What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast

shared guide book on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing,

because life's too short for boring podcasts and bad advice. What is up and welcome back to working hard. If you want people to take you more

seriously without changing who you are and you are fed up of saying like every five seconds,

this episode is for you. Today we are breaking down how to become a stronger communicator in

everyday life and at work. This was such a highly requested episode and one that I've been wanting to do for so long. I've been working on this specifically myself for a while. So when I found speaking coach Susie Ashfield, I knew she was the perfect person to talk about this with. We are talking about how to cut filler words, how to speak clearly without losing your personality, why women are taught to

soften their language, and what we can do about all of those things. I feel like throughout my

career, I very much learn that communication is absolutely everything for your job, for your

relationships, and generally for getting further in life. So I really hope you find this episode

as life-changing as I did. Before we get into it, please make sure you are following the podcast on whatever platform you are listening to this on. That means that a new

episode will land in your feed every single Monday morning and it hugely helps the podcast.

Susie Ashfield, are you currently more working hard or hardly working?

I am hardly working. Oh, really? I'm having so much fun.

Love that for you. I mean, I'm being paid to have the fun, which is fantastic, but it's too much fun to call it work.

But suddenly that's a very good position to be in. And for anyone who doesn't know what you do,

can you explain that for us? I am a communications coach. So I help people work out what it is they want to say and make them look really confident when they say it. I feel like a lot of people

assume that their communication style is quite fixed. It's something we do every day. It's something that I think a lot of us feel like is probably a bit ingrained and there's a bit of nature, there's a bit of nurture, there's a bit of kind of bad habits, all of that. How easy is it to actually make a significant change in your communication style when you're like, I don't know, you're an adult. You've kind of already

established how you communicate. They're right and they're wrong. Absolutely. If you've been doing

something day in, day out in one particular way, that feels totally like its nature to you. But of course,

you can change stuff all the time. Tiny little changes made frequently are the best way to do this. And I can tell you exactly what those changes should be. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about the changes. If someone's listening to this episode and the reason they've clicked on it is because they think, oh, well, I'm just not the best communicator. Maybe I speak well sometimes, but I say um and are and like and tend to

fill silences and all of these different things, which doesn't necessarily get my point across.

Where would you recommend they start?

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