This is a YouTube video titled "#215: Laura Khalil on How Women Can Muster the Confidence to Go After Bigger and Better Clients" featuring an English podcast episode hosted by Ed Gandia. The episode, recorded in July 2024, is part of the High Income Business Writing Podcast where Ed interviews Laura Khalil, a keynote speaker and trainer, about courageous leadership skills and confidence-building strategies for ambitious women and allies in tech, with insights applicable to all genders.
Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.
Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. You can find detailed show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com episode 215. Those notes always include a summary of our discussion as well as any links to resources we mention during the episode. When you're running your own business, it's critical that you muster the confidence you need to grow and to do better every year. You no longer have the safety of a day job with a steady paycheck or a team of co workers who are all working together to make things happen. It's all on you. But how do you find the confidence to push yourself? That's the topic of today's episode. My guest is Laura Khalil. She is a keynote speaker and trainer who shares courageous leadership skills to help ambitious women and allies in tech succeed. After hitting the glass ceiling in 2013, Laura launched her own tech marketing consultancy, quickly amassing a roster of global brands such as Intel, Twitter, GE and more. And she did that without having connections or relationships in those companies. She did it from scratch. She's a master storyteller, award winning brand marketer, and dedicated researcher of human behavior. Although much of what we talk about in this episode is about how women can improve their performance and the advice applies to men and women alike, I hope you enjoy our discussion. Laura, welcome to the show. Great to have you here, Ed.
Thank you so much for having me. I cannot wait to dive into this episode with you.
Yeah, likewise, likewise. I'm very excited about what we're going to be talking about today. But before we go there, why don't you give us a little bit of background. You came from the world that my listeners and I are in and came from and I'm just really interested in hearing a bit of your origin story. There's a lot of really cool things there and I think it's important for listeners to understand where you're coming from.
Absolutely. Happy to share. So let me go way back because I've had a couple of career transitions. The first one, I started my career in publishing and I decided after a number of years that I wanted to move to Silicon Valley. I had dreamt of living in San Francisco and I did, and I ended up landing in technology, which was a brand new field for me, and I was working at that point in content marketing, social media, pr, kind of wearing a number of hats. I am typically known as a pretty ambitious, driven woman, and I grew up being taught, if you just work hard, people will notice. And this whole idea around it being a meritocracy, which if any of our listeners maybe aren't as familiar with that, I'll explain the myth of meritocracy right now. So I was taught, hey, just go do good work. So I'd go into the boardroom and I'd advocate for my projects and plans and marketing strategies and writing and all that stuff, just like the guys would. And that's a very natural.
