Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Tissa Richards. Welcome.
Thanks so much. It’s really great to be here today.
It’s great to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. Thanks for that opportunity. So as you mentioned, I’m Tissa Richards. I’m based here in the US. I sort of like to say I’m a recovering tech founder and entrepreneur. I’ve done it a couple of times and now I coach, I speak, I train leaders and founders and executives. And I sort of help them navigate through founding companies, leadership and what it takes to be a really effective leader. Well, that’s quite a lot. There’s a lot to talk about there, but if I remember correctly, the topic we’re going to talk about today is knowing your work. Are you happy to talk about that? Yeah, I love that. That topic is so important and really close to my heart.
So a nice general question for you to get your teeth into. How do you determine your work? Sure. I mean, I like to talk about it is sort of knowing your value and your values. I think that the reason I’m so passionate about that is when you, when you know that when you know the value you bring to the table and you know the values that you operate on as a leader, you can be really authentic and you can be really fearless, you know what you will tolerate in terms of behaviours and you know when you can walk away from a situation that’s just not optimal for you, the question that you asked, which is sort of how do you determine it? It’s a process, right? You think about what have you done throughout your career, what value have you brought over and over tends to be a pattern? And I think something that we are not really good at because we’re so busy, usually just heads down, delivering is to sort of stop, interrupt that flow and figure out how to identify it articulated and then communicate it. So yours would be kind of like an evidence-based approach.
I actually love that. I like to say sort of interrogating your accomplishments, but yes, it’s very factual, right? So your value, your value proposition is a fact and the reason I love to say that is because when you communicate it that way, you don’t have to feel a lot of women ask me in particular in particular. it feels very arrogant to sort of say this is the value I bring, but it’s not arrogant, it’s data based and if you interrogate what you’ve done over and over, you can figure out with the pattern is and you can point to it as a fact. Yeah. So what do you do or what would you advise someone to do if they have been undervaluing their contribution? Yeah, I love that question because I think one of the things I like to say to people is think about what you’re actually paid to do and it’s not so much that you’re paid to do what your title says. It’s think about the value that you bring to your organisation, right?
So I love to use the example of let’s say a customer success, if you lead with that, if you say I’m paid to deliver customer success programs, think about go beyond that. Right? So what you’re actually paid to do is to do the values that a customer success program delivers to the organisation which is customer retention increased recurring revenue. If you think about a SAAS company that’s actually driving the metric that a public company stock value is based on rights, a recurring revenue. So you sort of think beyond just the parameters of what your title is or even what your daily activities are. So if you sort of feel that you’ve been undervalued or maybe you’re undervaluing yourself, think flip the script need with the value that you deliver and then how you do that. So I like to say to my clients, let’s say their VPs of customer success or there the chief customer officer.
I create the metric that our company’s recurring revenues based on. And I do that by creating customer success programs and I do that in X number of countries with X number of customers, X number of employees. And this is how we do that because that sort of makes sense. I think it does. Yeah. And one of the things which you highlighted which perhaps I would want to emphasise is that within your example you’re essentially keeping track of how value so that you can demonstrate it to people. So in your example, you know if you’re looking at the revenue you generate for example and if you generate an extra the same million dollars or something and you’re only being paid 40,000 or whatever it might be as an employee. then that would kind of be a definition of being undervalued. Right? Yeah. And I’ve had people say to me well you know when you talk about sales or customer, those are very easy, right? Because you can point to Those metrics that are very easy to measure.
And I would like to answer that by saying if you have a job then you’re generating value. Otherwise you wouldn’t have a job. It may be a little bit harder to sort of.2 your direct line value to revenue. But it’s there. So it’s if you haven’t tracked it so far, that’s okay. You can start right. But the fact is that if you have been employed, if you if you sort of if you have if there is a job and a title that you have the organisation sees value in the work that you do. So you sort of get to know the people in your organisation that track data or metrics or measurements and start to really dig in and figure out why am I here? Right? Why do people keep signing a paycheck for me? Because you are creating value and start to figure out how to quantify it because somebody’s quantifying it if they’re paying you there, quantifying it, right? And so if you can start to help on your end, figure that out, then you can advocate for yourself.
But Thomas, it’s not just about your paycheck. I think it’s also about just being able to advocate for the value that you bring to the table, being able to stand up and say, I know I’m good at this and good at it. I’ve done it, I’ve done it repeatedly. this is how I lead, this is why I lied that way. So that sort of makes sense. It’s also about internalising it. Yeah, I mean it can be at some other metric as well, like even if it’s difficult to quantify in a revenue term, then it can be something else which might be perceived as just as valuable. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, in a capitalist society it does come to sort of, are you generating revenue or reducing risk, but it’s knowing your value is also very much about just being a very strong leader, very authentic in that leadership but also knowing what you will accept from your team or your stakeholders. I think it’s just important because if you don’t really understand the value that you’re driving in, the value you bring, it’s easy to sort of kind of float a little bit aimlessly through your career and not really be intentional and say in my next role, I really don’t want to do X, Y, Z or I really enjoy this.
And so I want to make sure that this part is amplified. So it’s just as important for yourself as it is for your organisation. So why do you think people undervalue themselves? And where does where does it come from in your view? That’s a really meaty question, right, It’s sort of I mean, I’m sure you’ve had guests that I’ve talked about, sort of the imposter syndrome and self-doubt and I think sometimes I think we’re socialised to be that way whether that’s a cultural or a gender thing. and I think I think everybody has it. So it’s interesting because I have people say to me every day, well, I bet once you start working with people that are at a certain level that goes away and the secret is that it doesn’t. So I work with some of the top executives at the biggest companies and they still have that voice of doubt. So I think it’s human, it’s human to sort of worry about what people think and worry what if somebody realises, I don’t have all the answers.
So it’s really just about putting that framework around you that you know what you are good at and then you know what you’re not so that you’re not sort of pretending to know everything and be good at everything. Does that make sense? It doesn’t make sense. I was kind of half expecting you to go back to childhood. I think it’s probably more for a psychologist, you know? Yeah. But I also wanted to highlight something which I think is really interesting, which is a lot of people struggle with the concept of undervaluing themselves, but there are some people who don’t seem to struggle with it at all, like they’re more than happy to quote what they were, even if perhaps they’re not even worth that. Have you got any thoughts on that particular topic? Yes, So I guess let me ask you, are you sort of talking about people that might give off sort of an error of just being really confident and you know, they’ll quote what seems to be almost an inflated price, but it seems like they’re impervious to doubt.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s an interesting one because I feel like I’ve we’ve all met them, you know, I’ve worked with those people as we all have and I actually wonder whether that’s really the case, you know, whether they really are impervious to self-doubt because I think a lot of people are good at hiding it, which is great, right? You want to come across as confident and sure of yourself, I think, I mean, as I said, I’ve worked with some people who you would never expect to have doubt what they hide it really well. Maybe they’ve done the work of processing that doubt and really connecting with their value. and then some people maybe just are very, very naturally confident, but I think putting out putting that out there, right? You hear these stories, especially independent practitioners or consultants? Yeah, that range of compensation is so huge that what should I charge, what should I ask for and sometimes you seriously undervalue yourself and then you realise the budget was much bigger, you could have even doubled what you asked for.
But that’s a whole other discussion because how do you actually ask for compensation outside of sort of an organisational structure? That’s a really hard one. And to do it in a really confident way, I think people who appear to be very confident many times deep down or not. but that to me sort of leads into another interesting topic, which is sort of leadership communication and the people who I’ve noticed who are the most effective, the most confident are frequently the people who don’t say very much write that the most powerful person in the room is frequently the one that listens the most and doesn’t, it doesn’t try and say that most doesn’t try to convince people of their knowledge and of their sort of seniority. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean it reminds me of an example that we talked about before the call and it was that you walked away from a big deal and anything does it, you know what I mean?
And can you give that example? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that’s sort of related also to the topic of leadership values and principles and really so when I talk about your value, I really mean two things and I have a book coming out that really talks about knowing how you lead and knowing your leadership style and your leadership value. So one is how do you lead? And the other is how why do you leave that way? And I think what’s really critical is a lot of people can say to you well I lead with empathy. I lead with compassion. I lied collaboratively. Those are great. And you’ll be asked about those in interviews. I think what a lot of people don’t spend time doing is saying, okay, why do I leave that way? What is so important to me about how I operate that? I have a set of leadership principles, right? Operating principles and what to me, I think when you know that it’s really critical because then you know what your non negotiables are, right?
So for me it’s transparency, It’s honesty, it’s ethics and trust and knowing that those underpin how I run my companies, how I choose my customers, my investors, the behaviours that I sort of allow, don’t allow in my workplace is what’s really critical about that is that you then don’t defend anything. So just like your value is a fact. Your values are also affect. And so, for example, I don’t allow yelling in my workplace in my teens. I just, I don’t think it’s a constructive way to do business. I think it, that’s also how I live my life. I don’t yell in my personal life. Experimentation and curiosity are very important, especially in tech start-ups. And then another operating principle is just ethics and honesty. So if I’m not afraid to take things off the table and that includes a deal, a customer deal, an investor deal and walking away, taking something off the table in the past has cost me a huge amount of money, but I don’t regret it because it stays, it means I’m staying in complete alignment with my leadership values.
A lot of the work that I do, whether it’s some one-on-one coaching or workshops with big companies is helping people identify that so that they’re leading without fear. They’re not afraid of standing up and saying this is one of my non negotiables and I’m going to stand up and say this situation is not aligned well, I think that as you said, like determining what your values are. That’s a very you say a fruitful exercise to know what you want. But I think it requires some real integrity when to in order to sort of follow those, especially when you’ve got like a big a big deal going down. So I don’t know, congratulations on that one is what I’d say because it means that you mean it in my view. Yeah, I mean otherwise you’re a little bit toothless, right? You’re sort of not putting literally your money where your mouth is. But I think it’s operating from a place of fear. You’re sort of thinking this is the last chance I’m gonna have, I’m never going to have another customer deal or I’m never going to have another job.
But these are the two ft size, right? If you know your value, then you know that there is another job in the queue there, there is another customer deal around the corner because your product is great or whatever your situation, nothing is fatal. And I think that’s what I’m so passionate about because if you can remove fear from that equation, then you can really operate very consistently and not afraid, right? And that’s why I think knowing your value is so important because you fill that vacuum of self-doubt. Mostly I think that it can be the case, the people who do those big deals despite what their values are, can be a bad wellbeing from a wellbeing perspective and if you follow, as you say what your values are, then you know, that can be quite, you can be quite content going down that route. You say, you’re content 100%. You know, I think maybe that the word to sort of where we’re heading now is sort of into resilience, right?
Because you can take all the deals that come your way but not be happy, right? It’s doing business is hard, right? We’re working so much more than ever before and work at home life are bleeding into each other, but if you’re not doing the right kind of work or working with the right kind of people, we’re going to burn out a lot faster. So I think working authentically and this isn’t sort of like I don’t know life coach stuff, I’m not a life coach, right? I am an executive coach, but I think this is important. This is where they start to bleed together, right? If you’re not working the way you want to in alignment with your values, then yeah, it’s going to take a toll like you said, so what would you say? I haven’t actually asked you this directly, have you do you feel like you’ve been in a position maybe earlier on in your career, where you didn’t know your worth and going from that to where you are now, how has that changed things? That’s a really powerful question.
I don’t think I have ever been in a position where I did something that wasn’t in alignment with my values. I think if I even if I didn’t know them and have them articulated, I mean now I probably because the result of the work that I’ve done, I mean I literally have my leadership values and my value proposition printed out above my computer. But I’ve always been a very precocious and sort of bold person, so I’ve never been afraid of standing up and saying, no, this doesn’t work. maybe the difference though is how it felt to do that. So previously I might have worried more that that was the that’s the wrong thing to do, but it was a that it would have had a negative impact on my reputation or my chances, or what was next. Now I will do it and I’ll actually point to it like I do now and say this is actually an example of the right thing to do and not be at all shamed of it and actually use it as proof of good leadership. Does that make sense?
Yeah, sure. It sounds like the type of self-talk that goes through my mind was different than to what it is now. Yeah, and I think what’s also really interesting is what you said about how it impacts you just from a resiliency standpoint being a founder in running a company’s exhausting, right? It’s there’s no question and I’m no longer exhausted, I’m really energised and really I’ve never felt better and I think part of it is knowing that not only do I make those decisions really intentionally, but I share them with other people and I feel like that’s a really purposeful thing, so you’re able to sort of share your lessons with other people now, but how did you learn, what was the process for you about going from? I mean it’s a bit simplistic but not knowing your work to knowing your work, what did that look like for you? Yeah, I think for me it was it was a very expensive and very exhausting lesson.
It was, you know, it was having to shut down a company to stay in alignment with my values and seeing that making that decision At great personal cost was still the right one. And knowing that even in that case sort of the most extreme case, if that is still the right choice then the thousands of daily choices, the small ones, right, Those are those are definitely the right choices. So if I could make a big choice that cost me millions of dollars and not regret it at all, then it’s really helpful because I can use that as a story and say to people, let me help you find your leadership values and define them and then use them in your everyday life so that it’s almost like tiny little deposits into your bank account of resiliency, right? Because that was very powerful in my life.
So let me help you not sort of need to cross a big chasm because you can do this every single day, your mental wellbeing bank account. Yeah, yeah. Actually, that’s sort of what it is because then you don’t have to recover right from this really exhausting situation. You just sort of will never need to get there. You’re not in your overdraft of life or something. Yeah. Life’s too short, right? That’s too short to have to get there. You didn’t mention a big one, which I don’t feel I don’t know anything about. And I’m sure the audience would be interested in, which is you closed your company down as a result of being able to know you were, there’s a lot of details that we don’t know about that is a, what would you do that? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think I’ll still keep it at a high level, but essentially, you know, the board of directors and the management had to make a decision to shut the company down. That was, that was going very well and was going places and that was so that we could exercise their fiduciary obligations right, and really do the right thing.
And that came at a big cost? It came at a cost to our early investors, it came at a cost to our existing investors, to all of ourselves. But we have to do the right thing at a situation that had several kind of dubious aspects, right? And it was hard because if we had all been acting in our own self-interest, we wouldn’t have done it right. Yeah. Looking at the bigger picture, it was the only right decision. And so now, looking back, you know, I think you might look at it and think, boy, don’t you regret it? It costs you millions of dollars and seven years of your life, I don’t regret it for 1 2nd, because I look at my operating principles, I look at my non negotiables when I say is in complete alignment, and I think that gives you a really good sense of have you always been you always acted in alignment with those? Absolutely. So when you vote to shut the company down at great personal cost, but you know that it’s in alignment with your values, it’s not a hard decision.
And I think that’s, you know, I’ve done things like that outside of that really big one. And if you look back and say, do you have any regrets? No. And I think that’s important because you can, you can say to other people, what do you fear? Do you fear not taking a job because you kind of, a little spidery senses were tingling, don’t fear it, there’s another job right around the corner, you know, just know your values, because those will be your really good guiding principles. It’s interesting that you brought that up because I don’t know whether you’ve had the narrative as well or what you think about this, but it’s often I’ve heard many times about companies where or people’s opinions are that when companies get going and they’re like big Corporates for example, there’s no there’s no ethical, she said agency that’s guiding them, so basically no one’s accountable and it’s all the incentives are all in the wrong direction, but I was the first time I’ve heard a story where that’s actually not the case.
Any thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean and I think it does happen more than you think where there’s a lot of companies, I think more than ever, right where culture is culture and ethics are really coming to the forefront. I work with some of them, I do a lot of work around sort of culture and principles, but I think you can get to a point where a company is so big, you can’t turn the battleship around and I’m seeing more and more, maybe because of the pandemic and people sort of taking stock of their lives, but you reach a start, I’m seeing people who have reached a certain point in their career where they say I’ve just been working heads down for so long that I now want to be more intentional. Is it is it okay for me to say I don’t want to travel so much in the real, like the normal world, right? Or I don’t want to do certain things and they almost feel guilty about having these things they don’t want to do or things they really do want to do in a role. And my answer to that as always think about think about what, how picky we are in other areas of our lives, you know who we, who we date, who we marry, who we have Children with, even who we have worked on our cars or do our hair or where we send our kids to school right here.
So we’re so particular in other areas of our lives and yet we spend more time at work, I think than anywhere else. And yet we’re not very, we tend to give up a lot, I think at work were not as intentional. So I said, don’t be guilty about don’t feel guilty about that, right? It’s okay to sort of say these are the parameters of what I’d like out of my next role because I’m going to give you a lot of myself and so I feel like being really intentional, there is really important. I know whether you have used these principles in the concept of negotiation, but at least part of your answer made me think of that, knowing your worth in a negotiation, useful new thoughts. Oh definitely, definitely. And What’s the statistic? I think it’s 70% 65-75% of women, especially women, they accept the salary that they’re offered. And that to me that’s like that’s literally taking the dollar value of what a hiring committee thinks you’re worth, right?
So you haven’t even started the dialogue of your value and I have clients in particular women who that’s caused some issues because the expectation was that they would come back and negotiate. And so now they are markedly lower than some of their peers and as they both move up in the organisation, they’ve had to actually sort of even them up and so they’re getting these raises, they weren’t expecting so that they are now on par. There are some companies, especially in Silicon Valley, I’ve worked with that have complete salary transparency. So they literally say this is the highest and best you can see all of the salary bans we published them internally. And so there is no room for negotiation. I think that’s kind of nice as well because you know that you weren’t leaving any money on the table. but I think it’s culturally perhaps a bit of a shame that especially women, they fear, I think, or they’re just not comfortable talking about money, but to do that, you have to know a few things.
You have to know the value you bring with your work. You have to know this sort of market value of your role. You need to know a little bit about the revenue and what the company is paying, you know, in certain roles. So you feel comfortable speaking that language with the people who are hiring you. Yeah. What you talked about initially about knowing your worth from a dollar or pound perspective, you’d be much more likely to negotiate properly if you knew that. Whereas a thing, if you’ve got no experience at all, I think most people, a lot of people are too agreeable in that particular scenario and they just don’t want to rock the boat. And you say that’s accurate. Yeah, I think it’s also feeling a little bit of just, just discomfort, right? It’s just like an icky. It’s almost like don’t talk politics at the thanksgiving table, right? Well, you know, the reality is that this is a transaction and I also suggest to my clients, you know, even on your resume or in an interview, Don’t talk about things in dollars or pounds in the sense of, you know, I did a campaign that increased sales by $1 million dollars because that doesn’t have a contextual value to anybody.
You could be at a company where $1 million 1,000% increase or you could be at a company where that represents a tiny drop in the bucket. I really like to, I think it’s more impactful if you talk about it as a percentage because now somebody’s thinking she increased something by 25%. I’m sort of looking at that. I’m thinking, well maybe in my company that’s 25 million, but they’re able to do the math really quickly. So I think it’s just as an interview tips talk about, you can, you can talk about it in the number of pounds or the number of dollars, but also really quickly add the percentage increase or the percentage impact because that sort of universalise is what your value is to somebody outside of your organisation. So I mean, I’ve had a little bit of prep for our conversation and the first thing that I came across was personal history is one of the small group of women who have founded and funded technology start-ups in Silicon Valley.
And I felt that kind of came back to what I said a moment ago, which was an awful lot of details there too so that we don’t know about. Yeah, some of that stuff. Yeah. I mean, I’ve, I’ve started companies that I’ve raised money for companies and this is the first time in a very long time. I haven’t been raising money and I really enjoyed not raising them. It’s gruelling and I help founders raise money now. That’s actually you want to talk about knowing your work. That’s, that’s a really important thing is, is really hitting that message of what’s your value, What’s your company’s value, right? So you don’t know your own value, but also your company’s value in your message. Well, what do you say to founders if they shall we say what the main thing is the main principles that you would tell someone if they wanted to raise money? Yeah, absolutely. No. I have a series of articles on a publication called built in where I really focus on, on founders. And I think there’s a couple. The first is really that I think it’s easy to your product or your technology is your baby, right?
And so you really don’t want anyone to call it ugly. But you tend to think that that is the value, right? And really, it’s not because it’s the impact of that technology or that product that people are investing in. So I can’t tell you how many times they see funding pitch decks that go into excruciating detail about the product and the technology and not really about the impact that it has. What, why, why would a customer want it? How is it going to change the market? And so I think that’s the first mistake a lot of founders make, is they’re so tied to the features and the details and the guts, what’s under the hood. Right. Um, and not really how the car handles on the road or why somebody would want to buy that car versus another. And I look at them and they almost look like customer decks and not investor decks really think about it from that perspective. And the second is that investors will meet with anybody.
And it’s a harsh truth, but they get very excited because they’ll tell me, oh, I’ve got 15, 20 investor meetings and I’ll say, well, but you don’t even have a product yet. You just sort of have an idea. Are these really, really truly early seed stage investors? No, no, these are investors. And I said, well they’re really, they’re not going to invest in you. Oh no, no. They told me they will. And I said, no, they’re really just scoping out the market there. They will meet with anybody. And so you’ve really got to qualify. They’re probably checking you out because they have an existing investment in your space. They just want to know what you’re doing. Don’t waste your time and it’s okay to make some connections for later stage investment that your time is not a renewable resource, right? So if somebody is not actively investing at your stage, probably want to reconsider meeting with them. And then third, not every dollar is equal.
So you could raise money from some people and that’s not who you’d want to raise from. So it’s easy to be so grateful and excited to be getting checks coming in. But you’re going to have a relationship with those people and you really want to make sure go back to those leadership values and those sort of corporate culture. You want to make sure that they are aligned with how you want to do business. Talk to the people that they’ve invested in before, make sure that there are other founders, like the relationship that they have with them because it can really impact everything that you’re about to do. So in some instances it’s better to stay small for a while and get the wrong investor. Yeah. Or fail. I mean a failure is not defeat, right? So there’s times where it would actually be better not to raise that money and not to and for your company to not actually take off the ground then to take money. That is not the right money. And that sounds mercenary, but it’s true.
So you said that you’re not, you don’t, is that you don’t own businesses at the moment that you are a coach. What are you up to? Yeah. So this is the first time, I’m not running a technology company in a long time and I was going to take some time off and just, you know, rejuvenate and then jump back into the tech world and instead I’m busier than I’ve been in a really long time. I’m building a very fast growing training and coaching business and speaking business. Um, so, and I have a book coming out which is called Leading Your Way, which actually talks about this, this topic, um, and really walks readers through how to create your value proposition and your leadership values to really step by step. Um, if you don’t know it, that’s fine coming in, sort of a series of exercises on how to identify it articulated and then tips on how to communicate it. So it’s actually available for pre order on my website, which is tissarichards.com and I coach executives and executive teams and do workshops and trainings of group trainings.
So it’s growing faster than I had expected. I truly thought this would be just a one or two years sort of hiatus and discovered that I actually liked this a lot more than raising money and sort of writing patents and growing teams. So do you have goals for the company, given that it’s growing quicker than you expected? I do actually. So I have this book. and I’ve got two more books in the works. One is actually about this imposter syndrome voice of doubt. The other is about how to deal with failure and sort of reframe it into lessons. I have a group coaching training program coming out and an online training program. I also have some people who are requesting to sort of be trained as coaches, sort of using the methodology that I use. So, I think it’s, it’s becoming a bit of a tech platform despite my thoughts of staying away from technology for a little while, but does that mean that you will be bringing people on to kind of replace you or model what you’re, what you’re doing?
I think so, and I think that’s, it’s almost inevitable, right sort of to scale beyond one person, you know? Yeah, as I said, it just grew way faster than I expected. And it’s not possible to coach one on 1 or even one group coaching, um, just as one person. So, the leadership framework that I, that I coach, I think it’s pretty replicable. So there are, I’m starting to actually create a train the trainer program. Okay. And what would you say the main contributor is regarding the growth? I think it just resonated. I think the message resonated more than I expected and that message is really, replacing sort of self-doubt or fear or that sort of uncertainty of that value with a really crystal clear and very confident definition of who you are, what you do well and why you do it well and sort of why you operate the way you do.
So I think it just hit a chord with people who are either rising leaders within the organisation, founders or people who are already leaders and executives who are maybe I’ve been so busy for so long just delivering and working and suddenly thought, wow, I hadn’t stopped to think about it and be intentional for maybe a decade or more. It’s a great point. Um, is there anything that you feel would be valuable to the audience that we haven’t talked about so far? Yeah, I think just a couple of things, right? Which is, um, I’m very, very passionate about this, which is just if you have that voice of doubt, if you, if you worry that you, that you’re alone, having that voice of doubt, you’re not, I promise. And there are people who you’ve probably seen, you probably recognise their names or, you know, they’re from very recognisable companies, they have it. So any of the things you experience, you’re not alone experiencing them and that’s probably really important because I think it’s very human to think, oh, I’m the only person, right?
And having any sort of fear or trying to put on a mask of some sort to fit in or try and emulate somebody to lead the way they do. And so therefore not being really authentic to yourself is it’s going to burn you out, right? So really just figuring out what are you really good at what you love to do, what energises you. And then, and then leading that way and working that way is going to is going to make your life a lot better because you’re going to just have more energy, You’re going to be happier and life’s too short not to work that way. So I think just no, no. Why you lead the way you do, why you work the way you do and don’t be afraid to stand up or speak up or leave something that’s not making you happy, that it’s important. That very passionate about that because I’ve been there, lots of people have been there and you don’t have to stay there.
That’s a great point. And can you remind me about the book again? Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve got some more resources on my website, so it’s called leading your way and you can sign up for, you know, newsletter or the pre order or webinars or blogs may website is tissarichards.com, T-I-S-S-A Richards.com.
And just before we close, what would you say if you sort of walking down the street and you kind of mentioned your book and someone said all right, what’s the book about and well, the main principles of it, what would you say other than what we talked about today?
Of course. I think it’s other than what we’ve talked about. I think it’s a book that would really help you become a very fearless, authentic, resilient and effective leader.
Okay, Tissa Richards, normally what I say is where’s the best place for people to find you? It’s sort of pre-emptive there. Sorry, I know it’s tissarichards.com so thank you for the information on knowing your worth. I think it has the ability to make things a lot better for people. So thank you for all the value that you gave today.
I really appreciate the opportunity, Thomas.