23rd November 2021 | by Jacqui Harper MBE

I Learned to speak at Weight Watchers!

In my new podcast, GC Julie Honor, lost weight AND gained massive speaking confidence at Weight Watchers. From there she went on to become a successful lawyer and is now General Counsel for digital marketing disruptor, 3Q Digital. Here she reveals her journey as a speaker and her top tips.

Episode #2.

Jacqui Harper

Hello and welcome to join Jacqui, the podcast for presentation skills. Joining me today is a GC from Chicago whose expertise is change management. Her organisation is a growth marketing disruptor called 3Q. She’s also the winner of the Outstanding Mother of the Year Award. I just like saying that. Please welcome the multi talented Julie honour. Oh, Julie, it’s great to have you here today.

Julie Honor

Thank you so much, Jacqui.

Jacqui Harper

Brilliant. Tell me about your work at 3Q. What does a typical day look like for Julie?

Julie Honor

Oh, my goodness. I would say there’s no typical day. It changes by the hour. Sometimes you don’t even know what your day is going to look like until you’re almost at the end of it. But I’m a solo GC right now with a fantastic contract manager, but it’s just the two of us. And so we handle everything from our contracts, commercial disputes, employment issues, intellectual property protection, defence matters, everything. So it varies every day about to be intense to just the two of you.

Jacqui Harper

It must be intense and long.

Julie Honor

Yeah, it is, but it’s fun. I love it. It’s a new challenge every day and the ability to really make an impact and make a change.

Jacqui Harper

When you look at your career so far, what are you most proud of about your work?

Julie Honor

That’s a really great question. When I think of what I’m most proud of, I would really think of the areas where I’ve taught people to pause. There are so many times within the company somebody will come to me and say, I have a question. I don’t know if I should be waiting to ask you this, but I just want to ask you this and it’s just so rewarding to see that I have helped to teach somebody to think about risk in a slightly different way that impacts their every day.

Julie Honor

And they pause and they think and they reflect. And it’s just so I think that’s what I’m most proud of at each organisation. When I see people like learning and pausing, it’s just very rewarding.

Jacqui Harper

There’s a wonderful phrase, isn’t there that you need to slow down to go faster, that plugs into that idea, doesn’t it? Well, we’re here to talk about speaking and how to be a more effective speaker. And I know you speak a lot in your work, so we’ll start off with your choice of speaker, and it’s super unusual. So who is your favourite speaker and why.

Julie Honor

Yeah, it is very unusual. My favourite speaker is a group of speakers, and it’s the Peloton instructors, which is so funny to say, but I do an exercise on the Peloton app at least once a day, and it is so fascinating how relatable they are. They are physically moving and talking and inspiring, and they just connect with their audience in such an engaging way that it’s just been so fascinating to see each of the different styles and how each of them have an effectiveness despite being so different.

Julie Honor

So it’s been a really interesting platform to get to experience and to see these speakers just be fantastic as well as admiring them.

Jacqui Harper

Do you draw any inspiration from them in any way? Do you use their techniques?

Julie Honor

Yeah. I think each of them has their own catch phrase. Robin Arzon is one of the instructors. She’s like, “fix your crown, keep your head up”. And I bring that into my everyday. Like, when I’m speaking, I want to have a good posture and make sure that I’m holding my head up and I’m not looking down. Right. So like, little things like that are interesting that I carry with me. And I think what’s been relatable that implement when I speak, is, what can I leave my audience to take away with?

Julie Honor

Like, I want them to learn something and grow from hearing me speak and not just listen to me, blab forever. So I always try to think, okay, what is my takeaway that I want to make sure my audience is getting because I have takeaways I get from the Peloton instructors.

Jacqui Harper

Fabulous. Unique choice.

Jacqui Harper

And also how wonderful that you apply those ideas in your work. Now, your journey as a speaker is also particularly interesting, and I believe it started at Weight Watchers.

Julie Honor

It did.

Julie Honor

So I had gone through the Weight Watchers programme when I was in law school and was very proud of where I ended up and became a lifetime member. And I loved the programme so much, I wanted to be a part of the community still. So I became a leader with Weight Watchers, and so I would get up in front of a group of anywhere from, 15 to 60 people and be a conversation facilitator. So we had some science and knowledge that we were sharing, but we were predominantly there just to facilitate a conversation and give people support.

Julie Honor

And it was fantastic. And the community, as I led several meetings in Chicago, and so my audience or my members would range from people working at restaurants to CEOs of companies to judges coming in and being members. So it’s just a very interesting and eclectic audience that you never know who’s going to be in that room. And it was really great practise to just get comfortable and be in front of a crowd. Yeah.

Jacqui Harper

It just made me think that’s such a great training ground, really for a speaker, isn’t it? Really a variety of people and different needs. Fantastic. So where do you think you went next, then? So Weight Watchers, then what?

Julie Honor

So as I started getting more senior in my career, well, from Weight Watchers, I was still lawyering and practising law, and I was a litigator for a while. So I had a lot of courtroom experience and deposition experience. And so you deal with a lot of off the cuff conversation and having to ask questions and really being on and listening intently to your audience. But really when I transitioned into in house practice and being in the GC role, I developed relationships with some of our vendors that I really love, like, a contract management tool, for example.

Julie Honor

And I’m very candid with giving feedback to my vendors, because the better I can make their product, the better it makes it for me. So as I gave them more feedback, they would invite me to come and speak like, hey, can you come and talk to our employee base and share your experience as a customer, or can you come and speak on a panel of what we’re doing? And I just kept saying, yes. And I ended up having a lot of opportunities to begin my speaking career on panels in that way, which was really interesting.

Jacqui Harper

And I know that you had lots of successes, obviously. But there were times when you were challenged, when were the difficult times for you? What would you identify?

Julie Honor

Yeah. So I would say one of the most difficult ones was last year. I was invited to speak on a global intellectual property panel at a very popular conference, and I first pushed back. I’m like, are you sure that you want me? Am I smart enough? Do I know enough to be there? And they’re like, absolutely, we want you. And so I said yes to the panel. And then I get the other panellists. And it is like, chief privacy officers at these very global companies – and myself.

Julie Honor

And I’m way out of my League. And I studied so hard for that. Jacqui, I was terrified that I was going to come across as not knowledgeable enough or not be able to give something to the audience that they felt was valuable. And so I studied and prepared for that panel. More than anything I had done, it felt like bar exam studying, almost like, I want to be ready. I want to know what I’m doing because I was so scared. It was such an uphill battle to build my confidence from a knowledge level, to be able to then have a comfortable presence once the panel actually happened.

Julie Honor

And then during that panel, of course, it’s the one that I’m like, the most stressed; during the beginning parts of Covid, I had my three year old and my two year old at home with me because daycare was closed. And my kids walk in, no clothes screaming for mom, like, in the middle of me speaking in front of over one thousand. And I am trying to just stay calm. “You guys stay over there. Let me calmly walk you out”. And I was embarrassed. And it was like, it was so challenging.

Julie Honor

But the funniest thing was, after that panel, I had so many people send me LinkedIn connection requests because they were like, you made life so relatable. I saw how you handled that. And that helps me feel better about how I handle my kids coming in on calls. And it just was such an interesting experience where I had to work so hard. And I thought I had failed. But in a way, my failure was what most resonated with them.

Jacqui Harper

Oh, wow. That’s a great story. I love that triumph in the end. The final question I guess I have of you before we finish our time: people who are looking to improve their speaking skills, what would your top tip be?

Julie Honor

Anytime you’re speaking, I think there are two really important parts to keep in mind. One is, why should people care about what you’re saying? What makes you qualified to be talking to them about the topic, and the other is, what do you want them to walk away with? There are so many panels I sit on that people tell stories just to tell stories. But there’s not a tangible lesson to walk away with. And it’s frustrating to listen to those. So I think those are my two important, my most pressing ones of anytime I’m sitting there. I want people to know, why should they listen to me?

Julie Honor

Why am I qualified to be telling them about what I’m talking about? And then what do I want to make sure that they walk away with as a tangible learning?

Jacqui Harper

Fabulous tips. I love them. Well done, Julie. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Julie Honor

Thank you.

Jacqui Harper

And my pleasure. And that’s it for this episode of Join Jacqui. See you next time.

Tags: communication, lawyers, leadership, peleton, presence, presentation skills, weightwatchers

Categorised in: Communication, Jacqui Harper, Making Speeches, Podcast, Presence