Master workplace communication with Dr Louise Mahler

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a leadership strategy and business podcast brought to you by CPA Australia.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Welcome to CPA Australia's INTHEBLACK podcast. I'm Jacqueline Blondell, and today I'm speaking with Dr. Louise Mahler, communications expert and author of two books on the subject, Resonate and Gravitas. Louise is an expert in body language, voice, and human behaviour. She has a PhD in leadership, communication and degrees and masters in economics, organisational psychology, and music. She trained as an opera singer and performed for a decade on the European stage.

Welcome to INTHEBLACK Louise. Louise Mahler: Good afternoon, Jackie.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Today we're looking at trust and its links to communication. Recent research from the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report shows there's a global decline in employer trust.

In a world where trust is increasingly fragile, why is it more important than ever?

Louise Mahler:
Edelman Trust Barometer is fascinating, and what it's showing is that there is an ongoing decline year after year in every profession. And this year they've shown something particularly fascinating, which is that trust levels for people who are highly paid leadership positions are quite different, their optimism is quite different from those in lower paid positions.

So what they're saying, this year their focus is a crisis of grievance. So why is this trust issue more important than ever? Because of this crisis of grievance people believe that they have the right to mistrust their leaders in some way.

Jacqueline Blondell:
And why has this… this can't have come up suddenly, it must be something that's been evolving.

Louise Mahler:
Well, many people will have many different opinions, and I guess if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And my hammer is communication, and it is diminishing, I can coach people and I can say, what arrangements are you using in your work to speak?

What order are you saying things? Do you think about it? Everyone's speaking off the top of their head. Do you use gestures? Do you use eye contact? How do you shape your body? These are things that aren't being considered anymore, and we are losing those skills, and the more we're going online, the more skills we're losing and consequently trust is being diminished.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Okay, so what are some of the unconscious habits in the workplace that undermine trust and how can we correct them?

Louise Mahler:
So easy to correct once you know what they are. So, for instance, clenching our fists. Everyone today is clenching their fists and hiding their hands under the table. For trust, hands need to be always visible, hands need to be always unclenched. How hard is that? It's not rocket science. Could we smile? Bring back smiling. Smiling is about, we go back to ancient psychology about teeth. When I smile, if you break my teeth, I can't rip meat, therefore I will die.

And, and this remains today, the psychology, when I show my teeth, it means I trust you. We have to bring back smiling and keeping the jaw loose. Eye contact. And another thing is our voice and breath. We're holding our breath and we break the sentences. This is all indicating lack of trust. So once we're aware of it, yes, you can fix it quite quickly, but we've lost the awareness of these things that we do with our body, with our voice, with our breath, with our gestures. It's a lost art.

Jacqueline Blondell:
It sounds like you, it's saying we should bring the humanity back into play. It seems like years of being online as… in corporate environments has… we've neglected that side of us.

Louise Mahler:
You bet.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Yeah.

Louise Mahler:
You bet, we are humans. We will always be humans and welcome to the digital world, magnificent. But we are still human and the principles still apply, we are not robots yet, so we have to bring these skills back, we can't forget them.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Let's talk about authenticity in that case. So how do you build that trust back by using authenticity?

Louise Mahler:
Well, fascinating that people think, don't really know what authenticity is. So what is authenticity? People come to me and they say: "Oh Louise. I want to bring my authentic self". And I'm like, well, that's not your authentic self. I don't know who that is, because your authentic self is just a set of habitual patterns that you own and you feel "this is me". And we use the word natural there's no such thing as natural.

There's only habitual and... but when we're comfortable with something, we call it natural, therefore, it's the authentic me. Well, how about we change some of those habitual patterns and practice them until they feel natural and make it your authentic self? So we, it's really, we are blocking our authentic self.

If we are not actually working on ourselves in personal development to bring the best of ourselves to every engagement, then we don't, our authentic self is what? Just usually a whole pattern of defensive mechanisms where we're hiding from others with our body, hiding from others with our voice.

For instance, people are doing, a lot of young people are doing what's called vocal fry, and vocal fry is where we actually stop breathing and the vocal folds malfunction. And this is what it sounds like: "Vocal fry, that's vocal fry, so people are doing vocal fry, okay, let's have a look at your accounts, that looks fascinating".

What I'm doing there is there's no air coming out of my body, vocal folds are malfunctioning, the psychological message is: "I don't wanna be here. I don't wanna talk to you". Well, is that my authentic self? No, that's a defence mechanism, and so if I haven't ever thought about it, I can't say, oh, that's authentically what I do. No, that's defensively what you do. The authentic you is a much better person than that.

Jacqueline Blondell:
I've actually heard that, but I didn't know the name of it.

Louise Mahler:
It's very common.

Jacqueline Blondell:
I've heard that vocal tone a lot.

Louise Mahler:
Funnily enough, we do vocal fry at the end of a sentence, so we might say: "And what we'd like to do is get something automatic for your BAS system so that you know what you're paying", which says that I've lost my commitment to that statement, I've lost my interest in you. I've lost my motivating power, I've lost my connection. Uh, it's, it's terrible.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But what happens when we're suddenly put on the spot? What are your techniques for communicating under pressure?

Louise Mahler:
Well, first of all, we need an arrangement. So this is gravitas, gravitas is the manner of trust and respect, which is made up of five canons of what they call rhetoric. And the second of those is arrangement, how do you arrange what you are saying?

So… was it Churchill who said, I'm sorry for writing such a long letter, I didn't have time for a short one. We need to think about what we're doing, and the way, the trick to doing things on the spot quickly…. I worked last week with ambassadors going out on their placements, and so often ambassadors are in a room and they say: "We have the Australian ambassador here, would you like to say a few words?"

It is too late at that point to think of your content, so you need an arrangement and that arrangement, if you analyse what people are doing today, they're pretty classically starting off with: "I'm so excited to be here.

And this is a habit we really have to get out of our arrangement. Instead, the first part of our arrangement is to flatter the audience, just to straightaway say, wow, look at this incredible turnout that we have today, so many smiling faces, so much intellect in the room. People are on time, people have come, live, what is it that you can say to flatter them? And then not to go directly to your content, but to have some sort of message and perhaps what I call a creative link that leads to your message.

These are the arrangements people need that you can use, on the spot, at any time, under any circumstances. Leaders need to be able to speak under hot water, and their stress level's hugely high, their preparation's zero, and still get up and present, and part of that is about arrangement. And I haven't even spoken about the other skills, but…

Jacqueline Blondell:
Oh we'll, we'll get to that, we'll get to those, no doubt. Let's just talk a little bit about the absolute fear of public speaking, which is up there, I believe in the top five of all fears.

Louise Mahler:
Yes.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Above getting eaten by a bear, I believe, you know, it's quite, quite a serious fear. How do you look at overcoming that.

Louise Mahler:
Let me tell you: he/she who presents wins, you cannot avoid it.

So we have to understand that really it's the unconscious mind that has been running the show. We also have a conscious mind, so we need to understand that unconscious mind and begin to deal with it. The unconscious mind will be trying to save your life. It will be stopping you breathing, it will be closing your mouth. It will be shoving your tongue down your throat.

It will be clasping your elbows into the side of your body, it will be freezing you from doing any kind of movement. It will be jamming the back of your neck, it will be setting your eyes stiff. So we need to go, oh, okay, thank you unconscious mind for doing this and trying to save my life from what might be an alligator attack…

It's not a crocodile attack. It's actually there's people here I need to speak to. So let's move the body, let's unclench the fist, let's unclench the back of the neck, let's release the jaw, let's get the tongue out, let's release the diaphragm and get the air flowing. And there are techniques for each and every one of these things.

A silly little technique is that when the mouth goes dry, which it happens under stress, how do you get moisture into the mouth? It's not about grabbing for a glass of water, it's actually about biting your tongue. Actors and singers don't have water on stage, they have to do something else, and that's biting your tongue.

The tongue is very sensitive, the minute you bite it in the lightest way, moisture will come into your mouth. So there are little techniques, we're not taught them, and you can override whatever it is that blocks you. This is overcomeable, it is achievable, and we just need to know how.

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Jacqueline Blondell:
So let's get return to the topic of gravitas. You've written a book on this. Can you explain and define what it means and how it adds to the communication skillset.

Louise Mahler:
So gravitas is the manner of trust and respect, that is the definition of gravitas. And to achieve gravitas, you actually have the five canons, call them areas, whatever you want. They call them canons, the five canons of rhetoric. And they are: do you know what you're talking about, well, everyone out there in CPA land, yes they do.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Mm-hmm.

Louise Mahler:
Can you arrange your material so that people can understand it? We've already spoken about that. The next one is, do you use the right language? Well, often we do. The next one is memory, can you remember what you are going to say in what order? And the last one is delivery, and the ancients were very clear that the most important of these five was delivery and that we need to get back in the psyche. It's all about delivery.

And delivery is made up of your body, your gestures, and your voice. And in particular, the art of gesturing is lost and gesturing is so essential for guiding the airflow, for actually communicating to other people, to freeing our body to look… memory technique, there are so many reasons for using gestures, and I would love to get gestures back in particular,

Jacqueline Blondell:
Are there any particular gestures that you favour for… Louise Mahler: Yes.

Jacqueline Blondell:
…communicating adequately?

Louise Mahler:
Keeping your palms open and towards the people that you're speaking to. People who are out in the public eye who are communicating to others keep their palm... The Pope does… keep your palms forward to others. This is a hugely important gesture of trust.

Jacqueline Blondell:
I actually don't notice people making gestures anymore. 'cause a lot of the time we're actually online. Louise Mahler: People've stopped gesturing.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Yeah.

Louise Mahler:
So once we have… being online makes no difference, once we have lost our knowledge of an area, we go very black and white. So people will either gesture wildly and then we say, oh, you can't do that, so the answer to it is hide your hands.

The answer to it is not to hide your hands, the answer is to do three things: do congruent gestures, i.e. gestures that are meaningful, and relate to your material, two is to hold those gestures until you have another gesture, and three is, do not repeat them like a karate chop. Repeated gestures are useless.

And this is not difficult. So for instance, the gesture for the present is right here, right now, the hands go sharply down in front of you. The past is on your left hand side, the future is on your right. It's called the timeline, and we have the future, the present, and the past. It's a line and then we gesture on that line when we have different time concepts.

In our virtual world, we have a lot of space, all around us, we can still use our hands. We are limited within that screen, the hands can't go in and out of that screen, they're either in or they're out, and we have to stay in there, but we still have a lot of room to use that we can use.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Absolutely, well, before I ask you my last question, is there anything else that we can learn from the Ancient Romans, Greeks, about oratory and communication that you discovered when you were writing Gravitas?

Louise Mahler:
No, there's nothing you can't learn about the ancient Romans, Greeks.

I've been working on this all my life, basically putting my ideas together, and then a few years ago, 30% of women in particular were told in their performance reviews: you need more gravitas, and people are walking out of rooms going: I need more gravitas, apparently. Well, what is it? Uh, and, and researching that many people would talk about gravitas, talk about their own practice.

It actually had nothing to do with ancient Rome. So I went back to Ancient Rome and said, what do they mean by it? And was flabbergasted to find they knew everything. They knew everything about spatial psychology, they, they were magnificent, and we, we can learn from them and get back, so it's all in the book Jackie, it's all in the book.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Let's talk a little bit about memory and the importance you place on that, in communication.

Louise Mahler:
We cannot read documents anymore, we cannot read our presentations. We are not doing speeches, you read speeches, you do not read presentations, you are connecting with people. So this means we need to reengage with the lost art of memory.

And memory is about anchoring different bits of information with your hands, if you can move using your body to move to different areas, which is memory, uh, and then about perhaps placing your material in alphabetical order to be turning your lists of items into acronyms. And the other key thing that the ancient Romans said was Omne Trium Perfectum.

That means everything in threes is perfect. We need to speak in threes, if you have 11 items to discuss, don't. You have three. People can't remember more than three, you're wasting your time speaking to groups of people, if you're speaking about things in groups of more than three. So the key skill of memory is something we have to bring back.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Okay, well I'm gonna try and memorise the, the ending of this by saying, Louise, tell me about your early career as an opera singer and what sort of skills did that bring to your mix now as a communication specialist?

Louise Mahler:
Well, within opera, I was very lucky to be at the Vienna State Opera and, not just the singers, but the conductors, the musicians, the ballet dancers, people who were world class in their profession and watching them, uh, was, and watching them work and how they worked, and backstage.

I also had a teacher called Professor Miller Price, who was very famous worldwide, but not in Australia, who was a doctor and an expert in body movement. And I worked with her for 12 years analysing people's bodies to get expert, to get the best of themselves to come forward. So that was an unusual background to a singing career.

And when I came out of singing, I went into the business world to take over the world and, started to watch people in meetings, and I, I don't see the difference between being an opera singing, and being someone who's in business. You are performing, you are communicating, it might be a different mode, but it is exactly the same. You need techniques, you need, you need technique to actually deliver. And so I became passionate about that when I got into business and discovered it was a missing ingredient in what we do.

And I have a different pair of glasses I see the world through, and I love to share those pair of glasses with everybody else. Once you've got the glasses on, let me tell you.

Jacqueline Blondell:
Well Louise, thanks for sharing your insights with us today, and for listeners eager to learn more, Louise is presenting a masterclass on gravitas at CPA Week in Perth on 11th to 13th of June. Check out the show notes for links to the event and additional resources from CPA Australia. Thanks again, Louise.

Louise Mahler:
Thank you, Jackie.

Jacqueline Blondell:
And don't forget to subscribe to INTHEBLACK and share this episode with your colleagues and friends in the business community. Until next time, thanks for listening.

Garreth Hanley:
If you've enjoyed this episode, help others discover INTHEBLACK by leaving us a review and sharing this episode with colleagues, clients, or anyone else interested in leadership, strategy, and business. To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode, and we hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.