IAM1364 – Coach Trains Young CEO’s on Effective Communication

Dr. Elena Paweta is an executive communication coach, speaker, TEDx organizer, and university professor. She conducts courses, trainings, and workshops on effective communication and business presentations internationally.

Dr. Elena is a TEDx speaker and has played a big role in organizing TEDx and TEDxWomen conferences in Poland for the last 8 years. She is also a marathon runner and mother of 2 daughters.

• CEO Story: Inherited the entrepreneurial spirit from his father. Working in their business at a very young age helped her propel with the current projects that Dr. Elena has, from coaching to organizing, from professor to doing workshops.
• Business Service: Coaching, speaking engagements, workshops. Organizing TEDx events.
• Secret Sauce: Having theory and practice. Combining the business world, the academic world, and the non-profit world.
• CEO Hack: Elena’s podcast – Ideas and Leaders, talks about communication and leadership issues. Mindvalley platform – lots of free online courses.
• CEO Nugget: Networking – connecting with global entrepreneurs. Communication – the skill that will get you forward in business.
• CEO Defined: Taking responsibility for your own actions and for others. Knowing what you want/ your goals and how to achieve those.

Website: elenapaweta.com

Podcast: IDEAS+LEADERS elenapaweta.com/podcast

LinkedIn: elena-paweta

Instagram: elena.paweta

Facebook: DrElenaPaweta

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Transcription

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00:20 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview, if so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:47 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello, This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Dr. Elena Paweta of elenapaweta.com. Dr. Elena, it's great to have you on the show.

00:58 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Hi, it's great to be here.

00:59 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited to have you on and talking about all the awesome things that you're doing. So before we do that, of course, I want to read a little bit more about Dr. Alana so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And Dr. Alana is an executive communications coach, speaker, TEDx organizer, and university professor.

She conducts courses, training, and workshops on effective communication and business presentations internationally. Dr. Elena is a TEDx speaker and has played a big role in organizing TEDx and TEDx women's conferences in Poland for the last 8 years. She's also a marathon runner and a mother of 2 daughters. Dr. Alaina, I love that you're on the show. I love everything that you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:38 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Yes, absolutely. It's great to be here.

01:41 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. Well, let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. Hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:49 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Yeah, so actually my CEO story is my whole life because I started in entrepreneurship, let's say as a small child, as my dad had his own business and I used to help him on the weekends with all the small things. And of course, I felt that this was such a huge responsibility to count some things and to draw something. So I was actually thinking that I'm a part of the business. And I think that seeing my dad working on his business helped me a lot in all my future projects. And I think that I got this entrepreneurial spirit a little bit from him. So now, of course, as a communication coach, I have my own business and I'm working with business professionals.

I'm helping business professionals and entrepreneurs to speak with confidence, pitch their business ideas to investors, and actually do different trainings on public speaking and things related to public speaking. So I've been doing this for some time right now. I was certified as a business trainer by Dale Carnegie training several years ago. And I've, I've been working with them for some time also. And now I'm doing this, combining also this with my TEDx coaching. As you mentioned, I'm organizing TEDx conferences. And, I think that many people right now, want to speak on the TEDx platform. And they also want to speak like Ted because the way they speak is so impactful. So this is something that I'm doing as well.

03:52 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I absolutely love that, especially to hear kind of those seeds that were planted, it sounds like with your father and being able to kind of see how they blossom and some of all the awesome things that you're doing. And I often joke that I, it sounds like you're the same way. I had entrepreneurial tendencies before I even knew what an entrepreneur was or let them know how to spell it or anything like that. So it sounds like you've had a similar experience to me.

04:14 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

04:16 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to drill down. I know you talked a little bit about how you work with your clients. And I just feel like communications, I don't know if you feel this exact same way. I think it's such a, I don't know if you call it a skill, but it's something that's so necessary to be able to articulate, you know, things that you might want, let alone talk about your business, talk about the problems that you solve. I feel like being able to understand how to use communication so that you can reach your goals is something that's incredibly important. So I love that you kind of pour into people to do that.

04:47 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Yes, it is so important. And actually, we are communicating naturally. We are speaking with our friends. We are speaking with our families every day. We are telling stories and everything is OK. I think that the problem starts when we start speaking about ourselves and we start selling ourselves, our products, our services. We want to persuade something. We want to pitch our business idea.

And this is where we get this sometimes imposter syndrome that oh maybe I shouldn't speak about this, how should I, how can I approach this, so this is why I'm working with those cases a lot when people are great communicators and working with business professionals a lot? They are speaking on an everyday basis, but when it comes to selling themselves, they have all of those inner blocks And this is where we're working a lot on this.

05:51 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Yeah, I love that. And especially because often you can hear sometimes people are much better as quote unquote, wing man or wing woman, wing woman when they're able to say, hey, this is my friend, or this is so-and-so, just having casual conversations and build somebody else up. But when it comes to building themselves up, selling themselves as you said, so well, that's where they start to reach those blocks, and not sure exactly how to articulate that.

06:14 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Yes, absolutely.

06:16 – Gresham Harkless

That's awesome. So you touch on the different ways that you do that. Is there anything else you wanted to add, according to how you serve your clients, how you work with them, and how you help them to be able to communicate well? And then what would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce, the thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

06:31 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Yeah, I think that I approach what I do from many different sides. So on one hand, I am a business practitioner. I am an entrepreneur. And the other hand, as you mentioned, I teach at the university and I teach business. I teach business planning and entrepreneurship. I work with young people and show them that you can not only work in a corporation and build your career in this way, but you can also build something of your own and this is how you can do it. And I think that this combination of theory and practice helps me a lot in both of those areas.

I love supporting both business professionals and young people just at the beginning of their lives or their careers. And also another thing that I've been doing is organizing TEDx events for 8 years now. And working with TED speakers helps me a lot in working with my clients. So actually, in fact, for a couple of years, I've been working with people who want to become TEDx speakers. And they actually come to me and they say that, hey, this is something that I want to have. I want to have a TEDx speaker in my bio.

What should I do? Because this is something that can add credibility to your business if you are a CEO or if you are an entrepreneur. And we're working on their ideas, we're working on their speeches. So I'm helping them to create the speech for this red dot platform for a TEDx platform. And I think that this combination of 3, let's say worlds, a business world, an academic world, and also a nonprofit world, which is TEDx events.

This is something that actually differentiates me from all the other people in my field. What I do is so important for many different kinds of people, being a good communicator, being able to sell your services, your products yourself, to sell yourself, you are a product here. So those skills are very important for everyone. That's why I love working with different kinds of people.

09:05 – Gresham Harkless

That's so huge. I appreciate you mentioning that. I love how you said, know how to deal with it, not expel it, not get rid of it, know how to deal with it. Because I think when you talk about imposter syndrome, fear, all those things that kind of come up when we're getting outside of our comfort zone, we can feel like, you know, first of all, we're wrong because no.1 else feels it, but in reality, we all deal with some of those things.

It's not about not having it, it's about knowing and having it and knowing how to deal with it. So I love that you were able to kind of help people out related to that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But what's something that you feel makes you more effective and efficient?

09:47 – Dr. Elena Paweta

One of the things that I can recommend here is my podcast that I have. My podcast is called Ideas and Leaders. And I'm speaking with a lot of entrepreneurs and we're speaking about communication, actually, how to deal with different communication issues and leadership issues and business. So I think that of course, I can recommend this because I have a lot of amazing guests there. But now there is another platform that I'm thinking about and that I can also recommend to everyone and it, is a Mind Valley platform.

They have, They have a lot of online courses. They have members. You can just be a member and have access to all the courses. So I would just, I can totally endorse them and suggest them to everyone who's listening to us because they are courses. They actually helped me a lot in my self-development path and also in the development of my business.

10:54 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So it's a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice, I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you have to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:09 – Dr. Elena Paweta

I think that I would definitely tell you about 2 things. The first one would be networking. And this is something that I was speaking about in my own TEDx talk. Last year I did a TEDx talk on global entrepreneurs and the secrets of global entrepreneurs. The name of the talk is, what can we learn from global entrepreneurs? This is the right one. And I was speaking a lot about networking among others, because I did research and I was speaking with entrepreneurs who become global immediately. They don't start developing on the local market, but they just start acting on many different markets at the same time.

When I talked to those people for my book, and for my research, I realized that networking is a huge part of what they do. So their work actually in micromanagement is not what they do. Of course, they are in charge and they're doing many things, but they are speaking to different people all the time. And actually, the research that I did was before the pandemic. So there was this online communication and this global connection via Zoom or other platforms. It was not so widely popular, let's say in many areas. And those entrepreneurs, were on the international calls all the time.

There was Zoom, there was Skype, there were, and they were speaking with people from many different countries, sometimes during one day. And this was just so strikingly surprising for me. And the second thing I would say is communication. Communication is, of course, I am biased as I am a communication coach, but it is so important to work on this skill because this is the skill that will get you forward in business. So you need, if you are in business, you need to promote yourself. You need to have to speak on podcasts. You need to do Facebook Lives and Instagram Lives. You need to know how to speak, and how to present yourself.

13:32 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely love both of those nuggets. And so I now want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Dr. Elena, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:44 – Dr. Elena Paweta

This means having a huge business and managing a huge business. I think that everyone actually can be a CEO. Being a CEO means taking responsibility for your own actions and also for others, and also acting, knowing what you want, you know, knowing your goals, and knowing how to achieve those goals. So those are, I think that everyone, anyone, even those people who don't have their own business yet, they can totally be CEOs of their own, of their own personal brands.

14:25 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely appreciate that. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best people can get a hold of you, find out about your podcast, subscribe to all the awesome things you're working on, of course, get a copy of your book.

14:43 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Yeah, you can contact me via my social media. You can find me anywhere. Just type in my name and surname, Elena Poeta, and my website is elenopoeta.com. You're welcome to see the freebie that I have, the free PDF. This is the guide, if you want to become a TEDx speaker, very often people ask me, how can I get on the TEDx stage? And I just created this guide, to give you all the nuggets on how to do this.

What are the main points? If you want, you can just go to my webpage or Instagram and upload, and download this. And also, if you want to get in touch with me, I have free 15-minute calls. So if you're interested in being a TEDx speaker or in working on your communication skills, then just feel free to book a short call with me on my webpage and I would love to chat with you.

15:49 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I definitely appreciate you, Dr. Elena. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can follow up with you, connect with you, of course, get that downloadable, which is of incredible value if you want to communicate. Whether you're going on a set X stage or you're not, I think it's good to kind of sharpen that saw. So thank you so much again for all the awesome things you're doing, of course, your time today. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:10 – Dr. Elena Paweta

Thank you. Thank you so much.

16:11 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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