Unlocking Trust and Joy for a Standout Brand with Tracy LaLonde
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Description
What does it take to become the go-to person at work? It’s a question with layers—and Tracy LaLonde unpacks the answers in her latest book, Trust Me: The Insider’s Guide to Being the Go-To Person at Work. Tracy emphasizes that trustworthiness is a cornerstone of professional success, making it an essential ingredient for elevating your career and building an unforgettable personal brand.
In this episode of Branding Room Only, Tracy and I explore why trust is the foundation of a standout brand. She breaks down her key pillars of trust, shares actionable strategies for building it, and highlights common mistakes that can weaken it. From avoiding trust-eroding pitfalls to fostering authentic connections, Tracy offers a roadmap for becoming indispensable—and finding joy in the process.
Chapters
1:43 - Tracy’s simple definition of personal branding, her self-description in three words, a Warren Buffet quote she’s loving lately, and her hype songs
6:21 - How two influential experiences from Tracy’s childhood shaped her as an entrepreneur
9:34 - Tracy’s educational and career journey from her hometown of 3,500 people to where she is today
11:51 - Why trust is crucial in the workplace and what inspired Tracy to write a book focused on it
13:56 - How trust is a physiological process and what’s necessary for it to flourish
18:34 - Who will benefit most from the trust-building insights in Tracy’s book and common pitfalls that erode trust
23:24 - What sparked the idea for Tracy’s book, how it came together, and how societal conversations about trust are evolving
29:03 - How trust intersects with personal branding and building your personal board of directors
31:23 - What has remained constant about Tracy’s brand throughout her career transitions and the role of leadership and volunteerism
35:37 - Common mistakes people make when building trust and how these dynamics have shifted pre- and post-COVID
40:34 - What Tracy advises clients when trust is lacking within their team or organization
42:07 - The six components of trust and actionable ways to build it
49:24 - What Tracy enjoys outside of work, the aspect of her personal brand she won’t compromise on, and her “magical quality”
Connect With Tracy LeLonde
Tracy LeLonde is the founder of Joychiever, LLC and the author of Trust Me: The Insider’s Guild to Being the Go-To Person at Work. Harnessing over three decades of nitty-gritty business experience into actionable insights, she thrives on helping professionals and businesses perform at their peak. Empowering professionals to build meaningful planning relationships, manage with impact, boost revenue, and enhance workforce engagement has been at the heart of her work. Through Joychiever, she zeroes in on cultivating work environments where trust is the foundation, people management excels, and personal joy is a primary goal and not an afterthought.
Mentioned In Unlocking Trust and Joy for a Standout Brand with Tracy LaLonde
Trust Me: The Insider’s Guide to Being the Go-To Person at Work by Tracy LeLonde
Branding Room Only podcast episodes mentioned in this episode:
How to Navigate Generational Friction in the Workplace with Chris De Santis
Personal Branding Bruisers: Paula’s Professional Pet Peeves
Subscribe to The Branding Room Only on YouTube
Personal Branding Strategy Sessions
Sign up for Paula’s Upcoming Webinars
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by PGE Consulting Group LLC.
PGE Consulting Group LLC is dedicated to providing a practical hybrid of professional development training and diversity solutions. From speaking to consulting to programming and more, all services and resources are carefully tailored for each partner. Paula Edgar’s distinct expertise helps engage attendees and create lasting change for her clients.
To learn more about Paula and her services, go to www.paulaedgar.com or contact her at info@paulaedgar.com, and follow Paula Edgar and the PGE Consulting Group LLC on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Paula Edgar: Welcome to The Branding Room Only Podcast where we share career stories, strategies, and lessons learned on how industry leaders and influencers have built their personal brands. Now, let's get started with the show.
Hi, everybody. It's Paula Edgar, your host of Branding Room Only, and I'm so excited to have a conversation today with my guest, Tracy LaLonde. She's the founder of Joychiever, LLC, and author of Trust Me: The Insider's Guide to Being the Go-To Person at Work. Harnessing over three decades of nitty-gritty business experience into actionable insights, Tracy LaLonde thrives on helping professionals and businesses perform at their peak.
Empowering professionals to build meaningful planning relationships, manage with impact, boost revenue, and enhanced workforce engagement has been at the heart of her work. Through Joychiever, she zeros in on her primary passions, cultivating work environments where trust is the foundation, people management excels, and personal joy isn't just an afterthought, but a primary goal. You know, I love all of that. Tracy, welcome to The Branding Room.
Tracy LaLonde: Hello, thank you, Paula. I'm so glad to be here.
Paula Edgar: Same, same. Before we even get started with the question I always ask everyone, I need to tell you, for 2024, my word of the year is joy. This feels like a wonderful summary of starting with joy and ending with joy and having continuous joy. I'm glad about that. I think that joy should be our primary goal. There's that. That's my one shoot before I ask you a very important question. Tracy, what does personal branding mean to you?
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah, in its simplest form, it's how others perceive you. What I love about it is that it's completely within my control. I get to determine how I want to come to you in order for you to perceive me. That's why I think it's super powerful and a point I think sometimes people miss.
Paula Edgar: A lot of times people miss, hence this podcast. Speaking of that then, how would you describe yourself in three words or short phrases?
Tracy LaLonde: Well, like you with the joy, I'm definitely a joy seeker for sure. I mean, it's so critical to me I've tattooed it. It's my number one value in life. It's a visual reminder on my body because we can tend to work, work, work, work. I have to remind myself, joy, joy, joy. Second is creator. I love to build things. I love to create things. Third is excellence. I set a really high bar for myself in that process. Those are my three descriptors.
Paula Edgar: Those are great, strong words. I love that. As my listeners always know, I say excellence is at the core of every good brand. You hit it right out of the park on that one. All right. Do you have a favorite quote or mantra?
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. Lately, because my life has been revolving around trust and I know we'll talk more about that later, but I have been sharing a quote by Warren Buffett where he says, “Trust is like the air we breathe. When it's present, nobody notices. When it's absent, everybody notices.”
Paula Edgar: Oh, wow. That's a great quote. Wow.
Tracy LaLonde: Right? That's exactly the notion I had. Because I very rarely remember quotes long enough, but this one, it just stuck with me and it's so powerful and poignant.
Paula Edgar: It is so powerful. I'm sure everybody just went to a place where they didn't feel it. It's like, “Oh yeah,” sorry, y'all for that trauma moment, but I get it, I think it's really, really clear, you can feel that one. Yeah, that's a good one.
Tracy LaLonde: Well, also, Paula, I think it speaks to how important we all believe it is, yet how often we take it for granted.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, like air. Yeah, yeah. Yes, we literally need it. I recall when I was in college, it was the first time I ever did anything with mindfulness. They weren't even calling it mindfulness back then. It was a yoga class we had to take. I always said, “Black people don't do yoga.” That's a lie. I'm just saying that that's what I said. I know that that's not true. Don't come after me. Back then that's what I thought.
I was like, “I don't want to do this.” They were like, “You don't have to do any of the things. We just want you to breathe.” The woman who was facilitating, she was saying, “We breathe all the time, but no one pays attention to it. This is an opportunity to pay attention to the breath.” It stuck with me for all these years since in that when we actually take a moment, we realize just how powerful the functioning and how powerful breathing is for us like the air we breathe, literally.
Moving on to my other next question is this. Do you have a hype song? And this is when they're going to get full Tracy, you're about to present full Tracy, what's playing in the background music that we don't get to hear? Or if you're having a terrible day, which song are you playing? It could be the same song or different songs?
Tracy LaLonde: I have two. They hype in different ways.
Paula Edgar: Okay. I love it.
Tracy LaLonde: The more motivational inspirational, speaks to my soul song is the song Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield.
Paula Edgar: Yes. Yes.
Tracy LaLonde: Just like, oh, and it usually brings me to tears in some way, shape, or form, but I’m a potential junkie by nature. I believe in others' potential and just the potential junkie nature of that song like, “We can all do this. It's all unwritten. You just have to open [inaudible]” kind of thing. That's one, but then the fun energy song—and I've discovered this song recently and if folks are EDM listeners then maybe they know it and I'm just new to the space—is called, not surprisingly, Happy People by a group called Eats Everything with Stevie Appleton in it.
Paula Edgar: That'll be a new one for me again, at the culmination of the year, we put together a full playlist of everybody's songs.
Tracy LaLonde: Love it, great.
Paula Edgar: I’ll put it on there. All right. Tell me how the Tracy became Tracy. Where did you grow up and how do you think that that shaped you?
Tracy LaLonde: I grew up in a small town southwest of Chicago, Illinois. Maybe it’s a small town because as I was thinking about this, I was like, “Is it so much where I grew up? Or is it more about how I grew up?” But I think some of the couple of things that were really influential in my life, one is I'm an only child and I was a precocious, only child, very, very early on.
Secondly, I was really tall when I was a kid. I was 5’6 in the seventh grade. I was the tallest person in my entire class. Every seventh-grade dance was a struggle because I was taller than every boy in there in the room. But I think why those two relate to me and how I think it influenced me is along the lines of this idea of creator. I've always been putting myself out there.
When I was a kid I was the only child so I had to put myself out there with friends or I had my imaginary friends in my home that I played with and then had conversations with. I was also the tallest. I remember, in third grade, I was taller than my teacher.
Paula Edgar: Oh, wow.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah, so I've always been kinda out there. That's who I am as an entrepreneur too. I do public speaking for a living, so I'm out there. I'm always putting myself out there, which a large majority of the time is a really pleasurable experience. There are certainly those other times when the confidence lessons where you just put yourself out there for people to make comments to or criticize or not agree with you or what have you so I've developed a thick skin along the way with that because I think you have to when you're the person who just keeps striving for something different new, better, whatever.
Paula Edgar: 100%. I think first of all, 7th-grade children are evil and I say that as somebody who has one in seventh grade.
Tracy LaLonde: Well, we were in seventh grade before there were problems in social media, all that craziness.
Paula Edgar: Correct. Having had two kids who have gone through and are going through seventh grade right now, I'm like, “I'm not a fan of sixth or seventh grade. Middle school is terrible.” There's that. Interesting. I didn't have that experience, but I have something in common with you. I was also the tallest person in my middle school. But I am and have been 5'2 since then. I've been 5'2 my entire life but I was all this in there. So I hear that.
I also hear that developing a thick skin also takes a lot of trauma to get there. There's a lot of pain in that thick skin developing, but it does help you to navigate the wall a bit differently than others because your authentic space is the only space you have. I think there are some folks who are like, “Oh, well, I can hide amongst others,” but when you literally stand out, yeah, yeah, that part, I get that.
So we talked about you growing up, and actually give me a shout out to the town you actually grew up in.
Tracy LaLonde: It's called Manuka.
Paula Edgar: Okay. After Manuka, You left there and then tell me about your path from school, college, into doing what you're doing now.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. Manuka at the time was a town of 3,500 people. I was standing out a lot so I wanted to go to a university where I had an endless sea of people to meet and not everybody knew my business by the time I went to bed at night. So I went to the University of Illinois in Urbana, then my career evolved where, actually my very first job was as a sorority consultant for my sorority.
Paula Edgar: Oh, okay.
Tracy LaLonde: Put yourself out there again. I traveled for a year and I can't, I wish I could have kept count of all the cities, but I traveled eight weeks at a time and had like two weeks off. I did that for rotations, visiting the various universities. That's how I learned how to deal with people of all kinds, of all ages.
Then from there, I rolled into training and development positions. I first worked in the high-tech consulting space and then had my first PD job in a law firm in 2000. I followed my passion around public speaking because that's my most joyous strength and that was my beacon that guided me through most of my career choices.
Paula Edgar: Yeah, I love that. First of all, I totally get, even though I'm from New York City, I'm from Brooklyn, I'm in a place where there are a bunch of people. I went to two public schools. I went to UMass Amherst and I went to Cal State. It was like, I loved not standing out in those spaces but also taking the space to be able to spend where I wanted to be. That was interesting.
I always tell people that I started doing PD and education work every single time I got into a new group because it's like understanding what the challenges are, how I can make my case, and then having them hopefully be different and be better as I leave them. So, 100% hear that sorority peace being a good on ramp into doing, yeah, people work is what we all do. It's the people stuff. I love that.
Now you are talking about trust. I'm still breath taken away about that quote that you had. Trust is such an important piece of what we navigate in the world. Why is it important in the workplace?
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. It's interesting because a lot of the literature out there talks about why it's important. It is the cohesion that brings people together. It's the relationship you have externally with customers or clients. It's the relationship you have between manager and employee. It really permeates every aspect. It's also trust in the services you provide that the product you're buying is going to do what it says it's going to do. There's integrity naturally built into all of that too.
It's fascinating because what prompted me to write the book that I have is that there's lots of resources that tell you why it's important. There are not a lot of resources out there that tell you how to be trustworthy or to develop trust. To the extent that there are, they're typically in the manager-employee dynamic or there's some with a customer-client dynamic.
Flippantly, I made a comment of if we put as much energy as we do in the legal space in particular, focusing on trust the way that we do with clients internally, imagine the work environment that could take place. So I wrote this book to focus on that, number one, number two, to focus on the how to do it, and number three, to really focus on how to build trust between coworkers, between colleagues, almost in the horizontal because once you know how to do it this way, then you can take it in any direction you need to.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. When I just was thinking about what you're saying because obviously, I do a lot of work with law firms and the corporate league and house departments as well, as soon as I thought about trust, I thought about who establishes psychological safety and that it starts at the top and that when there's a lack of trust and when there's this integration of trust, it usually happens because it's been modeled or allowed out by the folks up top to not be the case. Yeah, welcome to my therapy session.
Anyway, what are some of the practical ways that you think if I'm sitting here listening to this podcast, in talking to you, I'm like, “Okay, I know what you're saying.” I know when you don't have it, but I do think it's more of a defined thing on when you don't than what you need to do so I would love to hear some of the things you're thinking about and what's in the book about how do you establish trust amongst folks who you are in relationship with the word?
Tracy LaLonde: Well, Paula, it begins with a simple question. It's an age-old classic question: Should trust be earned or should trust be given? If we start there-- and it's funny, because when I ask an audience this, the majority of the hands are, “It should be earned.” What people don't realize is that trust is actually a physiological phenomenon.
If I decide to extend trust to you, and it could be in small ways, I maybe trust you with something confidential, maybe I admit I've made a mistake, or I share something personal with you, or I give you the lead on something that we're working on together. What that does is that when that happens for you, in your brain, it releases oxytocin, which is the love or bonding hormone.
Paula Edgar: Yes, I like this.
Tracy LaLonde: Then it then sends you to trust me in return, which then releases oxytocin for me. It gets this reciprocal physiological thing going on that we can build up over time. Just even answering that question of “Should it be earned or should it be given?” it's like, if you start with the giving, it will take on an earned environment. But if you believe it should be earned and the other person has to do something in order to earn your trust, we prevent that physiological phenomenon from even happening. It becomes just much harder and more complex and often elusive.
Paula Edgar: I would say, for most lawyers who I know, the answer is immediately you gotta earn it. The folks who stand out, and connecting this back to brand and folks who people love, it's because they're giving it first. It's, “I'm going to tell you something about myself that I wouldn't normally share.”
For example, I was at a conference recently and there was somebody who was a new speaker. She was like, “I really hate this. I don’t like picking your brain, et cetera. But I would love it if you would share a few things that you would never do again as a speaker.” I was like, “What? I'm not only going to tell you a few things I would never do. I'm going to tell you what you need to do right now. Here are all those things.”
To your point, I could feel responding. I could feel the connection happening. But we in the legal profession do not like risk. We're not necessarily known for our vulnerability and our empathy either. So I think that this book is going to be such a powerful game changer because of that, allowing it to be looked at as a strength and as a business imperative that folks can get something out of because if I trust you and boost out to build that joy love, then I'm staying.
Tracy LaLonde: Right. Well, and vulnerability, in order for trust to work, vulnerability is a mandate. I say to people, “I'm not going to give you my account numbers to my bank accounts. I'm not going to start there, but I can start with little things I can trust you with, more safe things, if you will, that don't feel quite so risky.” Because the other thing that happens is if I choose to take the risk and extend trust to you, but you don't extend it back to me, I stop. Because I'm like, “Why am I taking this risk when it's not being returned?”
Paula Edgar: That's so true. My audience knows I have a lot of Paula's pet peeves, but one of my pet peeves is this, I consider myself a vault. I have so many secrets that live inside of me and I sign an NDA probably three times a day. I am living with a lot of information. When somebody says to me, “Don't tell anybody this,” and they're telling me that, I'm like, “Hello, literally what I do for a living is not telling anybody stuff,” but it reminds me that there's a conditional trust.
It's like, I'm taking a risk in order to share, but I'm scared because I've been burned before or I don't want to be burned going forward. But it always peeps me because I'm like, “What have I done to not show you that?” But I know it's not about me.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah, absolutely. It's terrifying.
Paula Edgar: Again, my therapy session. Would you say who is going to benefit the most from the trust discussion in this book?
Tracy LaLonde: Everyone.
Paula Edgar: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Tracy LaLonde: Ah, gosh, just everyone. Even those folks who believe themselves to be very trust-inducing or trustworthy or things like that. Because we all have blind spots. Another thing I talk about are the pitfalls that erode trust. There might be inadvertent things that we do small things on a daily basis that we don't realize are eroding trust with someone.
For example, maybe one of the things I call it, I call it the Sea of Endless Corrections. This is different for micro-managing, because by the way, that is definitely a trust eroder, but it's the sea of endless corrections in the spirit of getting it right. If you and I are working on something together, and I'm just nitpicking or I'm putting a lot of red lines in, it's in the spirit of creating a great product, because we're both excellence-oriented, if I do that once, you're probably like, “Okay, fine.” If I continuously do that over time, you're like, “I'm not hurt with her anymore.”
It feels really terrible because she doesn't trust that I can create good quality. She doesn't trust that she can have a conversation with me. Clearly, she's looking for something different with all these corrections. It feels like she's looking for what's wrong, rather than looking for what's right.
Another one I call the Disappearing Act. We're working together and I say, “Oh, you know what, come to me anytime when you have questions,” but then you can't reach me. I'm non-responsive, you have to nag me. I'm always seemingly too busy so you don't want to bother me. All these little things that we do because trust is, I forget exactly what the old phrase is, it takes forever to build and set moments to break down because it happens in all these small little ways.
I truly think everybody can benefit from the book, and the book can be taken in a bunch of different ways. I crafted it from the perspective of how an individual can get ahead in their careers, that's orientation. But businesses, firms, cultures that want to improve trust and teach their team members how to be more trusting and trustworthy and trust-inducing, the book is going to be great for that too.
Paula Edgar: I mean, I love it because I can actually already see in my mind you presenting at firms and talking about some things that I've seen that trust has eroded. In case there's not in the book, I'm going to give you a couple that I think, that I see all the time, trust has eroded. One of them is I send you an email and I don't know if you got that email and you said nothing. As a core, I don't trust the internet so I don't know if you guys believe it or not.
All I wanted for you to say, “Thanks, got it. I'm going to revert back in the X time or ask you a question. I'm going to stop by.” But one of the places that I see the generational challenges in the workplace and the lack of trust on both sides is that folks who are Gen X and above want to know you got that email. Folks who are in generation of younger are like, "I got it."
Tracy LaLonde: Right, why do I need to tell you?
Paula Edgar: And I'm like, it just takes one little thing to just make it a little bit better because what we like is accountability. If I then know that you have it, then I can say it like, "Hey, XYZ thing." Or you can say, "Hey, XYZ thing." So that is a big trust eroder that looks like a small thing.
The other thing is two minutes late. It’s like, “Do you know what I can never get back? Oh, that’s right, it’s time.” So when you waste my time or don’t honor my time, that is an erosion. I see that happen, there is a leader that I worked with years ago who was consistently, so much so that the team would say this is the time that they would all show up at the same late time because they knew that they were not going to be there.
People were adopting. They didn't trust you. You're going to be there the time that you said and that was what we knew a part of a 360 and it was like everybody said, “She doesn't respond to my time. She doesn't respect my time.” So I can imagine the conversations that are [inaudible].
Tracy LaLonde: Right. Well, there's another one, this has a little bit of a colorful descriptor, but it's called Ask [Cold] when there's someone who asks you for your opinion or perspective and you give it to them and they continuously ignore it or they do the opposite. Oh, guys, be crazy.
Paula Edgar: Oh, I'm going to start using that with my mentoring relationships. Don't be an ask cold, please. Again, trust. Again, I mean, there's definitely a lot of different ways that this can go. Was it just that you were seeing all these things we were presenting and facilitating, and then you were like, “I have to write this book because the world needs this, everybody needs this”?
Tracy LaLonde: Surely, I mean, because I even noticed in my own materials that I was saying how important trust was, but I wasn't even doing the deep dive. [inaudible], it spawned a presentation first. The presentation came before the book did. Then after I'd done the presentation, I thought, “Gosh, I have more to say. I have more to say, but a keynote is typically only an hour. What else do I want to say?”
With the help of AI as a brainstorming partner and editor, I wrote the book because I had the starter dough from the presentation, it was one of those birthing moments where it just came out.
Paula Edgar: Oh, my gosh, I love that. Sorry, I need a moment. As somebody who was in the process of putting together the book proposals, I'm like, "Wah!" I love that because I feel like this is the third child that I am having. I'm just like, there's no labor, but that is a really great way of thinking about how to help with the ideation and kind pulling stuff together. I love that. I love that you were able to get it to market faster because of the fact that you had that, I love it. I love it so much.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. Well, and remind me, Paula, have you written other books before?
Paula Edgar: I have not. No, this is going to be my first book ever.
Tracy LaLonde: You should [inaudible].
Paula Edgar: Yeah, 100%.
Tracy LaLonde: Because what you may find, at least it's been my experience because it's my second book, is that the writing of the book is somewhat the easiest part. It's all the editing and formatting and marketing and positioning and all the stuff that comes after that that's like, “Oh.” I write it and it's out there. No, no, no, no, no, no. I would happily offer to be an advisor in your process.
Paula Edgar: Done. Accepted. Contract ready. But yes, no, I think that I'm most excited about the marketing piece, because one of the reasons I reached out to, anytime I see somebody has a book, I'm like, “How can I help this book elevate?” Because number one, even though society is doing what it does, I do think that we are a reading society, we like to have content so the more that we can put conversations out there that help people to think and do things better, it's better.
When I saw that you had this book and thinking about joy and trust and what happens when you have trust and how it could bring joy, I thought a lot about what was happening societally and what is happening societally and how breakdowns of trust have led us to being in a lot of spaces that we're in.
I used to say when I went into firms that the walls of the workplace are porous. Anything that's happening outside comes inside whether you wanted to or not so we have to navigate those things. I do think the dialogue around trusting your colleagues right now is going to be a very different one than it had been two years ago because of what's happening.
It's much more important to realize that we can feel like it's not just a terrible thing we can’t do about it. There are things that we can do about it, but that vulnerability piece that you talked about, needed, very, very, very needed.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah, vulnerability and also candor and transparency.
Paula Edgar: Yes, yes.
Tracy LaLonde: I'm speaking to the choir as I say this, I know, absolutely. But just people are afraid to artfully express, I want people to be thoughtful and careful with it, but they're afraid to address the elephant in the room, or pick your metaphor. You can't have trust without being able to have candid conversations with one another.
Paula Edgar: It's so true. In the context of not just firms, but a lot of corporate organizations, people are dealing with past trauma, past action. When you want to now start to build and establish trust, it sometimes I think, and again, tell me if you think that I'm wrong, it requires a reset. If you feel like trust has been broken down, you have to say, “I know what happened before or I don't know, but I can feel it and I want it to be different as we go forward.”
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And for someone who's noticing it, it's just coming to mind because I had a coaching conversation just this morning of a junior partner at a firm who's managing someone and they're having a situation where the trust is eroding in her and I'm like, “It's clear she's got a fear. Something has happened to her. You need to open that door so that she can express it.”
Because he keeps telling her, “I've got your back, don't worry, go do this,” and she's not. I'm like, “There's a key component here that isn't getting surfaced for her to be able to trust that you actually have her back.”
Paula Edgar: Yeah, and usually in that case, just as what I've seen before, there's probably a mid-level associate or another, like somebody in there who was saying, “Actually.” This connects directly to branding. It's what people are saying about you when you're not there that can cause the disconnect and either how people will give you that grace or they will not, even if you're saying it, the lack of trust because there's additional information that exists out there that they are relying on, well, maybe someone who they have a better trust with already.
Tracy LaLonde: Right, right.
Paula Edgar: Right, yeah. Yeah, I love this conversation.
Tracy LaLonde: I know, I do, so much we can spend time talking about.
Paula Edgar: It's so true. I wrote down a bunch of notes, you said how trust is connected to vulnerability. I'm thinking about career things and branding. It also is tied to the vulnerability, but aligned with authenticity too, that you can, that same quote about you can, whatever the quote was that we messed up, in terms of building it, they can go away with one thing, the same thing I think about often when it comes to branding.
You can have a straight line or people can think really high, and then you can do one thing and then you have to rebuild up that trust. I see it, we see it in pop culture. We see it in a lot of things. That's where cancel culture came from. Like everything was fine and you got canceled. Now it's usually something terrible that's happened. But the point is similarly looking out for your brand by making sure that trust is a part of that calculation makes a lot of sense.
I would imagine being able to ask yourself, “Who can trust me and who do I trust?” and looking at that. I did a session on building your personal board of directors and one of the key pieces of that was I wanted it to be people who you can trust to give you feedback, the feedback that you need because you can sometimes trust that someone's going to say something nice and that's not necessarily the trust that you need. You need to trust the real stuff. This is so applicable to everything. I love it.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. Yeah.
Paula Edgar: What about relationships?
Tracy LaLonde: Personal relationships?
Paula Edgar: Yeah. Yeah.
Tracy LaLonde: I mean, this could be a book on marriage. Totally. Just as easily it could be a book on two co-workers.
Paula Edgar: Typically, when there are relationships. I'm asking about it in these senses because sometimes when I'm talking to authors about this, the thing, people will just take the high point and I'm like, “This is applicable to everything. You can talk about this in so many different contexts where people can get better and they can reflect on what they've done, what they've experienced, and then endeavor to be better, and that's the same thing as branding.” It aligns in the same way, like it always iterates.
Tell me, what do you think, coming back to branding, is something that has endured about your brand throughout your career?
Tracy LaLonde: Oh, gosh, I think, because I've been around the block a little bit. I know we started when we were 10, but [inaudible].
Paula Edgar: Correct.
Tracy LaLonde: We've said a couple of words and some not to repeat them, but they're actually genuine for me. I think that the authenticity and the excellence piece had really transcended my work overtime. What I've talked about, like what I do has shifted because I get bored after a while and I need to find a new topic to talk about.
But when you're in training and development you're doing it for 30-plus years, you just cover a lot of ground and those kinds of things. The what of what I do has shifted, but the how I go about it. Also really another key word for me is generosity. I try to be really generous with my time and energy with folks.
Early on, that really helped me because I was volunteering for different boards. I was volunteering for different projects. I was taking on the things that people didn't want to do, so I take on the crappy stuff and do that kind of stuff.
Paula Edgar: Those are trust builders. Those are also brand and trust builders at the same time.
Tracy LaLonde: Right. Right.
Paula Edgar: One of the questions that I send ahead of time and I want to ask folks all the time is like, "How has leadership and volunteerism helped you?" I ask it because I don't know who I would be if I hadn't been of service to be able to then be of service.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. Well, and I love it too, because it gives you ways, authentic ways to get to know people in a deeper way. I mean, to be fully transparent with folks who are watching this, we just saw each other literally last week at a conference. While that's fun and exciting, you and I probably had 15 minutes that we talked, if that.
We have surface time, we don't have deep time. With the volunteerism, that gives you the deep moments with folks. Especially if you're doing it in a space where you're with your tribe or your industry or your sector or your people or what have you, that kind of thing that enables that dynamic to happen.
Paula Edgar: Yeah. When you see, I love that you couch that volunteerism as generosity too because when you give of yourself, I do think to bring it back to trust, people then trust you more. They are seeing that you're doing something that you don't have to do for another good, whatever that good is, and whether it's not directly for them or not, they're still seeing it.
My gosh, you're going to have to come back. We're going to have to do a part two. I want to do like six months into what you've learned from having this book because I'm fascinated thinking about how this is really in every single thing that we do.
Tracy LaLonde: One more thought about generosity. Generosity isn't completely altruistic. It's also selfish. It really feels good. It literally releases endorphins within my body that give me joy. It's a mutually beneficial situation.
Paula Edgar: It is true and I studied anthropology when I was an undergrad and one of the things we have to do was watch monkeys. So when I tell people about their brand and how some of the things that are just physiological that we have no real control over but that helps build trust but also their brand is literally showing up and having a smile and making eye contact. Those two things help people to be like, “Oh, I feel a little bit safer. Oh, I want to come a little bit closer.”
While I'm not saying, and don’t take it this way, I’m not saying, “You got to smile everywhere,” because you do not. I have a scowl that I use as well. But it's so helpful to have folks feel that safety immediately to then want to delve a little bit more into that. Again, but I'm a New Yorker so don't expect that anyway in the subway. It's not happening. It's just not happening.
Tell me about this, I couched it in the questions about trust, but I mean about branding, but I want to ask you about trust. What mistakes have you seen people make when it comes to building trust?
Tracy LaLonde: So many. Almost the inverse of everything in the book that I say is how people made mistakes. Well, what rises to the top? The first one, the big one, is a lack of integrity. My simplest definition of integrity is doing what you say you're going to do and then adding on brands when you say you're going to do it. So many people don't do what they say they're going to do. It's mind-numbing to me because integrity is a big value for me generally as well. That's a big one.
Paula Edgar: Let me ask you this. Did you notice any shift post-COVID of how people perceived perceived lack of integrity? Perceived on purpose twice. Any shift there? Because I'm just thinking about we are different people post-COVID and that we have an experience that was traumatic as a collective and we also are dealing with that trauma still.
Sometimes what is perceived as us not doing what we say we're going to do when we're going to do it is not necessarily about lack of integrity, but lack of capacity or any other thing. Have you noticed a shift in the conversation at all?
Tracy LaLonde: Yes. I think I'm going to attribute it to a lack of communication.
Paula Edgar: 100%.
Tracy LaLonde: Right? In the simplest part of actually communicating with each other, weirdly, even though there's so much more technology now, has become so much more challenging.
We have to be much more intentional about it because we cannot rely on seeing each other in the office, like we did, which always baffles me when businesses who have multiple offices around a geographic region, around the world, when they get all up in arms about having people come back in the office, I'm like, "Wait a minute. You have 52 other offices everywhere and you have great working relationships.”
So I don't know why we can't transplant those same skills into the people that we are co-located with geographically. I will offer to you—and I'm not blaming generational differences—but I think that the generational differences in the way we communicate is hampering in that both sides which are a little bit rigid, and inflexible in meeting the others where they are and what their preferences are.
Paula Edgar: Absolutely, and I'm glad you said that because I've been thinking this whole time because we've mentioned generations a couple of times already in the conversation, that number one, I want to relink Christa Santos's podcast in here as well because at the crux of that, even though we didn't necessarily elevate it was trust, is that there's a lack of trust down and up, and that's what I sort of surfaced in the beginning of our dialogue.
But what just came to me when you said that about communication—I just wrote it down because I was like, “I have to make sure we get this point”—is passive aggression. That is a trust eroder. I can see you doing content every week on what erodes trust.
Passive aggression means that you don't trust me enough to tell me directly what I need to know for us to collaborate better. You think that, and it can be couched in what folks are saying is niceness. I always say it is not kind to be passive-aggressive. Oh, my gosh, I'm just sitting in the past trauma like I just can't. There's another Paula's pet peeve, see Episode 7.
It is definitely all of that. I cannot wait for this podcast episode to come out because I'm going to be like, ”Everybody, I bring in Tracy,” every way you work because this is the dialogue that needs to happen now more than ever, how we get to a point and trust each other in a society where we have so much that we can harp on that's different.
I think when we try, we move towards a trust practice, I make it up, take it, [inaudible] it is yours, we move towards that as a thing, then we get better at people, like the down to the humanity of us, versus talking about what is separating us. Now, that being said, there are a lot of other things, a lot of headwinds against that too. There's a lot of headwinds against that trust, but I think this is so powerful, so.
Tracy LaLonde: Well, what I thought for you and thinking about it, is when a team, a business unit, a business realized that they're lacking in trust, for example, I had a team hire me to come in and speak with them. The leader was like, “Well, can you come fix this?” I had to say over and over again, like, “This is not going to be fixed. This is going to be an opening of the door. It's going to give you language and a vernacular that you can all use to get onto the same page.”
That's what I have to caution my clients on. This isn't one conversation and you're done. As you and I could talk for hours and hours and hours, it's the same kind of thing in that environment where I go and speak with folks. I'm usually given an hour.
It's like, “Let's just recalibrate expectations here. It's just an opening of the door for you to actually do the real work after I'm not here or invited back to continue to do that work with you either way” kind of thing.
Paula Edgar: Which is important. It's actually your level setting about trust before you get into a conversation about trust because if the expectation is that you're going to fix it, then the understanding has to be that it, again, is a practice as opposed to an answer. It's not a destination. It is definitely a continuing journey when it comes to this.
Similarly, like you can be off-roaded in your journey, you can do that when you do these things that are trust eroders. It is just fascinating. I love this. What do you think are some effective ways to continue to build trust for folks in relationships? Whatever direction you want to pull. What are some things that you've seen work?
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. Well, I have six components of trust. Let me just list them quickly. Competence, so being good at what you do kind of thing, having the skills, continuously growing those skills, honing those skills. Openness, which is communication and transparency. Integrity.
Empathy, putting yourself in the other person's position and connecting on a human level. Empowerment, which is enabling autonomy, and decision-making, demonstrating confidence in someone's capabilities and judgment. Then finally, consistency, which is doing all five of those things reliably.
It's funny though, if you were to Google the definitions of trust and this is where I started because that's what we do, we start a project, and you Google it, there were so many ways that people looked at trust. I was like, “My brain is not that big.” [inaudible] into things that people can actually chew on and focus on. You know what the thing is, people don't wake up in the morning and say, "I'm going to be trustworthy today." We don't do that.
Paula Edgar: They don't.
Tracy LaLonde: Maybe we should, but do mantra. However, what I encourage people is there are the areas of those six where you might be already excelling naturally. But look at those areas where you maybe aren't excelling, or maybe you've gotten some feedback from others, or maybe they're challenging for you, and pick one and work on one for the month. Another thing I ask people to do is to think about these six and also write down a column there “Trust Musts”.
Paula Edgar: Come on rhyming.
Tracy LaLonde: It's the opposite side of a pet peeve. I want to be positive about it. We all have our trust musts. You and I are very aligned on being on time.
Paula Edgar: Yep. Yep.
Tracy LaLonde: Being on time, probably for you too, is late. Jotting down, having self-clarity around what your own trust musts are, number one, literally [inaudible]. Then number two, sharing them with the people that you work with most often or people you share life with most often because they're not bad. They just are.
If others don't know about them, they're going to continue to mismanage expectations and run against them. That's another way that I encourage people to look at those pillars of trust and to leverage them for the good.
Paula Edgar: I love those pillars of trust because they align very well with branding. If you're not competent and have excellence, you're not going to have a good brand. If you're not vulnerable and have a little thing about authenticity with openness, it's not going to work well.
If you don't have integrity, nothing works well if you don't have integrity in my mind. There's that. Empathy, I think that is a place where people don't necessarily think about it in terms of branding, but empathetic leaders are leaders who are stronger leaders and people want to follow. There's that.
Empowerment. It can't be your brand alone. It's got to be how you're going to navigate and continue to your team. Then, what was the last one? Consistency. That's in a nutshell, it's like when you hit your stride. I love that they dovetail so well together because it's so true.
It reminds me of when I do presentations, I always talk about how people often don't love to talk about personal branding as a thing. They're like, “Oh, it's too commercial and I'm not a product,” et cetera, et cetera. I'm like, “All right, okay, relax.” One of my speaking musts, and my writer says I have to have a can of Coca-Cola and a glass of ice when I'm presenting. It's not a bottle, a can and I need that.
I grab that can and I go, “Whether or not you like soda,” I don't care about your health plan. I don't care. But I love Coca-Cola and when I have Coca-Cola, I know what it looks like, I know what it tastes like and I know what I can expect when I drink it and that is the brand, what people expect from you.
How are you going to show up? What's going to be your excellent product? How am I going to think about you after I finish this can? That is how I dovetail those things. This is a similar thing, you know if somebody put in a glass and it was [insert other brand here], I’ll be like, “First of all, I know this is not Coca-Cola,” because I know what to expect.
It's a similar thing when you trust someone, that consistency is such a big piece of it, which gives you a benefit, I think. I recall a mentor telling me years ago, I showed up badly at an event. I was in a meeting and I showed up in a way that was not normal, typical Pauliana as they call me.
My mentor said, after the meeting, she grabbed me and was like, “What's going on?” I say that she could trust how consistent I had been before then to know that something was wrong in that instance because that's not how I normally show up.
That's also a sign of having a strong brand, is that when you have a bump, which we all are human, then they're going to question whether the outside thing is not the you thing is and how it's impacting you.
Tracy LaLonde: It'll give you the benefit of the doubt and mark it as an anomaly.
Paula Edgar: Exactly. I find that when you think about how you bring the trust conversation to firms and other organizations, the place that I see trust showing up in a way that can be challenging is because of the way bias is, there can be trust because of affinity. That just happens, and a lack of trust when there's no affinity.
That can be gender, race, that can be a lot of other things. The folks who are working on their trust practice—which I do have to use that—it's understanding the areas of difference and the opportunities for trust as opposed to places where trust needs to be eroded because it doesn't have to be the case.
I think that there are a lot of places where we can continue to build more trust because there are more similarities and there are differences that we perceive. I am so sold on this. I haven't even read the book yet, but it's going to be a [inaudible] going to be like, “And then Tracy said.”
Tracy LaLonde: I appreciate you.
Paula Edgar: I think that this is a powerful thing and everybody who's listening, you know I always tell y'all what to do, but this is so impactful in so many different areas and all we have is our integrity and all we can really think about is how we want to show up and how we want folks to show up for us and that trust is at the crux of that and so we need to be doing this better.
I knew this conversation was going to go fast, which is why I already told you that you'd have to come back in six months to talk about this, so there's that. But I'm going to ask you two questions that I ask everybody, and I think you already answered the first one, but I'll ask you anyway. Wait, before I do that, I have to ask you one more question. What do you do for fun?
Tracy LaLonde: Oh, I travel. My daily fun is I'm an exerciser. I love to get outside. I live in Miami, Florida for a reason because it's nice year-round here. But my big love is traveling because I'm super curious and want to experience other things. My husband happens to be European-born and raised. We have families still back there and that just is a springboard for going to lots of other places.
Paula Edgar: I love that. I love that. It's also my fun alignment too. I just want to be on an airplane. Take me to someplace new. So back to the two questions. The first question I ask everybody on the podcast is this: What is an authentic aspect of your personal brand that you will never compromise on?
Tracy LaLonde: It's that excellence is the core of who I am. Not in a way that makes me better than others. That's not the intention. If I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it to the best of my ability, no matter what it is. Whether it's cleaning out the closet, which I hate. I'm also super driven, I'm super going at it. I'm going to clean that closet out better than anybody's ever cleaned that closet. That's what I'm going to do.
Paula Edgar: I love that. I wrote down two things, I was like, “It's either going to be excellence or integrity.” For me, I like to put out from the conversation what I think it's going to be. It could have been also joy too, which I would have also loved as well.
Tracy LaLonde: Joy's just so part of it. It's like, “What? Okay.” There's therapy around excellence too because there are times, I'm a perfectionist, that's long-time therapy because there are those moments of what level does everything need to be kind of thing.
Paula Edgar: Progress over perfection. Progress over perfection always. Excellence is always the goal. Perfection is a standard we cannot keep. I say it at home, I say it whenever, I say it all the time. It's a lot of things, particularly women, that can hold us back, but I also get it as a goal. Excellence is always a goal. It always should be the goal.
Branding Room Only is a play on the term standing room only because as everyone knows I say, I am clever. What do you think is something that people would be in a room where there's only standing room to experience about you? What's that magic thing about you?
Tracy LaLonde: I think it's relatability. This is the feedback that I get from people too. It's that people feel like I get it, whatever it is. It's either the way that I'm able to listen to them or when I'm teaching or bringing content forth the way that I make it relatable to everyone in the room.
You've had these experiences too where people ask you to come speak and you've got the panoply of vintages in the room. Like, “Gosh, how am I going to make this point?” But we do because we have to. Now I’m like, “I should have said joy instead of excellence.” But with the joy is the relatability part of it and that's just something being a natural-born teacher of trying to help people assimilate these ideas into their own way of being, not the way I'm telling them, but they have to define their own authentic way of being that. I think relatability is what comes to mind.
Paula Edgar: I think I agree, and as you mentioned, we haven't had the chance to spend a lot of time with each other, but I will tell you what I noticed. Again, I'm always in the brand lens, probably to my detriment, but I'm always looking at people and thinking about who they are and how they're showing up.
I knew your face, but I hadn't seen it and talked to you. I was like, "Oh, of course, that's Tracy." Immediately, because of just seeing you I felt more at ease. There are some people who have that without even trying. I do think that that is a relatability that can just come across in how you look.
Then again, the trust bills by showing up and being that way. I'm so happy that we were able to be in conversation so I can actually see it show up and be that way. I want to thank you so much for being a guest on my podcast and talking about trust, joy, excellence, and all the good things.
You have an open invitation to come back whenever you would like to talk about anything you want. How can people find out more about you? What do you do and how do you add value? I will link the books so they’ll be able to get that.
Tracy LaLonde: Yeah. Two places. The best place is my website, joychiever.com. I do post a fair amount on LinkedIn. That’s where folks should pick up my stuff.
Paula Edgar: Awesome. We will put all of those in the show notes. Everybody, go tell a friend that they need to trust you that they need to read this book and listen to this podcast. Share it with anybody and share it with everybody, especially the ones you know are not doing well in that space. Let me be the one to tell them the things. Remember to stand by your brand. I will talk to y’all soon. Bye.
