us the ability to choose when and where to use that different part of ourselves, but it’s still us. Such an important lesson. I’ve been talking about authenticity much like you for a long time. And it’s what worries me is that it’s become a bit of a catchphrase and as a consequence, people actually don’t really understand it or spend any time thinking about it.

And I think it’s such an important. Element of how people respond and not, as you say, not being afraid to step through and share some of themselves. I find it quite fascinating. How people give this image, it’s almost the old fashioned ways of when you turn up at an office where you have to leave everything personal behind and you’re turning up in a suit and a tie and that’s your nature there.

And then when you. Go out through the door, you’re a completely different person. I think that’s such a an outdated concept and not bringing some of that with you because as you said, you mentioned earlier on about your husband and it’s, that’s part of being authentic, right?

It’s part of saying he’s a part of your life. So why wouldn’t you include that in the way that you speak? Absolutely. We are multifaceted human beings. We have our light and we have our darkness. And if people only see an element of our persona, how can they trust us? Now, of course, a lot of people have public personas and they have an image and they have a brand and you’ve got to stay on brand, but I think that’s the risk of getting to know humans who have big followings.

So if you think about any celebrity hashtag fail, what’s happened is that people have discovered, hey, when they’re not on the screen, dressed up and acting as a certain character, they are actually real human beings, and I am disappointed, because I thought they were this god like figure in my mind.

That’s why they say, never meet your heroes. What if actually you knew that your heroes were just as flawed? As every other human on the planet. I think that’s what social media tried to do, but instead, because humans are innately attracted to something lurid for want of a different phrase, we tend to exacerbate the negative or positive tendencies of something and think that the whole represents the whole, to the part represents the whole.

So we think, Oh, they’re like that. They’re always like that. No, no one is always like anything. We are humans. We have our ups and our downs, our highs and our lows. That’s what being human means. That’s what communicating differently means we can have a brilliant message one second and the other second, sometimes not so much.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s that whole idea of you go onto Facebook for example, and you see this photograph of a happy smiley family at a beach and you think, Oh wow, they’re having such a wonderful time and this isn’t it wonderful. They’re all together and everything. What you haven’t seen is that.

Five seconds before the photo, you get into that photograph right now, or also I’m going to, and then straight away afterwards, you’re running after the child has gone off down the beach and the other person doesn’t want to be there at all. And, but they’ve got this happy moment that’s there for everyone to see because it is a bit of a show.

And I think that’s. That’s the real danger with what you’re, if you’re putting up masks, if you use overusing AI, that what happens is you lose that authenticity, you lose the reality of what’s really going on, and that actually makes it a hell of a lot more fun and more interactive as well and more relatable.

I think that’s the most important thing is that you become much more relatable when you have those. Moments that are not perfect because as you say, as much as we’d like to all say we’re perfect, we’re not. And how great is it to actually admit that? Now, 2023 was in fact. The year that Merriam Webster used the word authentic as their word of the year.

It’s interesting that we went from authentic in 2023 to polarization in 2024. So I think there’s a kind of a bit of a flip there between we want to be what we want to be and. Oh, we’re polarized about who we want to be. Authenticity is one of those tricky words that people get annoyed with because they think it’s been overused.

Much like in my mind, branding or a brand or, Oh, here’s my favorite one. Strategy. Yes. The dreaded word strategy. It’s a, it’s enough to send everyone running for miles, isn’t it? My perspective is actually that those who use strategy in every other sentence don’t really understand what strategy is. But that’s perhaps my own bias.

Yeah, it’s, but it is interesting how words like authenticity become as I said, become common and used and become a word of the year. And yet people don’t really understand it or don’t take the time to understand why it’s important. And I think that’s to disadvantage. And I think particularly in this day and age of more and more AI and.

More automation, more things that bring a consistency in order to stand out, your only experiences are what differentiate you your interpretation of what’s going on and the way you think is what is different to the next person so that if you’re not talking about that, if you’re not bringing that, To whether it’s content, whether it’s a an appearance on somewhere, whether it’s a stage or a screen, it doesn’t matter.

Then what’s the point. Indeed. It’s and so tell me a little bit, I’m fascinated because you’ve done so many different things in your career, but you’ve done a TEDx talk. How good was that to be able to do that? Being on that stage in that moment was. Extraordinary. I had prepared more for that speech than I ever had in my entire life.

And I thought I was a good speaker until I started preparing for TEDx. And then I realized that I had so far to go. I think I did about 50 hours, five, zero hours of preparation for a one, five, 15 minute presentation. But in that moment, when I stood up there and I presented to the audience, something almost magical happened.

There was a connection. Between me and the people in the audience, I could almost feel a moment of a hush that fell over the audience. And by the end, I left that stage knowing that I’d nailed it. And that was the best feeling ever. Now, was it perfect? No, it was not. I can look back at it and identify the moments where I completely and utterly forgot what I was going to say next.

But, and this is the important part, I had prepared well enough that I knew there was a risk this would happen. So I had my slides to cue me. I didn’t have slide notes, but I had the images on the slides and enough words on the slides to be able to help me get back into that narrative that I’d crafted.

There were other people presenting at the same event who just completely forgotten, they stopped. For a minute, because once they’d lost their train of thought, they couldn’t get it back again. But I’ve always loved being on stage. I love that interaction between an audience. And the performer, I think that a stage, a performance venue can almost be like an alternative universe because the rest of the world ceases to exist.

At least it does. If you’ve turned your mobile phones off, the rest of the world stops. And for that time, it’s only the interaction between you and the person in front of you. And I think that if it’s done well. People actually are transformed, just like anyone who’s listening to any story. You’re listening to a great podcast and you suddenly realize, Oh, how did I get from point A to point B?

Because you were somewhere else in that moment in time. That’s what I try to help people achieve, is that ability to take someone somewhere else. For the duration of their performance. And what’s really interesting too is that it is a performance, right? Because when you’re appearing on stage in that kind of a scenario and any number of different scenarios, sometimes you, whilst you still want to be authentic and it still needs to bring out all your truths.

You have to perform in a particular way to get your message across, depending on who your audience is, because if you’re a CEO and you’re talking to a large number of staff, for example, then you want to, give that authoritative Kind of voice to it, as opposed to you might be speaking to a small meeting where it’s a much more relaxed idea.

I know I, I spoke last year at an event that was, and the nature of the speech was purely really about fundraising and was to encourage people to donate. And so it was a completely different tone of voice that I had to use for that event to what. I’m using now. And I think it’s about understanding that.

I think that’s one of the fundamentals of communication that has been left behind is this. We tend to resort to this middle ground where we think everybody we’re going to get to everybody with everything we say. And it just. You lose it into the background instead of adapting to your different audiences and the way you need to be in those different audience scenarios.

A good communicator is a good performer because they understand the subtlety of nuance. Yes, you’re right, a CEO when they stand in front. Of a town hall when they’re talking to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people will speak differently to when they are in a small meeting room. But again, are they their whole selves in each of those occasions?

The risk is that when we’re too diametrically opposed in what we say or how we say it, is that we aren’t truly ourselves. And it’s quite scary when you think about the gamut of emotions that humans can run. From extreme anger to extreme delight. Somewhere in between is normal human experience. Our voices will change.

If we’re calm and measured, we can actually reduce the tension in a situation. If we’re upset, we tend to be staccato and talk louder. The art is being able to pick which tone is appropriate, not just for the context, but also for the feeling that we want to leave people with. And this is something others often forget.

Communication is about not just getting your message across, it’s about what happens in the mind of the person you’re talking to. And your tone, your volume, your pitch can all affect how people hear you. I choose to use tones that are often more calm, but it’s nice to be able to throw in a little bit of excitement every now and then.

Absolutely. And that’s the difference is, I’d know when. What people wouldn’t know is that when we first connected on here to start this interview, before we hit the record button, Gina was very excited. And it was the first thing of the day. And a very different kind of way that you speak to when, we’re having a conversation of this nature.

Way too bubbly for me first thing in the morning. But everyone’s different. I don’t, I have to say it’s one of the interesting things and that’s part of it too, is like slotting in the way you communicate and recognizing different parts of the different parts of the day. I tend to prefer not to do things early morning.

And I’d much preferred, I’m happier doing things late at night if I have to do. Communicate with people, particularly in other parts of the world as I function a lot better at that time. For some people are very much morning person people. I know someone in particular that’s up at 4 30 and jumping out of bed every day and going and doing things.

And that is just not for me. I am. I’m not about getting up early and going to the gym and. By the time it’s hitting six 37 o’clock, I’m, I’ve sent out 20 emails and ready to go. That’s yeah. But I think that’s part of it too, right? You have to communicate in a way that is. Authentic to the way you are, because we talking about, things like being on stage and in a podcast scenario, but it’s also how you send in, in emails and when you send them and setting those ground rules as well for the time you send them and making sure that they’re.

Also succinct in those communications that what you’re learning from how you speak is also how you should be writing things because we’ve all been bombarded with these emails that go on for pages and pages and you think, couldn’t you have just put that into a few lines?

There is such a thing as a chronotype. C H R O N O. That refers to the time of day that people operate best. And it sounds to me like you are a night owl chronotype, as in you function better towards the end of the day. And the irony is that I actually am a later type of day person as well. I’d already been up for a good few hours before I gave you the Hi!

Hello! How are we doing? First morning wake up call. Because Trust me, you would not want to see me a couple of hours earlier. I can barely string a sentence together. I know the feeling it’s just, and that’s how it is. You have to as well, be conscious of your audience in the same way that how they.

Want to respond and receive things and whether it’s a written communication or whether it’s a verbal communication or whether it’s a, it’s a video, you have to be conscious of where they’re going to be at that time of day as well. That’s a fair point. We cannot make the assumption that what we’ve said or written is going to be received in the way that we intend.

I think in today’s day of instant responses. We often expect people to reply immediately. And the risk is that if they’re in a strange state of mind, the response we’re going to get, if we expect instant responses, could be much different to what we’d get if they waited a little bit.

And this is the challenge with the immediacy of communication. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a disagreement with someone where disagreement with anyone ever in the moment, if you respond to that trigger that has set you off, you will speak in a totally different way to the way you could have responded if you’d just calmed yourself down and given yourself a little bit longer to reply.

And I think one of those arts of communication is being able to have a certain amount of control of what you’re saying and the less rationally we can behave, the less likely we are to control our responses, which in turn exacerbates someone else’s response, which in turn exacerbates our response. And that’s how arguments happen.

Absolutely. And I think it’s amazing the difference that you can make when you come into a room, if you communicate in a particular way, I was lucky enough in the early part of my career to work with and some people will remember him, Brian Burey and worked on Channel 10 doing the weather with Brian and in the news.

And at this point, Channel 10 had been, had just moved to the 5pm news. So it was a new idea for them. So there was a whole lot of extra stress on them because it was an hour bulletin and it was an hour before everybody else was going to air. So the. They really felt like everyone was watching them, but it also meant that things had to happen a lot quicker.

That extra hour that people have for editing and stuff is huge. And so there was a lot of stress and tension and pressure in the room. And Brian had this way of walking into the room at four o’clock in the afternoon. Of just being bubbly and bright, and you could feel, even if it was just for a moment, everyone just took a breath and just went, Oh, Brian’s here.

And it was just, and the way that he communicated just made such a huge difference to the way people. Operated around him he was the consummate professional in the way that he delivered things on air as well. And I think we, talk about this in, in, earlier, but in terms of time that you have, you have to read the room and understand how much time you have.

And Brian was the best that I’ve ever come across in doing that because he would walk into a live weather bulletin and some nights. A moment before he’s going to air, they’d tell him Brian, you’ve got a minute 38 and the next time he’d come in and go, Brian, we’re running late. You’ve got 27 seconds and no matter what time he told it to, he nailed it every single time because he knew how to stretch out to be succinct and how to speak to that audience in a particular way.

And if you were watching the bulletin, you would never have had an idea of that. There was, there could be such a huge gap. From night to night in terms of what he was giving across, but it was there for everyone. And I think there’s a lot of lessons still to be learned from that basic idea of reading the room and understanding who’s in front of you.

It sounds like Brian was the master of several arts there. He was a master of the art of making people feel seen, as well as a master of the art of being able to deliver a message in a very specific time. That ability to deliver a message in a very specific time is something that people can practice.

Actually, Toastmasters is very good at helping people put a message across in 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes. Ironically, one of my least favorite amounts of time to deliver a message is 10 to 15 minutes because it’s short enough that you’ve got to be really concise, but long enough that you’ve got to be able to put enough stories in to keep people engaged.

Once you get beyond that. Then it’s a whole different ballgame and you’ve got plenty of time. You can even engage feedback. You can get people to debate with you. You’ve got so much more freedom and flexibility, but I think cutting it down to even seconds before that is something that you master your craft.

The longer you do this, the better you become. So one of the things I, again, I love about podcasting is we’ve got that flexibility here. We are, we’ve been able to, we’re coming up to the end of the podcast now, but we’ve had plenty of time to be able to go in depth into different conversations.

So just to wrap things up, there are a couple of things that I wanted to ask you about. So firstly, tell me a little bit more about the book and what that’s all about. The secret army, leadership, marketing, and power of people. It’s effectively a manifesto of what it means to be a leader and a communicator in the often confusing world of business.

And the secret, spoiler alert, is that your army is not just your employees and your managers. Your secret army is in fact your customers as well. And that applies to our personal lives as well. We all have a secret army surrounding us. There are people who’ve got our back, people who if we know we need help or support, they’re going to turn around and say, of course, I’ll help you, Gina.

Of course, I’ll help you, Anthony. They’re just there. What often happens in times of stress is people forget that they have a secret army. What often happens in business is that we forget that our secret army is, in fact, our customers. Happy customers beget happy customers. One of my favorite things to do in a business context is customer storytelling.

Because if I can read a customer’s story as a purchaser, I’m more likely to be convinced that this is the real thing. If I, as a marketer, am able to get a customer story and put it out there in the world, I immediately increase the trust that my audience or purchaser has in my product or service.

It’s very exciting for me to be able to collect happy customer stories and turn them into a thousand different versions of that, because it’s real. It’s authentic. When a customer is interviewed, they use imperfect language, but being able to quote them with those imperfections in their language increases the credibility of the output so much.

I worked with a client last year who was insistent on changing his customer’s turn of phrase. And this was based in South Africa. And so his customer had quirks in his language and the CEO edited out all those quirks. I actually came back to him. I said, stop it. If you want to change the language around his quotes, that’s fine.

If you want to change the context around his quotes, that’s fine. But he said that in using those words, using that turn a phrase, using it was imperfect, it was inaccurate, but it sounded like him. And as long as the audience can understand what he’s talking about. You don’t have the right to change his words.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you take out, as we said all along, the authenticity from that particular person. And just because you think that is the perfect way to say something doesn’t mean that’s what the audience think either. And everyone will have their own audience and their own way of saying things and that will resonate with them.

Versus someone else. It’s why we’ve got variety in what we watch and listen to in all aspects of life. Otherwise we’d all be, just after the one person, wouldn’t we? And in, in different things. So it’s important to. Embrace that authenticity, particularly, I think, and it’s why I wanted to do this conversation early on in the year, because I think 2025 is very much about being able to stand out and embrace the authenticity we’ve had so much in the way of AI and things that have overwhelmed people in the last year or two, and you’ve got to embrace your own individualism.

Otherwise, You risk falling back into the land of the competitors. I completely agree. Who you are can be good and bad, but it must be tempered with a sense of how can you help other people? It’s all very well to just shout your voice out there into the void, but what difference does it make?

Do things with purpose. Absolutely. And so I wanted to, one final question just to to wrap things up that I like to ask all of my guests. So what are the heart moments that people have when they start working with you that you wish more people knew about in advance?

I wish people knew it’s not about them. No one cares about you. They care about how you can help them. They care about the results that you can help them achieve. Last year, I did a small workshop on 30 second elevator pitch. And what I realized, even on the moment of standing up in front of people, was if I can’t understand Your 30 second elevator pitch.

I can’t tell someone else about it. So it’s not about you. It’s not about how clever you can be. It’s about whether you can help me understand what you do. And if I know what you can do, I can tell other people what you do, and that applies in all aspects of life. In marketing, in being able to communicate with people.

We think that what we say goes only one step, and that’s not true. What we say can have ripples in the universe. I wish people knew that it doesn’t matter how good or bad you are. What matters is the feeling that you leave people with. If somehow you can help people feel that they’ve been touched. That makes all the difference in the world.

Absolutely. I totally agree with you. It’s what we like to say is that the best way to change the world is to do it one person at a time. I think you’ve helped us do that today. So thank you so much for being a part of the Biz Bites program. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and I’m sure there’ll be many more conversations like it to come.

It’s been my absolute pleasure to all those people out there listening. Thank you for being here. I hope you have an extraordinary day. And of course, we will give you all of the details on how to get in contact with Gina, including how to get ahold of her book and lots of other good tidbits that she’s got on her website.

We’ve got a special link that we’re going to provide in the show notes. So everyone stay tuned for that. And again, thank you, Gina. And we look forward to everyone’s company on the next episode. Thank you. Bye bye. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.

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